Post-truth politics; information and narrative

Post-truth has been named as the word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. In terms of the narrative-information model, post-truth politics is when politicians who are presenting a particular narrative move beyond being highly selective in their choice of information to creating information which has no underlying data.

So narrative connects information, and information is constructed from a trapezium which, for convenience, is described here as converting an item of data (a difference) into an item of information (which makes a difference in the narrative). The trapezium is part of the narrative, so the process of converting data to information is also dependent upon the narrative. In politics, there is a pretence that, for a given purpose, if you have all the true data there is only one narrative: the true narrative. I say pretence because I doubt that anyone really believes it as baldly as that. However, this is how politicians' arguments line up: we want to achieve this (the purpose); the world is like this (the narrative built on the information) therefore there are no alternative: we need to do this.

If the information is true, the narrative is correct, so the argument proceeds. Post-truth politics doesn't bother with the truth of the information. It presents the narrative and creates the information needed to support it. Those opposed to the narrative cry foul! "You can't just make the information up: it has to be true." Well, there is a problem with requiring information to be true because information is always provisional, but even ignoring that, restricting narratives to those based on 'true' information doesn't get you very far.

The trouble is that there are almost limitless possibilities to choose from for the data, so, even if there is one true narrative to match the chosen data, there are endless narratives that may legitimately be constructed based on which choices are made. Given that situation, how can we chose one narrative over another? How we, as individuals, make the choice, is based on our prior beliefs: our prejudices, our past experiences, the community we share (our 'bubble', to use another current word). Beyond that is the question of what determines which narratives 'win out'. This is about recognising the hegemonic narratives and understanding where their hegemony comes from. The owners of the hegemonic narrative will defend their narrative by pointing to perceived flaws in competing narratives and either denying the data used in competing narratives or ignoring it and insisting on the superiority of the data they have chosen to their narratives. When competing narratives are being judged, much of the time the choice is based on which data you agree to recognise, rather than disputing the truth of the data.

So, looking back to the now-notorious EU leave campaign claim that "We send the EU £350 million a week. Let's find our NHS instead", putting it on the side of bus generated masses of publicity and, evidently, contributed to swaying enough of the voters to win the referendum. Most of the voters were not, realistically, in a position to make an informed assessment of the truth of that claim, or indeed most of the other claims on either side of the campaigns.

As argued in that previous post, the £350 million claim was sort-of true. The problem was that it was (IMHO - which is to say in my narrative!) wildly misleading, because: a) the information that it was converted to by the leave narrative was, questionable and b) choosing different data would support a very different narrative.

The truth or otherwise of the data, while important, is actually quite a small part of winning an argument. (Compare E.H.Carr's statement "To praise a historian for his accuracy is like praising an architect for using well-seasoned timber or properly mixed concrete in his building. It is a necessary condition of his work, but not his essential function".) What matters is the narrative, and the politician's ability to present the narrative.

Mainstream opinion pronounces itself shocked by post-truth politics and takes the moral high-ground, despising both those who present narratives built on falsehoods and those who believe them. But the real problem is the failure of alternative narratives. I referred to 'mainstream opinion' there, and that is part of the problem. Many people are rejecting the narratives of mainstream opinion because they feel let down, and they have been. And of course the concept of 'post-truth politics' is itself information created in a narrative of the mainstream opinion in order to discredit alternative narratives.

This post seems to be leading me towards sympathy for Donald Trump (as the most obvious  practitioner of post-truth politics). That is not what was intended, but sometimes narratives take you where they take you. (If you are an academic, anyway. A politician wouldn't let that happen.) And anyway none of this justifies the content of Donald Trump's politics, nor is it a defence of post-truth anything-at-all. What it is arguing is encapsulated very succinctly by something George Monbiot has said:

Those who tell the stories run the world. Politics has failed through a lack of competing narratives.

Clay Shirky on 'Cognitive Surplus' (TED talk)

IMHO, well worth the 15 minutes to listen to this - even with the annoying failed sound synchronisation.

Some quotes/ideas:

"The gap is between doing something and doing nothing" (I'm reminded of the former Bishop of Oxford saying "If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing badly"!)

The daycare experiment - where introducing a fine for parents who were late increased the numbers who were late because it changed from operating on a social contract to a payment for services. It doesn't come at all as a surprise, but it is great to see such a neat demonstration of the effect. (Can anyone give me the reference for the paper he talks about. Update, someone did give it to me, in response to my request in a comment on the TED website. It is: Gneezy, U. & Rustichini, A. (2000), 'A Fine is a Price', Journal of Legal Studies 29(1), 1-17. Thank you Chris Ke-Sihai.)

"A trillion hours a year of participatory value up for grabs" {Added later - see this visualisation of time available)

The Ushahidi story is great, but is in danger of becoming over-used. The references to it can become trite. For a bit more depth, I'd recommend SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa Fahamu Books 2009.



PS, on LOLcats. Am I alone in not loving cats? One day I might post a rant about the cats that defecate in my garden, kill birds, rip open the bin bags in the street. But that'd be petty, wouldn't it?

Has OLPC failed?

One Laptop Per Child - The Dream is Over says this blog post from the UN. "It’s time to call a spade a spade. OLPC was a failure." Several very interesting comments on the post disagree, though.

One of the claims in the post is: "They abandoned the human-powered power source.". A comment from Peru explains:

We don't want our undernourished children to spend their scarce calories generating power for a computer. A well fed human being can generate 20 watt, forget about children extenuating their breakfast less bodies in running the XO's after walking 4 hours to school. It seemed attractive to people who have no idea of what poverty really is.

One of the comments comes from Negroponte himself, including:

I suggest you look more carefully at Uruguay, Peru and Rwanda. In the case of Uruguay, every child has one. That is pretty amazing. Peru is headed there. Rwanda too.

All in all, a fascinating discussion of the project.

Next generation passports

Here's something I need to find out more about - the next generation passport:

The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) has announced De La Rue has won the contract to produce the next-generation British passport book under a new £400 million contract.

The passport, which will be available from October 2010, will have a new design and improved security features including the capacity to hold fingerprint biometrics. According to the Identity and Passport Service (IPS), it will give citizens added protection from identity theft and help secure borders against passport and identity fraud.

The contract will ensure the British passport keeps pace with international standards for travel documents.

"The British passport is recognised as one of the best in the world and we want to keep it that way. Today we are affirming our commitment to making this travel document more secure than ever by using fingerprint biometrics," said IPS chief executive James Hall.

"Upgrading the British passport is essential to keep pace with the most advanced international standards for travel documents and will ensure that British citizens have the freedom to travel easily world-wide.

Peter Singer

About Peter Singer in the Guardian today:

Singer's argument, as first laid out in an essay in 1971, isn't hard to follow. "If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it ... If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing." As he added, however, the "uncontroversial appearance" of this argument is deceptive. Considerations of distance, or of how many potential rescuers there might be, are irrelevant to Singer: the child you see dying of malnutrition or a preventable disease on the foreign news has as much of a claim on you as the child in the pond. Spending your surplus income on consumer treats rather than efforts to end extreme poverty, he concludes, isn't greatly different morally from leaving the toddler to drown.

[...]

Needless to say, this is a challenging position - "almost impossible to argue with", as the political theorist David Runciman once wrote, "but also very difficult to accept."

[...]

Singer's own approach to ethics, a version of utilitarianism, has deep roots in the English-language tradition, but it's scarcely uncontroversial. One famous criticism, associated with Williams, is that it's implausibly demanding, making people as responsible for the things they fail to do as the things they bring about. Williams's ultimate point was highly technical; Singer, in discussing it, soon brings the argument back to practical outcomes. "I think we can set standards that limit our responsibilities to help people. But I wouldn't want to say, therefore we're only responsible for our acts and not for our omissions.

(As an aside "Things they fail to do" has strong echos for those of us brought up in the C of E:

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done,
And we have done those things which we ought not to have done,
And there is no health in us:
But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders
Book of Common Prayer

I don't know you'd find much support for that expression ('miserable offenders') nowadays - within the church or without - but, there you go, the money I spend on, say, going to watch football, could have saved lives. How can that make me anything other than a miserable offender?)

But, back to Singer in the Guardian, on why you have to include 'things undone':

If you draw a hard line there, you end up saying that really quite trivial things are wrong because they're violations of my positive responsibility not to cheat or whatever ..." He casts about for an example. "Well, we have it all over the tabloids, don't we: I charged the government £5 for watching porn movies, right? I had the opportunity to save a child's life, either by ruining my shoes in the pond or by giving some spare money I had to Oxfam, but somehow that's not as important to assessing whether I'm a decent person or not as whether I cheated the government out of £5 to watch a porn movie. And I think that's the wrong set of priorities, that sends the wrong sort of message."

This leads into issues of moral equivalence (I don't think that's quite the right term, but it'll do for the moment), and I'd like to explore, for example, fiddling expense against the death of hundreds of thousands. Shame Hazel Blears is implicated in both! But thats for another time.

More or less

I enjoyed listening to More or Less over lunch just now.

Of course, while the programme says it "is devoted to the powerful, sometimes beautiful, often abused but ever ubiquitous world of numbers" I would argue that where it gets interesting it is really about information.

Today it included an item on the way that we respond, charitably, better to individual cases than big disasters. That we respond emotionally to the one-child-fallen-down-a-well but analytically, calculating, to thousands drowning in a flood (and give more for the one child). I'm not sure they considered the element of closeness - with the thousands being overseas - but the point is well made.

Maybe this is why it is so easy to say "I still believe that is was the right thing to do" after "despite, you know, that hundreds of thousands of people have died, and that is a tragedy"

Ada Lovelace Day

Today is Ada Lovelace Day:

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

We have lots of women excelling in technology here at the OU and it seems so ordinary that it hardly needs comment (but in the context of this event I could mention Clem Herman because she works on projects explicitly aimed at bringing women into science, engineering and technology).

Many years ago I went to a talk by Dale Spender. The particular thing that stuck in my memory was the story that women were initially well-represented on computing courses and in university computing departments, until men realised that computing was a 'serious' subject rather than glorified typing, at which point they muscled in...

US election

I can't have a blog of any sort and not say something about the election.

An election is, of course, about information. David Runciman reviewed the book Free Riding by Richard Tuck in the London Review of Books on 9th October. The book - and Runciman - was addressing the problem of why you should vote, since your individual vote will never - realistically - make a difference to the outcome. (When was an election ever won by 1 vote?) And more generally, the problem of the motivation for collective action - why shouldn't you get a 'free ride'?

There isn't a simple answer. But, I think a key point from the article is that the idea that people will not act collectively is a relatively modern phenomenon.

Contemporary economists and political scientists often take it for granted that anyone who views human beings as essentially self-interested creatures will inevitably conclude that groups are vulnerable to the defection of individual members who see that they can free ride off the contributions of others. But Tuck shows that before the 20th century philosophers who saw human behaviour in self-interested terms did not conclude this at all. Instead, they took it for granted that individuals will have good reason to co-operate in most circumstances, because it is obvious that the benefits of the group for the individual depend on the contribution of the individual to the group.

My emphasis, because it is another 'assumption about truth'. It is not seen as ideology: it is 'taken from granted'. Mind you, I don't view human beings as essentially self-interested anyway.

Anyway, back to the election. For me, it is as much - more - about the 'message' sent by whoever is elected as it is about the person. Although everything I read puts Obama streets ahead of McCain for me, still Obama is not exactly Gandhi or Martin Luther King. He's not even a European-style democrat. But selecting a black man as president says something important about America, if it happens. That matters in itself - and is an information issue.

The computer keypad is mightier than the sword?

I guess Amnesty is predicated upon the power of the pen - and now the computer keypad. (And I'm posting this here, of course, because these are all tools of information.)

This also gives me an excuse to plug a current Amensty campaign say no to 42 days

PS. As I said previously, partial quotations are a crime against context, and the context of the original is significant here:

True, This! -
Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch-enchanters wand! - itself a nothing! -
But taking sorcery from the master-hand
To paralyse the Caesars, and to strike
The loud earth breathless! - Take away the sword -
States can be saved without it!

From Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy Edward Bulwer-Lytton 1839

Information, context, stories, and the law.

The jury in a court of law has to come up with a story based on information.

I've talked about information and context, but there's also stories. Maybe the stories are the context. Prompted by a piece in the London Review of Books about the case against those accused of the 2006 plot to bomb planes, a court of law seems like an interesting field to consider these three concepts.

Borders

It could be any story about borders, but it serves to prompt musings on what it means to be in one country or another.

Egypt moves to seal Gaza border

The border in that case was marked out by a very physical barrier, but the boundaries of a country exist, surely, as information. If you stand here you are in Egypt. Walk a couple of yards and you are in the Gaza Strip (which, so wikipedia tells me, is "not recognized internationally as part of any sovereign country").

As a child, during the cold war, I lived for some time in West Germany and later in Berlin. You couldn't help but ponder what was going on when you looked at the East-West borders. In way, though the Berlin wall is more famous, the border in rural Germany was, for me, the most baffling. I remember walking in the Harz Mountains and coming to the border. From hill, you looked across at identical rolling woodland on either side of a couple of fences. What's different about standing on one side or the other? Well, somewhere there exist documents that say that if my coordinates are these I am under the jurisdiction (whatever that means) of the FRG, but if my coordinates are these I am under the GDR. Then what comes next depends on lots of other documents, things like passports and permits, international treaties - lots of information which determines where I am allowed to be and what can and will be done to me if I am somewhere I shouldn't be.

The lives of others

I saw The lives of others at the OU Film Society on Wednesday. Picking up on the role of information in the state and how information gives someone power over another, you couldn't ask for a better illustration. It is about the Stasi in East Germany (cf Sheds of Evidence), and their surveillance of a dramatist and his girlfriend. A trivial 'information' point, of course, is that if you were doing it today (as I'm sure some states are) the data would all be handled and stored digitally.

Perhaps more interesting, though, is to wonder to what extent we are willingly making information about ourselves available to the state or anyone else. Personally, I've stopped using my Tesco 'clubcard' for that reason, though I know it is a pretty poinless gesture while I'm still using credit and debit cards, posting on a blog and even putting stuff on Facebook.

The Last King of Scotland

Saw The last king of Scotland at the OU film society on Wednesday. A powerful film, and it set me thinking again about what gives a person control over others. What was it that enabled Idi Amin to (mis)rule Uganda for so long - what enables anyone to hold political power (or any sort of power over other people, come to that). Once again I'm sure there is an explanation that talks about information, at various levels. For example, Garrigan eventually, but too late, attempted to kill Amin. He could have done it relatively easily earlier in his relationship with the dictator, but he didn't at that stage realise what Amin and his supporter were up to. Amin manipulated Garrigan, as he did everyone, through control of what he knew. I want to argue that it is always thus with political power. Political manoeuvring is about maniplulation of information.

Remembrance day

In his sermon for the remembrance day service at the Church of Christ the Cornerstone yesterday, the preacher, David Tatem, spoke of the need to distinguish types of remembering. He proposed to speak of 'recalling' PIN numbers and passwords, and reserving 'remembering' for things like remembering the experience of war - reliving the experience, perhaps. He went on to point out that he was not in a position to remember the first world war in that sense, indeed there only remain a few individuals alive who can remember the first world war - but there are tragically many who can remember the wars since.

The sermon went on to talk about uncomfortable issues such the role of British arms in wars all over the world, but my point here is to raise a question the nature of information in these different types of remembering. Few would disagree that recalling a PIN number is about information (4 denary digits convey log2(10000) = 13.29 bits), but what about remembering the war?

Probably the main source of information about WWI for my 14 year old son has been 'Blackadder goes forth', watched on his CD boxed-set. The CDs, of course, encode the episodes digitally. Lots and lots of bits, but nothing but* a load of 1s and 0s none the less. But that's not remembering, in the David Tatem sense, of course.

*Notice the nothing-buttery which was how I heard reductionism described, when I first encountered it in the Oxford University Bampton Lectures by Arthur Peacocke in 1978.

Enough for now. It is past my bedtime.

First real-world use of quantum cryptography

From IET Engineering and Technology November 2007, "Swiss election marks 'first real-world use of quantum cryptography'". It was used to secure communication along dedicated optical fibre links used for counting ballots. The system was developed by University of Geneva spin-off company id Quantique. (The id Quantique Press Release.) I hadn't realised quantum cryptography was so close to reality.

An interesting quote in the piece, from Geneva State Chancellor Robert Hensler:

Information is the raw material of the State. Whether in the context of a political decision, a police investigation or hospital care, the State is both regulator of information exchange and a provider of information-based services.