Simon T. Kaye

Has Willetts put his foot in it?

We’re all still awaiting Lord Browne’s report into higher education funding. It’s very likely, as many have pointed out, that he will eventually recommend lifting the cap on undergrad tuition fees, which currently stands at a little over £3,000. Whatever level fees end up at, I think we also know fairly certainly that they will be paid retrospectively via a loan system, as introduced under Tony Blair (still, I think, a good way of going about things). What we don’t know:

• Where the new fees cap will be set – £9,000? £12,000? £14,000?
• How many universities (and university departments) will choose to set their fees towards the higher levels
• What process (if any) Browne or the government put together to ensure continued value for money in undergraduate study. This is a problem now, so imagine how people will feel about their 8 contact hours a week when they’re paying upwards of 10 grand for them.
• Whether, at the last, the government (at least the Tory element of it) will choose to endorse the report wholly, or merely take its recommendations into consideration while formulating some other new policy.

My party, the Liberal Democrats, have always leaned the other way, wishing to reduce or cut undergraduate tuition fees altogether. Under the coalition agreement, Lib Dem MPs retain the right to argue against legislation that would raise fees, and to abstain on any votes. This already seems too weak a stance for many of our MPs who have signed pledges to actively oppose such legislation.

Ming Campbell has already said, on national TV, that he would probably be forced to rebel. You can assume that many Lib Dems will do the same, coalition agreement be damned. It’s not outside the realms of possibility, therefore, that any such higher education funding bill could face defeat in the Commons, and specifically threaten the coalition’s cohesion. So the first consideration here is political: how likely is it that the Tories will pursue a higher education policy that could undermine their position in government? On this basis, I’d say we can assume that the eventual tory policy will be at least fairly ‘mild’ in terms of content, and probably far less radical than Browne’s recommendations.

This has always been a point of difference between myself and the policy platform of my party. I don’t mind owning my own education. Actually, I quite like it. Getting higher education was not automatic for me – as it should not be for anyone. It was a choice. I want to own that choice, and the responsibility for it, in every sense. Now we can argue about the level of cost and the point of income where I start paying back, but I think the principle was always pretty sound. People from my generation of students were torn on the movement from fees of around 1 grand to something over 3 grand now, and the so-called ‘top-up fees’ scheme of paying these costs retrospectively.

Globally, 3 grand per year for an undergrad degree is an almost astonishingly good deal. The real-terms quality of this deal is obviously to do with the quality of your course. My own priority is that some kind of framework ensuring value for money must be put into place.

What happens if fees are raised? Perhaps it’s instructive to look at Master’s degrees – MAs, MScs and so on – which are not capped in the same way as Undergrad degrees. I studied at the LSE, which charges all the way up to £13,000 (or more, and even more for foreign students) for a one-year MSc. Most other UK universities charge between £3,000 and £7,000. Nationally, the range of costs is wide, and higher costs are not always attached to actual quality (though they may be attached to prestige).

So the lesson is: with a raising of the cap, not all institutions will instantly raise fees to the highest that they can possibly get (except, obviously, for the LSE, which has never wittingly missed an opportunity to thus gouge). We can assume that technical, professional and scientific courses – law, medicine, etc. – will set the highest fees. And, paid retrospectively with a revised approach to the point at which one’s income is high enough to swallow the costs, a new regime need not be too arduous, nor put too many people off university altogether.

But, based on his appearances today, Willetts is certainly barking up the wrong tree in another way.

Willetts is suggesting that students avoid the costs of living away from home – living expenses –  by attending classes and learning in a local college, but receiving assessment – and eventual certification – from another, more prestigious university.

Does this make any sense? To anyone? Assessment is oriented around the content of specific courses. How can the UCL run an exam for a course taught by Bath Spa? It might work – just about – for maths or technical subjects. But this is at the cost of university as significant life-change, as an immersion into a culture of learning.

If people want to study – study good materials – from home, and pick up a well regarded degree, then we already have a very good system in place. It’s called the Open University.

Someone should tell David Willetts.

This month, I got a paper published in a journal called History & Theory (the ampersand is important). It’s been a long wait – a round of revisions, some serious collaborative editing to make it consumable in America, plus the usual long stretches of peer-review and publication.

It’s about counterfactualism. Here’s the abstract as it appears in the journal and on the Wiley Interscience website, where it’s hosted for all (who have an Athens account) to see.

Counterfactualism is a useful process for historians as a thought-experiment because it offers grounds to challenge an unfortunate contemporary historical mindset of assumed, deterministic certainty. This article suggests that the methodological value of counterfactualism may be understood in terms of the three categories of common ahistorical errors that it may help to prevent: the assumptions of indispensability, causality, and inevitability. To support this claim, I survey a series of key counterfactual works and reflections on counterfactualism, arguing that the practice of counterfactualism evolved as both cause and product of an evolving popular assumption of the plasticity of history and the importance of human agency within it. For these reasons, counterfactualism is of particular importance both historically and politically. I conclude that it is time for a methodological re-assessment of the uses of such thought-experiments in history, particularly in light of counterfactualism’s developmental relatedness to cultural, technological, and analytical modernity.

As I mentioned on my facebook page, this is an article that includes Star Trek, Leibniz, Back to the Future, Plato, John Stuart Mill and Lost.

In other words, I’m very pleased, even if I am just going over it again and again now and spotting all kinds of problems, mistakes and missed opportunities. Worst parts are where something simply hasn’t translated so well into that terrifying niche-language, American Academese.

Now according to this nice contract with Blackwell, I can’t put it up on my website for another year, and even then I shouldn’t use the official PDF. But if you’d like to read it and don’t have an Athens account, drop me a line (to my usual address) and I’ll tell you how to get hold of it.

Well, the political news is full of the planned Commons vote-on- referendum for electoral reform. This is one occasion where my job and political beliefs as a Liberal Democrat coincide very nicely with my vocation and my research for a PhD in Political Theory – so I hope you’ll permit me to indulge in a little bit of an academic approach to this situation.

The system to be voted on is a classic – the old ‘AV’ system. This is no surprise. Elements of the Labour party have long preferred the Alternative Vote or ‘Instant Runoff Voting’ as the basis for electoral reform (though I suspect that the majority of that parliamentary party has never quite seen the point).

The political motivations of Labour’s move appear to be twofold. Firstly, they hope to show up the Conservatives as visibly opposed to a reform that, following the whole Adventure of the Abused Expenses, may be viewed as a popular measure to hand stronger accountability to the public.

The other reason boils down to electoral mathematics: by building the mandate for electoral reform now, Labour is eyeing a future election where the tories are still broadly the most popular party nationally, but will be unable to build anything resembling Labour’s 1997-2005 unofficial supermajority in the Commons. It’s possible that serious treatment of voting reform could only ever emerge from a vaguely leftist, unpopular government. The truth is that the vast majority of voters for Labour would rather vote for the Libdems than the Tories, and that most (though a few less) Libdems would rather have a Labour government than a Conservative one. Together they’re a (50%+) majority, so at the most basic level the maths of this make sense for Labour. Moreover, the motivation for such reforms evaporate with the promise of political success in the First Past the Post system (FPTP) – why kick away the ladder that let you climb up?

Labour’s political machinations aside, as a Liberal Democrat I can only get excited about any half-serious approach to a change in the voting system. There’s no question that the Libdem preference – Single Tansferable Vote (STV) – would be more proportional in effect, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many of our MPs demurr during the vote on the basis that the reforms don’t go far enough. But there are other grounds for criticism of the AV system, beyond the “it goes too far” or “it doesn’t go far enough” cries that you’ll be hearing for a the next few weeks.

As part of my research, I’m working on something called Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. I won’t go into too much detail here, but Kenneth Arrow basically came up with mathematical expressions of democratic norms, and then asserted that within the boundaries of these requirements there could be no voting system between three alternatives that could guarantee stable and non-arbitrary outcomes.

Well, since Labour’s announcement I’ve been doing some thinking about this, and worked up a couple of examples, and I think I’m ready to assert that the AV system is not capable of increasing Democratic meaninfulness even as we know it has only limited ability to improve the proportionality of electoral outcomes.
I’ll leave it there for now, and put up part two, with all my more academic objections, very soon.

With the Copenhagen Summit underway and the low rumble of discontent over the hacked emails debacle still audible, I feel the need to communicate my feelings on all the claims and counter-claims on the ‘science’ of global warming.

I marched on the ‘Copenhagen Wave’ last weekend, along with tens of thousands of other people from all around the UK. It’s a worthwhile cause, I’m strongly in favour of firm emissions reduction targets, and I believe that human activity is responsible for the climate change going on around us. Note, however, the use of the word ‘believe’ – I don’t know anything – not scientifically, anyway.

‘Scientific facts’ are curious beasts. Science may be said to be incapable of producing hard-and-fast facts. One formulates a hypothesis; one tests it; if the hypothesis is upheld, and is upheld repeatably, then surely we have a scientific fact on our hands? Well, yes and no.

Within the framework of the experiment, we have shown a ‘fact’ – but it’s possible that laboratory conditions or the specific arrangements of a test differ from what we’d assume to be ‘normal’ conditions. Test conditions are capable of presenting spurious, irrelevant or simply untrue ‘facts’. It works the same way as the framing of verbal logic.

So, scientific facts prove only the specific hypothesis which are tested. More importantly, they can only be assumed to do so temporarily. Facts have use-by dates. The first relevant experiment to come along and throw new light on a question or display slightly different results will once again throw doubt onto any ‘scientific fact’, and it is a part of scientific method to assume that proofs are finite in this way. A statement is true until proven false, just as the accused is innocent until proven guilty. The difference is that reasonable doubt runs the other way: if there is reasonable doubt as to the truth of a scientific statement, then it cannot really be called a fact. For this reason, there must be much, much more evidence in support of a claim of scientific fact than there need to be made against it in order to ‘disprove’ it – which is parallel to our legal metaphor, where the onus lies with the prosecution to eradicate reasonable doubt.

The third important point about scientific facts is that, in an important way, they can never get beyond inference. We may observe the correlation between two different things a hundred times in experiments – but all we’ve really seen is the same correlation, a hundred times. So even with the non-existence of contrary evidence, ‘scientific fact’ requires someone to look at the evidence and draw a causal conclusion about it all – to claim “these things are not coincidental: one causes the other”.

These three question-marks can help us to look at the human-caused (‘anthropogenic’) global warming argument objectively:

First of all, anyone who tells you that anthropocentric climate change is proven, certain, a done deal, is either lying to you, or doesn’t know much about science. These will be the sort of people who say ‘climate change deniers’ instead of ‘skeptics’. Even in so far as there is any such thing as a ‘scientific fact’, I cannot in good conscience write that anthropogenic climate change is one – no matter how useful that could be politically.

Why isn’t anthropogenic climate change a scientific fact? First of all, our planet’s atmosphere does not constitute a nice, stable test condition. It has its own ups and downs, is sensitive to the activity of the sun and to its own internal weather patterns, such as el niño. Even today our weather and climate can be altered by unpredictable, freak occurences. Trying to draw a general trend out of this mess, even over fairly long periods, is very hard work. Even worse, climate change scientists will always be frustrated in their efforts to project changes into the future, and a key element of scientific proof is in the success of a model: can we extrapolate our findings into a means to predict what will happen next? In this case, the short-term answer is no.

Instrumental data on warming. The range since useful records began is about 1 degree centigrade in total. From Wikicommons.

Secondly, even with something like an upward trend (which is more or less visible in the data – see the diagram above), there is the problem of cause-attribution. This is made a bigger issue by the fact that the two curves under scrutiny here do not scale particularly well together.

I take as absolutely true that greenhouse gas levels are increasing significantly in the atmosphere, and that these gases are being released because of human activity.

More difficult to prove, but still, in my opinion, true, is the general trend of a warming climate over the last fifty years or so.

But these facts together signify only correlation. I, personally, believe that there is enough evidence to link them causally. This third leap is required for ‘scientific fact’. But the problem is that the rate of the increase in temperature does not match in terms of scale the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, or adhere to the predictions of scientists. There can be little doubt of an increase in CO2 levels – whereas warming levels can be attributed to other causes, such as solar activity or the (thus far barely understood) planetary rhythm of ice-age to warm-patch.

One word of warning  – stick to the instrumental data. Information on the ‘medieval warm period’ is worse than useless, because of course there is no reliable measurement information from that far back. We are limited to the last hundred years or so, and this is both bad news and good news for climate change scientists. It means we must discount the geological probabilities that this planet has been considerably warmer and considerably cooler than it is now at various points in its history, over the course of millions of years.

But these ‘good’ records do show a temperature increase, and it corresponds in terms of timeframe with the start of human industrial activity in earnest. This is enough for me.

Skepticism, it must be noted, is a good thing. It is the scientist’s responsibility to be skeptical, which is why the activities of the UEA scientists is particularly reprehensible. But skeptics must be skeptical always: there is far, far less evidence for ‘alternative’ causes of temperature increase than there is for the greenhouse effect argument, and this is what must be said at the Copenhagen summit.

It is with healthy skepticism that we ought to take action against CO2 emissions. We don’t know anything for certain – but shouldn’t we hedge our bets? I don’t think that scientific rationalism should ever form the basis, by itself, for public policy. But the intuitive response to all this information is to detect a cause, and the response to that intuition is clear.

And wouldn’t it be a noble human objective to cut down on pollution regardless of its relationship with climate-change? Why does no-one ever make that argument?

On a slight tangent from the last piece:

A friend of mine on Facebook reminded me about Berkeley’s course on Starcraft and Game Theory. I tracked down this video of their first lecture. They all seem to be having a lot of fun.

This is probably of most interest to nerds who enjoy Game Theory experiments (like me!). But it’s an interesting interpretation of a strategy game, and the information they are deriving or modelling with it seems to have very little to do with narrative or story. Compare and contrast with MIT’s approach.

On a completely different topic –  doesn’t that guy look too young to be a teacher? Must be a PhD student.

The Massachusetts  Institute of Technology, as part of its very friendly ‘let’s share the knowledge’ Open Course commitments, has been publishing the course design and full reading-list and materials for its Video Game Theory and Analysis class online. It’s just a little bit out of date, but intriguing nonetheless. 

Here it is!

They have listed the course as it appeared in Autumn 2006 and 2007, but the difference is really negligable (they had a few guest speakers in 2007).

Apart from making me want to enrol at MIT (ha!), a bit of scrutiny of the outline and reading-list is quite revealing. 

Perhaps they're learning about games RIGHT NOW?!

First of all, I’d like to point out that any course whose requirements include “complete (or play, at minimum, 70 hours of) a single contemporary videogame or a grouping of games in a particular series or genre (example: Civilization III and IV, plus expansions or online play; the Zelda series, etc.)” can only be a source of massive nerd-joy.

I’ve written a tiny bit on why I think we ought to take ‘gaming’ seriously – in fact, it was more of a declaration of why the broader media and public can’t take the hobby seriously as it stands, based on a criticism of the terminology which we seem to have reversed blindly  into over the years. 

MIT’s course – which is by far the most serious and impressive engagement I’ve ever seen with gaming by a big-time university – lessens the kind of outrage I was throwing about in that other article.

Each student on the course seems to be required to complete a project, based, in the main, on their engagement with a particular videogame and their understanding of it. It’s all listed here – so let’s see what the class of 2007 regarded as the most ‘important’ games of our era.

Knights of the Old Republic. Bioshock. F.E.A.R. Half Life. These are just the PC games. 

Okay, so far, so peachy.

But look a little bit further, and it soon becomes clear that the majority of engagement with these titles – with all of the titles they list, and the works they cite – is intrinsically founded in a narrative understanding of art. Games are viewed as “semiotic domains” for the development of stories. 

There does remain an understanding of the origins of videogames lying somewhere beyond narrative, in an Atari-flicker of puzzles, reflexes and technological joy. But most of this  material seems to place the modern, story-driven game (the game as vehicle for story) atop a pedestal, as if everything else has been evolving toward it.

Agency, and the impact of player participation, is an underlying theme of the course. But it’s treated as a kind of enveloping trick, a facade: the tale is as it is, and the importance of your activities is a clever way of immersing you. Even World of Warcraft is seen in these terms. 

This raises a few questions – first of all, are the folks at MIT right about our hobby? Are games simply the latest presentational package for old-fashioned narrative arcs? (Certainly, in the vast majority of cases, this is true?) 

But do we believe that our hobby is capable of more – that there’s more to the collective media and art generation that is modern games development than creating a plausible (or at least cohesive) space within which to tell stories? 

With these questions in mind (and I’m genuinely puzzled by them) I fully intend to read every book on that list. Do you think they’ll give me a certificate afterwards?