South West London Humanists: Discussion on Effective Altruism

I go to the monthly South West London Humanists monthly meetings for intelligent conversations on topics that interest me and in February that was Effective Altruism.

The conversations were seeded by a TED talk given by Peter Singer.

In this he made three main points:

1. We should give more money away than we do
2. We should give it where it has most impact, and that means saving lives in underdeveloped countries
3. We should check that our money is spent wisely.

In his talk he gave several examples to make his point, such as for the cost of rearing and training one guide dog to help one blind person in the USA we could do 2,000 simple eye operations to restore sight to people in Africa.

He also cited the Gates Foundation several times for the amount that they had given and the effectiveness of how it was being spent, e.g. in tackling malaria which kills thousands each year (an estimated 438,000 in 2015).

The arguments having been made we split into small groups and started the conversations. As is my rule, what follows is a mix of comments made by various people and edited by me after the event; it is my summary of the topic and not a record of the evening.

I was not convinced by the praise heaped on the Gates. Despite giving a vast fortune away they still had a fortune left. They had only given away money that they could not spend. Jesus got that right with the Widow's Mite.

While it is easy to say that we should give away all the money that we do not need the problem is we do not know how much money we may need in the future, particularly if we, or somebody else in the immediate family, has a long term illness. Most of us in the room were saving money just in case and would die relatively rich.

I was also concerned about the democratic aspect. Why should the Gateses get to decide where large sum of money should be spent? If we had more taxation and more foreign aid then the process would be both more democratic and more inclusive, i.e. we would catch all the very rich people who are not doing what the Gateses are.

I was interested in the politics behind the initial assumptions. Rather than address altruism I was more interested in addressing the inequality that makes it an issue, i.e. why are we rich while they are poor?

Most, if not all, of the people in the room gave to charities that deal with quality of life issues, e.g. the arts, as well as those that deal with health and well being. While one person said at the end that they might change their mix of giving to spend less on arts most of us felt that quality of life is as important as quantity of life and that we should remain members of the National Trust, Kew Gardens, etc.

In talking about the efficiency of charities Peter Singer wanted as much money as possible to go to the needy but I deliberately give to charities that also do political campaigning, e.g. Shelter, as we need to fix the problems not just help the people caught up in them.

I also felt that charities were under more scrutiny to be efficient than most organisations. I can see waste all around me at work but nobody is monitoring us.

It was an interesting and lively set of conversations but I left with the view that Effective Altruism while much better than no altruism at all fails to address the real point which is the inequality of wealth and health.

Humanist Debate on the Refugee Crisis

I had not managed to get to a South West London Humanists discussion meeting for a few months mainly because the move from Mondays to Tuesday gave me a clash with Big Ideas but that had gone dormant (or had finished) so the SWLH meetings came into the reckoning again. That did not mean that I was certain to go, it needed a reasonable topic too.

The refugee/migrant crisis was a topic I was keen to discuss having done so many times on Twitter while listening to Any Questions on Radio 4. It's a subject I feel passionate about for the same reason that I am a Humanist. These are real people dying and suffering severe hardship and they have as much right to a decent life as anybody else. They are not numbers and being foreign does not make them less important.

The logistics should have been good as Richmond is easy to get to from home and easy to get back to from working in London or Reading. Unfortunately on the day I was working in Leatherhead which means a long walk to the station to catch a train to Clapham Junction and then another one out again to Richmond. I got to The Cricketers soon after 7pm and while the others started to troop upstairs for the socialising I stayed down to have a spicy bean burger and my first pint. Both were good.

I got myself a second pint and went upstairs to join the others. Just in time it transpired as, with fifteen minutes or so to go until the start of the discussion almost all of the chairs was taken and I gratefully grabbed one of the last ones.

The debate was kicked-off by our chairman, Jeremy Rodell, who presented a few slides of numbers taken from the ONS etc. The introduction finished with some more numbers, this time from the Radio 4 programme More or Less. The technology failed so I stepped in and found the programme using my iPad (connected to the pub's wifi) and we plugged it into the speakers to listen.

We then took to table groups to have the discussion before coming together at the end to swap our main points. What follows is a mix of my notes from the time and some subsequent comments mostly things I tweeted during Any Questions a few days later when this topic came up again.

There was consensus that governments should work together both to try and resolve the situations in Syria etc. and to address the refugee problems arising from these conflicts. We do not help these countries or their people by building barbed wire fences in Calais.

But this will take time and I suspect that some countries (ours?) are hiding behind the need for mulit-country agreement as an excuse not to act now.

There was less consensus on what we should do about the immediate problem of the boats crossing the Mediterranean and refugees walking through Turkey. The UK is taking far fewer refugees than most European countries, especially when taking into account our relative population and wealth, and we should take more immediately.

Much as we have with foreign aid, I would like us to commit to being in the top-quartile of refugee takers in Europe. That would be leadership, which is sadly lacking at the moment. We claim to be a compassionate and rich country, now is a good time to prove it.

I was a little surprised, and somewhat disappointed, that a lot of the discussion was about the impact on us and largely ignored that refugees are dying in large numbers. Even if taking in a few refugees made things a little worse for a few people here, and I am not sure that it would, then surely that is a fair exchange for saving lives and giving people a second chance at a decent lives. Surely that is what Humanism means.

The headline from all this is I am deeply ashamed that so many people in this country, including the Government, are willing to watch many people die rather than have the possibility of suffering any discomfort themselves.

Humanist Debate on Nuclear Power

April's monthly debate organised by South West London Humanists  tackled the controversial subject of Nuclear Power.

We went led in our discussion by John Gallop, a physicist working at NPL who had an interest in the topic. He gave a thorough presentation on the history and technology of Nuclear Power and of the UK electricity market that it feeds.

What follows is my usual mix of statements made during the talk, comments made during the subsequent discussion and my further analysis which I do when writing up my notes, and that is the main reason that I do write them up.

Nuclear Power has been used for around 70 years in UK and has been (largely) uncontroversial for most of that time. It has become a current topic of discussion again because of Climate Change (where Nuclear Power is seen as a good thing, or at least a less bad thing) and the Fukushima Daiichi incident in Japan in 2011 (clearly a bad thing).

The European Pressurized Water Reactors (EPWR) used in the UK generate c 11 gigawatts (GW) of power. This compares to the two coal fired power stations that I worked at which each had 4 units producing .5 GW, i.e. 2 GW per station and 4 GW overall.

Baseload demand is around 20 GW. This is the amount of electricity that we consume irrespective of the time of day, the weather or other factors driving demand.

Nuclear Power is well placed to provide baseload electricity but it is difficult (i.e. expensive) to modify generation capacity whereas it is quite simple for piped fuel generators like coal and gas.

Taking all factors in to account, coal is the most dangerous fuel. This is bad both because of the safety issues with mining and the pollution produced. Nuclear Power incidents are rare and do not necessarily kill many people. Nobody has yet dies at Fukushima.

We've already released more CO2 in to the atmosphere than required to meet the relatively safe 2% temperature increase. The need to act is growing.

While it is tempting to move to more Nuclear Power it takes a long time to bring on-stream, well over ten years, and is also very expensive. The recent deal with EDFE to get them to commit to Hinkley Point C guarantees them a price of £92.50 per Mwh for thirty years against a current markey price of around £50/Mwh. There are other hidden costs and subsidies on top of this.

Nuclear Power is a very long-term commitment because of the time they take to build and then need to run to be profitable and this does not fit well in a world where we are moving away from a few large central generators to very many small local generators that operate at the house, street or community level.

Things like smart meters, electric cars and LED lights have the potential to be a game changer by dramatically changing the pattern of demand, i.e. only using electricity when it is freely available, and by giving homes local storage that can be used when electricity is more expensive.

Nuclear Waste is another issue. The only solution we have is to put it into storage for a few thousand years in the hope that it will stay safe all that time or that somebody finds a technical magic wand to get rid of it. Perhaps we'll throw it in to the Sun one day.

The Sun is also a possible solution to most of our energy problems. For example, we could put a large number of solar panels in the Sahara, something around the size of Wales which is a small fraction of the desert area, and that could provide enough energy to power the world.

Most of the discussion in the room was on ways to reduce or manage electricity demand and so remove the need for Nuclear Power or on ways that renewable forms of generation could be used instead. There were no obvious fans of Nuclear Power in the room, which was a shame as we might have had a more rewarding debate if a more diverse range of views had been presented.

Personally the debate helped to shape my view that Nuclear Power is a reasonable technology but it is neither the short-term nor medium-term solution that we need now. And any debate that helps to form views has been a good debate.

Humanist Debate: The Decline in Violence

The monthly debates at organised by the South West London Humanists Group have quickly established themselves in my calendar as they are proving to be very interesting and thought provoking.

April's meeting was no different when we packed in to the upstairs room of the Old Ship in Richmond to discuss the decline in violence. This is a theory from Steven Pinker that has had much coverage in recent years thanks to his talks at TED and the RSA etc. We used one of his videos to spark our debate.

Pinker's talk was wide-ranging and delivered quickly so there was little time to understand, much less challenge, any of his points.

I was happy to accept his general theory that our chances of dying a violent death are now much less than they ever have been but less convinced on some of the reasons that he gave.

I think that there are three possible reasons why violence has reduced:

1. We have got nicer (enlightened) and no longer accept violence as the means to solve conflicts.
2. We have better policemen, including the UN, who stop us from being violent.
3. It is just an accident arising from other changes, e.g. better trade has reduced the need for wars.

It is important to understand the causes for reduced violence if we wish to keep the peace. It is hard to undue enlightenment, though people like Hitler have had a good go at it, but it would be a simple matter to remove global policing.

In our discussion we also looked at what was meant by "violence". Pinker's focus was rather narrow in that he was taking about violent deaths but there are other ways to threaten, subjugate and defeat people. These include bullying at the individual level up to cyber wars at the national level.

Violence may have reduced but that does not mean that conflict has.

I suspect that violence has reduced because we have found better, not nicer, ways of fighting our battles, e.g. an internet troll can abuse somebody with virtual impunity.

There must be a risk that as we plug the holes that allow other forms of conflict, e.g. financial sanctions, that we will return to violence as the best (or least-worst) option for resolving disputes.

The example that most tables came up with was Crimea with Russia seemingly impervious to the sanctions imposed on it which may force the West to consider some for of military engagement. Incidentally most tables also thought that Russia was not as guilty on Ukraine as the West is claiming.

And being Humanists we had to consider the role of religion in this. One argument is that most religions tell us to be nice and that has led to a fall in violence but all the major religions are centuries old and and we are becoming less religious so that does not explain the continued fall since they were established.

A more worrying thought was religious fanaticism (from any religion) could create more conflicts and the promise of life after death could reduce the fear of using violence to resolve those conflicts. Many religions have martyrs.

Or, is religion, like war, a solution to a problem that is now being solved in other more enlightened ways?

Humanist Debate: Ethical Consumerism

I had to make a mad dash back from working in Birmingham for this discussion and it was worth it. The three trains ran on time and I arrived just before the 8pm start with a pint in one hand and a dish of peanuts in the other.

Instead of the usual speaker, the discussion was sparked by a film of a conference where strong views for and against the fair trade model of ethical consumerism were presented.

Please note that when I say "fair trade" I mean all schemes that aim to improve the deal for the local farmers of which FAIRTRADE is but one example.

After watching the film from the side I was able to join a table in the main room for the discussion that followed. I started the evening thinking that fair trade was a no brainer but the discussion showed that it was a complex problem with many aspects to it.

As always I juggled participating in the debate with taking notes and tweeting some of them so what I managed to capture is just my partisan view of part of what we covered.

Fair trading requires intelligent and rational consumers. Which we're not.

Is our new found desire for fair trading White Guilt at how we exploited these countries in the past, and does it matter if it is?

Most of the arguments against fair trade are the much the same as those used to justify attacks on the benefits system here, e.g. taking a grotty low paid job is better than nothing, the money children earn helps their families, etc.

Fair trade is not us doing things to them (the farmers and their communities), not doing fair trade is us doing things to them. Not buying fair traded goods is as much a statement as buying them and if we must but something, e.g. coffee, then we must make a decision between fair traded or not.

Can we export our poverty and close our eyes? We stopped bad working conditions in this country, including child workers and health and safety, because we want better for ourselves and I think it is wrong to expect other countries to adopt a standard that we rejected just to provide us with cheap goods.

Can technology help people more than we can? Or is that just our excuse for dong nothing? This argument is also put for doing nothing about Climate Change, i.e. the scientists will sort it all out somehow before it becomes a real problem so there is no need for us to do anything about it. This may be true (we won't know until we get there) but there is a risk that it does not work and is it fair for us to take that risk when it is other people who will suffer more?

Government's have more power but that does not mean that we should not do what we can. Buying fair trade coffee is one small thing and while it is only a small imperfect step it is better than doing nothing. Do we need more, such as insisting that our pension funds are only invested in ethical companies, and are we prepared to pay the price for this in lower pensions? Sacrificing a few pence on a jar of coffee may be one thing that many people would be prepared to do but how many would sacrifice a few thousand pounds?

Economics is the real problem, again. By that I mean that money incentivises children to work and farmers in Kenya to grow flowers for us rather than food for themselves, etc. We are also encouraged to spend money on things that we do not need (and to borrow to do so) because that boosts the economy.

The root cause is that we have the capital. The local farmers need this capital to invest in their farms and their communities (schools etc.) so they need to sell things to us. And one of the reasons that we have so much capital is that we stole wealth from their countries.

I found the debate fascinating because starting from the simple concept of buying fair trade coffee we quickly got in to some much larger and more difficult subjects.

Humanist Debate: Fair Admissions

My second debate with South West London Humanists took me in to familiar territory. Not that long ago I was on Kingston Council's Schools Admissions Forum, I was Chair of Governors of an LEA Primary School at the time, and the issue of faith schools came up there when a local boys' school wanted to become a C of E school and was denied (twice) by the Forum with me voting against both times.

The debate was led by Richard Thompson, a BHA Education Officer who is working on their Fair Admissions Campaign. He started off by giving us some information to explain the problem.

One third of. Schools are faith schools, circa17% of primary and 13% secondary applications are faith base. As an example,London Oratory has 9 different Categories of Catholic in their admissions policy, this is followed by other Christian groups then, er, nobody. Children cannot go to one Jewish school if have a TV in the house.

Some church schools maintain their ethos without a religious slant to their admissions.

The BHA opposes faith based admissions as segregation reinforces divisions. It also gives non-religious people less of a choice and, in some cases, no real choice at all. If you live in a village with just one school and it gives preference to, say, Christians then other people have no local school to go to.

Faith schools are state funded so this inequality is being done in our name as tax payers.

The BHA have produced a map of faith schools that show just how big the problem is.


Only three other countries allow religious selection, these are Ireland, Israel and Estonia. This is not a club that the UK can be proud of belonging to.

Some faith schools vastly skew intake when looking at the demographics of the local area, e.g. FSM or EAL.

Free Schools can only have 50% faith selection and the Government could easily make this apply to all schools. That would not completely solve the problem but would go a long way towards it and would be a relatively minor change of policy, i.e. something that politicians should be argue for easily.

The scene having been set we then had the debate, first in groups around our tables and then, having gathered our thoughts, we shared the main points with the whole room.

After pursuing several avenues, our table kept coming back to one basic principle, state-funded schools should not be allowed to select children on the basis of the alleged faith of their parents.

Other good points were made but we kept coming back to this one and there is a risk that by arguing against lots of little points in the schools' admissions policies that we win some of those but lose sight of the big one.

South West London Humanists Christmas Party

We Humanists are a sociable lot and the SW London Humanist Group has several events each month where like-minded people can meet and talk.

I am new to the group (but not to Humanism) and had only been to a couple of talks prior to the Christmas Party. It seemed like a good opportunity to get to know the group better and, besides, The Old Ship is one of the better pubs in Richmond (they sell Young's) and is easy for me to get to.

It all went rather well.

The ice-breaker was the "who am I game" which I did not win on time but as I was Nelson Mandela I am claiming a moral victory. I felt sorry for the people who were Margaret Thatcher (unpleasant) and Dr Who (confusing). The game worked well and I spoke to several people about more than just the names written on our backs.

The drinks were kept flowing via the small upstairs bar. They did not have Winter Warmer on tap but the Ordinary was good enough, as always. I am fairly certain that our barmaid was Sandra Bullock but other people were less convinced.

The buffet was neatly arranged in three sections, Vegan, Vegetarian and Meat, of equal size which meant plenty of choice for me as a vegetarian. I played fair initially and took just from the vegetarian table as I hate it when, in the more usual buffets, there is a limited vegetarian option and meat-eaters take most of it. I forgot to take a picture of my food but I think I had a leek tart, some breaded mushrooms, an onion ring or two and some bread and cheese.  Later on I went to the vegan table to help myself to some spicy chickpea bites.

We all sat down to eat and that helped the conversations to get deeper. I was a little (but only a little) surprised how left-wing my table was and there was a ringing endorsement for the nationalisation of key public services like energy, railways and the rapidly-privatising NHS.

Somehow it was suddenly 10pm and people started to drift away. I did so too but rather slowly speaking to more people on the way out.

With the South West London Humanists Group I have found another friendly tribe of interesting people and I look forward to spending more time with them.

Humanist Debate: Irrationality in Healthcare

I joined the British Humanist Association (BHA) recently, too add my voice to those opposed to the inappropriate imposition of religion into many aspects of our lives, and have started to get involved a little by attending lectures and debates.

The BHA has a regional organisation and I am in the South West London Humanists Group which runs its own events, including a monthly discussion in the conveniently located Old Ship pub in Richmond.

The discussion in November was led by Dr. Ed Presswood from The Secular Medical Forum and was on Irrationality in Healthcare.

He described a range of non-scientific practices used by the NHS, from not having A&E beds numbered 13 through to performing circumcisions on babies.

Along the way we learnt that a hangman's noose has 13 knots, some Irish do not like to be discharged on a Saturday as "a Saturday flit is a short sit" and religion still interferes with health by, for example, blocking right to die campaigns.

We were then asked to consider where the NHS should draw the line on irrational behaviour and we did this in small groups before coming back together for a summary at the end.

What follows are some scraps of notes taken during the discussion embellished by some further thought.

Science and Religion have their own views of what is right and it is impossible for one to persuade the other of their version of the truth. Therefore we often have to work in the middle and accept that we are not going to agree. If you are worried about number 13, or any other superstition, then I need to respect that. I might want to convince you of your folly but, in a health situation, this is secondary to your wellbeing.

If we are to be intolerant of the number 13 then perhaps we should stop lying to children about the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas.

I am very much on the side of science but we have to accept that our science changes and what was right, say, ten years ago is not always right now. Thalidomide was right once.

Patients are allowed to refuse a good treatment but cannot demand a bad one. If the good treatment is refused this could be traced back to bad education in which case we have to consider whether the patient is truly making an informed choice. Does an informed choice ever exist in this context?

If scientific logic is important to the NHS then we should beyond the simple medical. For example why do they serve meat when this is a grossly inefficient use of the planet's resources and is unnecessary for wellbeing.

I was somewhat surprised at how often money was suggested in the discussion as a means of moderating behaviour, e.g. getting people to pay for things that the NHS would rather not do. This approach always means that the rich can (continue to) do what they like and only the poor have their behaviour moderated.

I guess that just because we were all Humanists that does not mean that we agree on everything else too.

I enjoyed the conversations but I think that the question we were asked to consider was a little to side for us to get anywhere near any meaningful conclusions. Not that that mattered, I was there for the ride not the destination.

I'll be back there for another ride on another topic when my diary allows me to do so.

"Written in the Stars" with Prof Jim Al-Khalili

This was another those confluences of good things in one place which meant that I had to be there.

I think that Jim Al-Khalili is the best science broadcaster currently (TV and radio) because of the amount of hard science that he includes. He gave this talk in his role as President of the British Humanist Association, which I belong to. And the talk mixed very hard science with a touch of philosophy.

The question Jim tried to answer was that of free will and he addressed it from a scientific angle, i.e. if the future predetermined and predictable then we have no free will whatever philosophers may think.

He started with four hypotheses drawn from a simple 2x2 matrix, which is exactly how you should approach problems like this.

One on axis there were the choice of the universe is predetermined or random and on the other that we have free will or we do not.

Newton thought that the future was predictable in a mechanical sort of way and Einstein said it was already there, i.e. other times exist in the same way that other places do.

The scientific consensus seemed to be that the universe was both deterministic and predictable, then Quantum Mechanics came along and through some crazy random stuff in to the mix.

Jim spent most of his time showing us just how weird QM is, which was understandable given that is what he does. He talked us through the slit experiment that shows particles behaving as waves except when we watch them. I had seen this done many times before but this was the clearest explanation of the lot.

As a mathematician (well, I do have a degree in mathematics even if it is rather old now) I love the fact that mathematics explains QM perfectly (e.g. the probability model for where a particle is) but physicians do not know what is actually happening in the real world, e.g. what the particle is doing to behave like a wave.

Having spent a long time taking us through QM weirdness, Jim then said that this weirdness disappears as we scale up and disappeared well before we get to human scale and so can be discounted from the deterministic argument, e.g. it does not matter how an individual electron behaves at a point in time as it has now discernible effect even at the molecular level.

So the universe could be deterministic (i.e. it has to behave the way that it does) but that is not the same as saying that it is predictable (i.e. we can tell what it is going to do).

The main argument here came from an extrapolation of Poincare's three bodies proof which showed that even very small differences in the starting conditions can lead to very different outcomes. This has been popularised as the Butterfly Effect. The point of this is that we can never know enough about the starting conditions to predict how things are going to behave.

The summary of all this is that Jim claimed that the world is deterministic but we can never know enough to predict it, so it is undetermined to us and, for all practicable purpose, we have free will.

The QandA session that followed showed how little most people know about QM and a lot of time was spent revisiting some of the arguments.

It struck me then that we, the human race, have a cognitive issue here (Martin Rees has said much the same) in that our thinking is conditioned by and limited by our brains which have evolved to solve one set of problems. That is why we cannot comprehend the scale of the universe or the behaviour of very small things. For example, in our human-scale world we are used to an object being in one place at two times but we cannot make sense of an object being in one time at two places.

There is also the very real possibility that our brains are incapable of understanding everything about the way that the universe works, much as a dog is incapable of learning French. That we may never know how QM works is a sobering thought.

During the QandA Jim opened a potential gap in his argument from his current work in the new field of Quantum Biology where a quantum change in a single molecule of DNA could lead to a significant change to the observable world.

I think there is a more obvious flaw. It is easy to devise a mechanism that scales the random quantum world up to the observable world and thus stops it from being deterministic - and you only have to devise the mechanism to make the world non deterministic, you do not actually have to build it. One such a machine would be to select a single Uranium atom and take one significant action if it decays in less than the half-life and another if it does not.

Sadly we ran out of time for me to put this him but I was able to grab a very quick word with Jim on his way out. Obviously that quick word was about Leeds United, the team we both support.

I might dispute his conclusion but Jim is a good presenter and he put the question and some of the implications very well, and dealt with the questions likewise, which made it a stimulating and though-provoking evening.