Nudge judged
Nudging 鈥� the subtle manipulation of our behaviour by those who govern us 鈥� is, you say, “widely assumed to work best when people aren’t aware of it”. You then say “nudgers must be held accountable” (22 June, p 3).
Who is to monitor these secret nudgers and hold them to account? Sounds like another case of governments saying “trust us”. I think we’ve had more than enough of that. Is there any reason why we cannot just have open and forthright governments and allow responsible citizens to make informed decisions?
Cass Sunstein, author of the 2008 book Nudge, hails the success of an “automatic enrolment in retirement savings” in the US (22 June, p 35). Based on my experience of a similar move in the UK, this is more a shove.
When I heard that automatic enrolment into the UK’s National Employment Savings Trust was planned at my workplace, I looked into its ethical credentials and how to opt out.
I was told that everyone would be enrolled. The only way I could opt out was to wait until after the first contribution was taken from my pay and then ask to leave the scheme and for my money back. That’s a shove, not a nudge.
Subtle nudges are compelling, but given human nature I suspect that in time they will all become shoves. The world won’t be better, just more coercive.
The fuss about nudging is surprising; it is merely the refinement of the art of manipulation. That this is based on the application of science will not be news to the psychologists and cognitive scientists employed by the advertising industry.
As for the view that a nudged choice ultimately remains a free one, the very purpose is to skew the odds in favour of particular outcomes, that is, to ensure a choice is not free.
It is irrelevant whether or not the person in question is aware of their lack of freedom.
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
High life
I read Ed Douglas’s article on human physiology at high altitude (15 June, p 38) while dipping into my copy of English polymath Francis Galton’s 19th-century book The Art of Travel.
In it is an account of the symptoms of altitude sickness. Of particular fascination were the remarks on cats: “The symptoms are described by many South American travellers… oddly enough, cats are unable to endure [high altitude]: at villages 13,000 feet above the sea… they cannot live. Numerous trials have been made with these unhappy feline barometers, and the creatures have been found to die in frightful convulsions.”
Has the vulnerability of cats to hypoxia been the subject of further research?
I have long suspected that the health risks of long-haul flights may be only partly caused by sitting in cramped conditions.
After reading your article, I’m even more convinced that hypoxia plays a role, as the body responds to reduced cabin air pressure by producing more red blood cells, which makes the blood more prone to clotting.
Painful truth
Regarding 快猫短视频‘s exploration of consciousness (18 May, p 30), the ultimate feeling of consciousness is surely pain. Toothache, for example, easily fills your conscious awareness.
The hard problem is explaining this all-pervading subjective feeling. Can you simulate it on a computer? I guess AI developers would ask what that should mean, which proves that they have not yet approached the hard problem.
And feeling pain, the essential condition for moral respect for other beings, is common to all animals. So there is no place here for setting humans apart when it comes to consciousness.
Syntax error
Michael Brooks describes many of the problems with modern software but decries the tribalism that is endemic to programmers. Choosing a computer language is a religious choice (8 June, p 36).
Languages fall into a small number of groups, but within groups there is very little to choose between them. Choice is arbitrary but once made requires a huge investment. It is completely natural to construct a tribe of like-minded individuals to help you believe that you made the right choice (especially if you made the wrong one) and to defend that choice.
I use mainly Java, my son uses mainly C# and naturally thinks it better (faster, cleaner, easier). I naturally know he is wrong.
Brooks rightly points out that commercial pressures lead to the inclusion of pointless features in software requiring lots of code. When an Intel executive was told his new processor architecture would make for voluminous code, he replied: “Yes, I know. We make memory chips too.”
Settle, North Yorkshire, UK
Let them eat bugs
You say that eating insects could make a major contribution to our diet as well as offering some significant environmental benefits, because farmed crickets, for example, “are 12 times as efficient at converting feed into meat as cows” (18 May, p 4).
The trouble is, in many countries we don’t want to eat crickets. Why not crunch them up and just feed them to the cows?
Be afraid
Feedback reported a Belgian bank’s suspicions over a customer invoice that included the abbreviation “chemical weapons Syria” as shorthand for the title of a science article (15 June). This raises the significant issue of the trawl of IT metadata by the governments and secret services of the US and UK (p 21).
Many of the communications in their databases will have truncated headings which, if taken at face value in this way, can seem incriminating. This gives the lie to those who say that if you’ve done nothing wrong you need not worry.聽
Intelligent talk
Further to the look at the hunt for artificial intelligence (18 May, p 40), Pentti Haikonen claims that we will never create such a machine using software. The problem is not software, but when a system presents words to a user.
For example, in 1966 computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a relatively trivial system that managed, more or less, to maintain one side of a conversation. He was appalled to find that users attributed intelligence to it, and the artificial intelligence field never really got over this embarrassing success.
Shale seepage
Claims that the US has reduced greenhouse gas emissions in recent years may be premature (15 June, p 7). The supposed reduction is mainly due to the switch from coal to shale gas. But the figures don’t include methane leaks during the extraction and transportation of this gas.
Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. I estimate that if leakage exceeds just 0.7 per cent, shale gas will, over 20 years, have as great a greenhouse effect as the coal it replaced. Ecologist Robert Howarth and co-workers at Cornell University have estimated the leakage at between 3.6 per cent and 7.9 per cent, exclusive of accidents ().
The switch from coal to shale gas is not a solution to climate change and has no part to play unless its environmental effects can be eliminated.
Logical, captain
So a software firm is recruiting people with autism for their pattern-recognition and error-spotting skills (1 June, p 8). Fiction got there first. Homing in on the talents of those on the autism spectrum is exactly what the writers of Star Trek did with the character of Mr Spock.
Slip of the mind
In Kirsten Weir’s look at theory of mind she gave the example of two friends, Sally and Anne, in a bar, but there’s a flaw in the scenario (8 June, p 32). Sally leaves her cellphone on the table while going to the bathroom. Anne puts Sally’s phone in Sally’s bag and then heads to the bar to buy drinks. Weir then asks us to predict Sally’s thoughts on returning.
Surely it should be shame on Anne for abandoning Sally’s bag, unless there is a third party on guard 鈥� in which case, why bother hiding the phone?
Lost in translation
Frank Sierowski proposes a test for consciousness in other species: independently coming up with the hard problem of consciousness (15 June, p 33). It is a flash of genius, but possibly one with a fatal flaw. Were we to find aliens speaking of say “bloonong”, how could we conclude that this word meant for them what “consciousness” means for us?
Eco ding-dong
Fred Pearce examines offsetting of biological diversity by developers 鈥� if vital natural sites get in their way, they can fund a replacement down the road (22 June, p 26). The point is made that wildlife may not play by our rules and so offsetting may not always work.
Such schemes are so open to abuse that they make a mockery of any legislative protection. You might just as well specify in the case of the nightingales of Lodge Hill in the UK, that developers simply install doorbell chimes in each new home to mimic these birds and have done with it.
Peak logic
With respect to the discussion of uncertain sea levels (25 May, p 26), a related matter I have not seen raised is how the height of mountains is now measured.
If sea levels are rising, does this create greater uncertainty in the height of mountains? More provocatively, it might be asked whether mountains are now to be understood to be sinking 鈥� if sea level is still considered the reference point.
Fungus fashion
Feedback talked of using puffballs to make hats (22 June). My husband has a hat made of bracket fungus, which he bought in Hungary. Ladies’ hats are available too.