10 August 2011
Reasons for the UK riots
Firstly, the latest footage.
Many are proud of their looting and vandalism - these girls say they're "showing the rich people we can do what we want". Why?
Ros Griffiths, who runs the Employment café in Brixton, which provides advice to jobseekers, says the violence across the capital is the result of years of tension between working-class people and the authorities.
"Young people who feel vulnerable feel that there's no jobs, there's no future, there's no prospects. They feel that nobody cares about them so they don't care.
"They've lost respect for authority because at the end of the day if it was just about what happened in Tottenham, that'd be an isolated situation. That was just a trigger," Ms Griffiths says.
A theory echoed by Professor John Pitts, a criminologist who advises several London local authorities on young people and gangs:
Prof Pitts says riots are complex events and cannot be explained away as "just thuggery".
They have to be seen against the backdrop of "growing discontents" about youth unemployment, education opportunities and income disparities.
He says most of the rioters are from poor estates who have no "stake in conformity", who have nothing to lose.
"They have no career to think about. They are not 'us'. They live out there on the margins, enraged, disappointed, capable of doing some awful things."
The best thing I've read on the insufficiency of the knee-jerk condemnation that we've been hearing so loudly is this blog post from someone living in one of the rioting areas. Why don't people seem to understand that asking why is important? Do they really think crime can be prevented without understanding its causes?
More discussions worth reading about the "growing discontents":
- conditions similar to those before the Great Depression (The Telegraph, 8 Aug)
- resentment against the police and the wealthy (The Guardian, 8 Aug)
- The poor are copying the rich by looting (Liberal Conspiracy blog, 9 Aug)
- (Added 14 Aug): Anarchy and Austerity: Why London Won't Be the Last City to Burn (The Atlantic, 10 Aug)
Meanwhile, as usual with disasters of all kinds nowadays, there are spur-of-the-moment web-apps trying to help the situation: Zavilia is crowdsourced criminal identification.
On the other side of the technology, more reasons to be careful what you say on Facebook:
1644 GMT: Two 18-year-olds are arrested in Folkestone, Kent, after Scotland Yard says a number of "inflammatory" comments were seen on Facebook in relation to rioting in London and other cities.
1436 GMT: Strathclyde Police have arrested a 16-year-old from Glasgow after a Facebook message allegedly inciting others to commit acts of disorder. Police say they're monitoring social networking sites closely and will take "decisive action" to prevent copycat violence in the Strathclyde force area.
As of 1650 GMT, Scotland Yard says 563 people have been arrested in relation to the riots, and 105 people have been charged. The youngest person arrested is 11 years old. As usual for violent protests, there will be innocent people caught up in it.
More worrying is the recent announcement from the Met that plastic bullets (a British invention for reducing fatalities) are now being given to police to use against the crowds. Thankfully nowadays riot police are much more measured in their approach - frustrating as that may be, the police are protecting life, not property, so hopefully innocent people aren't killed, as happened with plastic bullets in Northern Island.
All of the above found through the BBC's live feed (the page is currently struggling to keep up with traffic).
Update 11 August: Russel Brand agrees.
Update 14 August (Originally posted here):
I thought I'd expand on the "more discussion" link #2 above. The Guardian article said "over 333 deaths in police custody since 1998 and not a single conviction of any police officer for any of them" while this article from the Economist said over 400 "deaths following police contact" between 1999 and 2009. In February 2008 over 100 lawyers resigned from the advisory body for the Independent Police Complaints Commission citing favouritism towards police, indifference, extreme delays and other problems.
The arrest count is now up to 1600:
One student was given a six-month sentence for stealing a bottle of water, and BBC legal affairs correspondent Clive Coleman said tough sentences were "inevitable" given the public outrage.
The "looters are scum" crowd is numerous and very vocal. The most popular e-petition calls for rioters to lose all access to social welfare and is now over 190,000 signatures - 100,000 were required for Backbench Business Committee to consider its suitability for debate when Parliament returns in September.
But voices of reason are still being heard: "You can't arrest your way out of the problem" says US cop Bill Bratton, credited for cutting crime in LA after the 1992 riots, who will be advising British PM David Cameron next month.
48 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr summed it up:
When you cut facilities, slash jobs, abuse power, discriminate, drive people into deeper poverty & shoot people dead whilst refusing to provide answers or justice, the people will rise up & express their anger & frustration if you refuse to hear their cries. A riot is the language of the unheard.
and 5 years later:
The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.
Update 31 March: Eight months later, the experts agree: The riots were fuelled by a lack of opportunities for young people, poor parenting and suspicion of the police.
Labour MP Diane Abbott, whose Hackney constituency saw some of the fiercest rioting, said: "I welcome the emphasis the report puts on the social and economic causes of the riots. In the first 48 hours after the riots, it was right to focus on restoring order. But, since then, the prime minister has insisted on putting the riots down to "criminality, pure and simple". This report completely demolishes his kneejerk response...
"What we have seen really reflects an unspoken crisis in the country's efforts to raise educational standards in some of the inner cities. A number of communities feel they don't have any control over their own lives. They feel harassed by the police and marginalised by their job prospects - and are bombarded with reminders of lives they will, in all likelihood, never have. In the week after we have seen the top rate of tax for millionaires cut and the Conservative party hawking intimate dinners with the prime minister for £250,000 a go, I think communities like mine are absolutely sick of being told 'we're all this together', when it's absolutely clear that we're not all on it together."
24 June 2011
Why 90% of published medical studies are critically flawed
This is a repost of a post I made on Facebook on March 27.
There is a systematic problem with research arising from the conflict of interest of scientists whose funding is not dependent first and foremost on finding the truth. I first encountered the problem at university when we were told what the result of our lab work should be and taught how to manipulate our results. Several scientists I spoke to admitted that fudging results was standard even in academia - because negative results aren't published.
John Ioannidis is an extremely influential meta-researcher whose paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" has been widely read. He found that 80% of non-randomized trials (by far the most common type) are later refuted. For randomized trials, 25% are later refuted, and 10% of large-scale randomized trials (these are very expensive and hence rare). He also found that of 49 of the top most highly regarded and cited research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions, 11 of those had *never* been retested, and of those that were, 41% had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated. "Even when the evidence shows that a particular research idea is wrong, if you have thousands of scientists who have invested their careers in it, they’ll continue to publish papers on it."
Even after that, Ioannidis says, "the odds that anything useful will survive from any of these studies are poor." And it's not just medical science; the same issues distort research every area, from economics to archaeology to physics.
"We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary—as long as scientists recognize that they blew it, report their mistake openly instead of disguising it as a success, and then move on to the next thing, until they come up with the very occasional genuine breakthrough. But as long as careers remain contingent on producing a stream of research that’s dressed up to seem more right than it is, scientists will keep delivering exactly that.
“Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor,” he says. “I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.”"
The above four paragraphs are mostly from this article: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269
The related problem to the expectation that scientists be right, is the expectation that scientists be impartial. Although open-mindedness is the ideal that scientists (and indeed all people) aim for, scientists are as biased as anyone else, and we should expect that, like everyone else, their beliefs and self-interest will affect their conclusions. Instead of presuming superhuman detachment, we need to encourage scientists to be honest about their biases. Only then can their research be taken with the necessary grain of salt so that the people who make important decisions based on that research do not give it undue weight or credibility. Also, bias can often be compensated for using meta-analyses and comparing research of opposing bias.
Some other articles:
- http://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/23/why-almost-everything-you-hear-about-medicine-is-wrong.html
- A lot of meta-analyses only make the problem worse, by hiding even more bias under the cover of supposedly reducing it: http://www.patrickholford. com/index.php/blog/blogart icle/928/
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The rest of my health science bullshit series, for reference (let me know if you don't use Facebook and are interested in me reposting these here on posterous):
- Series intro, and is fat & cholesterol really so bad for you? https://www.facebook.com/gracefool/posts/154133517981285
- Watching your weight is stupid https://www.facebook.com/gracefool/posts/191197527585943
- The shoe industry https://www.facebook.com/gracefool/posts/150231125040416
- Most anti-depressants are placebos https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150127929393926
- The "fat burning zone" on your treadmill https://www.facebook.com/gracefool/posts/10150111367876160
30 May 2011
Why Bitcoin is a scam
If you're interested in geeky computer stuff, you may have heard of Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer cryptocurrency. There's been a new wave of interest in the last few weeks, and prices have risen to over $8/BTC from its beginning in Feb 2009 - giving the market a valuation of over US$55m. So I thought I'd investigate, as it implements many interesting ideas.
Bitcoin tries to replace central banks with cryptography. The idea is to have money that, unlike other currencies, can't be controlled by a central government. The currency is seeded by using processor power to perform intensive cryptographic calculations, the digital equivalent of running in circles. This is now barely worthwhile as more people have bought into it (this is by design).
My verdict: Bitcoin is "a speculative investment vehicle backed by no physical assets masquerading as a currency substitute"1, and a poor payment system. Here's why:
Bitcoin as a currency
Bitcoins claim to be "safe from instability caused by fractional reserve banking and central banks". This is ridiculous. Adam Cohen's answer at Quorum demonstrates that Bitcoins are far more unstable: No central bank and no backing by physical assets means no stability - and stability is the most important thing about a currency. So far, its extreme liquidity has meant it is extremely volatile - just like a speculative bubble.
It's also likely to run afoul of the law - in most countries it's technically legal, but all governments want control of the money supply. It will never become popular since you can't pay your taxes in Bitcoins. It is also a favoured payment system for digital fraudsters. Bitcoin is commonly used for:
- Fraud and scams
- Money-laundering (anonymizing criminally-obtained money)
- Black-market trading (eg. drugs)
- Income tax avoidance
- Structuring (see below)
More importantly, not only is it far from "safe from instability", it can be controlled by governments.
Bitcoin as a payment system
As a payment system, it's not what it's cracked up to be:
- It doesn't offer anonymity, despite some claims to the contrary - it's merely pseudonymous as all transactions are public to the world. There are techniques to increase your anonymity but they are difficult. As Bitcoin becomes more popular, it will become easier to be anonymous, but still Bitcoins are far more traceable than cash, even after taking precautions. Anonymity techniques involving bitcoins worth large amounts of money (over FJ$1,100 to US$58,000, depending on your jurisdiction) are likely to violate anti-structuring laws.
- It's vulnerable to takeover by processor farms and botnets.
- It's vulnerable to being outlawed by governments, for the same reasons as for the currency. If it becomes sufficiently popular for criminal activity, or popular enough in general, governments and banks will respond (to the illegal usage and the destabilizing effect).
Conclusion
While an interesting idea, Bitcoin is flawed.
As an investment or store of value, it's speculation propagated by gullible survivalists and technoutopian anarchists. It may not be a purposeful scam, but it has the same function - a few people (especially the developer and some botnet herders) have made a lot of money from latecomers. It's a bad investment, no matter how much you want to support the general concept.
Bitcoin isn't worthless as a payment system. It's an interesting experiment for people wanting to work around the government and willing to take the risks inherent in that. Like cash, it has legitimate uses, but unlike cash, it's not anonymous, and it's nonetheless likely to run into trouble from governments.
Other sources - for
- Wikipedia
- Bitcoin FAQ
- Why Bitcoin is smart, and not a scam
- Is Bitcoin the Wikileaks of Monetary Policy?
Other sources - against
This article has been cross-posted at Quora (1, 2) and improved thanks to discussions there and here (below).
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