The Braindump Blog

📚 Finished reading Unlawful Killings by Her Honour Wendy Joseph KC.

Former Crown Court judge Wendy Joseph takes us through 5 fictional-but-based-on-reality trials of the type she presided over. The common theme is their relationship to a charge of murder.

The reader gets the intrigue associated with courtroom drama in general, alongside some more analytical legal tutoring as to how the court system works in practice, the factors that affect how cases are decided, what legislation applies and when. What does “not guilty” mean? When is being sure required, vs on the balance of probabilities?

There’s the case of the young man, a victim of knife crime, stabbed to death whilst on a lunch break. We see a mother who a witness believes was trying to suffocate her baby. Next up is another young man, who killed his friend in a car accident. Then the story of the parents whose child was found dead after a explosive family row. A solider appears to have killed his wife rather than let her leave him. And finally a wife who shot her allegedly career-criminal husband.

In each case we see that nothing is as simple as it sounds; very little is black or white. Often the people that kill are not inexplicably evil psychopaths who delight in pain, but people who have found themselves in extremely difficult situations, some of which may be unimaginable to a lot of us if we’re lucky.

Complications, both moral and legal ensue; mental illness, cultures of honour, infanticide, levels of diminished responsibility and gang life amongst others. We see witnesses who won’t testify, experts who disagree with each other, and cases resting on the words of vulnerable young children. Occasionally there are tensions between the agreed procedures of law, the incentives for lawyers and defendants, and what an external observer might consider as just. Nonetheless, the defendants are all alleged to have caused some of the greatest harms it is within our power to cause. At the end of the day it’s for a random selection of us, the jury of their peers, to determine their guilt, and the judge to weigh in on the consequences.

In her telling of the stories we’re introduced to the main characters present in each such trial: judge, defendant, solicitors, barristers, witnesses, clerks, ushers and the all-important jury. Appendices cover some of the relevant legislation and its interpretation. These days it seems judges may be quite constrained as to what they can do. Joseph appears to see her primary role as managing the proceedings of the trial, ensuring the rules are adhered to by all concerned, herself included.

One of her responsibilities is providing a “path to verdict”, translating the complexities of centuries of legal legislation to a set of decisions followable by a largely untrained jury as they make their determination, several of which are reproduced in this book.

The last chapter focuses on what Judge Joseph seems to see as a key failure of the system. Unlike the author of the previous book I read she’s no prison abolitionist. But I understand that she would like to see far fewer cases brought to court, being on the same side as Mariame Kaba in terms of seeing it as very often a failure of society that something harmful enough to warrant a crown court case happened in the first place.

Wrongdoers don’t fall from the skies…they are formed not just by their capacities but by their experiences…particularly difficult experiences in childhood and adolescence. In some cases, if we are honest, we must accept we have allowed them to become what they are.

If we create societies that alienate vast swathes of people, refuse to provide care to people - potential victims or perpetrators - at risk from mental illness, enable black market trades rife with violence whilst leaving large sections of the population destitute, vulnerable and unsatisfied, then we can’t be surprised when sometimes bad things occur.

I think the author believes that we’ve done a reasonable job of identifying what things should be classified as crime. But that we’ve not done nearly enough in terms of preventing those things from occurring. More and more people are locked up in prison, their lives sometimes almost as ruined by the experience as those that they victimised. And yet, crime continues.

A key flaw she identifies in relying on the criminal justice system to manage crime is that, however progressive we make opportunities for restitution and rehabilitation, it doesn’t kick in until after the harm has been done, after the crime has been committed.

Blaming crime on an individual being greedy, dishonest or angry may be satisfying. But many of us are also greedy, dishonest and angry but do not commit crime. She asks us to consider why this is.

Why when people are confronted with a situation wherein they could commit a crime do some choose to do so and others do not? How have we engineered a situation whereby someone feels that their best option for living the life they want is to knowingly harm another?

Maybe, instead of clapping ourselves of the back for the excellence of our criminal justice system, we should accept that the commission of any crime is a mark that somewhere, somehow we have failed.

Last year an AI-generated picture won an art competition. The technology has of course only got better in the time since then. So inevitably an AI generated image has now won a photography competition, even though of course no photography was involved. Well, other than the no doubt huge number of photos the AI ingested as part of its training.

Photographer Boris Eldagsen won a prize at the Sony World Photography Awards with this entry:

He titled it “PSEUDOMNESIA | The Electrician”, the first part of which is a reference to a condition associated with pathological lying.

Mr Eldagsen is on board with the idea that AI generated images are not photography as such and hence is declining to actually take the award and associated prize. It seems he was more in it to generate some kind of discussion about how “co-working” with AI fits into the world of photography. After all, it’s been a long time since the rules of many photography competitions forbade the use of computers and digital modification entirely. And as it stands, there’s no reason to suppose that a more nefarious actor couldn’t win a competition with the help of AI image generation in the future without feeling inclined to reveal the true source of their image.

📺 Watched season 12 of Death in Paradise.

Everyone’s favourite vacation paradise / murder hotspot returns for more light-hearted death presented in a Agatha Christie-ish style except with a backing track of jolly Caribbean tunes and occasional slapstick chases.

So the same as it’s always been. It’s never been the most fashionable of shows, but it has been one of the most consistent and, perhaps surprisingly, most popular BBC shows of the past decade.

Really the worst I can say about it is its slight whiff of the White savior trope in a ‘clever and logical white man comes to solve foreign mysteries’ way. Although the gentleman in question changes every so often and is always a little weird or inadequate in stereotypically British other ways. But if you liked anything in the last huge number of series then there’s no reason not to watch this one. I found a couple of the later episodes actually fairly gripping.

Very much ‘familiar, warm and dependable’, as the Guardian says. Nice family-friendly unambiguously solvable murders in the sun, no Special Victims Unit to be seen.

Rome et al analyse the costs of newly-launched pharmaceuticals in the US. They discover that the median average launch price of a drug has increased from just over $2,000 per year in 2018 up to $180,000 in 2021. Almost half of drugs launched in 2020-2021 cost over $150,000 a year.

The mean average price increased exponentially during this period by around 20% per year. Some of this may be explained by differences in the characteristics of the drugs launched in each year; oncology drugs and those for rare diseases tend to be more expensive. But even with that taken into account as best as the researchers could do, there remained an exponential increase in annual cost of around 13% per year.

This is clearly unsustainable for anyone who is in the position of actually having to pay for these treatments. The researchers suggest that in line with some other similar countries “the US could stop allowing drug manufacturers to freely set prices”, which would seem to me to be an obvious and decent first step.

📚 Finished reading We Do This ‘Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba.

In this book, Mariame Kaba presents a collection of short and readable articles - reprints of magazine or interviews for example - all dedicated to educating about and encouraging readers to take actions towards the total abolition of the prison system, and policing too. “Defund the police” taken to its most literal conclusion.

It’s a position I started off with some sympathy towards. I am more than happy to accept that far more people are in prison than should be. This book focuses on the US system, and that is almost indisputably true there.

I was already happy with the idea that the focus of the criminal justice system (or criminal punishment system, as she calls it - feeling there’s very little justice to be had in it today) should be on issues such as safety and restitution rather than punishment for punishment’s sake. Prison should be a last resort after all other options have been explored. There’s a lot of reform to what prison entails, and the life of someone post-prison, that should be urgently made. Likewise policing - again, a last resort, after other arms of the state whose role is to assist people in need have done all they can.

As far as I can see there is substantial evidence that much “crime” is driven by structural societal factors which opens many avenues for mass-scale prevention that could be invested to avoid incidents where people are even tempted to call the police occurring in the first place.

But I’ve never quite been able to push myself to the full abolitionist perspective that prison and policing are entirely unnecessary. Kaba would probably consider that a lack of imagination, which I’m happy to acknowledge. And so this book tries to provide the impetus for a full abolitionist outcome.

There are many aspects to this. Below is my attempt to summarise some of her main points.

The philosophical argument

Philosophically, the author entirely agrees that there should be consequences when people cause harm. However there is a difference between “consequences” that aim to help victims and make society at large and “punishment” that aims in part to make a perpetrator suffer. Sometimes they may look similar, but their goal is different and the latter is inhumane, however attractive it may be to those affected.

But the priority should be addressing the conditions that allowed the harm to take place and the actual needs of the person to whom it was done to. The default of people locking people in cages away from our sight-line is an abdication of the responsibility we all have to help those harmed. It hides important social and political failures.

Furthermore, the system does nothing to encourage accountability. In fact it works against it. People cannot be forced to accept accountability. The current adversarial court system discourages people from taking personal and public responsibility for their actions because it’s almost always in the perpetrator’s interest to deny or minimise the harm the caused, even when they’re fully aware and may like to make some kind of restitution. But if a guilty plea would result in inevitable imprisonment then they may find this unpalatable.

Many “criminals” are in fact victims of something themselves; the victim / perpetrator binary is a fiction. Most women in US prisons are poor, of colour and have experienced physical violence from a partner. Without lessening any harm they commit, we can acknowledge that some criminal actions come from someone making choices that they should never have been put in the position of making.

Hurt people hurt people; desperate people hurt people. Lessening social and economic inequities, and making other, non-criminalising, services easily available could go a long way to preventing the harm in the first place.

Neutralizing perceived threats, in an endless game of legal whack-a-mole, is not a path to safety. To create safer environments, people and circumstances must be transformed.

The legitimacy argument.

Firstly we should examine the definition of crime. It’s often arbitrary. Not everything that is criminalised is harmful. Not all harm is criminalised. A classic example of the latter is CEOs of companies who cause deaths by e.g. harmful, yet perfectly legal, environmental practices.

Additionally, prejudice is rife within the US criminal justice system, notably in the conflation of Blackness with criminality. Black people are more likely to be arrested and more likely to get harsh sentences than white people for the same offence. Black victims of crime are more likely to be ignored.

The current system doesn’t truly even try to meet the needs of victims. Services like counselling, healthcare, housing or money are rarely on offer.

Even in the domain of punishment the victim rarely has the final word. If the system requires the perpetrator to be be jailed then the are, irrespective of the victim’s wishes. The extreme case is someone being sentenced to death (remembering this book is mostly about the US) when the victim is virulent anti the death penalty. They may even feel like they have another person’s death of their conscience unless they drop the charges.

The rise of the “prison industrial complex” has produced economic incentives such for the system to perpetuate itself it needs to increase the number people imprisoned and the duration of their sentences.

Our response to violence and harm should not cause more violence and harm

The efficacy argument

Kaba writes a lot about sexual abuse. This is a crime so pervasive and in some cases so horrific that being seen to argue against an offender going to prison is almost blasphemous even in - or perhaps especially in - liberal circles.

But she raises fair points in that its very pervasiveness shows that the current system doesn’t work Very few reported cases in any case get anywhere near court. Those that do often in reality lead the victim being put on trial more than the perpetrator. These and other factors means who suffer this harm rarely even report it, demonstrating a total lack of faith in the only system that today exists to supposedly help victims of harm.

Harm caused by police officers - sexual misconduct is the second most common form of police violence - is very rarely punished.

The public does not understand the practicalities of policing. Most US officers make just a 1 felony arrest a year. Most of their time is spent dealing with non-criminal issues such as traffic citation, noise complaints or wellness checks. Many of these would be better done by non-police personnel who have better training in for example mental health issues.

In general, there is little-to-no evidence that prisons reduce violence, crime or people’s fear of it. The US prison population increased by over 400% between 1979 and 2014. Neither crime or the fear of crime is 400% lower now.

Some research suggests that going to prison increases the likelihood that you will commit crime again in the future. It’s not clear that they’re even a deterrent in the first place - criminals do not tend to be dispassionately weighing up potential risks and rewards before making their choices.

…a system that never addresses the why behind a harm never actually contains the harm itself.

Reform is not enough

The author believes that reforming the system will never be enough, and may often be counterproductive.

Previous reforms that may have been well-intentioned with regards to reducing the inhumanity of the prison industrial complex system tend to result in little more than more people being criminalised. A historical example is the introduction of women-only prisons and its relationship towards a far greater number of women being imprisoned.

The only reforms she believes we should support are those that reduce the amount of contact the public has with the police and reduce the resources the police have access to. These are steps on the way to full abolition that immediately reduce the harm police can do to people.

She believes that what we need beyond anything is imagination. Her view is that it’s perfectly fine, even necessary, to criticise the system even if we don’t have a fully fleshed out view of an alternative. Measures can be taken now to address issues that we do have solutions for, and real collective effort should be made to figure out the best way forward on those that we don’t.

In the mean time, our lack of imagination has several adverse effects. We imagine that policing, prisons and surveillance are “natural”. This is not true. Prisons are a human invention; in fact a fairly recent one if we consider the current incarnation whose aim is to punish people who committed serious offences by locking them up for long periods of time. These first appeared in the late 18th century; themselves a reform from the previous punishment regime of capital and corporal punishment.

Our criminal punishment system is also contingent on our culture. We tend to believe that our culture is static, even though it never has been. The fear we’re taught to have for each other, the need to bow to authority and celebrate criminalisation of harm-doers is not the only option.

When asked to imagine a world without prisons we tend to imagine the world exactly as today, with the same level of violence, but without prisons. Instead the aim should be to create a different type of society built on cooperation and mutual aid rather than individualism and self-preservation.

My full notes on this book are here.

Viewers Can Watch Prince Harry Talk to a Trauma Expert for $33.09

The ‘Give me privacy’ tour continues, this time in pay-per-view style.

Although there’s the argument that exposing viewers to topics of mental health and it’s treatment may be net beneficial I suppose.

Euronews.next reports on a tragic case where a man killed himself, his suicidal thoughts allegedly exacerbated by his interaction with an AI chatbot.

In a series of consecutive events, Eliza not only failed to dissuade Pierre from committing suicide but encouraged him to act on his suicidal thoughts to “join” her so they could “live together, as one person, in paradise”.

The bot in question was based on  EleutherAI’s GPT-J, and uses the same kind of technology as chatGPT et al, seemingly without the same guardrails that the more famous ones implement. He was interacting with the AI via the Chai app, which offers a varied selection of AI ‘personalities’ to chat with - marketed at least on the Android store as “chat with AI friends”.

Whilst there’s little doubt that the man in question had a troubled mental state before talking to the bot, and I’m not aware that any formal investigation has quantified any effect that the AI may have had in this case, it does feel like there’s a potentially real issue to consider here.

We tend to accept that suicidal tendencies can sometimes be reduced via chatting, at least to real humans trained to help in these situations from services like the Samaritans. In the US, the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline explicitly offers a chat feature, again, importantly, humans only. And, although I’ve not looked into the research at all, the opposite also appears to be considered to be true in the human world; multiple people have been found criminally responsible for encouraging others to kill themselves.

The app in question of course wasn’t designed to encourage these actions, but I don’t think we’ve any reason to believe that the default behaviour of large language models is to do the opposite either.

📺 Watched Wednesday.

The Addams family daughter is back in this TV series following Wednesday’s teen life as a resident of boarding school full of werewolves, vampires and the like. In between the teen angst and murder mystery, the deadpan goth girl one-liners occasionally excel.

Fun fact: Christina Ricci who played Wednesday in the 1990s Addams family films is back here in the role of “dorm mom” and teacher Marilyn Thornhill.

With their new advert, the Labour Party have managed to do the unthinkable and almost make me feel sorry for Rishi Sunak.

For one, I doubt anyone involved in its creation - or almost anyone else for that matter - believes the claim that Sunak thinks people that abuse children shouldn’t go to jail. Given the rightful backlash in times past when members of Sunak’s party, mostly notably Boris Johnson, were unfairly and offensively accusing Keir Starmer of being soft on child abusers one would think they should know better.

It is absolutely fair to publicise and campaign on the fact that much crime in the UK is effectively legal at present given the horrendously low rates at which crime is solved. Undoubtedly a huge part of that is the mismanagement and underfunding of both the police and other public sector bodies that may have been in a position to prevent a certain amount of crime taking place in the first place that the Conservative government has subjected us to over the last decade.

It’s right for Sunak and his colleagues to be held accountable for that and the other ways that they have damaged British society. But personal and almost certainly untrue adverts like this are not the way to go about leveraging that, even if you believe more incarceration is a valid goal. I’m curious how well the advert even polls with people, not that that should be the sole deciding factor as to whether one releases such material.

🎥 Watched The Batman.

Despite fairly glowing reviews I found this a little disappointing, with the exception of the visual rendering of Gotham City which was a treat for my eyes.

Maybe I’m being a little unfair. I absolutely loved the previous film in that world, Joker. So this had a lot to live up to. It also takes a lot for me to enjoy a 3-hour-long film. Especially when at times the reason it needed to be that long seemed to be that the hero speaks. extremely. slowly.

There were moments that got very close to interesting. Without giving spoilers, there was a little meander into Batman’s family history which could have led to a fascinating exploration of the tension between his singular focus on catching individual criminal masterminds vs the Wayne family’s historical and current potential culpability in creating or reinforcing the structural conditions of the society within which the residents of the imperilled Gotham City exist.

It’s not a pretty place. Inequality seems rife. Violence is infused. Healthcare seems minimal. The arms of the state are corrupt. It is explicitly noted that there’s a vast difference even in what it means to be an orphan based on the wealth one happens to have access to. And the Wayne family, past and present, seem to be powerfully connected billionaires. It’s not clear that punching bad men in the face is the only or optimal approach to reducing the harm the residents of Gotham city experience.

Hopefully someone somewhere has written an essay on that because whilst the film almost seemed like it was going to centre that uneasiness for a few moments it didn’t really follow through. I think it was an fine enough film, worth a watch if you’re a Batman film, but kind of forgettable in a way that I didn’t think the Joker was.

Only about a month to go until King Charles' coronation, and finally Buckingham Palace have released what we’ve all been anxiously quoting for: the official emoji.

It’s a depiction of St. Edward’s Crown. The crown dates from around 1661 - version 2 at least; the original was lost or destroyed around 1649 as a result of the civil war.

But since George V’s coronation in 1911 this crown has played a part in every such occasion; almost 5 solid lbs of gold and gems perched on the head of each new ruler.

Sky News is on top of things, helpfully informing us that ‘An emoji has never been created for a British coronation before’. This may not be the most 🤯 fun fact in that our previous ruler was famously long reigning, having been crowned in 1953 - before even the first iPhone was released if you can imagine such a thing.

In case that’s not enough to quell your posting desire, some ‘official’ hashtags have also been ‘released’. Very 2020. You’ve five to choose from, only two of which are a bit odd.

• #Coronation
• #CoronationConcert
• #CoronationWeekend
• #CoronationBigLunch
• #TheBigHelpOut

Of course the coronation emoji hasn’t been authorised by the Unicode Consortium so it’s not like you’ll actually be able to use it in the conventional manner. Mostly we’ll have to make do with the existing 👑.

But lest you think The Palace is pure bandwagonning it by calling their perfectly normal picture an emoji, there is one exception of with the once-semi reputable social network known as Twitter. If you use the state authorised hashtags within your 🔥 take coronation tweets then your post will be ‘rewarded’ with the new emoji (unless Elon Musk fires the emoji engineer in the mean time).

Cobb et al. find that almost 10% of citations found within papers published in top psychology journals completely mischaracterise the work being referred to.

And almost as many again don’t include ‘important nuances’ of the relevant findings.

…when authors mischaracterize prior research findings in their studies, such instances of miscitation call into question the reliability and credibility of scholarship within psychological science and can harm theory development, evidence-based practices, knowledge growth, and public trust in psychology as a legitimate science.

Happy Easter to all those who celebrate it. This is the day where religious Christians celebrate the resurrection of the saviour of the world, after he’d suffered a particularly cruel and unusual punishment at the hands of his persecutors who hated him solely for political reasons. And a lot of other people who want to mark the occasion eat chocolate eggs.

Traditionally of course Christians take Jesus as being the saviour in question. However the less normal side of the often-Christian US Republican movement has decided that this year we should take someone else as being the 2023 instantiation of Jesus Christ.

From the AP:

Comparisons likening Trump to Christ were among the top online narratives about the Republican former president and his criminal charges circulating in the last several days.

Yes, inevitably, the wilder fringe believes that Donald Trump is in fact the 2023 incarnation of Jesus. This is based on the fact that he became the first US president ever to be charged with a crime last week, charged with 34 felony offences, mainly around conducting illegal financial shenanigans in order to try and hide some of his affairs and potentially secret children. Not something that I ever heard that the original Jesus was supposed to have done, but there we go.

Extra fuel was put on the fire of this rancid discourse by one of the movement’s favourite US politicians, Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose Twitter bio starts with the word “Christian” and yet still had this to say in a televised interview:

Jesus was arrested and murdered by the Roman government. There have been many people throughout history that have been arrested and persecuted by radical corrupt governments, and it’s beginning today in New York City.

McBride, a lawyer famed for representing folk who took part in the January 6th insurrection joined the chorus:

As Christ was crucified, and then rose again on the 3rd day, so too will Donald Trump

Honestly I think we’ve all had enough of Trump rising, especially poor Stormy Daniels. However, he never ever has had enough of talking so was more than happy to frame his arrest, which all started with him participating in various activities very much banned by the bible, as being an instance of religious persecution against Christians.

As Rolling Stone reports:

But then Trump switched gears, painting his legal woes in a frame of religious persecution. He argued that believers in “our beautiful Christianity” have been targeted: “We’re being discriminated against as a religion. We’re being discriminated against as a faith,” he insisted. “And we can’t let that continue.”

Of course many actual Christians are fairly disgusted at the idea that this breaker of a good number of the ten commandments is in fact an echo of God’s only begotten son. Some see it as American Christian nationalism taking many steps too far: “the heretical merging of American and far-right Christian identities to proclaim that only conservative Christians count as true Americans”, to quote the Reverend Nathan Empsall who understandably finds the Trump = Jesus take rather blasphemic.

The Reverend does see one parallel in the Jesus/Trump narrative, but one where Trump is cast into the part of a different actor.

Pontius Pilate, on the other hand, was a regional Roman dictator known not only for his cruelty, but also for his alliance with local religious leaders. The high priests were eager to collude with the governor, including to crucify Jesus, because it allowed them to keep their status and personal freedom. In turn, Pilate benefited by having allies who could keep his subjects in line and thus keep him in power. It was a great deal for everyone—everyone but the people.

It likely goes without saying that the Q fringe of the fringe claim to believe the omnipotent Trump has in fact orchestrated his own arrest, as some five-dimensional chess strategy designed to [waves hands] such that this own enemies will be destroyed.

Tomorrow’s celebrations may be expensive (along with everything else).

From The Guardian:

The cost of Easter has soared by nearly a quarter compared with last year, as inflation hits popular items including chocolate eggs and hot cross buns

The indisputable royalty of Easter food - hot cross buns and chocolate - are up 18% and 12% respectively.

Anodal transcranial direct current stimulation of MPFC enhances humor processing.

Or in simpler terms: electrically stimulating the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain can make jokes seem funnier.

…our data suggest that MPFC stimulation improved the ability to identify a non-humorous incongruent element and to recognize the humorous element of the scene.

I’m sure there’s a weird wearable device opportunity out there somewhere.

From the paper’s figure 1, here’s some of the supposedly humorous vs non humorous examples of comic strips the researchers tested with, judge for yourself.

Google contractors say they don’t have enough time to verify correct answers from the company’s AI chatbot and end up guessing

Inevitable given the incentives, but still disappointing. Contractors are paid to evaluate whether chatbot responses are good. But they’re paid based on the assumption that each judgement takes a certain amount of time: not much.

“Three hours of research to complete a 60-second task, that’s a great way to frame the problem we’re facing right now”

It’s easy to forget how much very human but not very well-paid labour goes into many AI and other predictive models

A few years ago, a group of researchers spent their time looking for the world’s oldest recorded-in-writing joke.

The oldest they found was from Sumeria in around 1900 BC. Prepare yourself for some 2000+ year old mirth:

Something which has never occurred since time immemorial…A young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.

The remaining oldest nine are available in the same Insider article that the above retelling of the world’s earliest known fart joke is from.

More locally to me, Reuters reports that the earliest recorded British joke was some Angle-Saxon innuendo.

“What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? Answer: A key.”

That isn’t the worst joke I’ve heard even in modern times, if only we still hung keys at our thighs.

Sitting through 3 hours and 12 minutes of impeccably rendered splashy-splashy water scenes is causing cinema audiences for the new Avatar ‘Way of Water’ film to need a lot of bathroom breaks.

Never has the RunPee app been so essential.

From ConscienHealth:

Using Mendelian randomization they found evidence for a causal relationship between hyper-palatable foods and the rising risk of obesity.

Well, whilst I grudgingly understand that this is an April Fool’s joke, it doesn’t mean that the conclusion is wrong!

A recent episode of the Ezra Klein Show, “Our Brains Weren’t Designed for This Kind of Food” interviewed Stephan Guyenet who argued that the huge rise in rates of obesity in recent times is not a product of everyone suddenly magically losing all reason and will-power overnight and making “bad” individual choices. This of course should not come as a surprise to anyone who has read anything reputable over the past few decades on the subject (or simply engaged their common sense).

He argues that instead the main driver is that we’ve created ourselves a food environment to live within which is entirely strange and unsuited to the way our brains and genetics have come to work through evolutionary history.

When someone told me about the existence of tasteGPT - a LLM AI that sucks up a pile of data and then informs food companies what sorts of foods they should make and market for maximum sales potential via a chatbot - I felt a sense of trepidation.

There’s definitely a world wherein I could get onboard with fake Agatha Hannigan’s comment that:

Now, food marketers have come up with an endless array industrially formulated foods that taste unnaturally good. This is terrible.

Meat cultivation food company Vow has created a meatball out of wooly mammoth meat.

Sure, wooly mammoths have been extinct a good long while, maybe 10,000 years or so, but they’ve used DNA samples to recreate mammoth muscle protein.

From an interview with the company’s founders in the Guardian:

We chose the woolly mammoth because it’s a symbol of diversity loss and a symbol of climate change.

This is more a PR / awareness raising thing than a restaurant special. So far only one of these meatballs exist and no-one has eaten it, on the basis that we’ve no clue how our bodies might react to it.

“We have a behaviour change problem when it comes to meat consumption…The goal is to transition a few billion meat eaters away from eating animal protein to eating things that can be produced in electrified systems.

With the recent release of iOS 16.4, both Android and iOS users have access to the latest greatest emojis now.

Courtesy of the wonderful Emojipedia, here’s the new ones, iPhone style:

And for Android folk:

Most seem quite self explanatory. Second emoji third row is Khanda, a symbol of Sikhism.

Donald Trump becomes the first ever US president to be charged with a crime.

We don’t know the charge as yet but it’s thought to involve a payment made to Stormy Daniels designed to cover up his affair, and possibly more than 30 other counts of business-related fraud.

More might come in future. Per the Guardian:

He also faces jeopardy over his election subversion and incitement of the January 6 attack on Congress; his attempts to overturn the 2020 result in Georgia; his retention of classified records; his business dealings; and a defamation suit arising from an allegation of rape…

The UK’s cavalcade of strike action that has been taking place over the past few months continues in earnest. The UK Strike Action Calendar shows who’s on strike on any given day, and it’s often multiple groups.

Although I have limited exposure myself, I’m told that if you open Facebook or its ilk whenever you open it you mostly see a deluge of “strikers are bad and lazy and overpaid i hate them sack them all” comments. This is hurtful to those who find it necessary to take action. Trying to organise in what appears to be an environment where nobody supports you is surely disheartening and disempowering.

But as far as I can tell this condemning of strike action reflects the usual social media algorithmic insistence on promoting outrage content - nothing raises engagement stats more than an argument - more than a true reflection of public opinion. The British public in general remain more supportive than opposed to strike action, even in an environment where much mainstream media isn’t adverse to joining in with the insults and doom-mongering.

Taking the ongoing teachers' strikes as an example, my understanding is that there’s even a set of trolls that go to the bother of infiltrating private teacher Facebook groups just to spout abuse at a group of truly essential workers in a field that has a tremendous recruitment and retainment crisis but nonetheless have been subject to a substantial and ongoing real terms pay cut over the last decade, not to mention the increasingly dire working conditions that harm both school staff and students. ‘Teachers’ working conditions are students' learning conditions' to quote Mariame Kaba in her pro-abolition book, “We do this ‘til we free us”.

Anyway, the latest representative public opinion stats I could quickly find are from an Ipsos poll. from early March. In that, 48% of Britons supported teacher strike action, with 29% actively opposed.

Explicit support was even higher in the people who one might think have the most stake when it comes to the impact of the strike - but who also possibly in many cases may have more of a sense of the current state of the system than many of the rest of us: parents. 60% of parents and guardians support teacher strike action, with only 20% being opposed.

Sure, many of them are concerned about the impact of strikes on their child’s education (~40% of all parents/guardians). Given one of the points here is that plentiful and well-resourced teachers are necessary for a good education to be delivered it’s actually surprising to me that that figure is not higher. But it seems like they’re correctly taking a longer, more structural, view. They have a substantially higher level of concern present about the fact that education is suffering due to a lack of investment in schools and teachers (60%). Of course this concern of the majority is exactly what a lot of these strikes are about.

For what it’s worth the same polls showed the British public to be net in support of strikes by nurses, ambulance workers, railway workers, border fore staff, civil servants and university support. From the polled options, only strikes by driving instructors were more opposed (35%) than supported (28%).

📚 Finished reading Statistical Rethinking by Richard McElreath.

This textbook that teaches the use of Bayesian techniques and casual inference approaches (directed acyclic graphs and the like) as a way to test and compare scientific, as opposed to purely statistical, theories. There’s chapters on important topics that other approaches often ignore such as measurement error.

Honestly it felt like hard going at times, particularly as I was reading it as context for an associated course that the author was kindly providing, meaning that there were deadlines. But it did open up an interesting range of new possibilities that I’m looking forward to integrating in my future work, as well as new ways of thinking about modelling, so hopefully very worthwhile!

The code examples in the book mostly use an accompanying R library, rethinking, along with base R techniques. Although people have rewritten the examples to use e.g. tidyverse and brm, or Python, Julia and possibly others - links to those can be seen on the author’s book page.

From a recent visit to Doddington Hall - which had surprisingly few flowers given the event was billed as some kind of flower festival. But there were plenty of other things to see.

The hall itself:

As defended by a hedge-unicorn:

Kind of creepy looking trees:

With fascinatingly textured bark: