Quantum Forest

‘Playing politics’ is very close to the top of my list of nonsensical expressions, together with gems like ‘you have an accent’ (doh, you too). This is a year of federal elections and to see the government accusing the opposition — and vice versa — of playing politics is, well, ridiculous. What are political parties supposed to play? Soccer and music may seem more interesting than politics, but would you pay a politician to play that? I wouldn’t.

Long lists of scandals, broken promises and short-term-gain tactics have certainly reduced the value of the word politics below any acceptable standard. However, I prefer to think that politics is still ‘the art of government’ and ‘the art of the possible’. I still expect to see political parties playing politics, in the sense of following an agenda that — hopefully — will improve the lives of people.

Two nights ago I received a phone call from Newspoll, a market research company. I normally (99.99% of the time) say no, thank you; but this time I thought the survey could include politics, so I said yes, I have thirteen minutes to participate. I was right, the survey included the ‘if the elections where held tomorrow…’ question. It also included a survey about people’s perception of the Australian Navy, real estate agencies (seemed to be payed by L.J. Hooker) and internet travel agencies.

This ‘omnibus style’ survey made me wonder about what sort of biases could arise from the methodology. If you ask people ‘we only need five minutes’, and ask only about one topic they will get a very different sample compared to ‘we need almost a quarter of an hour’ and ask you questions about many topics. Yes, they can get the correlations between political affiliation and preferences on real estate agencies and internet travel, but who cares? It certainly must be cheaper for the market research companies (and maybe for the client) but how good are the results? It might be that the sample just gets a lot of bored people.

I would like to be asked one day ‘what do you think of the language of the candidates?’ I would much prefer that to ‘would you vote for X or Y?’ and ‘what is your income bracket?’ We already know that people with more money tend to be conservative; it happens all around the planet.

‘War on terror’ has been a common phrase during the last few years, repeated many times by uncritical media. Is it possible to wage a war on a concept? Well, yes, it is possible to do it, but it is impossible to win. We may have more chances winning the ‘war on religion’ or ‘war on mathematics’. Rather than tackling the causes (poverty, injustice, dogmatism, for example) many western governments are hammering the symptoms, intensifying the origins of terrorism. I think that a more correct sentence would be ‘war is terror’. Therefore we are trying to defeat terror with terror, in some sort of self-destructive endeavour.

Last week’s terrorist attacks in Madrid showed the enormity of the task and the inadequacy of the approach used to combat terrorism. Over the weekend, the Spaniard government lost elections that, until before the bombing, they were set to win. Some politicians argued that terrorism should not dictate (or interfere) with domestic policy and, accordingly, Spain should continue supporting the United States’ foreign policy. However, is not the United States’ foreign policy currently being conditioned (if not dictated) by terrorism? Even domestic policy concerning basic freedoms has been altered in the United States, all in the name of ‘domestic security’.

We are speaking and acting the language of contradictions and expecting positive results out of it. Just another contradiction in terms.

Every so often there are times of rediscovery; words, ideas and books that reenter our lives. Some days ago was a paper by Bill Venables. Today was Buddhism without beliefs: a contemporary guide to awakening by Stephen Bachelor.

I ordered that book from Amazon.com in 1999, while living in New Zealand. A few years later, I lent the book to an acquaintance, who took over two years to read the one hundred and twenty seven pages.

Bachelor set himself a difficult task: to explain Buddhism as a set of actions, or principles to be acted upon, rather than a set of beliefs. Using that approach it is possible to set a path for agnostic Buddhism. The book has mixed reviews. I enjoyed very much reading it, other people hated it. You may want to give it a try.

Several years ago, I think it was 1999, I downloaded and read Exegeses on Linear Models (PDF, 108KB), a paper written by Bill Venables in 1998. I then put it aside for five years, until last week.

It was a beautiful day in Hobart when I drove up to Bellerive’s Esplanade (Eastern Shore). For reasons beyond this note I spent one hour sitting next to the river reading the paper. I really enjoyed the language and the examples. The paper is elegant, witty and guides the reader around many interesting topics.

Near the end of the paper, I was suddenly distracted by intense sounds around. It was a combination of seagulls (I was completely surrounded by them) and the sails of five boats, twenty metres from my seat, flapping during a race. Just another day reading statistics.

Here I use the metaphorical meaning of echo chamber:

one purveyor of information will make a claim, which many like-minded people then repeat, overhear, and repeat again (often in an exaggerated or otherwise distorted form) until most people assume that some extreme variation of the story is true.

Lately I have been participating in several fora (or forums) that show the echo chamber effect. People are so used to hear and repeat the same stories, without a hint of critical thinking, that they convince themselves that ‘most people’ think the same. I believe that one of the big failures of the educational system — in many countries — is that does not prepare people to question, to research by themselves, and to distrust ‘common sense’ and commonly held opinions. Is there a solution against the echo chamber effect? It seems to me that, at least in the short term, proactive dissidence may work. What I mean by proactive dissidence is to actively participate in the public space, rather than just complain and forget about the issues. This will not make you popular, but it will mean acting on your principles.

Visiting a bookshop, killing time while waiting for a plane in the airport. I have always been a fan of science fiction, the traditional type, hard science extrapolation. No wizards, magic, or knights in a horse. Please, bookshop owners, put the four or six volumes sagas under fantasy. Anyway, I am moving off topic. One element that grabbed my attention was the presence of multiple trilogies, tetralogies, or higher order series of books, not only in science fiction by in almost every conceivable topic. It seems that writing a good book is not enough, but that now we need to have sequels, prequels and all sorts of extensions riding on the success of a single book. Even the Dalai Lama is under pressure! We now have ‘The art of happiness’ and ‘The art of happiness at work’, so we may have ‘The revenge of happiness’ in the near future.

What is going on? It might be a combination of risk aversion and a reduction (or lack) of creativity. If ones write a [novel, essay, story, poem, pick one], the odds of publishing increase if there is a chance for doing successive installments. It does not matter if the author is rehashing the same old ideas, but what is really important is the potential for buyers of the future variations of the book. From that point of view, most classical writers would still be looking for an editor, because they would not have wanted to sign up for ten books telling the same story.

I have received a couple of spam emails from the Tasmanian Liberal^* Party, specifically Rene Hidding (leader of the opposition). I use spam defined as “one or more unsolicited messages, sent or posted as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantially identical content” (from here). In addition to being spammed, I received one of the most obfuscated pieces of political writing that I have ever seen (see this post too):

It is timely and appropriate that we move down the pathway of delivering real downstream processing of our significant resource endowments to capitalise on the delivery of new energy infrastructure (comment: this is supposed to refer to the construction of a pulpmill).

Why do politicians fail to understand and use email appropriately? I guess that they would not make phone calls using reverse charge to play a tape full of propaganda. Spam is like that; I pay (with time and connection charges) to download unsolicited material. Then the question is “would you vote for someone with no respect for other people’s privacy?” I would not.

^*By the way, despite of their name, Liberals are in fact quite conservative. Linguistic contradictions…

P.S. At the time of posting this article I emailed the Liberal Party. A week later I received an apology for an ‘error in the system’.

Last Saturday I was walking in town and came across an excellent book: Death sentence. The decay of public language, by Don Watson. Language is one of my favourite discussion topics and I believe that we are killing public language. Yes, English is my second language and grammar is not my strong point (prepositions are a killer), but what is your excuse? Whenever I watch or read the news, read manuals or corporate communications, am amazed with the poorness of language.

On one side, everything must be dumbed down: “avoid long words” and “please do not include any uncommon word”; how people are supposed to learn them? On the other side, it is perfectly correct to repeat clichés and buzzwords: enhance, commitment, synergies, forward-looking mission statements. If you work in corporate affairs, please, get a copy of the book.

Some jewels from the book:

At Optus we are paving the way for better, more enhanced ways of doing business, and these enhanced systems are designed to deliver on that commitment. These improvements will allow for more flexible and efficient billing options as we move forward (Customer service letter from Optus).

Funding for legal aid is increasingly meeting less of the demand, but allocating additional funds on a one-off basis without a specific reason may be seen as an admission by the Government that funding is insufficient (Department of the Prime Minister & Cabinet).

Again, if you work in corporate affairs, get a copy of the book.

I often participate in The Agora a board of pedants that enjoy arguing about language: words, turns of phrase, grammar, etc. Most of the discussion is about English, but in the “World languages” section there was a question about vato/bato. Given the way the brain works, that took us to fulano and to this post. In addition to be a generic way to referring to people Fulano is/was a great jazz-rock Chilean band (do not confuse with Fulano, a Miami based band).

During 1987, my first year studying forestry, I came across two excellent bands: Fulano and Electrodomésticos (Spanish for electric appliances). Most rock bands that played at the time were most popular (although they often sucked), but Fulano and Electrodomésticos still sound modern after 16 years. I have tapes with their music, including “Fulano”, “En el bunker” and “El infierno de los payasos” (The hell of clowns, what a great name!) by Fulano and “Viva Chile” and “Carrera de éxitos” by Electrodomésticos. However, they deserve to be preserved so I am trying to get their CDs. So far, I have the first two albums of Fulano, but finding Electrodomésticos’ has turned to be quite difficult. If you have any of them, please contact me. We might be able to make a deal.

Sometimes I get nostalgic with music and feel the need to return to where I used to listen it. Someone said that rather than missing places we actually miss times. That is probably closer to the truth, because when going back to places I often realise that they are meaningless: I am not the same and other people have changed too. Nevertheless, Fulano and Electrodomésticos still sound great to me.