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I am currently reading From Eternity to Here by Sean Carroll. Excellent stuff; although I'm only a little less than halfway through, I think I can say with confidence that if I were to write a review, it would be a very positive one.
But one small complaint is I'm not sure if he's quite exactly worked out his audience. Early in the book, I was starting to fear it would be a rehash of stuff I already knew. It's not. But there were some elementary rehashes that, frankly, I think if someone went into the book not having that knowledge already, they aren't going to be able to grok the rest. This is not a mathematically demanding book, but it is a conceptually demanding book, and I am not sure if someone who doesn't have some limited grounding in the mathematics side will be able to make it through the conceptual side without missing a lot.
Carroll spends a good chapter or two explaining the rudiments of general relativity. At one point, he expends a few paragraphs for the benefit of people who don't know what a logarithm is. And then on page 176, he tosses this out:
Boltzmann has told us a compelling story about why entropy increases: There are more ways to be high entropy than low entropy, so most microstates in a low-entropy macrostate will evolve toward higher-entropy macrostates. But that argument makes no reference to the direction of time. Following that logic, most microstates within some macrostate will increase in entropy toward the future but will also have evolved from a higher-entropy condition in the past.
Emphasis is mine. Now, Carroll has been hinting at this for dozens of pages, and I've been anticipating it... but it's also been kinda bending my mind. Perhaps I am being a bit elitist, but I don't see someone who does not already have a deep gut feeling for mathematics understanding the profundity of that statement.
Now, I'm not saying I think someone needs to be an expert in general relativity, or a pro at computing logarithms, to understand this book. The treatment Carroll gives them is quite sufficient for his aims. Nevertheless, there is a certain math-y way of thinking which Carroll seems to take for granted, and I am skeptical that there are many people out there who are able to follow along with that assumed paradigm and yet who don't already know (at least conceptually) what a logarithm is.
It's not like the simpler material is entirely unwelcome: For me personally, I can always use a review of the rudiments of general relativity, as it's a concept my educational background unfortunately has given me very little time to explore. I can't exactly call curved spacetime "old hack", y'know? I'm just sorta wondering, does Carroll really think that someone who doesn't already have a firm grounding in basic math and physics is going to follow along with some of his more esoteric philosophical explorations of the nature of entropy? I'm skeptical.
There seems to be little doubt that fracking can be an unmitigated environmental disaster. I know quite a few people, some of whom I respect, who are opposed to fracking in any and all forms. But I have also heard it said -- though now I can't recall where -- that fracking, if properly regulated, can be reasonably environmentally-friendly (as environmentally-friendly as any technique whose sole purpose is to harvest fossil fuels, of course...). And it doesn't help matters that there has been some anti-fracking hysteria which is just clearly bullshit.
Whether fracking is ever a good idea turns out to be a pretty technical topic, and I just don't know where to start on it. I honestly have no idea. I know there are at least some people on the anti-fracking side who are completely full of it, and I know there are at least some people on the pro-fracking side who are perfectly willing to tell egregious and damaging lies to make a buck. In such a situation, facts must be the ultimate arbiter, but I just don't know the facts.
I haven't read barely anything about fracking in the skeptical blogosphere. I know it is distinctly anti-skeptical to want other bloggers to tell me what to think... but, hell, I'll be honest: I just sorta hope somebody else -- hopefully somebody whose work I already trust so I can be reasonably sure they aren't cherry-picking -- does the legwork so that I can bone up on the facts with having to, you know, find them for myself.
Really, given the prominence of the controversy in the media, I'm somewhat surprised I haven't read about it on, e.g. Bad Astronomy or something. Anybody got any links?
Since apparently every blogger at FtB is leaving on the same day -- curiously, none of them announcing it on their own blogs -- that has created a vacuum, which, I am happy to say, will be partially filled by No Jesus, No Peas. There's actually a pretty good synergy going on here, since in addition to the sudden desperate need for more bloggers, it dovetails nicely with the diversity efforts that FtB has been engaged in. Finally, heterosexual college-educated white males in their mid-thirties will be given a prominent voice within the skepticism community. It's a historic day!
There's been something I've wanted to say in the wake of Elevatorgate and all of the reverberations it continues to send through the skeptic blogosphere. I haven't said it for two reasons: One is because I'm not sure exactly how to get the idea across without making it sound like I am defending people whom I really don't wish to defend; and the other reason is because I'm not so sure the point I want to make matters all that much in practice (even though I think it is true and accurate). What people like Watson et al are asking for -- a little bit of thought about how our words and actions can make women feel welcome or unwelcome in the skeptic community, and just a tiny bit of effort trying to skew it towards the "welcoming" side -- is a bona fide good thing and I don't want to hinder that.
I've wanted to say something about the mindset of at least some of the people who are resisting this obviously good change, and why I think, even though their actions have obvious misogynistic consequences, they can be trying their best to be good people and still find it difficult to see this. And thanks to a recent SMBC comic, I think I just figured out how to say it.
This is exactly how a lot of lonely guys feel a lot of the time. (Take it from me; I was one for a loooong time) Unfortunately for everyone involved, young men are even more likely to feel this way if they find themselves in communities where women are significantly underrepresented, since this means they statistically will have fewer opportunities for successes that might help them overcome this crippling fear of Rejection Bacteria -- and of course these are exactly the same communities in which women are already going to tend to feel unwelcome due to being in a distinct minority.
What does all this have to do with Elevatorgate? Here's the thing: When that creepy guy asked you out, he very possibly overcame a crippling fear of Rejection Bacteria in order to do it. He seriously thought a flesh-eating microbe was going to eat his limbs right off his writhing body, but he faced down that fear and approached you anyway. In comparison to Rejection Bacteria, your passing discomfort or brief fear of being raped in an elevator seems incredibly trivial. "How dare you complain about being made to feel unwelcome when I just faced the risk of certain death to ask you on a date?"
Of course, sexual harassment and assault are real, while Rejection Bacteria are not. And so this is not a defense of Elevator Guy or anybody else who is being creepy.
But when you wonder why some of these guys, particularly the single ones, are just Not Getting It, this is at least part of your answer. I don't know if this has any value; perhaps the best way of winning this fight is to just keep speaking out against the behavior we don't want and eventually it will become socially unacceptable and/or people will start to "get it". Sometimes I wonder if it would be better to acknowledge that it can feel very difficult to be a lonely guy in a male-dominated community, to reassure people like this that we understand their challenges -- but that, whatever they might imagine, it's worse to be a woman in a male-dominated community.
I don't know, I don't know if that's helpful or not. The SMBC comic just struck me because, yeah, that's pretty much dead on what it feels like. For whatever that's worth...
Whether it's deserved or not, the general consensus on NASA's revelation of arsenic-based life seems to be largely negative, i.e. that the research was poor or tentative at best, and did not warrant the kind of hoopla the organization made over it; and Felisa Wolfe-Simon has taken a rather remarkable drubbing -- to the point where I've even seen some who condemn the research question whether her treatment has really been fair.
The NASA team didn't always respond in the best possible way, e.g. their rather odd comment that all dialogue had to be conducted via peer-reviewed journals, coming immediately on the heals of a rather splashy press conference they had just held. But one thing they never did was try to sue their critics.
You often hear it argued that the families of victims will not "find peace" until the murderer/rapist/etc. is executed. Certainly, victims' families feel an intense burning desire for retribution. I would too, I am sure! But does it actually make them feel better? As one who does not really believe in the idea of "closure", I am skeptical... But it just occurred to me while reading the recent Hitchens piece on the topic that we ought to be able to measure this.
One problem might be getting a large enough sample size, since there are only so many people executed per year, and you need to get the families to agree to do a series of questionnaires. And you need to have the first questionnaire administered before anybody's been executed, and you don't know for sure whether the execution will be granted, etc.
Anyway, I figure you want to have three cohorts (and two of them are indistinguishable before the end of the study, so it's tricky). One is families of murder victims where the perpetrator will certainly not be executed because the state does not have the death penalty. Another is families of murder victims where the death penalty was sought and granted, and the third is families of murder victims where the death penalty was sought but ultimately denied. You take various measurements of their psychological state at the outset of the study, then at various intervals later (e.g. 1 year later, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, or something), and also immediately after the execution for families in the relevant cohort.
In this fashion, we could see whether seeking and getting the death penalty actually does make victims' families feel better. My hypothesis would be that we'd expect to see a short-term bump immediately after the execution, but no long term differences -- and I would not be surprised if families in the cohort where execution was sought but denied might do worse even in the long term. I would love to see it measured...
A lot of people who want to believe the faster-than-light neutrino result (and count me as one who would love it to be true!) are displaying a tendency to get quite pissy at those of us who remain skeptical, e.g. see this comment over at Bad Astronomy, which is actually one of the more mild ones. There are accusations of dogmatism, that a "true" skeptic should just follow the results.
That is true as far as it goes, but in my never-humble opinion, if you want to "follow the results" properly, you must be a Bayesian.
The prior probability, based on everything we know about physics, that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, is vanishingly small. The results of countless past experiments would have to be either dismissed, or given a completely different explanation. Anything is possible, of course, but as somebody else said (can't remember where, sorry, no credit), this is "possible" on the order of saying, "Oops, turns out gravity doesn't attract, it repels!"
And Bayes tells us then, that even what would be very solid experimental support for this result in another context is totally unconvincing in this context. Bayes Theorem doesn't quite work this way, but to just simplify it: Let's say last week I gave you trillion-to-one odds that neutrinos could travel faster than light. Then we come up with an explanation for how this result could be an error, but unfortunately it requires a series of coincidences that are a billion-to-one against. I'd still believe it was the billion-to-one error before I'll believe FTL neutrinos were a real thing.
It's probably something much more mundane, of course. Or perhaps it will turn out to reveal some weird new physics where the neutrinos can appear to some observers to exceeding light speed, but in a way that doesn't screw up causality and relativity; that would be neat. But if you're a Bayesian (and you should be), then you can be virtually certain that it's not really FTL. Sorry, sci-fi fans. No galactic empires for you.
This morning as I was getting out of the shower, my wife reported that our two-year-old had said something rather, uh, disturbing: "Grandpa fell down! Grandpa fell down! Now he's sleeping..." Given that my parents are both over 70, Grandpa one day suddenly "falling down" and "sleeping" is unfortunately a fear that seems all too real. I said, "Lucky thing we're skeptics, otherwise that could be pretty scary!"
Later, my wife figured it out: The other day she had sung the "old man is snoring" song, but replaced "old man" with "grandpa". In other words...
It's raining, it's pouring, grandpa is snoring
Bumped his head on the bed, now he can't get up in the morning
Okay, now it's not so mysterious as to how our toddler got an image of grandpa falling down and sleeping, is it?
But here's why skepticism is a win-win: Since meaning is something humans invent, I can take whatever personal meaning from this I want to. My folks haven't gotten to see the boys in a few weeks, and I really ought to set up a time for us to get together. I managed to avoid the ominous fear that a more credulous person might have felt, but I also get a useful reminder to keep in touch with family. Huzzah!
A thought occurred to me while commenting over at Jerry Coyne's blog, and I just want to give a more concise version here.
The equations underlying the theory of relativity are quite elegant and beautiful. A friend of mine tells me of a modern physics class he was taking where the students burst into applause when the professor finished the derivation of E=mc2. So much complexity is summed up so simply and in such a cohesive theory.
This suggests that it might be true, but it's not evidence. One of the first solid pieces of evidence in favor of relativity was that it accurately predicted the precession of Mercury. And of course many more observations came later which confirmed the value of Einstein's theory over Newton's. One by one, the skeptics were forced to take Einstein's work seriously.
But let's imagine an alternate reality where relativity hadn't made this prediction, and in fact it's prediction for the orbits of all the other planets was somewhat less accurate than traditional Newtonian dynamics. Would a contemporary skeptic still have to take Einstein seriously? Would Einstein have been justified in saying, "You simply don't understand the math behind it. Look how elegant this equation is! Look how it unifies space and time in such a concise way! If you aren't convinced, I think you really need to read my book..."?
No he would not. And in a world where, it seems to me, the evidence against theism is overwhelming, we are under no compulsion to explore logical arguments for God. Arguments based on pure reason are often useful, but they ultimately carry very little to no evidential weight. I don't need to understand Aquinas' Five Ways in detail, or be able to point out the flaws in them, because I can just look around say, "Welp, no gods here. Must be some flaw in his reasoning or a concealed false assumption or something." Pure reason is valuable, but it has no power to convert the skeptic, nor should it. And that goes whether you are talking about science or theology.
The BBC reports that researchers at the Tevatron particle accelerator in Illinois are claiming the possible discovery of a new high-energy particle not predicted by current formulations of the Standard Model. It's not nearly high enough energy to be the Higgs-Boson, so they are thinking it's something completely unanticipated.
Now I am not a particle physicist, but this smelled fishy to me right off the bat, even before I remembered the whole story with Tevatron. Extraordinary claims, and all that. There are surely many refinements to be made in our understanding of particle physics, and the precise energy of the expected Higgs-Boson particle is of course highly uncertain. But a completely unanticipated particle, that would be... well, highly unanticipated. These things happen, of course, but it would take a lot of convincing, and even the researchers themselves agree they have not met the required uncertainty threshold yet.
But there's more. The BBC was extremely remiss in failing to point out in the article that Tevatron is scheduled to cease operations this September, unless they somehow miraculously secure an extension of their federal funding. The reason given is that it has been "made obsolete" by the Large Hadron Collider. Oh, and lookie, the scientist they quote casting a skeptical eye on this discovery works on the LHC. Hmmmmm, are you thinking what I'm thinking?
Again, I am not a particle physicist, but it seems obvious to me that this is what's going on:
The Tevatron folks are desperate. They feel they can still do useful work (and for what it's worth I agree; see below) and yet the whole project is going to be shut down in less than six months.
Now, the folks at these particle accelerators comb through a lot of data. As a recent XKCD graphically illustrates, the more data you are going through, the higher your chances of false positives. The standard of certainty for these guys isn't p < 0.05, it's p < 0.00001 (I think I counted the right number of zeroes... 5-sigma certainty). Tony Weidberg, the guy from the LHC project, is quoted as saying, "every few years we get these three-sigma [p < 0.001] effects..." (That is the certainty level being claimed by the Tevatron researchers at present.)
So a shade over five months from Doomsday, the Tevatron data fortuitously happens to show one of these three-sigma blips. In a desperate gambit to garner public exposure for the (still very useful!) work they do, they decide to go public with it right away, with breathless claims of a possible new particle. If their plan works, there is an initial spike of popular support for the Tevatron effort, which barely diminishes when (as not reported prominently in the mainstream media) the blip turns out to be nothing. Hell, maybe they can even leverage some of the populist jingoism we are so afflicted with these days -- after all, the LHC is located on the border between France and Switzerland. We can't let those cheese-eating surrender monkeys gain the edge in particle accelerators, can we?! The hope is that they can parlay this into an extension of their funding.
And to be honest, I don't really begrudge the Tevatron researchers for this last ditch maneuver. It is true that the pace of significant discoveries from Tevatron has waned, and it's also true that the LHC is bigger and better in virtually every way. On the other hand, there is only one LHC, so having the lower-energy Tevatron operational means the world's researchers can run twice as many experiments within that energy range. The LHC could be knocked out of commission for a period, by like a catastrophic magnet failure or something -- I know it sounds far-fetched, eh? Moreover, the annual operating budget for Tevatron is $35 million. So dudes, like, take one day off from mixing it up in Iraq, and you can keep Tevatron open for eight more years. (Seriously, fucking do the math, it's that ludicrous!)
Is it ethical? Would I engage in this kind of misrepresentation in their situation? Hell, I dunno. But I sure don't blame 'em. They're getting short shrift here, and if this little PR sleight of hand buys them some more time, more power to 'em.
[I]f we take the scientific method and the process of peer review seriously, that commits us to occasionally (or even frequently) publishing work that we believe time will eventually prove wrong.
---Tal Yarkoni, writing at [citation needed]
Yarkoni was writing in the context of the recent infamous paper by Daryl Bem published in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which purports to show evidence of ESP. Yarkoni's analysis of the paper is truly awesome, and worth a read if you are at all interested in research methodology (which means: nobody except for actual researchers, and perhaps hopeless pedants like myself).
Yarkoni's conclusion is in line with the impression I was already getting from reading other bloggers' and pundits' comments on the paper: It's a good paper as far as it goes, even though the conclusions are almost certainly wrong. (I differ from Yarkoni in the weight that I give to good ol' Thomas Bayes in rejecting the ESP hypothesis -- I frankly think that is the most important indicator of how we know this paper is wrong, and the rest is just a post mortem to determine what went wrong) Bem has been admirably transparent and thorough in documenting what exactly he did. As I've written elsewhere, that in many ways redeems the paper's publication, in that it provides the opportunity for a teaching moment in experimental design and what exactly can go wrong.
The quote from Yarkoni with which I open this post is indubitably true from a research perspective, but in a broader societal context, it's highly disturbing. No, I'm not criticizing Yarkoni; he's damn right, and that's exactly what is so disturbing about what he points out. The public doesn't see it that way. The popular press really doesn't see it that way. For science journalists and the lay public, a single provocative paper published in a reputable journal (and even then, the public -- and to a certain extent I include myself in this -- is generally ignorant as to which journals are reputable) is as good as gospel.
What can be done about this? Yarkoni is right, that if the only papers that got published were the ones which had a very high probability of being correct in their conclusions, it would entirely sabotage the scientific method. In fact, pretty soon you wouldn't be able to publish any papers according to that criterion, because a big part of how certainty is achieved is via a long line of less certain research which all points to the same conclusion. And in any case, many people -- including myself -- are increasingly of the opinion that publication bias is a tremendous problem, resulting in large amounts of waste, as well as retarding the rate of science's natural self-corrective ability. In that light, the last thing we want is to publish fewer papers.
The most effective solution, I think, would be for science journalists to collectively behave more responsibly. But good luck with that. That's only slightly more likely than thinking the entire public is suddenly going to become more skeptical.
There is some hope -- as demonstrated by the recent evisceration of the NASA-funded paper into arsenic-based life forms, the blogosphere is increasingly flexing its muscles in order to keep that sort of credulous nonsense in check. In the past, the blogosphere couldn't really be effective in that role, because even if a zillion science bloggers pointed out the flaws, they were only reaching a niche market of readers -- but now, enough noise in the blogosphere amounts to a news story in itself, one the mainstream media feels obligated to report on.
There's a potential blueprint here: Mainstream science journalists breathlessly report on the latest novel finding of public interest, as if one half-way decent p-value proves some controversial hypothesis beyond a shadow of a doubt; trained researchers blog about how the news stories are all full of shit and explain why the paper is either wrong or should be taken with a grain of salt; other interested bloggers link to and write about these criticisms, and in typical Interwubzian fashion, generate a lot of drama and heat in a short period of time; and finally, that becomes a story in itself, forcing those same mainstream science journalists to write articles playing down the earlier reports.
It's far from a perfect system -- people will in general still remember the early credulous articles rather than the later more skeptical ones, and those with an agenda (Buy my supplements! Don't vaccinate! Religion makes you live longer!) will cite the peer-reviewed-but-wrong papers for decades as if there was nothing wrong with them and they were never contradicted by later research. But the sheer noise the blogosphere is capable of generating, and in such a short time, I think makes the situation somewhat more promising than it has been in the past.
In any case, go back and read the quote from Yarkoni at the top of this post. He's hit the nail on the head here. This sort of thinking should be taught in grade school, and hammered away all through a person's education. Science is messy, and by it's very nature it will frequently produce wrong results -- in fact it is this very embrace of uncertainty which gives science epistemological dominance over all other attempts to get at the truth. We should neither discount science because of its dynamic and ever-changing character (for that is where its power lies!), nor should we assume that every proper application of the scientific method produces an unquestionable truth.
I was making a comment over at Bruce Hood's blog and a thought occurred to me that I think is worthy of its own blog post.
Pardon me for failing to dig up a citation for this, but there appears to be growing evidence that propensity for religiosity and other o'er-credulous beliefs has a hereditary component. In other words, there could be genes that make you more likely to believe without evidence (or to state it conversely, there could be genes that make you more skeptical).
One problem with this is that it takes very specific conditions to allow genotypic heterogeneity in a population. If there is a clear selective advantage afforded to one phenotype over another, then under normal conditions the corresponding genotype should eventually come to dominate the entire population.
Now, I'm totally a layperson in this regard, and I won't pretend that I understand the mathematics behind what enables heterogeneity, nor that I could list more than a couple of conditions that allow it. But I happen to know offhand that one way you can get heterogeneity is via a host/parasite relationship.
The idea goes like this: Host phenotype A is resistant to parasite phenotype X, but vulnerable to parasite phenotype Y. Host phenotype B is the reverse, i.e. resistant to Y but vulnerable to X. All other things being equal, the prevalence of each phenotype in each population will tend to oscillate, with shifted (or is it opposite?) phases. If the parasite population is dominated by X, then natural selection will cause the host population to tilt towards A... after which natural selection then causes the parasite population to tilt to Y, causing the host population to shift to B, etcetera ad infinitum.
I'm sure there's an evolutionary biologist reading this right now screaming about the horrible state of evolution education in America's schools, but I think I at least got the gist of it... maybe?
Okay, so now on to inherited credulity... one account for why humans are so damn credulous, given by Michael Shermer, is that Type I errors (false positives) tend to be far less costly than Type II errors (false negatives), therefore natural selection will favor individuals who tend to be biased towards Type I errors. Shermer's favored example is the rustle in the grass that might be a tiger. If you assume it's a tiger, and you're wrong, then you waste a little time and energy fleeing from a predator that wasn't there. If you assume it's the wind and you're wrong, then you are dinner.
One thing that's always bothered me about Shermer's account is that he rarely, if ever, explicitly brings probability into it. It's not enough that the cost of a Type I error is less than that of a Type II error -- it must be the case that the cost of a Type I error multiplied by the chance that it is an error must be less than the equivalent calculation for Type II errors. Presumably, most rustles in the grass are in fact not tigers, so for his account to truly show that natural selection would favor "patternicity" requires a bit more than what he has explicitly stated.
It was while complaining about Shermer's omission on Bruce Hood's blog that it occurred to me that we might have a potential solution here for the problem of heterogeneity in inherited credulity. I now copy-paste from my comment on Bruce's blog, with minor edits:
It's just conceivable that there could be an interaction between patternicity and certain environmental conditions (e.g. prevalence of food, prevalence of predation, etc.) that mirrors the interaction between host and parasite — an interaction we already know to mathematically support heterogeneity in a population.
If you'll pardon a "Just So" flight of fancy on my part: We could imagine a population of prey organisms where some individuals are "strongly" biased towards Type I errors, and others are "weakly" biased (whatever that would mean, but run with me here for a second). If conditions of predation were static, we’d expect one of the two phenotypes to become dominant. But if the local density of predators has a cyclic fluctuation, then the ratio of the two phenotypes in the prey population could conceivably track that cycle. In years with an unusually high-density predator population, the "weakly"-biased individuals tend to get eaten before they can reproduce, favoring the "strongly"-biased individuals; while in years with a low predator population, the "weakly"-biased individuals are able to gather more food than their cousins and therefore out-reproduce them.
Furthermore, this very shift could in itself exert a selective influence on the predator population. As the prey population becomes dominated by "weakly"-biased individuals, it's boom time for the predators. Those dumb prey animals just stand there like they didn't even notice that rustling in the grass. The predator population grows, which as we already postulated (remember, this is all wild speculation) will cause the "strongly"-biased phenotype to be favored in the prey population. Suddenly it seems like the prey have smartened up, as they flee even before it's possible they could have even seen the predator. More predators starve, their population wanes, and the cycle begins again with the "weakly"-biased prey being favored.
There's boatloads of math required before we could state that it's truly plausible, but it sounds to me to at least be plausible in principle. IANAEvolutionary Biologist, nor do I have any prayer of working out the mathematical model myself, so for now this will have to stand as merely another "Just So" story by an armchair biologist.
Hey, wait a minute, postulating a superficially-plausible-sounding evolutionary explanation for human behavior, and then throwing it out there like it's fact without even bothering to test it for plausibility against a mathematical model? I think I've found a second career in evolutionary psychology!
I have often said that it's not particularly interesting to me that the vast majority of scientists and other intellectuals who lived before Darwin believed quite devotedly in a personal God. At that time, there was a question which confronted us every day of our lives, and for which nobody had any answer that was even remotely satisfactory -- namely, "Where did all these animals come from?!?"
Now obviously, when confronted with a question one cannot answer, the "Let's just make shit up!" approach is not preferred. Especially if the shit you make up is the ol' "goddidit" refrain. But for a question so basic and so omnipresent as the origin of species, it's pretty forgivable, in my opinion.
Also prior to Darwin, there was no "Creation Science" movement to speak of. And why not? Humanity had all the tools they needed to do baraminology for millenia, and yet the idea wasn't even proposed until 1941, and wasn't formalized until 1990. And the bizarre clawing apologetics of idiots like Dembski is certainly a new phenomenon.
Why did it take so long? It seems as though in past centuries, a Creationist attitude was just the default. I forget who coined the term "promiscuous teleology", but it seems appropriate here. That's just the way we tend to think. So the majority of Creationists had no special stake in it. Now, of course, the only people who are Creationists are those who want to make some excuse for it, to keep this dumb old idea alive for some reason.
I wonder to what extent a belief in Cartesian dualism might follow a similar trajectory. And are we seeing the first wave of "dualist apologists" right now?
Yet another one of those elephant-in-the-room everyday questions that for most of history had no good answer is, "What is consciousness and why do we have it?" Much like the teleological explanation for the origin of species, believing by default in an immaterial "soul" that is the essence of consciousness would be an intellectual lapse, and far less preferred then simply admitting that we don't know -- however, it's such an every day question that, in the absence of any decent answers, people could be forgiven for taking the supernatural position. It's still wrong, but it's understandable.
As our knowledge of neuroscience advances, however, we are starting to have much better answers to that question. We still can't quite fully put all the pieces together, but we know from case studies of brain damaged patients that pretty much any facet of what we might call consciousness can be altered or destroyed by neurological changes. And as we start to understand more and more pieces of the brain, it becomes much easier to understand how the sensation of consciousness could emerge from this. (Particularly interesting are observations into how certain parts of the brain seem to be dedicated purely to coming up with a coherent narrative to give the appearance of all these disparate components acting as a single entity, but I digress...)
In the face of this, will dualism be forced to beat a retreat? In the future, will it no longer be the default position? And for those dedicated to the ideal of dualism, will they find themselves coming up with all sorts of pseudoscience-y apologetics to make room for a "science of dualism"?
Well goddamn, Deepak Choprah's already on the case! Could he merely be ahead of his time? Is he the Kent Hovind of dualism, proposing ridiculous ideas like a giant ice shield, before his more "refined" Dembski-esque counterparts come along with ridiculous mathematical "research papers"? Time will tell, I suppose...
XKCD wins again:
Hilarious but sobering. I would think one could extend this to all sorts of crazy beliefs.
I just came across this via Why Evolution Is True, and there are so many choice quotes in this (very old!) book review that I had to capture them:
There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus. 'Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct tract marked on the heart of the element by the psychical converge of the universe upon itself.' 'Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself,' and evolution is 'nothing else than the continual growth of. ... 'psychic' or 'radial' energy'. Again, 'the Christogenesis of St Paul and St John is nothing else and nothing less than the extension ... of that noogenesis in which cosmogenesis ... culminates'.
Ha ha, "nothing-buttery," I love it. I'm going to have to try to remember that one. I perhaps have fallen into this same rhetorical trap myself at times, but Medawar is right: It makes the speaker sound presumptuous and ridiculous.
...yet he uses in metaphor words like energy, tension, force, impetus and dimension as if they retained the weight and thrust of their specific scientific usages.
Ah, never have I seen such a damning critique of pseudoscience put so succinctly. It seems Medawar has described a special class of deepity, especially favored by New Age-y types. If I say, "I really feel negative energy coming from you," the metaphorical meaning is true-but-trivial (you are making me feel upset), while the literal meaning is earth-shattering-but-false (you are emitting a very real heretofore-undescribed physical force which I am able to detect).
Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.
A bit elitist, perhaps, but so very accurate. And frustrating.
Now this is what responsible journalism should look like!
First it was Penn Jillette, now it's James Randi. Why do otherwise sensible skeptics seem to be prone to buying into the claims of anthropogenic global warming denialists?
Okay, a sample size of two doesn't necessarily mean anything, but I think there is something to this. In my opinion, the reasons are twofold:
First, unlike most of the "hot topics" in the skeptical community, AGW is goddamn hard to understand. When it comes to creationism, anti-vaccination, alternative medicine, religious and paranormal beliefs, even as a layman I can pretty handily explain why it makes no sense. (On a side note, some of the anti-vaccination propaganda is somewhat harder to debunk, which may help to account for folks like Bill Maher) With AGW, on the other hand, pretty much the best I can do is point out that the vast majority of people with legitimate credentials say it's real, so I have to trust them on it. Of course, it helps that when AGW denialists show the graphs that are supposed to show that warming doesn't track with CO2, I think they show a pretty strong correlation given how noisy climatology data is... but I really don't know very much about the topic, and to be able to guess whether the predictive models are accurate or not, well that takes a lot of knowledge I don't have.
Second, and I think this is important because Randi alluded to this in his statement, environmentalism is a pseudo-religious endeavor for many of its adherents. For those who view it this way, often their goals end up being laudable anyway, but the reasoning is sometimes sloppy or just outright wrong.
"We taught a lion to eat tofu!" |
I watched Wheel of Time the other night, which contains several interviews with the Dalai Lama (incidentally, I think the Lama is a bit of a douche... he pays lip service to a lot of good causes, I suppose, but anybody who refuses to deny that they are a god is pretty much an asshole automatically). At one point, Hertzog asks him what his message would be to the world. Most everything he said was positive, but when he talked about protecting the environment, he pretty much summed up exactly what I am talking about: He said the objective was to "keep the environment pure." I had to roll my eyes at that one... And indeed, it seems to me that for a lot of people who support environmentalism, it's not about sustainability or ethics, it's about a metaphysical idea of purity.
A "supersense" of purity is the driving force behind a lot of religious intolerance, it seems. It also feeds a substantial amount of the appeal of alternative medicine: Don't "pollute" your body with those "unnatural" pharmaceuticals. Flush those toxins which are "contaminating" your health. Etcetera.
So should we really be surprised that some skeptics, as soon as they get a whiff of something being associated with a purity campaign, immediately put their bullshit detectors into overdrive -- to the point that it sometimes scores a false positive?
You could even argue that this may have fed into Jillette's ludicrous denial of the dangers of secondhand smoke (which he has since at least partially retracted). When the subject of smoking came up on the denialism blog, I was shocked at how much vitriol some of the commenters had for smokers. It was as if, rather than smoking just being a public health hazard, they thought it was a horrible sin, and that anyone infected with the sin must be an evil despicable person.
I also think a supernatural sense of "purity" feeds into some of the the stricter outdoor smoking regulations... There is no doubt that prolonged exposure to secondhand smoke is hazardous, but it is weird to me that someone who is bothered being ten feet away from a lit cigarette has no qualms about waiting minutes at a crosswalk at a busy intersection. I'm no scientist, but I have trouble believing the former is as harmful than the latter. (Try this experiment sometime: Ride a bike down a fairly busy road where traffic mostly flows at a pretty decent clip, but where there are a number of widely-spaced traffic lights. Smell the air in between intersections, and at the intersections. Mmmmm, that intoxicating scent of exhaust mixed with burning rubber and melting brake pads -- gotta love it!)
So the moral is: As skeptics, we must be careful not to let the smell of zealotry become a primary indicator of trueness or falseness. Though they may be garner the support of superstitious fanatics using fallacious reasoning, AGW and the risks of secondhand smoke are both quite real.
ScienceBlogs just added a couple of new blogs, and one of them -- Tomorrow's Table -- is about organic and sustainable farming from a scientist's perspective.
What a breath of fresh air! Time and again I have been frustrated by the unholy connections between the organic/sustainable farming community and all matter of paranoid insanity, like anti-GMO, homeopathy, Traditional Chinese Medicine, anti-vaccine, and government conspiracies of all types. I'm very interested to hear what Dr. Ronald has to say.
I've had an interesting story to share for some time about just how easy it is to fall into the post hoc fallacy, but I haven't posted it yet because it's also very sad and it helped to have some distance.
Back in July, my favorite cat and my first real pet as an adult suddenly got sick and died under very mysterious circumstances. It seems most likely she ate some kind of poison, but we never identified what it was -- she was an indoor/outdoor cat, so who knows what she could have gotten into? That morning, she appeared totally healthy. I clearly remember refilling the food dish that morning and seeing her chowing away, i.e. completely normal appetite. And then, that evening, her kidneys completely shut down, and even before we got to the vet I knew from her symptoms she was going to die.
She was eight years old, a little past midway point for a cat. I'm mostly over it now, but the one thing that still gets me is when I think to myself, "She could have had another eight years... all those wonderful times with Stash, multiplied by two." I tend to get kind of angry when I think that, so I try not to...
Anyway! Enough with the sad part of the story. So, it turns out that shortly before that we had decided we should put our cats on flea medication. We ordered it online, and it arrived a few days before her death. But despite my wife's helpful reminders, I kept forgetting to give it to the cats. I finally treated our remaining cat a couple weeks after Stash died.
Imagine if I had remembered to apply the medication when it first arrived..! I would be 100% convinced it was the flea medication: I put a chemical on my cat that she's never been exposed to before, and then 48 hours later she drops dead from apparent poisoning. I would have been devastated. I never would have forgiven myself.
And yet, it would all have been an illusion. Pure post hoc. Stash died for some completely different reason. I shudder when I think of the kind of unnecessary guilt and anguish I would have felt, if the chips had fallen just a tiny bit differently...
As a review, the moralistic fallacy is the mental error which causes one to think that because a certain proposition is "good" or "right" or "moral", it must also be true/natural. (This is opposed to the naturalistic fallacy, which conversely states that what is natural must inherently be good) It has been stated most succinctly as: What ought to be, is.
Of course, we think of the moralistic fallacy primarily in two contexts: One is the fallacious justification of a belief in God because "religion makes people happy" -- a premise whose truth or falsity I am not yet convinced of either way, but in any case, the conclusion does not follow from it anyway. The other context where you often hear the moralistic fallacy is in regards to human nature, where, for example, it is insisted for political reasons that there is no biological differences in the brains of men and women, a claim which is demonstrably false.
As a side note, a danger of the moralistic fallacy in the latter context is that we can lose track of the real reason why what ought to be ought to be. In the example I gave above, men and women should still be evaluated on equal terms1 because a) individual variations are broad enough that judging by generalization rather than case-by-case is woefully inefficient, and b) in any case most of us (including me) would perceive it as grossly unfair to judge an individual based on generalizations. Hinging our justification for equal treatment of women on the false idea that there are no biological gender differences is dangerous to say the least.
But that's not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the possibility of nontheists and skeptics employing the moralistic fallacy, something we don't usually think about. The reason I want to talk about this is because two events in the past twenty-four hours reminded me that we can be just as guilty of this fallacy as anyone.
The first was a post at Bruce Hood's blog where he discusses a new paper in PLoS by Sam Harris, et al., that happens to mention Bruce's SuperSense theory. (I still have not read the book, and now I'm bogged down in Guns, Germs, and Steel!) I'll quote Bruce here:
However, Harris and colleagues’s discussion of my hypothesis (never a theory till proven) in the current paper that beliefs are a combination of intuitive reasoning embedded in culture is somewhat misrepresented...I was pleased that Harris and colleagues acknowledge the supersense hypothesis but a bit dismayed when they dismissed it with the straw man statement, “Whatever the evolutionary underpinnings of religion, it seems unlikely that there is a genetic explanation for the why the French, Swedes, and Japanese tend not to believe in the God of Abraham while Americans, Saudis, and Somalis do.”
Well dah. Come on Sam, I am not like the others. You didn’t read the book-did you? I made it perfectly clear that just as any child is innately endowed to acquire a language, there is no genetic basis for French. What we need to know is why some people believe and some don’t even when they are raised in the same exact environment. That cannot just be culture.
Now this may not quite be the moralistic fallacy in action -- it is possible that Harris et al grossly misinterpreted Bruce's work out of sloppiness or something. But given some of the nasty responses regarding SuperSense, I suspect that there is a tendency on the part of nontheists and antireligionists -- yes, even luminaries like Harris -- to think, "Well, religion is bad, therefore it cannot be natural!" Surely Harris did not articulate it to himself as such, but I wonder if some similar impulse drove him to dismiss the SuperSense hypothesis without due consideration.
I admit that I myself engage in a more guarded version of this, not so much in regards to the question of whether religion is "natural", but in regards to whether people "need" comforting illusions. I take the position that, until I see convincing proof that people need these illusions, I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that adults are capable of living with reality. I may turn out to be wrong, but this is my default position in the absence of highly convincing proof.
The second event that got me to think was a guy over in some of the comment threads at Orac's blog -- whom I later suspected to be a troll, but he got me thinking anyway -- who was going on this huge attack about how "new atheists" are irrational, despite proclaiming to be an "old-school" atheist himself. His central point was rather bizarre: he spent at least half a day arguing that memes are bullshit, that everyone knows memes are bullshit, that even Dawkins knows memes are bullshit but that he employs them in anti-theistic arguments anyway, and that therefore any atheist who admired Dawkins for anything other than his strict biological work is just as irrational as any theist.
It's probably true that people of all stripes -- skeptics and atheists included -- are indeed rather irrational a shocking amount of the time... and judging by the reaction of folks who have read SuperSense, I suspect when I finally get around to reading it, I may be rather disturbed at just how much. Or maybe I already have an idea... In any case, I don't dispute that point. But I think the troll's argument is still a bit whack, and in any case, it is my feeling that the "new atheists" at least put a high value on rationality, and that even if we don't always succeed, that has to count for something.
I also mentioned to the troll that I thought another important difference was that atheists don't typically go around executing homosexuals, lopping off girls' clitorises, and crashing planes into buildings. His response had me really scratching my head:
scientific studies have shown that religion has been shown to be a NEGATIVE predictor of violence and terrorism
He didn't bother to back this up with any links or citations, and I have a really, really, really hard time believing that religious belief is a negative predictor of terrorism (the only secular terrorist I can think of off the top of my head is McVeigh.. and I suppose maybe Che Guevera and his ilk). I do know some studies have shown religion to be a negative predictor of violence, but my impression has been that the data is mixed on this point (and in any case, as we all know, correlation does not prove causality, and I have heard it speculated that many of the apparent statistical benefits of religious belief only apply if your beliefs are the same as the norm in the society in which you inhabit, i.e. suggesting that the causality is more associated with the benefits of "going with the flow" than they are with religion per se).
But the troll's comment got me thinking anyway. I like to believe that atheism can be a positive and liberating philosophy. I look around at all the religiously-motivated violence, all of the spiritually-motivated quackery, etc., and I feel like I am right. But am I engaging in the moralistic fallacy here? I admit that I have a rather strong distaste not only for religious delusions, but for the trappings of religion themselves. Am I letting this distaste cloud my judgment? Is there a part of me saying to myself, "Atheism ought to be a better way to live one's life than theism, therefore it is?"
I'm not at all sure. And I think this is something we all ought to reflect on. The falsity of religious belief is not in doubt. But when we talk about the costs and benefits of religious belief, we should be careful not to let ourselves fall victim to the moralistic fallacy.
1The one defensible exception is in regards to competitive sports, where biological differences give men such an innate advantage in sports relying on muscle strength, body size, etc., that a gender-neutral league would preclude many talented women from participating. Even in that case, I generally favor a gender-neutral league running parallel to a women-only league, as opposed to there ever being a men-only league, thus still allowing women on the extremes of the bell curve to be judged as individuals and participate in the gender-neutral league. In addition, it allows sports with a lot of variation in the physical requirements of each position to invite more women into the gender-neutral league, e.g. while I think even in a society perfectly unbiased about gender we would still rarely if ever see a female offensive guard in the NFL (the men who play this position are already on the very extreme ends of the bell curve for their gender in regards to body mass), I would not be surprised to see a female kicker in the NFL within the next couple of decades, and someday probably even female wide receivers, quarterbacks, defensive backs, maybe even situational tight ends and running backs. Anyway, this is all a huge digression and not what I wanted to talk about!
