Vote for the dirty little compromise

On May 5, people in the UK who are allowed to vote are going to be deciding whether or not to introduce AV, which is a voting system. It’s not as radical a change as this would be, but I’d prefer it to the system we have at the moment. I might argue for it nearer the time, but in this post I want to talk about something else.

A week or so ago I watched David Cameron’s speech arguing that we should vote against the change. I'm a sensitive guy, and watching it gave me the creeps in a way not many things have before. The other occasion it happened that sticks in my mind the most was when I saw Norman Tebbit doing a speech in Oxford. I didn’t like David Cameron before, but now I’ve got a kind of visceral revulsion of him that it’d be hard to get over even if he started doing things I agree with. But that’s just a feeling, and it doesn’t bear on the relative merits of AV and the current system.

I think the nastiest aspect of the debate is that the conservatives wouldn’t allow a referendum on changing to a system of the Lib Dems’ choice. We're not choosing between the system the No campaign wants and the one the Yes campaign wants; we're choosing between the system the conservatives want and a system the they think they can beat and wouldn't mind all that much if they didn't. The Lib Dems would like a more radical change to something like proportional representation, but the conservatives wouldn’t allow that because it’s so far from being in their party political interests. Since when the coalition was being formed the conservatives were holding most of the cards, the Lib Dems compromised and decided a referendum on AV was better than nothing. So now the conservatives are campaigning against the change on the grounds that AV has various shortcomings, but the fact we’re not allowed to vote for a system which doesn’t have these shortcomings is entirely the conservatives’ fault. Nick Clegg is getting quoted as calling AV a ‘dirty little compromise’, but this shouldn’t be held against him. It is a dirty little compromise, but it’s the best Cameron’s lot would let him have. If AV isn’t the best alternative to the current system, then why didn’t they let us vote for the best alternative? Because the conservatives made the decision and it wasn’t in their interests, of course. The No campaign should be pointing this out. I don’t know if they have been. Clegg certainly didn’t when he kicked the campaign off. Maybe he hasn’t given the matter much thought. But whether Clegg realises it or not, Cameron’s trying to bamboozle us, and we mustn’t let him get away with it.

Correction (19/6/13): In the fifth sentence from the end, it should of course say 'The Yes campaign should be pointing this out'.

Moral victories

Sometimes people don’t win but claim a moral victory. The grounds for such claims fall into at least three categories. One is where the result would have been different if the luck had been more evenly distributed. The idea there is that you played better than your opponent but they still won because you picked up nothing but Is and Us while they were laying down ‘jaguars’ and picking up ‘oxidize’. The second kind of moral victory is when the result was affected by bad officiating. If the winning goal was a penalty which shouldn’t have been awarded then it is commonplace for the losing side to claim a moral draw. The third kind of claim is when the opponents cheated. It’s hard to say where to draw the boundaries between cheating, gamesmanship and using one’s nous, but it’s uncontroversial that some kinds of cheating can take the morality out of a victory.

Football managers interviewed after a bad result often make excuses which seem tantamount to claiming a moral victory, and while there’s a degree of reasonableness to at least some of these claims, they do it far too often for my taste and presumably also too often for most people’s. There’s a particular type of claim managers make which really bugs me though, and thinking about it reveals two distinct ways of keeping the moral scorecard. This is when a team loses say 4-1, and the other team scored a wrongly awarded penalty when the score was 1-1. The losing manager will say that they were really in it until the penalty was awarded, and after that the game was as good as over and things just unravelled.

There are two ways of looking at this. One way to keep the moral scorecard is to keep the regular scorecard, crossing off tainted goals and adding goals where penalties should have been awarded. The other is to calculate what the score would have been if nothing dubious had happened. On the first measure the moral score was 3-1, so the team which should have won did win. The plaintiff here must be invoking the second moral scorecard, saying that the game changed after the penalty, presumably because they had to play more aggressively and kept getting caught on the break. I’m not denying that a case can be made here that if the penalty hadn’t been awarded the game would have been a draw. The reason I think this sort of moral scorekeeping should be resisted is that it gives no credit for how the teams played after the dubious incident. It can act as evidence for how they would have played, but lots of things can act as evidence. Actual play should have a distinctive role which on this kind of moral scorekeeping it doesn’t have.

This sort of thing leads to crazy results. It doesn’t just mean that it doesn’t morally matter how you play after you change your tactics in response to a bad decision; it also means that morally nobody needs to defend against a corner or free kick which was incorrectly awarded. You do hear this though: sometimes people will claim that a goal doesn’t morally count because there was an incorrectly awarded throw-in during the buildup. Enough. Defending is just as important whether the other team should have possession or not.

One thing we could do in response to this is calculate the moral scorecard in the first way. I don’t think that’s a good idea, because the second way is plainly more accurate. A goal can change the whole complexion of a game, and a wrongly awarded penalty can sometimes change the result by more than one goal. I think the only thing for it is to forget about the moral scorecard altogether and only pay attention to what the score actually is. This isn’t the same as saying that the real score is the moral score; it’s to say that the moral score is unknowable even if it’s coherent, so we should just ignore it. It’s not easy to view bad officiating the same way you view the weather, but that’s the mature thing to do. You can campaign for better referees, but you can install undersoil heating or put a roof on your stadium. I don’t know how normal people feel about this, but Strawson said the difference was resentment. You might not like the weather, but you don’t resent it. I find it can be quite liberating to stop resenting your incompetent referees and cheating opponents as well.

Online Scrabble

One of the things I do in my spare time is play Scrabble with strangers on the internet. I use a Facebook app for it, which isn’t the best program in the world but it does the job and you can have a good game. One unfortunate feature of this setup is that the internet abounds with anagram generators which tempt the players to cheat. Sometimes you wonder whether people are succumbing to this temptation. There are some very good Scrabble players out there and when you’re playing one of them over the board it can feel like they must have an iPad under the table with an anagramming app on it. They don’t, of course. I’m reminded of the brouhaha that erupted when Veselin Topalov was playing Vladimir Kramnik for the world chess championship and Kramnik kept going to the toilet so Topalov accused him of having a chess computer in there. Grandmasters everywhere were defending Kramnik by saying how a tight endgame can play havoc with your bladder. Kramnik won, and almost certainly wasn’t using a computer.

Anyway, Facebook Scrabble has a chatbox in the corner, as these things usually do, so you can talk to your opponent. Normally it’s used for saying ‘hi, gl’, ‘nice 1’, ‘gg’, ‘my letterz are no gud’ and so on, but occasionally people use it to accuse their opponent of cheating. I’ve been accused three times, and I never know how to react. You don’t want to stop playing because then they’ll think they were right, and you don’t want to keep playing with someone who thinks you’re cheating. Fortunately they usually make the accusation towards the end of the game, or make it, wait for your reaction, say they don’t play with cheats and then resign. It’s unpleasant.

What I find most peculiar is that people do it at all. It’d be a strange person indeed who got any satisfaction out of watching strangers play Scrabble against an anagramming program they didn’t design. Perhaps people occasionally cheat for a move or two when they’re losing just to even up the scores, but that’d be hard to detect and wouldn’t completely ruin the game. I expect the vast majority of accusations are from people who aren’t very good and aren’t bright enough to realise some people are much better than they are, and all it does is spoil the game and upset their opponent. Sometimes I suspect my opponent is cheating a bit but I never make any accusations because there’s no point. It’ll probably be unfounded, if it’s not it still won’t achieve anything and either way it’ll ruin the game. I guess the lesson to be learnt is this: Veselin Topalov shouldn't play online Scrabble.

How many people is David Mitchell?

I like David Mitchell. I’m impressed by his output. Acting, writing opinion pieces for the Observer, doing staged rants on TV panel shows and even more staged rants on his Soapbox (and one or two in Peep Show as well!): he seems to have it all. But he’s not quite got it all, because contrary to what I assume to be a common confusion, he isn’t the author of Cloud Atlas and those other books whose names nobody like me remembers. That’s a different person with the same name. I’d be surprised if the actor doesn’t have publishers queueing around the block to give him book deals, but he hasn’t published any novels to my knowledge, and if he has they’re not as praised as Cloud Atlas and those others. And if he had and they were, that’d be impressive. I’m told they’re pretty good. If that’s all it’d take to catapult him into the Stephen Fryosphere of national admiration then he should definitely give it a go. Though he wouldn’t want to risk turning into Will Self.

Now the French seem to think that even though they haven’t produced a playwright as good as Shakespeare that’s fine because they have Racine for the tragedies and Moliere for the comedies, and if that’s not enough for you they’ve got Corneille too. But isn’t that cheating? Part of what’s so impressive about Shakespeare is that he did it all by himself. When we find out he occasionally called in Marlowe or Middleton when a deadline loomed, it’s less impressive. It doesn’t make the plays less enjoyable, and indeed I was actually pleased to be told that the silly first scene of Macbeth wasn’t from the pen of our greatest writer. But it does (in other cases) make it slightly less impressive. I suppose what we’re looking for is heroes, and we want our heroes to work alone. When you find out Hercules did one labour with the help of a couple of rivers (which were presumably gods in disguise) and one with the help of Iolaus (blatant cheating) you send him off to do another two to make up. So while the French dramatic canon may be as good as ours, when it comes to literary heroes you can’t cobble together a Shakespeare out of a Moliere here and a Corneille there. All of this is rather a shame for me. One of my favourite heroes is Jason and that’s because he really knew how to put a team together in a way that makes Danny Ocean look like Rafa Benitez. Perhaps I should stop rewatching Peep Show and read Cloud Atlas.