Black boxes

Interesting snippet about the Face ID system in Apple’s iPhone X.

Even Apple will not be able to explain how its forthcoming iPhone X can spot some efforts to fool its facial recognition system.

The firm has released a guide to the Face ID system, which explains that it relies on two types of neural networks - one of which has been specifically trained to resist spoofing attempts.

But a consequence of the design is that it behaves like a "black box".

Its behaviour can be observed but the underlying processes remain opaque.

Really this isn’t so different from the OCR systems I was involved with over a decade ago. If the OCR system read flow as flaw, nobody would ever know for certain why. We’d pick it up with error correction systems and move on. I doubt if those who wrote the underlying recognition software could tell us in any but general terms.

These machines “know” what they are doing but we don’t know in detail and they can’t pass on that detail because they would hit us with impossible amounts of information. So as far as possible we let them handle it and only get involved when things go wrong, which probably isn't as often as we'd like to think.

It isn't easy to dwell on modern technology without feeling somewhat superfluous. Are we here to give the machines something to do or is it the other way round?

The darker side of complexity

If Peterson is on the right lines then he has set all manner of hares running.

To take a highly speculative example, obesity could be explained by increased social complexity. This would fit Peterson’s idea where the weakest biological point is the one which first causes problems when complexity stresses become too acute to bear. In the case of obesity, eating too much is an easy flight to comfort in a world where food is cheap and always available.

If so, then official attempts to control general calorie intake are misconceived and won’t work. If anything, they are likely to make the situation worse because government interference increases life’s complexities.

What else might we expect from a world too complex for many people to handle? How about simpler and correspondingly extreme political mantras? Politics for dummies may be a welcome relief in a world already too complex to understand.

Is nonsense underrated?

You may seek it with thimbles—and seek it with care;
You may hunt it with forks and hope;
You may threaten its life with a railway-share;
You may charm it with smiles and soap—

Lewis Carroll - The Hunting of the Snark (1876)

Who hasn't watched Dr Who or a James Bond film, Harry Potter, Jurassic Park or any one of thousands of other improbable entertainments? There is nothing wrong with any of them but many films require the suspension of disbelief because otherwise they don’t work. This does not seem to detract from their entertainment value but it raises a question about nonsense and the way we use it. We are entertained by nonsense and a huge number of people make a living from it.

Suppose we use nonsense as a handy word for all those myriad dishonesties so widely use to evade reality or simply keep it at bay until something turns up. For convenience that would be nonsense, partial nonsense, nonsense diluted with reality and many other evasions lumped together. We may as well begin with relatively undiluted nonsense found in political speeches.

Leader strides confidently towards the rostrum. An expectant hush descends on the arena because that is the primary role of expectant hushes. Leader casts a keen, laser-like glance over the audience. The hush deepens, lifts as a heckler is ejected then deepens again. Leader pauses for dramatic effect then launches into a speech the faithful are waiting for. Wow –what a build up. Dramatic nonsense it may be but what a build up. I almost wish I were there.

To attract applause, even from the most infatuated supporter, any political speech needs a fair amount of nonsense to pad it out, spice it up and feed some headlines into the following day’s news. Nonsense is politically crucial, it is what followers expect, what they demand. It is a key ingredient in their political beliefs, their social standpoint. Not only is nonsense a vital aspect of entertainment, it is equally vital in politics. Hardly surprising though – the two are joined at the hip.

Tony Blair and Barack Obama were grandmasters at blending nonsense into their political art. At their best they soared above the prickly restraints of reality, giving only the faintest nod towards real life. Even that they did graciously, as if unbending for a brief democratic moment to depart from their airy art. Nonsense sustained them but not everyone has such a finely honed aptitude, for their sublime ability to float above the real world and crap on it from on high without the faithful noticing a thing.

Theresa May and Donald Trump are nowhere near that level of skill and this seems to be one reason why they are attacked so relentlessly. People need the feelgood nurturing of political nonsense and in their turn pundits need to feed on it. Blair and Obama delivered, May and Trump don't.

Even so and in spite of its familiarity, isn’t it strange how much nonsense there is in the world, how much of we need to keep things going? We pretend that nonsense is a wholly negative aspect of debate used by the other side but it isn’t. Surely the pervasive and intractable nature of it suggests how important it is to all sides. Not only that, but nonsense has always permeated the human condition, from tales of the supernatural to – well you name it. We are all familiar with nonsense, almost as if it is –

Useful? Essential?

Indeed. Perhaps nonsense really is important and maybe even essential to what we are, how we make progress, how ideas compete for our allegiance. Perhaps we need nonsense to leap o’er the intellectual chasms and knowledge gaps. Perhaps we need it to feed the imagination, stir the pulse and justify accepting whatever is wrong but necessary if we are to move on from where we are. For political reasons, where we are must always be where we never wanted to be in the first place. It’s nonsense of course, but that’s political progress for you.

A real advantage of nonsense can be seen when our ignorance of reality does not lead to damaging uncertainties. In such cases nonsense can be sustaining and lead to social coherence, keeping at bay the dread spectres of complexity and uncertainty and the grim chore of admitting we don’t know. Always a difficult one that. Sometimes it may even be the case that complexity and uncertainty are more damaging than the nonsense we use as a substitute for knowing. Often we’d rather not know anyway. Often we actually prefer nonsense.

Organised religion seems to have been a major source of nonsense during recent centuries, but not the only one. However, within the nonsense of religious superstition there is that core of moral value, something that perhaps we should have held on to when we thought we were merely ditching the nonsense. The trouble is we did not ditch nonsense, we merely switched our allegiance from religious nonsense to secular nonsense and the secular nonsense turned out to be worse.

Unfortunately our modern world has wandered into an arena of pseudo-technical nonsense without the moral core and the intellectual coherence of organised religion. Coherence partly based on nonsense is still coherence and may be enormously valuable in spite of the nonsense. Our need for nonsense and the inept way we swap one form for another, the way we build competing forms of nonsense all have the potential to be extremely damaging – simply because they are nonsense and nonsense has to be used wisely. As it often was when organised Christianity held sway.

Tackling nonsense is a real problem because when we tackle nonsense we have this innate tendency to look around for a dollop of more nonsense to do the job. Somehow, and this may be overly pessimistic, but somehow I can’t see that approach turning out well. 

Uprooted

But if I had stinted him, in his usual quantity of wine, or forbidden him to taste it altogether, that would only have increased his partiality for it, and made him regard it as a greater treat than ever. I therefore gave him quite as much as his father was accustomed to allow him; as much, indeed, as he desired to have — but into every glass I surreptitiously introduced a small quantity of tartar-emetic, just enough to produce inevitable nausea and depression without positive sickness...

...and once or twice, when he was sick, I have obliged the poor child to swallow a little wine-and-water without the tartar-emetic, by way of medicine; and this practice I intend to continue for some time to come; not that I think it of any real service in a physical sense, but because I am determined to enlist all the powers of association in my service; I wish this aversion to be so deeply grounded in his nature that nothing in after-life may be able to overcome it.

Anne Brontë – The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

Straightforward aversion therapy, the core of which must have been common knowledge for aeons. Sometimes it seems as if much of what we once knew has been recast into jargon then regurgitated as new, technically complex and only understandable by the initiated. As if we have been uprooted by modernity because otherwise we would have understood too much and resisted.

Leonardo's millions

This story is interesting in an odd kind of way.

Leonardo DiCaprio announced Tuesday that his eco-focused foundation has given more than $20 million this year in fresh grants to more than 100 organizations around the world.

From lion recovery and mangrove restoration to the defense of indigenous rights and better access to affordable solar energy, the actor announced the grants ahead of his appearance at a climate change conference at Yale University.

He planned to use the appearance to urge more immediate steps to reduce the world's reliance on fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy sources.

I used to dismiss the guy as a hypocritical, virtue-signalling plonker but he seems to believe too. No doubt the money could be better spent but he is not an ungenerous hypocritical, virtue-signalling plonker.

The Beast of Bolsover on the EU

Big badges

It isn't only the cars, but car badges seem to grow bigger and bigger as the years roll by. There is no mistaking a Mercedes in the rear-view mirror, with a badge big enough to adorn a truck only a few years ago. As most cars are little more than boxes on wheels I suppose manufacturers have an increasing need to distinguish their brand. 

Does it work though? Not for me, I prefer something more discreet, but times change so there must be some advantage to big badges. 

I wonder if car badges will continue to grow? Perhaps manufacturers will come up with some kind of holographic effect where the badge seems much bigger than it really is.