At the zoo

Interviewed by a machine

L'Espresso has an interesting and somewhat chilling piece on using an AI system called HireVue to screen people for job interviews. The original piece is in Italian - quotes below are Google translations.

Do you want to work? Convince the computer. The algorithm selects the personnel selection

The large US and multinational companies that select managers increase through interactions with a computer that "spies" mimics and tone of voice. Thanks to an application created by a twenty year old...

HireVue is able to monitor about 15 thousand traits of a person, including the choice of language, eye movements, response speed and stress level. Furthermore, it is a program that "learns" and by coding the traits of the talents that are selected allows you to find them in future candidates. Every company in this way refines its database for finding the best candidate.

The advantages are obvious but so are the dangers. For example, according to promotional material the system is capable of treating diversity as a positive hiring parameter. Other biases are easily imagined, as are other uses.

In Great Britain Vodafone has examined 50 thousand candidacies for "junior" positions but now intends to make use of the same program also for the selection of senior managers. Unilever thanks to Artificial Intelligence has evaluated 275 thousand applications, of which about half were stopped at the first step due to a series of online "games" designed to measure concentration ability under pressure and short-term memory. And only a third of the remaining participants were invited to the final video interview (always with HireVue). Mike Clementi, Unilever America's vice-president for Human Resources is enthusiastic: "With a portfolio of more than 400 brands we could no longer continue to hire in a traditional way".

Beyond the motive

There is insanity in absolute badness, something motiveless, or something that reaches out, with a longing arrogance, beyond the motive: Iago lusted after Desdemona a little and hated Othello a great deal, but beyond those tiny passions was a lust to possess the evil deed as a thing worth having in itself, a flower, a jewel of the mind, a trophy of the intellect.

Hugh Walpole - The Cathedral (1922)

As we approach the season of goodwill, suppose we compare Lenin and Jeremy Corbyn. On the face of it the two men are not obviously similar. Lenin was intelligent, capable and charismatic. Corbyn isn’t. Yet if we use Walpole's trophy of the intellect analogy there is more similarity between Lenin and Corbyn than we might initially assume. For example, what was Lenin’s ultimate aim in driving through the Bolshevik revolution? Political altruism? Hardly.

Supposedly Lenin’s ultimate aim was a dictatorship of the proletariat but every move he made tells us that his real aim was a dictatorship of the Bolshevik party. However one looks at Lenin’s political career, it is not obvious that he had a clear and unambiguous altruistic goal in mind, one which would ultimately benefit the proletariat.

There is no great reason to suppose that Lenin cared anything about the proletariat anyway. Certainly there is nothing to suggest that he thought the Russian proletariat capable of forming a dictatorship, whatever that might mean and whatever Marxist theory might require.

In which case we might use Walpole’s trophy of the intellect analogy. As an analogy it suggests that Lenin merely saw the Bolshevik revolution as a jewel of the mind , a trophy of the intellect. Like an Olympic gold medal it was a trophy to aspire to with fanatical dedication but that is all. A political victory as opposed to an Olympic victory - I knew I could do it and I did it.

The analogy works well if we compare Lenin to Jeremy Corbyn. Mr Corbyn’s totalitarian political ethos seems to have no genuine altruism embedded in it, nothing which could usher in a better world for ordinary people. Just the opposite if historical experience is any guide and all that historical experience has been readily available to Mr Corbyn for the whole of his adult life.

Yet as with Lenin, Jeremy Corbyn seems to have no interest in the political, social and economic damage his political goals are likely to cause. As far as we can tell, and the clues are abundant, the trophy of the intellect is everything to him. We are nothing.

The trophy of the intellect is merely an analogy of course, but fascinating and surprisingly apt. It has wide application too. Many people with radical ideas do not come across as selflessly altruistic. It is not at all obvious that they are striving for a real improvement in the human condition. It is more competitive than that. More murky. More sinister.

Instead they come across as people pursuing a trophy of the intellect and like an Olympic medal the trophy is an end in itself. Job done. Goal achieved. Altruism doesn’t come into it.

Maybe Victorians were smarter than we are

How did two people who had once filled each other's universe manage to hold together as the tide receded? Why, by the world-old compulsion of marriage, he supposed. Marriage was a trick, a sham, if you looked at it in one way; but it was the only means man had yet devised for defending himself from his own frivolity.

Edith Wharton - The Gods Arrive (1932)

It is worth remembering that by our standards almost all Victorians were poor simply because our general prosperity has increased so enormously over the past century or so. Victorian elites may have lived lives of pampered comfort but today, the majority of us live lives which are at least as comfortable as the most pampered duke or duchess.

This prosperity divide is important because it reminds us that Victorians were much closer to the edge than we are. Closer to infant mortality, childbirth mortality, hunger, disease, destitution, slums and a host of other horrors our prosperity and knowledge have mitigated or virtually removed.

Victorians were aware that life is uncertain and felt the precarious nature of life much more acutely than we generally feel it. Uncertainty was their lived experience. They knew nothing else and neither were they constantly persuaded that smoothing out life’s uncertainties ought to be some kind of human right.

In other words Victorians had an acute understanding of how important it was to defend themselves against a whole host of threats to their well-being. They understood why family life, thrift and hard work were the essential basis of an increasingly technical and urban population. From this it follows that they knew how vitally important it was to defend themselves, their families and their country against anything which threatened the basis of their existence.

Even by Edith Wharton’s time the threats were receding. Consequently social constraints were eroding as the consequences of frivolity became less appalling. Incompetence and a feckless life were less hazardous for a much greater number of people. But feckless is not smart.

Victorians understood how a sustainable culture remains sustainable, how it is defended and the compromises we have to make in defending it, how we have to sustain a restrictive bias towards our own culture because that is what sustains us now. In this respect yes - maybe Victorians were smarter than we are.

Like a week in the nut-house

“It’s all beautiful when you read it,” this man said disgustedly, “but when you write it down plain it’s like a week in the nut-house.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald - Financing Finnegan (1938)

The other day it struck me just how comical it is that Jeremy Corbyn’s elevation to Labour party leader was merely a horrible mistake. Comical that the party should do something so stupid. Even more comical that it should become so entangled in its own rules that it cannot unpick the situation.

The icing on the cake is that Labour supporters and the media have to pretend that everything is okay and having a major political party led by bunch of raving totalitarian loons – yes that’s perfectly fine.

Hmm –

Well it struck me as funny at the time, but now I’ve written it down...

Christmas games – Piggy

As Christmas approaches we appear to lack a series of Animal Farm inspired family games to educate the little ones about politics. It would need to fit in with modern times without losing the overall Orwellian flavour so here is one tentative suggestion.

"Piggy" would be a topical family board game introduced in time for Christmas but the game also fits in well into the frenetic atmosphere of the UK General Election.

At the beginning of each game players are dealt various cards to determine the strategies they should adopt when playing Piggy. The basic aim for each player is to roll the dice, move their chosen board token and land on areas of the board which allow them to “hide” certain cards in their hand. In some situations a player with too many cards to “hide” may have the option of “emigrating” which allows him or her to leave the game and watch TV.

One player only will have been dealt the single Piggy card and this player must try to roll the dice, move around the board and appropriate as many cards as possible from the other players before they can “hide” them or “emigrate”. In which case the player with the Piggy card wins the game and claims Piggy!

The cards which players need to “hide” as quickly as possible are Pension Cards, Savings Cards, Job Cards, Free Speech Cards and Education Cards. Added interest comes when the holder of the Piggy card also draws the “Green” card and is allowed to make up new rules on every throw of the dice.

Fun for all the family.

For a while.

Courage

Test launch at Greenock - source

I recently stumbled across a reminder of how Hawker Hurricanes were used on a few merchant ships during WWII. My father alluded to it once or twice.

CAM ships were World War II-era British merchant ships used in convoys as an emergency stop-gap until sufficient escort carriers became available. CAM ship is an acronym for catapult aircraft merchant ship.

They were equipped with a rocket-propelled catapult launching a single Hawker Hurricane, dubbed a "Hurricat" or "Catafighter" to destroy or drive away an attacking bomber. Normally the Hurricane fighter would be lost when the pilot then bailed out or ditched in the ocean near the convoy. CAM ships continued to carry their normal cargoes after conversion...

In total, there were nine combat launches. Nine German aircraft were destroyed (four Condors, four Heinkels and a Junkers 88), one damaged and three chased away. Eight Hurricanes were ditched and only one pilot lost.

Somewhere in the Atlantic a Hurricane pilot climbs up the supporting superstructure and into the cockpit of his disposable hurricane. He is to be fired into the air by a rocket in order to attack an enemy bomber, knowing he will have to ditch the plane or parachute into the sea afterwards and hope for the best. Maybe we should pause for a moment and wonder what we have lost.