Daniel

I tend to regard myself as Crooked Timber’s online myrmidon of a number of rather unpopular views; among other things, as regular readers will have seen, I believe that the incitement to religious hatred legislation was a good idea (perhaps badly executed), that John Searle has it more or less correct on the subject of artificial intelligence, that Jacques Derrida deserves his high reputation and that George Orwell was not even in the top three essayists of the twentieth century[1]. I’m a fan of Welsh nationalism. Oh yes, the Kosovo intervention was a crock too. At some subconscious level I am aware that my ideas about education are both idiotic and unspeakable. But I think that all of these causes are regarded as at least borderline sane by at least one fellow CT contributor. There is only one major issue on which I stand completely alone, reviled by all. And it’s this; Budweiser (by which I mean the real Budweiser, the beer which has been sold under that brand by Anheuser-Busch since 1876) is really quite a good beer. I have been threatening this post in comments for a while now, and here it is:
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Really rather shameful. Riyadh Lafta, one of the co-authors of the Johns Hopkins/Lancet studies on excess deaths in Iraq, has been refused a transit visa for his flight to Vancouver to make a presentation on alarming increases in child cancer. He was apparently meant to be passing on some documentation to some other medical researchers who are going to write a paper with him on the subject; the presentation was happening in Vancouver because Dr. Lafta had already been refused a visa to visit the USA.

What on earth can be in this data? Presumably the UK and US authorities have reasoned that Dr Lafta is an ex Ba’ath Party member (as he would have had to have been to hold a position in the Iraqi Health Ministry), and thus the data he is carrying is not really about child cancer at all. Perhaps he is involved in some sort of “Boys from Brazil” type plot to clone an army of super-soldiers from Saddam Hussein’s DNA, and for this reason the UK cannot be exposed to this deadly information for even four hours in the Heathrow transit lounge.

The alternative – that Dr Lafta is being intentionally prevented from travelling in order to hush up his research on post-war deaths (research which even the Foreign Office have now more or less given up on trying to pretend isn’t broadly accurate), or to hush up the news about paediatric cancer for political convenience – is too horrible to contemplate. I’d note that there isn’t an election on in the USA at present, so the denialist crowd can shove that little slur up their backsides this time too.

(thanks to Tim Lambert as always)

In semi-related news, and with apologies to the person who gave me the tip for taking so long to post it, it appears that Professor Michael Spagat, the author of the “main street bias” critique, has a bit of previous form when it comes to making poorly substantiated and highly inflammatory statements about other people’s research. His involvement with the general issue came about because he’d been using some of the IBC data in support of a power law hypothesis[1] about the scaling of violent deaths. This carried on from previous work he’d done on Colombia, where he had also defended his own somewhat tendentious interpretation on the data by slagging off Human Rights Watch. I sense something of a pattern here; I noted in a previous post that although the “main street bias” critique appeared in the Lancet colloquium on the Burnham et al paper, Prof. Spagat himself did not, and I thought at the time it might be because of this habit.

[1] And one of Prof Spagat’s co-authors on the main street bias paper, and a few others in the power law of violence series was Neil Johnson of Oxford University, who was also a co-author of that paper about the Eurovision Song Contest that we had a go at a while ago, and so the circle of minor irritation is complete.

I have a post up at “Aaronovitch Watch” (incorporating “World of Decency”) imagining the response of the South African government to some of the media commentators who are loudly shaming them for their failure to act (in what way?) on Zimbabwe. A few more thoughts for the slightly less polemic Crooked Timber venue …
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The Times has published a really quite bad piece of science journalism on the subject of the Lancet study. When the topic is sampling theory, your heart really does sink when you see something like this:

Several academics have tried to find out how the Lancet study was conducted; none regards their queries as having been addressed satisfactorily. Researchers contacted by The Times talk of unreturned e-mails or phone calls, or of being sent information that raises fresh doubts.

Yes indeed, out of the population of people with outstanding questions, none of them have had their questions resolved.
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Alex at “The Yorkshire Ranter” has a go at the concept of “embodied energy“, which is currently quite fashionable in the “Environment” section of my newspaper. I have to say I agree with him.

Anyone who has ever got close even to the very fringes of Sraffian economics or the labour theory of value is bound to be suspicious of attempts to assign a “fundamental, objective” number to a physical object based on adding up dated inputs over the history of the process that produced it. Casting an eye over the research on embodied energy confirms me in this view to some extent; I get exactly the same bilious feeling as layer after layer of complexity gets added to the same basically insoluble problem.
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The British journalist Nick Cohen has been sorely misunderstood. His book, “What’s Left?”, is not a phillippic of the pro-war “Decent” left at all. It’s a scholarly assessment of the authoritarian strains of left wing politics, and the tension between resistance under capitalism and resistance to totalitarianism, as exemplified in the writings of George Orwell for example. As he says:

I look at and explain how Bosnia revealed the dark side of the pacifist European temperament and how and why Douglas Hurd and other liberal Tories appeased Serb nationalism. There’s a chapter on the strange and virtually forgotten story of how pacifists and communists ended up arguing against the British war effort during the Blitz. There’s even a chapter of how the intellectual history of Islamism can be traced back to the insane conspiracy theories developed in the furious ultra-right reaction to the Enlightenment of the 18th century.

You would never guess it from what the critics are saying, but the story of the Stop the War coalition fills just half of one chapter in a 13-chapter book.Contrary to what Peter Oborne maintains, I go to great lengths to separate decent people from the scoundrels who lead them. I put their arguments as well as I can, and say they were right in all respects except one: they couldn’t support their comrades in Iraq once the war was over.

Which is odd, because the publishers, Fourth Estate, had apparently originally been pitched a book entitled “Our Friends On The Left”, being “an examination of agonies, idiocies and compromises of mainstream liberal thought”. Since Nick didn’t update his author profile on the Guardian blog, you can see the original blurb there.

Fair enough, maybe the project changed significantly in writing, as Nick decided that mainstream liberal thought wasn’t as agonised, idiotic and compromised as he’d previously believed when you get a good look at it. Except not.

Nick did update the biography on his personal website when he changed the title of the book. It’s described there as

“What’s Left? the story of how the liberal-Left of the 20th century ended up supporting the far Right of the 21st ”

I think the majority of Nick’s readers can hardly be blamed for taking exactly the same assessment of this book as its author. Did anyone really expect anyone to be fooled by this?

Background research on this subject provided by “Aaronovitch Watch (Incorporating Nick Cohen Watch)“, which is a general site about the nature of international politics in a world of globalisation, commonly mistaken for a specialist site for obsessives and stalkers of two named journalists.

Posting has been rather light from me recently, sorry, but it’s mainly because I can’t get over how mental some of the comments are on this YouTube video of John McLaughlin playing “Cherokee”, and it’s turned into a tight little ball of rage in my stomach that’s preventing me from achieving anything else. Check out what I’m talking about below:

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When you make a bad prediction, you need to be sure that you don’t lose your nerve. The best thing to do is to assess your new information, pluck up your courage, and make a brand new prediction about something else …

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I’m rather glad to see that Hilary Benn is the bookies’ favourite for the Labour party deputy leadership. I have no real knowledge of the state of internal Labour party politics, or of what Hilary Benn’s actual policies are. But on the other hand, neither is my support for him[1] based on pure sentimentality about his dad. Nope, I’m a Benn man for the simple reason that I think there ought to be some earthly reward for a political career that has been marked out by honesty and competence. If only for novelty value. After the disgrace that was Clare Short’s term as Secretary of State for International Development[2], Benn was a breath of fresh air. He was (and remains) utterly essential to the peace talks in Sudan. And he was the only major World Bank shareholder to stand up to Paul Wolfowitz and say what needed to be said about Wolfowitz’s utterly bogus “I Can’t Believe It’s Not An Anti-Corruption Policy”. My only reservation in voting Benn is that, to be honest, the developing world needs him a lot more than the Labour Party does, and that the SSID job is cleaner, more honest and more important than turning himself into the thinking man’s John Prescott.
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At this late stage in the occupation of Iraq, many of Henry Kissinger’s old arguments about Indo-China are being dusted down. One of the hoariest and worst is that we need to “stay the course” (or some similar euphemism) in order to maintain “credibility” – to demonstrate our resolve to our enemies, who will otherwise continue to attack us. It reminds me of my one and only contribution to the corpus of game theory.
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I’ve just noticed that we haven’t had a specific post on the Litvinenko poisoning, despite the fact that it’s an interesting subject. I don’t really have anything to say on this, except that I would point out that this is a good refutation of those self-consciously “level-headed” types who like to believe that “most suspicious things are a case of cock-up rather than conspiracy”, that “you can’t put together any big plan without someone talking about it” or that there is something intrinsically weird or tin-foil-hattish about assuming that political ends of one sort or another are often advanced by illegal means. The most interesting thing about this case to me is that whoever is responsible for killing Litvinenko (and I suppose that the truly “rational” point of view of the non-conspiracy-theorist might be that the polonium got into his sushi by a series of coincidences), they will almost certainly get away with it. All of the main suspects are simply too geopolitically important in one way or another to ever be charged with or punished for anything as simple as murder. Informed opinions solicited, the other sort welcomed, try not to libel anyone please.

Here I am, talking about the Lancet study on “Counterspin”, the American radio program. Fans of incoherent mumbling, strangely reminiscent of the interviews that ended Shaun Ryder’s career, tune in. Or alternatively, copy one of my blog posts into Word and add the phrases “kind of”, “like” and “you know” every three words, to get a similar effect.

Look, can we knock these two on the head, please, gang? I realise that we have no chance of stamping out these fallacies all over the internet – it’s almost as if there were a whole network of right-wing talking points sites out there all taking in each other’s washing! – but we can at least stop regurgitating them ourselves.

1. Iraq is a young country. Therefore, it has a low “crude” death rate. “Crude” in this case means “not adjusted for demographic structure and therefore not meaningfully comparable across countries”. Therefore, it is not surprising that pre-war Iraq had a crude death rate similar to that of Denmark, any more than it is surprising that any other two completely non-comparable statistics might happen to be the same number.

2. When someone dies, you get a death certificate from the hospital, morgue or coroner, in your hand. This bit of the death infrastructure is still working in Iraq. Then the person who issued the death certificate is meant to send a copy to the central government records office where they collate them, tabulate them and collect the overall mortality statistics. This bit of the death infrastructure is not still working in Iraq. (It was never great before the war, broke down entirely during the year after the invasion when there was no government to send them to and has never really recovered; statistics agencies are often bottom of the queue after essential infrastructure, law and order and electricity). Therefore, there is no inconsistency between the fact that 92% of people with a dead relative could produce the certificate when asked, and the fact that Iraq has no remotely reliable mortality statistics and quite likely undercounts the rate of violent death by a factor of ten.

Go on and sin no more, or at least not on our Lancet comments threads.

A piece up at the Guardian blog which probably belonged over here at CT but I didn’t have my CT login to hand. Basically, Harry Collins, a sociology professor, has been doing the Dian Fossey bit with a subcommunity of physicists. He has been accepted among them to the extent that he can have perfectly sensible conversations with physicists, and even teach them a few new things about physics on occasion (since he puts a lot more effort into networking than they do, he’s usually got some new bits of information from the bleeding edge of research).

The question that interests me is, in what sense can one say that Harry Collins doesn’t “really” understand gravity waves? What is that thing which he is missing, if anything? A lot of people on the Guardian blog seem to want to argue that the particular mathematical manipulations carried out by gravity waves researchers are in some way constitutive of what it is to “understand the physics”, but this seems to me to be obviously wrong. “The current state of research about gravity waves” clearly names a different entity from “gravity waves”, and what I’m interested in is the existence of any sense in which the physicists understand gravity waves and Collins doesn’t. (It’s a common belief among physicists, probably derived from Quine, that there is a particular correspondence between mathematics and physics which might serve to hold a special relation together. Not so, as we’ve known ever since Hartry Field‘s work, managing to derive Newtonian mechanics using only logic).

We don’t want to make “understanding the subject” mean “being able to do calculations about the subject”, unless we have some reason to believe that this is a necessary condition rather than a sufficient one (and to be frank, I don’t believe it’s a sufficient condition; I’ve spent enough time with economists to know that ability to do the maths does not mean that someone understands the economics). Is there anything? Or is Collins’ concept of “interactive expertise” really all there is, in terms of understanding?