Archive for Brave New World
Martin Behaim’s globe
Posted in Books, pictures with tags 1492, Brave New World, Centro del Mudéjar, Erdapfel, Fra Mauro's map, maps, Martin Behaim, Nuremberg, Palacio Marqueses de la Algaba, planisphere, Rand McNally & Co, Sevilla on December 12, 2025 by xi'an
make eugenics great again?!
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Statistics with tags 1930's, anti-vaccine, antivaxers, autism, Brave New World, COVID-19, eugenics, heredity, HIV, Human Genetics, IQ test, Julian Huxley, MAGA, MAHA, Nature, NIH, Oregon, Portland, Ronald Fisher, sterilisation, The Eugenics Society, The Guardian, Trump administration, USAid on May 26, 2025 by xi'an
A most interesting (and ghastly) article in The Guardian by Portland writer Derek Beres on “Maga’s era of ‘soft eugenics’: let the weak get sick, help the clever breed“. It points out how significantly the Trump administration is influenced by (soft and not that soft) eugenics ideas. Starting with (the US Secretary of Health) Robert F Kennedy Jr’s MAHA (“make America healthy again”) movement that centres on “natural” selection of the fittest and healthiest members of the community, from his anti-vax positions to his insistence on health being a personal responsibility, to his denying the genetic roots of autism (or letting those impacted disappear from the gene pool), and to stopping NIH funding of research on HIV, vaccine hesitancy, vaccination rate disparities, and COVID-19, all pointers to this selection by (at best) passivity from the State.
Similarly, Elon Musk’s and Trump’s fascination with IQ tests and levels need not much arguing towards eugenism when recalling that IQ was intrinsically linked with eugenism (as for instance setting the IQ bar in many US States forced sterilisation programs that ran till the 1980’s). Same for the current natalist discourse that mimics the one of the earliest eugenists like Galton, Pearson and Fisher. Trump’s proposal of a baby bonus echoes 1930’s Fisher’s call for an allowance so “that the standard of living of the competent will rise, and that of the incompetent will fall”. And the defunding of USAid, Head Start, HHS and other programs that contribute to children health, nationally or internationally, follows the same furrow that the resulting (numerous) deaths and diseases will only impact the “unfit” part of their Brave New World.
Nature tidbits
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags AI, Brave New World, climate change, Clockwork Orange, CO2 levels, cover, frogs, Huber loss, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, loss functions, machine learning, Nature, neural networks and learning machines, neuroscience of religions, sauna, temperature anomalies, ZRR on September 2, 2024 by xi'an
- a “technology and tools” long article on picking the “right” loss function when constructing an algorithmic predictor or another ML tool,
although the author remains vague about the “rightness” part (with an incorrect entry for Huber loss). The message is however clearly that tuning the loss function to the problem one wants to address is (obviously) key. With additional advices about properly handling outliers, avoiding overfitting, and correctly modelling noise. In short, run a proper statistical analysis! - a call for neuroscientists not to be afraid of studying religions, which should sound like an obviousness, but believers and religious leaders are often so touchy about their faith that running representative scientific studies of the “brain processes associated with religiosity and spirituality” may prove inaccessible. I also find the statement “researchers might be able to get a better handle on what (if any) alterations happen in people’s brains in the rare instances when religious belief turns to radicalized action or sectarian hatred” closer to Brave New World or Clockwork Orange than to the purpose of Nature!
- the warmest summer ever, ever, ever…
- a scary story from South Korea where an academic got sentenced to two years in prison for sharing data with Chinese collaborators on “national core technology”, a case reminiscent of similar ones earlier in the US. And where the academic researcher is again seen as the sole culprit instead of their university or the government sharing the responsibility. In France, the imminent threat to turn mathematics and statistics labs into restrictive regime zones (ZRR), with much heavier constraints on visitors and students, and on publication contents, carried by the researchers themselves, pertains from the same tendency. (A personal illustration of the induced administrative absurdities: my datascience lab being next to a biomedical ZRR lab, I am not allowed to use the lift shared by both units, but can nonetheless reach the same spot using the nearby stairs.)
Number savvy [book review]
Posted in Books, Statistics with tags #ERCSyG, book review, Brave New World, Brussels, Bruxelles, Canada, Census, CHANCE, CRC Press, data, data market, data pooling, data privacy, demonstrations, ERC Synergy Grant, EU, European Research Council, European Union, Gödel Escher and Bach, GDPR, geography, Kurt Gödel, microdata, Nassim Taleb, Paris, prospect theory, savvy, Statistics Canada, survey, Taoism on March 31, 2023 by xi'an“This book aspires to contribute to overall numeracy through a tour de force presentation of the production, use, and evolution of data.”
Number Savvy: From the Invention of Numbers to the Future of Data
is written by George Sciadas, a statistician working at Statistics Canada. This book is mostly about data, even though it starts with the “compulsory” tour of the invention(s) of numbers and the evolution towards a mostly universal system and the issue of measurements (with a funny if illogical/anti-geographical confusion in “gare du midi in Paris and gare du Nord in Brussels” since Gare du Midi (south) is in Brussels while Gare du Nord (north) in in Paris). The chapter (Chap. 3) on census and demography is quite detailed about the hurdles preventing an exact count of a population, but much less about the methods employed to improve the estimation. (The request for me to fill the short form for the 2023 French Census actually came while I was reading the book!)
The next chapter links measurement with socio-economic notions or models, like unemployment rate, which depends on so many criteria (pp. 77-87) that its measurement sounds impossible or arbitrary. Almost as arbitrary as the reported number of protesters in a French demonstration! Same difficulty with the GDP, whose interpretation seems beyond the grasp of the common reader. And does not cover significantly missing (-not-at-random) data like tax evasion, money laundering, and the grey economy. (Nitpicking: if GDP got down by 0.5% one year and up by 0.5% the year after, this does not exactly compensate!) Chapter 5 reflects upon the importance of definitions and boundaries in creating official statistics and categorical data. A chapter (Chap 6) on the gathering of data in the past (read prior to the “Big Data” explosion) is preparing the ground to the chapter on the current setting. Mostly about surveys, presented as definitely from the past, “shadows of their old selves”. And with anecdotes reminding me of my only experience as a survey interviewer (on Xmas practices!). About administrative data, progressively moving from collected by design to available for any prospection (or “farming”). A short chapter compared with the one (Chap 7) on new data (types), mostly customer, private sector, data. Covering the data accumulated by big tech companies, but not particularly illuminating (with bar-room remarks like “Facebook users tend to portray their lives as they would like them to be. Google searches may reflect more truthfully what people are looking for.”)
The following Chapter 8 is somehow confusing in its defence of microdata, by which I understand keeping the raw data rather than averaging through summary statistics. Synthetic data is mentioned there, but without reference to a reference model, while machine learning makes a very brief appearance (p.222). In Chapter 9, (statistical) data analysis is [at last!] examined, but mostly through descriptive statistics. Except for a regression model and a discussion of the issues around hypothesis testing and Bayesian testing making its unique visit, albeit confusedly in-between references to Taleb’s Black swan, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (which always seem to fascinate authors of general public science books!), and Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory. Somewhat surprisingly, the chapter also includes a Taoist tale about the farmer getting in turns lucky and unlucky… A tale that was already used in What are the chances? that I reviewed two years ago. As this is a very established parable dating back at least to the 2nd century B.C., there is no copyright involved, but what are the chances the story finds its way that quickly in another book?!
The last and final chapter is about the future, unsurprisingly. With prediction of “plenty of black boxes“, “statistical lawlessness“, “data pooling” and data as a commodity (which relates with some themes of our OCEAN ERC-Synergy grant). Although the solution favoured by the author is centralised, through a (national) statistics office or another “trusted third party“. The last section is about the predicted end of theory, since “simply looking at data can reveal patterns“, but resisting the prophets of doom and idealising the Rise of the (AI) machines… The lyrical conclusion that “With both production consolidation and use of data increasingly in the ‘hands’ of machines, and our wise interventions, the more distant future will bring complete integrations” sounds too much like Brave New World for my taste!
“…the privacy argument is weak, if not hypocritical. Logically, it’s hard to fathom what data that we share with an online retailer or a delivery company we wouldn’t share with others (…) A naysayer will say nay.” (p.190)
The way the book reads and unrolls is somewhat puzzling to this reader, as it sounds like a sequence of common sense remarks with a Guesstimation flavour on the side, and tiny historical or technical facts, some unknown and most of no interest to me, while lacking in the larger picture. For instance, the long-winded tale on evaluating the cumulated size of a neighbourhood lawns (p.34-38) does not seem to be getting anywhere. The inclusion of so many warnings, misgivings, and alternatives in the collection and definition of data may have the counter-effect of discouraging readers from making sense of numeric concepts and trusting the conclusions of data-based analyses. The constant switch in perspective(s) and the apparent absence of definite conclusions are also exhausting. Furthermore, I feel that the author and his rosy prospects are repeatedly minimizing the risks of data collection on individual privacy and freedom, when presenting the platforms as a solution to a real time census (as, e.g., p.178), as exemplified by the high social control exercised by some number savvy dictatures! And he is highly critical of EU regulations such as GDPR, “less-than-subtle” (p.267), “with its huge impact on businesses” (p.268). I am thus overall uncertain which audience this book will eventually reach.
[Disclaimer about potential self-plagiarism: this post or an edited version will potentially appear in my Books Review section in CHANCE.]
brave new worlds
Posted in Statistics with tags Brave New World, cover, elections, French Guiana, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Kent, Nature, Nigeria, Russian invasion, Science for Ukraine, Solidarity with Ukraine, twitter, unilateral nuclear disarmament on March 28, 2023 by xi'an
