miscellaneous factZ – The online home of Rufus Pollock

Today I attended the the Clare Hall Ashby Lecture which was given by Richard Layard on the subject of Happiness and Values.

Notes

Four main explanatory variables for level of happiness:

• Perceived trustworthiness of individuals
• Perceived trustworthiness of governments
• … [one i missed]
• Divorce rate

“Tsunnami of individualism washing across the Atlantic and hitting Britain first.”

Thesis: Individualism is the problem because the statement “You should do the best you can” becomes “You should do better than others” (otherwise you cannot be doing your best). This gives us a zero-sum game. To get to away from a zero sum game want to have increased caring for others (compassion).

Mentions an unnamed famous French Monk who pointed out you need to do a lot of practice to be good at anything — and this applies to being happy too.

Main way we can get this kind of practice is through the school system (”Main institution under social control”).

Seligmann “positive psychology” thinking. 11 studies, one unsuccessful, average reduction in depression of a half, reduction in delinquency by 1/3.

Got to get education onto the same scientific basis as other areas including psychological therary (now have proper double-blind evaluations etc). [ed: a little sceptical here as the data I've seen is still pretty inconclusive].

Silent reflection: “What am I like when I most like myself”. “What makes me happy and what makes other happy”.

4 principles:

1. Moral education in schools. Should be in schools and should not be abstract. Train up emotional reactions more than intellectual evaluation.
2. Should be taught in secondary schools by experts. Need a single dedicated member of staff to deal with this.
3. “Will not succeed unless grounded in scientifically grounded truths. Values education has been thought of as ‘woolly’, even as ‘hot air’.” Science is a powerful instrument for persuading people, especially young people, that this is important.
4. Curriculum. Managing your feelings. Loving and servings others. (Service is not common nowadays but need to reinvent). Work and Money. Sex and Parenting. …

Questions

Various. In response to one Layard mentions recent survey which shows people are less likely to say something if they are given too much change.

My question:

• Most interactions are more anonymous because of increasing social and technological complexity of society.
• We generally trust strangers less than those we know well and have more social and empathetic connection with those in our immediate community than a large multinational.
• But then many of these changes in trust (and happiness) may not be a result of changing values but indirect results of the changing systems of production and exchange.
• That is values are changed by these systems not the other way round.
• Won’t these changes involve some fairly radical reorientation of the economics and social systems of the modern world — more localized production and interaction.

This is Skidelsky’s first volume (1983) in his monumental trilogy charting the life and times of the economist-statesman John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). It is an excellent work, not overlong, willing to state judgements but always judicious in doing so, full of surrounding detail but never wandering far from its central theme and, perhaps most importantly, with a fine suppleness of prose that becomes, on occasion, almost aphoristic. While I, personally, would have liked greater detail on, and discussion of, the economics this is, after all, a biography for the general reader so this can hardly be a criticism.

Moore’s Principia Ethica

Skidelsky summarizes:

As we have seen the Apostles were looking for an ethic which could direct attention to ends other than the duties set before the Victorian gentleman. This Moore provided for them. He unshackled contemporary ethics from its connection with social utility and conventional morality by locating its ultimate ends in goods which stood apart from the Victorian scheme of life, and by making ‘ought’ correlative with these goods. By dropping Hedonism and by proclaiming as intrinsically valuable dispositions and states of mind which Mill and Sidgwick had been forced to treat instrumentally he had evaded the problems which wrecked their attempt at coherence. No one serious about achieving Moore’s goods could take Victorian morality entirely seriously again. What Moore had not solved was the problem of how to relate his goods to the practical business of life, most of which had no connection with them. It turned out that Sidgwick’s difficulty of effecting a harmony between the private and public sphere, between the good life and the useful life, had not been overcome by Moore: it had merely been restated in a new way. [pp. 140-141. Emphasis added]

And then returns to the theme:

Leavis’s remarks draw attention to a point already made — that Moore’s philosophy was very much a product of time and place. Two things helped to produce it. The first was the change in circumstances. By the 1890s the Victorian reform movement had run out of steam without making political reaction any more reputable. At the same time recovery from the economic depression of the 1880s and early 1890s had taken the edge of social stress without relieving the emotional stress of Victorian life. The times, as Harrod observed, seemed ripe for new experiments in living rather than new experiments in social order. The second impulse arose out of the dilemmas of moral philosophy itself; specifically from Sidgwick’s failure to reconcile public and private ends, my own good with the world’s. Moore abolished the problem by abolishing the set of ethical goods connected with public life. But anyone whose temperament and upbring was such as to make him take both Moore’s ends (good states of mind) and Sidgwick’s end (general happiness) seriously was bound, sooner or later, to discover that Mooore had not solved Sidgwick’s problem; that the problem of bring them into a logical relation was, in fact, insoluble with the intellectual tools available. Moore’s philosophy was imply a temporary halting-post on the road to the complete disintegration of a unified world view. [Emphasis added]

Keynes’ Early Beliefs

p. 157

He was as timid about his expectations of realising good states of mind on a large scale as he was bold in his expectations about the amount of happiness or utility a government could deliver. In both sides of his moral thinking he gave priority to immediate goals over future ones, reinforced in this by his theory of probability: rational actions were the best possible in the circumstances. The duty of the state was to realise happiness and not ultimate goods, though the latter might follow as an indirect consequence of the former. He was thus both an aesthete and a manager. But he rejected the role of therapist, believing that truth took priority over expediency.

Keynes on Starting Economics

Keynes to Lytton Strachey on 15 November 1905, quoted p. 165:

I find economics increasingly satisfactory, and I think I am rather good at it. I want to manage a railway or organise a Trust or at least swindle the investing public. It is so easy and fascinating to master the principle of these things.

One imagines this still provides a fairly accurate summary of the reasons for studying economics — at least for the majority of students. This quote also provides a fine example of Harrod’s bowdlerisation as, according to Skidelsky, he cut out the statement on ’swindling the investing public’.

Marshall on mathematics

From a letter to statistician A. L. Bowley (27 Nov 1906) quoted in a fn p. 223 with source A. C. Pigou (ed.), Memorials of Alfred Marshall (1925), p.427.

I had a growing feeling in the later years of my work at the subject that a good mathematical theorem dealing with economic hypotheses was very unlikely to be good economics; and I went more and more on the rules — (1) Use mathematics to be a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of enquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can’t succeed in 4, burn 3. This last I often did.

Bloomsbury

Bloomsbury was particular expression of, and gave direction to, the ‘revolt against the Victorians’. The rejection of conventional sexual morality was one facet, but only one, of the revolt against ‘false values’ in the name of which Victorians had sacrificed the possibility of leading a good life. … They [the members of the Bloomsbury group] were not sexual anarchists but rather creators of anew kind of sexual order inherent in a proper concept of the good life. That is why Bloomsbury was able to undertake the frequent rearrangement of its emotional affairs while remaining so (comparatively) free from sexual jealously.

In these ways, Bloomsberries were cultural and sexual revolutionaries. In other ways they remained rooted in the assumptions of their times. Indeed, the particular form of their ‘revolt against the Victorians’ depended on other aspects of Victorian life remaining in place. Culture was not regarded as a force to reshape social relations, but to reorient the elite to ‘what is good’. … Bloomsbury’s cultural artefacts were highbrow; its propaganda aimed entirely at the (highly) educated middle classes. There was a clearly tension between its cultural ideals and democratic sentiment: civilisation, as Clive Bell put it, always rested on having someone to do the dirty work. Maynard Keynes, as we shall see, attempted to go beyond this contradiction; but it cannot be claimed he got very far. And he, like the rest of the Bloomsberries, depended completely on domestic servants to sustain their own lives [cf. Peter Clarke's comments in Liberals and Social Democrats]. Bloomsbury was rooted in the class assumptions of the Victorians. Their revision of the Victorian scheme of life tended to take them back to the eighteenth century idea of a cultured aristocracy [1] rather than towards the ideal of a civilized democracy; … [pp. 248-250]

[1] This suggests an interesting parallel with Tietjens inclinations towards a similar vision of the Eighteenth century in Ford Maddox’s Ford Parade’s End.

Reasons for the influence of Bloomsbury and Keynes’ role:

The cultural influence which Bloomsbury eventually acquired was based on the clarity of its vision of its publicists and the mutually supporting achievements of its members. But two further ingredients must be added: its relative financial independence and its power of patronage. Bloomsberries were not rich. But they were never forced into dependence on institutions alien to their spirit. There was just enough inherited wealth to go round to enable them to lead their preferred lives until their own talents could give them an earned independence. … But it [these various factors some of which I have omitted] were not enough [to make Bloomsbury have the influence it did]. Financial backing was needed. Here the role of Maynard Keynes became crucial. He came to give Bloomsbury financial muscle, not just by making money a great deal of money himself, which he spent lavishly on Bloomsbury causes, but by his ability to organise financial backing for their enterprises. [p. 250]

Keynes and Food Rationing

The proximate cause for this gloomy epistle [JMK to his mother at Christmas 1917] was the government’s announcement of food rationing. Like other less reflective members of the middle classess Keynes tended to equate social order with the continuance of his own customary standard of comfort, and take an exaggerated view of the consequences of any diminution of it. To Florence his Christmas visions suggested communal kitchens and the drying of the supply of domestic servants. Maynard’s incipient bolshevism [a reference to a joke in his letter] stopped well short of food rationing, which filled him with horror. … In fact, [contrary to Keynes prognostications] food rationing worked perfectly well in both world wars, and posed no permanent threat to the social order. [p. 346]

The Long Littleness’ of life

[following a dispute over rooms in 46 Gordon Square between Keynes and Bell] But there was still friction. Maynard had commandeered Clive’s bed, substituting one that felt ‘more like the seat of a third-class railway carriage’. As the war’s end approached, Clive wrote to Maynard, ‘I must have my bed back … Nothing could be more easy for you than to get a new one for yourself.’ [Maynard by this point was on 1000 pounds a year] Since Maynard proved in no hurry to oblige, Clive had his own bed moved upstairs. ‘Dear Maynard,’ he wrote from Garsington, ‘I had no notion of leaving you to sleep on the floor.’ He was sending down his third-class railway carriage. ‘As you appear to fuck less than I do it may serve well enough.’ [Maynard had long been without any kind of permanent lover since his separate from Duncan Grant years earlier]

Skidelsky inserts a fascinating footnote here which reads:

Maynard’s was not the only character to wilt under the strain of war. Clive Bell withheld from his parents the knowledge that he was a conscientious objector, preferring them to believe that he was medically unfit, in order, as he put it to Vanessa, ‘to preserve our lien on the Bell millions.’ Vanessa tried to hush up the fact that the daughter she had in 1919 was by Duncan and not Clive, probably for the same reason. Honesty had its limitations for everyone.

I was struck by this comment of Charles Simic in a review of Pablo Neruda’s poems [NYR Sept 25 2003 p.43]: Rebellion may be one of poetry’s traditions, but so is eulogizing the goodwill and godlike wisdom of some murderer.

The context for this comment was Simic’s discussion of Neruda’s devout Communism which resulted in the penning of lines such as:

In three rooms of the old Kremlin
lives a man named Joseph Stalin
His bedroom light is turned off late.
The world and his country allow him no rest

The gun lobby, oh my peaceful friends, you may hate, but first you had better understand that it is a religion, only secondarily connected to the bill of Rights. The thick-headed, sometimes even close to tearful, gaze you get when chatting with one of its partisans emanates from the view that they’re holding a piece of God. There is no persuading them otherwise, even by a genius, because a life without guns implies the end of the known world to them. Any connection they make to our ‘pioneer’ past is also a fraud, a wistful apology. Folks love a gun for what it can do. A murderer always thinks it was an accident, he says as if a religious episode had passed over him.

Source: Bats out of Hell, Barry Hannah, [Houghton Mifflin, 1993] p.83

Second Life is a massively-multiplayer world developed by Linden Labs. Unlike many other MMGs there is no particular aim, rather the intent is to live in the world and add to it. Thus importantly it is the game’s participants that create and develop the universe they inhabit (its creators explicitly invoke the Metaverse of Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash as a model).

MMG (massively multiplayer games) solve the central problem that current computer technology faces in creating interesting games: namely no decent AI. Without AI all the interesting parts of a ‘world’ have to lovingly crafted by hand. Thus while we can draw some lots of pretty stuff we are a) we are severely limited in the size and variety of the world’s artifacts and geography b) /very/ limited in the other entities that we can interact with.

Standard MMRPGs such as EverQuest address problem (b) in a limited way by using the games participants to populate their world. However one is still restricted by the fact that such participants must remain within the contours of the plot and the surrounding reality as well as by the need to provide backup computer generated entities (be it for the dull occupations in this online world or until the strong law of large numbers kicks in). Moreover this type of games fails to leverage the games own /participants/ to help create/extend the world (much). A game such as Second Life (there are several others that have gone down that route) takes this logical next step and allows both (a) and (b) to be addressed. The final step would be to integrate some kind of incentive mechanism though it should be noted that Second Life appears to demonstrate that is not strictly necessary to get the participants to contribute.

Extracts from The Lessons from Lucasfilm’s Habitat, Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer. A fascinating work which, unusually for computer scientists, is full of lapidary phrases and well-written prose.

The Problems of Central Planning (or, the dangers of being a pointy-headed engineer with his control variables)

There were two sorts of implementation challenges that Habitat posed. The first was the problem of creating a working piece of technology — developing the animation engine, the object-oriented virtual memory, the message-passing pseudo operating system, and squeezing them all into the ludicrous Commodore 64(the backend system also posed interesting technical problems, but its constraints were not as vicious). The second challenge was the creation and management of the Habitat world itself. It is the experiences from the latter exercise that we think will be most relevant to future cyberspace designers.

We were initially our own worst enemies in this undertaking, victims of a way of thinking to which we engineers are dangerously susceptible. This way of thinking is characterized by the conceit that all things may be planned in advance and then directly implemented according to the plan’s detailed specification. For persons schooled in the design and construction of systems based on simple, well-defined and well-understood foundation principles, this is a natural attitude to have. Moreover, it is entirely appropriate when undertaking most engineering projects. It is a frame of mind that is an essential part of a good engineer’s conceptual tool kit. Alas, in keeping with Maslow’s assertion that, “to the person who has only a hammer, all the world looks like a nail”, it is a tool that is easy to carry beyond its range of applicability. This happens when a system exceeds the threshold of complexity above which the human mind loses its ability to maintain a complete and coherent model.

Engineering Rule #1: Don’t trust anyone (because you can’t)

If, however, a computer game involves multiple players, delving into the program’s internals can enable one to truly cheat, in the sense that one gains an unfair advantage over the other players of which they may be unaware.Habitat is such a multi-player game. When we were designing the software, our”prime directive” was, “The backend shall not assume the validity of anything a player computer tells it.” This is because we needed to protect ourselves against the possibility that a clever user had hacked around with his copy of the frontend program to add “custom features”. For example, we could not implement any of the sort of “skill and action” elements found in traditional video games wherein dexterity with the joystick determines the outcome of, say,armed combat, because you couldn’t guard against someone modifying their copy of the program to tell the backend that they had “hit”, whether they actually had or not. Indeed, our partners at QuantumLink warned us of this very eventuality before we even started — they already had users who did this sort of thing with their regular system. Would anyone actually go to the trouble of disassembling and studying 100K or so of incredibly tight and bizarrely threaded 6502 machine code just to tinker? As it turns out, the answer is yes. People have. We were not 100% rigorous in following our own rule. It turned out that there were a few features whose implementation was greatly eased by breaking the rule in situations where, in our judgment, the consequences would not be material if people “cheated” by hacking their own systems. Darned if people didn’t hack their systems to cheat in exactly these ways.

Or they might just exploit your own bugs/features

In order to make this automated economy a little more interesting, each Vendroid had its own prices for the items in it. This was so that we could have local price variation (i.e., a widget would cost a little less if you bought it at Jack’s Place instead of The Emporium). It turned out that in two Vendroids across town from each other were two items for sale whose prices we had inadvertently set lower than what a Pawn Machine would buy them back for: Dolls (for sale at 75T, hock for 100T) and Crystal Balls (for sale at 18,000T, hock at 30,000T!). Naturally, a couple of people discovered this. One night they took all their money, walked to the Doll Vendroid, bought as many Dolls as they could, then took them across town and pawned them. By shuttling back and forth between the Doll Vendroid and the Pawn Shop for hours, they amassed sufficient funds to buy a Crystal Ball , whereupon they continued the process with Crystal Balls and a couple orders of magnitude higher cash flow. The final result was at least three Avatars with hundreds of thousands of Tokens each. We only discovered this the next morning when our daily database status report said that the money supply had quintupled overnight.

“Engineering” Rule #2: Keep Reality Consistent by Working Within the System Wherever Possible

One of the more popular events in Habitat took place late in the test, the brainchild of one of the more active players who had recently become a QuantumLink employee. It was called the “Dungeon of Death”. For weeks, ads appeared in Habitat’s newspaper, The Rant, announcing that that Duo of Dread, DEATH and THE SHADOW, were challenging all comers to enter their lair. Soon, on the outskirts of town, the entrance to a dungeon appeared. Out front was a sign reading, “Danger! Enter at your own risk!” Two system operators were logged in as DEATH and THE SHADOW, armed with specially concocted guns that could kill in one shot, rather than the usual twelve. …

One evening, one of us was given the chance to play the role of DEATH. When we logged in, we found him in one of the dead ends with four other Avatars who were trapped there. We started shooting, as did they. However, the last operator to run DEATH had not bothered to use his special wand to heal any accumulated damage, so the character of DEATH was suddenly and unexpectedly “killed” in the encounter. As we mentioned earlier, when an Avatar is killed, any object in his hands is dropped on the ground. In this case, said object was the special kill-in-one- shot gun, which was immediately picked up by one of the regular players who then made off with it. This gun was not something that regular players were supposed to have. What should we do?

It turned out that this was not the first time this had happened. During the previous night’s mayhem the special gun was similarly absconded with. In this case, the person playing DEATH was one of the regular system operators, who, accustomed to operating the regular Q-Link service, had simply ordered the player to give the gun back. The player considered that he had obtained the weapon as part of the normal course of the game and balked at this, whereupon the operator threatened to cancel the player’s account and kick him off the system if he did not comply. The player gave the gun back, but was quite upset about the whole affair, as were many of his friends and associates on the system. Their world model had been painfully violated.

When it happened to us, we played the whole incident within the role of DEATH. We sent a message to the Avatar who had the gun, threatening to come and kill her if she didn’t give it back. She replied that all she had to do was stay in town and DEATH couldn’t touch her (which was true, if we stayed within the system). OK, we figured, she’s smart. We negotiated a deal whereby DEATH would ransom the gun for 10,000 Tokens. An elaborate arrangement was made to meet in the center of town to make the exchange, with a neutral third Avatar acting as an intermediary to ensure that neither party cheated. …

These two very different responses to an ordinary operational problem illustrate our point. Operating within the participants’ world model produced a very satisfactory result. On the other hand, taking what seemed like the expedient course, which involved violating the world-model, provoked upset and dismay. Working within the system was clearly the preferred course in this case.

Conclusion: Decentralize Control to Allow for Evolution (or: don’t be a pointy-headed engineer who wants to control everything)

In a discussion of cyberspace on Usenet, one worker in the field dismissed ClubCaribe (Habitat’s current incarnation) as uninteresting, with a comment to the effect that most of the activity consisted of inane and trivial conversation.Indeed, the observation was largely correct. However, we hope some of the anecdotes recounted above will give some indication that more is going on than those inane and trivial conversations might indicate. Further, to dismiss the system on this basis is to dismiss the users themselves. They are paying money for this service. They don’t view what they do as inane and trivial, or they wouldn’t do it. To insist this presumes that one knows better than they what they should be doing. Such presumption is another manifestation of the omniscient central planner who dictates all that happens, a role that this entire article is trying to deflect you from seeking. In a real system that is going to be used by real people, it is a mistake to assume that the users will all undertake the sorts of noble and sublime activities which you created the system to enable. Most of them will not. Cyberspace may indeed change humanity, but only if it begins with humanity as it really is.

… a witches’ dance of idiocy and adult hypocrisy. DuPont, for instance, and his wonderful grandfather, and grand old state of Ohio, and the golden state of Iowa, and the flag, red, white, and blue, all its stripes, all its stars, and the flag a thousand times over, and Americanism till your ears ached, and the slaves and the tariff, and Abraham Lincoln, mauled and dragged about and his name taken in vain, and his spirit degraded, prostituted to every insincerity and used as window-dressing for every cheap politican. The incredible sordidness of that convention passes all description. It was a gathering of unsanitary callous men who blasphemed patriotism, made a mockery of Republican government and filled the air with sodden and scheming stupidity.

Walter Lippman on the 1916 Republican Convention

Money Cases

• 1988 First National Bank of Chicago is the victim of $70-million computer heist. [1]
• 1994, summer. Russian crackers siphon $10 million from Citibank and transfer the money to bank accounts around the world. Vladimir Levin, the 30-year-old ringleader, uses his work laptop after hours to transfer the funds to accounts in Finland and Israel. Levin stands trial in the United States and is sentenced to three years in prison. Authorities recover all but $400,000 of the stolen money. [1]

To Investigate

• Kevin Mitnick

Biblio

1. http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Timeline-of-hacker-history
2. Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown (available in a digital edition – just search online)

Here is Lord Macaulay (unsuccessfully) opposing an extension of copyright term from 28 to 60 years in the 1840s:

It is good that authors should be remunerated, and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil: but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good

….

Dr Johnson died 56 years ago. If the law were what my honourable and learned friend wishes to make it, somebody would now have the monopoly of Dr Johnson’s works. Who that somebody would be, it is impossible to say: but we may venture to guess. I guess, then, that it would have been some bookseller, who was the assignee of antoher bookseller, who was the grandson son a third bookseller, who had bought the copyright from Black Frank, the Doctor’s servant and residuary legatee in 1785 and 1786. Now, would the knowledge that this copyright would exist in 1841 have been a source of gratification to Johnson? Would it have stimulated his exertions? Would it have once drawn him out of his bed before noon? Would it have cheered him in a fit of spleen? Would it have induced him to give us one more allegory, one more life of a poet, one more imitation of Juvenal? I firmly believe not.

The tests carried by the English mathematician Dr Soal are often cited as powerful evidence for the existence of ESP phenomena. However there is strong evidence that Soal engaged in fraud in order to obtain his results and thus such claims should be viewed with caution.

Soal originally became interested in psychical research when he conducted a lengthy series of ESP tests, hoping to provide independent corroboration of Rhine’s work. He tested 160 people over a five-year period and analyzed the total of 128 350 guesses against the targets (symbols on the cards) they were attempting to ’see’. He found nothing but chance results and promptly stopped his ESP research, criticizing Rhine for what he considered must be errors in the methods he used to produce positive results.

That might have been the end of the story, had it not been for the influence of yet another English researcher, Whately Carington. In his own ESP tests, using drawings as targets, Carington had discovered strange displacement effect. Sometimes a subject would miss the target he was trying to guess and instead reproduce the previous day’s targets or even the one to be selected at random the next day. Carington urged Soal to re-examine his statistics and look for such a ‘psychic displacement’. The mathematician did this, and sure enough the effect was found in the results produced by two subjects, Basil Shackleton and Gloria Stewart. Both showed positive and negative displacement at times, and Soal continued his ESP work using Shackleton and Steward as his subjects.

The results of experiments conducted with Shackleton between 1941 and 1943 were extremely impressive and were taken up by parapsychologists as evidence of the existence of ESP. But 20 years later Mrs. Gretl Albert, who had been involved in the tests as an am agent, claimed she had several times seen Soal altering the figures. A recent re-examination of the Soal statistics suggests that this is exactly what he did. In order to ensure that the cards used in the experiments were picked at random, Soal used the standard laboratory technique of referring to Chamber’s logarithmic tables and Tippett’s random number tables (although he did not indicate exactly how he used them). What has been discovered is that the random lists Soal used in his experiments do not match the standard ones. A study by Betty Markwick, published in 1978, has revealed that certain long sequences of numbers are repeated many times. This need only mean that Soal was using a small pool of random numbers and would not be necessarily affect the validity of the experiment. However, Miss Markwick has discovered that the long repeated sequences are in fact not identical; they are sometimes interrupted by extra numbers, and that these, where they occur, show a remarkable correspondence with the ESP ‘hits’ recorded by Soal. Remove them and the scores fall to chance levels. Summing up this evidence, Miss Markwick states that ‘all the experimental series in card-guessing carried out by Dr. Soal must, as the evidence stands, be discredited.’

See: Betty Marwick, "The Soal-Goldney Experiments with Basil Shackleton: New Evidence of Manipulation," Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 56, 211.