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Monday 30 November 2015

The Weird Pendulum Swing of Dawkins' Ideology

When I was in year 11, I read a book called The Selfish Gene, by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. It's a great piece of science communication. It inspired me to make a lego DNA model for my high-school biology project. The idea that much of what comprises our identity is contained in this ribbon of code seemed genuinely wonderful, to me.

My Lego DNA model, featuring falling Technics guy

But I have to admit, part of why I loved The Selfish Gene so much is because it seemed a closer linkage to reality than the book some avowedly creationist peers in biology class were reading. It was the same with his later work, The God Delusion. That book wasn't about science communication, but it described a philosophy that I already subscribed to, and put my frustration into words. It also made feel like I had access to an insight that was being ignored by most other people.

Dawkins now seems to exemplify the things that he once called out: namely, succumbing to some internal force that draws you away from rationality, and failing to recognise when bias and the unconscious defence of belief is tugging you in some unpleasant direction.

It's nearly a full decade since I first read The God Delusion. Now, Dawkins is tweeting obsessively about a teenage boy, Ahmed Mohamed, who was recently arrested in Texas for bringing a homemade clock to school, for a science project. The clock was mistaken for a bomb, and Mohamed was arrested:


There's something about that photo that kind of gets to me. The NASA shirt is instantly disarming, and of course, his arrest is indicative of irrational racial profiling - the idea that you can spot a threat by the origin of someone's surname, rather than evidence-gathering and analysis.

Dawkins hasn't discussed the serious implications of Mohamed's wrongful arrest. He's focused instead on the authenticity of the clock, and  is now firmly convinced that the teenage boy removed a clock from its housing and offered that as his own work. Follow the reply threads on Twitter you'll see the regular assertion that the family orchestrated this as an intentional hoax, designed to provoke a response.


It's pure conspiracy theory - the assumption that intentional agents are orchestrating events, rather than a natural emergence of patterns. It's an odd pendulum swing. Believing that expected occurrences are orchestrated by a single organism is one of the things that leads to a belief in, say, creationism - and it's also something that, when combined with Dawkins' genuine hostility towards Islam, leads him to attribute some over-arching scheme to this teenage boy's high school project.

I see this a lot. Senator David Leyonhjelm, who is ideologically anti-government, hates government support for wind energy so much that he advocates for government regulation of wind farm projects - regulation funded by the taxpayer (the recently announced 'wind commissioner' role, requested as part of an inquiry helmed by Leyonhjelm, comes in at $600,000).

This is a standard feature of feeling your way through the world by adhering to pre-determined schema, rather than mulling over issues using your noggin. You will be weirdly driven towards whatever thing it is that you're railing against, and you won't blink an eye when someone highlights your hypocrisy. Guaranteed.

In an effort to refute accusations that he was embarking on a vendetta against a kid, Dawkins awkwardly juxtaposed Mohamed's recently-announced $15m lawsuit with the actions of a 10-year-old boy being forced by an ISIS fighter to decapitate a Syrian officer:


He's baffled and outraged by the suggestion that he was directly equating Mohamed's alleged "hoax" with the actions of the child in the linked article. But his tweet, the reaction and his subsequent defense illustrate an important point that he's never understood: if everyone fails to understand something the way you understood it when you wrote it, you are a bad communicator. Also, there won't be a single interpretation of what you said: context, attitude, sentiment and timing all impact how your message sits inside the brain of those who choose to consume it.

Even if Dawkins' assertions are true, and Mohamed has committed the unforgivable crime of not  manufacturing an electronic timepiece from raw mined materials, Dawkins has fallen deep into a hole of weird conspiracist reasoning. Take, for instance, the classic 'if you don't believe me, google [x]' argument:



It should be relatively easy to spot the error in reasoning, here. You can't determine whether something is real by simply googling it - research is effortful, and often google is used as a tool to find a collection of links that agree with your worldview, rather than a broad synthesis of research or evidence-based arguments. Finding evidence isn't enough - you need to know how to evaluate it:

“Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you"

Dawkins said that in The God Delusion. His plea, to advocate for a greater spread of critical thinking, directly contradicts his newfound attitude: if you don't believe me, just google it.

The clock-trutherism might just be a some sort of ideological defense - the creation of a narrative that negates the threat to his worldview. In this case, it's the preservation of organised religion (and its adherents) as consistent aggressors. It extends to the lawsuit thing, as well. In America, there is a new lawsuit every two seconds, but Dawkins sees the response of the boy's family and declares it part of the conspiracy (that's not to say the lawsuit is a good thing - just that it's unremarkable).

Jeff Sparrow writes in The Guardian about Dawkins' increasingly steep descent into irrationality:

"You can proclaim you’re an atheist, a freethinker, a devotee of the enlightenment – and yet somehow still end up backing rightwing Christians like George W Bush and Ben Carson in their campaigns against the Muslim hordes. 
Which is why it’s not enough to denounce Dawkins and Harris. If we’re to save the good name of atheism, we need to popularise a fundamentally different approach, one that seeks to understand religion rather than simply sneering at it"

I'm not sure I agree with all of Sparrow's piece, but he makes a monumentally important point: injecting a dose of empathy and a time of listening both go a very long way. I'd argue that it's more rational to spend time understanding the gears inside someone's head - what's made them turn to organised religion? Why is someone rejecting the science of vaccination? It's almost never 'stupidity' - it's usually a complex brew of sentiment and cognitive bias - you can't counter it with assignations of ignorance. It's also rational to work towards effective communication. Being right is half the game, not the whole game. You need to be right, and to be heard.

Dawkins prodded me into the very real and thrilling joy of understanding science. But his attitude and approach are leading to increased prevalence of the precise things he's railing against. This pendulum swings with such momentum that Dawkins now exemplifies conspiracist ideation and irrational discrimination.

A confession: my brother helped me make my lego DNA model. Like..majorly. He did all the hard bits, and I just finished it off. Come at me, Dawkins.
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Tuesday 24 November 2015

Clarification from Ketan Joshi to Sarah Laurie

I am a Research and Communications Officer employed by Infigen Energy, which operates wind farms in Australia.

On 29 June 2015, in the context of a series of tweets describing the proceedings of a public hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Wind Turbines, I published the following tweet:


In the interests of avoiding confusion, I would like to re-state that the allegation contained in the tweet by Ken McAlpine, linked to in my tweet that Sarah Laurie is a “deregistered” medical practitioner, is without foundation and entirely false.

I would like to reassert that Sarah Laurie is not deregistered and has never been sanctioned by the Medical Board of Australia.  Sarah Laurie allowed her registration as a medical practitioner to lapse for personal reasons.

Ketan Joshi
Research and Communications Officer
Infigen Energy
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Tuesday 10 November 2015

Why incumbency breeds tone-deaf social media - #YourTaxis and #CoalisAmazing

Social media, and Twitter in particular, is experiential, confessional and largely anecdotal. By design, it isn't a good medium for level-headedness or facts. It's a hazy, roiling shitstorm of japes, memes, in-jokes, stories, pictures, abuse and friendship. It sounds unpleasant, but it's sometimes quite nice.

For most organisations and corporations, it's largely a tool for injecting tiny bits of information into the mass of shifting, uncontrolled chaos. Most of the time, it meets this need with unremarkable ease.

But for industries that are facing widespread unpopularity or the onset of competition, social media is sold to them as the precise opposite: a predictable, meaningful and manipulable collection of willing participants, ready and waiting to be convinced of the merits of a thing.

The most recent victim of this fallacy is the Victorian Taxi Association (VTA). The #YourTaxis campaign, designed to encourage taxi users to write-up stories of their experiences, was managed by Melbourne PR agency Ellis Jones. It hasn't gone well:



This isn't the first time an ill-conceived hashtag has been hijacked - remember #QantasLuxury and #FreshInOurMemories? But I think the Victorian taxi industry is different. This error was caused by the VTA assuming that heavy public usage of their product is due to their popularity, rather than their monopoly. The site is plastered triumphantly with statistics on the huge number of vehicles and trips in Victorian taxis


Like many people, I tend only to use taxis when I need to. In this situation, we're faced with a  choice: take a taxi, or walk some enormous, unfeasible distance. Our reliance on taxis does not signal a love of taxis. Being forced to use this specific service means many, many negative experiences - you, and all of your friends and family, have had them.

In fact, it seems people are waiting impatiently for alternatives - this is where Uber, an American ride-sharing service (with a interesting skill in marketing and PR - they once delivered kittens, but largely only to media outlets) rides the wave of public grievance, and they profit.

The VTA are now insisting that around five thousand personal and public declarations of horror, inconvenience, racism, sexism and sexual assault are a Good Thing:


The CEO of the VTA said:

"The response online over the past 24 hours isn't anything we didn't expect. We asked for feedback and we got it. The good and the bad and everything in between” he went on. 
"It also demonstrates the number of people that rely on taxi services and we want to make sure our service continues to meet customers' expectations in a period of rapid change.” 
"We will respond to everything that comes our way on YourTaxis.”

They've accidentally identified the root cause of their problem, here. A large number of people do rely on their services. This is why the several hundred stories of sexual assault should trigger serious changes, rather than cheerful promises.

It's also misleading for them to frame their campaign as a feedback initiative - if it was, they'd have simply designed a survey, collected the results, and implemented changes, without the fanfare. My own experience is that it works well, when you do a representative questionnaire.

This incumbency/popularity confusion is also the root cause of the Minerals Council #CoalisAmazing backlash, which followed almost exactly the same trajectory. Twitter didn't respond positively to that campaign, either:


And the organisation behind the campaign also clumsily insisted it wasn't bothered:

"We've been delighted,"  
"We completely anticipated it, we revel in it. 
"We fully expected that there would be parodies and we would've been disappointed if there weren't some."

It's weirdly similar to the VTA's insistence that they're unsurprised, unbothered and pleased by the response. It might even be true, but it comes across as completely insincere, and sour-faced.


And, of course, they also repeat, proudly, how much everyone is forced to rely on their product. The Minerals Council trumpets statistics showing coal's dominance in Australia, in the precisely the same way the Taxi Industry does:


Part of the reason coal dominates our fuel mix so profoundly is the fact the power stations were paid for by state governments when they were built. New, clean power stations don't get lump-sum government support - it has to be earned per megawatt hour - and this support is angrily opposed by the now-incumbent, carbon-intensive generators.

All this does is remind people that no matter how hard you try, you don't have a choice. The electricity flowing into your powerpoints will be generated from inefficient, heavily-polluting dead old plants, so you better learn to love it. And your trip home at 3am, after public transport shuts down, will be in a taxi that you have to shed blood and tears to find and capture - if you're less than 10 kilometres away, you won't be getting on at all, so you better learn to love it.

This is why people like the idea of rooftop solar, grid-connected utility-scale wind, Uber, Lyft and Go-Get. Incumbents are in a position where they are free to ignore public opinion, and they almost certainly will. #Coalisamazing and #YourTaxis aren't surveys designed to determine the shape of public sentiment; they're misguided attempts to wrangle popularity.

Incumbency create a permanent state of tone-deaf social media confusion.

Instead of paying for risky social media campaigns, they could invest in new technology - upgrading systems to meet or even out-perform new entrants; blending their experience with cleverness and novelty. It won't happen. Social media will continue to be presented as a conduit for manipulation, reliant on this confusion between incumbency and popularity.

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Update - Victaxis seem to have ditched the social media agency after a poorly-considered tweet about Remembrance Day. Meanwhile, the American 'I Love Fossil Fuel' coal-lobby account has sent a nearly identical tweet, hijacking remembrance day to push their agenda. Both accounts managed to misspell 'remembrance' (Victaxis even misspelled it in their apology):


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Tuesday 3 November 2015

No, wind farms did not cause Adelaide's power outage

Last Sunday, there were widespread power outages in Adelaide, due to what seems to be a combination of planned maintenance on one of the two interconnectors between South Australia and Victoria and a collection of other outages. The link between the two states was partly severed, and 160 megawatts of flow from the interconnector vanished instantly. This causes a sudden change in frequency, and to balance this loss of power, some demand had to be shed, causing the outages.



As you might expect, this easy-to-understand series of events serves as a great little substrate for panicked assignations of blame, devoid of evidence or analysis - check out these two articles for some actual numbers around the issue.


Attributing this incident to the presence of renewable energy isn't supported by evidence. Single events like Sunday's outages don't suggest a prior or looming trend of frequent outages caused by renewables. Heard, at least, is willing to engage with this question on Twitter.

But Andrew Bolt, a blogger for News Corp, takes what might normally be a subtle, calculated effort to heap blame on any technology that doesn't burn compressed dead old plants to get power, runs with it, and fumbles in the process. It's like that brave seagull you always see at Circular Quay, that steals an enormous sandwich, thinking it's done something totally great, but then proceeds to drop it into the ocean. Then it just hovers, squawking with angry confusion at the foregone bounty, as the square of sodden oceanic food expands into nothingness.

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Andrew Bolt's piece, here, is cleverly titled "Wind don’t blow, South Australia don’t glow". This is an attempt to distract you from the fact that power supply in SA continues uninterrupted during low wind periods, because you're dazzled by the revolutionary, inventive rhyme that's been deployed in the headline.

IT RHYMES THEREFORE IT IS TRUE AXE TAX WIND BLOW POWER FLOW GLOW YAY RHYME

In the image above, you might notice a chart of wind power. Look at that drop! Wind power is the worst!..............except, Bolt seems to have presented a chart of wind power output on May 25th this year, not Sunday the 1st of November.

The 1st of November is a full 160 days from Bolt's chart. Weirdly, Bolt has picked a single day - specifically, one in which the change in output looks dramatic due to the scaling on the y-axis of his chart. Let's look at 25/05/2015 in context:


It's a little disappointing that he didn't choose the 3rd. Maybe he was trying to be generous? Or maybe the change in wind speed wasn't spooky enough? Anyway, it gets worse.

"South Australia’s Premier likes to boast his state has more wind power than any other.....what he doesn’t add is that this not only gives South Australia the country’s highest power prices and a dependency on Victoria’s coal-fired power"

This is the part where the seagull soars through the air, but begins to feel the sandwich falling from its beak. He  claims that SA's power price is the highest in the country, due solely to wind power - he uses the word "gives". Australian Energy Market Commission data shows pretty clearly how weird that claim is.

First, we can say with confidence that SA has relatively high power prices. The following shows FY15 costs:


Hmm, okay. So SA has the highest cost, and the highest wind power penetration (about 30%). Since good ol' common sense tells us that if two things that happen at the same time, one thing has definitively caused the other, we could stop here.

But, well, sod it, let's look at the percentage contribution of the LRET, the scheme that supports wind development in Australia, for each state, for the same year:


SA's high retail costs aren't caused by wind farms. SA's LRET cost, as a percentage of total bills, is the second lowest (it's 2.17%, only the NT has a lower percentage, at 1.48%).

Shucks. Turns out you can't establish a causal relationship because two things happen at the same time. This piece of knowledge is really going to shake up public discourse.

After providing some handy links to an anonymous anti-wind blog that regularly posts death threats and racist abuse, Bolt quotes from an article in the Adelaide Advertiser:

"A spokesman for SA Power Networks said the state lost supply from “upstream” when the interconnector shut down, triggering an automatic loss of power — load shedding — in SA, resulting widespread outages…When the Victorian system shut down, 160 megawatts of energy was lost and wind power did not supply energy because it often does not start until 3am."

Oh, boy. I don't even know where to start. The last sentence seems to have been added in by someone who literally just threw in a reckon into their article. Readers were entirely convinced by this too - many of the comments express a hatred of wind power as a consequence of this weird, invented claim.




First, megawatts are power, and megawatt-hours are energy. So, the lines 'megawatts of energy' and 'power did not supply energy' aren't exactly filling me with hope that our reckoner understands the basics of the national electricity market.

So, did "wind power not supply energy" (it hurts, typing that)? Here's a chart of output by fuel type for the night of the 1st, on which the power outages occurred:


At the time of the outage, 21:55 NEM-time, wind power in South Australia was producing 221 megawatts. It continued at that level for the next hour, and wind speeds across SA gradually decreased throughout the next morning. So, it's completely wrong to say 'wind power did not supply energy' (it kept producing over time), or even 'wind power did not supply power' (it was producing when the IC broke).

This is roughly the point at which our seagull is watching its coveted sandwich plummet towards the dark green surface of Sydney harbour.

What about "often does not start until 3am"? Are wind speeds over South Australia directly connected to Central Standard Time? Does Andrew Bolt really believe that the atmosphere refuses to move until a specified time, every day? Let's look at average wind power output in SA, by hour, so far this year:


Obviously, averages don't tell the whole story, but this is more than enough to dismiss that weird, casual statement about diurnal variations in wind speed. In fact, that profile is neatly opposite to SA's solar power output, which is a good thing in the long run.

Yes, South Australian wind power was producing at the time of the blackout, and no, the atmosphere doesn't wake up at 3am. This is where our seagull friend simply hovers above the inedible, putrid sandwich, wondering what went wrong, squawking at nothing and no-one in particular.

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Over the next few weeks, there will be quite a few attempts to induce fear and anxiety about South Australian renewable energy, using this event as a basis. They'll over-egg the risks presented by variable-output power, and they'll completely ignore the risks presented by a total reliance on outdated, carbon-intensive fuels and technologies. Some of these attempts will be more subtle than others. These claims are somewhere in the angry-seagull-that-lost-a-sandwich zone.

Click here to access the raw data used for this blog post - please don't republish this post without first checking with me :) Thanks :) 
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