Nigerian Taliban rejects vapour theory of rain
The Boko Haram group, also known as the Nigerian Taliban, is a radical Islamic sect that has launched a number of attacks across northern Nigeria. Its main target has been police stations and it aims to overthrow the government and impose extreme sharia law. Boko Haram means “Western education is a sin”, and the group is determined to outlaw it.
Their leader, a wealthy, “highly educated”, Mercedes-driving Muslim fundamentalist, died in police custody on Thursday. But Mohammed Yusuf’s background doesn’t explain his primitive medieval views. In an interview with the BBC, he espoused some interesting views, to say the least:
In an interview with the BBC before he was killed, Mr Yusuf, 39, said such education “spoils the belief in one God”.“There are prominent Islamic preachers who have seen and understood that the present Western-style education is mixed with issues that run contrary to our beliefs in Islam,” he said.
“Like rain. We believe it is a creation of God rather than an evaporation caused by the sun that condenses and becomes rain.
“Like saying the world is a sphere. If it runs contrary to the teachings of Allah, we reject it. We also reject the theory of Darwinism.”
He’s right of course. It’s absolutely preposterous to believe that rain is not a mysterious gift from god! And like the world isn’t flat! Sure… Look – it may be a slightly bigger stretch to believe that god uniquely created every living thing on earth and minutely controls the activities of every single living cell – but he’s a religious man so he must be right.
Jebus or hang!
I took this pic in Lagos, Nigeria last year. It’s one of thousands of ads in the city exhorting its denizens to reject reality and embrace an invisible friend.
This one is just pathetic – in a funny sort of way.
Oppose censorship: break down the firewalls
The protests in Iran over the election results have once again highlighted the increasingly significant role digital technologies are playing in exposing the outrages of oppressive regimes. The Iranian regime has gone to great lengths to stifle electronic communication including shutting down cellphone networks – particularly texting services – and denying access to a number of websites where ordinary Iranians would be able to access news of what’s happening in their country.
The mark of an oppressive regime is that it prefers to operate in an information vacuum where its carefully controlled messages can be fed to its oppressed citizenry. The PC and the Internet have challenged that model allowing ordinary citizens to publicise their plight to the outside world. And it has accelerated enormously with the ubiquitous camera/video-enabled cellphones. Almost every individual now walks around with a camera, ready to take images that compliant state media wouldn’t touch. Take a look at this video from Iran – notice how when the shooting starts the electronic shooting takes off. Virtually everyone records the events on cellphones.
Social networking has provided the distribution medium. Twitter in particular has been the main platform used to organise the protest within Iran and report the turmoil to the outside world. Following its use in the recent anti-Communist protests in Moldova, Twitter has now become an incredibly powerful tool for the citizen reporter. Even a few months ago people were scratching their heads over Twitter, saying they “just don’t get it”. Now it’s likely to become the number one target of despotic regimes.
To preserve this channel of freedom it is important that individuals and groups around the world do what they can to continuously attack the firewalls and service removals used by oppressive governments to keep their populace in ignorance. Censorship requires a total blockage of the information being suppressed. Anything less is a blow against censorship.
This is not something to ever delegate to government. No government can ever be relied on to break down the information walls that surround the dictatorships, theocracies and police states. Even some liberal democracies, like Australia, yearn to block information that it deems unfit for its child-like citizens to consume. Politicians, given the opportunity, will tend to block information rather than open it up. They should never be given the opportunity. No matter what excuse, what great benefits they espouse, censorship should always be opposed and freedom vigorously defended.
Global Internet Freedom Consortium is one such group that is working hard to crack the censorship walls. Members of this group of “hacktivists” produce a range of anti-censorship technologies. They have had considerable success in cracking the Great Chinese Firewall and devoting much energy to punching holes in the Iranian and Burmese barriers.
However things turn out in Iran, these protests will cause two things: Governments will redouble their efforts to censor digital information, and private citizens will exponentially increase the amount of information for dispersal. In the end, with all our support, the ordinary citizens will prevail.
The crowd in your head
The Wisdom of Crowds, a somewhat ground-breaking book written by James Surowieki, was published in 2004. Since then the phrase, “wisdom of crowds” has entered the popular lexicon.
Surowieki argued that data aggregated from a group is often better than could be made by any single member of that group – including an expert in the field. This differs from crowd psychology, or herd mentality as it pertains to diverse collections of independently-deciding individuals.
Now in a new study, Stefan Herzog and Ralph Hertwig have shown that the power of averaging could be applied to individuals making two estimates which when averaged are shown to be more accurate than either of them.
But it’s not as simple as making two wild guesses and then averaging them out. Surowieki had shown that in order for a crowd to produce a successful estimate, it (the crowd) needs to be wise. A wise crowd has the following four attributes:
- Diversity of opinion: Each person should have private information even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts
- Independence: People’s opinions aren’t determined by the opinions of those around them
- Decentralization: People are able to specialise and draw on local knowledge
- Aggregation: Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision
When it comes down to a single individual, the first assumption must be that the person has knowledge relevant to the topic. The diversity implied in the attributes of a wise crowd is more difficult to achieve. We know from the “wisdom of crowds” that greater diversity improves decision making. So how is diversity achieved by a single person?
Herzog and Hertwig got participants to make their first guesses – at the dates of historical events. When the participants were made to simply give a second estimate, there was little increase in either either knowledge or diversity.
A second condition was designed to increase diversity. Participants were given detailed directions for making their follow-up guess: “First, assume that your first estimate is off the mark. Second, think about a few reasons why that could be. Which assumptions and considerations could have been wrong? Third, what do these new considerations imply?… Fourth, based on this new perspective, make a second, alternative estimate.”
Using this second method to estimate the second value, the average was significantly more accurate than the first estimate – about half the accuracy gains that would have been achieved by averaging with a second person.
Herzog and Hertwig called their more involved process “dialectical
bootstrapping.” You can pull yourself up by your own proverbial
bootstraps by assuming that you are wrong, providing a second estimate
based on a search for new evidence, and then averaging the two
estimates. (Interestingly, in Herzog and Hertwig’s studies,
bootstrapping did not lead to second estimates that were more accurate
than the first. The benefit of dialectical bootstrapping was only
realized when the first and second estimates were averaged together.
Compared to simply providing a second judgment, dialectical
bootstrapping creates diversity —it leads to estimates that are more
likely to have offsetting errors.)
We’ve heard terms like “thinking outside the box” which I take to be an attempt to increase diversity. The question is how does this increase the quality of decision making? Without the insights into “wisdom of crowds” any new estimate is simply a data point that has as much chance as any other as tending to be “correct”.
The more structured and methodical approach of dialectical bootstrapping is potentially a powerful technique for decision making – without the need for advisers. You could be carrying your own board-of-adviser crowd around in your head.
Beware English libel laws
Jack of Kent has been covering a story that has been generating a great deal of heat and fury amongst scientists, writers, academics, and virtually everyone who supports freedom of speech. It concerns the British Chiropractic Association suing the highly respected science write Simon Singh over an article he wrote in the comment section of the Guardian.
In his article he criticised the BCA for promoting treatments for potentially serious aliments affecting children without clinical evidence for them. The offending passage is:
“The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.”
Astonishingly, the judge ruled that the word “bogus” meant deliberate and targeted dishonesty. Under English libel laws, Singh would have to prove that the BCA was being deliberately dishonest. An impossible task. It’s obviously not what Singh was saying; he was saying the BCA was promoting treatments for which there was no evidence of their effecacy (or safety, for that matter).
Singh certainly knows what he’s talking about. He’s co-author (with Edzard Ernst) of Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine, in which most alternative treatments – including chiropractic – are shown to be worthless.
Bravely, and at the urging of his many supporters, Singh is now appealing this ruling. It’s brave because defending a libel suite is a particularly expensive business in England. Having already coughed up £100,000 defending his right to speak freely, he could now face up to £3,250,000! Compared to other European countries, England is more than three times more expensive than the next most expensive country, Ireland. Ireland in turn is many times more expensive than any other European country.
But what does this mean to those who don’t live in England? A lot, if anything you write has even the vaguest possibility of being consumed in England. A new industry, libel tourism, has been spawned by Englands outlandish libel laws.
Seen one way, it is nothing short of a scandal. Small non-British news outlets and humble non-British authors (in many cases catering almost wholly to a non-British public) are being sued in English courts by rich, mighty foes. The cost of litigation is so high ($200,000 for starters, and $1m-plus once you get going) that they cannot afford to defend themselves. The plaintiffs often win by default, leaving their victims humiliated and massively in debt.
A Ukrainian publication was sued by a wealthy Ukrainian. At first there was a settlement (remember it’s prohibitively expensive to defend such an action), and later the wealthy Ukrainian won another, undefended judgement. The English system virtually guarantees that you can squeeze cash out of your victim just by accusing him of libel. And all it takes is some tenuous readership link to England. In this case, barely 100 subscribers were from England.
A small, totally Ukrainian website was successfully sued on the same grounds. Any alarm bells ringing yet? These publications are not even in English and couldn’t have been read or understood by more than a handful of English citizens. How much more at risk are English-speaking writers?
Well at least the US is getting serious about it. As described in the Wall Street Journal, a New York-based author, Rachel Ehrenfeld was sued in England by Saudi banker Khalid Bin Mahfouz. Her book, Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It, named Bin Mahfouz as a possible funder of terrorism. The book was published in New York. But a few copies found their way to England, giving Bin Mahfouz the pretense to sue. On advice from her lawyer, Ehrenfeld didn’t contest the matter.
The English court found against her and entered a judgment of $225,000. She immediately sought protection from the order through a New York court, which ruled that it was a legislative matter. The New York legislature, to its credit, passed legislation to give Ehrenfeld and other New York citizens who are sued for libel abroad the right to obtain a declaration that their works are protected under American law.
A campaign for a similar law has been stuttering along. The latest version submitted to the Senate, the Free Speech Protection Act, also gives American-based litigants an additional right to countersue for harassment.
A campaign has been started by UK-based Sense About Science, The law has no place in scientific disputes. It has broad, high profile support. Signatories include Richard Dawkins, Derren Brown, Stephen Fry, Ricky Gervais – and thousands more, even a few lawyers.
You can sign the statement here.
200 years that changed the world
Hans Rosling of Gapminder World, has released a fascinating video showing how the average health and wealth of the world’s countries have changed – drastically – over the last 200 years. Interestingly the gap between the richest and poorest, as well as the healthiest and unhealthiest was narrow 200 years ago. Today it is disturbingly wide.
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