Vale: Don Day

This post is to mark the passing on of Don Day (1924-2010), former member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly (the so-called “Bearpit”, roughest of Australia’s 15 parliamentary assemblies) and former NSW Labor Minister.   I knew Don when he was my local MLA in the 1970s and 1980s, when he won a seat in what was normally ultra-safe Country Party (now National Party) country – first, the electorate of Casino, and then, Clarence.  Indeed, he was for a time the only Labor MLA in the 450 miles of the state north of Newcastle.  His win was repeated several times, and his seat was crucial to Neville Wran’s surprise 1-seat majority in May 1976, returning Labor to power in NSW after 11 years in opposition, and after a searing loss in the Federal elections of December 1975.

In his role as Minister for Primary Industries and Decentralisation, Don was instrumental in saving rural industries throughout NSW.   Far North Coast dairy farmers were finally allowed to sell milk to Sydney households, for example, breaking the quota system, a protectionist economic racket which favoured only a minority of dairy farmers and which was typical of the crony-capitalist policies of the Country Party.  Similarly, his actions saved the NSW sugar industry from closure.   NSW Labor’s rural policies were (and still are) better for the majority of people in the bush than those of the bush’s self-proclaimed champions.

Like many Labor representatives of his generation, Don Day had fought during WW II, serving in the RAAF.  After the war, he established a small business in Maclean.   He was one of the most effective meeting chairmen I have encountered:  He would listen carefully and politely to what people were saying, summarize their concerns fairly and dispassionately (even when he was passionate himself on the issues being discussed), and was able to identify quickly the nub of an issue or a way forward in a complex situation.  He could usually separate his assessment of an argument from his assessment of the person making it, which helped him be dispassionate.  Although The Grafton Daily Examiner has an obit here, I doubt he will be remembered much elsewhere on the web, hence this post.

Update (2010-06-12): SMH obit is here.

Beliefs and actions redux (& redux & redux . . .)

Over at Normblog, Norm begins a post with the words:

Here’s another in that series: religious beliefs vindicated by being redefined to mean something different from what people used to think they meant. We’ve had religion not being about beliefs so much as about practices;  . . .”

Well, actually, not quite.   Nothing has been redefined, and most people did not previously think the way asserted here.  Unless, of course, by “people” Norm means merely, “educated Westerners since the Enlightenment”.   But that group constitutes a small (and often blinkered) minority of the world’s human population.  For  most of the world’s people,  for most of human history, religion has indeed been mostly about practices and not about beliefs.   I am thinking of Taoism, Buddhism (particularly Zen), large parts of Hinduism, and the mystical strands of Judaism (eg, the Kabbala), of Christianity (eg, the Name-Worshipping of Russian Orthodox believers), and of Islam (eg, Sufism).  

In the tradition of The People of The Book (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), one hears and accepts The Good News and then engages in religious actions such as worship, prayer, and meditation.  In the Eastern tradition, by contrast, it is the repeated doing of certain religious actions (Yoga, Zen sesshin) which may lead the practitioner to Enlightenment, not the other way around.   I have argued this before, for example here and here.

That beliefs should or do always precede actions is a peculiarly western and peculiarly modern notion, part of the prevailing paradigm of post-Reformation Western thought.    That this fact is hard for many modern westerners to grasp is evidence of the strength of the prevailing paradigm on our thought.  However, the strength of a paradigm on the minds of our best and brightest is not itself evidence of the paradigm’s necessity, nor its uniqueness, nor its truth, nor even its comparative usefulness.

Old Etonians

Congratulations to Rory Stewart, newly-elected Conservative MP for England’s largest electorate, Penrith and the Border.

I heard Stewart speak in December 2009, shortly after his pre-selection, at a bookshop in Penrith.  At the time, he was walking across his prospective constituency as a way to learn about it and to meet people.  He was most impressive – intelligent, urbane, witty, sincere, respectful, and also very laid-back.  He read from his book on Iraq, and talked about Afghanistan and Iraq, even quoting the poetry of TS Eliot.  The audience then had a good debate with him and with each other about do-gooding foreign wars and about the UK-USA relationship.  From their comments, I would say about half the audience were probably Labour voters.

Stewart, as good a facilitator as Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, got us all to say who we were and what were our concerns.     He did not  interrupt anyone, listened attentively and respectfully (even when he disagreed), and remembered everyone’s name and profession; I’m sure he charmed some of the audience there and then into voting for him.    When someone said they’d like to vote for him personally, but could not face voting Conservative (calling it “the Work-House Party”), he laughed at the description and said this was a decision they’d have to make for themself.  He didn’t even present a case for voting for him personally while ignoring the party label, as most politicians I have known would have done at that point.    In fact, he proceeded to give an honest assessment of his own strengths and weaknesses as a candidate – if he was selling himself, this was an extremely soft-sell.

The whole event struck me as remarkable:  Here was a modern-day soldier, colonial administrator, and educator of America’s nomenklatura campaigning in rural Cumbria and doing so very explicitly on his Iraq and Afghan experience.  And, more surprisingly, people seemed to respond with great passion to his message, with its key theme being that the West needs to understand and accept the limits to its own power to change other societies.  It says something about the effect these two wars have had on people in Britain that such a message would have even been listened to seriously in a local campaign, let alone that it would resonate with people.

Some British commentators have compared Stewart to Winston Churchill, who also had had colonial military adventures and had written some damn fine and exciting prose before entering Parliament.   I think that other writer and warrior Teddy Roosevelt is a better comparison, as TR appears (from this distance) to have been more respectful of human diversity and difference than was young Winnie.    One does not have to be a Conservative to be pleased that a person of Rory Stewart’s intelligence, sophistication, integrity, courage and wisdom should now be in the Mother of Parliaments.

NOTES:
Another account of the same meeting here.   My memory is that the dog was not small, and the photographs confirm my memory.

Here is a profile from National Geographic (undated, but before Stewart’s appointment as a Harvard professor).

And here is Ian Parker’s profile in The New Yorker (2010-11-15).

Through his American mother, Winston Churchill knew TR, and once stayed with the Roosevelts in Albany when TR was Governor of New York.

Combinatorics of some musical objects

Excerpts from Appendix C (page 164) from Keith [1991].  All results assume a 12-tone equal-tempered scale.

Number of diatonic scale classes: 3
Number of note names (A-G); number of notes in a common scale; number of white keys per octave on a piano:  7
Number of scales one note different from the Major scale: 9
Number of notes in the most common equal-tempered scale:  12
Number of common musical keys (C + 1-6 flats/sharps):  13
Number of 7-note diatonic scales (=7 * 3):  21
Number of elementary 2-fold polychords: 23
A k-fold polychord is an n-note chord sub-divided into k non-empty subchords, for k=1,  . . ., n.  For example, the 6-note chord <C, D, E, F#, G, A> can be subdivided into the 3-note 2-fold polychords, <C, E, G> and <D, F#, A>.
Number of 7-note chords:  66
Number of distinct interval sets (partitions of 12):  77
Number of 7-note triatonic scales (=7*35):  245
Number of notationally-distinct diatonic scales (=13 *21):  273
Number of distinct chord-types (= N(12) – 1):  351
Number of 7-note musical scales (=7*66):  462
Number of scales (=Number of n-note scales, summed over all n)  (=2^(12-1) = 2^11):   2048
Number of chords without rotational isomorphism (= 2^12 – 1):  4095
Number of notationally-distinct scales (=13 * 462):  6006
Number of non-syncopated 8-bar 1/4-note rhythmic patterns:  458,330
Number of non-syncopated 8-bar 1/8-note rhythmic patterns:  210,066,388,901

Reference:
Michael Keith [1991]:  From Polychords to Polya:  Adventures in Musical Combinatorics.  (Princeton, NJ:  Vinculum Press.)

This Much I Know (about CS and AI)

Inspired by The Guardian column of the same name, I decided to list here my key learnings of the last several years regarding Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Few of these are my own insights, and I welcome comments and responses. From arguments I have had, I know that some of these statements are controversial; this fact surprises me, since most of them seem obvious to me. Statements are listed, approximately, from the more general to the more specific.

Dream on

Over at Normblog, Norm is thinking about anxiety dreams, and seeks to answer the question:  Who is the author of these dreams of ours?  Some think it seems not to be us, since the events in the dream come as a surprise to us and trouble us.  He concludes that it is the dreamer who is the author. If we think of dreams as being like films that we view in our sleep, then I assume Norm means that the author is the film-director, or perhaps the projectionist.
But there is another explanation of  all our dreams, not only those which cause us angst.  That explanation is that our dreams are just random images flashed before us by some mechanical process in our brain.  Here there is no continuous film, no coherent plot, no themes, no actors, no film-director, and the projectionist is outside having a cigarette while images are being loaded automatically by a random reel selector that management installed to save on staff.   We, however, are not outside.  We are sitting down in the front-row of the stalls of the cinema, being the audience for the film. So its no wonder we are surprised by what we see.   We try our best, both then and after waking, to make sense of the images that flash past us, looking for some narrative coherence.  If we have anxieties, this is when they appear, in our attempts at reconstruction of  a plot or a theme or some identifiable characters.   We are indeed the authors of our dreams, but only in the way that texts are written by their readers, and not their writers.

Poem: Petit Testament

About time we had another poem by Australian modernist, Ern Malley (Liverpool, UK 1918   1943 Sydney, Australia).  That Malley was not an existential being does not make his poetry any less powerful.

Petit Testament

In the twenty-fifth year of my age
I find myself to be a dromedary
That has run short of water between
One oasis and the next mirage
And having despaired of ever
Making my obsessions intelligible
I am content at last to be
The sole clerk of my metamorphoses.
Begin here:

In the year 1943
I resigned to the living all collateral images
Reserving to myself a man’s
Inalienable right to be sad
At his own funeral.
(Here the peacock blinks the eyes
of his multipennate tail.)
In the same year
I said to my love (who is living)
Dear we shall never be that verb
Perched on the sole Arabian Tree
Not having learnt in our green age to forget
The sins that flow between the hands and feet
(Here the Tree weeps gum tears
Which are also real: I tell you
These things are real)
So I forced a parting
Scrubbing my few dingy words to brightness.
Where I have lived
The bed-bug sleeps in the seam, the cockroach
Inhabits the crack and the careful spider
Spins his aphorisms in the comer.
I have heard them shout in the streets
The chiliasms of the Socialist Reich
And in the magazines I have read
The Popular Front-to-Back.
But where I have lived
Spain weeps in the gutters of Footscray
Guernica is the ticking of the clock
The nightmare has become real, not as belief
But in the scrub-typhus of Mubo.
It is something to be at last speaking
Though in this No-Man’s-language appropriate
Only to No-Man’s-Land.
Set this down too:
I have pursued rhyme, image, and metre,
Known all the clefts in which the foot may stick,
Stumbled often, stammered,
But in time the fading voice grows wise
And seizing the co-ordinates of all existence
Traces the inevitable graph
And in conclusion:
There is a moment when the pelvis
Explodes like a grenade. I
Who have lived in the shadow that each act
Casts on the next act now emerge
As loyal as the thistle that in session
Puffs its full seed upon the indicative air.
I have split the infinite. Beyond is anything.
 

Catwoman, my old flame

Those of you paying attention to these lectures will realize how obsessed I am with Economics.  That flaxen-haired lady promised so much, but she has so many flaws and failings.   When we first meet her, it seems she is everything you could wish for:  she is concerned with how society should be organized, how people should be given material goods, how the benefits of new technology and material well-being should be shared with all, and how the poor should be enriched, so that they can spend their time on self-improving and fulfilling activities, like art and sport.  So much is promised!
But then, once the flirtation and seduction are over, her flaws become evident. I have been thinking about these flaws again, having just read Deirdre McCloskey’s superb 2002 pamphlet, The Secret Sins of Economics.  Many of McCloskey’s criticisms are ones I (and many others) have made before, but some are new.   I decided, for comparison, to list here my chief complaints with this blemished beauty, this feline seductress, Our Lady of the Catallacts.  Date her if you wish, but you should read these accounts by her ex-lovers before you do.
First, she is blinkered, often unable to see what is obvious to anyone else – that we are all shaped by social and cultural forces, and peer pressures.   Instead, Catwoman and her acolytes invariably assume an individualist explanation for any economic or social phenomenon, and then seek to demonstrate it.  McCloskey calls this a focus on the P-variables (price, individual prudence, profit, the profane) as distinct from the S-variables (solidarity, speech, stories, shame) which Anthropology, that Indiana Jones of academic disciplines – creative, unruly, a thorn in everyone else’s side – has focused on.   A classic example is Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics.
Because of her blindness to the social, Cat Lady mostly ignored (until recently) major aspects of society, such as Institutions, legal frameworks, norms, and power relationships, aspects which can make or fail the marketplaces she says she studies.   She can’t claim that no one mentioned these to her, since 19th-century economists such as Karl Marx made the study of these aspects the work of a lifetime, and their study has continued to the present by sociologists and anthropologists and political scientists.
She has also been blind to anything historical or temporal, as if all her work stood outside the mundane and messy world in which we live.  This blindness manifests itself most strongly in the complete disregard (until recently) for endowments:  how did we get to where we are?  So, for example, free trade theory says that if England produces textiles more cheaply than Portugal, and Portugal produces wine more cheaply then England, the two should trade textiles for wine, and wine for textiles.   And the choice of these products is a subtly clever one, obfuscating much, since wine needs sunshine and not too much rain, while textiles (in the 18th and early 19th centuries) needed lots of rain, in order that the damp air would ensure cotton threads did not break when woven by machines.   So, Portugal’s sunshine and Northern England’s rain, being part of the God-given climate, were natural advantages, beyond the control or manipulation of any temporal human powers.  Free trade seems to have been ordained by the Almighty. But why consider only England’s textiles and not Ireland’s?    The answer is that Ireland had no textile industry to speak of.  And just why is that?  After all, much of Ireland is as damp as the valleys of Lancashire.   The reason is that the owners of northern English textile factories lobbied the British authorities to exclude Irish-made textiles from entering England.  When Ireland lost its own Parliament in a hostile takeover by Westminster, this protectionism for English textiles was entrenched, and the growing British Empire provided the critical masses of customers to ensure bonuses in Bury and Bolton and Burnley.     (Is it any wonder that people in Ireland and India and elsewhere sought Independence, when colonialism so powerfully stifled economic aspirations.)  Northern England has no natural comparative advantage in textile production, at least, not when compared to Ireland, but an artificial, man-made advantage.  The same type of advantage, in fact, that South Korea today has in ship-building, or the USA in most computer and aerospace technologies.   Where, in the mainstream theory of free trade, are these aspects studied, or even mentioned?
And when, angered by these failings, you face her with them, the wench promises you that that was all in the past, and she will be different from now on.  Path dependence and network goods and institutional economics are all the rage, she says.   But then you find, she’s still up to her old tricks:  She says she’s building models of economic phenomena in order to understand, predict and control, just like physicists do.  But, although it looks like that’s what she’s doing, in fact her models are not models of real phenomena, but models of stylized abstractions of phenomena.  Her acolytes even use that very word – stylized – to describe the “facts” which they use to calibrate or test their models.
Of course, she will say, physicists do this too.  Newton famously assumed the planets were perfect spheres in order to predict their relative movements using his theory of gravitation.   But physicists later relax their assumptions, in order to build revised models, in a process that has continued since Newton to the present day.  Physicists also allow their models to be falsified by the data they collect, even when that data too is stylized, and overturned.     Instead, Catwoman is still assuming that people are maximizers of individual utility, with perfect foresight and unlimited processing capabilities, obeying the axiom of the irrelevance of independent alternatives, when all these assumptions have been shown to be false about us.   When was the last time a mainstream economic model was overturned?
Indeed, here is another of her flaws:  her loose grasp of reality.  She says we are always, all of us, acting in our own self-interest.  When you quiz this, pointing out (say) a friend who donated money to a charity, she replies that he is making himself feel better by doing something he thinks virtuous, and thus is maximizing his own self-interest.  Her assumption, it turns out, is unfalsifiable.   It is also naive and morally repugnant – and false!  Anyone with any experience of the world sees through this assumption straight away, which is why I think our feline friend is borderline autistic.   She just does not know much about real people and how they interact and live in the word. Who would want to step out with someone having such views, and unable to reconstruct them in the light of experience?
And, despite her claims to be grounded in the material world (Paul Samuelson:  “Economics is the study of how people and society end up choosing, with or without the use of money, to employ scarce productive resources that would have alternative uses,  . . .”), she sure is fond of metaphysical entities for which no hard evidence exists:  invisible hands, equilibria, perfect competition, free trade, commodities, in fact, the whole shebang.   As marketers say, the existence of a true commodity is evidence that a marketing manager is not doing his or her job.  In comparison, Richard Dawkins with his memes is a mere amateur in this creation of imaginary objects for religious veneration.
One could perhaps accept the scented candles and the imaginary friends if she was a little more humble and tolerant of the opinions of others.  But no, the feline femme fatale and her acolytes are among the most arrogant and condescending of any academic disciplines.  Read the recovering Chicago economist McCloskey for an account of this, if you don’t believe me.   McCloskey’s anecdotes and experiences were very familiar to me, especially that sneer from an economist who thinks you’ve not acted in your own self-interest – for example, by helping your colleagues or employer with something you are not legally required to do.  Indeed, the theft by economists from philosophers of the word “rational” to describe a very particular, narrow, autistic behavior is the best example of this.   Anyone whose behavior does not fit the models of mainstream economics can be thus be labeled irrational, and dismissed from further consideration as if insane.
Date her at your peril!  You have been warned!