A distraction

we interrupt the regular service to provide you with a message about contemporary (UK) politics 

For obvious reasons, this year's Ditchley Annual Lecture, given by The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, is worthy of both comment and analysis.

Superficially it is hard to disagree with the general thrust of the argument, that Government should better reward risk taking, that the Civil Service should have more diversity of thought, that centralising decision-making in London means that the cultural outlook of the majority decision-makers does not reflect the wider cultural outlook of the country, and that the Government is piss-poor at measuring success, and should do better.

But anyone with even a passing interest in UK politics over the last 5 years will have noticed that our politics is now entirely tribal. We are just as split between individuals who identify as pro and anti Brexit as the US is between those who identify as pro and anti Trump. A significant number of former comrades find themselves stuck behind enemy lines - more on the right than the left, where there are plenty of Conservatives aghast at what the current leaders of their nations are doing on trade, security, fiscal policy and common decency yet are unable to align themselves with the Tories/Dems - but on the left, too, though these types are perhaps more used to being out of step with the majority of 'their' tribe. Pro-protectionist anti-immigrant leftists exist, and have existed forever, but are very much in minority, and have been for years.

The lecture is aimed solely at one tribe, and blames their woes solely on a foe with all the realism of Mantel's Thomas Cromwell -- i.e. there are grains of truth, in here, rooted in documented historical fact, but the overall concoction is entirely fictional  -- or perhaps some mythical version of Clive of India as a Hero of the Empire. If I were to ask you what went wrong in 2008, and has failed to go right since, I doubt you'd point the finger of blame at the Civil Service. Maybe you would. Maybe I'm too close. But I suspect the voices that are now claiming the Civil Service is ideologically attached to Europe would, 30 years ago, have claimed that the Civil Service was too slow to adopt to the benefits offered by globalisation. Where politicians lead, Civil Servants follow. The single market was a political creation and one which diminished the powers of Whitehall. It wasn't dreamed up by Mandarins nor do I imagine they were terribly keen on it in the early days, given that power flowed away from them. And we all know that austerity was a political, not technocratic choice. Officials seldom advocate policies which will see their Departmental budgets decimated, or as was the case for several Departments, far worse than decimated.

But I'm going on too long. Many many columns will be written about the impending re-organisation of Whitehall. Here are some others.

But I would like to point out what I think is a flaw at the heart of the argument that we need . It's about Maths and Science. As a physical scientist, I completely reject the assertion that decision-making should be "less reliant on those with social science qualifications and more welcoming to those with physical science and mathematical qualifications".

As a citizen rather than a Civil Servant I've seen policies come and go. Most policies, in my observation, fail or a best offer extremely poor value for money compared to readily available alternatives. Some crash and burn spectacularly, like privatization of probation services, or the Green Deal. Most chunter along, eating money and not doing much active harm or good. Occasionally we hit a great one (in my field, both the boiler regulations, which drove down UK gas use, or Contracts-for-Difference which, in the wind sector at least, have driven renewable electricity prices down beyond our wildest dreams.

But yeah. Policies usually suck. And they usually suck because the real numbers bear no resemblance to the forecast numbers.

So, more numerate people = better policy outcomes?

I'm afraid it's not that simple. There are a lot of numerate people in Government. The Government Economics Service runs the show, so far as policy appraisal (that is, assessment before the fact) goes. They know their stuff. And the Government spends a lot on building complex, often (in my view) over-complex, models to discover the truth.

And there you have it. If your model of the world is wrong, then no amount of mathematics can help you. Let me put to one side any beliefs I have about any given Government's moral model of the world. Let us just assume something morally neutral, like the way people make decisions to buy gas boilers. If your mental model of that "simple" decision is wrong (and, it turns out, it isn't a simple decision at all) no amount of numeracy can dig you out of the hole in which you find yourself. Indeed more complex models (by which we really mean equations, hidden from view, nestling in code) makes it worse, because you cannot easily see (or even difficultly see) where you went wrong, so many twists and turns have you taken.

Big data and machine learning (let us not even pretend that AI has any short or medium term role in policymaking) are a deeper concern. In finance these tools are already used. They make a small number of people a lot of money. They don't, obviously, know anything about the immediate health or outlooks for any given stock, beyond what values humans have already applied themselves, through the buying and selling which provides the data the machines then 'feed' on.

Nothing scares me more than the idea of a data scientist who knows nothing abut decarbonisation using a learning algorithm to find the 'answer' to a complex policy problem. This isn't a joke. If you 'analyse' the data without understanding what real world forces give rise to the data, you can kill lots of people.

If data can be used to provide insights which then allow humans, and most particularly social scientists (I exclude economists from this category), to investigate patterns and find out probably reasons for them, then more power to the data monkeys. But if we believe that the Civil Service is too reliant on Social Sciences, we will fail to generate policy that has a positive impact on citizens, because citizens are rooted in society, and society follows social science 'rules', not the rules of physics.

It took me 9 paragraphs to say that policies depend on a robust understanding of the behaviour of citizens, and that only by properly equipping the Civil Service with Social Scientists - not merely economists - can we ever hope for better policy. That numbers alone mislead without human insight. A lack of understanding of Natural Science, or Mathematics, or Social Science, will lead to choices which, with hindsight, look very foolish.

To illustrate my point with a field that I know something about. Civil Servants, we are told, need to know "how to interrogate climate modelling". Well, the Civil Servants who work on climate already possess this knowledge. Indeed, it is an area where the Civil Service already has deep expertise, and better, can draw on the deep expertise of the Met Office, and others. But that isn't the real issue. The big question is what "interrogate climate modelling" means. It should not mean that Civil Servants should be looking at climate models to better forecast when Hebden Bridge will next flood. Because climate models cannot tell you when Hebden Bridge will next flood. They can't tell you what the probability of Hebden Bridge flooding is. They can't even tell you what the probability of the level of rainfall that last caused Hebden Bridge to flood falling over the next 5 years is. They can tell you what the probability is of that rainfall level occurring according to the model  but (and very few people seem to recognise this) the model is not reality.

What can climate models tell us? Well, if we have a range of climate models all of which can resolve rainfall at the level required to tell us something about Hebden Bridge and floods, we could look at the range of outputs from those models, and perhaps look at how well each model performs historically (a model which doesn't produce weather over the last decade that in any way resembles the actual weather over the last decade is probably a poor guide to future weather). It doesn't give us a numerical probability of Hebden Bridge flooding, because none of the models are reality and the 'average' of all the models certainly isn't a model of reality but it gives us the best possible scientific insight as to whether Hebden Bridge is more likely to flood over the next decade than it did in the last. Which is useful policy-relevant information.

But at this point you can see that it is easy to get lost in the numbers, and begin to believe that the numbers tell you some 'truth'. The do not. They numbers are shadows on the walls of a cave.

I'm not for a moment suggesting that climate modelling is a wasted endeavour or that we should not take notice of the outputs of climate models. It is precisely because climate models tell us that changing the concentrations of GHGs (and particulates) in the atmosphere changes the weather around us that we should pay attention to them, particularly as climate models are significantly more skillful (I don't care what the dictionary says, "skilful" looks awful and both spellings are valid) than anyone who tells you that GHGs don't cause climate change. But our response to climate models, particularly as civil servants, should not be to interrogate the data. It should be to look at the data, and decide what actions are a proportionate response to the evidence available.

What I am talking about here is risk management, at national (and, of course, global) level. The fact that the future is unknowable does not prevent us from making decisions because we can predict, with some greater or lesser certainty, what is likely to happen. I am very uncomfortable with putting numbers on these things, as it gives a false sense of precision. Rather I would suggest we believe that an outcome which all models predict in most circumstances is more likely than one which only some models predict, which is more likely still than an outcome which only one model predicts, and infrequently. (But of course, the low probability event can't be ruled out).

So if "interrogate climate modelling" means understand the strengths and limitations of climate models and use that to develop a risk framework that focuses the available resources for climate change adaptation where we predict they will do most good, and prevents stupid policy (like building in areas which are predicted to be increasingly prone to catastrophic flooding) then I am all for it. But if "interrogate climate modelling" means drilling down into the data to find deeper meaning, then I fear some fundamental misunderstanding of what a climate model is and isn't, has occurred.

I hope by now, if you have made it this far, you recognise that a framework to respond to climate change relies on social scientists just as much as it does on physical scientists (and that mathematicians, while they have an essential role in developing and verifying models, are of limited use when it comes to applying them in the real world).

We live (and continue to live, we hope) in a world of people. If you don't understand people, you can't build effective policy.    

Real Life. Ish.

It's just about possible that someone reads this blog to find out what I am up to. Seems rather unlikely but not outside the bounds of possibility.

So, Kate, Fergus and I are living on Columbia Road in Shoreditch. It's a great spot, offering easy access to the Flower Market, Brick Lane, Broadway Market & London Field (inc. lido), Kingsland Road (yum yum Viet Grill yum yum), Hoxton Square (including The White Cube) and the city.

I am working at DECC, in a vaguely scienceish role. I no longer travel the world and engage in fruitless negotiations. At work I am particularly interested how the electricity system fits together, and how it will fit together in future. Precisely what will the mix of carbon capture (if any), nuclear (if any) and renewables be, how will it all be balanced, will electricity storage (how do you do this at scale - we don't know) play a role, what will that role be, and how will smart meters, smart grid and, well, a smart system work? And what should government be doing (both in terms of innovation support, and policy) to make it happen.

It's one thing to come up with a successful pathway using the 2050 calculator (and you really should do this), it's quite another to make that pathway happen. Particular as you don't know what technologies will be available and what they will cost in 2020, let alone 2050. The answer probably is not to build very large amounts of wind power as this might turn out to be a very expensive and unreliable way of decarbonising the electricity sector. On the other hand, if wind becomes significantly cheaper, and a reliable (and cheap) way of dealing with times when the wind doesn't blow (or blows less than needed) then wind could produce a very large fraction of the UK's electricity demand. Indeed, if you are pretty bullish you can find a route to zero-carbon electricity in the UK that relies almost entirely on wind and foregoes the need to build any nuclear or carbon capture (CCS) plant. However, the question remains (and here you have to read the small print - If there are five cold, almost windless, winter days in 2050, then up to 56 GW of backup generation capacity will be required to ensure that electricity is always available. ) - how do you back it up?

There are no simple answers to these questions. Or if there are, I'm not aware of them.

So that's me.

Kate is working for an NGO that blackmails big companies into reporting their GHG emissions.

Fergus is one (and 6 days), in a nursery 3 days a week, is growing rapidly and is beginning to talk. He can say "yum yum", "bye bye", "no" and "daddy" though his pronunciation is a little off. And he refuses to address Kate as anything other than "daddy". He does this deliberately and then laughs when we try to correct him.

You are welcome to visit. We have 5 kinds of tea in the house and a new coffee machine.

That thing

What's the thing where you half-smile at someone you work with, but never speak to, but it isn't quite a smile because you don't actually know their name. What's that called?

Kissinger to lead climate negotiations

I didn't sleep particularly well last night. I've got the world's snottiest, most persistent, cold (it's been going for a week and a half and shows no sign of abating) and just as I dropped off someone in the room above started taking a bath. The plumbing in the Bedford Hotel is loud. I woke with a start and grumpily spent the the next 3 hours listening to toilets flushing and showers being taken.

It's not all trips to Bali you know.

So I'm now stuck on a homeward bound Eurostar with Belgium's most boring man. And he's sitting with North London's most boring man. And the two are talking transport.

There's something particularly wretched about talking transport. It's somehow duller and even featureless than the weather. We've run the full gammut too. There's fog at Brussels airport (if there wasn't I'd be spared the conversation). The two have swapped the numbers of reliable taxi drivers from their respective localities. The Brit has patiently explained the role of the Thameslink in the London transport signal and its relationship to the Oyster card. Now we are on to motorway juctions in Belgium. The factory is at junction 25a, you see, but the Belgian is explaining that there are major roadworks at the next interchange and that may effect travel times, though of course that will depend on the time of day. Hmmmm.

This boring conversation makes me want to go to sleep, but perversely keeps me awake. Argh!

Nanagedon

We were at Granny's last weekend. How times change, I drafted this on Granny's PC. (What a banal statement. "How times change." This is what times do. If times didn't change, would they be times?)

Er, so. Yes. Granny collected us at the station and took us to the supermarket to buy groceries (why else would one go...?) and while we were there, we bumped into an old friend. When you're a granny, I guess you have more than a few old friends bumping around in the background.

Anyway, this old friend was also something of a lost acquaintance. Not been seen for yonks, that sort of thing. So, while I stood there looking awkward, and Kate stood there looking magnificent, the old ladies started on the only conversation possible in the situation. Namely, who's sprogged, who's dead and who's got/recovered from [insert grisly ailment, and graphic description thereof]

Now the journal tries to shy away from mundane subjects, most of the time. "Shys away from all subjects, most of the time", I hear you mutter. (I hear you mutter this because I'm bugging the computers of everyone I know in an attempt to get material for my genre defying play called simply "No title")

Anyway, yes, there has been a lack of posting this year. And last year. Sorry about that. I was busy. Sort of. I had the best of intentions. Like Blair, but without the power, or the god-awful grin.

But, once again, I digress, and I sense you grow bored of this rambling tale.

The point is that one reaches a point in one's life when one hasn't had a meaningful conversation about one's life for a while, or written about it on their tedious blog and rather than fire off an email with a description of exactly what type of croop the dog has, or put the whole lot down in a round-robin (shudder) and sent it out with the Christmas cards (double-shudder), or, most horrifying of all, have an actual real life conversation with someone (beyond shudder), if only on the telephone, I can, instead, post everything I've got up to in the last year and a half on here, and why I bump into Ross Macdonald outside Waitrose I can just "W.W.W.DOT.I.A.M.S.I.L.K.DOT.C.O.M." at him, and run away.

So a heck of a lot has been happening. Stuff and that. So much to talk about, some many happens.

So ... oh, is that the doorbell?

Lack of gravitas

Kate is reading "Our longest days", which is a collection of diary observations by British civilians during World War II. Alan Clarke's diaries may be more famous for their sexual revelations but they cover a fair bit of social territory, spanning the rise, reign and fall of Thatcher. And then there's the Pepys chap. And probably a few others, like, er, Gladstone?

I was thinking this as I rode through Battersea Park this morning. That's an unusual thought for me, because on an ordinary day I'll either be thinking about what happened in the football last night, different permutations of English cricket selections with imaginary future Test performances, or work. I try to save introspection for when I'm part-drunk.

I digress. The question which was bugging me was does this blog, or indeed the act of blogging, tell people anything about society? Is it of its time? Does it mean anything? Should it? Does the fact that it doesn't mean it's worthless?

Then I wondered, "Does anybody care?". Having arrived at the answer, I went back to thinking about cricket teams, without a worry in the world.

Deep Heat

Occasionally, after a particular hard day on the rooftops, my father would return home, take a bath, and a most peculiar smell would drift throughout the house. The only other place I smelt that particular smell was in rugby changing rooms. The smell, for those of you who have not smelt it, is a bit like a cross between menthol and nerve gas. For those of you who have smelt it you will of course know what I'm describing. Deep heat.

Now 'Deep Heat', as deeply engrained in our culture as it is, sadly doesn't have it's own webpage (that I can locate) though it has entered the blogosphere and there is a wikipedia entry, which I think proves beyond doubt that people who contribute to wikipedia are now getting desperate.

(This takes me off down a strange line of thought. Can I think of anything that doesn't have a wikipedia entry? I mean, obviously the biography of Johnny Banks, my best mate from primary school, isn't in there, but from The Battle of Maldon to Jif (now Cif) cleaning product wikipedia has it covered. Hell, even Stanway, the village I grew up in, has an entry and I can't think of anything that happened there. A Google of "Things that aren't in wikipedia" comes up disapointing)

But I digress.

Why am I talking about Deep Heat? It appears that the reason is simple. I'm 32.

When I was 12 I wondered, what was this strange substance that emanated this unearthly smell? Why was there an enormous can of it in the bathroom cupboard? Rugby players, and my dad seemed to live off it, but I never saw the point. In the intervening years of my young adulthood I forgot all about Deep Heat.

Last weekend I went out to play a simple game of Ultimate Frisbee. For those of you who've never played, it's a bit like American Football, without tackling. Two teams. Two end-zones. Throw the fisbee to a colleague in the end-zone. They catch it. You've scored.

What I wasn't expecting was a coach. What sort of frisbee club has a coach? And training drills? And practices tactics and 'plays'?

After two hours of this I was feeling pretty stiff. But I didn't make the mistake of going home and sloughing on the sofa. No sir! I went for a big long walk with friends and warmed down properly.

Monday morning I was in moderate agony. Pain and stiffness followed, as expected, on Tuesday. And irritatingly on Wednesday, slightly alarmingly on Thursday and by Friday I was downright embarrassed that I was still walking around like the tin man from Wizard of Oz.

Yesterday I went paintballing for a friends birthday. It was the first time I'd been, and in the excitement my stiffness was forgotten. Until I can under sustained fire, ran pell mell for cover and pulled up in agony as the FUCKING FIRES OF HELL shot up and down my hamstrings. I mean, OW!

This morning I woke up covered in paintball bruises, stiff and sore legs, and most crushingly of all, the realisation that at the age of 32 I can no longer do exercise whenever and wherever I want, and be feeling fine a couple of days later. Either I'm going to have to stay fit, or avoid running and jumping type things altogether.

In the meantime I'm off to Boots for a can of Deep Heat.