Marbury

go newt

Last week Newt Gingrich - serial polygamist, blowhard, D.C fixture, his very face a reminder of what even Republicans hate about Republicans - launched his campaign for the GOP nomination, despite having next to no chance of winning the presidency. But in the days since his announcement, he has done something quite extraordinary: he has forced commentators to reassess his chances. They are now judged to be zero. In fact, he has only an evens chance of making it past Memorial Day.

Gingrich gravely upset his own party by laying into one of its current heroes, Paul Ryan, the author of the GOP's plan to reduce the deficit. Humiliatingly, he then had to call Ryan to apologise. It's also been revealed that he once owed up to $500,000 to Tiffany's the jewellers. Not a good look when you're trying to portray yourself as a man of the people.

Still, Gingrich's self-regard is nothing if not resilient. His press secretary has issued the following statement:

Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

Gosh. I suppose, with Donald Trump gone, there was a vacancy for the Grotesque-Joke-Candidacy. Brave of Newt to fill it.

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what george osborne could learn from blue peter

Reading about Tufte has got me thinking about how this government could use better information design to tackle its big political goals, in particular its central one of reducing the deficit while retaining favour with the voters. Although the Coalition (at least the Tory part of it) is so far doing rather well at convincing the public that its cuts are necessary, this consensus is probably rather fragile. After all, unlike crime or transport or health, the deficit is not something you can see or experience; it's an abstraction, and it's hard to get passionate about an abstraction. That's why barely anyone turned up to the Rally Against Debt at the weekend. It's easy to laugh at the organisers, but you don't have to be right wing to take the point: money spent paying debt interest is money not spent on schools, hospitals or welfare. What the government should be doing is making tangible the size of the problem, and their progress in tackling it.

The Blue Peter fundraising thermometer was a simple but brilliant solution to a not dissimilar problem: how do you give individuals - in this instance, children - a sense that their small contribution matters, that it counts towards a common goal, that it forms part of a collective narrative with a happy ending? It was an insight that the Obama campaign - advised by behavioural economists - stole (directly from Blue Peter, no doubt) for their historic fundraising effort in 2008. They ensured that every individual or group had their own thermometer, so that everyone could see how much they'd done, and how much more they needed to do. Visualising an abstraction makes it feel real.

So to the government's challenge. I must confess, I didn't fully understand the scale of the deficit problem - despite reading reams of words about it - until I saw this chart, from the Guardian (which is brilliant at information design). What the government needs to do is produce an inverted thermometer.

If I'd been advising the Tories at the last election I'd have told them to drop all the posters with Cameron's scary alien-face on them and just paste up big versions of that Guardian chart all around the country, asking, 'Who do you trust to deal with this?' And then, every year or every two years, do a new poster, showing the progress made on reducing the deficit. Until it's election time again and - if things go to plan - they produce the final version, showing that the deficit has disappeared.

Then they could send out Blue Peter badges to everyone, along with a signed picture of the Chancellor, feeding a happy, tail-wagging Danny Alexander.

powerpoint corrupts

Washington Monthly has a superb profile of the information design guru Edward Tufte. More than any other single individual, Tufte has changed the way we view and interact with data, by consistently advocating on behalf of elegance, simplicity and economy in the visual presentation of information. This is his most famous and best-selling book.

Above is a picture of Tufte's favourite-ever example of information design. It was drawn in 1869 by a French engineer named Charles Joseph Minard, and it tracks Napoleon's failed invasion of Russia in 1812 (see the article for an explanation of what makes it so extraordinary).

We're living in an age of public data and increasing transparency - which brings huge challenges of information design. Tufte is currently advising the Obama government on how to present its data (on, for example, where the stimulus money is going by zip code) so that it's as easy to comprehend and engage with as possible. This is not the first time he's advised the government:

Tufte’s most public engagement with the federal government came in the form of a scathing crusade against its endemic use of Microsoft PowerPoint. In January 2003, the space shuttle Columbia took off from Kennedy Space Center. Seconds into its flight, a piece of foam insulation broke off from the shuttle’s fuel tank and punctured its left wing. For days, as the shuttle orbited the earth, engineers at NASA and Boeing debated how serious the hole might be. Much of this communication was done in the form of PowerPoint, a software program that Tufte says is constricting and obfuscating and “turns information into a sales pitch.”

After reviewing several PowerPoint presentations, NASA officials decided to proceed with the shuttle’s return flight. On February 1, Columbia burned up as it reentered the earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven crewmembers on board. Tufte has called PowerPoint a “co-conspirator” in the shuttle disaster. Tufte dissected NASA’s PowerPoint slides on his Web site, showing that the program didn’t allow engineers to write in scientific notation and replaced complex quantitative measurement with imprecise words like “significant.” He then published a twenty-eight-page essay called “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,” in which he analyzed hundreds of existing PowerPoint slides and showed that the statistical graphics used in PowerPoint presentations show an average of twelve numbers each, which, in Tufte’s analysis, ranks it below every major world publication except for Pravda. The low information density of PowerPoint is “approaching dementia,” he wrote.

the incredible oliver james

If you're a media-designated expert on something you can pretty much get away with any old rubbish, because journalists rarely bother to check that you what you're saying has a basis in fact. And why should they? Journalists trust experts not to talk nonsense and usually they're right to do so. But occasionally you come across statements from 'experts' in the press that are so absurd, so dramatically wrong, that you end up spilling coffee over your newspaper. That's what happened when I read this by Oliver James in today's Observer, from a sidebar appended to Andrew Anthony's excellent piece on the wayward chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer:

It is true that top [chess] players tend to have higher scores than less good players on tests of numerical reasoning and processes such as pattern recognition or forward search for moves. They also have astonishing memories for these patterns. The question is why you have them. It would be a big mistake to assume that they are genetically inherited – the Human Genome Project appears to be proving that genes play little or no role in causing differences in intelligence. 

I'm certainly no expert on the influences on intelligence. But then you really don't have to be to know that this is utter bollocks. There is a very lively debate amongst psychologists, neuroscientists and social scientists on this question but nobody - nobody credible - would agree that "genes play little or no role in causing differences in intelligence".

The only argument is over how big a role they play. The American sociologist Richard Nisbett has written an excellent primer on this debate, called Intelligence and How to Get It (a rather misleading title for quite a scholarly book). Nisbett wrote it to rebut the 'strong heritability' view of intelligence, which holds that intelligence is inherited and remains constant throughout a person's life, no matter how many books they read as a child or piano lessons they attend, or how long they spend practicing chess. Nisbett argues that early nutrition, parenting and education can make big differences to a person's intelligence. This might seem like common sense but Nisbett is probably in a slight minority of his peers on this issue. For an alternative view see Bryan Caplan, who has a book out proposing that parents shouldn't worry too much about how they raise their children because genes will triumph in the end whatever you do. Anyway, the point is, even Nisbett doesn't think genes are irrelevant to intelligence; in his view they probably account for around half of the variation in a given population.

Oliver James follows this nonsense with similarly ungrounded speculation about chess-players having unhappy childhoods. Total piffle. But he's a psychologist, so he gets away with it. Given his form, you wonder how long he'll continue to do so.

i am become death, destroyer of worlds

Those are the words that came into the mind of Robert Oppenheimer, inventor of the atomic bomb, as he witnessed the first controlled nuclear explosion. The quote may be familiar to you, but this astonishing footage may not - it wasn't to me.

via Things That Quicken The Heart.

bin laden, the spin doctor

Pro Publica has an excellent account of what has emerged so far from the stash of bin Laden's documents seized at Abbottabad. It seems that, far from being a figurehead, bin Laden was as involved as he could be in AQ's operations, given the limitations on his communication. He was above all an assiduous guardian of the AQ brand:

Bin Laden was bent on inflicting mass-casualty attacks on the West, the U.S. official said. At the same time, however, he criticized an online propaganda magazine edited by a young American in Yemen, saying the bloodthirsty tone of an article could harm al Qaeda's image among Muslims, according to the U.S. counterterror official.

The magazine, called Inspire, "apparently discussed using a tractor or farm vehicle in an attack outfitted with blades or swords as a fearsome killing machine," the official said. "Bin Laden said this is something he did not endorse. He seems taken aback. He complains that this tactical proposal promotes indiscriminate slaughter. He says he rejects this and it is not something that reflects what al Qaeda does."

On another point, Joe Biden can rest easy:

"He talks about targeting priorities," the counterterror official said. "He says the president is of course the top target if you could get a shot at him. Also the military chiefs like the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the defense secretary, top military people. There is a note indicating that the vice president is not an important target because that position has less weight."

the decline of nicknames

This picture was snapped by journalist Ed Howker, outside Bar Italia in Soho last month (and ended up on Bryan Appleyard's blog). I was reminded of it (rather tangentially) when reading this item on the sad decline of proper sporting nickames:

The Yankees won generations of championships with men known as Babe, Iron Horse, Joltin’ Joe, Scooter, Yogi, Catfish and Mr. October. More recently, they won with players named Derek, Mariano and Andy. Alex Rodriguez — A-Rod — has what passes for a nickname these days. The sociologist James Skipper, author of “Baseball Nicknames: A Dictionary of Origins and Meanings,” found that the use of nicknames peaked before 1920. It has since been in steady decline, dropping quickly in the 1950s.

(What are our equivalents? I'm not sure we ever did it that well. Crazy Horse? I mean 'Gazza' hardly counts.)

The author comes up with several possible reasons for the change, including that more people have are more unusual real names (Kobe, son of Joe Bryant), and the influx of Japanese and Hispanic players in American sports means people are wary of giving offence. But it might just be that people are touchier than they were: 

 “Nicknames are less needed today because given names themselves are so much more varied than they used to be,” said Evans, the Bellevue psychology professor. He also posited that nicknames are often “humorous or noncomplimentary, and we may live in a culture where people are less willing to accept names that are less complimentary.”

This is unlikely to have been true of The Bastard.

via The Browser.

mick jagger's riposte

Photo: Patrick Lichfield, St Tropez 1971

I recently finished reading Keith Richards's autobiography, Life. I loved it. It's not your average celebrity memoir. For one thing, he's got a truly amazing story to tell, of a boy from Dartford who fell in love with the strange fruit of the blues and went on to shake the world by making his own very distinctive version of it, at a time when Anglo-American culture was at its most innovative and exciting. The life that came with that was, of course, like nobody else's, despite the casual, free-floating noun of the title, and it provides a fund of breathtaking and horrifying anecdotes (of which the drug stories are the least interesting). For another thing, it's brilliantly written. Not in the sense that its sentences are elegantly turned or its grammar is correct - far from it. But boy, has it got 'voice', as they say in writing school. Much or most of it was dictated, and it's a compliment to say that it sounds like it, because Richards's way of expressing himself in words is as distinctive as his guitar-playing, somehow wrong-sounding and utterly right at the same time, and always crackling with dark energy. He had a fine collaborator in James Fox, who corralled Richards's reminisces into something readable and structured without draining them of vitality (Richards can spin some wonderful metaphors; the book includes a copy of a fax he sent to Fox in which he sketches some musical notes on a stave and below them scrawls out his feeling that the blues represented a jail break for music out of classical western forms; the notes busted right out from behind those bars).

At the heart of the book are two things: music (about which Richards is never less than fascinating) and Mick Jagger. Jagger, as has been widely noted, comes out badly. Not only has he got a tiny todger, according to Anita Pallenburg according to Keith, but he is a soulless egomaniac, obsessed by his own image, his status within the band, and money - all at the expense of the music, which is all that Keith cares about, apparently. Despite Richards's scorn and derision of his partner, there's a plaintive tone to this stuff; a sense that's he's addressing Jagger directly, tugging his sleeve, asking him what happened to the man he met and fell in love with on a train into London.

What does Mick think of this? We'll probably never know, because Jagger is too self-contained to tell us. But it may well be something like this, an imagined riposte to Richards, penned by a journalist who, rather confusingly, is called Bill Wyman. It's a wonderful piece of writing in its own right, informed by an intimate knowledge of the Stones' music and career, funny, astute and very convincing in its assumption of the Jagger perspective. It's a reminder, for one thing, of what a bloody nightmare it must have been to be in a band with Keith Richards:

Keith likes to talk a lot about his getting clean from heroin. It is not correspondingly apprehended that he replaced the heroin comprehensively with liquor. Given a choice I select the slurring alcoholic over the comatose junkie as a lifelong professional partner, and I say this with some knowledge of the two alternatives. But neither is strictly desirable. And, yes, they do fall over onstage... In our organization, inside this rather unusual floating circus we call home, I am forced into the role of martinet, the one who gets blamed for silly arbitrary rules. (Like, for a show in front of 60,000 people for which we are being paid some $6 or $7 million for a few hours' work, I like to suggest to everyone that we start on time, and that we each have in place a personal plan, in whatever way suits us best, to stay conscious for the duration of the show.)...No sooner did Keith kick heroin than Charlie took it up. In the book Keith blames me for not touring during the 1980s. I was quoted, unfortunately, saying words to the effect of "the Rolling Stones are a millstone around my neck." This hurt Keith's feelings. He thinks it was a canard flung from a fleeting position of advantage in my solo career, the failing of which he delights in. He's not appreciating the cause and effect. Can you imagine going on tour with an alcoholic, a junkie, and a crackhead? Millstone wasn't even the word.

Read the whole thing. Though Paul McCartney is friends with Richards, I suspect he might empathise with Jagger a little more (at least, more than Richards seems to be able to). By 1970, all the other Beatles, and most of the world, turned on McCartney and accused him of being a bossy, overbearing, egotistical tyrant. But without McCartney's bossing and harrying of the others, particularly a Lennon sunk deep into smack and LSD, there would be no Abbey Road or Let It Be - and probably only half a White Album (the less good half).

Of course, people will always find Richards the more attractive figure than Jagger, just as John Lennon will always be cooler than Paul McCartney. We have inherited from the Romantics an idea of genius that is all heart and no head, all feel and no logic, all inspiration and no effort. The idea that great art is the product, not just of inspiration, but of hard work, dogged focus, and cool calculation, is not something we're used to. It doesn't seem to have struck Richards that he reason he's been able to focus so single-mindedly on the music is that Jagger was taking care of everything else. At his peak, Richards made magic every time he picked up a guitar. But somebody had to make sure there was an audience to hear it.

was bin laden killed by a dog?

 
This is one of a series of amazing images from a superb photo-essay at Foreign Policy, on the many roles played by dogs in the modern U.S army. As you may recall, the assault on bin Laden's compound was carried out by 79 humans and one dog. As with many other details we're not clear on exactly what the dog did, but it could have been a number of things, from attacking a human target (in an act of 'controlled aggressiveness') to sniffing for explosives. The dog in question may have been equipped with the latest kit for a SEAL dog: bulletproof flak jacket, infrared nightsight camera and 'doggles' (protective eyewear). Amidst all the killing machine stuff there is still room for man-dog love:

Military dogs and their handlers often form deep bonds -- it's an essential part of the canine-handler relationship that is specifically built into their training regimen. The personal attachments are often so intense that it can take weeks of training before a dog can begin working with a new handler. Not only are these dogs fierce assault weapons, they are loyal guardians. When Private First Class Colton Rusk was shot after his unit came under Taliban sniper fire during a routine patrol in Afghanistan, Rusk's bomb-sniffing dog, Eli, crawled on top of his body, attacking anyone -- including Rusk's fellow Marines -- who tried to come near him. Rusk did not survive the assault, but Eli was granted early retirement so he could live with Rusk's family.

Read the whole thing.

u.s political ad of the day

They do things differently there...

why reasoning is really all about winning

I'm glad Obama has decided not to release that photograph. As I said, it would be a mistake to imagine that anyone who believes that bin Laden wasn't killed by American forces on Sunday would be swayed by any evidence to the contrary. Some people just aren't open to reason; or rather, they will use reason as a way of confirming what they already believe.

This is a widespread habit, of course, and one we might notice in ourselves in other contexts. Whether it's relationships or politics or the workplace, we have a tendency to start off with we want and then reason backwards towards it; to cloak our true motivations or prejudices in the guise of reason. It's been shown again and again in studies that we have a very strong 'confirmation bias'; once we have an idea about the world we like (Obama is un-American, my girlfriend is cheating on me, the world is or isn't getting warmer) we pick up on evidence we think supports our hypothesis and ruthlessly disregard evidence that undermines it, even without realising we're doing so.

A new paper, written by a couple of evolutionary psychologists, has caused a big stir in the world of social sciences by proposing that such behaviours aren't distortions of our reasoning ability; they are why we have it in the first place. This is called "the argumentative theory of reasoning". One commentator on the paper neatly summarises its core proposition:

Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.

We tend to think of reason as an abstract, truth-seeking method that gets contaminated by our desires and motivations. But the paper argues it's the other way around - that reasoning is a non-violent weapon given to us by evolution to help us get our way. Its capacity to help us get to the truth about things is a by-product, albeit a hugely important one. In many ways, reasoning does as much to screw us up as it does to help us. The paper's authors, Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier, put it like this:

The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things.

Whether you agree with it or not, the paper represents an impressive and stylish example of reasoning itself. Its key move to is to reposition reason from a truth or reality-seeking method (how we like to think of it) to something that is, first and foremost, a communication tool - another product of our deeply social nature.

Link to paper.

Link to conversation with Mercier.

Link to Jonah Lehrer commentary.

is ed miliband really ready for an election?

Photo: David Jones/PA

In a competitive environment for political journalists, one available strategy is to be consistently sympathetic to a particular senior politician. If that means you get more scoops and more access to that politician, and can therefore deliver original insights to your readers, then that's surely a legitimate role to take. But there's a fine line between that and becoming a mouthpiece, or failing to give readers a truthful impression. It seems to me that Allegra Stratton wobbles perilously close to that line in today's piece on how gung-ho Ed Miliband is about the prospect of an early election. Yes, I'm sure that's what he wants us to think, and perhaps he really feels that way. But it's remiss of Stratton not to point out that a) He still has no policies, to speak of, and b) He still lags behind Cameron in public perception. Neither of these factors are insurmountable barriers to success were an election to be called next month, but they're not exactly negligible either.

Then there's this:

In Miliband's office a phrase they use to describe the coalition government has, for them, a pleasing radioactive fuzz. The "half-life" of the coalition government keeps shrinking, they say – it appears not to follow a smooth curve downwards but instead seems to surge in finite periods, each lasting only half the length of the one before.

If anyone can tell me what on earth this means, and why it's a useful metaphor, I'd be grateful.

fiction and non-fiction

If you haven't already Lawrence Wright's book about the September 11th attacks, then I strongly recommend you do so. It's an extraordinary combination of rigorous investigative journalism (it's based on over 500 interviews) and brilliant storytelling. It's a superb history of Al-Qaeda - and of the evolving American response to it - which includes rich portraits of its leading figures, including, of course, OBL. Wright is also a screenwriter (of fictional movies).

The other day Wright did an NPR interview with Terry Gross about the ramifications of bin Laden's death, and it's as interesting as you'd expect. The following, in particular, caught my eye. Gross asks Wright how the manner of OBL's demise compares with the scenarios he'd imagined:

Actually, Terry, I think it was in 2006, the CIA came to me to write a scenario, in their words, about what would we do if we got bin Laden because this has been a subject of concern within the intelligence community. What if we did get him? How would we treat him? Where would we take him? Would it be better to take him alive or dead? And because I had written this movie, "The Siege," you know, and Hollywood had done a somewhat better job of connecting the dots about terrorism and the threat to America than the intelligence community. The CIA was reaching out to screenwriters, such as I had done, and I said: Well, you know, I'm a reporter. I can't go writing screenplays for the CIA. But I'll tell you in the form of an op-ed for the New York Times what I think if we were able to catch bin Laden.

Read on for Wright's proposed scenario, which I can't imagine was considered terribly helpful. But what a bizarre thing to do: 'reach out to screenwriters'! It's a sign of how much the CIA, in between catching the bad guys, worries about 'the narrative'; and in particular how its actions, or America's actions, can shape the battle of ideas in the Islamic world. This is what I suspect lies behind the administration's embarrassing missteps over the official account of exactly what happened in that Abbottabad compound. Their immediate instinct was to shape the story in a way that damaged OBL's image amongst his supporters and sympathisers. Hence the exaggerated or fabricated details about "human shields".

Having said that, much of the confusion is down to the difficulty of getting a story straight with so much action, and so many people involved, over such a brief and intense period. The gap between the shot that killed OBL and Obama's speech was extraordinarily short. It would be more suspicious if the account that emerged on Sunday evening was the one that survived - because that would imply a pre-cooked story. The most striking thing about the corrections isn't that they're necessary, but that they're happening.

who is osama bin laden and why should i care?

Oh don't you worry your pretty little heads about it...

via Joanne Jacobs.

don't release the photograph

Anton Chekhov advised dramatists that if a loaded gun was brought on to stage in the first act, then it must be fired in the second. "Otherwise don't put it there". Now that the White House has conceded that there is a photograph of Osama Bin Laden's corpse, there is enormous, probably irresistible pressure on them to release it. But I'm with Philip Gourevitch:

The Abu Ghraib photographs were unofficial documents of an official policy that was supposed to be kept secret, but if nothing else, they should have taught us that a photograph of the violence you inflict is always, in very large measure, a self-portrait. In getting rid of bin Laden, Obama has made the greatest step yet toward being able to put that era behind us. Do we want a photo of bin Laden’s bullet-punctured skull to eclipse this moment?...

...Under Obama’s command, the raid on bin Laden—on par, as a feat of heroic military derring-do, with Israel’s 1976 raid on Entebbe airfield in Uganda—projected a cool and fearless capability. The perfect secrecy of the operation was part of its inspiring style—the total control, even the pitch-perfect relentlessness of Obama’s speech announcing the kill. Publishing trophy photographs is antithetical to that; it’s what our enemies do.

Exactly. The only good reason to release the photograph (or indeed the video of the burial at sea) is to "prove" that the US did indeed get its man. But that is impossible. As Gourevitch says, very few minds will be changed by such a photograph, even as it becomes the most ubiquitous, iconic image of the assassination, because those who prefer to believe that the Americans have made it all up will simply find confirmation of a sophisticated conspiracy. The conspiratorial mindset - as we've seen with regard to 'birtherism' - isn't swayed by mere evidence. Conspiracy theories are endlessly self-generating alternative realities. As for those who already believed in the president's announcement, and welcomed it; they will find their satisfaction coarsened.