Sparkling rapid chess

Posted on August 19, 2020 by Nicholas Gruen

In the Age of COVID chess has been reinvented. In March (I think it was) the Candidates Tournament was dramatically ended a few rounds in and everyone wondered “what next”. Enter Magnus Carlsen entrepreneur. With his star power, he has been getting himself a piece of the action. He owns something like 11 percent of Chess 24 a website which provides information and live televised commentary on chess as it happens. It does so on a freemium model. It’s free unless you want to get some extra features one of which is having a chance to play Magnus and others among the Great and the Good of chess when they play ‘banter blitz’ which is fun if you like that kind of thing. They comment on the destruction as they beat patzers and damn good people – and occasionally get beaten spectacularly as here.

Then Magnus came up with the Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour which is a series of online tournaments among the best ten or so players in the world and some veterans for interest sake. The format is best of four ‘rapid’ games – in which each player gets 15 minutes plus 10 seconds per move. If that doesn’t produce a result there are two blitz games of 5 minutes and (I think) 3 seconds a move. And if that doesn’t work there’s a game of armageddon in which white gets five minutes and must win to win the exchange and black four and wins if they draw or win.

In any event, it’s been great fun for chess tragics. Magnus has been in each of these tourneys and they’ve been very exciting, rapid chess rewarding more aggressive games – though. The final has turned out to be between Magnus and American Hiruku Nakamura who’s in and out of the top ten in classical chess but is arguably better than Magnus at blitz and perhaps at rapid.

He’s been playing incredibly well getting Magnus into lines he’s uncomfortable in, getting ahead of him on time and putting huge pressure on. The score is 3-2 in a best of seven match, so the tourney will be settled with a Nakamura win tonight – or will go to a final ‘set’ if Magnus wins tonight.

Some of the games have been stunning such as this one in which Magnus gets Hikuru into serious trouble, and Hikuru finds a way to force Magnus to sacrifice a rook and then his queen to keep his chances alive – without doing so Hiruku’s mating threats start dominating. Amazing he could conjure such threats so quickly out of such a bad position. Anyway if you want to play any of this together with computer analysis of the positions, this link will do it for you. And here’s the game I spoke about.

Next game starts in 29 minutes!

Oops – pressed ‘save’ rather than ‘publish’. Here it is after the first game of the evening. Another rip snorter.

Posted in Chess | Leave a comment

Could lock-downs lead to a baby boom in several Western countries? If so, why?

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Paul Frijters

For months now, demographers and other social scientists have been predicting a covid baby bust because marriages were postponed, pubs were closed, anxiety levels were up, measured fertility intentions were down, sexual activity went down (in some reports), and economic uncertainty was up.  The dominant story of lock downs and babies so far has been (also for Australia) that the genders cant find each other, can’t close the deal, and think its a bad idea to have children in these circumstances anyway. Historically also, recessions are bad for babies.

And yet, whilst cycling through the Netherlands during the family holidays, I was struck by a story in a regional newspaper that said the local mid-wives expected a baby boom. The article said they had many more inquiries and bookings. There is a similar (but somewhat inconclusive) report from New Zealand that the mid-wives are overbooked for some of the coming period.

Mid-wives are only part of the pregnancy story though and the reports for individual mid-wives prove very little. How about hospitals? Well, some hospitals in Switserland are also reporting an increase and, like in Australia, more pregnancy tests sold in shops. There was another such recent report from the National maternity ward in Ireland. So we have indicative reports from four countries of a possible baby boom, plus national data from at least two countries on strong increases in pregnancy tests. Not conclusive, but still. What could be going on and how would it affect the tally of the pros and cons of lock downs and social distancing? Continue reading →

Posted in Coronavirus crisis, Dance, Geeky Musings, Health, Life, Parenting, Philosophy, Science, Social, Social Policy, Society | 2 Comments

How change has changed: changemaking then and now

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Nicholas Gruen

Below is a piece I published on the NESTA website in early 2016 which they took down in a web revamp. It’s still available on archive.org, but I thought I’d also publish it here for the record.

Quick Troppo Quiz: Are there as many strategic diagrams on the web as there are molecules in the universe?

There’s a fascinating world of difference between social change seeking a generation ago compared with today. Then, political projects – around equal rights for women, employees and minorities, and greater respect for our environment – were largely about public policy and wider cultural norms. Accompanying this, ‘theory’, political campaigning and raising awareness were at the heart of activism.

Today’s change-seeking is different. The ultimate concerns are similar. Most change-seeking shares left-of-centre values, but today a lot of the focus is directly on the doing of good. Typical forms of the new activism include social entrepreneurialism, personal commitment to such things as ‘ethical’ consumption and investment, and its corporate analogue – corporate social responsibility and/or ‘shared value’, transparency (of governments and corporations), hacktivism and open data.

There’s a lot to like about this new world where the prizes go, not to those with the loudest, angriest voices, but to those who’ve done the most. Instead of asking kids what their take on Marx is (and following that whether they’re Stalinists, Leninists, Trots or Maoists), and how many times they’ve been arrested, we ask: if you believe in these causes, what have you achieved for them? Continue reading →

Posted in Cultural Critique, Democracy, Economics and public policy, History, Philosophy, Political theory, Politics - international, Politics - national | 3 Comments

A snippet: when to use consultants

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Nicholas Gruen

A stupid diagram which I have made small for obvious reasons.

The Mandarin asked me to provide a summary answer to this question:

What is the appropriate level of the use of consultants in the public service? Has it gone too far? Are consultants doing too much core/routine work or are they providing a vital service?

It’s a fair enough question, but rather too decontextualised for me to make much sense of it really – but I didn’t think the Mandarin wanted my musings on that, so I offered them what’s below the fold. My main point is really on contracting out in the first two paragraphs rather than consulting per se. Continue reading →

Posted in Economics and public policy | 7 Comments

A short story by Herbert Simon

Posted on August 13, 2020 by Nicholas Gruen

Models of My LifeI’ve been dipping into Herbert Simon’s autobiography, Models of my life. He’s from an interesting time in the intellectual history of economics and the social sciences. The major contributions of his professional life began in the 1950s and, though he was part of the mainstream, he was highly critical of that mainstream. Being in search himself of the means for scientifically formalising economic subject matter himself, I think he was far more reflective in its pursuit than many of the neoclassicals whose approach was very formulaic.

He is pretty scathing about neoclassical economics, but from an unusual angle. He’s a very rigorous thinker. You won’t find me using the word ‘rigorous’ often because of its ambiguity. Most people use the word to mean ‘with lots of maths’, whereas I use the word to mean “being careful in proceeding from the premise to the conclusion of an argument”. In Simon’s case it’s both, which distinguishes him from a lot of his neoclassical colleagues.

In any event, the major preoccupation of his professional life was decision making. That led him into economics, the psychology of decision making (and precisely in how one might build a ‘science’ of such a thing), and he then ventured into computing and artificial intelligence in the mid-1950s. This immensely enriched his thought. I’m realising how much he anticipates embodied cognition as it emerged in the late 1970s and has matured into its own field since a landmark paper by Clark and Chalmers in 1998. I’m writing a little more about that which I hope will appear here soon.

In any event, Simon’s best-known contribution to economists is his idea of ‘bounded rationality’ – of the necessity to make decisions with less knowledge and understanding than one would like. The book contains Simon’s only short story which I reproduce below. It riffs on one of Simon’s obsessions which was the labyrinth as metaphor for decision making in life. It won’t surprise anyone to know that he was most intrigued by Jorge Luis Borges writing on the same theme and the book also contains a transcript of their discussing their shared interest in the labyrinth as metaphor. Anyway, below the fold is a transcription of Simon’s short story. It’s quite intriguing. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

A review of “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes”, the prequel to “The Hunger Games”.

Posted on August 13, 2020 by Paul Frijters

[spoiler alert!]

As a fan of the “Hunger Games”, a dystopian trilogy where teenagers are thrown into gladiatorial games to fight till the last survivor in a world that is a blend of ancient Rome and modern America, I eagerly awaited its prequel “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes”. Its another intricately constructed book by Suzanne Collins, displaying her impressive tool-kit of story-telling tricks, taking elements of different fantasy writers over the last 100 years.

Let me first discuss some of the tricks she uses and then what I think of the messages she uses them for.

One trick in “the Ballad” is that the names of the characters are full of meaning and cultural references. The main character is a young Coriolanus Snow, who was to become the ruthless ruler of the Rome-like ‘Capitol’ in the “Hunger Games”, combining the name of a brutal Roman emperor (Coriolanus) with the name for purity (Snow). The main group of ‘good people’, a gypsy-like entertainment group called the Coveys, are all given names that combine a song and a colour, such as Barb Azure or Lucy Grey. The songs they are named after have a story that fits them, and their colour has a function too (Lucy Grey is somewhat in between good and evil, ie grey). As with the Hunger Games, there are Heavensbees and Plutarchs, somewhat performing the roles of heaven’s bees and very rich people. There are also Highbottoms and Sickles, being precisely that for comic effect.

Another standard trick of the trade is that we get to read the internal voice of the main character as he internally comments on what others say and do, drawing us into his confidence. There are also catchy emotional songs, stunning visual scenes (like a seductress buried in snakes), clever spur-of-the moment decisions, and gorgeous costumes. It already reads like the script of another movie. Continue reading →

Posted in Art and Architecture, Cultural Critique, Democracy, Films and TV, Geeky Musings, History, Literature, Media, Social Policy, Society | 3 Comments

How can the Covid-policies be countered with the help of Big Money?

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Paul Frijters

Suppose you agree with me that containment and elimination strategies pursued regarding Covid-19 do far more harm than good. Suppose you also believe that having an open economy and a vibrant close-contact social life is vital for the long-run health of the country. You want to know how to convince the general public who currently support extended lock downs and social distancing measures. And you have quite a bit of money to spend on the issue.

Where you can help is to put the hurt of the victims of the repression strategies on the table. The population needs to be shown the human costs of the policies so as to get them emotionally involved with the victims they have made. It is easy to ignore the pain one causes if one doesnt see it. It is harder to pretend one is nobly saving lives if confronted with the emotions of the victims made along the way.

I think a professional campaign costing tens of millions of dollars and lasting for months is the way to go. That requires big money to get involved and professionally organise the campaign, primarily via television ads. Obvious sources of that big money are the industries decimated by the lock down policies, such as the tourism and hospitality industries.

There are several victim groups that one would think make strongly emotive cases against the lock downs and social distancing measures.

I imagine a woman who missed her last chance at starting a family because of the cancellation of IVF treatments due to corona being able to make a powerful example of the human costs of the “safety” mantra.

I imagine some institutionalised locked-away elderly demented woman continuously asking when she is going to see her family again making a powerful case against lock downs and social distancing.

I imagine a few children from disadvantaged backgrounds rioting in a home whilst the mother cant cope with them, as compared to children going to school, making a powerful visual image of the costs of school closures.

I imagine tearful Australians abroad or in other states prevented from seeing each other being good ammunition against quarantines.

I imagine small businesses whose livelihoods has been destroyed making a strong case against the notion the economy is not about lives.

I imagine family members whose elderly relatives passed away from cancer or some other non-corona disease, but whom they were not allowed to see in their dying days because of the fear, making a strong visual against the inhumanity of the apartheid system that has now emerged.

Etc.

 

A professional effort is needed to track down the right examples, make high-quality videos, get a good narrator or quick sound-bites, place the ads in front of the right audience, have a clear message throughout the campaign, etc. A bombardment of emotive examples of the human cost of lock downs and the collapsing economy seem a good way to me to try and wean the population off the idea that they are protecting lives via support for lock downs and social distancing.

The ads should not be judgmental or use difficult terms, indulging in statistics or ideologies, because those would allow the audience to dismiss them. All they should do is show the emotions of the victims in the context of how their hurt relates to the policies pursued. Whilst facts and arguments can always be challenged and ignored, hurt is much harder to dismiss.

The hurt of the victims of the policies has to be put on the table.

Posted in Coronavirus crisis, Death and taxes, Economics and public policy, Education, Employment, Health, Life, Media, Politics - national, Science, Social Policy, Society | 84 Comments