Category: Life, The Universe and Everything

Recommended Reading

I ‘ve realized that there are a set of books I’ve been recommending to others pretty consistently since reading them, and a recent spate of doing so made me think to post them here.

The first book on my current “everyone should read this” list is The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt. I’m unlikely to think about moral decision making and differences of perspective and prioritization the same way after reading it. Early in the book Haidt describes our system for “moral decision making” using the analogy of an elephant and a rider. The elephant – our intuitive decision making system, akin to what Kahneman calls our “fast” system – leans toward things it likes and away from things it doesn’t. The rider – our rational (or “slow”) system, he says, isn’t there to steer the elephant rather to explain the elephant’s actions. So when faced with a moral conundrum we make a decision, then construct post-facto rationalizations in support of that decision. The book goes on to explore how our decisions and rationalizations are shaped by the different weights we place on a set of core “pillars.” Thoughtful and thought provoking through out.

The next book up is shorter, older and a bit harder to find – Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Written in 1970, it remains both relevant and seemingly the definitive writing on the subject. Hirschman argues that when we find ourselves in a relationship with an organization (company, club, country) we come to disagree with, we have only two real tools at our disposal; voice (raising our voice to cause change) and exit (severing our ties with the organization). The book spends its scant pages exploring how we choose to apply those tools in different situations, the impact that loyalty has on our decision making, and how different “ratios” of voice and loyalty affect the organization in question.

Last for the moment is Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies, by Charles Perrow, first published in 1984 and updated in 2011. Perrow looks at systems in terms of their “interactive complexity” and “coupling.” Interactive complexity is about the number and degree of relationships between parts of a system, and coupling (tight or loose) is about how easy it is for failures in one part of the system to cause cascading failures in other parts. I found the core ideas to be an enlightening lens to look at all sorts of systems through.

It is what it is

As someone utterly incompetent said recently, “it is what it is.”

A month ago, I characterized London as “slowly creeping toward normal.” Today, London has been placed on the COVID “watch list” – which as far as I can tell means Boris and Co. will sit and watch as we cede the gains made in containing the spread of the virus.

It ended up taking just about a month to get my BRP back from the DVLA, and a few days later my provisional driving license arrived. License number in hand, I was able to schedule a theory test. I took the first available, which turned out to be over a month out – the 3rd Monday in October. So I’ve got plenty of time to forget (and review) the material. And, of course, I can’t schedule the practical exam until I’ve passed the theory test. This country could stand to learn a thing or two about pipelining.

Once I had my license, I reached out to a handful of driving instructors. Most of them were either on sabbatical or were fully booked. I ultimately booked an hour with one who was neither. We got on reasonably well, and he was good at pointing out habits (like palm steering) that I’ll need to suppress for the exam. Once I can book a test, I’ll book a test, and he and I will spend another couple lessons in his Kia before I sit it. At this rate, I’ll be lucky to have it done by Christmas.

At his suggestion, I took a couple practice “hazard perception tests.” They show you a video from the point-of-view of a driver, you have to click on the screen when there’s a “developing hazard.” Your score depends on how early you recognize the hazard and react. These tests were clearly not made for motorcyclists. My first attempts I scored nul points – each of my clicks was just before the scoring window opened. Of course that farm equipment traveling parallel to the road is a hazard, waiting for it to turn into my path seems counter-productive. So before taking the test I need to practice reacting later. Somehow that seems very British.

Life has otherwise found a routine. I’ve been running three days a week, though we’ll see how devoted I am as the wet winter starts. Dawnise does the weekly shop and I help her mule it home. With apologies to Casablanca, “she buys the food, I cook the food, we eat the food. It is fairly convenient.” Most weekends we visit our local cafe for brunch, and we read the news from America with a mix of frustration, sadness, fear and resignation.

I’ve continued keeping track of noteworthy COVID-related articles I’ve read, though there have only been a handful in the past month that have made the list. And I’ve posted a few other thoughts that haven’t been about “life in London” and so haven’t been sent to this list.

So I’d say we’re still doing well, overall. We’ve had some rough days, for sure – when it’s been hard to remember we’re both on the same team – but more good days than bad ones.

I’ve started, several times, to write something about the election, or American politics more generally, but each time I’ve tried I end up deleting the draft and walking away. I’m at a total loss about how to have positive impact on any of those issues, but it’s reasonably clear that shouting into the electronic void won’t change anything.

So we’ll vote (absentee, it’s much better than mail in voting). And hope that enough of the country agrees with our perspective to vote with us. And hope that the popular vote carries the day. The whole thing seems dangerously close to the definition of insanity.

Doing the same thing, expecting a different result.

Tit for Tat: American Democracy and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

It should come as a surprise to no one that the party in power in the US is pushing to install a new supreme court justice with haste – before an election they stand a non-zero chance of losing.

The fact that this same group vociferously and successfully obstructed a similar appointment four years ago is being broadly cast as “evidence of hypocrisy.” If it’s hypocrisy isn’t the point, the point is they understand the game they’re playing, and are playing to win. Call it (calling out?) hypocrisy doesn’t change anything.

The prisoner’s dilemma, in case you’ve forgotten, is a simple game with rules often phrased something like this:

You and a partner-in-crime are arrested. You’re kept apart, unable to communicate. You’re both told that if you both admit to the crime, you’ll each face 3 years incarceration. If you both stay silent, there’s sufficient evidence to convict on a lesser charge, so you’ll both face one year in jail. If one of you implicates the other, who stays silent, the silent implicated party will be jailed for 5 years, and the betrayer set free.”

To people who study games the window dressing (crime and jail) don’t really matter – what matters is the relationship between cooperation, betrayal, and rewards.

It should be evident that both players end up best if they cooperate and stay silent. But if one party betrays the other, the betrayer suffers no penalty and imposes a larger one on the one they betray. So for each individual player, betrayal looks like a better outcome than cooperation. The net result is that mutual betrayal is, in a sense, the most likely outcome.

A single play of the game is interesting as a study in trust and self-interest. And individual political outcomes are often intuitively understandable by treating them “roughly” as a prisoners dilemma. But what we should be thinking about are repeated plays of the game.

Implicit in the relationship between cooperation and self-interest, and often overlooked, is the equality between the actors. Betrayal from either actor penalizes equally. This equality means “if you hurt me, I can hurt you.” And so it’s fairly easy to convince ones self that if you’re playing the prisoners dilemma over and over against the same opponent, a good strategy might be to initially cooperate, and then “do unto them as they did unto you.”

Tit for tat.

Intuitively most of us would call this strategy “fair,” and it turns out to be both simple to describe and highly effective at achieving cooperation.

Tit-for-tat clearly isn’t generally possible in American politics, due to party power dynamics if nothing else – but I wonder how the party and partisans would behave if it was.

Always ask why

The family story (“legend” just sounds pretentious) is that one of my most valuable, and likely most irritating, habits was instilled and encouraged at a young age by my uncle Denis. “Always,” he advised, “ask why.” I’ve always imagined it must have caused my parents some consternation that his was a direction I chose to listen to.

Fast forward a bunch, and I’m working at one of the A’s in FAANG (the river, not the fruit). Like any large company, it has a culture. Some of its norms and customs have been instituted deliberately, others have accreted, all have evolved. Adherence to those customs is a large part what it means to “be one of us.” While I disagree with some of those customs, in the aggregate I think they’re positive. One such positive, in my view, is that we look critically at our mistakes, try to understand root causes, and to capture those observations and lessons in written form and publish them, so that others might learn vicariously. And part of that process is to ask the five whys.

The nuance, and the value, in the five whys approach is is asking ‘the right’ question at each iteration, stress-testing the answers, and following the chain of causality, even if – especially if – it leads in unexpected directions. When it works, the illumination can be blinding.

So what, I hear you ask? Well, I’m reading more and more in the “main-stream media” asserting that social media may just might be hurting us. What I don’t read much of, if any, is thoughtful analysis of the how and why. Mostly, the argument goes, it’s because they have all the data – and with enough data, “they” (whoever “they” are) can make us do what they want. Some sort of social-media mass hypnosis.

This, to put it crudely, sets off my bullshit detector.

I don’t think it can be wholly explained by Facebook, or Twitter, or Mark Zuckerberg and all the data they have about us. They have the data we give them. If an individual tends to engage with content that’s dishonest, narcissistic, misogynistic, xenophobic, or antiscience – the algorithms didn’t make them do it. The person is making the choices. Clicking the links. Clicking some more.

I also don’t think it’s Trump. Don’t get me wrong, he’s pathologically dishonest, narcissistic, misogynistic, xenophobic, and antiscience, but he didn’t create any of those things. And regardless if he was elected to office because of those traits or in spite of them, he didn’t invent anything. He tapped into something existing. Exploited it.

So the algorithms feed us what we show them we want – it’s just operant conditioning – and we’re conditioning the algorithm. Living in a filter bubble certainly doesn’t makes us better, more rounded, people – but feedback loops amplify an input signal. They don’t create it.

So where does that leave us?

If you’re one of those people, like me, who have concluded that social media is a clear and present danger to democracy, ask yourself why. And keep asking. Because you can’t fix a problem until you understand it, and I believe we need to fix this problem.

And, like that, it’s gone

Today is “Summer Bank Holiday.” I have, basically, no idea what that means – but I can’t help but think that it says something deep about British culture that the country all but shuts down on “bank holidays.”

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” [1]

I also can’t help but notice – as the days grow slightly shorter, my morning runs cooler, and the afternoon light more golden – that in a few short weeks another Summer will officially be over.

The Earth made another voyage around the sun and all most of us got was this lousy pandemic.

I’m not sure why it matters to me. Dawnise and I rarely travel in the summer – we have no kids, so we’re not bound by the traditional school year, and Dawnise and hot weather don’t get along particularly well, so we usually do our traveling in the Spring and Fall.

Never-the-less, I feel like I’ve missed something.

Life in London is slowly creeping toward normal. More people on the streets. More people commuting to work. The response to the government’s “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme suggests that people are willing to set health concerns aside in return for £10 off their meal bill. The scheme ends today, so soon we’ll see how many of those discount diners remember how much they used to enjoy eating food they didn’t cook, and wasn’t delivered by a guy on a scooter, and keep going out for meals.

Even the theaters have started re-opening, though I’m unsure who’s attending the socially distanced shows. Sitting through a multi-hour performance wearing a mask is somewhere near the opposite of my idea of a good time.

In the midst of all this, and almost certainly because of all this, the case count across the UK is trending up. The hospitalization and mortality rates aren’t following, and while that’s clearly good news, it does raise obvious questions.

In more positive news, thanks to a roughly £1.9 million investment from the UK government, the Cambridge vaccine could be in trials ‘by autumn.’

In mundane news, my BRP is still in the hands of the driver and vehicle licensing agency (DVLA). A polite, but basically pointless, online chat asking when I might have my identity document back ended with “hopefully not too much longer.”

Good thing we’re not planning to go anywhere for a bit.

When an errand feels like an adventure, and other thoughts

Long ago, nearly in the before-time, I bought a merino wool base layer from Mountain Warehouse. Since I was ordering anyway, I added a few speculative items to the basket, as did Dawnise. On arrival most of the speculative items were earmarked for return. As the UK was busily shutting down, we put the the stuff in a closet.

(queue time passing)

I thought of that bag, sitting in the closet, on our way home from brunch this morning and decided to see if I could still arrange a return. It was months past purchase, long past their official returns policy. For a while their website had a message about extending return windows, but the message was now gone. So, expecting at least a bit of an argument, I tossed the goods in a backpack and walked a mile to the shop.

Aside from my morning run it’s was the furthest I’ve ventured on foot in months, and in a different direction. A few blocks after setting out I felt like an intrepid explorer. Surely no one has been here for months! I thought. Only to turn a corner and find a few people sitting on benches in park. Hrm. Ok. Clearly someone has. By the time I reached my destination it all seemed almost familiar, and normal. I donned my mask, had a quick chat with the shop attendant who was more than happy to accommodate the return. I took a different route home, arriving just before a sudden cloudburst would have soaked me through.

And now I can tell Dawnise tales of far off lands she hasn’t seen in half a year.

So that was that.

In more serious news, it seems the federal occupation of Portland is extending to more cities, including Seattle. I keep wondering if, one morning, I’m going to wake up to learn our townhouse in the city is under siege. Or is no more.

These are not questions I expect to have to ask about a self-proclaimed first world democracy.

Memories of things to come

We ate dinner at a restaurant tonight. With friends.

It’s hard to describe exactly how unusual that was. And simultaneously how perfectly ordinary.

A good friend of ours has a problem that seems related to acid in her diet. She’s been adhering to a strictly neutral/alkaline diet for a few months, waiting for non-essential medical services to resume so she can get properly tested and diagnosed. Her doctor called with an opening on Monday, and to gather data she needed to eat something close to “regular meals.”

She wanted a steak & a glass of wine, and asked if we’d be up for finding a restaurant and eating with them. To my surprise Dawnise decided she was up for it.

A bit of searching this afternoon revealed that the Flat Iron and the Hawksmoor near us are still closed, and a bit more searching by our friend secured us a booking at Blacklock.

We got dressed. Dawnise did her hair and put on makeup and heels. I wore a proper shirt. And shoes. And a watch.

And we walked to meet them.

The restaurant took a bunch of seemingly reasonable steps – the doors at both ends of the large room were left open to the outside. Every other table was left empty. Our server asked about how close we were comfortable with her getting, and there were hand sanitizer stations strategically placed around the room.

The food was fine, but more important was we were out.

And there were moments, talking to good friends, eating food we neither cooked nor collected, that felt so… normal.

P.S. When we got home, the cats collected around Dawnise on the sofa, seemingly having forgotten that in the “before-time” the humans were not here as often as they were.

The centre cannot hold

[Warning: Politics Ahead.]

I just finished reading Drutman’s Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America.

If you’re frustrated, or despondent, at the state of politics in America you should read it.

If you’re not frustrated at the state of American politics – because you’ve stopped paying attention – you should read it, too.

Drutman’s core argument is roughly that despite being two-party in name for the decades when American government was seen as being the most effective it was, practically speaking, a four party system. Factions of conservative-leaning Democrats and liberal-leaning Republicans enabled compromise.

Drutman presents a compelling argument that the breakdown of this “effectively four party” system into two well sorted parties leads directly to our current “lesser-of-two evils” state, and is the root cause of much of the fundamental dysfunction in American politics and government.

What makes his analysis different, and recommended reading, is that he proposes a plausible solution that doesn’t require a constitutional amendment and doesn’t immediately fail the sniff test.

Not to spoil the ending, but Drutman proposes abandoning winner-take-all elections and adopting single winner ranked choice voting for Senate seats and multi-winner ranked choice voting for House seats, while enlarging the house and expanding two-parties into between four and six.*

He supports this proposal with evidence from other countries that have done similar things, and with examples from America’s past where seemingly impossible electoral and political reform happened.

My read of his proposal is that it isn’t particularly partisan – it doesn’t help one party at the cost of the other. It fundamentally changes the election game and makes room for collaboration and compromise in a system that’s lost that ability by choice, accident, and design. He persuasively argues and presents evidence that this has worked in other countries, and that it can work in America.

I found the book well researched, considered and methodical in its approach, and focused on a concrete problem and a potential solution. I don’t know if what Drutman proposes will work, or can work, but I can’t find fault with his fundamental thesis: that American democracy is on a course to tear itself apart.

It’s up to America, and Americans, to find a way to fix it.

Next on the reading list: How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future.

* I’ve been supporting FairVote for several years, but honestly never saw it as part of a larger potential fix for American politics.

[24-May]

** For more thoughts on the subject of how the two party sorting contributes to the problem, consider Rethinking Polarization, by Rauch [nationalaffairs.com].

All the news that’s fit … or something

I’ve been a bit remiss of late in publishing updates. Mea culpa. Things have been simultaneously tumultuous and incredibly mundane.

I started working from home the first week of March. I stood at the stair rail for a week or so – my computer propped on a desk made of a box and a book.

By the time we saw City of Angels on the 10th, it was clear the city – and especially the west end – were running on borrowed time.

We encouraged a friend of ours, whose sabbatical year in Europe was rapidly unraveling, to accelerate her planned transit from Spain by a week and offered up our guest room while she figured out her next move. She arrived on the 16th, the day the theaters closed, and we condensed her planned “London experience” into a meal at The Wilmington, nearly-deserted on the night of her arrival and shut down the following day, and breakfast at our favorite local cafe the next morning.

She managed to see a few sights as the city shut down around her, and by the end of the week on the advice of her University, and a little help from the same, had abandoned her booked accommodation and secured a flight back to the US.

Our cleaning service came the day she departed, right on schedule. It turned out that would be the last visit for a while.

All the local restaurants in our bit of London quickly closed – not having sufficient traffic to support themselves without the daily crowd commuting into The City.

After our guest had departed, Dawnise pointed out that the guest room wasn’t likely to see any guests for a while and encouraged me to make it my office. After dragging my feet for a few days I disassembled the guest bed and took her advice. I bought a “podium-cum-standing-desk” from Amazon and dragged the Poäng in from the master bedroom. I’ve strongly resisted buying anything I can’t easily stash once we can welcome visitors again.

The next few weeks were punctuated with emails informing of us canceled theater bookings and concerts, news about new transport closures, and reminders from Transport for London not to take the tube except for essential journeys.

We live around the corner from the Barbican Waitrose – I’d typically stop on my way home to pickup whatever bits and bobs we needed for dinner that evening. Like everywhere else there was an initial run on stock – with some staples (like flour) only now returning to pre-panic levels. We’ve shifted our shopping to a weekly larger shop, Dawnise typically does the shopping and I meet her there to help mule it home.

In the long long ago I worked from home full time for a few years, and once I had a home office, it didn’t take us long to remember old habits that worked. Punctuating the start and stop of the work day, being conscious to eat an actual lunch on a regular schedule and not just wandering into the kitchen to snack.

I largely spend weekends reading – either short form, often COVID-related, or long form, continuing to alternate between fiction and non-fiction. Along the way I’ve written a couple blog posts I didn’t think worth sending to the mailing list. At some point I found an offer for three free months of Fender Play and pulled the guitar out of the closet. I hadn’t touched it in years, and forgotten most everything. I guess the good news is I forgot all the bad habits, too.

Dawnise has been reading, cultivating sourdough and baking with it, killing unsuspecting alternate-history Brits in We Happy Few, and of late amusing Facebook friends with the photographic adventures of QWar and Tina – if you Facebook, you can search for “#QWarandTina”

The weather has been, on average, frustratingly nice, which hasn’t helped compliance with the “Stay Home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives” directive. We feel very fortunate to have a deck and easy access to the out-of-doors. We bought a stand for an umbrella left by the last tenants, and I have a better tan than I’ve had since our last trip to Hawaii.

Boris Johnson addressed the nation last night to lay out a roadmap for reopening. It was hardly the Saint Crispin’s Day speech, but it was mostly coherent (aside from maybe the “we have a 1-5 scale, and we’re between 3 and 4” bit) and I’m pretty sure he actually understood the words he used.

We both struggle occasionally to keep perspective. We’re both healthy, safe, and mostly as sane as we were when this all hit the fan. That it’s completely fubar’d our travel plans for the year puts us in good company. We try with varying success to not focus on the work it took to get here.

So here we are. Living in London. Aside from when I’m out for a morning run the city outside our windows could be a matte painting.

I can’t throw a rock far enough to tell.