The Slippery Slope fallacy: the one we’ve never got on with

“Don’t throw that rubbish there! Put it in the bin like you’re supposed to!” Many years ago we lived on a pleasant private estate in West London with trimmed lawns, walkways, security, a residents association, all those sorts of things. The only problem was some of the residents, who were either too lazy or felt culturally compelled to throw their domestic rubbish down by the rubbish chutes instead of putting in properly, as we, the decent majority did. This bad practice spread, being quickly copied across the estate and soon we all had a widespread problem with flies, rodents and an ugly disfigurement of our pristine areas. It’s called the slippery slope. Another example is when the office agrees to step out for a single drink and, three hours later, the entire company ends up blind drunk ,broke and embracing each other with varying declarations of love. Everyone copies bad behaviour, because they feel entitled, or are missing out. And so crime, disorder, drugs and violence spread quickly through communities, reducing everyone to common beggary.

And that raises a bigger problem for us here at LSS. For years we have proudly touted our Enlightenment, Whig, rational, call them what you will credentials like a badge of honour. Central to our purpose, hardened readers will recall, is the practice of reason and logic. Avidly do we follow websites like your logical fallacy which are stuffed with every classic example you could wish for: post hoc propter hoc, texas sharpshooter, all shining beacons of clear thought each one of them.. Standing out like a dead rat in a melon souffle is the slippery slope, of which the authors state

Allowing to happen will cause Z to happen: therefore we should ban A now!

Yes, we see the error. The slippery slope is a fallacy for it allows one to jump to conclusions without checking each intervening link from A to Z for both logic and empirical fact. Its the classic howler of someone like a Daily Mail columnist, carried away on tides of hysteria and dread. The trouble is: it’s how humans really behave. It’s the way most of them are.

So our problem with the slippery slope mirrors a more general problem. Reason, learning, and all the the qualities which we prize are not always good guides to how society works. (Try a Friday night out in Croydon if you don’t believe us) Yet the values we espouse are the only ones which will ensure not only the good life but also human survival in the long term. The problem we now have is how do we form a critical mass to allow those values to prevail?

[1]https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/

#logic #fallacy #reason #slippery slope #enlightenment

Exclusive: We reveal the only definite finding from quantum physics(and you can be certain of it)

Always believe someone who tells you that they don’t know what’s going on. Especially when that someone is one of the best trained and most intelligent people in the world. That’s why this story from Nature Briefing caught our attention as the week-ender for this session of blogs: What Does quantum Physics Mean anyway?

First sketched out a century ago, the equations at the heart of quantum mechanics underpin technologies from computer chips to medical-imaging machines. But no one seems to agree on how best to describe the physical reality that lies behind the maths. A Nature survey of more than 1,100 researchers — the largest ever on the subject — has revealed just how widely researchers vary in their interpretations of the most fundamental features of quantum experiments, and their confidence in their answers. [1]

The survey asked questions like “is there a real quantum world behind – or does all this work we’ve done only represent what’s inside our heads? What are the most favoured explanations for quantum theory? What is a wavefunction anyway? Is there a boundary between classical objects and quantum objects (i.e ,between the table you’re sitting at and the atoms it’s made from) And the answers that came back-and remember who gave them-read more like the responses to political opinion polls or market surveys about the best brands of instant custard.

From all of which we concluded the following.

1 If the brightest and the best think like this about something they have studied for decades, it suggests the rest of us might do well to be a little less opinionated on many things

2 Above all this includes certain journalists who think they know it all on things like climate change, vaccines and global warming

3 Watch the last episode of Jacob Bronowski‘s TV spectacular The Ascent of Man on You Tube. or one of the other streamers. It’s still good after 52 years [2]

4 There is still much out there to discover-as we tried to hint with our little blogs on Euler’s number and π(LSS 14 3 22; 16 4 24)

5 All knowledge exists within certain limits, and is probable. Of this last point, you may be certain

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02342-y?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=a8d315930b-nature-briefing-daily-20250730&utm_medium=email&utm_term=

[2]https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x20p9h4

#quantum physics #uncertainty principle #knowledge #reason #science #nature

When was the best time to have been alive? Start of a new series

When was the best time in History that you could have lived in? With all the problems facing us now, like climate change, rising xenophobia, faltering economies-it’s natural for the mind to wander to other times and other places , where they had it good, in ways that we just can’t seem to manage.

It’s easy to idealise bits of the past when you didn’t have to live there and use the toilets. It’s also easy to make mistakes. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!” declared Wordsworth, while on a tour of Revolutionary France. He just got out with his life, as did many other deluded middle class intellectuals. And even the Nazis tried to drum up a cultural vibe, what with Leni Reifenstahl and all that modernist architecture. That duly said, it is possible to pick out certain periods when the humans really did seem to be doing better for a while. Like a football team putting together a run of successful results. We will try to identify those times using the following criteria, if you will forgive us, gentle readers.

There has to be peace, or general political stability, over a wide area. We”ll illustrate this with a counter example: Beethoven and Schubert wrote some pretty good music during the Napoleonic wars, but you wouldn’t have wanted to have lived through those wars would you?

Learning is advancing, preferably big time : despite all the wars and coruuption, Big Stuff was happening in Renaissance Italy- arts, sciences, architecture, you name it. By that criterion. all those Cardinals and Condottieri have to be in with a shout

Trade must boom According to the great Professor Davis, this is the great sine qua non of civilisation

The staging must be right The backdrop of islands and temples etc gives the Classical Greeks an enormous leg-up before they even take the pitch. Whereas Lancashire in the Industrial revolution? You mainly died at thirty, after a lifetime of bracing hard work. Although it probably felt like much longer.

There must be a long running cultural movement No one sat down one day and declared “OK chaps, it’s the Bronze Age and humanity stands on the edge of a bright new frontier. Put away all those stone tools and mammoth skins, and let’s start living in cities!” The periods we refer to must be embedded in a long movement of progress and general moving forward.

And all too often they come at the end of it. The swinging sixties ended in strikes and inflation. The Renaissance city states were leaned upon, terminally, by much bigger places like France and Spain. The long peace of Rome degenerated into the Crisis of the Third Century. But we are nothing if not triers here. And so our first try in the next blog of the series will be China in the Tang dynasty 618-907 AD, using the western calendar. Let’s see if they were really, really, like, cool?

#renaisance #history #china #greeks #learning #science #society

Heroes of Learning: Steven Rose (and why things are never simple)

No book ever tore through the calm assurances of progress through co-operation like Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. [1] It wasn’t so much the book itself. That was an attempt to popularise, albeit sometimes in colourful language, the discoveries of an important group of evolutionary theorists such as William Hamilton and EO Wilson. It was the use made of it by political activists, zealous propagandists of the Free Market, to prove that every attempt at co operation, collective action and sharing resources was against the basic laws of nature. “Out upon your Trades Unions, your Keynesian economics” they thundered in a thousand articles in places like the Daily Mail “we are nothing but animals. Your only purpose is to pass on your DNA to make copies of yourself. Look at them lions. mate! When one of them takes over a pride he kills all the cubs and mates wiv the females to make sure his genes get frough! Go and do like wise!” It was not an experiment we felt disposed to try. Compete, for the other fellow is your genetic enemy was their credo. All barriers to that competition were both evil and deluded.

It was simple, it was seductive, it was based on some facts. It played well in the broken restless zeitgeist of the 1970s when the pillars of the old prosperity- high taxes, demand management for the common good, collective institutions like the IMF and UN seemed ineffective. It sold by the million; and swept ever more voters into the booths for one Margaret Thatcher in 1979, whose own simplistic and reductionist nostrums seemed to chime so well with those of the book.

One man did not buy. His name was Steven Rose, a remarkably accomplished scientist who spent most of his work in neurobiology and biochemistry [2] This obituary summarises his work better than us. But it was his insistence on complexity and the irreducible flexibility of the human mind, that still allowed hope for a way out from the genetic prison in to which we had been so neatly incarcerated

He wrote: “It is in the nature of living systems to be radically indeterminate, to continually construct their – our – own futures, albeit in circumstances not of our own choosing.”

Look at that carefully, then leap with us to another part of the scientific forest. Where the BBC showcases a new technique to rid the world of the scourge of inherited mitochondrial disorders [3] Basically you take a fertilised ovum from a normal male-female coupling, but put it as the nucleus in the egg of a different female. Which then develops as a normal embryo until nine months later a healthy baby emerges[3] A three parent child? Sort of. Two parents get to pass on their DNA, no doubt to the blissful delight of Dawkins’ more extreme followers. And a different mother sends her mitochondrial DNA cascading down the ages, which rather complicates matters for some. Now look at the Rose quote again what was that about continually constructing?

At the time of the great Dawkins controversy the old BBC Horizon programme ran a show in which the quoted one of the wiser and more humane scholars in the Selfish Gene camp. His name was John Maynard Smith. And he ended with this thought “humans are not just animals- we are not prisoners of simple genetics” At the time it seemed a forlorn hope. It has just been proved triumphantly real.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene

[2]https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jul/10/steven-rose-obituary

[3]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8179z199vo

#richard dawkins #sociobiology #biochemistry #medicine #DNA #mitochondria

Conversation Article gets to the heart of why people get things wrong

You know a piece of writing is good when it explains many things, not just the ostensible subject the writer has before them. Such is the case with Edward White of the prestigious Kingston University in the UK whose article in the Conversation forms the basis for today’s blog [1] Ostensibly, the subject is Evolution. Now, we’ve always liked a bit of Evolution here. But only as abit of light relief, following it the way people follow the fortunes of Leicester City FC or the doings of celebrities.

Not so in the United states of America where the subject is of neuralgic importance as Edward points out. Huge numbers of the citizens of that country still hold that God created Man exactly according to the schemata laid out the in the early chapters of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. And he has a barrage of statistics to explain how and why. But the point for us, gentle readers is why these people think as they do. For it explains a much wider truth, which is: no species as so supremely adapted to self delusion and to believing the lies, deceits and threats of charlatans as is Homo sapiens. And this is true in all fields-politics, religion, economics, even science and medicine(remember the MMR controversy?) The fault according to Edward is motivated Reasoning, where you start with a conclusion and work back to justify it. This ensures a high chance of error, whatever cognitive powers you may possess, as astute readers will have spotted. Why do people do this? Get this killer quote from Ed:

Brain imaging studies show that people with fundamentalist beliefs seem to have reduced activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — the brain region responsible for cognitive flexibility and analytical thinking. When this area is damaged or less active, people become more prone to accepting claims without sufficient evidence and show increased resistance to changing their beliefs when presented with contradictory information. Studies of brain-injured patients show damage to prefrontal networks that normally help us question information may lead to increased fundamentalist beliefs and reduced scepticism.

As Edward concludes: for most people learning is about who gets to define truth, and own the power that flows from it thereby

And our conclusion? We seem to be drilling down to the bedrock at last and knowing why people make and hold errors, From here at last the Progressive Community may find a way forward

[1]https://theconversation.com/why-many-americans-still-think-darwin-was-wrong-yet-the-british-dont-260709?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversa

Is Donald Trump a Socialist? #2: some readers responses

A few months ago(LSS 7 4 25) we published a blog called Is Donald Trump a Socialist? It was one of those end-of -the -day tired pieces which we expected to be soon forgotten, by ourselves and everybody else. Instead it turned out to be one of the most read, and remarked-upon pieces we have put out in months. Sadly, much more so than our ones on antibiotic resistance ones which was what this blog is supposed to be all about.

The essence of the piece boiled down to this. Capitalists, Liberals, Neo-liberals, call them what you will, believe that individual liberty is the only true basis of a healthy society and a prosperous economy. People making their own choices on how to spend their money, whom to hire and whom to fire, where to live, etc will allow the optimum possible outcome in the supply of Capital, Goods and Labour. The essence of socialist belief is that people cannot be trusted to make those decisions and that the state must often step in to ensure the best possible social and economic outcomes. In that sense, Mr Trump’s attempts to control the supply of Labour by immigration controls, and of Goods by tariff controls are socialist policies, not capitalist ones. The responses have been coming ever since. Here are a few which are broadly representative . (We protect the respondents anonymity for all sorts of reasons)

MC from Edinburgh pointed out that if a Communist like Mr Xi could run a capitalist economy in China, why shouldn’t a Capitalist like Trump run a socialist one in America? (intriguing!)

DG from Texas said that Mr Trump’s policies were not Socialist, they we Nationalist (that doesn’t make them Capitalist, we thought)

JS from Massachusetts said he had studied economics at Princeton. And that essentially we had “placed Trump on a New Deal continuum, with fewer unions and more nationalisation” (We are still struggling to understand this)

V. from Mumbai wondered “if all leaders become Socialist when it comes to steel and swing states”

As we write an actual self-proclaimed Socialist called Zohran Mamdami is running for Mayor of New York, that Holy Ground Zero of Capitalism. If we are right, he and Mr Trump may find more in common than they realise. Maybe it’s all about what you do, not what you call yourself, that counts.

But we feel exceedingly grateful for your reactions. Keep ’em coming.

#Donald Trump #Xi Jinping #Capitalist #communist #socialist #liberal #neo liberal #free market #tariff #immigration control

No that last blog does not make us a bunch of Communists

Every so often one of our blogs engenders some intriguing feedback . Alongside the usual welcome comments with all their nods and frowns, we occasionally get one that is a little-uh- longer, yet expresses its views with passionate clarity, to push euphemism to its limits. Such was the case today, when a reader alleged that our criticism of fossil fuel and tobacco companies was a sure sign that we were under the influence of Communists, who aim to tear down the free market system and replace it with a “nightmare of bureaucratic state socialism” of the sort found in places like Venezuela and North Korea. In particular the reader observed:

“What you’ve got to remember is that markets not governments are best at allocating resources. Intervening in fossil fuel markets is crypto socialism- it will only distort price signals, stifle innovation and lead to unintended consequences”

When we asked if this was true for immigration control as well, they replied

“Absolutely! Free markets mean the free movement of labour. Anything else is protectionism in disguise.

So, where does that leave us at LSS? Having worked for many years in the Government Employ and thereby known the ways of Civil Servants, we can more and more share the view that Free Markets really do work better. No, it’s the “unintended consequences” that pulls us up. Free markets can have those too. Totally unregulated sales of tobacco produced an epidemic of cancer. We suspect that over enthusiastic marketing of certain foods and drinks will one day produce an epidemic of obesity. As for gushing out vast quantities of poisonous mineral oil and burning it with heedless abandon-well we wish people had been better informed before this was started. To call for better product information, and to ask that consequences of free markets are cleaned up, or at least controlled, does not make one a Communist. Or anything like it.

Thanks for the feedback, and we appreciate that in view of this respondent’s employment, they must remain anonymous

#climate change #free markets # global warming #immigration #communism #socialism #capitalism #hayek #marx

Simon Kuper on how to Make the Transition to Intelligence and Wisdom

One of Saturday morning’s great pleasures, an hour or so before Spanish class, is to settle down in Costa with a coffee and a hard copy of the Financial Times. And one of the best writers in that journal is Simon Kuper. He’s clear, he’s brief, he deals in the currency of short sentences and defined concepts. He’s also a polymath, covering subjects as diverse as politics, urban planning and football(he’s even done a very workmanlike guide to the affairs of Barcelona FC . [1] In fact, he’s exactly the sort of writer we ought to showcase here, because he believes in our core LSS values of evidence, reason, and reserved judgement.

How appropriate therefore that his last column was called Seven Intellectual Habits of the best thinkers., for there can be no better short guide. [2] The problem is that access is behind a paywall. As LSS is such an important institution, and our readers so avid for wisdom, we rang the Editor of the Financial Times a to demand that this be lifted as a Special Case., and that he/she/ they might like to buy us lunch to discuss the matter further. The young person on the switchboard thanked us very much and promised they would call us back. So far they have not done so(that was three days ago) but doubtless there were other callers. So, while we are waiting, we thought that we could offer you a distilled reproduction of Simon’s thoughts:

1 Read Books ” Their complexity is a check on pure ideology” People who simplify the world are the ones who fall for conspiracy theories or the offers of charlatans.

2 Don’t use screens much Apparently, biochemist Jennifer Doudna, who invented CRISPR technology gets her best insights when she’s out weeding her tomato plants. Obviously you have to use screens a bit, or you couldn’t read this! But we get Simon’s drift: a little screen time is a lot.

3 Do your own work, not the world’s The same Doudna got a gig at Genentech, leading their research. She lasted two months before hightailing it back to Berkeley where the true intellectual freedom led her to the Nobel Prize. We agree: people who spend all their time on office politics actually accomplish very little that is either interesting or of value.

4 Be multidisciplinary Kuper cites the examples of Hayek, Godel, Van Neumann and others who all studied one thing, trained in another and did their best work in a third. Daniel Kahneman is cited as another multi-disciplinarian polymath of formidable intellectual power. Rather worryingly, our AI system has set his book as homework for us. Where’ are John and Sarah Connor when you really need them?

5 Be an empiricist who values ideas Kuper cites the case of Isaiah Berlin and his marvellous work the Hedgehog and the Fox , a masterpiece of political philosophy. Incidentally Winston Churchill got him mixed up with Irving Berlin and invited the wrong one to dinner.”My British Buddy” as Berlin himself would later remark in song.

6 Always assume you might be wrong Yep: in this country we are still trying to repair the effects of the blissful certainties of Brexit. You will doubtless have examples from your own lands

7 Keep learning from everyone “Only mediocrities boast as adults about where they went to University at 18.They imagine that intelligence is innate and static. In fact people become more or less intelligent through life depending on how hard they think. The best thinkers are always learning from others, no matter how young or low status” We quote Kuper rather fully here as the first part seems one of the most admirable and accurate summaries of the sorts of people one met on a daily basis during long decades in the Scientific Civil Service. Now there’s intelligence indeed.

[1]https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/products/barca-book-simon-kuper-9781780725543?sku=NGR9781780725543&msclkid=6c7699156a7f1cc4c9f2f1238

[2]https://www.ft.com/content/c42cb640-a03c-441b-868f-d1a92d78bcb7

#wisdom #intelligence #FC Barcelona #isaiah berlin #daniel kahneman #thinking #financial times #simon kuper

Is Keir Starmer becoming a Socialist?

Because he’s certainly acting like one. Forget the labels that people apply to each other, and to themselves. They’re mostly rubbish anyway. Look at someone’s actions. Today, Sir Keir (great name, by the way) has announced that his government has announced major new controls on the flow of immigration into the United Kingdom.[1] In support of this action, he cites the social problems caused by uncontrolled immigration and the harm it does to the social fabric. In doing so he makes the classic socialist case for controlling the laws of supply and demand. The same argument that socialists of all kinds from the most milk-and-water Social Democrats way out to the crazed ravings of Maoists and Trots.

The Capitalist argument is quite different. The law of supply and demand is the best approximation we have to the way people live in groups. Any restriction of free movement of anything such as taxes, business regulation or migration controls is contrary to nature, and must therefore lead to long term harm. After all, what is more socialist than civil servants telling employers whom they may, and whom they may not, hire to do a job? The socialist riposte is clear: the State should ban your desire to hire foreign workers if by doing so you harm the well being of members of our community here.

No, we are not going to say which one we agree with. The capitalists had their time to run the world, particularly after 1991. Their dream of universal prosperity seemed to be a true busted flush after 2008. Since then, the wind has been blowing in a socialist, that is to say, regulated direction. Whether it is to be socialism of the National or International variety remains to be seen

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2025/may/12/immigration-keir-starmer-labour-reform-visa-foreign-workers-uk-politics-latest-live-news

#socialism #capitalism #sir Keir starmer #immigration #economics #politics

Evolution is happening right now in South Korea

We tend to think of Evolution as something happening over millions of years. First, all those trilobites and early fish swimming in the warm Devonian seas. Then early newts and scorpions slithering out onto land, followed by dinosaurs and pterosaurs dodging the cycads; and finally those desperate battles between humans and mammoths in the frozen wastes of the tundra. Millions of years-billions if you look at things like bacteria and red algae.

But evolution isn’t like that. The change of one species into another is a by product some something much smaller, local and more rapid. It is about the environment selecting a gene here, now, for one small purpose. Read this from Nature Briefing, No Diver is an island

A tradition of diving on the South Korean island of Jeju might have influenced the genomes of all of the islanders. The Haenyeo — meaning ‘women of the sea’ — have been cold-water diving year-round and without any breathing apparatus for centuries. A genetic analysis revealed that gene variants associated with reduced blood pressure, cold water tolerance and red blood cell count — which is related to oxygen-carrying capacity — are more common in people from Jeju, regardless of whether they dive themselves, than in other South Koreans.CNN | 7 min read
Reference: Cell Reports paper

In other words, good old fashioned Darwin-Mendel natural selection of the central DNA of the organism. Because one gene variant conveys a selective advantage which the other allele doesn’t. Textbook case: on single genetic change will transform a bacterium into an antibiotic-resistant organism, with profound consequences millions. Of course, if you have enough of these over time, you might eventually transform a tabby into a tiger, or a dinosaur into a bird. But those are second order consequences.Recent discoveries have made our understanding a little more complicated. We have to factor in epigenetics (the great Nessa Carey is good guide [1] ) and even the possibility of some environmental feedback into the genome, to which we have alluded here sometimes(LSS passim)

Every so often we come across some fool, usually a pub bore or right wing columnist, who loudly declaims” I don’t believe in evolution-why would a fish want to transform itself into a salamander?” Here is your answer. The majestic old Darwinian model still functions, Right at the heart of one of the most modern countries in the world.[2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nessa_Carey

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haenyeo

#natural selection #evolution #epigenetics #darwin #mendel #dna #gene #south korea