On our post-COVID-19 future, India’s regional cultural divide, the Cambridge Analytica investigation, on India’s startup mess through the eyes of edtech, and quantum jumps

Interesting Links: October 11, 2020

1. I quite liked this post by Bruce Schneier on COVID-19 and Acedia. Not at all what he normally ever writes about! But something that reflects what I think most of us are feeling.

   COVID-19 has erased many of the spatial and temporal horizons we rely on, even if we don’t notice them very often. We don’t know how the economy will look, how social life will go on, how our home routines will be changed, how work will be organized, how universities or the arts or local commerce will survive.

   What unsettles us is not only fear of change. It’s that, if we can no longer trust in the future, many things become irrelevant, retrospectively pointless. And by that we mean from the perspective of a future whose basic shape we can no longer take for granted. This fundamentally disrupts how we weigh the value of what we are doing right now. It becomes especially hard under these conditions to hold on to the value in activities that, by their very nature, are future-directed, such as education or institution-building.

2. Alice Evans on why are North and South India so different on gender? Great post. A few interesting data points:

   In many desirable cultural norms, such as gender parity when it comes to things like women getting an education, being able to choose their husbands, to own more assets, and to work alongside men, there is a pretty strict divide where the conditions are relatively more favourable for women (though not ideal) in southern and north-eastern regions of India while the conditions are quite poor for women in most of central and northern India (excluding the northeast). No one who knows India will be surprised by these findings directionally, but it is still quite something to see this laid out so starkly. And it is clearly not a divide based on income levels.

3. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office published its findings from their Cambridge Analytica investigation (pdf).

   Here’s a decent twitter thread about it, and this article in the Spectator is also worth a read.

   Cambridge Analytica (CA) were purchasing significant volumes of commercially available personal data - at one estimate, over 130 billion data points(!!) about millions of US voters. The reports notes the poor data practices at the company (yep, shocking, I know). However, the report notes that the office found “no significant breaches of the privacy and electronic marketing regulations and data protection legislation that met the threshold for formal regulatory action” in the UK.

   The unsurprising, but troubling, finding: Facebook (and Facebook-derived) data was found in a variety of locations with little thought for effective security measures. One would have to assume this is the case across practically every entity that gets access to and uses such data.

   And another unsurprising but similarly troubling finding: there is evidence that in its latter stages CA was drawing up plans to relocate its data offshore to avoid regulatory scrutiny by the British regulators. Again, this is something we’ll only keep seeing more and more with all such companies that buy and share such data (and there are an ungodly number of such companies).

   Also, “we recovered data which included Voter files (the US version of the Electoral Register), Consumer Data Sets, Social Media and Intelligence Data Sets that appeared to come from the following companies: Labels & Lists, InfoGroup, Aristotle, Magellan, Acxiom and Experian. Some data has the appearance of similar US voter data that has been subject to known cyber breaches and has been available on-line.”

   And “what is clear is that the use of digital campaign techniques are a permanent fixture of our elections and the wider democratic process and will only continue to grow in the future. The COVID-19 pandemic is only likely to accelerate this process as political parties and campaigns seek to engage with voters in a safe and socially distanced way.”

4. The Ken writes an interesting story about Byju’s and WhiteHat Jr.’s apparent usage of social media to drive its narrative and minimize critical voices. In some ways, this is not unlike reports of similar things at Lambda School in the US. It is also why, when it comes to any product or service these days, I’ve returned to the 1990s and don’t consider any reviews on any popular social media platform or tech website.

   Two firms (Aiplex and Technisanct) based out of Bangalore do all-round ‘reputation management’ for Byju. “Make no mistake. This is a new framework of moderation on social media platforms,” says a technology lawyer embedded with a think-tank.

   Aiplex is so prolific with its notices that it has now signed a deal with YouTube. “Earlier we would send them millions of notifications. Now they’ve developed a tool. It gives us a login to their server, and we’re able to directly eradicate at least 50% of the URLs. For the rest, we send DMCA notices to these hosting platforms,” says Kumar.

5. Philip Ball’s article in Quanta last year about quantum jumps not being abrupt is very interesting. He outlines an experiment done at Michel Devoret’s lab at Yale. To put it crudely, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is popularized in textbooks, essentially has this idea of a ‘wave function collapse’ - as soon as you measure a quantum system, the wave function ‘instantaneously’ collapses to a particular result. Now admittedly, I don’t think many quite literally believed this interpretation when I was in college even though the textbooks talk in these terms - the idea is that the equations all work out and you’re able to solve your problems in college and conduct experiments without loss of generality under such an interpretation. However, in this interesting set of experiments, not only were the researchers able to ‘observe’ the quantum jumps (or rather, quantum transitions) which take time, they were also able to essentially tell the particle, on verge of a quantum jump, to reverse course.

   Their results apparently match the predictions by the ‘quantum trajectory’ theory, which is totally new to me. In a separate article a month later, Philip Ball explored quantum trajectory theory. He discusses how the Schrödinger equation essentially being statistical in nature - a probabilistic theory with predictions about ensembles of many particles rather than one with the ability to describe the behavior of individual particles.

   As the article says, “in traditional quantum theory, that path [of possible states a quantum system might have] is described by the wave function of the Schrödinger equation. But crucially, QTT [quantum trajectory theory] can also address how measurements affect that path, which the Schrödinger equation can’t do. In effect, the theory uses careful and complete observations of the way the system has behaved so far to predict what it will do in the future.”

   Peter Woit, separately (and back in 2018), ruminates about some similar issues in his post Is Quantum Mechanics a Probabilistic Theory?. So much interesting stuff in this area that goes beyond just what Sean Carroll often talks about. Check out the comments as well.

   And Physics StackExchange expresses scepticism, to put it mildly. But do check it out, there are some very good, clear explanations here to ensure we don’t misinterpret the articles describing the experiment.

   It describes the ‘dumb Copenhagen’ interpretation - everything evolves nicely per Schrödinger’s equation until you try to measure it and then the state instantly ‘collapses.’ Yes, this experiment contradicts ‘dumb Copenhagen’ but we’ve known this doesn’t work for a long time. We know the process of measurement is intimately tied to decoherence which is continuous. Key quote: “Copenhagen and, say, many worlds just differ on how to treat branches of a superposition that have completely decohered.”

   And lastly, do also check out Ron Garret’s blog post about the same.

   tl;dr: Don’t believe the hype in the popular science articles, but it is a very interesting experiment showing quantum state transition.