Left Wing vs. Right Wing Brains

So apparently: Left wing or right wing? It's written in the brain

People with liberal views tended to have increased grey matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain linked to decision-making, in particular when conflicting information is being presented...

Conservatives, meanwhile, had increased grey matter in the amygdala, an area of the brain associated with processing emotion.

This was based on a study of 90 young adults using MRI to measure brain structure. Sadly that press release is all we know about the study at the moment, because it hasn't been published yet. The BBC also have no fewer than three radio shows about it here, here and here.

Politics blog Heresy Corner discusses it...

Subjects who professed liberal or left-wing opinions tended to have a larger anterior cingulate cortex, an area of the brain which, we were told, helps process complex and conflicting information. (Perhaps they need this extra grey matter to be able to cope with the internal contradictions of left-wing philosophy.)

This kind of story tends to attract chuckle-some comments.

In truth, without seeing the full scientific paper, we can't know whether the differences they found were really statistically solid, or whether they were voodoo or fishy. The authors, Geraint Rees and Ryota Kanai, have both published a lot of excellent neuroscience in the past, but that's no guarantee.

In fact, however, I suspect that the brain is just the wrong place to look if you're interested in politics, because most political views don't originate in the individual brain, they originate in the wider culture and are absorbed and regurgitated without much thought. This is a real shame, because all of us, left or right, have a brain, and it's really quite nifty:

But when it comes to politics we generally don't use it. The brain is a powerful organ designed to help you deal with reality in all its complexity. For a lot of people, politics doesn't take place there, it happens in fairytale kingdoms populated by evil monsters, foolish jesters, and brave knights.

Given that the characters in this story are mindless stereotypes, there's no need for empathy. Because the plot comes fully-formed from TV or a newspaper, there's no need for original ideas. Because everything is either obviously right or obviously wrong, there's not much reasoning required. And so on. Which is why this happens amongst other things.

I don't think individual personality is very important in determining which political narratives and values you adopt: your family background, job, and position in society is much more important.

Where individual differences matter, I think, is in deciding how "conservative" or "radical" you are within whatever party you find yourself. Not in the sense of left or right, but in terms of how keen you are on grand ideas and big changes, as opposed to cautious, boring pragmatism.

In this sense, there are conservative liberals (i.e. Obama) and radical conservatives (i.e. Palin), and that's the kind of thing I'd be looking for if I were trying to find political differences in the brain.

Links: If right wingers have bigger amygdalae, does that mean patient SM, the woman with no amygdalae at all, must be a communist? Then again, Neuroskeptic readers may remember that the brain itself is a communist...

Left Wing vs. Right Wing Brains

So apparently: Left wing or right wing? It's written in the brain

People with liberal views tended to have increased grey matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain linked to decision-making, in particular when conflicting information is being presented...

Conservatives, meanwhile, had increased grey matter in the amygdala, an area of the brain associated with processing emotion.

This was based on a study of 90 young adults using MRI to measure brain structure. Sadly that press release is all we know about the study at the moment, because it hasn't been published yet. The BBC also have no fewer than three radio shows about it here, here and here.

Politics blog Heresy Corner discusses it...

Subjects who professed liberal or left-wing opinions tended to have a larger anterior cingulate cortex, an area of the brain which, we were told, helps process complex and conflicting information. (Perhaps they need this extra grey matter to be able to cope with the internal contradictions of left-wing philosophy.)

This kind of story tends to attract chuckle-some comments.

In truth, without seeing the full scientific paper, we can't know whether the differences they found were really statistically solid, or whether they were voodoo or fishy. The authors, Geraint Rees and Ryota Kanai, have both published a lot of excellent neuroscience in the past, but that's no guarantee.

In fact, however, I suspect that the brain is just the wrong place to look if you're interested in politics, because most political views don't originate in the individual brain, they originate in the wider culture and are absorbed and regurgitated without much thought. This is a real shame, because all of us, left or right, have a brain, and it's really quite nifty:

But when it comes to politics we generally don't use it. The brain is a powerful organ designed to help you deal with reality in all its complexity. For a lot of people, politics doesn't take place there, it happens in fairytale kingdoms populated by evil monsters, foolish jesters, and brave knights.

Given that the characters in this story are mindless stereotypes, there's no need for empathy. Because the plot comes fully-formed from TV or a newspaper, there's no need for original ideas. Because everything is either obviously right or obviously wrong, there's not much reasoning required. And so on. Which is why this happens amongst other things.

I don't think individual personality is very important in determining which political narratives and values you adopt: your family background, job, and position in society is much more important.

Where individual differences matter, I think, is in deciding how "conservative" or "radical" you are within whatever party you find yourself. Not in the sense of left or right, but in terms of how keen you are on grand ideas and big changes, as opposed to cautious, boring pragmatism.

In this sense, there are conservative liberals (i.e. Obama) and radical conservatives (i.e. Palin), and that's the kind of thing I'd be looking for if I were trying to find political differences in the brain.

Links: If right wingers have bigger amygdalae, does that mean patient SM, the woman with no amygdalae at all, must be a communist? Then again, Neuroskeptic readers may remember that the brain itself is a communist...

The Ethics of Getting as High as a Kite

Are drugs good or bad?

I mean, in the ethical sense. Medically, all drugs have potential harms variously associated with use, long-term use, overdose, etc. Politically, by buying illegal drugs, you're probably ultimately funding criminals and terrorists (although you might well blame prohibition, not drugs, for that). But setting that aside, assuming no-one gets harmed as a result: is it morally wrong to take recreational drugs per se?

It's an important question, because your opinion about this will influence your opinions about less abstract, more immediate issues: whether cannabis ought to be sold in coffee shops, how many years you should spend in jail for dealing coke.

However, no-one really asks this question, directly. The medical and the political aspects of drugs are endlessly debated, but after listening to these arguments for a while, you'll realize that while people on both sides talk about public health risks and harm reduction, most of the time they're really just disagreeing about the abstract question of whether taking drugs for fun is acceptable.

Here's the two major schools of thought as I see them. There are those who see no problem with recreational drug use, assuming no-one gets hurts. If it feels good, it is good. If it makes people happy, what's not to like? If people want to enjoy themselves in that particular way, it's no-one else's business. Call this the 'hedonist' view.

On the other hand, there are those who see drug use as a shameful escape from reality. There's more to life than "having fun", life is serious. You ought to be out there doing something, not just sitting around with a silly grin on your face. That's cheating, getting enjoyment for nothing. Call this the 'puritan' school.

People differ on which one they favour, but most of us identify with both to some extent. Few people are puritan enough to forgo all of life's pleasures, not even a quiet drink or a hot bath. Few hedonists would be happy if their own kids announced that they had no ambition to succeed in any kind of career, they'd just live off their inheritance and buy heroin.

As a whole, society has a mixed view. We have a puritanical objection to people who just take drugs and do nothing else with their lives; "junkies", "crackheads", "alkies". But we have no problem with drug use by people who clearly have engaged with the world, and succeeded.

Musicians, actors, and other stars take industrial quantities of drugs. Everyone knows it. It's not even an open secret in most cases, it's just open. Even gossip columnists don't notice unless someone gets so far gone that they do something funny. We don't care, because, whether or not we actually like their work, they're not just drug users, they're also doing their jobs.

The Ethics of Getting as High as a Kite

Are drugs good or bad?

I mean, in the ethical sense. Medically, all drugs have potential harms variously associated with use, long-term use, overdose, etc. Politically, by buying illegal drugs, you're probably ultimately funding criminals and terrorists (although you might well blame prohibition, not drugs, for that). But setting that aside, assuming no-one gets harmed as a result: is it morally wrong to take recreational drugs per se?

It's an important question, because your opinion about this will influence your opinions about less abstract, more immediate issues: whether cannabis ought to be sold in coffee shops, how many years you should spend in jail for dealing coke.

However, no-one really asks this question, directly. The medical and the political aspects of drugs are endlessly debated, but after listening to these arguments for a while, you'll realize that while people on both sides talk about public health risks and harm reduction, most of the time they're really just disagreeing about the abstract question of whether taking drugs for fun is acceptable.

Here's the two major schools of thought as I see them. There are those who see no problem with recreational drug use, assuming no-one gets hurts. If it feels good, it is good. If it makes people happy, what's not to like? If people want to enjoy themselves in that particular way, it's no-one else's business. Call this the 'hedonist' view.

On the other hand, there are those who see drug use as a shameful escape from reality. There's more to life than "having fun", life is serious. You ought to be out there doing something, not just sitting around with a silly grin on your face. That's cheating, getting enjoyment for nothing. Call this the 'puritan' school.

People differ on which one they favour, but most of us identify with both to some extent. Few people are puritan enough to forgo all of life's pleasures, not even a quiet drink or a hot bath. Few hedonists would be happy if their own kids announced that they had no ambition to succeed in any kind of career, they'd just live off their inheritance and buy heroin.

As a whole, society has a mixed view. We have a puritanical objection to people who just take drugs and do nothing else with their lives; "junkies", "crackheads", "alkies". But we have no problem with drug use by people who clearly have engaged with the world, and succeeded.

Musicians, actors, and other stars take industrial quantities of drugs. Everyone knows it. It's not even an open secret in most cases, it's just open. Even gossip columnists don't notice unless someone gets so far gone that they do something funny. We don't care, because, whether or not we actually like their work, they're not just drug users, they're also doing their jobs.

The End of Europe as We Know It?

gnxp's Razib Khan links to this article about Greek protests and comments:

Wow. Every news story makes me wonder if it’s the end of Europe as we know it.

It may be, but not because of the riots.

Riots are as Greek as olive and feta pie (look at 2008), while France has a proud tradition of civil disobedience. The UK also has a good history of protest, although in recent years we've refrained from violence. So the student protests were a shock, although the level of bloodshed was nowhere near that seen in say Greece: rocks were thrown, but no petrol bombs. The police beat some people, and dragged a guy out of his wheelchair for no apparant reason, but there were no water cannons or teargas.

If anything, the level of disorder in Europe has been remarkably low. Compared to some of the reasons why people rioted in Europe during the 20th century, the current austerity measures are far more serious. If this was happening 20 years ago, we would have seen governments brought down by strikes and disorder by now. That hasn't happened because the European left isn't what it used to be.

Europeans (outside Germany and Scandinavia whose economies are strong as always) are basically being faced with a future structured on centre-right lines, after spending the past 60 years building nice centre-left welfare states. And it's not their fault, it's "the bankers", or at least that's what everyone believes. Europeans are angry and you can see why. But not angry enough to stop it.

So in a sense this is the end: the end of Europe as the land of tax-and-spend (which has never been a dirty phrase over here). At the moment the model is tax-and-don't-spend, which is obviously unpopular. But when the budgets are balanced again, in say 5 years, governments may find it easier to just cut taxes rather than trying to rebuild the welfare and social programs they dismantled.

The End of Europe as We Know It?

gnxp's Razib Khan links to this article about Greek protests and comments:

Wow. Every news story makes me wonder if it’s the end of Europe as we know it.

It may be, but not because of the riots.

Riots are as Greek as olive and feta pie (look at 2008), while France has a proud tradition of civil disobedience. The UK also has a good history of protest, although in recent years we've refrained from violence. So the student protests were a shock, although the level of bloodshed was nowhere near that seen in say Greece: rocks were thrown, but no petrol bombs. The police beat some people, and dragged a guy out of his wheelchair for no apparant reason, but there were no water cannons or teargas.

If anything, the level of disorder in Europe has been remarkably low. Compared to some of the reasons why people rioted in Europe during the 20th century, the current austerity measures are far more serious. If this was happening 20 years ago, we would have seen governments brought down by strikes and disorder by now. That hasn't happened because the European left isn't what it used to be.

Europeans (outside Germany and Scandinavia whose economies are strong as always) are basically being faced with a future structured on centre-right lines, after spending the past 60 years building nice centre-left welfare states. And it's not their fault, it's "the bankers", or at least that's what everyone believes. Europeans are angry and you can see why. But not angry enough to stop it.

So in a sense this is the end: the end of Europe as the land of tax-and-spend (which has never been a dirty phrase over here). At the moment the model is tax-and-don't-spend, which is obviously unpopular. But when the budgets are balanced again, in say 5 years, governments may find it easier to just cut taxes rather than trying to rebuild the welfare and social programs they dismantled.

Wikileaks: A Conversation

"Wikileaks is great. It lets people leak stuff."

"Hang on, so you're saying that no-one could leak stuff before? They invented it?"

"Well, no, but they brought leaking to the masses. Sure, people could post documents to the press before, but now anyone in the world can access the leaks!"

"Great, but isn't that just the internet that did that? If it weren't for Wikileaks, people could just upload their leaks to a blog. Or email them to 50 newspapers. Or put them on the torrents. Or start their own site. If it's good, it would go viral, and be impossible to take down. Just like Wikileaks, with all their mirrors, except even more secure, because there'd be literally no-one to arrest or cut off funding to."

"OK, but Wikileaks is a brand. It's not about the technical stuff - it's the message. Like one of their wallpapers says, they're synonymous with free speech."

"So you think it's a good thing that one organization has become synonymous with the whole process of leaking? With the whole concept of openness? What will happen to the idea of free speech, then, if that brand image suddenly gets tarnished - like, say, if their founder and figurehead gets convicted of a serious crime, or..."

"He's innocent! Justice for Julian!"

"Quite possibly, but why do you care? Is he a personal friend?"

"It's an attack on free speech!"

"So you agree that one man has become synonymous with free speech? Doesn't that bother you?"

"Erm... well. Look, fundamentally, we need Wikileaks. Before, there was no centralized system for leaking. Anyone could do it. It was a mess! Wikileaks put everything in one place, and put a committee of experts in a position to decide what was worth leaking and what wasn't. It brought much-needed efficiency and respectability to the idea of leaking. Before Wikileaks, it was anarchy. They're like... the government."

"..."

Edit: See also The Last Psychiatrist's take.

Wikileaks: A Conversation

"Wikileaks is great. It lets people leak stuff."

"Hang on, so you're saying that no-one could leak stuff before? They invented it?"

"Well, no, but they brought leaking to the masses. Sure, people could post documents to the press before, but now anyone in the world can access the leaks!"

"Great, but isn't that just the internet that did that? If it weren't for Wikileaks, people could just upload their leaks to a blog. Or email them to 50 newspapers. Or put them on the torrents. Or start their own site. If it's good, it would go viral, and be impossible to take down. Just like Wikileaks, with all their mirrors, except even more secure, because there'd be literally no-one to arrest or cut off funding to."

"OK, but Wikileaks is a brand. It's not about the technical stuff - it's the message. Like one of their wallpapers says, they're synonymous with free speech."

"So you think it's a good thing that one organization has become synonymous with the whole process of leaking? With the whole concept of openness? What will happen to the idea of free speech, then, if that brand image suddenly gets tarnished - like, say, if their founder and figurehead gets convicted of a serious crime, or..."

"He's innocent! Justice for Julian!"

"Quite possibly, but why do you care? Is he a personal friend?"

"It's an attack on free speech!"

"So you agree that one man has become synonymous with free speech? Doesn't that bother you?"

"Erm... well. Look, fundamentally, we need Wikileaks. Before, there was no centralized system for leaking. Anyone could do it. It was a mess! Wikileaks put everything in one place, and put a committee of experts in a position to decide what was worth leaking and what wasn't. It brought much-needed efficiency and respectability to the idea of leaking. Before Wikileaks, it was anarchy. They're like... the government."

"..."

Edit: See also The Last Psychiatrist's take.

Online Comments: It's Not You, It's Them

Last week I was at a discussion about New Media, and someone mentioned that they'd been put off from writing content online because of a comment on one of their articles accusing them of being "stupid".

I found this surprising - not the comment, but that anyone would take it so personally. It's the internet. You will get called names. Everyone does. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you.

I suspect this is a generational issue. People who 'grew up online' know, as Penny Arcade explained, that

The sad fact is that there are millions of people whose idea of fun is to find people they disagree with, and mock them. And they're right, it can be fun - why else do you think people like Jon Stewart are so popular? - but that's all it is, entertainment. If you're on the receiving end, don't take it seriously.

If you write something online, and a lot of people read it, you will get slammed. Someone, somewhere, will disagree with you and they'll tell you so, in no uncertain terms. This is true whatever you write about, but some topics are like a big red rag to the herds of bulls out there.

Just to name a few, if you say anything vaguely related to climate change, religion, health, the economy, feminism or race, you might as well be holding a placard with a big arrow pointing down at you and "Sling Mud Here" on it.

The point is - it's them, not you. They are not interested in you, they don't know you, it's not you. True, they might tailor their insults a bit; if you're a young woman you might be, say, a "stupid girl" where a man would merely get called an "idiot". But this doesn't mean that the attacks are a reflection on you in any way. You just happen to be the one in the line of fire.

What do you do about this? Nothing.

Trying to enter into a serious debate is pointless. Insulting them back can be fun, just remember that if you find it fun, you've become one of them: "he who stares too long into the abyss...", etc. Complaining to the moderators might help, but unless the site has a rock solid zero-tolerance-for-fuckwads policy, probably not. Where the blight has taken root, like Comment is Free, I'd not waste your time complaining. Just ignore it and carry on.

The most important thing is not to take it personally. Do not get offended. Do not care. Because no-one else cares. Especially the people who wrote the comments. They presumably care about whatever "issue" prompted their attack, but they don't care about you. If anything, you should be pleased, because on the internet, the only stuff that doesn't attract stupid comments is the stuff that no-one reads.

I've heard these attacks referred to as "policing" existing hierarchies or "silencing" certain types of people. This seems to me to be granting them far more respect than they deserve. With the actual police, if you break the rules, they will physically arrest you. They have power. Internet trolls don't: if they succeed in policing or silencing anybody, it's because their targets let them boss them around. They're nobody; they're not your problem.

If you can't help being offended by such comments, don't read them, but ideally you shouldn't need to resort to that. For one thing, it means you miss the sensible comments (and there's always a few). But fundamentally, you shouldn't need to do this, because you really shouldn't care what some anonymous joker from the depths of the internet thinks about you.

Online Comments: It's Not You, It's Them

Last week I was at a discussion about New Media, and someone mentioned that they'd been put off from writing content online because of a comment on one of their articles accusing them of being "stupid".

I found this surprising - not the comment, but that anyone would take it so personally. It's the internet. You will get called names. Everyone does. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you.

I suspect this is a generational issue. People who 'grew up online' know, as Penny Arcade explained, that

The sad fact is that there are millions of people whose idea of fun is to find people they disagree with, and mock them. And they're right, it can be fun - why else do you think people like Jon Stewart are so popular? - but that's all it is, entertainment. If you're on the receiving end, don't take it seriously.

If you write something online, and a lot of people read it, you will get slammed. Someone, somewhere, will disagree with you and they'll tell you so, in no uncertain terms. This is true whatever you write about, but some topics are like a big red rag to the herds of bulls out there.

Just to name a few, if you say anything vaguely related to climate change, religion, health, the economy, feminism or race, you might as well be holding a placard with a big arrow pointing down at you and "Sling Mud Here" on it.

The point is - it's them, not you. They are not interested in you, they don't know you, it's not you. True, they might tailor their insults a bit; if you're a young woman you might be, say, a "stupid girl" where a man would merely get called an "idiot". But this doesn't mean that the attacks are a reflection on you in any way. You just happen to be the one in the line of fire.

What do you do about this? Nothing.

Trying to enter into a serious debate is pointless. Insulting them back can be fun, just remember that if you find it fun, you've become one of them: "he who stares too long into the abyss...", etc. Complaining to the moderators might help, but unless the site has a rock solid zero-tolerance-for-fuckwads policy, probably not. Where the blight has taken root, like Comment is Free, I'd not waste your time complaining. Just ignore it and carry on.

The most important thing is not to take it personally. Do not get offended. Do not care. Because no-one else cares. Especially the people who wrote the comments. They presumably care about whatever "issue" prompted their attack, but they don't care about you. If anything, you should be pleased, because on the internet, the only stuff that doesn't attract stupid comments is the stuff that no-one reads.

I've heard these attacks referred to as "policing" existing hierarchies or "silencing" certain types of people. This seems to me to be granting them far more respect than they deserve. With the actual police, if you break the rules, they will physically arrest you. They have power. Internet trolls don't: if they succeed in policing or silencing anybody, it's because their targets let them boss them around. They're nobody; they're not your problem.

If you can't help being offended by such comments, don't read them, but ideally you shouldn't need to resort to that. For one thing, it means you miss the sensible comments (and there's always a few). But fundamentally, you shouldn't need to do this, because you really shouldn't care what some anonymous joker from the depths of the internet thinks about you.

I Wish I Hadn't Said That

In the past two weeks Britain has seen two men attempt to travel back in time.

First there was Steven Fry, who gave an interview to a gay magazine in which he said:

"I feel sorry for straight men. The only reason women will have sex with them is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man... Of course, a lot of women will deny this and say, 'Oh no, but I love sex, I love it!' But do they go around having it the way that gay men do?"

amongst other variations on that theme. People got annoyed, although it's not exactly a new idea, and as soon as it all kicked off, Fry twittered

So some fucking paper misquotes a humorous interview I gave, which itself misquoted me and now I'm the Antichrist. I give up. Bye bye.

Fortunately for his 1.9 million followers he came back to Twitter a week later and blogged in his defence.

Now, as noted by Private Eye magazine, Fry never offered any support for his Tweet that he'd been doubly misquoted. Rather he claimed that, although he had indeed said the words in question, he didn't believe them.

the keenest disappointment...is the idea that there are people out there who actually swallow the notion that I am so stupid as to believe that women don’t enjoy sex. That I am dense, dotty and suicidally deluded enough to make a public declaration of such a crazed belief... I entertain no such notion... I can truly report that I [am] quite assured of the fact that women do indeed enjoy sex.

In fact...

I chatted to [the interviewer], we had a pleasant, relaxed and easy conversation. That’s the word, a conversation... At some point we chatted about gay sexuality – well, you would wouldn’t you, for a gay magazine? – and as part of that conversation I repeated the old canard about how men, unlike women, were cursed with their uniquely pressing and annoying libidos.

...I do not believe it as some kind of eternal gender truth, I was simply taking a thought for a walk, I was “playing gracefully with ideas” to repeat Oscar’s great phrase, or at least attempting to do so.

But what does this mean, exactly? Why would he repeat that old canard, if he didn't think there was at least something in it? It's not like the statement is so obviously crazy that that goes without saying that he doesn't believe it: hence why it's an old canard.

It's true that the nuances of speech get flattened out in print. But when he said it, he evidently didn't make it clear that he thought the idea was "stupid ... dense, dotty and suicidally deluded... crazed" - as he later claimed.

Then it happened again. Lord Young (who ironically is 78), a government advisor, said that Britain's economy was strong, that many British people had profited from the "so-called recession" due to low interest rates, and that current government spending cuts were no big deal in the grand scheme of things.

People got annoyed, and he quickly retracted his words saying that his comments were "insensitive and inaccurate", though he still had to resign in the end. Why he'd suddenly revised his analysis of the economic situation, or what was wrong with his earlier statements, he didn't bother to explain...

Fry and Young obviously misjudged how socially acceptable their words would be. They made a faux-pas. We've all done it: you say something and then realize, to your horror, that everyone's jaw just dropped a little. You wish you could un-say that.

But the point is you can't.

Unless, it appears, you're in the media. Fry and Young tried to do just that. But why on earth is that acceptable? Are we so touchy that we'd rather have someone insult our intelligence by trying to convince us that they don't believe something we all heard them say, than have someone believe something we don't agree with?

I Wish I Hadn't Said That

In the past two weeks Britain has seen two men attempt to travel back in time.

First there was Steven Fry, who gave an interview to a gay magazine in which he said:

"I feel sorry for straight men. The only reason women will have sex with them is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man... Of course, a lot of women will deny this and say, 'Oh no, but I love sex, I love it!' But do they go around having it the way that gay men do?"

amongst other variations on that theme. People got annoyed, although it's not exactly a new idea, and as soon as it all kicked off, Fry twittered

So some fucking paper misquotes a humorous interview I gave, which itself misquoted me and now I'm the Antichrist. I give up. Bye bye.

Fortunately for his 1.9 million followers he came back to Twitter a week later and blogged in his defence.

Now, as noted by Private Eye magazine, Fry never offered any support for his Tweet that he'd been doubly misquoted. Rather he claimed that, although he had indeed said the words in question, he didn't believe them.

the keenest disappointment...is the idea that there are people out there who actually swallow the notion that I am so stupid as to believe that women don’t enjoy sex. That I am dense, dotty and suicidally deluded enough to make a public declaration of such a crazed belief... I entertain no such notion... I can truly report that I [am] quite assured of the fact that women do indeed enjoy sex.

In fact...

I chatted to [the interviewer], we had a pleasant, relaxed and easy conversation. That’s the word, a conversation... At some point we chatted about gay sexuality – well, you would wouldn’t you, for a gay magazine? – and as part of that conversation I repeated the old canard about how men, unlike women, were cursed with their uniquely pressing and annoying libidos.

...I do not believe it as some kind of eternal gender truth, I was simply taking a thought for a walk, I was “playing gracefully with ideas” to repeat Oscar’s great phrase, or at least attempting to do so.

But what does this mean, exactly? Why would he repeat that old canard, if he didn't think there was at least something in it? It's not like the statement is so obviously crazy that that goes without saying that he doesn't believe it: hence why it's an old canard.

It's true that the nuances of speech get flattened out in print. But when he said it, he evidently didn't make it clear that he thought the idea was "stupid ... dense, dotty and suicidally deluded... crazed" - as he later claimed.

Then it happened again. Lord Young (who ironically is 78), a government advisor, said that Britain's economy was strong, that many British people had profited from the "so-called recession" due to low interest rates, and that current government spending cuts were no big deal in the grand scheme of things.

People got annoyed, and he quickly retracted his words saying that his comments were "insensitive and inaccurate", though he still had to resign in the end. Why he'd suddenly revised his analysis of the economic situation, or what was wrong with his earlier statements, he didn't bother to explain...

Fry and Young obviously misjudged how socially acceptable their words would be. They made a faux-pas. We've all done it: you say something and then realize, to your horror, that everyone's jaw just dropped a little. You wish you could un-say that.

But the point is you can't.

Unless, it appears, you're in the media. Fry and Young tried to do just that. But why on earth is that acceptable? Are we so touchy that we'd rather have someone insult our intelligence by trying to convince us that they don't believe something we all heard them say, than have someone believe something we don't agree with?

The Joy of Sexism

This week, I've been embroiled in not one but two gender-based debates.

First up, I've been quoted in Delusions of Gender, the new book from Cordelia Fine, in which she examines the science of alleged sex differences in behaviour. The quote was from this 2008 post about Vicky Tuck, a teacher with odd ideas about the brains of boys and girls. I haven't had time to read the book yet, but a review's in the pipeline.

Then yesterday, I found out that I've been the subject of some research.

In this report, we detail research into the representation of women in science, engineering and technology (SET) within online media...

The research involved data collection and analysis from websites, web authors and young web users. We monitored SET content across 16 websites. Eight sites were generalist: BBC, Channel 4, SkyTV, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter.

Eight sites were SET-specific: New Scientist, Bad Science, The Science Museum, The Natural History Museum, Neuroskeptic Blog, Science – So What? So Everything, Watt’s Up With That? Blog and RichardDawkins.net.

Quite a line-up. Clearly they decided to look at the very best, most illustrious and most respected science blogs... and also Neuroskeptic. Anyway, unfortunately I can't access the paper, despite being in it, but according to the abstract they found that:

Online science informational content is male dominated in that far more men than women are present... we found that these women are:

• Subject to muting of their ‘voices’. This includes instances where SET women are pictured but remain anonymous and instances where they are used, mainly as science journalists, to ventriloquise other people's scientific work.
• Subject to clustering in specific SET fields and website sections, particularly those about ‘feminine’ subjects or specifically about women...
• Associated with ‘feminine’ attributes and activities, notably as caring, demonstrating empathy with children and animals...
• Predominantly White, middle-class, able-bodied and heterosexual.
• Peripheral to the main story and subordinated as students, young scientists, relatives of a male scientist ... we found less hyperlinking of women’s than men’s names in online SET.
• Discussed in terms of appearance, personality, sexuality and personal circumstances more often than men...
• More generally, constructed in ways that relocate them in the private domestic sphere, detract from their scientific contribution, and associate them, more often than men, with the new category of ‘bad science’.

Without knowing the details it's hard to evaluate these claims, but it's fair to say that some of it rings true.

There's been lots of buzz recently about the gender ratio of science bloggers - we're mostly male, who'd have guessed? - and I suppose this would be a good time to chip in. Does it matter?

I think it does, and moreover it's part of a bigger picture. As far as I can see, science bloggers are mostly: male, white, under 40... and almost all of the biggest ones are also native English speakers; I don't know if, overall, English-speakers are overrepresented, because not all blogs are written in English and I only know the ones that are - but English ones get the lions share of the traffic.

Back to gender, even in fields such as psychology and neuroscience in which there are lots of female researchers, bloggers are overwhelmingly male. Likewise, a lot of researchers, even those working in English-speaking countries, are non-native-English speakers, but they have an obvious disadvantage when it comes to blogging in English.

So science bloggers are drawn mostly from a narrow cross-section of the scientific community, which is a problem, because it greatly increases the chances of bloggers becoming an "echo chamber", or a clique, neither of which is likely to end well. Diversity is valuable, in this kind of thing, not because it's somehow morally good per se, but because it helps prevent stagnation.

The Joy of Sexism

This week, I've been embroiled in not one but two gender-based debates.

First up, I've been quoted in Delusions of Gender, the new book from Cordelia Fine, in which she examines the science of alleged sex differences in behaviour. The quote was from this 2008 post about Vicky Tuck, a teacher with odd ideas about the brains of boys and girls. I haven't had time to read the book yet, but a review's in the pipeline.

Then yesterday, I found out that I've been the subject of some research.

In this report, we detail research into the representation of women in science, engineering and technology (SET) within online media...

The research involved data collection and analysis from websites, web authors and young web users. We monitored SET content across 16 websites. Eight sites were generalist: BBC, Channel 4, SkyTV, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter.

Eight sites were SET-specific: New Scientist, Bad Science, The Science Museum, The Natural History Museum, Neuroskeptic Blog, Science – So What? So Everything, Watt’s Up With That? Blog and RichardDawkins.net.

Quite a line-up. Clearly they decided to look at the very best, most illustrious and most respected science blogs... and also Neuroskeptic. Anyway, unfortunately I can't access the paper, despite being in it, but according to the abstract they found that:

Online science informational content is male dominated in that far more men than women are present... we found that these women are:

• Subject to muting of their ‘voices’. This includes instances where SET women are pictured but remain anonymous and instances where they are used, mainly as science journalists, to ventriloquise other people's scientific work.
• Subject to clustering in specific SET fields and website sections, particularly those about ‘feminine’ subjects or specifically about women...
• Associated with ‘feminine’ attributes and activities, notably as caring, demonstrating empathy with children and animals...
• Predominantly White, middle-class, able-bodied and heterosexual.
• Peripheral to the main story and subordinated as students, young scientists, relatives of a male scientist ... we found less hyperlinking of women’s than men’s names in online SET.
• Discussed in terms of appearance, personality, sexuality and personal circumstances more often than men...
• More generally, constructed in ways that relocate them in the private domestic sphere, detract from their scientific contribution, and associate them, more often than men, with the new category of ‘bad science’.

Without knowing the details it's hard to evaluate these claims, but it's fair to say that some of it rings true.

There's been lots of buzz recently about the gender ratio of science bloggers - we're mostly male, who'd have guessed? - and I suppose this would be a good time to chip in. Does it matter?

I think it does, and moreover it's part of a bigger picture. As far as I can see, science bloggers are mostly: male, white, under 40... and almost all of the biggest ones are also native English speakers; I don't know if, overall, English-speakers are overrepresented, because not all blogs are written in English and I only know the ones that are - but English ones get the lions share of the traffic.

Back to gender, even in fields such as psychology and neuroscience in which there are lots of female researchers, bloggers are overwhelmingly male. Likewise, a lot of researchers, even those working in English-speaking countries, are non-native-English speakers, but they have an obvious disadvantage when it comes to blogging in English.

So science bloggers are drawn mostly from a narrow cross-section of the scientific community, which is a problem, because it greatly increases the chances of bloggers becoming an "echo chamber", or a clique, neither of which is likely to end well. Diversity is valuable, in this kind of thing, not because it's somehow morally good per se, but because it helps prevent stagnation.

Israel and Palestine are Both Fighting Back...?

There are three basic schools of thought on the Israel / Palestine thing.

• Those evil Israelis are out to destroy Palestine, and the Palestinians are just fighting back.
• Those evil Palestinians are out to destroy Israel, and the Israelis are just fighting back.
• It's a cycle of violence, where both sides are fighting back against the other.
  

Which one you subscribe to depends mostly on where you were born. I'm not aware of many people who've changed their minds on this issue, perhaps because doing so would require a study of the last 2,500 years of history, religion and politics.

Wouldn't it be handy if science could provide an answer? According to the authors of a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the "cycle" school is right: both sides are fighting back against the other: Both sides retaliate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The authors (from Switzerland, Israel and the USA) took data on daily fatalities on both sides, and also of daily launches of Palestinian "Qassam" rockets at Israel. The data run from 2001, the start of the current round of unpleasantness, to late 2008, the Gaza War.

They looked to see whether the number of events that happened on a certain day predicted the number of events caused by the other side on the following days, i.e. whether a Palestinian death caused the Palestinians to retaliate by firing more rockets and killing more Israelis, and vice versa.

What happened? They found that both sides were more likely to launch attacks on the days following a death on their own side. The exception to this rule was that Israel did not noticeably retaliate against Qassam launches. This is perhaps because Qassams are so ineffective: out of 3,645 recorded launches, they killed 15 people.

These graphs show the number of "extra" actions on the days following a event, averaged over the whole 8 years, according to a statistical method called the Impulse Response Function. Note that the absolute size of the effects is larger for the Israeli retaliations (the Y axis is bigger); there were a total of 4,874 Palestinian fatalities and 1,062 Israeli fatalities

The authors then used another method called Vector Autoregression to discover more about the relationship. In theory, this method controls for the past history of actions by a given side, so that it reveals the number of actions independently caused by the opposing side.

the number of Qassams fired increases by 6% on the first day after a single killing of a Palestinian by Israel; the probability of any Qassams being fired increases by 11%; and the probability of any Israelis being killed by Palestinians increases by 10%. Conversely, 1 day after the killing of a single Israeli by Palestinians, the number of Palestinians killed by Israel increases by 9%, and the probability of any Palestinians being killed increases by 20%

....retaliation accounts for a larger fraction of Palestinian compared with Israeli aggression: in the levels specification, 10% of all Qassam rockets can be attributed to prior Israeli attacks on Palestinians, but only 4% of killings of Palestinians by Israel can be attributed to prior Palestinian attacks on Israel.... 6% of all days on which Palestinians attack Israel with rockets, and 5% of all days on which they attack by killing Israelis, can be attributed to retaliation; in contrast, this is true for only 2% of all days on which Israel kills Palestinians.

What are we to make of this? This is a good paper as far as it goes, and it casts doubt on earlier analyses finding that Israel is retaliating against Palestinians but not vice versa. However, the inherent problem with all of this research (beyond the fact that it's all based on correlations and can only indirectly imply causation), is that it focuses on individual acts of violence. The authors say, citing surveys, that

Over one half of Israelis and three quarters of Palestinians think the other side seeks to take over their land. When accounting for their own acts of aggression, Israelis often claim to be merely responding to Palestinian violence, and Palestinians often see themselves as simply reacting to Israeli violence.

But I don't think many Israelis would argue that the IDF only kills individual Palestinians as a reflex reaction to a particular attack. They're claiming that the whole conflict is a defensive one, that the Palestinians are the aggressors, but that doesn't rule out their taking the initiative on a tactical level e.g. in destroying Palestinian military capabilities before they have a chance to attack. And vice versa on the other side.

WW2 was a war of aggression by the Axis powers, but that doesn't mean that the Allies only killed Axis soldiers after they'd attacked a certain place. The Allies were on the offensive for the second half of the war, and eventually invaded the Axis's own homelands, but it was still a defensive war, because the Axis were responsible for it.

For Israel and for Palestine, the other guys are to blame for the whole thing. Who's right, if anyone, is fundamentally a historical, political and ethical question, that can't be answered by looking at day-to-day variations in who's shooting when.

Comment Policy: Please only comment if you've got something to say about this paper, or related research. Comments that are just making the case for or against Israel will get deleted.

Haushofer J, Biletzki A, & Kanwisher N (2010). Both sides retaliate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 20921415

Israel and Palestine are Both Fighting Back...?

There are three basic schools of thought on the Israel / Palestine thing.

• Those evil Israelis are out to destroy Palestine, and the Palestinians are just fighting back.
• Those evil Palestinians are out to destroy Israel, and the Israelis are just fighting back.
• It's a cycle of violence, where both sides are fighting back against the other.
  

Which one you subscribe to depends mostly on where you were born. I'm not aware of many people who've changed their minds on this issue, perhaps because doing so would require a study of the last 2,500 years of history, religion and politics.

Wouldn't it be handy if science could provide an answer? According to the authors of a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the "cycle" school is right: both sides are fighting back against the other: Both sides retaliate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The authors (from Switzerland, Israel and the USA) took data on daily fatalities on both sides, and also of daily launches of Palestinian "Qassam" rockets at Israel. The data run from 2001, the start of the current round of unpleasantness, to late 2008, the Gaza War.

They looked to see whether the number of events that happened on a certain day predicted the number of events caused by the other side on the following days, i.e. whether a Palestinian death caused the Palestinians to retaliate by firing more rockets and killing more Israelis, and vice versa.

What happened? They found that both sides were more likely to launch attacks on the days following a death on their own side. The exception to this rule was that Israel did not noticeably retaliate against Qassam launches. This is perhaps because Qassams are so ineffective: out of 3,645 recorded launches, they killed 15 people.

These graphs show the number of "extra" actions on the days following a event, averaged over the whole 8 years, according to a statistical method called the Impulse Response Function. Note that the absolute size of the effects is larger for the Israeli retaliations (the Y axis is bigger); there were a total of 4,874 Palestinian fatalities and 1,062 Israeli fatalities

The authors then used another method called Vector Autoregression to discover more about the relationship. In theory, this method controls for the past history of actions by a given side, so that it reveals the number of actions independently caused by the opposing side.

the number of Qassams fired increases by 6% on the first day after a single killing of a Palestinian by Israel; the probability of any Qassams being fired increases by 11%; and the probability of any Israelis being killed by Palestinians increases by 10%. Conversely, 1 day after the killing of a single Israeli by Palestinians, the number of Palestinians killed by Israel increases by 9%, and the probability of any Palestinians being killed increases by 20%

....retaliation accounts for a larger fraction of Palestinian compared with Israeli aggression: in the levels specification, 10% of all Qassam rockets can be attributed to prior Israeli attacks on Palestinians, but only 4% of killings of Palestinians by Israel can be attributed to prior Palestinian attacks on Israel.... 6% of all days on which Palestinians attack Israel with rockets, and 5% of all days on which they attack by killing Israelis, can be attributed to retaliation; in contrast, this is true for only 2% of all days on which Israel kills Palestinians.

What are we to make of this? This is a good paper as far as it goes, and it casts doubt on earlier analyses finding that Israel is retaliating against Palestinians but not vice versa. However, the inherent problem with all of this research (beyond the fact that it's all based on correlations and can only indirectly imply causation), is that it focuses on individual acts of violence. The authors say, citing surveys, that

Over one half of Israelis and three quarters of Palestinians think the other side seeks to take over their land. When accounting for their own acts of aggression, Israelis often claim to be merely responding to Palestinian violence, and Palestinians often see themselves as simply reacting to Israeli violence.

But I don't think many Israelis would argue that the IDF only kills individual Palestinians as a reflex reaction to a particular attack. They're claiming that the whole conflict is a defensive one, that the Palestinians are the aggressors, but that doesn't rule out their taking the initiative on a tactical level e.g. in destroying Palestinian military capabilities before they have a chance to attack. And vice versa on the other side.

WW2 was a war of aggression by the Axis powers, but that doesn't mean that the Allies only killed Axis soldiers after they'd attacked a certain place. The Allies were on the offensive for the second half of the war, and eventually invaded the Axis's own homelands, but it was still a defensive war, because the Axis were responsible for it.

For Israel and for Palestine, the other guys are to blame for the whole thing. Who's right, if anyone, is fundamentally a historical, political and ethical question, that can't be answered by looking at day-to-day variations in who's shooting when.

Comment Policy: Please only comment if you've got something to say about this paper, or related research. Comments that are just making the case for or against Israel will get deleted.

Haushofer J, Biletzki A, & Kanwisher N (2010). Both sides retaliate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 20921415

How To Sell An Idea

You've got an idea: a new way of doing things; a change; a paradigm shift. It might work, it might be no better than what we've got already, or it might end up being a disaster.

The honest way to present your proposal would be to admit its novelty, and hence the uncertainty: this is a new idea I had, I can't promise anything, but here are my reasons for thinking it's worth a try, here are the likely costs and benefits, here are the alternatives.

However, let's suppose you don't want to do that. That's hard work, and if your idea is crap, people could tell. How else could you convince them? By making it seem as though it's not a new idea at all.

You could dress your idea up as:

• the glorious past. Your idea is nothing more than how we did things back in the golden age, when everything was great. For some reason, people strayed from the true path, and things went bad. We should go back to the the good old days. It worked then, so it'll work now. You'll use words like: restoring, reviving, regaining, renewing... "re" is your friend.
• the next step. Your idea is just the logical progression of what we're already doing. Things used to be bad, and then they started to change, and get better. Let's make them even better, by doing more of the same. It's inevitable, anyway: you can't stop history. You'll use words like: progress, forward, advance, build, grow...
  
• catching up. You're just saying we should bring stuff into line with the way things are done elsewhere, which as we know, is working well. It's not even a matter of moving forward, so much as keeping up. It would be weird not to change. We don't want to be dinosaurs. You'll use words like: modernization, rationalization, reform...
  
• keeping things the same. Things are fine right now, and don't need improving. But in order for things to stay great, we must adapt to changing circumstances, so we'll have to make a few adjustments, but don't worry, fundamentally things are going to stay just as they are. You'll use words like: preserving, maintaining, protecting, upholding, strengthening...

The point in every case being to make an innovation seem like it's not one. New means untested, and uncertain, and risky. No-one likes that. Passing off ideas as already proven is a way of gaining acceptance for ideas that wouldn't stand up on their own merits. I'm sure I don't need to point out that this trick is a mainstay of politicians, ideologues and managers everywhere.

Of course, there are plenty of changes that really are these things, to various degrees. Sometimes the past was glorious, relatively speaking (France 1942 springs to mind); sometimes we do need to catch up.

But every new idea still has an element of risk. Nothing has ever been tried and tested in the exact circumstances that we face now, because those circumstances have never existed before. Just because it worked before, or elsewhere, in a situation that we think is similar, is no guarantee. There are only degrees of certainty.

This doesn't mean we can't decide what to do, or that we shouldn't change anything. Not changing things is a plan of action in itself, anyway. The point is that we ought to be willing to try stuff that might not work, our guide to what's likely to happen being the evidence on what's worked before, critically appraised. "I don't know" is not a dirty phrase.

How To Sell An Idea

You've got an idea: a new way of doing things; a change; a paradigm shift. It might work, it might be no better than what we've got already, or it might end up being a disaster.

The honest way to present your proposal would be to admit its novelty, and hence the uncertainty: this is a new idea I had, I can't promise anything, but here are my reasons for thinking it's worth a try, here are the likely costs and benefits, here are the alternatives.

However, let's suppose you don't want to do that. That's hard work, and if your idea is crap, people could tell. How else could you convince them? By making it seem as though it's not a new idea at all.

You could dress your idea up as:

• the glorious past. Your idea is nothing more than how we did things back in the golden age, when everything was great. For some reason, people strayed from the true path, and things went bad. We should go back to the the good old days. It worked then, so it'll work now. You'll use words like: restoring, reviving, regaining, renewing... "re" is your friend.
• the next step. Your idea is just the logical progression of what we're already doing. Things used to be bad, and then they started to change, and get better. Let's make them even better, by doing more of the same. It's inevitable, anyway: you can't stop history. You'll use words like: progress, forward, advance, build, grow...
  
• catching up. You're just saying we should bring stuff into line with the way things are done elsewhere, which as we know, is working well. It's not even a matter of moving forward, so much as keeping up. It would be weird not to change. We don't want to be dinosaurs. You'll use words like: modernization, rationalization, reform...
  
• keeping things the same. Things are fine right now, and don't need improving. But in order for things to stay great, we must adapt to changing circumstances, so we'll have to make a few adjustments, but don't worry, fundamentally things are going to stay just as they are. You'll use words like: preserving, maintaining, protecting, upholding, strengthening...

The point in every case being to make an innovation seem like it's not one. New means untested, and uncertain, and risky. No-one likes that. Passing off ideas as already proven is a way of gaining acceptance for ideas that wouldn't stand up on their own merits. I'm sure I don't need to point out that this trick is a mainstay of politicians, ideologues and managers everywhere.

Of course, there are plenty of changes that really are these things, to various degrees. Sometimes the past was glorious, relatively speaking (France 1942 springs to mind); sometimes we do need to catch up.

But every new idea still has an element of risk. Nothing has ever been tried and tested in the exact circumstances that we face now, because those circumstances have never existed before. Just because it worked before, or elsewhere, in a situation that we think is similar, is no guarantee. There are only degrees of certainty.

This doesn't mean we can't decide what to do, or that we shouldn't change anything. Not changing things is a plan of action in itself, anyway. The point is that we ought to be willing to try stuff that might not work, our guide to what's likely to happen being the evidence on what's worked before, critically appraised. "I don't know" is not a dirty phrase.

"Koran Burning"

According to the BBC:

Koran protests sweep Afghanistan... Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets across Afghanistan... Three people were shot when a protest near a Nato base in the north-east of the country turned violent.

Wow. That's a lot of fuss about, literally, nothing - the Koran burning hasn't happened. So what are they angry about? The "Koran Burning" - the mere idea of it. That has happened, of course - it's been all over the news.

Why? Well, obviously, it's a big deal. People are getting shot protesting about it in Afghanistan. It's news, so of course the media want to talk about it. But all they're talking about is themselves: the news is that everyone is talking about the news which is that everyone is talking about...

A week ago no-one had heard of Pastor Jones. The only way he could become newsworthy is if he did something important. But what he was proposing to do was not, in itself, important: he was going to burn a Koran in front of a handful of like-minded people.

No-one would have cared about that, because the only people who'd have known about it would have been the participants. Muslims wouldn't have cared, because they would never have heard about it. "Someone You've Never Heard Of Does Something" - not much of a headline.

But as soon as it became news, it was news. Once he'd appeared on CNN, say, every other news outlet was naturally going to cover the story because by then people did care. If something's on CNN, it's news, by definition. Clever, eh?


What's odd is that Jones actually announced his plans way back in July; no-one took much notice at the time. Google Trends shows that interest began to build only in late August, peaking on August 22nd, but then falling off almost to zero.

What triggered the first peak? It seems to have been the decision of the local fire department to deny a permit for the holy book bonfire, on August 18th. (There were just 6 English-language news hits between the 1st and the 17th.)

It all kicked off when the Associated Press reported about the fire department's decision on August 18th and was quickly followed up by everyone else; the AP credit the story to the local paper The Gainsville Sun who covered the story on the same day.

But in their original article, the Sun wrote that Pastor Jones had already made "international headlines" over the event. Indeed there were a number of articles about it in late July following Jones's original Facebook announcement. But interest then disappeared - there was virtually nothing about it in the first half of August, remember.

So there was, it seems, nothing inevitable about this story going global. It had a chance to become a big deal in late July - and it didn't. It had another shot in mid-August, and it got a bit of press that time, but then it all petered out.

Only this week has the story become massive. US commander in Afghanistan General Petraeus spoke out on September 6th; ironically, just before the story finally exploded, since as you can see on the Google Trends above, searches were basically zero up until September 7th when they went through the roof.

So the "Koran Burning" story had three chances to become front-page global news and it only succeeded on the third try. Why? The easy answer is that it's an immediate issue now, because the burning is planned for 11th September - tomorrow. But I wonder if that's one of those post hoc explanations that makes whatever random stuff that happened seem inevitable in retrospect.

The whole story is newsworthy only because it's news, remember. The more attention it gets, the more it attracts. Presumably, therefore, there's a certain critical mass, the famous Tipping Point, after which it's unstoppable. This happened around September 6th, and not in late July or mid August.

But there's a random factor: every given news outlet who might run the story, might decide not to; maybe it doesn't have space because something more important happened, or because the Religion correspondent was off sick that day, etc. Whether a story reaches the critical mass is down to luck, in other words.

The decision of a single journalist on the 5th or the 6th might well have been what finally tipped it.

"Koran Burning"

According to the BBC:

Koran protests sweep Afghanistan... Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets across Afghanistan... Three people were shot when a protest near a Nato base in the north-east of the country turned violent.

Wow. That's a lot of fuss about, literally, nothing - the Koran burning hasn't happened. So what are they angry about? The "Koran Burning" - the mere idea of it. That has happened, of course - it's been all over the news.

Why? Well, obviously, it's a big deal. People are getting shot protesting about it in Afghanistan. It's news, so of course the media want to talk about it. But all they're talking about is themselves: the news is that everyone is talking about the news which is that everyone is talking about...

A week ago no-one had heard of Pastor Jones. The only way he could become newsworthy is if he did something important. But what he was proposing to do was not, in itself, important: he was going to burn a Koran in front of a handful of like-minded people.

No-one would have cared about that, because the only people who'd have known about it would have been the participants. Muslims wouldn't have cared, because they would never have heard about it. "Someone You've Never Heard Of Does Something" - not much of a headline.

But as soon as it became news, it was news. Once he'd appeared on CNN, say, every other news outlet was naturally going to cover the story because by then people did care. If something's on CNN, it's news, by definition. Clever, eh?


What's odd is that Jones actually announced his plans way back in July; no-one took much notice at the time. Google Trends shows that interest began to build only in late August, peaking on August 22nd, but then falling off almost to zero.

What triggered the first peak? It seems to have been the decision of the local fire department to deny a permit for the holy book bonfire, on August 18th. (There were just 6 English-language news hits between the 1st and the 17th.)

It all kicked off when the Associated Press reported about the fire department's decision on August 18th and was quickly followed up by everyone else; the AP credit the story to the local paper The Gainsville Sun who covered the story on the same day.

But in their original article, the Sun wrote that Pastor Jones had already made "international headlines" over the event. Indeed there were a number of articles about it in late July following Jones's original Facebook announcement. But interest then disappeared - there was virtually nothing about it in the first half of August, remember.

So there was, it seems, nothing inevitable about this story going global. It had a chance to become a big deal in late July - and it didn't. It had another shot in mid-August, and it got a bit of press that time, but then it all petered out.

Only this week has the story become massive. US commander in Afghanistan General Petraeus spoke out on September 6th; ironically, just before the story finally exploded, since as you can see on the Google Trends above, searches were basically zero up until September 7th when they went through the roof.

So the "Koran Burning" story had three chances to become front-page global news and it only succeeded on the third try. Why? The easy answer is that it's an immediate issue now, because the burning is planned for 11th September - tomorrow. But I wonder if that's one of those post hoc explanations that makes whatever random stuff that happened seem inevitable in retrospect.

The whole story is newsworthy only because it's news, remember. The more attention it gets, the more it attracts. Presumably, therefore, there's a certain critical mass, the famous Tipping Point, after which it's unstoppable. This happened around September 6th, and not in late July or mid August.

But there's a random factor: every given news outlet who might run the story, might decide not to; maybe it doesn't have space because something more important happened, or because the Religion correspondent was off sick that day, etc. Whether a story reaches the critical mass is down to luck, in other words.

The decision of a single journalist on the 5th or the 6th might well have been what finally tipped it.