Going beyond “why is this true?”: improving generic feedback on analysis

One of the most frustrating pieces of feedback to get as a debater is “you needed to analyse that more/better”. When you ask what that means, you’re often told that when you make an argument, you need to answer two questions: “Why is this true?” and “Why is it important?”. If you enquire a little further, you’ll find that those questions need to be asked constantly, at every level of your argument, until you bottom out at some piece of analysis that can’t really be disputed.

Two quick things that I want to add that I think can help to elucidate this a little bit for those who might be struggling to implement this feedback and improve.

What’s the difference between “assertion” and “analysis”?

First, there’s no qualitative distinction between “analysis” and “an assertion”. An assertion is something you say that’s “unproven”. What constitutes being proven (in debating) is: does this seem like the reasonable person listening would instinctively disagree with it or intuitively think it’s incorrect?

Some things are harder to prove than others. If you say “on our side one person dies, but on yours, five people die”, then you don’t also need to add “and death is bad”, or provide reasons that death might be bad. Why? Well, both sides of the debate are using the same metric to judge the outcome: death. But also, we intuitively understand that death is bad. If you said “on our side, one person is badly maimed, but on your side one person is killed”, then again, we intuit that the death is worse. To undo that intuition would require a lot of work, probably using rhetoric to convince us that the life of the maimed person is so transformed by their experience that it would be better if they had simply died.

Analysis, then, is just a number of assertions stacked on top of one another in a trenchcoat. If the bottom assertion is one that everyone in the debate agrees upon, then that’s fine. If, however, your bottom assertion gets contested – say, someone decides to argue that death might not be that bad after all – then you’ll need to add another link underneath it in order for your trenchcoat-wearing argument not to topple over.

Calling something an “assertion” is a rhetorical tool used to say that it needs further substantiation. Imagine putting on an Australian accent and saying, “Speaker, they told us that many people would die. What they failed to tell us at any point was why death is bad. They simply asserted it.” All you’re doing is saying that you wish to contest the premise that death is bad.

So: assertions are just individual lines, stacked on top of one another they make analysis, and that in turn forms an argument when it’s directed at making an overarching point.

Going beyond “why is this true?” and “why is it important?”

The second thing is arguably more important. Let’s imagine you’re proposing the motion “This House Would ban religious schools”. You want to make the argument that these institutions are bad for students. If you stand up and say, “religious schools are bad for students, and therefore we should ban them”, that’s an assertion (see above). I tell you in feedback, “you needed to analyse that better. When you’re constructing the argument in prep time, ask yourself ‘why is this true?’”. That’s not particularly helpful, because I’m telling you to ask that question about an argument without any kind of specificity.

One way around this is to tell speakers to go for an actor-centred prep time. Think about the different groups affected by the motion, and then think up arguments that apply to them, and then ask “why is this true?”. That’s fine, however, there’s another way of going about this which might be more helpful (if you want to know why, that’s a subject for another post).

Instead of just asking why something is true, add in a few extra sub-questions. For whom is it true? Where is it true? To what extent is it true? When is it true? Each of those questions should spark a number of trains of thought. In our religious schools example, the first question would open up a number of actors: LGBTQ kids, girls, kids raised in a faith from birth with no other option, kids who aren’t religious but whose parents want them to go to a good school, and kids in really extreme religions. From there, you can ask “why is this true?” for each of those sets of people. To what extent allows you to demarcate and delimit the scope of the impact upon each set of people: it might be that the effects upon a queer kid in a Catholic school are quite severe, for instance, whereas the effects of a moderate Anglican school on a girl might be less impactful. When is this true allows you to access time-scales and think about whether impacts accrue to people immediately, or whether they might come about in their future. Where questions allow you to situate the analysis, both geographically (in which country, where in that country, etc) and in contextual terms (in the school, at home, at church, and so on). 

Asking these extra questions allows you to add a great deal of extra depth and breadth to the arguments you’re making. It’s essentially a “what, where, when, why, how” set of questions, but incorporated into the framework of trying to generate arguments that work in a debate. It’s not just “why is this true?”, but a whole set of other prompting questions that let you think deeply and carefully about how, where, when and why different motions will affect different sets of people.

Two problems with British Parliamentary debating

I have a lot of Hot Takes About Debating that I need to put out there. I’m trepidatious, because in writing a commentary about debating you open yourself up to the criticism (often unspoken) that you’re setting yourself up as someone important who thinks they’re in a position to make a critique. I’m not someone who’s finalled at Worlds, and nor have I won enough other competitions that you’d consider me to be a Great Debater. Moreover, I just haven’t done hugely well at competitions in the last half a year. So when I level critiques at trends I see in the game that we’ve made a significant portion of our lives, there’s a big risk that I’m seen as bitter or not entitled to make them, or even just ignored.

Now, there’s obviously an enormous problem with the idea that we as a community only listen to critiques when they come from one of the handful of people we consider to be incredible debaters, as though they are the only people qualified to find fault and make suggestions for improvement (introducing gender pronoun policies and stricter equity policies are the two examples I can think of off the top of my head, but there are likely more). But that’s a take for another time.

Instead, here are a couple of trends that I think I’m noticing in British Parliamentary debating right now. It’s entirely possible they are limited to the IONA circuit, but I’d be delighted to hear input from people elsewhere. I have more, but i’ll start with these two.

N.B. When I use the term “good teams” here, I’m referring to teams who have a reputation for being good, rather than all teams who are good at debating. This is because there are a great many speakers and teams who aren’t recognised by judges as being as good as they are, and the points i’m making here are often about teams or speakers being able to get away with things as a result of judges’ perception that they’re good.

The slow, sad death of taking a point of information in back half. 

Good teams are able to get away with neither asking for, nor taking when offered, POIs, particularly in extension speeches. Even when they do take one, if they take it from Closing then they’re unlikely to ever be penalised for not sufficiently engaging with Opening. They will often deliver debate-winning material which deserves a response, but never give anyone the opportunity to engage with that material. They are invariably not penalised for this. That obviously encourages it, because why would you waste a solid minute of your speech taking and responding to a point of information when you could just fit in another minute of uninterrupted analysis?

Not to be a “back in my day” bore (especially because I only did BP sporadically during my first degree) but when I began debating there was a guideline often given in speaker and judge briefings that teams ought to take three POIs over the course of their two speeches. They would not necessarily be penalised for not doing so, but judges were advised to take into account that failing to take POIs might indicate a lack of engagement, or willingness to engage with the arguments of the other teams. Moreover, if it was obvious that a team was trying to offer a POI in response to material that might be debate-winning (whether that be constructive material, or rebuttal to that team) and the speaker refused to ever take them, then we should probably assume that the POI contained a good response to that material. It was also quite seriously looked down upon to not take a POI from an Opening team if you were in Closing. This was meant to be a way of ensuring sufficient engagement between all teams. 

Now, it seems acceptable for a good team to refuse to take any more than one POI, and because they only really need to take one, they’re rarely if ever penalised for taking it from Closing rather than Opening. That means that they can effectively lock out an Opening team without any kind of repercussions. I probably don’t need to explain why this makes the quality of debate substantially poorer, but let’s do it anyway. Closing half teams often rely on a reframing of the debate or bringing new material that is a bit Out There by comparison to the Opening half. It’s often unpredictable what they’ll come up with. Sometimes the extension will be something that legitimately was missed by the rest of the debate and is pretty important, but often it’s something that hasn’t been said because it’s actually kind of wacky or only tangentially related to the debate. Obviously there’s another team in Closing who can rebut them, but if they’re incompetent or incapable of doing so, then the only way it’s going to get pointed out is in a POI from Opening. The net effect of this is that Closing teams are able to get away with things they shouldn’t, but also judging the clashes gets a lot harder. If Closing didn’t engage with Opening through a POI or give them a chance to respond, then how you adjudicate that clash becomes significantly more subjective. If you don’t penalise Closing for not taking the POI, then that gives them a big advantage.

I probably also don’t need to explain that this problem disproportionately benefits teams who are already perceived as good, because they can get away with not taking POIs when other teams can’t. Judges either assume that they would have a good response to the POI, or just that the POI would add very little to the debate, and as such they choose to disregard it. But that means that good teams have a whole extra minute (or even two!) in their two speeches to be able to add extra analysis. It’s not just that they don’t have to engage with a tough question, it’s also that they get a bunch of extra time to make their case stronger.

It’s really unfair for some teams to be able to get away with this, but it’s also a trend that makes the quality of debating on the circuit as whole worse. Judges need to start hardening up and punishing teams who shut out the Opening half, because there’s no other way that this will change. If they didn’t take two POIs in total – one in each speech, or two in one – then we need to assume that the POI would have been a robust response to their case or their rebuttal and adjudicate accordingly. It sounds harsh, but outside of the Manchester EUDC “compulsory POI” rule I don’t see any other solution.

New (rebuttal) material in the whip.

This is likely controversial. There’s what I think is a growing trend of Closing teams backloading all of their responsive material into the whip speech. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this per se, after all the whip is meant to be entirely for framing and rebuttal. However, I think there’s a significant caveat to that: the whip should not include any new material. Given that we consider rebuttal in the extension to constitute a substantive contribution to the debate, it’s inconsistent from a judging philosophy standpoint to not consider new responses in the whip to also be new material.

How do we resolve this conundrum? It’s pretty simple. The whip is for whipping the debate. That means that responses should be using your partner’s case to beat the rest of the debate’s material. That can include weighing the impacts, framing their case out of the debate, showing how your partner’s case means that theirs can’t be true, etc. It is in my view entirely unreasonable for a whip speaker to be the first person to respond to something that came out in Opening Government with an entirely new response, for them to then not take a POI from OG to try to rebuild (because often the response will be a strawman, or something that could be rebuilt pretty easily), and for that to be enough for CO to beat OG. The reason we say that you can’t bring new material in the whip isn’t because of some weird conception of what kind of role each speaker has in the debate; it’s because nobody has the chance to respond to it. There is no meaningful difference between bringing new constructive material and new rebuttal in the whip. Use your partner’s case to beat the other teams, but don’t make the whip speech entirely a set of new responses which nobody can then engage with. At the very least make an effort to make it look like you’re using your partner’s analysis as rebuttal.

Again, the solution here is for judges to be a lot harsher about what constitutes new material from Closing. It’s not hard, but a lot of us (myself included) are guilty of the lazy thinking that says “well, they responded to it, and it sounded convincing, so I guess they won that clash”, and that should probably be fixed.

Old Cambridge Union Debate Motions, 1995-2014

Back in 2014 I was in the Cambridge Union for an extended period of time during the holidays. In order to avoid my actual job of organising debates, I spent some time going through old motions. One of the great things about old societies like the Union is that they rarely throw anything away, and so there were still a large number of extremely heavy leather-bound books containing the details of past debates.

I compiled a spreadsheet containing every debate from 2014 back to 1995 before it got to the point where I could no longer ignore my work. The spreadsheet includes the motion for the debate, who spoke on the Proposition and Opposition, how many people were in attendance (in a few instances far more than the 500 allowed in the building by fire safety regulations), and how they voted.

This morning I noticed that someone in a debating group I moderate asked how motions had changed over time. Some people managed to dig up motions from as far back as the 19th century (which I now wish I’d done back when I had the chance). Whilst I’m unable to go that far, I thought it might be nice to share the 428 motions that I archived.

Some (dis)favourites of mine:

15th June 1995: THBT Girls Seldom Make Passes at Guys Who Wear Glasses, including Peter Stringfellow and Sir Tim Rice

13th February 1996: TH has no confidence in Her Majesty’s Government’s Treatment of Women, including current Prime Minister Theresa May

5th March 1998: THBT Feminism is Corrupting the Family, including Germaine Greer

7th May 1998: THBT Staying in is the new Coming Out, including Peter Tatchell

14th November 2002: THBT Gay Rights are Family Wrongs, including Peter Hitchens

If you go through them all, you’ll likely notice a theme: anything to do with sex, relationships, LGBT issues or feminism has a tendency to get exponentially more cringeworthy as you go backwards in time.

You can find them all here. Enjoy.

 

 

Strategy for debating from Opening Government

Opening Government is dreaded by new speakers, but often loved by those who’ve been speaking for years. Intuitively, the former issue can be ascribed to the fact that you have fifteen minutes to read the motion, get to the room, figure out what the words in the motion mean, brainstorm arguments, discuss with your partner what you want to run, write your notes, and get your head into a space that’s going to allow you to give seven minutes of cogent analysis on something you often know little to nothing about.

The latter, though, takes a little more explanation. I would posit that the main reason that more experienced teams are often more positive towards OG is because of the control it grants you over the debate that’s about to happen. From the perspective of an inexperienced speaker, debating from Prime Minister amounts to giving a seven minute speech and then listening to nearly an hour of other people telling you how wrong, inadequate, shallow or offensive you were. But if you understand the motion and the clashes and trade-offs involved, it’s possible to craft a tight PM speech that is difficult to assail, dictates the course of the rest of the debate, and has material left standing even by the end of the Opposition Whip speech.

How does this work?

1. Anticipating the clashes

It’s a truism that debates always have two sides. Probably the key mistake that people make in Opening Government is that they forget this and end up proving things that are tangential to the debate or never going to be contended. The more things you say that the Opposition agree with or are happy to concede, the less time they need to spend responding to you and the more material they’re going to be able to get out. Ideally, you want the Leader of Opposition to stand up and have to spend their entire seven minutes responding to you because there’s so much to unpack.

How can you make that happen?

Let’s say the motion is THW ban zoos. You might walk into prep time and immediately start drafting arguments about cruelty to animals: you start a logical chain on why animals must have rights similar to those that humans possess based on their capacity to form and pursue preferences, experience pleasure and suffering, and possess consciousness of some kind. You adequately formulate the principle that discrimination between humans and animals purely on the basis that humans are humans amounts to speciesism, and is not a legitimate argument within the debate. You therefore say that, given animals have rights, one of those rights must be to freedom of movement and freedom from exploitation. Given that zoos amount to the enforced capture, enslavement and exploitation of animals for the purposes of entertainment, you say that we ought to ban them and allow animals to roam free.

The problem is, the Opening Opposition can then stand up and immediately concede the first four minutes of analysis that you’ve just given on animal rights. They say, “absolutely, animals have rights. We just think that we’re better able to defend those rights on our side of the house”, and then they give a list of reasons: zoos allow us to perform research to better cater not just for the animals in our care, but also for animals in the wild; there are some animals whose habitats are entirely destroyed, such that releasing them into the wild would condemn them to certain death; the educative function of zoos is what inspires children and teenagers to engage in conservationism and donate to wildlife charities; and so on.  They beat you, because they prove that they fulfil your principle better than you do.

How do you stop that from happening? Anticipate the arguments.

They could say “zoos allow us to perform research on animals”. You might pre-emptively say, “in the same way that we wouldn’t allow humans to be kept in captivity and have research performed on them for the benefit of themselves and others if they were unwilling to or incapable of consenting into it, we argue that animals – because they have the rights we outlined above – should not be instrumentalised in this way”. That then means that Opp now has to prove either that animals are dissimilar enough from humans that they don’t have the rights you stated, or that instrumentalisation of humans for research purposes is legitimate in some circumstances you outline, for some set of reasons. Both of those are harder burdens for them to take on.

To pre-empt the point about habitat destruction, you can argue that it’s not reasonable to artificially keep a species alive simply for the purpose of keeping it alive. There’s no intrinsic value to a species existing except the lives that constitute that species, and as such we would allow those animals to live out their days on a reserve or similar before shutting down those facilities.

Then finally, you can run some mitigation on the educative potential of zoos, pointing out that zoos are not available to the entirety of the population, including those who live in rural areas or can’t afford the time or money to go. Comparatively, things like documentaries allow you to see the existence of animals in their natural habitats, and also to witness first hand the way those habitats are being destroyed. To the extent that there’s an education, it’s not something that’s exclusive to zoos.

None of these responses is perfect. Rather, they’re simply enough to make it much more difficult for the opposition to dance around you, accept your analysis and then use it to bolster their own arguments. By anticipating the arguments they’re going to bring, you’re able to make their job a lot harder, and make it a lot simpler for your arguments to stand the test of the whole debate.

2. Making tactical concessions

You can’t win every argument. If you try to fight every battle, everywhere, all at once, you’re probably going to lose some of them, and sometimes the time that you plough in to trying to win some of the clashes is time that would have been better spent shoring up some of your other arguments or impacting them further.

That means that sometimes making concessions can be a good strategy. For example, in the debate above Opp has the ability to point out that some species have had their natural habitats destroyed, such that they would die out if they were placed back there. This is something that’s a little difficult to contest (though I’ve given a reasonable attempt above). Instead, you might want to tactically concede this. You can say something like, “of course, it’s regrettable that some species are unlikely to be able to survive on their own in the wild. However, species become extinct all the time: there’s no reason that we ought to value the existence of a species in and of itself. In addition, this is true only of a very small number of species, and their habitats having been destroyed they will never be able to go back into the wild, and so any of their number who exist will do so solely in captivity of the rest of their days. We don’t think that’s any kind of life for them, and so this is a harm we’re content to swallow.” Not only does this allow you to move on to other things, it also makes it relatively difficult for the opposition to contest the claim: they’re going to have to re-assert a lot of ground there in order to make the point theirs. They’d have to show that these animals do have a life worth living in zoos, or that their habitats have a plausible route to rehabitability, or that there is some other value to having them there that’s more important than just entertainment and education for kids. Given that you’ve also incorporated some weighting (showing that it’s a relatively unimportant impact), they would also have to work to make it seem important in the debate again.

Again, this is not a perfect solution, but it’s one that dramatically increases the amount of time that the other teams in the debate would have to devote to a point in order for it to be credited to them, and in turn reduces the amount of time they have to make arguments that will stick.

3. Incorporating weighing and trade-offs

One of the most significant ways in which you can improve the tightness of your case and make it easier for judges to weigh it against other material in the debate is to incorporate some analysis of the trade-offs that are present in the debate, and show how they fall on your side.

For example, let’s consider “THW introduce eye-in-the-sky policing in urban areas with high crime”, which is essentially about having drone patrols above rough neighbourhoods. There’s a very obvious trade-off in this debate of liberty for security. If you’re on government, you’re going to have to navigate that trade-off, and show two things: first, why security is a more important good than liberty, broadly construed; and second, why even if you value liberty above security, you should still support this policy as it facilitates greater liberty overall.

So you might say, for example, that having extremely effective surveillance systems in place is (i) a disincentive to crime, because you’re aware you might be caught; (ii) makes crimes easier to solve and criminals easier to catch, which in turn bolsters (i) because criminals think they’re more likely to get caught; and (iii) that crime makes people feel unsafe in their neighbourhood even if they’re not directly affected by it. The latter then feeds into an analysis of rights, that essentially says that the ability to act unsurveilled is less important than the ability to feel safe on your own streets, because bodily autonomy is the right that facilitates all others (including freedom of expression and the right to privacy, which are presumably the two that you might be at risk of losing). Moreover, you can then say that if this policy is successful (which hopefully you’ll have proven it will be) at reducing crime, then this will in turn reduce the need for this policy, which will in turn  facilitate greater liberty in the future.

Here you’ve incorporated into your argument both trade-offs (“we’re happy to trade off some of the right to privacy for people to feel safer”) and weighting (“security facilitates liberty, so it’s more important”). This makes your speech much tighter, as now an opp team will have to unpick a number of different things and show: (i) why liberty is more important than security; (ii) why the policy is unlikely to be successful; (iii) why there might be some other consideration (e.g. discriminatory policing) that makes liberty particularly important for some group; and so on.

4. Anticipating clarifications

One of the most unnerving things that can happen to you in PM is for CO to stand up and ask you a point of clarification about something you hadn’t even considered. You then flub some kind of answer, and they smile to themselves, safe in the knowledge that they’re really going to screw you in about 30 minutes’ time.

There’s no hard and fast way to avoid this: even the best debaters sometimes get caught off guard by some clever chink in their case’s armour. But broadly, you can start to try to anticipate these questions before you get them. From there, you can either build the responses into your mech, or you can just leave it for when you get a point of clarification and look like you really know your stuff.

How do you do that?

Essentially, it involves asking yourself and your partner what the most plausible questions might be. You simply need to brainstorm potential issues that might come up, and how you can deal with them. For example, if you’re banning zoos, are you also banning nature reserves and safari parks? If you’re introducing drone policing in high crime areas, how are you defining high crime? What kinds of powers will those drones have? How will the evidence that they collect be stored and used? These are all questions that you need to have some kind of answer to, because they can be fuel for “gotcha” questions from the other side. But in addition to that, they can also serve some use to you: you can make your case as airtight as possible by leaving little room for things to go wrong. One of the key argumentative strategies you have to pursue from opposition is to say “this simply won’t work, and it will make things worse”. It’s much harder to make that argument stick when the Opening Government team have very clearly laid out the mechanism by which something will work, and then shown why that makes it likely that it’ll achieve the ends that they want it to achieve.

How to debate Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and the dark web

Recently there have been a number of debates set about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. These are technologies that rely upon another technology called the blockchain. I’ve seen at least one instance of a team trying to fiat out discussion of the blockchain and instead confine the debate to cryptocurrencies alone. This is not a legitimate definition. Bitcoin, and all other cryptocurrencies, only exists as a result of a blockchain: it’s the part of the architecture of the blockchain that incentivises people to donate their computing power to keeping the blockchain running and working. That means that the two technologies are inseparable, and so you can’t have a discussion about cryptos and their implications without also discussing the potential applications of blockchain for e.g. circumventing censorship and removing middle-men from transactions.

This guide should give you a decent understanding of the structure of a cryptocurrency and the potential applications of blockchain. It should also give a decent outline of current issues facing this field, before going on to give a brief explanation of the dark web and the ways in which it has been used – historically and currently – to facilitate the sales of illicit materials.

Before reading this, it would be a good idea to read this primer on encryption, as all of the technologies below depend upon it and it’s often misunderstood.

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Structure of a cryptocurrency

Blockchain

A blockchain is a distributed public database that keeps a permanent record of digital transactions.

Imagine you’re a company in the era before computers and you have a ledger in which you keep a log of all of your transactions. Anyone who came along would be able to look at that ledger and check those transactions: where money came from and went to, what was sold and for how much, and whether everything added up.

The blockchain is like a ledger, but it’s distributed across all computers that use a cryptocurrency like bitcoin. In order to mine bitcoin, or do a bitcoin transaction (in most circumstances), you have to download the entire blockchain onto your computer. That means that, unlike a normal ledger, the blockchain is stored across a lot of computers, and is thus decentralised and can be accessed and inspected by anyone.

Every “block” in the blockchain contains a record of recent transactions, a reference to the block that came immediately before it, and an answer to a difficult mathematical puzzle (see below).

The way that blockchain is used to support bitcoin (or any given cryptocurrency) is through the decentralisation mentioned above.

Whereas with a normal currency, there will be a central body that authorises your transactions and the currency they’re performed in (for example withdrawing money from a bank, which was in turn issues by a central bank which sets interest rates), with bitcoin there is no central authorising body.

Instead, the authorisation (the process that checks and checks again to make sure that a transaction was correctly conducted (there was no fraud, the currency is real, and went from one specified address to another) is done by computers. That authorisation requires a massive amount of computing power, because in order to authorise the transaction, a very complicated mathematical problem must be solved (to prevent the aforementioned problems of fraud etc).

Where does that computing power come from?

There has to be some incentive to place your computer at the disposal of the blockchain: the calculations are time and processor intensive, and that means they cost money in electricity bills to both power and cool the computers involved.

The incentive is bitcoin. Individuals who devote their computing resources to the network compete to validate bitcoin transactions in each block by solving the complex mathematical problem associated with that block. If they solve the problem and validate a bitcoin block, they are rewarded with bitcoin, which then goes into their wallet.

The power of this decentralised network is that power, economic value and governance are distributed among the network’s stakeholders (miners and consumers who use the currency) rather than concentrated in a single organisation (banks, governments and accountants). Anyone can own and transfer assets digitally without a third party.

Protocols

A protocol is a set of rules that nodes in a network use when they transmit information to one another, specifying how interactions work between them. Examples include the Internet Protocol (IP) or Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which governs how messages are exchanged at the packet level on the internet.

Protocols in blockchains are the “cryptoeconomic rules” that are enforced by a blockcain in order to maintain distributed consensus across the blockchain’s network of users.

These  cryptoeconomic rules govern a decentralised digital economy that:

a. Uses public key cryptography for authentication

b. Has economic incentives to make sure the rules are followed.

Tokens (bitcoin etc)

Bitcoin is an example of a token – the asset that incentivises the rules being followed on the blockchain. A token is built on top of the blockchain, and is an asset that someone owns that can be transferred to someone else.

Bitcoin is an intrinsic token – it’s built directly on top of the bitcoin blockchain. Other tokens (Monero, Litecoin) are built by “forking” the bitcoin blockchain (taking the original blockchain source code, which is freely available, copying it, and building a new token on top of it) or by building an entirely new blockchain and then having tokens built on top of that (e.g. Ethereum).

Bitcoin was originally envisioned as a system where anyone could mine using their personal PCs to earn some cash by supporting the network. 

As it became more valuable, people realised that the mining could be done more efficiently with custom built circuits called application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).

These ASICs are mass-produced and owned by a few very large companies that house them in air-conditioned warehouses and make their money primarily from mining cryptocurrency. These ASICs are capable of computing the necessary problems so much more efficiently than PCs that PC miners soon couldn’t produce enough bitcoin to even cover their electricity bills.

A number of forks have been executed with an aim to decentralise the mining process and put the power to mine back in the hands of individual users (e.g. Bitcoin Gold, launched in August 2017).

By analogy, you can think of tokens as currency and protocols as monetary policy.

Main takeaway here: every token is based on some underlying blockchain.

 

Application Layer

Money is only one application of the blockchain. There are an enormous number of potential uses for the blockchain for both protocols and applications.

Protocols developed for cryptocurrencies have the potential to solve problems with centralisation that are endemic to the internet.

Examples include protocols for payments, identity, domain name systems, cloud computing, reputation systems, etc.

Many of these systems are currently highly centralised through e.g. Paypal, Google and Amazon, and there are no defaults or standards on the Web.

Decentralised Applications (dApps) can be developed using the blockchain.

What does this look like?

Bitcoin uses a scripting system for transactions on the bitcoin blockchain. That script defines the requirements that recipient has to meet in order to gain access to the transferred bitcoins. In a typical transaction, the sender has to provide a public key which matches the destination address included in the script, and a signature to show evidence of the private key that corresponds to the public key they just provided.

There is flexibility in the parameters that can be sent with a transaction, e.g. a script that makes it only valid if there are two private keys. This means that we can move money or information around  without requiring us to trust some third party to follow a set of rules. We just trust the code.

The main idea behind dApps is that there is a decentralised set of rules that define an application, sitting on a public and decentralised blockchain instead of a central server owned by a large entity like Facebook or Amazon. This enables the application to be governed by autonomy and be resilient to censorship.

Problem – where are the apps?

Bitcoin, since its release in 2009, has yet to become much more than a store of value and a speculative investment.

There are wallets and exchanges like Coinbase, GDAX and Kraken.

Likewise, there are dark net markets (most of which are now compromised or shut down) which have processed billions of dollars in drug sales.

Blockchain lacks developer friendliness and tooling, which makes it hard to program applications with it.

Building decentralised applications with strong network effects is hard.

Network effects are when a product or service increases in value as more people use it (think Facebook).

Those network effects help build better products and services, but there’s a chicken and egg problem with building the network.

It’s hard to get both investors and product builders involved in, say, a decentralised crowdfunding platform because there is no easy framework or tools provided to drive adoption of the network.

Decentralisation alone isn’t all that great.

We have existing apps that work perfectly fine: Kickstarter for crowdfunding, Transferwise for remittances, Paypal and Venmo and Square for payments.

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Enter Ethereum

Ethereum was launched in 2015, built on its own blockchain technology. It’s intended to include a built-in usable programming language which would allow anyone to write smart contracts and dApps.

You don’t need to know the details, but the key point here is that Ethereum allows developers to develop any type of application, safely and reliably, with no centralised governance.

What could this look like?

Smart contracts – like a regular contract between people or entities, but run entirely on the blockchain, removing humans from the loop and making them automated, open, secure and trustless.

Decentralised organisation – an organisation that runs based on rules encoded within smart contracts.

In addition, Ethereum allows additional protocols and tokens to be launched very easily. This gives rise to the ICO, or Initial Coin Offering, where tokens are sold off as a means of kickstarting an application.

Initial Coin Offering (ICOs)

Comparable to an Initial Public Offering (IPO) – when a company goes public by selling shares to investors, who then sell to the public on the securities exchange.

ICOs are used to raise capital, just like IPOs.

KEY DIFFERENCE: IPOs are regulated by the SEC and have a set of legal requirements and a formal process for how they’re done. ICOs are currently completely unregulated.

In an ICO, a party offers investors some units of a new cryptocurrency (tokens) for a certain price, that can then later be exchanged with other cryptocurrencies. So the investors buy into the tokens, which are then transferrable on cryptocurrency exchanges like Bitfinex and GDAX.

Ethereum’s smart contracts enable startups to use token sales to fund the development of protocols and applications built on top of existing blockchains.

Tokens can be used to represent a very large number of different things:

Paid credits within an application; entitlement to a share of profits and losses, or assets and liabilities; ownership or equity interest in a protocol or project; voting power in a company; or just mere existence that can be freely traded.

Some projects have successfully raised funds via token sale, including Augur, Antshares, Melonport, and Gnosis.

The network effect problem outlined above (applications only become useful when they have users, but they need users in order to be able to attract users) can be resolved in part by dApps and protocols.

Early adopters who believe in a protocol or application have an incentive to buy the token because it may be worth more in the future.

Tokens can bootstrap a network of early adopters because their incentives and those of the development team align. Once you’ve bought the token, you have an incentive not just to keep it, but to proselytise.

Many of these new protocols and applications will fail in the same way that start-ups do, but over time it’s likely that some core set of protocols and associated networks will successfully drive mainstream adoption.

Current issues & future prospects

Tokens would ideally have a value that is tied to the value of a protocol or application, in the same way that a company’s stock is tied to the company that issued it, or to represent a valuable digital right to a service. Right now, the value of tokens is mostly speculation.

The cryptocurrency market is volatile and frothy.

Securities regulations make it hard to sell tokens (which are unregistered securities) as equity, and so developers instead structure them as unregulated crowdsales.

This is fine in some instances where respectable projects need capital, but there’s a large number of projects that are just taking advantage of the excitement over ICOs to raise millions of dollars in capital with little to show.

There have been some scams where the funds have just ended up disappearing along with the developers.

Bitcoin is a game of chicken. Its rise in value has very little to do with the currency applications, and everything to do with it being a store of value.

The higher the value of bitcoin goes, the more confident investors become. For example, it’s easy to believe in gold as a store of value because it’s been used for thousands of years. As bitcoin gains more value, its increase in value becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Arguably, it might not be a bubble: Amara’s Law states that we tend to overestimate the impact of a technology in the short-run and underestimate it in the long-run. Even if bitcoin takes a short term hit after all the hype, it’s likely that in the long run it continues to act as a store of value.

Blockchain’s potential for disruption of industries comes through its decentralisation.

E.g. someone could invent a life insurance app on the blockchain, which would remove the insurance companies and allow people to directly pay in premiums and get payouts, rather than having a middle-man skimming off the top.

The industries most at risk are those where middlemen take the highest tolls:  investment managers; internet software; banks.

Other examples: Augur is a decentralised prediction market; PROPS is a decentralised digital video economy; OpenBazaar is a decentralised P2P marketplace.

Balkanisation of bitcoin is another risk.

If you are unhappy with Bitcoin, you can either suck it up, sell your bitcoin and leave, or take the open source code and fork it. This splits the community and creates divergent loyalties, as well as meaning that Bitcoin’s governance structure is fairly rigid as these are the only options.

Bitcoin (and specifically bitcoin) is traceable.

All interactions are transparent: transactions are public, traceable, and permanently stored in the network. Bitcoin addresses are private, but once used they become tainted by the history of all transactions they are involved with.

Anyone can see the balance and all transactions of any address. Since users usually have to reveal their identity in order to receive services or goods, Bitcoin addresses can’t be anonymous.

Because the blockchain is permanent, something not currently traceable may become trivial to trace in the future.

The privacy concerns can be circumvented, either by “tumbling” your bitcoins (like laundering money), or by using a completely anonymous service like Monero.

Monero obfuscates the amounts, origins, and destinations of all transactions, and is untraceable.

This is rapidly becoming the crypto of choice for individuals wanting to purchase illicit goods.

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The Dark Net

What is it?

A darknet is a network that can only be accessed via specific software or authorisation.

Two typical types are peer-to-peer networks often used for file sharing; and privacy networks like Tor.

It’s not the “deep web”, which refers to all of the pages on the internet that are not indexed by search engines.

The dark net is used for a number of different purposes:

Computer crime; protecting dissidents from political reprisal; file sharing; protecting the privacy rights of citizens from surveillance; sale of restricted goods on darknet markets; whistleblowing; circumventing network censorship; exercising human rights like free expression; and so on.

Tor, or “The Onion Router”, is a piece of free software that allows users to access the internet anonymous. It drives traffic through a free worldwide overlay network consisting of thousands of relays, concealing the user’s location and usage.

The fact that someone is using Tor can be seen, even if their activity cannot.

In order to access a site on the dark net, you need to already know its address. This means that it’s quite difficult to access sites unless you already know of their existence (although it’s not impossible, and notably experts are able to access many sites through various exploits and code loopholes).

Dark Net Markets (DNMs)

DNMs are used to buy and sell illicit or restricted products, such as drugs and identity documents.

Used to be incredibly popular. The first, the Silk Road, was shut down by US law enforcement in 2013 and markets have been under increasing attack ever since.

2017 saw the fall of AlphaBay, one of the largest DNMs. Dream, another still existing market, is thought by many to be compromised and under the control of law enforcement.

They work by keeping funds in escrow: buyers place bitcoin or another crypto in a “wallet” on the site and use those funds to purchase goods from vendors. The vendors send the goods, and on receipt the funds are released from escrow to the vendor.

This has made them vulnerable to exit scams, where the owners of a DNM have simply taken all of the bitcoin currently in escrow and disappeared, leaving buyers and sellers short of huge amounts of money.

Alternatives include P2P networks and forums where purchases can be organised without a middle-man. One example is The Majestic Garden, a forum where psychedelics are advertised by verified vendors. Users post reviews of the vendors’ products, meaning the forum functions like an old-fashioned trust-based system of purchase.

This kind of peer-to-peer solution could also involve blockchain: if an application could be developed that would allow individuals to make purchases without having to go through a central authentication, then this would make the purchase and sale of e.g. drugs significantly easier and less vulnerable to law enforcement cracking down on it.

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What I’m Reading This Week #4

This week is a bit of a medley, with some ethics, a bit of foreign policy, and bits on China, Kenya and the Tory party. I’ve also been doing a lot of other reading (notably still working my way through Prisoners of Geography, which is excellent; as well as having read the entirety of Naomi Alderman’s The Power in one day because it was that good.

1. Barry Lam, “Is it moral to respect the wishes of the dead above the living?” https://aeon.co/ideas/is-it-moral-to-respect-the-wishes-of-the-dead-above-the-living

   We don’t allow people to vote after their death, because we consider death to nullify all rights we had over the future political direction of our state. But we allow people a lot more leeway in how wealth is dealt with posthumously. In the US, inheritance can be conditional on marrying within a faith, or naming a school after you. Tax-sheltered trusts for descendants are protected even from creditors. Charitable trusts can be left with incredibly specific conditions on what the money can be spent on. Universities, hospitals and libraries often have the majority of their spending capital tied up in endowments which can only be used for certain purposes. Honouring the wishes of the dead ties up trillions of pounds and plausibly results in massive intergenerational economic injustice. We honour them in part because of moral duty, as the article suggests, but I would argue that there are also incentives bound up in this: if we tell people that their wills will be executed faithfully after their deaths, we change the decision-making calculus they have during life. We might be far more likely to just spend our money on a worldwide cruise rather than leave it to our children or charity if we didn’t have the guarantee that it would be spent as we wished.

2. The Weeds, Trump’s “the buck stops somewhere else” foreign policy: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/voxs-the-weeds/e/50497732

   Contains a deep dive into the current situation in Qatar, as well as the Middle East more generally construed. There’s some nice bits on the status quo in Afghanistan and the way in which it should probably be considered a failed war, as well as an analysis of the problem with Trump’s lack of engagement with the wars that the US is fighting (specifically, that it essentially abrogates the principle of civilian control of the military and means that e.g. the MOAB was dropped without any knowledge from civilian command). It’s illuminating and an easy listen.
    

3. Fraser Nelson encapsulating the Tories’ current soul-searching: https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/06/what-are-the-tories-for/#

   The Tories have failed to promote a positive campaigning vision for Britain. They haven’t won a convincing majority since 1987. They’ve primarily campaigned, since then, on how much worse all the alternatives are, rather than any of their own supposed positive traits. That means that they’re quite lost. Theresa May is still in power because the factionalism that would result from deposing her would eat the party from the inside out and result in an even more broken party, but that doesn’t meant that she’s actually doing much. Nelson makes the case for campaigning on the “conservative principles” of individual freedom and social cohesion, freedom from incompetent government and the ability to make the best of life for oneself. In this way conservatism is, for him, a movable feast that doesn’t need to be associated with the traditional conservative values of homophobia/racism/sexism etc, but instead with what amounts to classical liberalism. This, to me, shows how far the political discourse in Britain has shifted leftwards with respect to social values: it’s no longer possible to win an election campaign with the kinds of Toryism prevalent until the 1990s; rather, in order to win (by Nelson’s lights) they would have to appeal to free market individualism blended with skepticism of government and a desire for social stability. Given that the ravages of austerity have primarily resulted from precisely this kind of suspicion of government and the desire to roll back the frontiers of the state, I’m uncertain that Nelson’s Thatcherite vision (minus Section 28 and the associated toxic penumbra of conservatism) holds water as an electorally appealing strategy.
    

4. The FT on “the dark side of China’s national renewal”: https://www.ft.com/content/360afba4-55d1-11e7-9fed-c19e2700005f?mhq5j=e1

   This article essentially proposes that the translation of Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” is one that emphasises the rejuvenation of the Chinese “race”, rather than just the Chinese “nation”. This, in the FT’s opinion, refers to the Han Chinese who make up more than 90% of China’s population. But moreover, it incorporates anyone with Chinese ancestry or blood, no matter how long ago they left the nation. 

   It’s worth noting, on the side, that this has strong parallels with the concept of “ethnic Russians’ mobilised by Putin, which is a politically malleable concept: ethnic Russians can be anything from just Russian speakers to people with Russian ancestry, and the claim made over the safety and community of those people is one that is used to political effect, rather than being grounded purely in sentimentality (see Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography, Chapter 1). 

   The concern is that this rejuvenation necessitates the co-opting of Chinese worldwide to promote traditional Chinese culture and values, as well as the political positions of the PRC (e.g. opposing Taiwanese independence).

   Importantly, the context in which this takes place is one in which China is still seen, internally, as recovering from the Century of National Humiliation, in which China was continually subjugated by outside powers. That renders the slogan of rejuvenation as one that demands to “Make China Great Again”, and the race- and nationalism-based connotations of that shouldn’t be ignored.
    

5. Here’s an article about politics in Kenya, and the way that it currently pivots around ethnicity: http://theconversation.com/how-kenya-could-move-away-from-the-politics-of-ethnicity-77980

   The essential gist is that politics in Kenya has always been based on ethnicity as an artefact of the political arrangements around the time of independence, when nationwide political movements weren’t allowed to be formed under colonial policy. That meant that the political parties which formed were largely regional, and thus tribal. Kenya has 42 ethnic groups, and the 5 major ones make up two thirds of the country’s population. 

   The solution proposed is essentially a power-sharing one (common in post-colonial states and other emerging democracies). Power-sharing deals usually create more executive positions beyond just the President and Deputy President, and say that all parties or ethnic groups must be represented in these roles. That means that political mobilisation would likely become motivated less by ethnicity, and more by attempts to fix socioeconomic problems and ideology.

   I think it’s a reasonable take, and it’s definitely worth bearing in mind that the majority of states in the world are either post-colonial or otherwise post-conflict or emerging democracies, meaning that power-sharing agreements and attempts to facilitate stable democratic institutions is really important. I think it’s probably quite relevant to the recent Trinity Open semi-final about the African Union guaranteeing democratic principles and institutions in its member states: one of the things teams often struggle to do is conceptualise exactly what this might look like, and power-sharing is one good example of this.

Does raising taxes drive out the rich?

Does raising taxes drive out the rich? The Economist seems to think so, as this is the crux of their argument against Jeremy Corbyn’s solutions to the crises of austerity. They say that “the rich will leave the country and corporations will pass taxes on to citizens”. I’m agnostic towards the second proposition, but I wanted to explore the first because it’s an argument so commonly deployed both in general discourse and in debates.

The WSJ suggests that the answer is “no”. Wealthy people tend to express a desire to leave the country, and this is usually spun by the right-wing press and establishment as driven by high taxation, but their actual intentions and actions give the lie to this. Of the wealthy who want to leave the UK, a large proportion want to go (or at least did in 2012 when this article was published) to France, where taxes are higher and service provisions better. Taxes seem to be a relatively minor part of the decision-making calculus. This seems reasonable. Wealthy people, whilst more mobile than the poorest, are still not perfectly mobile: they have communities and children and schools and houses and all of these things mean that leaving isn’t just a snap decision caused by a marginal tax rise. This study doesn’t reflect the desires of the super-wealthy, though – those who are hyper-mobile and more likely to be more tax-sensitive.

An article from a think-tank in North Carolina suggests that the answer is, again, broadly “no”. Millionaires, particularly business-owning millionaires, failed to move state when New Jersey raised the marginal tax rate on earnings over $500k. The only people who really were affected were millionaire retirees, who are less of a concern because of their lack of job-creating capacity and economic clout. In fact, rich people seemed to actually migrate to places with higher taxes, often because the service provisions are better, which is something they can take advantage of particularly if they own businesses. 

Forbes suggests that millionaires in the US are highly unlikely to move from one state to another for any reason. About 2.4% of >$1m/year earners move in any given year, and this rises to 2.7% of those earning >$5m. This corroborates the analysis above: lower income people are more likely to move, as are single people, because they can afford to be more mobile or because they need to move for work. Richer people tend to have more obligations, making them less mobile than the middle earners.

The BBC writes that the primary impact of increased marginal tax rates is a psychological one, rather than a financial one: individuals who are hit by the taxes are more likely to engage in clever accounting so that they pay more in, say, capital gains than they do in income tax, or so that they are paid more in bonuses than in salary. Similarly, Full Fact says that the cut in the 50p rate of UK income tax to 45p did not result, as was claimed, in an increase in income tax receipts; rather, it cost about £360m per year, in line with the government’s expectations.

It seems that the answer to the question, “does raising taxes drive away the rich?” is for the most part “no”. There might be exceptions for the super rich, though they are likely to find ways around taxation regardless, and it’s unclear that we should formulate economic policy in a way that appeals to them as much as possible. The primary concern should probably be about whether tax rises drive away people and companies that create jobs, and with respect to raising personal tax rates the answer appears to be that it does not.

What I’m Reading This Week #3

This week I’ve got a couple of different themes to the reading I’ve been doing. As well as some miscellaneous bits on Arab LGBT culture and prescription heroin, there are a couple of pieces on famines (why they’re man-made, and how they’re used as weapons of war) as well as a bunch of articles and videos on new trends in the economy looking at Uber, Apple and the military-industrial complex. Enjoy.

1. Saleem Haddad on “The Myth of the Queer Arab Life” is an attempt to push back against the essentialisation of LGBT Arabs. I can’t quite do it justice and it really needs to be read, but it asks the question of “who owns queer Arab bodies?”, navigating the various parties who vie for control of the lives of queer Arabs and the methods by which they do so.
    
2. Vox on the 4 man-made famines threatening 20 million people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvSW5Ez0koM

   The video explains how famine can be used as a weapon: warzones aren’t particularly conducive to normal agricultural practices, meaning that people inside them often can’t produce enough food for themselves, particularly if they’ve become concentrated in a small area through displacement. That means they’re reliant on aid, and if that aid gets blocked, then they risk starvation. Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen and South Sudan are all the subjects of man-made famines right now.
    

3. Similarly, The Inquiry: are famines always man-made? http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04w1b07

   This podcast looks at the current crisis in South Sudan, but it also takes a more historical look at famines, including the Bengal famine which it argues was caused by Winston Churchill. The broad sweep of the argument is that famines are always man-made, and that we can always prevent them.
    

4. Ben Smith on Uber’s toxic workplace culture: https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/trumpian-tactics-have-finally-stopped-working-for-uber?utm_term=.svJGMREdG#.bajEMOleE

   Smith takes a look at the “Trump-style” tactics Uber has attempted to employ over the years, sacrificing public relations, staff happiness and employee satisfaction for continued growth. The article seeks to answer the question of what happens when a company continually mistreats all those who work for it whilst providing a service that people find valuable. For a long time it appeared that Uber was effectively invulnerable to PR problems, but the #DeleteUber campaign and steady stream of whistleblowers from inside the company appear to be catching up with it. There’s also something to be said for the fact that Uber in many instances requires the permission of a city or country to be able to operate there, and if it continues to act like a spoilt child then it’s less and less likely it will be welcome in new places.
    

5. Keeping with the Uber theme, an analysis of why Uber cares so little about its “contractors”.

   Uber treats its drivers badly because it doesn’t see them as its future. Jeff Holden, its chief product officer, says that it doesn’t matter that employees are discontented because “we’re going to replace them all with robots”. Drivers (2000 of them) overnight in their vehicles because they can’t afford to live where they drive. When they’re assaulted, they receive no support from Uber. Uber uses behavioural psychology to gamify driving, incentivising drivers to keep working for them even when it’s against their best interests. After petrol, some drivers make less than minimum wage. Uber offers drivers a temporary lease on a vehicle at rates that make subprime mortgages look safe. “You’re like, I’m a whisper away from being homeless. So you drive, and drive, and drive.”
    

6. Staying on with labour in the digital economy, but bringing in the old sweatshop chestnut: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract?CMP=share_btn_tw

   1.3 million people work for Foxconn, the company that manufactures iPhones. That makes them the third largest employer in the world, behind only Walmart and McDonalds. They employ as many people as live in Estonia. In 2010, it made the news when workers at its plant in Longhua, an assembly plant with 450,000 employees, started killing themselves (at a rate that Steve Jobs pointed out was within the national average). 12 hour shifts; managers making unrealistic demands, breaking promises and publicly scolding those who fail to perform. One journalist, Brian Merchant, managed to get an uncurated look inside and what he found corroborated what he was told: “It’s not a good place for human beings”.
    

7. Moving back to a more traditional aspect of the economy, here’s an explanation of the military-industrial complex by Vox: why Congress keeps buying the disastrous F-35.

   This is a really nice primer on the way that the military-industrial complex manages to cement itself. The idea is that job creation is used as a means by which it becomes politically palatable to keep investing in expensive military projects. The jobs get spread out across the country, and often between countries, in such a way that there are so many stakeholders who are so widespread that it becomes impossible to cancel a project without massive economic repercussions. This is a nice, granular look at one particular case study (the F-35 plane), but the military-industrial complex has been a major factor in politics and the economy since at least WWII, if not before (definitely before). It’s worth having a look at some of the technologies create during the Cold War as an insight into the way that science, technology, the military, industry and politics all linked up (the Space Race is a classic example).
    

8. And now for something completely different. German Lopez giving the case for prescription heroin: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/12/15301458/canada-prescription-heroin-opioid-addiction

   A long read which describes the effects of a clinic in Vancouver which provides heroin-assisted treatment for addiction. The idea is essentially that some people don’t respond well to methadone or buprenorphine (the go-to medication-assisted treatments) and their addiction can be managed with actual heroin instead. Rather than being forced to spend a large amount of money on heroin that could be impure (and is potentially deadly, given the likelihood that it’s contaminated with fentanyl or similar which means that you can’t accurately gauge the correct dosage), they can receive free heroin from a clinic. This allows them to live their lives rather than be enslaved to the need to find more drugs. They’re still addicted, but they’re living rather than subsisting.

 

 

What I’m Reading #2

This week I have an eclectic array of different topics: the place of expertise in democracy, the nature of terrorism, the question of which lives matter the most, how to have civil discourse in new democracies, and the distinction between cults and religions. Enjoy.

1. Tom Nichols on expertise.

   I have to say this is a bit of a disjointed read; you can tell that it’s been ripped from a book in a way that’s meant to create an overview of Nichols’ arguments, but it’s not particularly coherent. Given that the book itself is a bestseller, it’s probably a good idea to get some conception of Nichols’ thought on the topic (and thereby to understand what a lot of people are likely thinking). I’m not sure that I agree with his perspective: it’s very much a “the internet is here and now anyone can know anything! What if knowledge, but too much???” type affair, and he fails to take account of a lot of the literature from Science and Technology Studies and associated social sciences which examines expertise through a constructivist lens. In particular he would do well to familiarise himself with the academic literature on the fate of expertise after the internet, which addresses a lot of problems he raises: whilst information might be increasingly accessible, it’s becoming ever more important to be able to sift through that information to find the important things, and to know how to do that.
    

2. Yuval Noah Harari on terrorism.

   “A terrorist is akin to a gambler holding a particularly bad hand, who tries to convince his rivals to reshuffle the cards. He cannot lose anything, but he may win everything.” After showing why terrorism is the chosen means of attack for many disempowered groups, Harari proposes the idea that terror is so effective at destabilising countries because states have, over the past couple of centuries, based their credibility and mandate to govern on their capacity to prevent political violence within their borders. Terrorism works through theatre, and countries work to create a security response of the same kind, performing their actions and words in such a way as to give an impression of safety, of having the problem under control. 
    

3. Dominic Wilkinson and Keyur Doolabh on the question “Which lives matter more?”.

   This essay is an accessible exploration of a classic philosophical problem, the “non-identity problem”, made famous by Derek Parfit. It shows how the decisions we make about the future will often change the people who will be around to experience that future, and then asks whether there are ethical implications to those decisions that accrue regardless of whether they affect specific people or not. This is all fairly standard, but the latter part of the essay attempts to reconcile the theoretical literature with the intuitions of non-philosophers who’ve taken a survey, and does a quick dive into Rawls’ concept of “reflective equilibrium” which tries to bring our intuitions and theoretical ruminations into alignment with one another. It’s an interesting treatment of an important topic.

    

4. Shadi Hamid on how to hate each other peacefully in a democracy – looking at the challenges of living together in newly formed democracies.

   First Hamid examines the ways in which political systems can be designed to prevent violent conflict, arguing for parliamentary systems above presidential ones. He goes on to argue that the design of democratic systems only goes so far, and that forming norms of which kinds of discussions ought to be had early on is equally important. The last part of the article focusses on constitutions, and how countries might attempt to write them in such a way that they guarantee the rights of minorities without sacrificing democratic representation. There’s a focus on Egypt as the case study throughout, and it’s helped to solidify my understanding of fledgling democracies and their issues.

    

5. Tara Isabella Burton on the distinction between religions and cults. Confronts the argument that “the word ‘cult’ is meaningless: it merely assumes a normative framework that legitimises some exertions of religious power – those associated with mainstream organisations – while condemning others. Groups that have approved, ‘orthodox’ beliefs are considered legitimate, while groups whose interpretation of a sacred text differs from established norms are delegitimised on that basis alone.” The idea here is that in order to study something properly we have to treat it as we treat any other religion, rather than making a priori distinctions based on our preconceived notions of legitimacy of belief. The problem with blurring the distinction too far is that it allows you to do too much: you can easily claim that all religions are cults, and then extend that to any system of belief or community that requires some degree of sacrifice or commitment from its members, to the extent that pretty much any organisation can be called a cult. That makes the term meaningless. Of course, this ignores that religions tend to have specifically explanatory approaches to the world that attempt to establish some kind of overarching order, and other communities – no matter how much sacrifice they demand from their adherents – don’t tend to do this to the same extent.

   The converse of “if God isn’t real, then all religions are cults” is that “if this religion cult is correct, then that is the most important thing in the universe”. “If a deity really, truly wants you to, say, flagellate yourself with a whip (as Catholic penitents once did), or burn yourself on your husband’s funeral pyre, then no amount of commonsense reasoning can amount to a legitimate deterrent: the ultimate cosmic meaningfulness of one’s actions transcends any other potential need. And to be in a community of people who can help reinforce that truth, whose rituals and discourse and symbols help not only to strengthen a sense of meaningfulness but also to ground it in a sense of collective purpose, then that meaningfulness becomes more vital still: it sits at the core of what it is to be human.”

   The conclusion Burton draws is that our practices define our identities: every time we participate in rituals, religious or not, they reinscribe our identities and define ourselves with relation to the people around us. It’s a nice sociological treatment of religion and community.

    

What I’m Reading #1

This summer I’ll be competing as one half of the Edinburgh University Debates Union (EUDU) A team at the European Universities Debating Championships (EUDC) in Tallinn. Aside from having to learn to differentiate between two extremely similar initialisms, I’ll also be spending a lot of time reading up on current affairs and various strands of political/social/cultural thought in order to try and be a little bit less ignorant about the world when it comes time to argue about things in front of strangers.

I often get asked by novice debaters what they ought to read or listen to or watch in order to Know Things About the World. Rather than answer ad hoc each time and share the occasional link on Facebook (whilst trying to tread the thin line between being helpful and spamming my friends’ news feeds), I’m going to have a go at writing short blog posts which link to the things I’m reading and give a brief explanation of them and their importance.

Here’s the first one.

Today I am reading:

1. Anushka Asthana and Fiona Harvey on the implications of the Lobbying Act for NGOs in the run-up to the British General Election. They explain the way that the Lobbying Act, which restricts what non-governmental organisations can say in the year before a general election, has prevented charities from being able to bring important issues into the spotlight. Environmental charities are particularly upset, and you may have noticed that the environment has been something of a non-issue in this debate, in spite of Trump pulling out of the Paris Agreement whilst it has been ongoing.
    
2. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett on the changing spending patterns of the upper middle classes. She delves into a little social theory (primarily Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class), looking at the shift in “conspicuous consumption” from spending on material goods as a sign of status towards “intangibles” like health and education. It could be argued that this oughtn’t necessarily to count as a change in the nature of conspicuous consumption and instead should be regarded as its diminution, but it’s a good read regardless.
    
3. CFR’s backgrounder on US-Saudi relations. Newly updated to take account of changes since Trump became President, this article explains the (on face unlikely) alliance between the two countries with antithetical worldviews from its beginning. It looks at relations over oil, defence, and counterterrorism, as well as the large amount of investment from each nation tied up in the other.
    
4. Damian Carrington on the drop in prices of renewable energy and its effects. He explains that in spite of a decreased level of investment over the past year and subsidies that pale in comparison to those given to fossil fuels, renewable energy capacity has boomed due to decreasing costs. This is heartening news in the wake of the US’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, which could have major geopolitical effects with respect to China’s positioning as a leader in renewables, potentially pushing it closer to Europe.
    
5. Vox on why China is building islands in the South China Sea. This is a video, not an article, but it’s probably one of the most comprehensible explanations of China’s motivations behind its militarisation and colonisation of the SCS. A lot of it comes down to the oil and gas reserves under the sea, but the primary motivator is the 30% of the world’s trade that goes through the route, and the control it would grant China to be able to control that trade.