Psybertron Asks

I’ll probably come back to this, but for now just a brief comment.

I’ve very pro next generation nuclear power, though I need to check out the intrinsic safety of the particular EDF / AREVA design proposed, and I’m very pro French and Chinese (and Russian, and South African) engineering innovation in this space, where UK and US have lagged. However the “deal” agreed with the UK government seems to be the worst of all possible worlds in terms of the political economic energy pricing fog that is bound to hang like a millstone around the project for its lifetime and beyond, obscuring any actual technical and social cost-benefit.

Can’t believe the wholly French-Chinese consortium with UK Gov price-guarantee was the best arrangement for UK Power industry, or UK consumers & tax-payers long term. Convenient for the current government obviously, underwrite a big future cheque and stand back from any responsibility to make it work. Future blame-game assured.

[Grist to the “who is we” agenda. UK (w or w/o Scotland), EU, Western Alliances, Global consitituencies?]

[Post Note : Ditto the Porstmouth vs The Clyde shipyards political deal ….. who is we, again ?]

Interesting after the exchange with Tiffany and Ed on their articles about the danger of losing the point of curation (in museum and gallery context) when the institution is encouraged by funding based on goal evaluation, to turn those goals into the object of curation rather than the curated / shared objects themselves, to see David share this one from Euan.

In this case it is in the sharing items of interest through blogging and social media – the point being to share things that are of interest in their own right, rather than trying to second guess the value / lesson / message of the shared objects to those with whom you’re sharing.

Briefly caught Paul Collier with Stephanie Flanders on BBC R4 Start the Week this morning, and noticed instantly that his immigration agenda (Exodus) is another example of my Eco-Diversity Beats In-Breeding mantra, pointing out in particular that there are important subtleties behind the headline. For Darwinian evolution to work, this truth depends on understanding fidelity and fecundity. Too little and the “species” (*) stagnates, too much and no new stable species can emerge amid the chaos. Just enough and the new inputs to the status-quo are absorbed into emergent meaningful species

[(*) PS for the biologists, Yes, I’m talking species at a social and group selection level …. with all the debate that entails …. but that’s social species subject to social group selection, not bio-species.]

More grist to the writing mill from Brain Pickings.

Plotto – generic plots for all of literature.

Do I really have to draft another post to join up the “Respect for the wisdom of established authority” dots between these three?

Scientist Chris Packham https://www.psybertron.org/?p=6371
Artist Grayson Perry https://www.psybertron.org/?p=6388
Political Administrator Ronald Storrs https://www.psybertron.org/?p=6400

A month or so couple of weeks ago, I posted a holding post for a whole collection of posts I need to write. Despite more than a dozen significant posts since then, not to mention Tweets and Facebook posts, I’ve still barely acknowledged those I telegraphed then, even though some of the subject matter clearly overlaps.

I can at least catch-up on The Cyprus Connection and the Tale of Two Cities allusion contained in the ‘Twas Ever Thus passage.

I’ve completed Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities and completed Storrs’ Orientations.

Glad I finally finished TOTC after many false starts. The opening message remains important (the ’twas ever thus quotes extracted in the post linked above), and, in case we didn’t know, it ends with Sydney Carton sacrificing himself for Charles Darnay, going to his death at the Guillotine, with the words:

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.

In between it’s all a bit predictable as soon as the visual similarity between Darnay and Carton (and the potential love triangle with Ms Manette) is laid on a plate – even illustrated in the “Likeness” instalment very early on. Useful to know the dependence on Carlyle’s The French Revolution as a British-biased source of much of what Dickens was able to imagine of France at the time. And, I have to say the long prose letter “left” by Dr Manette and later “discovered” in his original Bastille cell is a lame and contrived literary device to conveniently join up the loose ends with the metaphorical but none-too-apparent golden thread. Found motivation (the will to live) hard to continue from that point, but I did stick at it to the end. Ho hum. Come in Victor Hugo, I expect.

Orientations, on the other hand, remained wonderful to the very end. A little sad as Storrs recounts his difficulties leading up to the 1931 Cypriot revolt against the British, the burning down of Government House with so much of Storrs’ personal collection of papers and artefacts destroyed, and the eventual shootings that restored military order, but signalled the breakdown in orderly, civil development of Cyprus. Storrs went on to take up governorship of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1932, but nevertheless defends the value of lessons learned from his (and predecessors’) periods in Cyprus (and Egypt and Palestine before that) for the benefit of those who came after. His sense of being undervalued at that point is underlined by his also noting that his acquisition in 1938 of his country retirement home back in good old England was an “unfulfilled dream” until funded by Orientations written in 1936 and published in 1937.

Failure would have been not to try. Storrs also adopts the “twas ever thus / plus ca change” attitude. In concluding he spends quite some time summarising the influences on his life, as well as acknowledging a number of the losses (in the fire) “from which the rest of his life is freely and eagerly disencumbered.” Beautiful language to the end.

Affectionately, he recalls Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, (a cubic yard of) Bach, Kitchener, Allenby and of course T.E.Lawrence.

Included amongst his long but eclectic list of things he was glad to see the back of are “restaurants with bands” (*) as well as “fervent converts to any religion or cause”. In his own words :

So much the more must I cling to that highest which need not and must not be resigned while strength is left to perceive it – to that particular manifestation of immortal power by which individual spirit is most deeply moved.

I believe, and proclaim my faith, that this solace will proceed increasingly from the great classics of the world; both from their own splendour and from their contrast with the limitations of modern life. True, we may rise from Mr [H.G.] Wells Autobiography convinced for the moment that the paramount of life is physical science. Yet throughout the war, I never saw one tired man refreshing his soul with a scientific treatise or a mathematical problem; whereas there were many beside Lawrence transported from their own fatigues and anxieties by following those of Patroclus and Odysseus.

And finally:

Before such epiphanies of the god in man
I can but repeat the prayer of a Moslem
uttered in Basra more than a thousand years ago:

“O my Lord !
If I worship Thee from fear of Hell,
burn me in Hell.

And,
if I worship Thee from hope of Paradise,
exclude me thence.

But,
if I worship Thee for Thine own sake,
then withhold me not from Thine Eternal Beauty.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Four Horsemen of New Atheism, not to mention the hoard of scientistic celeb scientists and comics hanging onto their coat-tails. I recall it was cognitive scientist Dupuy I read and blogged about in 2002 that first made me realise that “literature is a superior form of knowledge to science” is a valid statement, to be denied by scientists at our peril. It is at least not for scientists to say there is no debate on scientific grounds – per Pinker / Wieseltier correspondence.

Talking of literature, the reason for sticking to the  bitter end of Storrs and the Dickensian allusion, was The Cyprus Connection.

The inter-war history of Cyprus formed a good lead in to Mak Berwick’s Langkawi Lair. Mak is under no illusion – as he said on Facebook – our high-school English masters may be turning in their graves, to read his rookie opus, though our physics teacher gave it praise. It’s not literature in any sense that would pass muster with Grayson Perry’s idea of intellectual authority for quality. I could fill a few paragraphs myself with literary criticism – too many redundant adjectives and adverbs better served by better nouns and verbs, maybe too much dwelling on explaining military jargon, procedures and acronyms rather than letting the reader’s intelligence carry them forward – but I won’t.

I managed to read the opening (Cyprus, and the single live round fired) and the developing (Paris) chapters before breaking off to finish Dickens and Storrs, and I do have a new Neil Gaiman on the reading pile. But, whilst being an action/adventure genre I would not normally read, I already know I want to get to Malaysia, and back hopefully, with a moral in the tail no doubt. A good yarn in prospect? [Post Note : having read on 3 or 4 more chapters, I can’t see me sticking with it. A great yarn if you like the smash bang wallop of designer branded fire-arms, Rolex Oysters, Mercedes AMG’s, murders, executions, torture interrogations, convenient coincidences and general mano-a-mano combat – at a rate of least 3 of each per chapter currently. BTW, do I claim my prize of spotting that the autobiographical reality flips into 99% fantasy the moment scarface reaches across our hero’s drink in the Paris bar scene? Sorry, not my scene anyway. Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” next.]

[(*) Restaurants with bands. I know what he means. I love live music, but find the idea of live musicians as background music not so much a distraction to whatever the foreground is, as an insult to the musicians and their music deserving attention. People talkin’ while I’m singin’ – as Tommy Womack puts it.]

I have much sympathy with this Susan Sontag piece from Brain Pickings.

I must admit myself to using adages and aphorisms as short-hand for many of my recurring points, some stolen directly from others, some borrowed and modified to suit, some essentially invented / evolved as new species. I use them a great deal in fact. Many of these aphorisms are effectively working chapter titles for my book. But Sontag’s point is so important, that they are no substitute for any wisdom intended, they may make the apparent wisdom easy to share and recall, but we must avoid being lazy and presuming they actually contain or communicate the wisdom.

This is exactly the same issue as the “A Picture Paints a Thousand Words” adage – which  first blogged about way back here in 2002, when I followed in back to its 1921 Printer’s Ink origins with the title “An Aphorism Too Far”. The point being a picture (typically these days a brand “icon”) can signify a massively complex point very simply and quickly, but the image does not actually contain much of the message. The communication is one of recall, of something which must already have been learnt, at least implicitly, by the viewer of the image, or the recipient of the aphorism. To think the message is “communicated” by the image or aphorism is lazy and misleading – dangerous – this case in particular, a meta-adage, an aphorism about an image.

Lovely coincidence to see this today, having read and mentally remarked on Sam Norton’s latest tweeted blog post. I had been meaning to respond from the keyboard since reading the post in mobile format at the crack of dawn today.

My initial response was “Sam, you’ve got the acronym wrong it should be APPATW not APAATW”, and was about to deliver my lecture on the “Aphorism Too Far” from 2002. Ha. No, the wise Sam has it right, he does indeed mean “And” a thousand words, not “Paints” a thousand words. The and is so important, you cannot achieve one without the other.

Just a holding post for now after hearing the first of four in full.

Democracy has bad taste.
Quality does not = popularity;
Quality = validated by enough of the right people.

Simple truth. And brings in the value of “authority” based on time-served effort to understand. That and the memetic downside of popularity – all there. Democracy itself needs layers of authority. Brilliant. This one will run. Fun too. Wonderful lecture on many levels, language and style as well as content and message. Direct and without prevarication. Refreshing. And a great collection of authorities in the invited audience, asking questions as I type.

More later no doubt.

[I like the fact that, after the visual-introduction-for-radio, there is no mention of cross-dressing in either the lecture or the Q&A.]

[Also important to note, in the context of this blog, that the bit of the “truth” people will baulk at is the idea of “the right people” – an inescapable kind of “elitism” based on earned authority – as many will want to reduce this to objective definitions as will cling to individual subjective democracy, whereas by definition it’s a kind of “agreed subjectivity”. And in fact it is very close to “governance” in any sphere, democratically delegated but operationally subjective – but never totally objective in terms of popular democratic numbers.]

[Post Note : No separate blog for the second lecture. Common sense description of the “baggy” definition of what constitutes art – starting with the inevitable Duchamp again – anything can be art but not everything is. Ultimately a Venn diagram of many complex and shifting issues.]

[Post Note : April 2016 update on Chris Packham and Speaking the Unsayable.]

Just listened to Chris Packham on Desert Island Discs. We have a lot in common, I’m maybe 4 years older, our interests in science and music had very similar origins and early trajectories, but I have to say he came across as a gross self-parody of the worst kind of scientistic media-celeb scientist. Nothing personal, just the stereotypical archetype of much that is wrong with modern science, and why the way it is promoted as teaching knowledge through the media is potentially so damaging to humanity.

His “red in tooth and claw” description of the Sparrow Hawk shredding the Greenfinch, suggesting any “repulsion” is tantamount to closing one’s mind on the true beauty of the process [*]. No, it’s the human response acknowledging that there is far more to Darwinian evolution than the individual vs individual life and death competition. His infatuation with the joyous predictability of his “dogs and other animals” is precisely because he – on his own admission – rejects human beauty as too complicated for his taste.

Proudly sceptic, like any good scientist, rejecting authority, the rebel (rebel rebel, punk to be different) always questioning authority. As he says, authority needs to be earned (yawn, this is news?) but having earned it, I ask, does it not deserve any respect ? Simple Darwinian principles are levels of “fidelity” and “fecundity” – predominantly copying established precedent – upon which to play the exceptional mutant games of new opportunity. Conservative authority must be respected or we have no progress. Anti-establishment rejection for its own sake gets us nowhere, the special – destructive – case of falsification testing [or Sparrow Hawk eats Greenfich] is only a small part of the whole enterprise. Difference must be an exception from a norm.

I’d mentally drafted most of the above during the programme, but he caps it all …. the Bible and Shakespeare as “fuel”. Oh how we laughed. I’m often impressed how Kirsty manages to skip over those two without attracting anti-religious comment (take it or leave it being left unsaid as not the point of the program) …. but no, he had to take the fight to the religious (and the literary in the same breath). What a closed-minded, bigoted, scientistic stereotype. Talk about missing the point.

And the final “pick one” choice-of-choices of this book-burning bigot?
The refrain from Penetration’s Shout Above the Noise.

“Don’t let them win.”

Truly the scientistic neurosis in Maxwell’s terms. A scientist paranoid about them. We should be teaching the next generation to acquire knowledge in the application of wisdom, not neurotic paranoia against those nasty humanities / humanists.

[(*) Post Note : coincidentally, posted on Facebook last year witnessing from my office window a Sparrow Hawk take a Chaffinch from our garden feeder in classic over-the-hedgerow smash-and-grab ambush mode last year. More interesting, early this year, we stood and watched a Kestrel stoop in full view just ten feet in front of us at Portland Bill, gradually dropping and hovering in careful stages as it kept eyes on its prey the opposite side of a 2 metre high wall in front of us, only to pop-up instantly to sit with the vole in its claw on top of the wall in front of us. It proceeded to tear and swallow strips over the course of maybe 15 minutes, as we and a growing crowd of maybe 6 or 8 passing walkers paused to watch. Fascinating.When it got to some of the more gruesome entrails it contemplated disdainfully whether to swallow before discarding and moving on to tastier morsels, eventually flying off to somewhere more private to finish its meal.]

Posted by David Morey on Facebook, an autistic child’s response to a spelling test.

Neat, though the comment thread is maybe more interesting that the test response itself?

[PS To be clear, I’m interested in autism as a description of how human institutions look objectively at human activity, not particularly in the relatively abnormal condition of a given human individual.]