The recent outbreak of measles in America, and its relationship with the anti-vaccination movement, has led to a lot of online debate. Much of this debate is about how these “anti-science” parents and the movement they listen to is increasing the risk of disease for everyone. While the increase in risk is undoubtedly a real issue, I’m not convinced by the quality of the “anti-science” framing of the issue. I’ve said before on this blog that I think the rhetoric of “anti-science” is both unproductive and unrealistic, and I think this applies even more to the anti-vaccine issue than to the GMO issue where I originally discussed it.
Much of that argument was about things written on John Quiggin’s blog, and today he has again written a post about anti-science, this time in the context of the Republican’s newfound interest in anti-vaccination ideology. The comments illustrate the pointlessness of the anti-science label well, with partisan actors degenerating into a frenzy of accusations that their opponents are anti-science, mostly without any reference to any form of evidence, or based on the kind of one-sided “facts” that Quiggin has previously associated with anti-science rhetoric. However, near the top of the comments thread a commenter called “Jim Rose” has a link to a blog post by Dan Kahan, explaining his recent work on science communication on this very issue. In a recent experiment that I briefly mentioned in my last post on this issue, people’s attitudes were categorized on two dimensions of social deviancy and risk, and then they were exposed to different forms of science communication. Those exposed to an “anti-science” diatribe divided rapidly into a group who doubled down on their views and a group who supported the anti-science framing. Kahan’s conclusion is blunt and damning for the kind of “agnotology” favoured by people like John Quiggin:
The “anti-science trope,” in sum, is not just contrary to fact. It is contrary to the tremendous stake that the public has in keeping its vaccine science communication environment free of reason-effacing forms of pollution.
i.e. the “anti-science trope” is itself anti-science, in that it does not reflect the reality of how people think about science in judging controversial issues, and is inconsistent with the best available knowledge about how to engage people with divergent views on important scientific issues.
Dan Kahan is a well-respected authority on this issue, and it’s interesting to note that he has attracted a comment from one well-known pro-science blogger, Skeptical Raptor, saying
Let me say that I’m gobsmacked as I read the conclusions. It may turn my world on its head …
Kahan’s findings on how to communicate science and how to engage objectors to particular scientific ideas basically completely oppose John Quiggin’s agnotology, and that of much of the scientific blogosphere, especially those on the New Atheist/Leftist fringe. They also back up my initial sense that this “anti-science” label is ignorant of both the reasons people take the positions they do, and the best ways to engage with them to change those positions. Kahan gives an example of a good way of engaging with anti-vaxxers, from a blog post by a pro-vaccination mother, and shows that it is nothing like what he calls the “ad hoc risk communication literature” that (in my opinion) characterizes much of the science blogging community’s response to these movements. I should also point out that I have defined a group of what I call the “scientific left,” who I roughly consider to be people like John Quiggin and myself, and Kahan’s findings (and the example he links to) are radically different to the way that the “scientific left” as I understand it engages with these movements.
There’s a lot of food for thought here, and a lot of ideas about how to better handle anti-vaccination, anti-GMO and (maybe) anti-AGW movements. It’s my personal opinion (on the basis of nothing solid, yet) that anti-AGW and pro-smoking movements are different to others, though I can’t at this stage say clearly why. I also think that the approach of people like Stephan Lewandowsky seems inferior to that of Kahan – there is value in identifying the conspiracy-theory side of AGW denialism, but the combative and confrontational nature of Lewandowsky’s work seems to disagree with Kahan’s approach. But Kahan’s work certainly suggests that the scornful agnotology of commentators like John Quiggin, PZ Myers and Dawkins, while fun to join in on from the inside, is potentially very counter-productive, and is itself “anti-science” by its own definition (which fact I find hilarious). This validates my initial suspicions about the term, and makes me think the scientific left has to do more – and be more scientific! – if we want to improve the use of science for the public good.
Crimson, an aging warrior once famous for his military exploits but now gone to seed, slower and past his prime
Quark, a man of genuinely diminutive size (a dwarf, in fact), albino and considered monstrous in the gyre. A technical genius, drone pilot and artillerist
Ryan, a 15 year old dragged to service from the booms, where his remarkable swimming abilities drew attention. Ryan is a rider, a rare type of person with a symbiotic relationship with a sea lion. Ryan’s sea lion is a 1 ton Steller’s sea lion called Arashi
These three are members of the Wind Guard, a small and tight-knit squad of agents who do specialist work for the Gyre. They had previously worked together on the Bobsled, a famous tug boat reconditioned for battle and renowned for its resilience in storms. The adventure starts with them meeting Captain Dilver at the Strategy Gardens in the Hulks. Captain Dilver is the highest-ranked person they have ever met in the Gyre, a leader in the Wind Guard who is infamous for having quashed a rebellion in the Hulks 20 years earlier. Through spies, treachery and violence he beat the rebellion and captured its leaders; he is famous for having joined them together by leg and hand with plastic ties. He then threw their children in the ocean and laughed as they struggled to save them. Once they had drowned, he made the controversial decision not to recover the bodies for recycling, because “we’ll not have their taint in our world.” He left them for the ocean. For the PCs, he is a figure of awe and command.
They met in the strategy gardens, a small space of peace and calm built onto the bows of the MV China 1, a huge bulk carrier forming one of the central parts of the Hulks. The strategy gardens have a small central shed, in which Captain Dilver is rumoured to meet and plan his strategies, inside a small garden of roses, strawberries, blackberry bushes and a few stunted lemon and plantain trees. A solar-powered antibiotic fermenter bubbles away in one corner, casting an acrid stench over the whole garden. The PCs met him at midday on a clear day in what was once early autumn. A gentle breeze blew over the gardens and clouds over the Gyre cast enough cover to enable them to meet without veils. Being midday, the call to prayer echoed across the Hulks, singing the song of the afternoon weather report to anyone who needed to know it. The characters approached Captain Dilver humbly, sitting on chairs around a small table and politely taking up cups of konbucha, nibbling daintily on candied grasshoppers, and waiting for him to speak.
Dilver offered them a simple job. After their work on the Bobsled they were deserving of a rest, and he had a simple job for them that, while it carried a small risk of violence, was basically a holiday. They were to travel to a raft on the edge of the Gyre and collect an old man. An oral history project conducted across all the raft communities in the Gyre’s areas of influence had recently finished, and as part of this oral history project they had discovered a raft city that had lasted for 50 years. On this city was an old man called Ken who knew the intricate details of the Gyre’s currents, fish movements and weather. This man was old and surely soon to die, and they wanted to bring him to the Gyre to learn his secrets before he did. The PCs were to take a ship to this raft, and buy this man. On the way they were to stop off at the Eiffel Tower and deliver medicines, because 4 of the 6 guards resident in the tower had fallen sick with some disease that could not be cured with the current stock of drugs on the island. They were to take the Windslip, a famous and beautiful trimaran that could move fast on the wind over calm seas, and use its high density solar cells to power a computer unit that was running a task for the Arc. Some scientists on the Arc had identified a satellite with a possibly stable orbit, and to test its orbit they needed a moving ship running a continuous GPS signal to the satellite. The Windslip was perfect for this job, and a 5 day journey the right length of time. The PCs were to run the computer tracking system over the whole 5 days of their journey, via the Eiffel tower, to the raft.
What could possibly go wrong?
Dilver gave them vague guidance on negotiations with the Raft for the old man. They were to carry an initial down payment consisting of a solar-powered antibiotic fermenter, 100 old screens, a new satellite dish, some weapons and a basic stock of drugs. They were to agree to any payment up to and including a small ship. Noticing the PC’s expressions of surprise at such a high price, he hastened to explain to them that, having discovered that the raft community had lasted 50 years they were thinking of inducting it into the Gyre proper. The Gyre is not a colonial enterprise, and the rafters had to want to join the Gyre. To facilitate this they wanted to make them wealthier and connect them more closely to the life of the Gyre. Currently only the raft community’s leaders held screens, but it was hoped that shipping in 100 screens would make raft culture available to a wider pool of people. That plus the wealth the raft could gain from extra drugs, independence in communications and drugs, and a small ship, would certainly make it look favourably on accession to the Gyre.
Unconvinced, the PCs set out for the Eiffel tower.
Poison and iron
They set off from the inner dock, the dock where the smaller ships hide from the full ravages of the world ocean. This dock is a sheltered spot under an oil rig, connected to the sea by a twisting canal some 100 metres long that winds through the poorest part of the Hulks. They met the Windslip‘s four crew in the breathless, still air under the rig, drawing first suspicion and distrust at the sight of the monstrous Quark, and then relief and confidence when the men learnt they would have a rider aboard. The Windslip set off, drifting out of the docks under its own electric power and then speeding to the southwest on a light but constant wind. The computer in the hold slid silently through its infinite cycles of tracking and counting, and in the gentle wind the PCs had little to do. The Windslip steered itself, skipping lightly over the vast world sea towards their destination. By the afternoon of their second day they could see a distant cloud, like a smudge on the horizon, and soon the first seabirds were mobbing their ship. An hour or two later and they were at the Eiffel tower, sliding gracefully in to dock at the small second wharf. The second wharf was a capsized ship, made fast against the side of the huge bulk carrier Silicon Dream by a complex web of chains and tires. They slid into this dock in the shadow of the tower itself, which loomed above them and glowed orange in the afternoon light. The whole tower screamed with the constant calls of a million seabirds of every shape and colour, and even separated from that horde by the full height of the Silicon Dream and the first spars of the tower the noise was nearly deafening.
They lashed the Windslip tight and alighted to the dock. Here they were met by the man in charge of the tower, Captain Jack, and the tower’s ornithologist Vlae. They greeted them warily, hailing them with the traditional greeting of “Fair Winds, brother” but standing well back out of fear of infection. Seeing their wariness, Jack led them straight to their cabins and offered to immediately introduce Quark to the four sick soldiers. Ryan went with him but Crimson had a deep fear of disease, having experienced cholera outbreaks before, and stayed as far away as possible. Captain Jack led Quark and Ryan through the vast cavernous holds of the Silicon Dream, some empty and some filled with supplies or precious materials – old wood, bales of soil, seed stock, ivory, steel, crates of guano ready for transport, endless shelves of eggs – until they reached a smaller cargo hold in the stern. This space had been converted into a medical facility, and through its door they could see into the chamber, in which 12 beds and a small nurses station were set out. The four guards lay in their beds, looking sorry for themselves and very weak. Quark entered and began investigating their symptoms, asking them about what they ate and how it was prepared, and looking especially for signs of the dreaded cholera. The eldest of the soldiers was an aging hero named Anna, who had led the attack that captured the itinerant warship the Gunfather some years ago, and who was famous for her calm and poise. A younger soldier, Adams, revealed that he had prepared the food – made a bowl of mashed pumpkin and taro, flavoured with honey, then gone personally to fish for snapper near the first dock. The group had eaten the pumpkin mash with fresh snapper sashimi an hour later. Quark realized that during that hour the food was largely unattended, and investigating their symptoms concluded they had all been poisoned, probably with rat poison.
There was a poisoner in the Eiffel Tower.
They returned to the living area of the ship, passing back through the silent halls of stored treasures and emerging on a narrow gantry. As they emerged, they ran into Vlae, walking along the gantry covered in blood. He was carrying a seabird in one hand, its neck ripped open and blood all over his face and coveralls. “Dinner,” he said by way of explanation, stopping in the sulphurous light of a decklamp. He had obviously torn its throat with his teeth, judging by the down still stuck to his bloodied chin. They edged past him, looking suspicious. Quark told Captain Jack that, being unsure about the possibility of contagious disease in the food, he and his crew would eat on the deck of the Windslip with their own food; Jack and Vlae could join them but bring their own food. He did not mention rat poison. This agreed upon they retired to prepare dinner, and Quark warned the others of his suspicions.
Dinner passed awkwardly, with the PCs watching Jack and Vlae warily to try and work out which was the poisoner. Over dinner they discussed the guards’ “illness,” and discovered that both had an alibi, though unproven: Vlae “took his dinner on the tower” (i.e. he killed a seabird and ate it raw), while Jack ate in his office while filling in reports. After their awkward dinner Ryan slipped into the shadows and stalked them back to their rooms, where he was able to watch Vlae reading ornithology books and Jack communicating with his family by screen. No evidence at all of ill intent. With no proof of who was the poisoner, they went to sleep – Quark and Ryan on the Silicon Dream in their assigned quarters and Crimson on the deck of the Windslip.
In the early dawn Quark was shaken awake by Jack and led quietly through the ship to the tower. He and Jack climbed some stairs to a viewing gantry some 30m above the decks, and along the gantry to a harpoon gun. The night was clear and blissfully free of the scream of birds, most of which were sleeping; under a moonlit sky a gentle wind was blowing, raising the sea surface into mild choppy waves that gleamed white in the moonlight as they broke. The wind streamed cool and fresh across the ship and the tower, bringing with it the smell of salt and guano. From above them came a constant gentle sussurration of coos and gulling, as occasionally a few birds amongst the throng muttered or complained in its sleep. Hidden in the shadows of the harpoon gun, Jack pointed down to the deck of one of the giant carriers on which the tower rested. Down there in the shadows of the ship’s decking, tubes and crates, a tableau of iron piracy was playing out. Three men stood over a steel tube on the deck. One was cutting it with some kind of welder, while one ran a saw or wire through the red hot metal, and another pulled the metal slowly away from the cut. Nearby, standing in a patch of moonlight, a sentry of some kind stood, wearing whalebone armour that glowed in the moonlight like a ghost. Jack pointed at Quark and then at the harpoon gun, a silent question that Quark answered with a grim nod. He prepared to fire …
Meanwhile Vlae had woken Ryan and led him to meet Crimson on the decks of the Windslip, where he explained the problem. They needed to ambush these men and kill them, but first they needed to know by what ship they had come, and how many combatants might have come with them. Vlae wanted Ryan to take his sea lion Arashi and approach the area from which the men must have boarded the ship, and search it for their boat. Had they come in a tiny ship’s boat, or had they managed to get a whole warship to silently approach the tower? Ryan nodded and slipped away into the darkness on Arashi, with clear instructions: find the pirate ship, tell the others the situation by his cellphone, and then give the order to attack when he thought it was clear. As Ryan slipped off through the moon-streaked waves to find his prey, Vlae led Crimson through a complex network of corridors and gantries to a point in the ship beneath the pirates. From there, he said, Crimson could rush up a flight of stairs and out through a hatchway onto the deck, emerging right on top of the pirates. As soon as he got the signal to attack, he could charge.
Ryan slipped around the outside of the Silicon Dream and down to the point where the pirates had boarded the next carrier, the Batons Rouge. In the near-darkness he could not swim under the keel, for fear of getting tangled in chains and plastic in the darkness, so instead he had to swim the long way round, but pulled along by Arashi he was able to get to his target zone rapidly. Emerging from a short dive near the point where the pirates had boarded the ship, he immediately found their vessel: a small submarine pulled up near the Batons Rouge, its deck just beneath the water but its conning tower protruding from the gentle waves. A thick black cable ran from the submarine’s conning tower up to the deck of the Batons Rouge, indicating that the conning tower was open, and ropes hung down the side of the Batons Rouge. Ryan gave his sea lion the order to guard him and slipped through the seething waves onto the deck of the submarine. Somewhere out in the darkness his giant mount disappeared into the waves, to circle the submarine and wait for anyone to approach. Ryan crawled up the conning tower and took position behind the hatch, bone spear out. He then drew out his cell phone and sent a text: “Found a small submarine. Go!”
Arashi protects his rider
As soon as he received the text, Quark powered up the harpoon and fired at the gleaming ghost-soldier. At the same time Crimson hurled himself out of the depths of the ship, charging in to attack the group of soldiers. One died instantly in his charge, and the other slipped down to join the fight. Quark’s shot missed, as did his second, and in the struggle that followed one of the men jumped over the edge of the ship. Crimson joined battle with the remaining two pirates. From his position on the conning tower Ryan heard the man hit the water, and start swimming to the ship; soon he heard a huge crash, desperate panting, a curse; there was some splashing, another huge crash, and a more agonized series of moans; another splash and then just the silence of the waves. Up above, Crimson was being pressed back by two foes, one wearing terrifying armour of carved bone, until Quark’s third harpoon smashed into the bone knight’s leg and tore it off. Quark then fashioned himself a flying fox of shark leather and hurled himself down towards the deck on a nearby cable, but missed the deck and flew into the sea, where Arashi waited. Fortunately Arashi was feeling discerning, and as Quark scrambled up one of the pirates’ ropes Arashi’s head popped up from below, giving a knowing “whuff!” and pushing him up the rope.
Arashi is not renowned for showing discretion in the exercise of his guard duties, and he weighs 1 ton.
As the battle crawled to its bitter end up on deck a pirate emerged from the hatch of the submarine, looking for the reason the power had stopped flowing to the welder. Ryan struck him from the shadows, sticking his bone spear straight through the pirate’s neck and killing him instantly. Up above, Crimson took down the shark-skin armoured pirate while the bone-armoured man floundered and gasped. The greasy business of the kill done, he cornered the bone-armoured man against the railings, warned him not to jump, and offered him clemency for information. The bone man, feeling his life rapidly ebbing out of his speared leg, agreed, and told them all they need to know. Iron piracy is an automatic death sentence that the Wind Guard have the power to commute to a life sentence repairing nets; there is a small host of cages hanging on the lower levels of the Eiffel tower, in which Iron pirates are trapped alive while the seabirds eat them, that attest to the savagery of Gyre justice. The bone pirate was all too willing to give away his submarine and any hope of freedom in order to avoid that fate, even though it meant a life spent as a crippled slave. He revealed that there was only one more pirate inside the submarine (who Ryan had killed) and that there was a trap on the bottom rung of the ladder inside the conning tower, and a switch to turn it off further inside – anyone stepping on the yellow mark on the lowest rung would experience the full power of the submarine’s extensive array of batteries, in a millisecond. Ryan entered the submarine, avoiding the yellow mark, turned off the trap and explored. The submarine was almost entirely batteries and motor, with three tiny rooms reserved for the crew. One was a tiny common area, one a control room, and one a sleeping room. The sleeping room had four beds rolled out next to each other, and two more beds in the unused torpedo tubes. There was nothing to steal – these men had been living on the edge of nothing when they raided the Towers. There was, however, a half-empty container of rat poison …
The party retired for the night. They called Captain Dilver and he told them, “We’ll send a ship to secure the submarine. Continue on your path. This submarine is a wavegift. Offer it to the rafters if they demand a ship in exchange for the old man.”
The PCs went to sleep stunned. The Gyre was willing to offer a submarine for a single person?
The raft
The next day they set out for the raft community, leaving the bone pirate tied in the cavernous hold of the Silicon Dream. Their journey passed uneventfully, though it was delayed for a couple of hours after they stumbled on a school of tuna and pursued it for meat; they arrived slightly late on the second day bearing a gift of maguro. As they approached the rafts they decided to do some reconnaissance, and Quark sent up his drone to scan the area. It revealed a small collection of rafts built around a container ship, the bow of which was unimpeded by construction, plowing the waves like a real ship. The rafts fanned out from the rear, built around a series of semi-capsized ships that offered both wavebreaks and structural stability. The rafts themselves were a kind of campsite, scattered with homes made in containers or tents, or the ruins of old yachts dragged atop the rafts themselves. At the outer extreme of the fan of rafts as an open space built from the smallest and weakest platforms, and it was here that the Windslip would dock, and the negotiations would proceed. However, as they approached Quark identified a small, deadly-looking ship on the far side of the container ship, that looked too new to be part of the raft. Someone else appeared to be here, and their first fear was that it was a Himalayan ship.
They sent Ryan to investigate. He slipped away with Arashi, diving under the container ship and aiming to surface just beyond the Himalayan ship. This time, driving fast on Arashi in a calm sea in daylight, he could go directly under the ship, staying in the sunlit zone where the autumn sunlight struck through the waves in beautiful golden lances, trusting to Arashi to guide him through the thick reeds and garbage growing under the ship and to drag him back to the surface before his prodigious lungs gave out. Five minutes underwater being carried forward by a ton of sleek death was as nothing to Ryan, who hung in that liminal space between sunlight, air and limpid darkness with a confidence borne of years of experience. Beneath him lay the long-abandoned stones and temples of the Tibetan plane, longed-for but lost; above him the glorious interplay of sunlight and ocean, all that Ryan had ever known; a sleek line of bubbles streaked by him as Arashi sped through the semi-darkness to their prey. Bound to that mighty beast like a silent sibling, Ryan guided it through the dancing golden rays, under the shadow of the container ship and the vicious-looking interloper, to emerge exactly where he intended, drawing deep breaths but controlled and quiet. The waves chopped, Arashi gently whuffed, and in the near distance the lethal-looking ship floated, tied to the old container ship. There was no sign of movement on board, and no one stirred at the sight of a sea lion on the edge of the rafts. The ship had a nasty-looking deck gun, and writing in a language Ryan could not understand – but Ryan could barely read his own language, let alone identify another. After a few minutes’ watching, with no sign of movement, the teenager gave up. He and Arashi slipped below the waves and returned the way they had come, no knowledge gained.
They docked with the raft, and immediately a delegation of elders met them. At the centre was The Matriarch, leader of the rafts and a powerful presence in her own right. A pavilion was set up near the sea edge, and a conclave sat around the old woman as she prepared to negotiate. The down-payment was unloaded from the ship, and the old man, a stumbling, halting and ancient man came forth, accompanied by two children. In the course of negotiations it became obvious that the Matriarch wanted the two children to be sent to the Arc to do an apprenticeship. She also wanted an ocean-going fishing vessel – not a submarine, but something capable of real fishing work. How could she think a single old man was worth so much? Crimson had to make a call to check if such an offer was acceptable, but as he pulled out his mobile phone to make the call everyone’s phones started ringing. The dial tone was the emergency tone reserved for Captain Dilver. Crimson answered.
“Dilver. Do you have the man?”
“No, we’re negotiating now. What’s wrong?”
“Change of plan. Grab the man and get out. Turn off the computer in the ship and get away as fast as you can. Something’s coming.”
“What?”
“Don’t waste time, just do it. Move now!”
The phone went dead. Dilver had spoken. No one argues with Dilver. Crimson moved. He pushed forward and grabbed the old man, announcing the change in plan to his colleagues. As he did so they heard the crack of rifles and three bullets shot past their heads. Up on the ridge of rafts near the container ship’s stern, three men were moving forward, carrying carbines and intent on combat. It was immediately obvious from their size and armour that they were Gurkhas. The Himalayan kingdom had sent its soldiers after the old man. Why was he worth so much?
They ran for the ship, rifle shots cracking around them. Ryan ran for the water, calling Arashi. The old man struggled, and somehow Crimson couldn’t move him. The Gurkhas came closer, shooting. Someone hit Ryan in the leg, but he managed to hit the water. Crimson dragged the old man into a channel of water between two rafts, and would have been trapped there moving slowly except that Ryan and Arashi slid down the channel, grabbed him and hauled him out as fast as they could. They all slid to the Windslip, Arashi pushing them on board. Quark was on the deck gun, firing nail bombs out at the Gurkhas to keep them down and away from the ship. Crimson ran below with the old man to tie him down where he wouldn’t be able to escape, as their crew started the ship away from the docks, moving as fast as they could.
Suddenly there was a huge explosion, a bright flash and a moment of confusion. Quark and Ryan were hurled from the decks of the ship, Crimson and the old man pushed deep down into the water and stunned. Boiling water streamed over them, and moments later they were all floundering in the water. Arashi lay stunned and gurgling, Crimson struggled in the water near death, the old man struggled in the hot sea, his legs melted. A huge wave of displaced water rolled over the rafts, knocking down children and elderly and Gurkhas alike. Somewhere near them the ship’s crew screamed and thrashed. The Windslip, broken and melted, sank beneath the waves with a horrible gurgling roar, and they were all left floundering in the water.
Crimson struggled in the water next to the old man, holding him up and looking in horror at his melted and wrecked lower legs, when his phone rang, the same emergency tone.
“Dilver, are you out? Do you have the old man?”
What??
“Something hit us. He’s dying.”
“Get the code. Whatever you do, get the code!”
Crimson stared in dumb shock at the phone. He had been about to abandon this stupid old man to the waves. What was this? Floating in the water, still half stunned, he turned to the old man and grabbed him by the neck. “What is the code?”
The old man hissed, “There is no code.” But Crimson noticed that as he did so the old man reached for a strange necklace he wore. This necklace was a piece of plastic in the shape of the character 源、strung onto a strange thick plastic cord. Was that the code? Crimson tore it off and stuffed it into his sharkskin tunic, then dragged the man to shore.
Another brilliant flash and the sea exploded behind them, a wave of super-heated salty steam roared past them, and they were tumbling over and over in the water. The remaining crew, floundering there in the centre of the blast, disappeared and never came up. More waves of warm water rushed past them.
When he righted himself, Crimson was closer to the raft and somehow still holding the old man. He thrashed forward in the water, hauling himself to the raft. As he did so Arashi, recovered from his temporary stun, surged behind them and hurled them onto the raft with a satisfied “whuff!” Almost immdiately, rifle shots cracked into the deck around them. Looking down, Crimson realized he was badly hurt, possibly dying. Quark and Ryan also struggle onto the deck, and Arashi cruised the verges of the rafts, ducking in and out of sight.
The Gurkhas had run out of ammunition and were charging forward now. One charged towards Crimson and two towards Quark where he was attempting to tend to the old man’s wounds. Crimson charged his mark, leapt into the air and delivered a solid kick to the man’s chest, knocking him off the raft and into the water. Quar, saw two coming for him and hurled a grenade at them, managing to blow the legs off one but barely hurting the other. He fell back until Crimson could join the battle, sword join, and Crimson and the remaining Gurkha began a deadly duel, kukri against cutlass. Behind them the Gurkha in the water died horribly, battered away from the rafts by Arashi and savaged from below whenever he tried to swim. His desperate thrashings soon calmed.
Crimson was too badly injured to hold off the Gurkha, who began to press his advantage. Quark watched in horror from his position over the old man, unable to do anything. But Ryan still had his crossbow. He took aim and fired at the Gurkha’s unarmoured head, scoring a spectacular blow under the jaw; the bone bolt blew out of the man’s face, and he fell dead on the spot. They had beaten their attackers.
The phone rang. Dilver.
“Where’s the old man. Did you get the code?”
“There is no code, just a necklace. We’re fighting.”
“Fighting who? What?”
“Gurkhas, there’s a ship here.”
“Do not let that ship get away on pain of death. No message can reach the Himalayans. Kill everyone.”
The phone went dead. Though they were all nearly dead, they charged off to the ship.
There were two men on the ship, already moving it into open water. A gun battle followed, but Quark managed to shoot out their radio, and Crimson and Ryan boarded the ship and killed both the crew. They had stopped the ship escaping, and no Gurkha survived the battle. Crimson was nearly dead, Quark and Ryan both badly injured, and the rafters in uproar. Crimson called Dilver.
“Dilver. Do you have the code?”
“We got something. The ship is stopped. We lost the Windslip.” Losing the Windslip is a death sentence.
“No matter. We’re sending a sloop, the Gunfather. We’re sending seaplanes. I’ll be there in a few hours. Don’t let anyone send any messages, keep the old man near you and find the Matriarch. We’re going to have a serious conversation with her.”
They waited. Within hours, as promised, three seaplanes arrived. Seaplanes fly on biodiesel, a rare and precious commodity. Sending three large ones for any mission is unheard of. They taxied up to the rafts and disgorged scores of soldiers, men the PCs had never seen before: large, heavily armoured, carrying terrifying guns. Shots were fired. Rafters were rounded up, beaten, corralled. From amongst the mess Dilver emerged, wearing full combat armour, carrying his helmet, accompanied by two men in full armour none of the PCs had ever seen.
“Fair wind, brothers. Where is the matriarch?” They dragged out the matriarch.
Dilver then proceeded to show the same steel he showed those years earlier, when he made his name. He turned to the matriarch. “I am taking hostages, including your family.” As the PCs watched one of his soldiers dragged off the two children she had earlier tried to bargain with. “If anyone ever hears about what happened today from anyone on this raft I will hang your children from the Towers, to be eaten by birds. I will then come here and sink your rafts, the waves will take you and no one will know you were ever here. Fifty years of your history will be gone like raindrops on the waves.” Behind him a protesting rafter was shot, as if for emphasis. “Keep today’s events secret for one year and your raft will join the Gyre. Do you understand me?”
She nodded, silent tears running down her cheeks, as her children were bundled into a plane.
Dilver looked at the PCs. “You. Come with me.”
Dilver ushered them into a seaplane with the children and a few other moaning rafters, who he pushed and slapped out of the way. They were soon airborne, Dilver yelling over the roar of the engines.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t tell you all the details. Before the world submerged, near the end, the Chinese government built a kind of arc, filled it with rare materials that can’t be found on the open ocean, and left it for the flood to cover. It has a nuclear powerplant at its centre, which will activate and power it to the surface when called. The idea was that the government would call it up when they had stabilized after the flood. A good idea but the Chinese government expended itself fighting for the Himalayas, and everyone thought the codes to control the arc were lost. We knew where it was, but no one could activate it. But one of our spies in the Himalayan kingdom heard of a bundle of diaries that revealed some old Chinese scientists who survived the flood and the wars and were somewhere on rafts in the area, who might have the code. That’s why we instituted the oral history project, and the old man ken was one of them. So we sent you to get him but we didn’t want anyone to know why, which is why we told you a story about him knowing the currents. We didn’t realize the Himalayans had found him too.
“But the real mistake was the computer we had tracking that satellite. Our science guys didn’t realize that the satellite was a military satellite. They realized this morning that their hacking had triggered an emergency system. They warned me immediately and I called you, but it wasn’t fast enough. The satellite is an orbital laser. The scientists who made this mistake are already dead, I saw to it myself this morning.”
“We lost the Windslip but we gain a Gurkha warship, and more importantly we get this.” He took the necklace from Crimson. “The story is that this arc holds 100,000 tons of steel, a seed stock, another 100,000 tons of soil, it has huge quantities of wood, cement, medicines, vaccuum-packed rice, medical facilities, glass. And at its centre is a nuclear powerplant. The Himalayans know where it is, but if they think their ship was lost to storms without any record, and they don’t realize we have the key, they may not be there when we raise it from the depths. So we can take possession of the whole arc.”
“You have done well, boys. Even the loss of the Windslip will not count against you. But next time, follow my instructions a little less tardily, yes?”
He pocketed the necklace, and that was all the thanks they ever received from Captain Dilver – that, and their lives.
Sometimes Drew has difficulty remembering where she keeps the coffee
Date: 5th October, 2177 [will this day never end?]
Weather: Rainy
Mood: Disappointed. Does our hacker really have to be this incompetent?
Outfit: Today I wore my maid outfit, because we were torturing this Rice dude and Pops wanted me to get coffees. I don’t know why this hunk of existentially doomed meat needs coffee, but Pops had his Earnest Conversation face on, so I had to be the coffee wench. I figured if you’re going to do it you should do it properly, but apparently Rice gets all freaked out being served coffee by a girl in a maid outfit who wants to cut his fingers off. And he thinks he has it tough! Now I’m gonna have to flee across town in my maid’s outfit, and everyone is going to think I escaped from a love hotel with a man twice my age, which is like gross.
News: There is no news. We are in deep trouble is all that matters.
So in between killing people I’ve been reading some more of the Dialectical Ephemeralism that Lima was into before we iced him. They have this bunch of crazy visionaries who have all these sayings about life and love and killing people, because they seem to care about a bunch of unimportant stuff like passion and politics, not just the big things like killing people and fashion. One of them, this chick called the Falcon, was mostly responsible for some sort of military tactics that combined guerilla warfare and mobile hacking teams, and it looks like she laid some of the theoretical groundwork for the transsubstantiation shtick that Lima and his hyper-incestuous family got their kicks from. After one particularly nasty fubar in the Andes she had this to say about the difference between machine life and reality:
The difference between virtuality and life is very simple. In a construct you know everything is being run by an all-powerful machine. Reality doesn’t offer this assurance, so it’s very easy to develop the mistaken impression that you’re in control.
Until today I never really understood why people listen to the ranting of crazy visionaries, but today I got it a bit, because this Falcon chick was completely right about getting the idea you’re in control when you’re not. Case in point: everything that went wrong today.
We raided this rundown apartment block in Little Boston looking for this dumb hacker called Rice for reasons I don’t really understand or care about, but which Pops thinks are worth killing people for (so probably not very important). That raid went completely south because there was a riot going on and Americans are so stupid that when they see a heavily armed team of wet-workers come to ice a dude they think running into the gunfire is a good way to get rich. Once the smoke and nunchakus cleared we found out Rice had managed to do a runner in an AV because our hacker got ambushed by some homeless guys who stole his gun. We all had, as the Falcon would say, the mistaken idea we were in control, and didn’t employ bodyguards for our van, and in the chaos Rice got away.
When your enemy goes to ground …
But our hacker isn’t stupid so he managed to get a fix on that AV, and we chased them across town. Unfortunately they dropped out of sight and we lost them, but Coyote guessed they were heading for the docks so we ran a shortcut down there and managed to find at least roughly the area where we thought they might have gone to ground. There was this huge area of slums and ruined houses clustered around some kind of monster building the size of a city, and all these shacks and shanties clustered everywhere we could see. We tried asking the natives about the AV but nobody was talking, because maybe they think we look scary in full body armour or something, so after a bit we gave up. Then Ghost remembered he had had a run in with some goldfish hunters down here, and maybe they could help him. He put in the call and after a bit they rocked up, pretty casual and all happy to see us. When we explained the situation they agreed to help, and after a bit of asking around they found out that our target had gone inside that huge building, which is like a beehive if a beehive were made out of interlocking multi-storey carparks. We took our AV in and demounted, leaving Tail to run the AV in a holding pattern while we went looking for our kill. The goldfish hunters asked around a bit and we found out that the AV belonged to a small mercenary corp that based itself at the bottom of the beehive, and everyone told us they were nasty and not to be messed with. But Rice had left them behind and gone up to the top of the beehive with a couple of guards, and we thought maybe he had hired some mercs to help him out. That meant if we avoided the mercenary base and just went to get him we’d probably not piss them off too much, provided their relationship with Rice was purely business. What could go wrong?
It was dark in there and there were more people living in jumbled-up wreckage down here, and they were also scared of us and moved out of our way when we passed them. Pretty soon everywhere we went was deserted before we got there, but I guess no one knew what we were looking for because when we got to the top of the beehive to where we thought Rice was hiding out we found that he didn’t know we were coming. There was this kind of murky stairwell with spiral stairs leading up to a couple of apartments that we thought he was in, so up we went. Pops and Coyote took point, and I hung back one spiral down on the stairs to give them cover as they went. Just as well I did…
Unfortunately the steps halfway up were booby-trapped, and Pops’s eyes are too old and blind to notice something like that so he triggered it. A whole section of stairs fell apart and down he went, landing on the stairs one level down right next to me with one of his grand-daddy grunts like the ones he makes when he has to plug the tv cord in because it “accidentally” came out while he was watching one of his boring news shows. Only louder, I guess, and kind of angrier. Pops’s Angry Voice is like da Vinci’s paint palette or something, when you first discover him it’s all sepia shades of tasteful and subtle anger but then once you know him a bit better and start exploring his work you discover that he has this lurid technicolor range that he’s quite capable of painting the ceiling with. And at this point he hit the brighter tones of red from that palette. As he was cursing and pulling his cyberleg out of the woodwork and trying to remember not to swear in front of a girl and then telling me not to repeat these words he was using even though he knows I spent years in hit squads with a Scottish munitions expert who had forgotten every civilized word in more languages than Pops has ever learnt this little squad of goons came to the top of the stairwell and started shooting at Coyote and Ghost so I had to kill them. So then battle was joined, as the Falcon would say, and we started working our way up the stairwell with me shooting carefully at anyone who popped their heads over the balcony and Pops yelling and inventing new ways of being a grumpy old man and Coyote getting shotgun pellets in the face. Eventually we got to the bit where the stairs end and the balcony starts, and we were crouched there looking at a couple of groaning dying mercs and getting ready to blast our way over the top when this dude hiding behind an indestructible concrete column yells “Wait!”
So we wait and suddenly Pops isn’t grumpy anymore and is ready to be reasonable and says “What?” in his best Friendly Officer Voice. And this dude grunts and then slings a body out from behind the column and says “you can have this guy if you leave us alone and go away,” which is like the most reasonable thing I have heard anyone say in weeks (except maybe last week when Ghost finally agreed to lower the seat on the shared toilet after he uses it, after I told him I’d shoot off the only limb he has never used if he kept leaving it up, which Pops told me was unreasonable! But this is no time for venting about Pops’s poor negotiation skills and Ghost’s bad hygiene habits). So then we get into this little negotiation thing, where the dude reveals he has a grenade launcher with every chamber full (wow!) and then Pops has to go forward and get that body and we don’t know if it’s actually the dude we’re looking for but we’re all frankly sick of this scene so it’s time to move on and then Coyote makes everything extra tense by asking the dude if he’s willing to sell the grenade launcher which is like a Charlton Heston question, “my cold dead hands” Coyote, “my cold dead hands” and then we start backing away down the stairs under the watchful eye of that grenade launcher, dragging the Man Who Would be Rice with us.
Which is where I had to put on my maid outfit. We got out okay, paid off the goldfish hunters with a bit of nuyen by way of thanks, and got our AV out of their as fast as we could. Once we got back to our base we tied Rice up in one of our rooms, and woke him up, and then Pops put on his Insane-but-Reasonable Voice and started asking Rice simple questions. The first of which was “would you like some coffee?” and so then I had to make coffees because apparently I’m not very good at asking people questions and Rice kept losing his equilibrium when I asked chirpy questions about how we were going to kill him. Which is apparently even more disturbing if you’re wearing a maid outfit when you ask. Boys are so wimpy! Anyway we came to an agreement and Rice told us everything we wanted to know and agreed to do everything we told him to do if we didn’t kill him, so today was really turning into like the Annual Festival of Reasonable People or something.
So Rice told us he used to work for this dude called Blacklist but now he’s all into moonlighting for this religious nut-job called Blue, who runs the church of the children of Exalta or something down in the Docks and has started attracting some of Blacklist’s better and less reliable cadres because of ghostchalk and money. Blue is dealing ghost chalk on Blacklist’s turf which is messing stuff up in the social order, and Blacklist wants Blue taken down because of this and other things. In exchange for this Blacklist might be able to make us some fake IDs to get topside, which we need because we need to start killing cyber psychiatrists. So Rice told us all about Blue’s defenses and hideout, and in exchange for not dying horribly (or at all!) he agreed to help us set up a trap for Blue, though he said it would take a few days to be sure Blue thought Rice was still on the run and in hiding and not suspicious. So we agreed to keep Rice for a few days and then set up a meeting.
And this is where everything went wrong. All flushed with our success we decided to start investigating the link to Alt and the cyber-psychiatrists. We have to liberate some dude called Hog from a top security cyber-psycho facility because he might know something about where Alt’s lost crazy sister is hiding or something, but to get to him we need to trace his records. He was being seen by some small-scale psychiatrist for a while, so we decided to get Ghost to hack that psychiatrist and get some records and information about Hog. Unfortunately, Ghost completely messed up the hack. He got the info we wanted, but then he tripped the security systems of the company, and managed to get traced back to our hideout for bonus points. Now we have a Goliath security team coming down on us, and we’re all in our base surrounded by a captive hacker and a bunch of illegal weapons … and I’m in my maid outfit.
I guess that Falcon chick was right about things going wrong if you get the mistaken idea you’re in control. Now we have to run or fight or find some trick to get out of trouble with New Horizon’s biggest security company. I hope that we don’t get to test out another one of the Falcon’s sayings before I can finish this diary:
In my recent post on the growth of anti-vaccination ideology in the Republican party I described the process by which I think it’s possible that anti-vaccination politics has got a hold on some prominent republicans, entering through the back door of sexual “morality” (pardon the pun) and gaining prominence through the influence of group dynamics and a general culture of anti science. But this phenomenon is surprising to a lot of people (myself included) because anti-vax ideas are generally seen as a thing of the cultural left rather than the political right. I’m no exception to this rule, and generally saw anti-vax politics as a thing associated with left-wing hippy-dippies. I’ve always been scornful of the idea that it is a part of the political movement of inner city rich liberals (Gwyneth Paltrow’s vag-steamers), and associated more with rejectionist radical vegan and anarchist hippy leftists, and I’ve been aware for a long time that it is also common amongst a certain type of right-wing religious type, but to see it gaining prominence among the mainstream of the American political right is disturbing and unusual. It’s disturbing because bipartisanship in stupidity is dangerous, and unusual because the right is usually happy to define itself in opposition to others, and it’s unusual to see the right adopt ideas that are traditionally associated with the left.
This suggests that anti-vaccination ideas have a long right wing history, and they aren’t getting any new ideas from the left but have had this in their blood for a long time. But this also suggests that anti-vaccination ideology has been bi-partisan for a long time. I’m interested in why that might be and what the implications are for the politics of “anti-science.”
Dan Kahan from Yale, who has a history of researching this kind of thing, has recently published a long and confusing, almost unreadable article exploring the relationship between political views and vaccination policy, interpreted (bravely) in the Washington Posthere. To the extent that his findings are comprehensible, he seems to be suggesting that rejection of vaccination is associated equally with right-wing and left-wing political ideals, and that this is very different to rejection of climate science, gun control or marijuana legalization. The Washington Post hints at another issue in analysis of this problem: political views are often inferred from vaccination proportions in geographical regions, but just as with voting, behavior at the aggregate level does not necessarily reflect behavior at the individual level (this is called the ecological fallacy) and just because there are high rates of non-vaccination and measles in affluent, liberal areas doesn’t mean it’s the liberals in those areas that are the cause. Kahan’s research suggests that at an individual level much more complex motivating factors are at play. The Washington Post article also references a paper by Stephan Lewandowsky suggesting free market ideology rejects vaccination, which contradicts Kahan but doesn’t seem particularly unusual: free market ideology is often a part of extreme right wing views in America, so it figures that endorsing one would be associated with endorsing the remaining two.
So why does anti-vaccination ideology transcend political ideology? The first reason, I think, is that it is old. Anti-vax ideas are as old as vaccination, which makes them much, much older than a lot of other “anti-science” ideas like global warming denialism or fear of power lines. Anti-vaccination ideas sprang up around the time that the smallpox vaccine was mandated, and have renewed their strength every time a new vaccine was introduced. This perhaps puts it in the same vein as creationism (though for very different reasons) but distinguishes it from modern anti-science reactions such as to global warming. Having been around for more than 100 years, anti-vaccination ideology has had a lot of opportunities to mutate and infect a wide cross-section of society. Anti-vaccination ideas can be based on notions of purity, distrust of the government, religious ideas about the origin of the products, basic failure to understand conflicting risks, and – as we have seen recently in Pakistan – reactions to fake doctors working for the CIA. So for left wing people it’s about distrust of companies, for hippies it’s about body purity, for vegeterians it’s about animal products, for libertarians it’s about government control and for religious nutbags it’s about religious nutbaggery. But for all these people their objections seem internally consistent given their available scientific knowledge.
Anti-vaccination ideology is also a reaction to an immediate thing. Vaccinations are an injection into someone’s children, that happen now and come with a real though small risk of adverse effects (mostly minor). This makes them a much more powerful thing than evolution (a mere concept) or global warming, which is a risk occurring in the future. Many of my friends have told me how the act of getting their infants vaccinated makes them aware of the desire to baulk, because the experience is visceral and immediate, not intellectual and delayed (none of my friends have relented in their determined pro-vaccination stance, but it gives them pause to think). Thus it is easy for anti-vaxxers to create new generations of concerned individuals, and keep pushing their ideological platform. This visceral experience also cuts across ideological divides, by dint of its physicality, so that it is no longer a debate about abstract future concerns, but becomes an issue with real physical consequences to be discussed now. It is an easy fear to exploit, and it is a fear that easily transcends party lines.
In many ways our reaction to infectious diseases is the opposite of the way we should react to global warming. Eliminating an infectious disease through vaccination requires an easily managed, cheap individual decision that is meaningless by itself and only powerful if everyone else does it. In contrast, the best responses to global warming are institutional, involving shared action through institutions. You can choose to sit in your room freezing in winter and not turning on your heating, but it will make no difference to the carbon economy unless a government acts to change the source of the power you are eschewing, whereas shared action implemented through politicians at an institutional level will make change happen rapidly. Responses to global warming involve changing industrial systems, whereas responses to measles involve individuals sticking a needle in a child. The difference is obvious, and profound. But because the required vaccination rate is very high even a very small number of people reacting against this theory are enough to destroy the whole thing – and it appears that this small group of individuals cross the political spectrum, so it’s the responsibility of people of all political stripes to stomp on this scourge – it’s not sufficient any more for right wingers to assume that this public health scourge is something the left has to deal with.
My suspicion is that the rich liberals of Marin County are simply the most visible and obvious of anti-vaxxers, because they are the ones with the voice who are photogenic, but that anti-vaccination ideas cut across party, racial and ethnic lines and are best dealt with not through cultural communication but through the law. Not getting your children vaccinated is hardly a challenging decision, especially in a society without public health care, and signing a form to get your kid into school is hardly a big deal considering the general overheads associated with starting school. But most of these anti-vaxxers won’t privilege vague health concerns over education and won’t want to make trouble out of it. This is because most of these anti-vaxxers are responding to a vague suspicion about how much they can trust science, not from a determined investigation of the risks of vaccination. This theory is related to my last post, that ordinary individuals have to make judgments about science from authority, and people who reject much of science are doing it from a position of distrust of authority rather than scientific judgment. When their political and cultural guides and (in the unique case of vaccination) the law tell them they’re wrong they will acquiesce because most people’s interaction with science arises through appeals to authority, rather than individual scientific judgments. This makes anti-vaccination ideas very different to anti-global warming ideas. At its best a response to global warming will use economic instruments which force companies to change their practice but (ideally) don’t involve any individual change – individuals won’t even notice – whereas effective responses to infectious disease require strict legislative changes that force individuals to take a specific action.
I think there are no lessons to be learnt from the battle against global warming to apply to vaccination, and vice versa. They’re completely different political challenges with different causes and solutions. The anti-vaccination movement is also an example of how the notion of “anti-science” is meaningless in a practical sense, and better replaced with nuanced responses to specific complaints, or legal responses to specific objections. In the case of global warming, objections to the science of global warming are best ignored and dealt with through legislative changes and direct government influence on industry. They’re completely different issues with different responses and different causes, and different implications for the interaction between society and individuals. Not all “anti-science” is equal, and in reality “anti-science” is a meaningless concept. Understanding people and reacting to their concerns is the best way for governments to respond to challenges to rational policy.
In preparation for a post on the political origins of anti-vaccination ideology, I want to make a point about the way that the ordinary public interact with scientists. My last post on anti-vax and Republicans has been linked to by a climate change blog, and on that blog one of the commenters is making big claims about what the public should do to understand climate science. In particular he or she says:
‘Trust the science’ is a very ambiguous statement. People should follow the scientific method, but I think what you mean is closer to ‘people should blindly believe what authority figures in science tell them’. This can get very dangerous and appeal to authority is not part of the scientific method. Rather the scientific method involves questioning authority and skepticism.
I think this is an incredibly unreasonable and unrealistic depiction of how people should interact with scientists, and is an advanced form of epistemological nihilism. I want to give a specific example of why, though I’m sure there are many others.
My father left school at 15 to take up a trade as a typesetter, my mother left school at 13 to work in a cake shop and her father left school in Spain at 15 to fight fascism (he subsequently became a forester in England after the war and devoted his spare time to raising a family and learning English). Not only did all my forebears leave school before they got a chance to receive an advanced science education, but they went to school before computers were common, when quantum mechanics was still in its learning stage (e.g. before Bell’s Inequality) and in my grandfather’s case before the invention of the microwave, the guided missile, or a man on the moon. The idea that my parents and my grandfather can “follow the scientific method” – indeed, that they even know what it is – is ludicrous, as is the idea that they have any kind of skill or capacity to question authority where science is concerned. Furthermore, the idea that they should work 9 hour days of physical labour and then come home and devote their time to learning about these things in order to understand policy about important issues like global warming is both unreasonable and, frankly, insulting. If you can’t explain this shit to these people in a way they understand, don’t get uppity that they aren’t willing to put the time into learning your shit properly. They’re busy, and their reasons for being busy are just as valid as yours. I would go further and say that most scientists don’t have a clue about how typesetting works (that’s why LateX was invented!) and would get quite miffed if they got an email from their publisher saying “we can’t be bothered fixing up the typesetting in your paper so that it can be legible in print. You should have learnt this stuff. Your paper is going to look like shit.” Life is too big to learn everything, and this is why we have specialization. Expecting everyone to engage with your trivial little skillset[1] is called “arrogance” in the real world.
So, I don’t think this is how ordinary people should interact with science. In a functioning society, ordinary people should be able to assume that scientists are working for the good of all, that government funds are expended on science in a way that is somehow subject to reasonable oversight and judgement, that experts translate this stuff into public policy, and that ordinary people with no science background can trust that their political representatives are handling the science in a way that is open, rational and coherent. With proper governance structures they can have mild confidence that science is being done ethically and to certain basic standards of intellectual rigor, and with a professional and well-run media they can have some confidence that the popularization of science doesn’t also debase and ruin it. In this sense, while “appeal to authority” is not part of the scientific method it is very much part of how we the public interact with and make decisions about the implications of the scientific method for policy. If 97% of climate scientists say the earth is warming through human influence, then the public should be able to be confident that this means mitigation needs to be debated. If doctors say vaccination for mumps, measles and rubella is needed at a certain age, we should be able to go along with it because we trust that those doctors came to that position through a transparent, ethical process of scientific inquiry, and this position only entered practical health policy through a well-governed and robust process of policy development. We should not have to follow the chain of logic, statistics and biological science that led to this decision in order to support it.
This process by which people actually engage with science in practice is the reason that ideologically-determined views of science are both unavoidable and necessary. Left-wing or working class people will trust that the science minister they voted in from the labour party interprets science into policy in a way that is both a) in the interests of all of society and b) in their class interests; similarly right-wing or rich people will assume that the science minister they voted in will interpret science into policy in a way that represents their love of the free market and eating puppies while kittens cry. This is both inevitable and right (except for the kittens crying). The breakdown of political responses to climate change and the acrimonious debate surrounding it has not occurred because ordinary people failed to follow the scientific method (or did, and found it wanting); it has occurred because a certain part of the political scene in the rich west has abandoned its responsibilities to its electors and started lying to them about a fundamentally important issue. This is a failure of governance and ethics on the part of our leaders, not a failure of ordinary people to engage in scientific critique.
Provided their political representatives hold their best interests at heart, people can be as ignorant as sin about science, and still see good scientific outcomes without even knowing that there is such a thing as “the scientific method.” Conversely, when our political representatives go feral on us and refuse to act on science that is compelling and urgent, it doesn’t matter how educated and engaged ordinary people are – we’re toast. This is why the global warming issue is not being addressed, and in my opinion (as I hope to show in my next post) there is absolutely no lesson to be learnt about vaccination policy from the clusterfuck that is global warming. And in any of these scientific debates, the expectation that ordinary people should engage with science rather than judging it through reference to their authority figures is simultaneously arrogant, unrealistic and ignorant.
—
fn1: “Skillset” is one of my most hated words, and I use it here to be deliberately insulting
The recent outbreak of measles in the USA has brought on an epidemic of Republican anti-science blathering, this time focused on vaccination. First we had Chris Christie saying measles vaccination should be optional, then Rand Paul putting his libertarian principles where his mouth is and declaring all Americans should be free to give each other smallpox; now the National Review Online has stepped into the fray with the rather contradictory policy advice that vaccination obviously works but should be voluntary (and thus, in the case of measles, almost certainly be rendered useless).
Vaccination policy is one of those areas that is ripe for Republican chaos. As the National Review observes, it involves “elites” (a perjorative deployed in this case to describe doctors) making decisions about what parents should do, and pushing for strong laws to ensure that everyone does what they’re supposed to. Like public education, it is only of value if the overwhelming majority of people do what the “elites” want. In this case, we can calculate mathematically what proportion of the population need to do what they’re told in order to prevent the spread of disease and, unfortunately for libertarians everywhere, the required proportion for measles and whooping cough is so high as to require even strict religious types and conspiracy theorists to obey if we want to prevent everyone getting the disease. This article from the Bulletin of the WHO makes the case for herd immunity, which in the case of measles requires greater than 95% of the population be vaccinated. Allowing parental opt-outs is going to rapidly get the proportion of children vaccinated below this threshold, especially in a society where many people can’t afford medical care. This is particularly likely for measles, mumps and rubella, since the Andrew Wakefield scandal has put the fear of God (well, autism) into parents in the UK and the USA, leading to precipitous falls in vaccination rates for these conditions. Indeed, the UK is now experiencing endemic measles after a long period of only having imported cases, and recent epidemics can almost certainly be traced to the cohort of children who were not vaccinated in the years after the Wakefield scandal. Elimination of these diseases requires strong pressure for all parents to vaccinate their children, and in rare cases these children will experience usually minor side effects. We all literally have to take one for the team, because those black-helicopter “elites” at the WHO tell us to. It’s a Republican’s nightmare.
But Republicans never used to be so fragile about science. This rash of equivocal statements from potential presidential contenders and their lackeys in the media is a new phenomenon. I have a feeling that the Republicans are lurching slowly towards a new orthodoxy of denialism, to add to their creationism and global warming denialism: anti-vaccination ideology. I hope I’m wrong, but I have a suspicion that this next denialist lurch is going to be inevitable given three potent forces driving modern Republican political ideology: populist anti-government rhetoric, potent sexual morals, and a virulent anti-science culture.
The modern Republicans are steeped in anti-science through their long association with the tobacco lobby, anti-environmentalism in the service of corporate interests, and their deep commitment to global warming denialism. US libertarian and right-wing politics is notable for its foolish fixation on DDT built on a foundation of false attacks on Rachel Carson, its hatred of the clean air act, its increasingly fantasist opposition to the science of global warming, and its strict libertarian stance on smoking. Indeed, the link between these ideological strands is hardly surprising given that big tobacco has funded the network of climate denial and anti-environmentalist organizations for years. But as this web of denialism expands, and newer activists grow up and learn their trade in a political environment that is suffused with not just the rhetoric of anti-science activism but also with a deep disrespect for scientists and the scientific process, it is hardly surprising that the Republican political world will become vulnerable to new forms of anti-scientific crusade. Many Republicans seem to be opposed to any form of scientific research, not just that which directly threatens business. How can we forget Senator McCain’s derision for a study of the DNA of bears? It’s easy to imagine that the post-tea party Republican party is easily fooled by anti-science rhetoric posing as scientific critique.
I think this toxic atmosphere turned its sights on vaccination science proper for the first time when the HPV vaccine was introduced, and vaccination got its full attention for the first time. This happened because the HPV vaccine is aimed at a sexually transmitted disease, that is only harmful to women, and in order to prevent this disease one needs to vaccinate girls before they become sexually active. Somewhat alarmingly for those in our community who want to pretend that their daughters are all good little girls, the policy therefore requires vaccination at a surprisingly young age, the implication being that good little American girls might be getting laid rather early. This immediately drew the ire of the sexually conservative wing of the Republican party and associated organizations like the Family Research Council. Initial objections were based on sexual morality, but it entered Republican politics during the primary season for the 2012 presidential election. By this time arguments against the HPV vaccine had become more nuanced, as for example in this National Review piece where the author tries to argue that HPV is different to measles because it is intentionally transmitted and rare (wrong!) and questions why only girls get it, as if this is some evidence of a sexual conspiracy by liberals (in fact this policy is followed because the science suggests it is sufficient to prevent cancer, and more cost-effective). However, in the modern world debates on health policy inevitably require some kind of scientific rhetoric, so by the time of this primary season Michele Bachman had found the spurious scientific objection that it causes mental retardation. In four years opposition to the vaccine had gone from a purely sexual-morality-based principle to a general scientific critique of the safety of the vaccine and the validity and necessity of the policy. All these “science”-based arguments are wrong, but how is a modern Republican to know? They have a kneejerk distrust of scientists and they are so negative about science that it’s hard to believe they would understand or accept any science they read. So of course people who want to object to the vaccine on principle but feel the need to cloak their opposition in scientific rhetoric are going to be willing to believe any rubbish they’re fed.
Finally, overlaid on this mixture of christian anti-sex moralizing and distrust of science we have the libertarian arguments about agency and control over one’s individual choices. For most moderns, health continues to be seen as an individual choice, and decisions about healthcare are things that we take for ourselves when we are sick. Vaccination policy is the exact opposite of this: it concerns actions taken with our bodies when we are well to protect others. It’s all too easy for libertarians to fall prey to conspiracy theories and bad science where vaccination policy is concerned because it just doesn’t sit comfortably with their ideology. So the trifecta is complete, and the entire ideological sweep of the Republican party is vulnerable to anti-vaccination claptrap.
If my theory is correct, then we should expect to see more of this kind of rhetoric as Republican primary season heats up, and we should also expect to see the typical Republican approach to undoing long-standing laws they don’t like: administrative procedures to make them too difficult to enforce, followed by court challenges rather than direct political debate. If we start to see that happen then I think we need to throw vaccination into the large and growing dustbin of sane and rational policies that have become too tough for the Republican machine to handle – along with gun control, universal health coverage, and global warming. Once they take the step to anti-vaccination denialism, what bridge connecting them to the science community is left to burn?
Following up on yesterday’s post about the new Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, today I investigated his involvement in computer game economics a little more. I found this article by Brad Plumer, written for the Washington Post in 2012, which describes the growing role of economists in computer gaming. Modern online multiplayer computer games are now so complex that they have their own economies, and small decisions by the game company can have major effects on the economies operating in the game and, by extension through the money players invest in some products, on the real world economy. The decisions can be political decisions – such as a decision by Second Life to ban certain kinds of gambling – or they can be god like interventions, such as when the people running Eve Online decide to change the distribution of resources in their galaxy. Some companies have recognized that they need to understand the consequences of their decisions if they want to keep players happy, and the company running Eve Online appear to have led the pack by assembling a whole team of economists.
Into this fray in 2012 stepped the new Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis. Valve, the company now running Steam, wanted to join together a bunch of different games so that players could trade between game worlds. I’m not sure how this works or why one would want to do it but they seemed to think it was a good idea, but in essence what they were trying to do was set up a kind of European Union, in which different games are sovereign in their own resources and political decisions but not in their own currency. So they employed an expert on currency zone economics – Yanis Varoufakis, the new Greek finance minister. According to Varoufakis in the article, his academic colleagues
know I don’t have any actual interest in video games. But I only need to talk to them for a few minutes, and they quickly get excited, asking, ‘Well, what if you tried this . . . ?’
and I can see the appeal of this. You can run experiments, and learn about how decisions will affect the economy, which can provide useful information outside of the computer game world. Varoufakis has apparently used this to show interesting things about General Equilibrium theory, but interestingly the players quickly realize an experiment is being conducted, and game it. What does that tell us about the way ordinary people react to economic policy even when they don’t know it is coming?
Besides being a fascinating field of study in itself, this tells me interesting things about Varoufakis. While some people seem to see him as a threatening radical, and the Guardian‘s initial reaction to his appointment was to publish a whole run of “sky is falling” quotes from German bankers[1], in the world outside of politics it appears he is seen as a serious and intelligent judge of how to manage monetary unions, to the extent that people who depend on getting this right have paid him to help them do so. My guess is that his work on computer game economics will not register at all to Europe’s deep thinkers, or will even constitute a black mark against his name – further evidence he is not a “serious” economist – but it seems to me that he is someone they should listen to, and probably the only finance minister in Europe who might know something about the fundamentals of the EU process. Perhaps all of Europe could benefit from listening to the experience of Greece’s new finance Minister – if they can see past his party and their biases about Greek.
Varoufakis’s ascension to power politics in Europe also puts computer game economics in the spotlight. Maybe it’s time computer game companies started taking the possibility of economic experiments within their worlds seriously, and presenting their virtual worlds to world leaders as an opportunity to study economics in a safe environment. It appears we can learn a lot about the shortcomings of real world theories by testing how they work in worlds in which we can control the fundamentals, right down to the raw materials. There are many questions in economics that could be answered through interventions in these worlds.
My guess is that the European Union will ignore Varoufakis’s expertise, and even if they wanted to computer game companies will have little intellectual impact on the economics world, even though they offer a unique opportunity to test a wide range of economic theories. A shame, for both Europe and the economics profession. Let’s hope the Europeans listen to the economic aspirations of a bunch of dragon slayers and space pirates, and use the lessons learned to fix their most intractable problems!
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fn1: They put these on their execrable blog-formatted “live” news section, so I can’t find them or link them now. Why they thought German bankers would be objective commentators on Greek political appointments is beyond me.
As expected, Syriza have won the Greek elections, taking a near majority and forming a government with a minority right wing populist party, and so far none of my fears have been realized (yay). As expected, Syriza’s “radical” economist Yanis Varoufakis has been selected as finance minister, putting him on a direct collision course with the Troika. Varoufakis seems like an interesting guy, and it will be interesting to see what the burden of his position does to him. He is young, an academic economist until he decided to run for parliament, seems to be quite a handsome chap, and is also a dual citizen of Greece and the Duchy of Edinburgh Australia. So now it appears Australia has two finance ministers, Matthias Corman the actual finance minister of Australia who was born in Belgium and Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister who was born, somewhat surprisingly, in Greece. Yanis Varoufakis has written a book and is also a private consultant for Valve, the game company responsible for Half-Life and Steam. I wonder if he’s a gamer?
That’s a pretty interesting background and, whatever one might think of his political views, pretty solid qualifications for a finance minister. In sad comparison, Matthias Cormann has been a political apparatchik since the 1990s, has an undergraduate degree in law, and has never written anything as far as I can tell. But in addition to writing a book and some academic articles, Varoufakis also maintains a blog. He’s just like me! And in his latest post he has promised to try and keep blogging while working as a minister, which I suspect makes him the first ever blogger finance minister. This potentially means we are going to get some kind of real-time coverage of how and what the finance minister of Greece is thinking as he negotiates with the EU, IMF and ECB on the tricky issue of Greek debt. He has previously written alternative solutions to the problems of public debt in the EU, which seem to have worked their way into The Economist. His blog is a pretty interesting read, and if he does manage to find time to maintain it while managing his new position I think it will make a fascinating and unique contribution to both the blogosphere and the disciplines of economics and politics.
This also gets me thinking: will there come a day when an active role-player gets into the halls of power, and chooses not to stop gaming? Imagine if they turned up at conferences, and you could role-play with the US president … (I bet there’d be no rules-lawyering at that table! “Why can’t I get +2? It’s in the rules!” “I am the president of the USA, you get whatever bonus I give you!”) Or if they were a regular commenter at an RPG forum, posting in between meetings with heads of state to complain about why Bards are the worst character class. Maybe they could run online role-playing sessions where they run adventures in all the trouble spots they’ve invaded and messed up, until it gets to the point that the electorate start thinking the President is only starting new wars so that he can have new campaign settings. That may seem crazy, but it seems like a better rationale for a war than the gloop we were actually fed before Gulf War 2…
Greece has been suffering difficult economic times, and it seems obvious that something has to be done. Austerity has failed Europe dismally, and the economic pressures it is creating are being released through politics of the worst kind, as extremist right wing parties grow in influence across the continent, perhaps most especially in Greece. The search for a solution is going to be really challenging for Syriza, and it is my hope that they will find a solution that makes Greeks better off, and averts the social catastrophe they seem to be sliding towards. Yanis Varoufakis seems like a man well-placed to take on the job, and it is my hope that he can find success despite the challenges he faces. I also hope he can find the time to blog about it, so we can get some insight into what happens both behind the scenes and behind the man. Good luck, Dr. Varoufakis, and I hope more bloggers in future (and eventually, more gamers) can get to the halls of power.
And remember, if you find Greek debt challenges too tough, you can always come to Australia and help out our government…
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is now a well-accepted aspect of modern soldiering, and it seems to be now recognized that earlier disorders of soldiers such as shell shock that might once have been described as cowardice or weakness were in fact manifestations of the same condition. I did not know, however, that there are accounts from ancient times of this phenomenon occurring amongst soldiers from very different types of warfare, and it isn’t the case that PTSD is a function only of modern warfare. Today I discovered an article describing symptoms of PTSD in Assyrian warriors, from Iraq between 1300 and 600 BC, which were taken from cuneiform tablets. Apparently the Assyrians had a form of military service, with military age males spending one of every three years of their service in combat, and the Assyrians kept extensive documentation of both their campaigns and their medical practice. The article, published in the journal Early Science and Medicine, reports on symptoms of PTSD (especially seeing ghosts and nightmares) taken from some of these tablets. It also gives a bit of detail about Assyrian medical practice, and the importance of diagnosis to Assyrian doctors. The article is a bit jumbled up and confusing, but it makes the case that PTSD is not just associated with modern, extremely lethal soldiering, but is associated in the case of these ancient warriors with fear of death, the sight of colleagues dying, and also the fear of slow death from injury.
The findings themselves aren’t groundbreaking, but I am interested in the general finding of PTSD in ancient soldiers and its documentation. As role-players, we often play warriors engaged in quite brutal old-fashioned combat, often engaged with horrible things from beyond the grave, but in the older games there is no mechanism for the gradual erosion of confidence and strength that constant terror of this kind might cause – indeed, the classic model of gaining XP from experience suggests that our soldiers only gain in strength from continued exposure to slaughter and near death (or, in many cases, death and resurrection!) Of course some of the more modern games have mechanisms for insanity and humanity loss, but these are generally primarily triggered by exposure to sinister magic and beasts from beyond, not from the “mundane” horrors of seeing your friends dismembered, clubbed to death, burnt alive or eaten by zombies. Upon reflection it seems obvious that this would tend to wear one down, and it appears that published accounts from people who did a lot of stabbing, smashing and clubbing to death support the idea that it is a disturbing and sometimes enervating experience.
Some of the symptoms are also quite profound: blindness or deafness, sudden weakness, and loss of sleep. It’s easy to imagine that in a classic D&D setting the inability to sleep would be crippling for a wizard. Inserting some kind of simple mechanic for PTSD from continued battlefield exposure – perhaps ramping it up for multiple back to back battles – would lead to a quite interesting change in play style and get people rethinking battlefield strategies, especially if even “mundane” combat could bring it about, and if it was related more to the length of exposure than the intensity. Players would reconsider frontal assault tactics if there was the possibility that their wizard would suddenly freak out and decide to blow himself up … or their cleric became a shivering wreck incapable of healing them.
I guess we have a tendency to think about psychological health of our characters only in terms of their exposure to hideous dark secrets from beyond the veil. We imagine ourselves as heroes whose basic psychology and morality can only be tempered with by the gods and dark magics. Apparently, and not really surprisingly, the reality is rather different. It would be interesting to see how the tone and style of classic fantasy play would change if it were modified to make the psychology, as well as physiology, of its heroes vulnerable to the slings and arrows of their horde of enemies…
Today a friend took me, without explanation, to see Sophie Calle’s The Unsold (売り残し) at Koyanagi Gallery in Ginza. I don’t often attend art shows – let alone modern art installations – and I almost never visit Ginza, so this was a real novelty for me, but despite my initial misgivings it was definitely worth it. Here is my review.
When I entered the gallery my first glance revealed an installation of everyday objects, including two dresses, that to my jaundiced and cynical eye immediately resembled Tracey Emin’s execrable bed-type stuff, and I was immediately disappointed. However, right at the door there is an introductory explanation (in Japanese and English) of the premise of the work, which changed my mind. Basically, three artists set up a flea market in the grounds of Yasukuni Jinja. They laid out their wares on three squares of cloth, as shown in the picture. One (I don’t recall which) sold worthless every day items, to each of which was attached a story that actually happened (i.e. a real story) with some relationship to the item but in which the item itself was not directly involved (so e.g. the typewriter on sale is not necessarily the typewriter from the story). Another sold a mixture of semi-antiques (cutely mis-spelled as “semi-antics” in this exhibition) and ordinary items, to which were attached completely fake stories with apparent emotional content[1]. The third sold actual antiques, and one of his original photos. For example one person was selling a completely normal bra for about 25,000 yen, and another person was selling a picture of a psycho-analyst (freud?) for 38,000 yen. One of the antiques was an ancient ceramic hot water bottle, and the picture was a pretty cool sea/sky thing. Each artist catalogued what they sold and the amount of money they sold it for – which was surprisingly large. Apparently an American tour guide passed by as this sale was going on and told his charges “there is nothing here, ignore it.” (Cute). The explanation finishes with the simple, curt phrase “These are the unsold.” So the exhibition consists of the material that was not sold.
This exhibition consists of three pieces of cloth on which the remaining items are laid out, attached to each of which is a tag with the price and the story. Behind each installation, on the wall, is a photo of the original setup, so you can see what was sold. On the opposite wall are the tags for the sold items, with their corresponding story. These tags have no information about the item to which they correspond, so you have to wander across to the original picture and guess. The stories are really interesting and believable, though whether they are actually true or not I have no clue. Investigating on wikipedia I discovered that the Eiffel tower story is true, and just as unbelievable as it sounds – Sophie Calle certainly knows how to do crazy things (I can’t remember if the item attached to this story was sold or not).
I’m an uncultured barbarian, so I have no idea what this installation was trying to tell me about whatever, but I thought it was really cool. Trying to understand why people bought these ludicrously overpriced objects because of their vague stories, or didn’t buy some object even though its story was cool, was an exercise in intruding into someone else’s private life. The stories themselves were fascinating, disconnected monologues, none of which I believed (but some of which I have subsequently learnt are real!) I can’t speak for the Japanese but the English used in the broader narrative descriptions – what the exhibition is about, how the artists met – is clear, sparse and strong. The structure of the main introductory sign and its finishing statement, “These are the Unsold” is particularly powerful, and suits the style of the exhibition. It’s a simple idea done well, and it holds your attention. Why did the passersby leave the charred bedspring and buy the useless typewriter? This, I cannot fathom. I wouldn’t buy the red bucket some guy pissed in, but why would someone else buy the bottle. Also the story of the horn is acutely sad and the horn is quite cheap, but apparently un-sellable. What does that mean?
I didn’t know anything about Sophie Calle before this exhibition, but reading her Wikipedia page I get the impression that she is a powerful, prodigious and generally unethical talent. My friend has also seen the exhibit Take Care of Yourself, which as the quoted reviewer says seems to be both shallow and deeply engaging. Her attempt to get blind people to define beauty sounds like it has the potential to be very powerful (I don’t draw any conclusions!) and the work where she gets a guy to shadow her and then presents pictures of herself sounds really interesting. Invading others’ privacy, not so much. How come medical researchers have to get ethics approval, but French artistes can pursue some guy across the world, or hijack a stolen diary for money?
Don’t answer that.
Anyway, I’d never heard of Sophie Calle before today and I think her work is a genuinely interesting and challenging example of modern art at its finest. I don’t know what she’s trying to say with this exhibition and I can’t really say what I think of it, but it’s really cool. It would be better if she followed it up with some kind of article in a peer-reviewed journal giving her conclusion about what the purchases and non-purchases mean, instead of leaving it to an ignorant rube like me to try and understand, and if she had found a way to summarize what was bought and wasn’t (e.g. rankings with stories, or a website where you can see all the objects with what was bought and what wasn’t, and its story) then the exhibition would have been even cooler. But despite these missed opportunities this exhibition is very cool, and in general I have to say Sophie Calle’s work seems pretty interesting. I hope more of her stuff comes to Japan, and I recommend visiting it if you are in Japan, or keeping an eye out for her work if you are not.
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fn1: I may be mis-remembering the exact nature of what these items were, but I hope you get the general gist.
Compromise and Conceit 