Garret Hardin’s idea that the emotion of shame can help to manage a common resource has always been a favourite for me. Up to 150 people, as Hardin suggested, can help one another do the right thing (for them all) by instilling a feeling of shame in transgressors. Seems he and I have been wrong. Not about the role of shame, but about what to call it. Brené Brown told me so in her Ted talk, Listening to Shame.

Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is “I am bad.” Guilt is “I did something bad.” … Guilt: I’m sorry. I made a mistake. Shame: I’m sorry. I am a mistake.

It hadn’t really occurred to me before that when I felt ashamed, it was for who I am rather than for what I did. In fact, it has never felt that way, and it doesn’t now. Shame and guilt, guilt and shame, for me are not quite synonyms. If I broke a written law that I believed to be wrong, I would be guilty, but I wouldn’t feel guilt. Or shame. The same if I broke an unwritten law that I believed to be wrong, I would feel neither guilt nor shame.

Brené Brown may well be onto something, that there is an aspect about how people think of themselves that correlates with all the things she says it does.

Shame is highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders. And here’s what you even need to know more. Guilt, inversely correlated with those things. The ability to hold something we’ve done or failed to do up against who we want to be is incredibly adaptive. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s adaptive.

In fact, I am sure she is right. Without doing a huge literature search, it does seem that (some) psychologists distinguish negative behaviour-evaluations from negative self-evaluations — guilt from shame — although it is very complex.

I can’t help feeling, though, that in her Ted talk Brown is doing that thing that psychologists (and other -ists) often do; taking a perfectly good word and giving it a special somewhat technical meaning (intelligence, extravert) and then slightly forgetting to remind people that when she talks about shame she doesn’t mean shame, she means “shame,” the thing that’s measured on her preferred shame scale.

I’m not rejecting the idea at all. In fact, I rather like the distinction, although not sure how I can use it. And I’m not ashamed to say so.

I heard this woman from Southampton University give a talk called History of the Web Part I to the Royal Society, and it was quite good, even though, possibly even because, there were a couple of things I disagreed with.

And being a glass half full sort of guy, most of the time, we could leave it at that.

Most of the time. But today, my glass is half empty. So I’m going to moan. I subscribe to the Royal Society’s podcasts, which is how this happened to be available to me. But nowhere does the podcast tell me that the speaker was Professor Dame Wendy Hall, FRS. Other podcasts manage to include the speaker’s identity and more; how hard can it be?

Moving on, the podcast is audio only. Fine, no problem, except that Professor Hall clearly had some very interesting slides that she was sharing with the audience. But hang on a moment. On the page for the event, there’s a link that says “Watch the video”. So I did. And that seems to be the identical audio (a little longer, rather than cut off in mid sentence as the podcast is) linked to the slides. Which is nice. But hang on another moment. Why not share that, rather than pure audio? Makes no difference to any of the podcast technology. And lo, they do; I have changed my subscription. Pictures and a voice is better than a voice and no pictures.

Better yet, why not video the speaker and do a modest amount of editing before splicing in the pictures? I reckon just cutting out the number of times Dame Wendy told us she was running out of time and needed to speed up, plus a little bit of judicious de-umming, could have brought her in well under the 30 minute mark. And it isn’t as if you need to be the BBC to do that kind of thing. The average acned teenager is fully competent.

In fact, The Royal Society is fully competent.They host scads of really good videos, with spiffy technology (see above) that shows the speaker and their slides simultaneously and allows you to jump from slide to slide. Nice! But there’s no RSS feed, and I can’t see a way to subscribe to those videos.

There now, that’s enough moaning for now.

About that stuff I disagreed with. Dame Wendy said a couple of times that you have to be the biggest on the web to matter: you’ve got to be where everybody is, or there’s no point being there. Not so, for me. Being the biggest, I reckon, will be the doom of Facebook and Google for me eventually. Sure I want all the information I can get, but there is a limit to the size of the communities that I want to be part of. The problem with giant online “communities” is that they think I care about what the other 99.999999% are up to, and much of the time, I don’t.

Time was when a blogger in search of inspiration looked no further than the search terms people brought with them. Me too. Today, though, I happened to delve into my muck filter and discovered the schizoid spammer pictured above. So am I appreciated, or despised? You be the judge.

In any case, inspiration is often more about a bit of time than a bolt from the blue. This morning, however, three bolts struck, and it wasn’t until 11 hours later that I’ve had time to unravel them.

Bolt No. 1 a Ted talk by Kevin Slavin about How algorithms shape our world. I’m not sure I entirely got everything he was trying to say, but I certainly got the way he used some great footage of, I assume, starlings in megaflocks to illustrate his point. Or points.

Bolt No. 2 the immediately following Ted talk, by Markus Fischer, who demonstrated his robot that flies like a bird, a mechanogull that flaps its wings, steers, lands, and everything.

Bolt No. 3 a comment from my friend Derek on my previous post, which augurs well for the impact of this post, not least because Derek is a big fan of starling flocks and portents for the gull-able. So I’m hoping he’ll be able enjoy those two Ted talks, and maybe we can consider some options. A huge flock of mechanogull birdbots, linked to one another only as a network and doing the starling fling. Or a single steerable mechanogull doing his bidding and so creating his own auguries. Like the white dove that shoots from Florence cathedral on Easter Sunday. When I saw this spectacle, I was told that in times past an actual dove was released, and that if it flew straight out of the cathedral doors, that presaged a good year. Nowadays the dove is fake, and on a wire that takes it straight out of the cathedral door, thus guaranteeing a good year. Of course, that’s not the story they tell in this history of the bird on a wire, but I don’t care.

Bonus Bolt Ted gets the same stupid kinds of spam that the rest of us have to put up with, and even thier awesome filters, which are surely more advanced than anything in the real world, fail to block some of it.

Which lends a certain roundness to this post.

Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 is unfailingly interesting. Even sub-par episodes are head and shoulders above most other discussion programme. This week’s episode, on Malthusianism, was no exception, being full of insights into the background and context of Malthus’ famous Essay on the Principle of Population. I learned much, not least that I could probably call myself a Phyiocrat and get away with it.

The programme title — Malthusianism, rather than Malthus — should have alerted me to the likelihood that there would not be too much discussion about the fundamental premise, that population growth, unchecked, will always outstrip growth in the food supply. This, to me, is axiomatic. One of the participants said that Malthus’ numerical analyses were “not correct,” but I frankly do not see how anyone can dispute the conclusion that geometric growth, compound interest, if you will, must necessarily outstrip arithmetic growth, the simple interest represented by bringing more land into cultivation.

Of course it was Malthus’ misfortune to be making this crucial point just as the scientific approach started to increase the productivity of land per hectare, and we have seen something approaching geometric increases in the food supply as a result. But the amount of sunshine falling on the Earth represents a fundamental limit to agricultural productivity, and hence the food supply, unless we’re somehow all going to be fed on sulphur-reducing tube worms and the like.

The modern-day optimists who cry “Malthus was wrong” do not understand that Nature does truly set limits. And I believe we are bumping up against them.

Of course, Melvyn doesn’t usually do argument on In Our Time, and his guests are invariably pretty clubable, but this is a case where I think it might have been a good idea to have an ecologist, or even an economist on hand to explore this other aspect of Malthusianism. Most of the comments about the programme (self-selected, I know) seem to say the same thing. So maybe we can look forward to a more substantive discussion of food security, agricultural productivity, and international aid and the culture of dependency. And Physiocracy.

More or Less is one of my favourite programmes on BBC Radio Four. Not for the presentation style, which for me sometimes grates like fingernails on a blackboard, but for what they present, which makes it well worth getting beyond the style to the substance. And last week’s episode was particularly good for its first item, on the mysterious disappearance of a map of climate change refugees from the website of the United Nations Environment Programme. Lest the programme, or at any rate that segment, suffer the same fate, I thought it was worth extracting and making available here.

Climate Refugees.mp3

If you haven’t already listened, consider spending 10 minutes doing so. And don’t miss the bit at around 6’48″ when the source of all the fuss defends himself with the immortal “you can’t prove that smoking causes cancer”.

Note, as many people in the item do, that this is not about the reality of climate change or its environmental impact. It is about simplistic extrapolation and the credence given to accurate numbers emanating from authority figures, especially after much repetition.

It is thus an example of Aunt Jobisca’s Truth and The Bellman’s Truth  rolled into one perfect package.

Bravo More or Less!