Psybertron Asks

A theme of mine when people are banging on about humour as a “weapon” is that is does matter how it’s used. There’s no simple right to offend, sarcasm can be cheap, and the context matters. In days of old, the court had a jester so everyone knew it was the “fool” who spoke the ironic riddles – nonesense at face value, funny or foolish – but not the guv’nor. The need was recognised, not simply “tolerated”. And it needs to be used sparingly. Anyone attempting serious dialogue or enabling real change, whether formally in politics or not, is perfectly entitled to use ironic or foolish humour, but with so much transparency of communications through social media, it’s important such humour doesn’t deflect-from or crowd-out the serious work. Best left to the professionals. Frankie Boyle is my current favourite, but you will have your own preferred national treasure. (We Cannot All Be Court Jester – with Frankie links lower down).

“Taking a baseball bat” (*) to Boris Johnson, by Matthew Parris in The Times (behind paywall), shows exactly how overplaying the fool – by his critics as well as by Boris himself – simply hides real and serious political issues.

Well said, a must read.

[Hat tip to @Emma_C_Williams for the “baseball bat” tip off. Take note my US friends.]

Too much free choice is not necessarily a good thing. This kind of vote needs expert candidates before “popularity” becomes any kind of tool. Hammers & Nails?

[Post Note : And the following day The Spectator caught up with me 😉]

One in a long line on the idea of Vive la différence. So many beliefs on gender equality are simply political correctness – as Djokovic suggests – which have nothing to do with the intended equality of opportunity and human rights.

Sure, you could argue – morally – sport should not be a professional commercial business, but so long as it is, men will earn more than women. Different argument, and it demeans women not to celebrate their actual difference. Archetypically dfferent attributes mean different challenges – physical as well as mental – and that’s true even if the range of attributes overlap enormously – not many men would choose to face a serve from Serena. Politically correct however, to simply suggest women are (should be) no different to men.

At least Djokovic acknowledged the constraints of political correctness in explaining his own view, unlike the ignorant Raymond Moore. Ignorance doesn’t change the truth however.

Wonderful interview with outgoing director of Liberty Shami Chakrabarti by Joshua Rosenberg on today’s BBCR4 Law in Action. (Last item.)

Posting during a week’s business trip to China, with the “Great Firewall” constraints on social media and Google services – including no access to any of my email (!) or any TV media. A fascinating visit to Wuhan capital of Wuchang, the home of the original 1911 Chinese revolution and more, but I digress.

One of the web-pages cached on my phone was the one extracted below from HuffPo’s UK version Tech pages. Fusion Reactor ‘Breakthrough’ Could Finally Hold The Key To Giving Us Clean, Abundant Power (16 February 2016 by Thomas Tamblyn Technology Editor, The Huffington Post UK)

Apart from the usual media hype of the key or final piece in the science jigsaw – mediated by “could” in the title and “may” in the opening sentence …

Researchers may finally have overcome one of the biggest obstacles to making nuclear fusion live up to its dream of giving us clean, virtually limitless energy.

… the view of science as a completable jigsaw is misguided anyway, even as a mathematical model – ask Godel, but again I digress.

The “almost exact” will turn out to be significant, but for now, whilst this is a computer model, physics is at base fundamentally computational. And whilst the scale of computation here is impressive (more details – read the story) it is an established fact that repeated computation throws up unpredictable results (at higher “evolved” levels than the starting point) even if the computation is simply and repeatedly algorithmic. (See Hofstadter, see Dennett, distinctly and together.)

The distinct levels (gestalts) ARE distinct – have their own identity, properties and behaviours – and whilst related, connected, even dependent, the lower does NOT cause the higher in any reductively, predictable way. Knowing the lower tells you nothing (very little) about the higher. Small differences in either the starting point or in the algorithmic relationship will lead to entirely different outcomes, and neither can you predict how small is too small to ever circumvent the problem. (In the specific example of the two-level plasma turbulence, the turbulence is already metaphorical I suspect, compared to “normal” fluid flow, but turbulence is notoriously chaotic, unpredictable and empirically stochastic – which spookily IS related to why I’m in China.)

Science ain’t that scientific. Not all, not even all good science is that repeatable.

Entertaining review from Eugene Wolters at Critical Theory, of  Francois Dosse “Intersecting Lives” of the philosophical odd-couple  Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. (Hat tip to Judith Stout @judystout1)

Apart from the madness and chaotic activism from pre-1968 Paris, the lives intersect with the name-dropping list of all those you’d expect from Lacan, Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida and more. Less expected, for me anyway, was to see the Spinoza references as a common thread of sanity despite the lunatics having taken over the asylum.

The buzz-cloud also gives a clue to the material covered by the Critical Theory blog. Entertaining and a useful resource.

Reminded of this due to twitter exchanges with several quite different people on new nuclear power options – partly the problems dogging EDF at Hinkley, partly the stay of decommissioning (but need for replacement) at Hartlepool (also operated by EDF these days), and initially because I had some involvement some years ago with Chinergy / Tsinghua / PBMR. This is the most advanced commercial scale PBMR, an “HTR-PM” – almost complete and due for start up as soon as next year in WeiHai, RongCheng Bay, China.

PBMR is not new at demonstrator scale, shelved because no-one took it up a commercial scale previously, and paused whilst the world took a deep breath over Fukushima Daiichi. But the point is, like all AGCR’s it is passively / intrinsically safer than liquid (water / molten salt / sodium) reactors AND specifically smaller and modular, reducing many other kinds of risk, commercial and political, as well as technical, safety, sustainability and environmental. Start small, add more later with confidence, in fact, just like the first commercial installation above has 2 x ~100MW HTR-PM’s going in now with an additional 18 planned in future.)

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Notes:

AGCR = Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor – there are many different designs in various stages and scales of development around the world – including Russia. All designed as 4th Gen alternatives to the 3rd Gen PWR / EPR’s like those causing problems in European projects, including Hinkley C, right now.

PBMR = Pebble-Bed Modular Reactor – a specific AGCR variant originally South-African / German design. Key thing is pebble-bed is well proven furnace technology in other industries (where I’ve also been involved directly) and inherently safe (just switch off and allow to cool).

(Thorium is the other fashionable new option, and in fact is one of the other 4th Gen AGCR designs, so is another viable option, but just not quite as close to full commercial start-up. Not even sure if Thorium couldn’t be substituted for Uranium in an evolved PBMR design, but the point is the PBMR future is now here. Sustainability also involves having evolutionary exit ramps of course.)

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[Post Note – Why not just go with a molten-salt reactor?

Another intrinsically safe design, with emphasis on the density and energy density and consequent thermal efficiencies compared to Helium cooled AGCR’s. Not sure thermal efficiency is a big deal for nuclear if overall compactness of design and build is achievable, and not sure we want proliferation of fast breeder designs with other nuclear weapon product possibilities. Still with details to be developed & proven? Part of a future mix with international controls, but maybe not the mass option? Not yet anyway. Unprejudiced dialogue and a balanced mixed portfolio is the key need.]

Not Khan, but one of his staff, once tweeted about the suggestion, didn’t and doesn’t actually suggest it. The “false flag” conspiracy-theory suggestion was much talked about at the time, thanks to the fact the killer was so well known to the authorities beforehand.

Sickening tragedy, and no-one is suggesting otherwise except opportunist Boris, but that’s politics.

And anyway, the guy has now resigned – the honorable thing.

One for the collection – Vive La Difference.

Excuse me, could I borrow your brain for a moment? This story about a crisis in psychology due to lack of repeatability has been doing the rounds on social media since yesterday.

For physical sciences, repeatability is an indicator scientific quality; a key part of science “senso stricto”. Life however is not a repeatable experiment, except where that life is expendable. So in life-sciences you can arrange for repeatable procedures where the individual lives can be manipulated and terminated, but a new experiment is a new life, a new individual. For more complex researches, either in the direction of multiple generations, the development of individuals and the evolution of species, or in the direction of higher functioning levels of conscious life in humans and higher animals, strict repeatability becomes a tougher proposition. Tougher to arrange for physically without indirection or intermediation, and more doubtful ethically depending on the kinds of manipulations of life and consciousness involved.

We could do the experiment, but I’d have to kill you afterwards.

Of course high quality scientific research should always strive to be as repeatable as possible, with clear boundary conditions as free as possible from extraneous, intermediating or (god-forbid) subjective effects, and failing that with clear recognition of and accounting for any such effects, so that repeatability and sensitivity to boundary conditions can be judged.

However, it is part of the scientistic turn to hold more complex and more highly evolved levels of nature to the same exclusive standards of objectivity and repeatability as pure physical science. Academic researches can still gain the “scientific” seal of approval even when they are not pure science – or at least pure science cannot be the sole arbiter of academic quality. Pure politics and rhetoric are one end of a scale remote from pure science, but scientific researches elsewhere on that scale are not necessarily “bullshit”. The “scientific” seal of approval itself does come with a fair helping of politics for funding support and the like.

Objectivity, repeatability and evidence are all fine attributes, but it’s fetish to hold all academic endeavours to account to the same standards of objectivity, repeatability and evidence.