A couple of times recently, I have been taken back to work I did in the 1970s on the justification for majority voting, both in government and the legal system (jury trials).
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
If you have a question about an old Best I Can Do post no longer visible here, you can email me at patemantrevor@gmail.com. If you want to buy the book, The Best I Can Do, which started here, go to https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop. New June 2019: For details of my recent books and forthcoming public appearances, go to my new site trevorpateman.com
Friday, 6 December 2019
Wednesday, 25 September 2019
Is there a Right not to be Conceived?
I don’t read much
popular science, but recently in my local bookshop I picked up Adam
Rutherford’s A Brief History of Everyone
Who Ever Lived (2016) which is a very readable introduction to modern
genetics and its historical background. At one point he illustrates the hazards
of inbreeding by telling the tragic story of Charles the Second of Spain who
died in 1700 aged thirty nine, but after a lifetime of painful illness and
distressing incapacity. When people marry out of their family then after six
generations they will have 62 different ancestors; after eight the number rises
to 254. But because of the marriage of cousins to cousins, uncles to nieces,
and disregarding the possibility of unsanctioned incest, Charles the Second had
just 32 six-generation ancestors and a mere 82 eight-generation ancestors.
“This is not desirable”, comments Rutherford at page 190. There is both a
general problem about inbreeding and a specific problem that the probability of
a recessive congenital disorder being activated dramatically increases.
A few pages later (page
200) Rutherford tells us that in 2005 one United Kingdom ethnic group produced
3.4% of all live births but 30% of all babies with recessive congenital
disorders. He then goes on to discuss genetic counselling as a way of reducing
such outcomes which in practice arise largely from repeated first cousin
marriages, which are allowed in English law. But I was shocked by his figures,
which I had never come across before, and felt that genetic counselling sounded
like a feeble response. But how to think through the problem in a dispassionate
way?
I imagined using
something like John Rawls’ veil of ignorance. In his major 1971 book A Theory of Justice, Rawls tries to show
what kind of social contract individuals would agree to if they were obliged to
decide not knowing important facts about themselves as individuals. So, for
example, if behind the veil of ignorance you did not know whether you would
turn out to be male or female when the veil is lifted, then it is most unlikely
that you would agree to a public decision making method which excluded females
– or males, for that matter – from any franchise. You would tend to favour
universal suffrage which minimises your risk of being disadvantaged and
maximises the opportunity which others, thinking along the same lines, would be
willing to grant you.
In the case I am trying
to consider, those behind the veil of ignorance have not yet been conceived.
Nonetheless, these potential persons can be imagined as listeners to a genetics
lecture which informs them, among other things, that their risks of being born
severely disabled are greatly multiplied if people with varying degrees of
closeness are allowed to conceive children, especially if done repeatedly. They
are given figures and the problem of recessive genes explained. They are told
that the risk of being born disabled is greatly reduced when the law forbids
conception between closely related individuals, especially when this is
repeated through generations. Eventually, they have to decide on the level of
risk they are willing to accept in formulating one of society’s fundamental
laws, the law which sets out with whom
you may and may not conceive children.
This kind of question
has been posed in other ways for other life and death issues. In his 1785 major
work on majority voting, the title now usually translated as Essay on the Application of Mathematics
to the Theory of Decision-Making, Condorcet pointed out that when
the death penalty is provided as a possible punishment in any society, there is
always the possibility that an innocent person will be executed – and that is
irreversible. So he asks us to consider the question: What probability would you accept for an outcome in which you yourself
might be executed though innocent?
From the point of view
of the unconceived, the choice seems fairly straightforward whether you think
along Rawlsian or Condorcetian lines. Though you stand to lose something from
outlawing a host of close relative reproductive relationships – you will never
get to be Philip the Second of Spain - this potential loss of benefit is
minimal compared to the risk of being born to a life of pain and discomfort
which may be very short and may, unfortunately, be quite long. You will listen
to the geneticists and you will outlaw reproductive relationships which carry a
high risk of causing you serious harm if you are born within them.
This calculus done from
the standpoint of the as yet unconceived is quite different from that deployed
by those entering genetic counselling. They are being asked the question, Do you want to risk having a seriously
disabled child? not the question Do
you want to risk being one? Those counselled are real, existing people.
They may be under family pressure to start a family together. They may be in
love. They may be gamblers. They may not believe in science. They are unlikely
to be thinking of the fact that their choices may well yield very large health
care bills, to be paid for out of other people’s taxes. Overall, they are not
well placed to answer the question in terms of the best interests of an as yet
unconceived child.
In other words, though
adults normally think otherwise, their situation in real life is not always one
where they can be assumed to be good judges for children, still less for
children who have not yet been conceived. Both veil of ignorance reasoning and
Condorcetian probabilistic reasoning suggest that our laws about who you can
and can’t have children with are lax, and that the fall-back of genetic
counselling unreasonably favours the interests of the living over those of the
unconceived.
Trevor
Pateman explores other gaps and failures
in our moral thinking in essays included in his The
Best I Can Do (2016) and Silence Is
So Accurate (2017)
Wednesday, 14 August 2019
Voice Mobility
The other day, I
recorded my first podcast. Since I had not been in a recording studio for many
years, the sound engineer suggested that I make a sample recording - just a few
minutes long - and then listen to the playback before returning to my
soundproof booth to do the real thing.
I sat down with the
engineer and he pressed Play on my sample. What
do you think? he asked at the end. I
sound a bit posh is what came out, immediately. He was surprised (maybe he had
heard no poshness) and puzzled, Is that a
bad thing?
Well, yes and no. Yes,
because it may give listeners the wrong idea about me. I didn’t start life with
a posh voice; I acquired one as a result of succeeding educationally and
thereby becoming socially mobile. But I’ve always liked to think that my voice
has not been quite so mobile. I still recall once meeting a university
acquaintance from a similar background but a decade after we had both left
Oxford. I was appalled by his accent, Oxford and affected. But it probably
wasn’t affected at all; it’s likely that he had just assimilated more easily.
Now here am I, someone
who hasn’t taught a university seminar or been to a middle class dinner party
for twenty years, placing myself in front of a microphone and immediately, to
my own ear, sounding posh. Maybe the subject matter explains it: I was reading
something I had written about Milan Kundera’s theory of the novel. Maybe if I
had been talking in a less scripted way about my childhood or a pet hate I
would have sounded different.
I had other criticisms
of my first attempt. My voice was too high pitched - first night nerves; I
spoke too slowly - I was afraid of stumbling over words, an age-related hazard.
And when I listened to the final product, I thought I sounded a bit camp. The editor
of Booklaunch (Stephen Games) who had
requested the podcast picked up on the last two aspects, asking that in any
future recording I should be a bit faster (but not less dramatic).
But there is a case to be made for the poshness. The voice in
which I read my piece about the novel was appropriate to the subject matter. It
was full of words I never learnt as a child, only much later from
teachers and friends. If I had read it in my original accent, it would have
sounded false because a listener would realise that those words being spoken in
an identifiably lower class accent would never have been spoken in a lower
class home. That falseness would have been more distracting than the poshness.
In contrast, if someone who had grown up speaking with a Scottish or West
Indian accent had read my piece for me, it would be less distracting or not
distracting at all because those accents are not in themselves class-related.
In middle and upper class Scots and West Indian homes, one also talks about the
novel.
To hear the finished podcast, go to
Monday, 5 August 2019
Memory meets De tre vise men of Dalarna
Click on Image to Enlarge
Like death and taxes,
memory losses are inevitable. We may swear to ourselves or to someone else that
this moment will never be forgotten but it will, even before old age or worse
sets in. As psychologists keep trying to tell us, to little effect, our minds
constantly reorganise our memories: deleting, mislaying, editing, revising,
inventing. Our memory is a bit like Microsoft run amok, improving or weeding to
its own satisfaction yesterday’s Word docs while we sleep.
There are things I
would like to write about but when I sit down to it, I promptly discover that I
remember no more than the file name. Oh, they are splendid file names but standalone
they do not make a splendid story.
The objects which pass
through our hands perhaps have a bit more success in being there when we want
them. It’s true that we lose things, bin them, give them away, forget where we
have put them but, still, some survive and often for much longer than the
memories which we may hope to find still attached - but don’t.
Today I come across
this charming card which has managed to accompany me through many house moves
since it was purchased in 1964 - fifty five years ago! The summer of that year - I had just turned seventeen - I organised for myself a holiday job in Sweden, working in the Hotel
Siljansborg situated beside Lake Siljan in the province of Dalarna.
Everyone is familiar
with one Dalarna thing: those simple, chunky carved wooden horses painted in
bright colours (traditionally red) with simple floral decorations in green,
white, blue and yellow - the last two the colours of Sweden’s flag. When I came
to the end of my time at the Hotel Siljansborg, I was given one as a leaving
present and I still have it.
The carved horses were
a portable part of a larger tradition of visual folk art, centred in Dalarna,
which flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and which produced
painted furniture and wall decorations in which the floral motifs ( the
technical name is Kurbits and I was
able to google it because I still remembered the word) are always present.
My card has pin holes
in the top corners so at one time I must have displayed it. A horizontal banner
across the top spells out what the original depicts: De Tre wise man matthei 21 Cap Malat ar 1841 an A L S ( The Three Wise Men Matthew chap[ter] 21 Painted [in the] year 1841 by A L S ).
Aren’t they splendid?
Not a whiff of the Middle East. No donkeys or camels to bring them to the stable,
just fine Dalarna horses. The three kneeling figures who could have been modelled on the
local priest or lawyer - maybe they were; a rather patrician Joseph and a matronly
Mary, her black leather shoes peeking out from under her full skirts. It looks as if having babies is something she takes in her stride.
We are very
familiar with the idea that human beings fashion God in their own image; in
Dalarna, they imagined the Nativity as something which happened not so long ago and just
down the road. But I suspect that their religious beliefs were at least as
robust as those of people who were brought up on donkeys, flowing robes, and
sandals. But either way, the Dalarna folk artists were thinking rather like those who re-thought Shakespeare as West Side Story.
On the back of the card, the work
is titled De tre vise men
(modernising the spelling) and given as originating from the small town of
Rättvik which provided the postal address for my hotel. Then it gives the
current location of the work as the Zornmuseet.
That opens a file: one day, during hours off work, I walked to the Anders Zorn
museum in Mora. It googles and I am immediately offered a portrait of the
artist (1860-1920) which I recognise as one of which I took away a postcard. But
though I can google as much of his work as I want, I can’t see the folk art
which must also have been in the museum.
I google a bit more. It is out of the question
that I walked. Mora is 37.8 kilometers from Rättvik!
The World Memory finds
and opens its files for me in half a second and, once again, forces me to revise my own
memory.
*
I write more about that summer in Sweden in my memoir of childhood, I Have Done This In Secret (degree zero 2018)
Sunday, 28 July 2019
Do The Dead Have Any Rights?
Whatever rights the
dead may have, they are secured for them by the living. A man writes a will
disinheriting his children; they go to court to have the will set aside and a
living judge decides the matter. Another man writes a will endowing a fund out
of which lawyers can be paid to defend his reputation against all-comers. But
in a jurisdiction where English law prevails, that would be pointless: there is
no offence of libelling the dead. Only the living can be libelled. In France, the dead are protected too.
The living grant rights
to the dead, no doubt guided very much by what rights they themselves would
like to be accorded when they die. Rights for the dead are about anticipation,
not retrospection. So in most cultures, maybe all, there are protocols for
handling a dead body and disposing of it. Failure to observe those protocols is
both shocking and probably a sign of some breakdown of the social order. If the
protocols dictate at least a shroud and an individual grave, then something has
gone very wrong if naked bodies are tipped into common graves, as often they
are in times of plague and war.
But does it make sense to say that the rights
of the dead have been violated in such circumstances? After all, they know
nothing of what is going on. And we can understand and criticise what is
happening without invoking the language of rights. So, for example, we could
say that if we don’t show respect towards the dead, we will soon cease to show
respect to the living, to each other. And that is not going to be good news.
This argument is a cautionary, prudential one rather than a rights-based one.
It is also the case
that the language of rights seems inappropriate where there is constant flux in
the protocols which set out the rights of the dead. It is only very recently in
my culture that burning bodies has been accepted as an alternative to burying
them; even more recently that it has been thought acceptable to harvest vital
organs - with or without explicit consent -
from those who may have died only minutes beforehand. It doesn’t seem
that “rights” come into it. It looks more like “needs must”.
Nonetheless, we do
accord rights to the dead which are quite extensive and sometimes not always
explicitly reflected upon. Most of these rights relate to property and
reputation. Some deserve to be challenged.
An elderly widow with
no children and a great deal of inherited wealth writes a will leaving the
whole lot to a donkey sanctuary. She has every right to do so. There is no
Public Advocate enabled to go before a judge and argue that the will should be
set aside. There is no one who can stand up to say: Your Honour, the reality is
that we have far too many donkey sanctuaries; donkeys are being bred to
populate them; the sanctuaries are not much more than a lucrative scam for
those who promote them. I urge you to divert the late widow’s wealth to the
oncology department of her local hospital where, at public expense, she
received extensive treatment for several years. It would be right for her
estate to be put back into the community from which she took so much. Ditch the
fake donkeys, Your Honour!
It would require a
revolution in our thinking to find that argument compelling. I would welcome
such a revolution, but as things stand, the imagined Public Advocate’s argument
is nothing more than an open threat to property rights which - in our minds -
are inextricably linked to the idea that those are things which can be passed
on. Quite cursory analysis would show that there is really not much of a link
between the idea of a property right and the idea of an indefinitely and
indefeasibly transmissible property right. A practical demonstration of the
distinction between property right and transfer right was once provided in
traditional gypsy cultures where both the caravan and its contents were burnt
on the death of its owner. But woe betide anyone who had thought to steal from
the caravan during the lifetime of its occupant.
So much for property.
What about reputation? Here there is a cluster of protocols which create or
enshrine rights to externalised memory, to memorials. Someone dies, they are
buried, and their grave marked with a tombstone giving name, dates, some
personal details and maybe a Commendation, “A Kind Father to all His Children”;
“She Loved the Donkeys”. All this involves several financial transactions, none
of which guarantee that tombstone in perpetuity. In practice, grave furniture
is quickly neglected by those who have paid for it; the weather takes its toll
on soft stone; the graveyard fills up - and eventually everything is bulldozed
to make way for new graves or simply public green space. The dead are
forgotten. No one much minds because the protocol has allowed memory to be
gradually, not abruptly, extinguished. Those who mourn have been given their
time.
In contrast, when a
memorial - a monument - to a dead person is erected in public space, whether at
government expense or funded by public subscription, it seems to be some kind
of assumption that they thereby acquire a right to stand or sit there, in stone
or bronze, in perpetuity. There is no protocol for taking these things down, no
equivalent to the protocol which allows graveyards to be cleared out. In the
context of lively conflict over statues of controversial figures, it would
actually be helpful to develop some kind of intellectual framework which would
aid us in deciding when a statue’s lease on public space has run out.
One
criterion might be whether we still remember the name and history of a person
memorialised, regardless of whether the memory is fond or hostile. Yes, for
most of us, it’s still Nelson on top of the column in Trafalgar Square. But who
are those characters who occupy the surrounding plinths? If you can’t so much
as name them, why would you want them to remain there, in perpetuity? It’s not
as if the hack work of monumental sculpture ever has any artistic interest and
only rarely can it claim architectural merit. Without a protocol for removing
the upright monumental dead, our urban public spaces are simply doomed to become
more and more cluttered by forlorn figures, very rapidly forgotten by us and
attracting the interest only of dogs - the reason for plinths in part to
protect trouser legs - and pigeons.
Tuesday, 23 July 2019
The Bank Note Problem (Second Attempt)
For First Attempt, scroll down to 17 July 2019
In Ruritania, there are
four denominations of banknotes. The Ruritanian National Bank issues them in
unequal quantities, according to perceived need, and on a rotating basis
changes the designs to make forgery more difficult and less remunerative. One
design is changed every three years, and once changed the old notes for that
denomination cease to be valid. So each design has a life of twelve years.
In the past, the
designs comprised abstract and complicated backgrounds (so-called guilloché or burelage ) combined with unique fonts in mostly calligraphic
styles, all designed to defeat attempts at forgery. But at the urging of a
modernising Ruritanian government, some decades ago now, the bank changed its
policy and all new designs have represented dead people who are remembered for their
achievements. The modernising government wanted to see different kinds of
people and different kinds of achievement represented, but did not bind the
bank to any particular formula.
This posed the bank a
problem. How many different kinds of people are there? How many kinds of
achievement? Without answers to those prior questions it was very hard to know
how to proceed. The Bank did not at first identify this problem and started out
without any clear answers, rather hoping that “obvious” cases would present
themselves, as indeed they did ; Mr Shakespeare, Ruritania’s most famous and
acclaimed dead playwright, had his image uncontroversially placed on a twenty pounds
sterling banknote in 1970. It was true but irrelevant that there have always
been doubts about whether images of Mr Shakespeare look at all like the man
they purport to represent.
The lack of clear
principles of choice immediately encouraged subjects of Ruritania to come
forward with humble petitions addressed to the Governor of the Bank proposing
that such and such a person, or group of persons, or achievement, or group of
achievements, should be represented on the next banknote scheduled for
replacement. In the common parlance of the United States, these humble
petitions - however worded in terms of justice, fairness and representation not
to mention Greatness - were necessarily instances of log rolling.
That posed the Bank a
problem. Should it respond to the biggest logs rolled its way or should it seek
to establish some principles of fair representation? The Governor decided that
Principles should be sought. A committee was formed to find them.
After the usual lengthy
deliberations, the committee proposed that two categories of person should be
recognised (Male and Female) and four categories of achievement (Arts, Science,
Politics, War). The committee pointed out that these numbers had been arrived
at having regard to the reality of four bank note combinations. All eight
possible combinations of the categories (which they summarised as MA, MS, MP,
MW; FA, FS, FP, FW) could be represented on four notes in just two complete
banknote cycles. There would be no awkward remainders to deal with.
As for the actual
personages to be represented, the committee concluded that (a) that they all be
dead - there was no disagreement about that - and (b) that it was up to the Governor
to decide between several possible selection procedures enumerated as follows:
·
a committee of experts and / or the Great
& the Good to pick the person to be featured in any of the eight
categories;
·
a simple lottery the tickets for which
would bear names selected by some method or other;
·
a weighted lottery with the number of
tickets for each name equal to the number of signatures on humble petitions
submitted in favour of that name - this was seen as a concession to log
rolling;
The
committee also felt that a further accommodation of the public was possible:
·
A list of names selected by the Bank’s
own committee could be submitted to public vote according to one of the
recognised procedures (first past the post, and so on).
This
last procedure had built into it a guarantee against any possibility of an
overwhelming public vote in favour of Banky McBankface.
The committee did
identify one unresolved problem. Since banknotes of the four denominations are
issued in unequal quantities, it might be thought that the representational
value of the image on them should be weighted according to the number of
banknotes on which that image would appear. The committee noted that this would
remove an element of simplicity from its proposals and would require assistance
from someone able to do advanced mathematics and not just simple sums.
The committee then took
cover.
When it learned of the committee’s recommendations, the government of
Ruritania was appalled. There were far too few categories of person and it was
not sure that “War” was any longer a category of achievement. What about
“Entertainment” or “Sport” - perhaps these could be combined into “Culture”? If “War” was then added to “Politics”, that
would preserve the four categories of achievement. A neat counter-proposal.
But as for categories
of person, the government felt it had a duty of special care for the Ruritanian
Minorities of which thirty nine were currently recognised. How did the Bank
propose to ensure that those minorities featured appropriately on the four
denominations with only its Male and Female categories available?
The Bank replied humbly
that it thought that it could cope with the increased complexity demanded by
the government but would need a few extra mathematicians, a new computer, and
an answer from the government to two remaining questions: Are the thirty nine
minorities to be represented equally within the Person categories or in
weighted form according to the number of persons identified as being members of
those minorities? And if the latter, should the number be those actually living
or the number who have ever lived within the borders of Ruritania? The second
question was given its point by the twin facts that all Persons had to be dead in
order to qualify and that today’s Ruritanian Minorities were not distributed in
the same proportions or same aggregate numbers as the Minorities of yesteryear.
The government
appointed a small committee of mathematicians to come up with its reply to these
two supplementary questions and it is hoped that a Nobel Prize (possibly for
Mathematics but preferably for Peace) will result.
Saturday, 20 July 2019
Boys from Slade Green are Under-represented in Hollywood films
Click on Image to Magnify
I was born in Dartford’s
West Hill hospital, which provided maternity facilities a few miles away from
where my parents lived in Slade Green. Slade Green was an area sandwiched between
Erith (which was a Borough) and Crayford (which was an Urban District), both within
the county of Kent. But by the time I
was born, this part of north-west Kent was really part of south-east London and
is now legally so - Slade Green is within the Northend ward of the London
Borough of Bexley. In other words, I lived in a place which had no real
identity or boundaries.
I lived in Slade Green
from birth until the age of eight when we moved to Dartford. So you might say
that I passed half of my boyhood there, not quite a tenth of my life. I could claim to be from Slade Green which I
tend also to think of as some kind of outgrowth of Erith rather than of
Crayford. The postal address was “Slade
Green, Erith, Kent” and the nearest town for shopping was Erith.
Google can’t find me
many people who claim to be or have been from Slade Green; Jade Anouka (1990 -
) was born there and that’s the only notable name I can find. For
Erith as a whole, there are notable people who were born there including the humanist and socialist comedian and writer Linda Smith (1958-2006) who joked that Erith isn't twinned with anywhere but it does have a suicide pact with Dagenham [ which it faces across the river Thames]. And another one:
Erith is in Kent - the "Garden of England" - I can only assume Erith is the outside toilet because it is a shit house.
A 2014 post on
Reddit in answer to a question from someone thinking to move to my hometown has
this to say:
“Erith is crime
central, and Slade Green has absolutely NOTHING going for it.”
That’s not untypical
of what I can find and I doubt it’s untrue.
Now to the point. Would it make sense to say in any context
that people from Slade Green are underepresented
in any 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 but with 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?
And yet if we generalise a bit more the question no longer
looks absurd. I borrow a sociological category from Trump, D. 2018 and put it this way, Are actors from shithole places
under-represented (or over-represented) in Hollywood films? Cleaned up to
meet Sunday School sensibilities, the question becomes, Are actors from under-privileged backgrounds …?
I don’t know the answer to that question for Hollywood, but
do know that it is reckoned to make sense in many other contexts and that the
answer is that those from under-privileged / deprived / poor backgrounds are often
under-represented. Bankers, lawyers, politicians, museum directors …. well,
they don’t come from Slade Green-like places.
Knowing that as I do, I confess that I sometimes wonder if
I was the first / only boy from Slade Green to go to Oxford, get a doctorate …
etc and I have Googled on occasion to see if I can make any progress in answering
those questions. There must have been more than one by now, maybe lots more
than one. But it's irrelevant for the reasons I have already given.
My country has a state broadcaster which now has a website where
every day there are feelgood stories of the form “ So-and-so becomes first X in
Y” or (less satisfactorily) “first openly X in Y” and “first X in Y since …” . These
stories often irritate me because so many assumptions are quietly smuggled in with
the story. Why is it a good thing that the Church of England now has its first black
female bishop?
The Church of England is, from where I stand, a small but
extremely wealthy (the bishops all live in what are called Palaces) religious organisation which attends to the needs
of the highest in the land for infant baptisms (a reprehensible practice),
weddings and funerals. And that’s about it. It has little to commend it. What
is a black woman doing selling her soul to this organisation, I wonder? Why isn’t
she - let’s say - a Quaker? [ Incidentally, the BBC website does not recognise
the existence of any Christian churches other than the Anglican and Catholic
(it prefers the latter). Please tell me if you can find a BBC website story
about Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Quakers …].
The BBC would not feature a piece claiming “First woman to
head the Institute for Torturing Political Prisoners” because it gets the point
that torturing people is not very nice. The Church of England is not very nice,
but it doesn’t get that.
You can experiment with variants: Cardinals elect first gay / first openly gay/ first…. since 1555 Pope”.
I headed to Wikipedia for the 1555 date:
The context in which I
am writing this is one in which there is endless chatter about representation,
under-representation, diversity and so on but in which there seems to be very
little thought about the categories X and Y which matter and what in the end
counts as a satisfactory result.
Even at the apparently simple level of male:female
representation, there has to be some thinking about what counts as “gender balance”
[ I prefer “sex balance” since gender is a complicating factor].
Fifty:Fifty looks like
the right answer. But for a large organisation which has to deal with changes
in the available labour force, the legacy of past training practices and so on,
fifty: fifty is not a reasonable target. It would force employers to take on
less qualified candidates just to keep the balance at a point in time. What
might be a reasonable expectation and aim would be to keep variation in, say, the 45
- 55 range, either way, over a period of time. Affirmative action is then
required if the actual figures gravitate to the outer limits of the range but otherwise everyone can just get on with their regular work.
Even then, there are
difficult cases to consider. I offer just three: midwives, coal miners, primary
school teachers.
Credit for the Linda Smith jokes:
Source: https://www.chortle.co.uk/features/2019/01/29/42176/remembering_linda_smith
Credit for the Linda Smith jokes:
Source: https://www.chortle.co.uk/features/2019/01/29/42176/remembering_linda_smith
Wednesday, 17 July 2019
Alan Turing and the Banknote Problem
In a long tradition, a moral claim is only sound
when it is universalisable. Morally, policy or decision X can only be good for
the goose if it is also good for the gander. What I wish for myself I must be
willing to wish for anyone else similarly situated. Any other form of a wish is
discrimination, usually in its own favour. Log rolling campaigns aim to get X
for me but not for you. So there are people who are unhappy with the decision to put Alan Turing on the new £50 note. For example, they thought it was time for a black person.
Suppose there are seven colours of the rainbow and four
banknote denominations. Suppose a rule says that only one colour can appear on
a banknote denomination besides black and white. (I will leave this rule
unchallenged for purposes of the argument; Coca Cola advertisements challenge it).
A first task now is to find a rule for securing “fair
representation” of all rainbow colours, a rule which is universalisable. There
are a couple of obvious possibilities: rotate colours through time or pick
colours by repeated lotteries. These are
non-discriminatory methods or algorithms.
Now suppose that bank notes of different
denominations are issued in unequal quantities. This then seems to require that
to secure overall fairness in colour distribution, any appearance of a colour
should be weighted by the number of banknotes issued in that colour. Otherwise, some
colour could be left languishing on a denomination banknote that very few
people ever see (like the 500€ note).
But suppose that the colours of this metaphorical rainbow
do not occur with equal real-world frequency. So to measure for fairness, we
now have to weight for colour frequency and also be prepared for those frequencies
to change. Unlike the colours of the real rainbow, the distribution of colours in
the social rainbow change through time.
A mathematically minded reader might like to keep
going and try to produce the decision-making algorithms which would secure fair
representation through time. Can lotteries achieve it?Can rotation achieve it?
However, there was a prior question to which an
answer was simply assumed. There are seven colours of the real rainbow. How
many colours of the metaphorical rainbow? In other words, how many categories exist
which require representation?
As far as I can see, when you get past two (male and
female the obvious ones), the going very quickly gets very hard. Are blind
people and deaf people one category or two? Are cyclists and pedestrians one or
two? How many categories is BAME? How many categories is LGBTQ+ ? (For human resources managers tasked with achieving
diversity, the gay black woman is a gift from heaven since she occupies three categories at once. When does that become an unfair advantage, a sort of new Eton and Oxford and male? And is it an unfair disadvantage that old and male and pale also occupies three categories not one?).
Unless there is an agreed answer to the How many categories? question, we will never be able to satisfy all of the
people all of the time. Instead, we will continue to live in a world of serial
log-rolling campaigns But social justice always used to be envisaged as an
alternative to log-rolling, not its justification.
Tuesday, 16 July 2019
Book Learning
How many books have you
read? I count in books per week rather than day or month and I reckon that my
average must be about two a week and that average probably holds up over sixty
years now.
Reckon a year at 50 weeks (easier math), then that’s three thousand
weeks and so, six thousand books. I don’t count books which I skim or abandon
early on and, in any case, I tend to be a dutiful reader who once started keeps
going to the often bitter end.
Anyway, six thousand. A
very small number. The best-selling among my own books in the Amazon ranking is currently in
position 560 353. Lot of books out there, most of them desperately seeking readers.
Six thousand. If you
locked me in a room for a week, instructed to write out the authors and titles,
I would struggle. How many could I actually recall even at the entry level of
author plus title? Maybe I could make a start with the books read in other
languages which I am sure would number no more than a few hundred, nearly all
in French. I have (for example) only ever read two books in Spanish, both by
Eugenio Coseriu and in historical linguistics - easy enough to understand since
all the technical vocabulary could be guessed via the very similar French.
Those six thousand
books have left me in possession of a great deal of book learning, though they have
not made me learned because I have
never been much concerned to achieve “chapter and verse” recall. I have never
read biblically, and can’t quote you Shakespeare or Marx or Virginia Woolf, let
alone the Bible. I don’t think of books as monuments onto which memorable
inscriptions have been carved, but rather as things which develop or express
ideas and feelings which can be put to use without it being necessary to recall the exact
words used. Sometimes the exact words matter, but not often. I’m an active reader, but
not a faithful one.
All this book learning
goes towards making me an educated person, and all this book learning dies with
me, if not before - I think it is already slipping away. It can only exercise
its effects in my conversation, in what I write, in how I conduct my life. And
then it ceases to exist at all.
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?
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
This week I was in Germany for a couple of days in a city very familiar to me. I was working but in my lunch breaks and evenings, I did my usual things. I like to stroll, taking in the people. On a lunch break promenade in a pedestrianised shopping area, a woman appeared coming towards me out of the crowd: tall, slender and dressed in an immaculately well-cut and seemingly brand new niqab, the first I had seen on this visit. When I see a niqab, my habit is to look at the male who will be walking alongside the female and, yes, he was there: rather shorter, hunched a bit over his smartphone, and dressed according to the regulations: a bit of stubble, tee-shirt, jeans, and trainers. My rapid visual profiling didn’t manage to take in the logo on the trainers so I don’t know what brand he favoured.
It’s very decent of God
to 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 and outrun their own children.
I just wish God was a
bit more thoughtful 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. More importantly, it 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 picked out with some expertly applied kohl.
But I can’t decode the
look as angry or friendly or just inquisitive - there is no mouth gesture to
help out. I’m stumped to understand why I should be worth a very frank stare. The stare is made possible, I guess, by the fact that I’m wearing sun glasses (advised for cataracts) and so, from her point of view, there is no
eye contact.
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 another Panama -
I would notice. So maybe a Panama is not a German thing, even for elderly bald
heads. So it’s like this now: she is my first niqab of the day and I am her
first Panama. I think it's the hat which caused the stare.
People do sometimes
call out to me when I’m wearing a hat. Later, in the central park, a young woman on a
bench with a boyfriend called out Bonjour though I was too slow to turn, lift my hat, and reply Bonjour, Mam’selle. Anyway, it shows that there’s at
least one person in the city who reckons a Panama a French thing.
That brings me to 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 false. A lot goes on, an awful lot. I give one example
relevant to what I want to say.
If in the street I see a child behaving
in a way which is charming or delightful or just funny, I will almost certainly
smile at whichever person is doing the parenting. I think that is the norm
rather than an elderly eccentric exception. 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 the child’s age or name. If I smile at a
parent who happens to be wearing a hijab, as I do, she will also smile back.
When women wearing the hijab first began to appear at shop tills in London and then where I
live, I acted in a correct but very restrained manner, as if attending a
vicarage tea party. I didn’t engage because I imagined that 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 joke. I now wonder whether in national and local contexts which are not always friendly,
it is really quite nice when old white males in panama hats behave as if they were ordinary human beings.
The woman in the niqab is pretty much excluded from this 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 been watching this on my strolls
elsewhere). Perhaps the best hope for the future is that the women who wear
headscarves enable the women in the niqabs 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 to do so - I can understand why someone might want to wear them for special occasions, even if they often end up being kicked off and abandoned.
Later in that lunch break stroll, a group of teenagers wearing hijab passed me. One has combined her hijab with bright yellow stiletto heels. I think that's another story for another day.
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 to do so - I can understand why someone might want to wear them for special occasions, even if they often end up being kicked off and abandoned.
Later in that lunch break stroll, a group of teenagers wearing hijab passed me. One has combined her hijab with bright yellow stiletto heels. I think that's another story for another day.
Wednesday, 12 June 2019
Girl or Young Woman With a Rose: A Nineteenth Century Painting from Finland
Click on Image to Magnify
I bought the painting
recently, bidding online in a Finnish auction on the basis of how it looked on
screen. Now it hangs to the side of the desk where I am typing this. When
shipping costs were added, it still cost me under two hundred euros. Those who
viewed it in the actual sale room would have seen that it is damaged - the line
which runs horizontally across the painting starting from the girl’s elbow
marks a repair.
On the back, a very
recent label reads “Luultavasti Aino Aalto” - “Probably Aino Aalto”. That
proves to be unhelpful. The most famous “Aino Aalto” was a Finnish architect
and designer, born 1894, died 1949. Google not only knows all about her work
and illustrates it profusely; it also reckons there is no other Aino Aalto
worth knowing about. All I get from Google is the new knowledge that Aino is a
first name for a female.
The label is ambiguous.
It most likely assigns a probable painter but could assign a name to the
sitter. From the style of the painting, the fairly crude wooden stretcher, the
style of the gilt frame, the dress and hair of the sitter - well, I think this
painting dates from before the advent of portrait photography, from the first
half of the nineteenth century.
I guess the age of the sitter at between
thirteen and nineteen. She’s not displaying a ring but then it’s
only her right hand that you can see. The rose is probably a conventional
symbol - the bloom of youth, romance - but one should remember that portrait
painters (and subsequently photographers) got sitters to hold things simply to
stop them fidgeting with their hands. The painter has solved the problem of the
other hand by simply chopping it off.
Aino is a Finnish name.
There were women painters in nineteenth century Finland, so there is
no obstacle to the painter being the Aino and a label on a painting for auction
is more likely to attempt to name the painter than the sitter.
In the nineteenth
century, someone who was Swedish-speaking was more likely to have been able to
afford a portrait in oils. That I infer from my general knowledge, not from
Google, though that probabilistic knowledge certainly does not exclude that the
sitter was Finnish-speaking. Likewise,
from general knowledge and from the sitter’s hair, dress and facial features, I
infer that this is not a girl from the Russian governing population - the Grand
Duchy of Finland passed from Swedish to Russian control in 1809. Her religion
will be Protestant.
To my eye, the portrait
is not in any way cute. Though she has been made to hold a rose, the girl in
the portrait looks seriously at the painter, with eyes which are unwavering. If
she is nearer to thirteen than nineteen, she may just be uncertain about
herself. Nearer to nineteen, then she is a determined young woman.
I can think of no way
of finding her name, her date of birth, details of her life, the date of her
death. It’s possible that no one anywhere now knows those details, or how to
retrieve them. It’s also possible that she figures in some family genealogy,
but that the link between the person in the genealogy and the person in the
portrait has been lost. After all, this nice portrait ended up in a public
auction.
I do think it’s a portrait, not a genre painting for which some
temporarily anonymous model has been paid to sit. The idea of the “genre”
painting is very convenient for art museums; it saves them from a great deal of
homework, and in this case would result in the title, Girl With A Rose or Young Woman With A Rose, depending on how you resolve her age.
And without a name for her, that generic title
cannot be improved.
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