tim's experiment

I am glad to see that somebody besides me (column by Albert Cheng in the Post the other day) is puzzled by the legal ongoings consquent on the fatal collision during the last National Day fireworks.
The skippers of both the boats concerned have been charged with manslaughter. On the face of it this is very odd. The Rules for the Prevention of Collisions at Sea are quite simple, of great antiquity and known to all professional seafarers. If you are overtaking another vessel it is up to you to keep clear. If you are on converging courses it is up to the helmsman with the other boat on his right to keep out of its way. If you are actually heading straight for each other then both should turn right. It appears from the evidence given at the Commission of Inquiry that one of the captains followed the rules and one did not. Actually this is not a great forensic feat because it was quite obvious from the location of the damage. It follows that the other captain did what he was supposed to do. So one wonders why he is also in the dock.

This is not the only questionable feature of the whole case. It seemed to me that the Commission wasted a great deal of time on rather irrelevant matters. No doubt this owed much to the legal talent for exploiting any opportunity to expend billable hours on a client’s behalf. Much attention was given, for example, to the fact that the chairs on the boat which sank were not securely screwed to the deck. But why should they be? This was a ferry, not a roller coaster. Fixing the chairs to the floor is just a convenience to increase the seating capacity. More luxurious boats of the same size have the furniture entirely free, as it is on land. Then there was the matter of the missing watertight door. Watertight doors are important and useful on warships, where one generally knows when someone is going to try to blow a hole in the hull. The doors can be closed when you go to Action Stations. They are useful also in large ocean liners like the Titanic, on which they can be closed remotely from the bridge in moments of crisis. On a small boat the door, if it leads anywhere useful, will probably be wedged open anyway.

It seems from the evidence produced that the Marine Department’s ship inspections are as effective and serious as the rather similar exercises inflicted on local universities. But the fact that some plates were a bit thinner than they were on the plans did not seem terribly relevant. They are not designed to stand up to being rammed anyway.

It may be that the Commission’s report will correct some of these deficiencies. I hope so. Because so far a great deal of attention has been given to what happened or should have happened after the collision, but nobody seems to have considered that perhaps we should try to make collisions less likely. It is strange for the Marine Department to issue notices before firework displays urging boat owners to check their lifejacket supplies and make a list of their passengers. People do not float any better if they are on a passenger list. Wearing life jackets makes sense on yachts and racing boats, whereon occasional accidents are part of the game. Ferry passengers do not sign up for swimming lessons. If the department really thinks that collisions are more likely on firework nights why does it not consider methods to make the traffic safer?

They might start by considering the speed limit. On old charts of Victoria Harbour a speed limit is marked, but this it seems is no longer enforced. Whenever I get on a catamaran ferry the driver whips it up to cruising speed within a minute of leaving the pier. This may be perfectly safe on a normal day, but this means rules framed in the days when most ships puttered about at 8 knots are now being applied by ferries doing more than 20. On nights when the harbour is going to be very crowded we could perhaps insist that drivers give the battle cruiser speeds a break. No doubt the department has experts who can suggest other possibilities. They should start from the point of view that we wish to eliminate collisions, not just make it easier to count the casualties afterwards.

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So what, after all the words and demonstrations … and the song … are we to make of Mrs Thatcher? I must confess that like most English people of my age I do not approach this question with an open mind undisturbed by any previous thoughts or feelings.

Actually I thought Mrs Thatcher was the worst Education Minister who ever held the job and one of the reasons I moved to Hong Kong in 1980 was because I did not wish to be present during her Prime Ministership, which I thought would not be a happy period. As indeed it wasn’t, for a good many people. I bristled at the suggestion by a local columnist that her decision to abolish the supply of free milk to schoolchildren was an example of fearless and creative administration. It was a short-term political fix with distressing long-term consequences.

The history of “school milk” goes back to the Second World War, when large numbers of children were evacuated from London for their own safety and billeted with foster families elsewhere in the country. Most of the children provided with this service were from working class families. Most of the foster families were prosperous enough to have a spare bedroom or two. As a result of this coincidence it became widely known for the first time that rickets (a bone deformity caused by insufficient calcium in the diet) was endemic among the children of the poor. The solution adopted by the first post-war government was to issue to all schoolchildren a small bottle of milk every school day. In primary schools the teachers made sure that you drank it. In secondary schools it was optional. I did not personally like it. But as a piece of social policy this was a complete success. Rickets disappeared. Mrs Thatcher’s decision to stop the milk supply was an instant political success with calamitous long-term consequences. Rickets returned. Of course if you believe, as devout Thatcherists tend to, that the feeding of children is entirely up to their parents then the reappearance of child malnutrition will not bother you.

And this is what a good many people hate about the “Thatcher revolution”. It depended heavily on ignoring the consequences — particularly for the vulnerable — of politically tempting options. The argument that this was necessary — that her willingness to grasp nettles and tread on toes rescued the economy from the doldrums and led it to the sunny uplands of sustained growth — is not born out by the facts. The British economy grew no faster in the 80s and 90s than it had done in the 70s. None of these three decades matched the record of the 60s, when the policies which she despised were in their full flower.

Still if you expect prime ministers to solve the UK’s economic problems you are probably over-estimating the power which goes with the job. What bothered me about Mrs T was that she made all sorts of toxic ideas respectable, at least for a while. Her admirers describe her as “principled”, but her principles eerily coincided with the prejudices which had been for years the staple of conversation in Home Counties golf club bars and Conservative Association tea meetings. She did not like trade unions. She did not like nationalised industries. She did not like council housing programmes. She did not like welfare. She did not like foreigners who could not speak English. Especially if they spoke German. And like the Roman administrators of Britain she thought the territory north of a line between the Wash and the Severn Estuary was a barbaric country which needed only firm policing. If you manage to become prime minister than of course academics will queue up to dress your prejudices in the verbiage of political theory. And mandarins who share them will then translate the theories into policies.

If great unhappiness then results then you must not, I fear, complain if people sing happy songs at your funeral. The tragedy of Mrs Thatcher’s political life was that she was a good war Prime Minister. But unlike Winston Churchill she only had one small war in which to display this quality. Like Churchill she was no good at the peacetime stuff but she didn’t get his opportunities for heroics. In some ways she leaves a harder, crueller world.

Let us return briefly to education policy. When I was a student — as indeed when she was a student — everyone who won admission to university had his or her fees paid by the government. You also got a maintenance grant, which was inversely proportionate to your parents’ income. There were similar arrangements for post graduates. Many universities also offered scholarships. If you were a geeky type who was good at exams you could pay your way. When I describe these arrangements to students from the UK now they think I grew up on another planet.

I do not dance on people’s graves. A charitable epitaph might be: She made a lot of things happen. Not all of them good.

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Well it’s nice to know that our local papers know what is important. No less than two columns in Wednesday’s SCMP were devoted to the fact that a Caucasian man in a rugby shirt had been seen urinating publicly during the Sevens. The results of this odd journalistic exercise were not encouraging. Alex Lo, who had seen the outrage, basically declined to comment on the grounds that journalists are hardly in a position to criticise public drunkenness. On this point I must entirely agree. Those of us who have been around the business for a while will mostly have personal histories which make this matter rather, well, personal. On the other hand Mr Lo rather lets the side down by not being terribly specific about what exactly he saw. The “young white male” was “in full view of dozens of commuters, pedestrians and patrons of a popular sushi bar…” But this does not really tell us where we are on the horror spectrum, because we do not know whether it was a front view or a rear one. Did the sushi consumers see more raw prawn than they were expecting, or are we just talking about a growing puddle here?
This did not trammel the muse of Mr Peter Kammerer, also uninhibited by the undisputed fact that he had not seen the incident. What seemed to be bothering Mr Kammerer was that Hong Kong racism was being directed unfairly at misbehaving mainlanders. His preferred remedy for this is that racism should be directed at errant foreign rugby fans as well.
In his eager pursuit of this curious quarry Mr Kammerer jumped eagerly to some unwarranted conclusions. He pointed out that the internet has an ample supply of clips of mainlanders peeing, or allowing their children to do so, in public places, and these often attract critical comments. Yet it seemed that the waiting bus queue treated to expat urination “although shocked, did not become outraged as they may have done had it been someone of another ethnic persuasion”. So the emotional reaction of the bus queue, as related by Mr Lo, did not reach the reaction which Mr Kammerer, who was not there, might have expected if the perpetrator had been peeing in Putonghua. This is a pretty fragile peg on which to hang several hundred words on history, culture, language and colonialism.
Let us put it this way. The fact that some people like to film mainlanders doing things which HK people do not do does not mean that any randomly selected group of Hongkongers will be moved to vocal protests if they see such a thing themselves. People who write internet comments on videos represent nobody but themselves. They are a self-selected minority of a minority. Probably none of them was present. A boring and rather deflating explanation but there it is.  Mr Kammerer also seems to suppose that drunken misbehaviour is some kind of Western speciality.  Lockhart Road regulars will know better.

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The curious thing about attitudes to democracy in Hong Kong is the number of butters it attracts. Butters are the people who say “of course I believe in democracy but…” They are closely related — indeed in some cases they are the same people — as the freedom of expression butters, who believe in “freedom of the press but…” It then turns out that freedom of the press is not an absolute right (platitudes, platitudes) and the butter throughly approves of whatever new restriction is now being proposed. Things are a bit easier for the freedom of expression butters because every reputable modern Bill of Rights notes that there are some restrictions necessary for the protection of other rights, like the right to a fair trial or the right to an unblemished reputation. Interestingly, though the relevant international covenants have no similar exceptions to the right to have elections.

So the democracy butters do not come up with some conflicting right. They chide the pan-democrats for disunity and including some disreputable banana-throwers, and then they announce that democracy is an unreasonable ambition because the central government “will never allow it”. This is, you will notice, pretty much what they used to say about democracy in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, with the Russians filling in for the central government. For a while it was true, and then it wasn’t. I do not know what the central government will like or dislike in 2017. Most of the time you can get pretty accurate predictions by saying tomorrow will be the same as today. But history does not flow smoothly. It lurches. All we can know with certainty about the future of democracy in Hong Kong is that we won’t get it unless we ask for it.

There are some weird things about the democracy butters. One is that so many of them have US passports. You would think this might be a problem. Urging surrender if we are all in this together is one thing. Urging a policy which you can avoid by leaving is another. It would be nice to have some local Henry V to sort this out: “He that hath no stomach for this fight, let him depart … We would not die in that man’s company which fears his fellowship to die in ours.”

Then there is the curious addiction for phrasing their comments in the form of advice to the democrats. Nobody offers advice to the DAB. But everyone has an opinion on what the democrats should be doing. This is a harmless rhetorical trope when it is used by people like Nau Lai-keung. No sane democrat will suppose that advice from such a source is intended to help. Butters need to consider that the first requirement for successful advice is a shared objective. People who want democracy at any cost and people who want it only if it is cheap do not have a shared objective. One wants democracy; the other wants a quiet life.

The butters are also rather naive. What is wrong, they wonder, with the Chinese government wishing to ensure that the next Chief Executive does not want to “confront the central government”. This displays a distressing failure to understand the way these things work. First we are told we must have a CE who loves Hong Kong and loves China. This is a nice thought, but totally impractical. How do you know what a politician loves? Or to put it another way, of how many of them can you say confidently that they love their wives? But having admitted one requirement, we are then entertained with another. The CE must not confront the central government. In other words the democratic process must produce someone who either warmly admires or is prepared to grovel to a regime dependent on a million secret policemen to keep it in power. The hard fact is that if there is a selection mechanism then we will finish up with what we have now: a creep chosen by the Liaison Office. The objection is not to having no chance to elect a CE who confronts. Few people would vote for such a programme. The objection is to having a vetting mechanism, however justified, because it will be abused to fix the whole election.

I wonder if they are also naive in believing that this whole matter will be decided by public discussion. According to today’s papers 30 pro-government thugs turned up at a democracy forum in City U and forced its abandonment by shouting at the speakers. Whether the disruptors were wearing brown shirts was not specified. Police refused to take action on the grounds that the event was on university premises. I must remember that next time I am tempted to murder a student. Acting in a disorderly manner to disrupt a public gathering is an offence under the Public Order Ordinance. I suppose all gatherings are equal, but some are more equal than others.

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I see the people who proposed that young couples should be housed in containers parked under fly-overs have retired hurt, having heard a lot of criticism of their proposal. Maybe the critics were right: housing schemes of this kind are a technical matter on which lay opinions are not worth very much. But the people who suggested this were right about the big picture: we need to think of something.

The hard fact about housing in Hong Kong is that it is no longer feasible for young people even to dream of a home of their own unless they have rich parents. Prices, even for tiny flats, have outrun the sort of salaries most people can hope for in their 20s, and indeed for many the sort of salary they can hope for ever. This has a variety of bad effects, ranging from acute unhappiness, frustration and alienation in the people directly affected to important social effects like the declining birth rate, as couples put off babies in the hope of finding accommodation fit for two and a half people later in their lives. This is not a problem which is going to be solved by dickering with the stamp duty rules, or by poking about for bits of community land which can be reclassified as housing. Nor will it be solved by market forces. Mainlanders will always be willing to pay silly prices because for mainlanders it is worth paying a premium to get their wealth into the outside world where they can spend it without being arrested.

Hong Kong used to have a reputation for creative solutions to housing problems. This was not for our new towns or public housing, which closely followed models in other places, but for a thing called Temporary Housing Areas. These were a creative solution to a shortage: unused patches of land of the kind which now tend to become open-air car parks were paved and fitted with a set of roofs. The occupant was allocated his roof and built the rest of the hut (these were hardly big enough to qualify as houses) himself. Toilets and showers were in communal blocks. THAs were not confused with paradise but they accommodated a lot of people without costing much money. At the time they filled a need. A lot of visitors from places with housing problems (and perhaps a bit more space than we have) came to look at them and were impressed.

I do not suggest that THAs should be revived. But they emerged from the sort of creative spirit we need now and are not getting. Last time I was in London I stayed in a place which had been converted from an office block into a sort of budget flat hotel aimed at the student market. We had one room for living, sleeping and eating, a tiny kitchen and a bathroom which was actually quite big because of a quirk in the shape of the building. This sort of thing would not be anyone’s dream first home but it would beat living with the in-laws hands down. Are there no buildings in Hong Kong which would fit this sort of treatment? Dare I suggest the West Wing?

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Among the criticisms levied against the Mandiant report on mainland hackers was one which caught my eye. The writer (who was trying very hard to rubbish the report) complained that it “had not been peer-reviewed”. This demonstrated a serious misunderstanding which I have occasionally detected in my colleagues. Peer review is an attempt to secure a minimum of quality in academic publications. It is a characteristic of academic publications that market forces do not work in the usual way there, because the writers want to be published, even if they are not paid. Also there are no readers worth speaking of.

In the real world people who write do not submit their work for peer review. They write on the understanding that they will be paid. If their work is not up to snuff they will not be asked to write again. In many ways this is a tougher regime than the one to which the academics are subjected. When I became an academic I found it rather easy, though time-consuming, to get things published in peer-reviewed journals. One does not see many academics switching to journalism, and those who do are usually historians, who are expected to be able to write properly even by their peers. As far as Mandiant is concerned this is a company which sells its research, I presume for large sums which customers would not part with if they thought they were getting garbage. The company’s peers are its competitors. Obviously it does not want to distribute its work to them free. And clients may prefer to have exclusive use of much of the output. But this company must in general be doing good work. Otherwise seriously greedy people would not be paying for it, and the company would go out of business.

Actually journalists seem to be rather impressed by peer review. Whether a finding has been published in a peer-reviewed place is often mentioned in science stories, even as the import of the science itself is mangled. Last week, for example, the Post reported a palpably peer-reviewed finding that playing of violent video games was associated with real-world violent behaviour. Unfortunately the headline, and indeed the comment crop incorporated in the story, proceeded on the assumption that the research had proved that violent video games CAUSED violent behaviour. Which it had not, and which the researchers had carefully not claimed. This is why the word “associated” was used. The fact that A and B are associated is interesting. It does not prove that A causes B or that B causes A. Actually it would be surprising if people interested in violence in the real world were not interested in violent video games. What is really going on may emerge eventually, or it may not. People are still struggling with the influence of other kinds of media on behaviour.

Either way, though, peer review is not much help. The reviewer (I have done this occasionally) is not expected to repeat the research, so there is a limited range of issues he can usefully look at. Does the research answer the question which the researcher says it answers (surprisingly often a tricky point)? Has the work been reported in sufficient detail to allow interested scholars to repeat the experiment? Do the sums add up? The reviewer is not supposed to, but frequently does, defend the conventional wisdom by giving the thumbs down to anything that questions it. Great diligence is not to be expected because the peer reviewer, like the author, is not paid. And the peer reviewer dos not get a by-line.  This is not much of an attempt at quality control. The real quality control, in fields where such things are possible, is to repeat the experiment. As well as a long string of trail-blazing discoveries vetoed by reviewers there is also a long string of stories about pieces which passed peer review with flying colours, only to disappoint when people tried to repeat the work in their own laboratories.

This sort of event has become surprisingly common. Pharmaceutical companies which are constantly on the look-out for interesting new work report that in between 70 and 90 per cent of cases when they try to repeat work reported in a learned journal the experiment fails. A careful piece of research into duff science reporting looked in detail at 12 stories reporting breakthroughs in the treatment of ADD (a fashionable disorder of children). In each case the original report was in a prestigious refereed scientific journal and was lavishly reported. In 11 out of the 12 cases subsequent research disclosed that the breakthrough was not a breakthrough. These disappointments were not reported in the press. But they were not reported in the prestigious scientific journals either. Repeating somebody else’s experiment and getting a negative result is not the sort of thing they publish. The people who do it have to send their work to more humble newssheets.

If this sort of thing goes on in the hard sciences you can imagine what happens in “softer” fields like sociology. Academics are not rewarded for doing research; they are rewarded for having research published, which is not the same thing at all. Pleasing editors and peer reviewers is just a fatal to the open experimental mind as pleasing yourself. And in the statistical stuff you are allowed what is known as a 5 percent confidence level. That means you can show that the possibility of your result being entirely due to chance are 5 percent or less … or one in 20. This seems a reasonable standard if you are looking at one piece of research. If you look at the industry as a whole it is terrifying. If there were 10,000 articles published last year that allows for 500 which were entirely spurious, mere consequences of chance or coincidence. They were probably the most newsworthy ones.

Another problem is the disproportionate enthusiasm and autonomy accorded in academic circles to pure theory. Plenty of people have warned about this. Karl Popper said that philosophy became barren and pointless unless it considered questions which arose outside Philosophy. Clausewitz said that the green shoots of theory should not be allowed to get too far from reality, which was their proper soil. The modern view is that theory is an interesting and worthwhile thing in itself, and much more interesting and prestigious than practical matters. I fear it must also be said that a body of theory tends to be defended as a matter of interest and instinct by people who spent years mastering it in their youth and want to see potential competitors do the same. It’s like the British Admiralty’s attitude to steel warships in the 19th century – innovation should be resisted as long as possible because when it arrives everyone starts from the same position and advantages accumulated over the years become worthless. The most interesting front at the moment, at least to me, is the one where the psychologists are demonstrating that classical economics is based on a wholly erroneous view of human nature. The big battle of the future will be between the sociologists and the biologists, who are developing a whole new set of explanations for society.

Lusty blows can be expected from everyone concerned. All contributions, on both sides, will of course be peer reviewed.

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When I was a student, which was admittedly quite a long time ago, the organisation of picketing, protests and petitions was done by us, entirely off our own bat. True the government paid student union fees for most students, but this wasn’t really intended to encourage political activism. Meanwhile the university administration tried to keep out of the line of fire and not look too embarrassed. This is not the way things are done at the university where I still, intermittently, work. Here the protests, petitions etc are organised by the university administration, encouraged beforehand and thanked afterwards in emails from the Vice Chancellor. Huge banners have appeared whose production values bespeak an origin in the University PR budget. I found a Dean – no less – collecting signatures the other day.

This is all intended to put pressure on the authorities over the rezoning of a piece of land which the university has had its eye on for some time. If the patch is rezoned it will be used for housing. It is quite a small patch of land. The proposed use for housing was part of the new administration’s gesture politics. There may be a shortage of housing in Hong Kong but putting a few up-market flats in Kowloon Tong is not going to solve it.

For geography fans, my university is the Hong Kong Baptist one. Alongside our long stringy campus is the former premises of the Lee Wai Lee Technical Institute, which has moved. At the moment the buildings are being used as overflow accommodation for two universities which, having only had ten years to prepare for the arrival of four-year degrees, have found themselves short of teaching space.  The official proposal is to allocate the northern half of the site to Baptist, and use the southern half for housing.

Of course this is silly. In housing terms it’s a trivial site. And it doesn’t make sense to put housing there because apart from the nearby hordes of students there is also a fire station next door which is quite noisy. The university’s anxiety is understandable, because it is sandwiched between a hill and the vast empty space formerly known as the Prince of Wales barracks and now occupied, or rather unoccupied, by the PLA. The chances of expanding within walking distance of existing buildings are very limited.

Whether the government will take kindly to being pressured in this way remains to be seen. The Institute of Education succeeded in a rather similar campaign to keep its independence. And they are still being punished for it. I also wonder where else this stirring up of popular fervour may lead. Student activism is an uncontrollable force and the genie, once out of its bottle,  may be difficult to put back.

I do think, speaking as one who mis-spent quite a lot of his youth on this sort of thing, that the university made a serious tactical error by announcing that it wanted the new plot for a Chinese Medicine Teaching Hospital. This made a rather simple question – housing or education – more complicated by introducing other questions, such as whether Hong Kong really needs a Chinese Medicine teaching hospital, and if so whether Baptist U would be the best institution to supply it. This part of the campaign seems to have been downplayed lately. It is now a simple choice: flats for mainland money launderers or teaching space for Hong Kong students. So if the petition comes your way, please sign it.

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