My image of stock traders as small, fearful animals

Maybe it's unfair of me, but I always have this image of stock traders in my mind as small, skittish little animals which, as soon as they see a shadow or hear someone say "Boo!", scurry back to the safety of their holes, before fearfully creeping out again. Or maybe like little furry lemmings throwing themselves helter-skelter over financial cliffs for little or no reason.
Now, I know they're just doing their job, being cautious and all that. But there's just something about the way they scuttle about en masse, overreacting to every minor event and rumour, that keeps that image fresh.
The latest sky-is-falling event has led to at massive 1,175 point fall on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, with smaller but still substantial "corrections" on the S&P 500, the NASDAQ and the TSX. Asian exchanges have seen even larger percentage drops, and sone estimates put the accumulated global value of the correction at a ridiculous $4 trillion. This is the largest tumble since the dark days of 2008.
And the world-shaking event that precipitated this slashing of billions of dollars off the main stock exchanges? Well, nothing really. Just a vague feeling that maybe things to have been going too well for too long (two steady years of increasing markets leading to record or near-record high indexes, upbeat economic and employment reports, strong global economic activity), and that inflation may be rising, with another interest rate cut possibly in the air. Or maybe not.
It's really not much to go on. But as soon as few major players start to act on a hunch, however vague or misguided, everyone else follows suit, in a veritable orgy of FOMO. It all seems so unscientific somehow, so tribal. It's a most unflattering image I have of all these important and almost certainly very rich individuals, but I can't seem to shake it.

UPDATE
Some are now blaming the run on automated computer algorithms, which frankly makes the human traders look even sillier.
When stocks are as expensive as they are currently, very small shifts in expectations can lead to big market moves. And when hard-wired computer algorithms are involved  (e.g. at its simplest, automatically sell when a stock value reaches $x), the effect can be unnecessarily exacerbated. And when one computer sees another computer selling, it too can be triggered to sell., even if there is no good underlying reason, leading to the stock exchange equivalent of a multiple car pile-up. So, ultimately, all those billion dollar computerized stock trading systems can begin to look like nothing more than a headless chicken running around the farmyard.

Get to know the blockchain

I know a lot of people are still very confused, so here is the simplest and best explanation I have yet seen of how a blockchain works.
Get to know it, it's not going away.

SuperbOwl Sunday again

Bored with the SuperBowl? Here are some SuperbOwls. (Yes, I know it's a bit hackneyed now, but it was a very cool meme when it first came out).

UPDATE
Actually, it was a pretty good exciting game, and I don't even like American football. It was nice to see the underdog win, and the sanctimonious Tom Brady get his comeuppance.

Does virtual pedophilia lead to real-world crimes?

Here's (yet) a(nother) thing I have never thought about.

In Second Life - the venerable online role-playing game that goes back to the early days of the internet, but which apparently is still going - you can inhabit a virtual avatar, and carry out virtually most of the things you do in real life, including having sex. Because individuals in the game can choose the age, gender and appearance of their virtual characters, that means that it is possible for a virtual adult character to have sex with a virtual child.

Now, pedophilia is illegal and ethically verboten in the real world. So, should we be concerned about people doing it without repercussions in the virtual world of Second Life? Some people definitely are concerned, and some Second Life players and others have vowed to expose such activity within the game. There is also pressure on Linden Labs, the manufacturers of the Second Life software, to actively disallow such behaviour.

But it's not a slam-dunk ethically. How is it any different from a person just imagining the activity in their head (which, so far at least, is not illegal)? No real-world children are affected by it, so is it not just a harmless (if slightly weird) pastime? Might it even prevent potential pedophiles from committing real world crimes, in the same way as child sex dolls do for some people? And what about all those violent computer games that involve torture, killing, even mass genocide - shouldn't they be disallowed as well (many would say to that, "Hell, yeah!")?

It seems to me that our attitude towards such games should be informed by the extent to which they might encourage such illegal activity in the real world. For example, there is plenty of evidence that violent video games desensitize players and may well encourage real-life violence (the teenage Columbine murderers and the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik being oft-quoted cases in point). There seems to be less evidence that virtual underage sex leads to real-world pedophilia, but the picture is far from clear, and it could quite conceivably be a valid issue.

Tricky one.

Boushie trial shows Saskatchewan's racist underbelly

The Colten Boushie murder trial in Sasketchewan is bringing some of the seamy racist underbelly of the province out into the light.
Northern Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley is accused of shooting dead young 22-year old indigenous man Colten Boushie, after the latter trespassed onto the farmer's land. This occurred out in the boonies near the town of Battleford, an area with a particularly checkered history of racial tensions dating back to before Confederation. And the trial, which is only just beginning, has brought some of the worst elements of that tension to the fore. The Internet has lit up with scary comments like the suggestion aired on Facebook that Stanley's "only mistake was leaving witnesses", and some vocal support for Stanley from a shadowy group called Farmers With Guns. You can just imagine.. Not that Boushie and his buddies were exactly angels - they were trying to steal Stanley's ATV at the time - but this just does not sound very Canadian to me.
Stanley's counsel insists that the trial is "not a referendum on racism", but the town is now surrounded by a heavy police presence, and many commentators are warning that street violence is by no means out of the question as both the indigenous and non-indigenous population nurse their various grievances.
The early proceedings of the trial do not bode well. A huge pool of 750 potential jurors were called, although only 204 of these actually showed up, partly a reflection of the huge distances covered by the jury region, as well as the poverty of many of its rural inhabitants, both indigenous and non-indigenous. The defence then proceeded to throw out any candidates who looked even vaguely indigenous, something they are apparently well within their rights to do without explanation or appeal according to the system of "peremptory challenges" built into the legal system - leading a relative of Boushie to comment that "the decks are stacked against us".
Certainly, if Stanley is found not guilty, the local indigenous population - already highly skeptical about the legal and police treatment they have received over the years - will be up in arms. And even if he is found guilty, the best the area can look forward to is a rather fractious status quo.

UPDATE
Well, guess what, Gerald Stanley has been found not guilty of the murder of Colten Bouchie. Most of the courtroom, the indigenous population of Canada, social media, and a good proportion of the rest of the country, reacted with bewilderment and anger as the jury foreman announced the decision. Stanley was immediately protected by the sheriff's deputies and rushed out of the room pronto.
Doubtless, there will be recriminations, demonstrations and quite possibly violence as a result of the stunning and controversial decision. But possibly not as much violence as would have ensued if the decision had gone the other way. That's about the best that can be said of this execrable situation. That and the fact that the whole system of peremptory challenges is likely to finally come under the microscope.

The world most influential thinkers - some old chestnuts and some surprises

I recently came across the Global Thought Leader Index an annual index compiled by the Swiss think-tank Gottlieb Duttweiler Institut (GDI).

It purports to rank that elusive concept, the most influential thinkers in the world. This is not the same as the most influential people, so there is no Vladimir Putin, no Lady Gaga, no Warren Buffett, and no old dead guys like Aristotle or Descartes. Neither does it include (in the main) active politicians or entrepreneurs, whose influence stems mainly from their actions rather than their ideas. The thought leaders considered are those living individuals whose work is considered to be mainly as a "thinker", and whose ideas are known and influential beyond their own field.

From a selected pool of 600-odd such people, GDI then measures their "weight" in terms of global public discourse on the Internet, Wikipedia, Twitter, etc, using sophisticated software that measures their mentions, likes, followers, and the strength of relationships between them, to come up with an influence ranking. It's not a perfect recipe, but it nevertheless makes for interesting reading.

The top 20 for 2018 are:

1. Pope Francis (religion)
2. Noam Chomsky (linguistics)
3. Stephen Hawking (physics)
4. Richard Dawkins (evolutionary biology)
5. Al Gore (ecology)
6. Henry Kissinger (politics)
7. Bill Gates (entrepreneur)
8. Dalai Lama (religion)
9. Desmond Tutu (activist)
10. J.K. Rowling (novelist)
11. Pope Benedict XVI (religion)
12. Pedro Almodovar (artist)
13. Joseph Stiglitz (economist)
14. Kofi Annan (politics)
15. George Lucas (artist)
16. Richard Stallman (activist)
17. Orhan Pamuk (novelist)
18. Edward Snowden (politics)
19. Tim Berners-Lee (computer science)
20. Slavoj Žižek (philosophy)

Other than the question of just how Henry Kissinger got in there in the Top 10 in 2018, I was surprised by the number of novelists in the list - e.g. J.K. Rowling (10), Orhan Pamuk (17), Salman Rushdie (26=), Mario Vargas Llosa (26=), Paulo Coelho (33) - and not perhaps the most obvious or expected ones either. Also, surprising to me is the number of names with which I am just not familiar - e.g. Slavoj Zizek (20), Amartya Sen (22), Daniel Kahneman (31), Muhammad Yunus (40) - many of whom appear towards the top of this list year after year. Slavoj Žižek, for example, is a Slovenian post-structuralist philosopher, who has been called "the Elvis of cultural theory" and "the most dangerous philosopher in the West". Who knew? Well, obviously a lot of people know, and I am just exhibiting my own woeful ignorance here.

The ethics of self-driving cars (revisited)

The discussion about the ethical programming of autonomous vehicles continues, and it seems like we tie ourselves in ever more Gordian knots over it (I have already looked at this issue in some detail).

Another article in today's Globe and Mail Drive annoyed me a bit, though, because of the line of thinking of some participants in the debate (mainly car manufacturers) who believe that we are putting unfair expectations on self-driving vehicles. As an example: "I don't remember when I took my driver's license test that this [in reference to the need for autonomous cars to decide which victim to pick in the case of a potential accident] was one of the questions". Others point out that the concerns being debated over the ethics of future self-driving cars does not seem to extend to existing vehicles and their current capabilities.

It seems to me that this is an entirely moot point. The whole issue with autonomous vehicles is that they do not have a human in control, a human with decades of accumulated life experiences and millennia of social, psychological and evolutionary development. We have to try and teach these machines all of that in just a few years. If we are putting life and death decisions in the hands of technological mechanisms, then we need to do the very best we can. This is not unfair expectation, it is merely due diligence, and "doing the right thing". And the time to do this is now, at the very beginning, before lives are at stake (oops, too late!)

Another aspect of this debate which I had not thought much about is the idea that autonomous cars need to communicate with pedestrians. We need the equivalent of a pedestrian's ability to make eye contact with a driver to have confidence of what they are intending, or the simple nod or light flash of a driver to a pedestrian or another driver, indicating their awareness of a situation and their intentions. There are many such non-verbal communications in use daily on our roads, many of which we are not even aware of ourselves.

How, then, is a driverless car to make such nods and eye contacts? Various ideas have been suggested, including flashing text (language barriers?) and symbols (low recognition rate) and a system of flashing lights (need for a national/global standard and pedestrian education). What I found interesting, and a bit depressing, though, was the research using fake driverless cars which showed just how little eye contact there really is these days. Only 19% of pedestrians ever looked up at the cars around them (19%!), most being more intent on their phones and conversations. So, most people would not even be aware that they are facing an autonomous vehicle, and any amount of winking and flashing the cars may be engaged in is likely to be pretty much wasted.

You can kind of see why vehicle manufacturers might be a bit jaundiced in their outlook...

How we know that atheists are just as moral as religious people

I have been reading Peter Singer's Ethics in the Real World, a collection of 82 short articles and essays by the prominent ethics philosopher. One of them, entitled Godless Morality (also available on the web), looks at whether we need to be religious in order to be ethical. Now, you might think the answer obvious, but an awful lot of religious people apparently believe it to be true, arguing that it is God that gives us our sense of morality.

Unfortunately, a simple study using an online "moral sense test" gives the lie to that line of thinking. It seems that the responses from atheists to various hypothetical moral situations are almost identical to those of people who consider themselves religious. This suggests that our shared basic morality comes not from learned religious doctrine or directly from some God figure, but from our underlying humanity: we have an intuitive judgement of right and wrong, as a result of millions of years of evolution as social animals. No surprise to atheists perhaps, but a bit of a kick in the face for many religious people.

It's also interesting to consider the overwhelming responses to three of the situations in the test:

1. A runaway trolley is about to run over five people walking on the tracks. A railroad worker is standing next to a switch that can turn the trolley onto a side track, killing one person, but allowing the five to survive. Flipping the switch is ______.
2. You pass by a small child drowning in a shallow pond and you are the only one around. If you pick up the child, she will survive and your pants will be ruined. Picking up the child is _______.
3. Five people have just been rushed into a hospital in critical care, each requiring an organ to survive. There is not enough time to request organs from outside the hospital. There is, however, a healthy person in the hospital's waiting room. If the surgeon takes this person's organs, he will die but the five in critical care will survive. Taking the healthy person's organs is _______.

The three possible responses are "obligatory", "permissible" and "forbidden". A solid 90% of respondents answer "permissible" to No. 1, 97% say "obligatory" to No. 2, and 97% reply "forbidden" to No. 3. What is interesting is that there is such a consistency of opposite opinion between Nos. 1 and 3, both of which result in the saving of five people at the expense of one, albeit in different circumstances. Arguably, this shows more about human psychology - of atheists and theists alike - than about morality.