I love that most everyone here is willing to be wrong about everything.

Through disagreements, we are able to see our views reflected back at us and change them if necessary. Or, even if they don’t change, we may gain insight into just why we hold a particular view.

That’s how I try to approach my whole life.  It’s just as rewarding to “lose” an argument as to be right in the first place.  Either way, it means I come out of the discussion feeling smart.

But that’s not why these things are a threat to actual real scientific medicine (ARSM?).  The real danger is when CAM seems to get real results.

I don’t possess a great deal of knowledge about cars.  If I took my car to a faith healer, all the prayer in the world wouldn’t change the oil.  (I guess if I took it to a detox loon, their BS might actually apply in this case).  Clearly a complex system like a car is going to need some real work done eventually, or I’m going to notice it doesn’t work right any more.

But what if that car healer chose to learn and incorporate some actual, real mechanical repair and maintenance techniques into their practice?  They might not be ASE certified, sure, but they’d probably be able to do a passable job making my car work.  They can get real, even measurable results.

As an unsophisticated customer of this faith-based mechanic, I might drive away with a great testimonial about how my car’s chi was unblocked and its aura re-alignment took care of that weird noise in the passenger door.  At a minimum, each visit builds trust in my faith-canic, and their authoritative expertise in all things auto.

What’s the harm if he puts a homeopathic sealant on the tires and tells me they’re now good for another 20 thousand miles?  I have a horrible blow-out on the highway, but I’m OK; modern car safety features are extremely well-designed (by science)

This is obviously an absurd example, but I’m trying to illustrate the problem of false attribution in fields based on woo.

Massage, range of motion exercises, strength-building exercises, and mobilization of joints are all legitimate science-based techniques used by physical therapists and physicians with specialties in physiatry, orthopedics, and sports medicine. Some chiropractors also use similar techniques -and with good results. But by doing so and calling it “chiropractic” it legitimizes the pseudoscientific practices that are very common within the profession - like treating non-existent “subluxations” in order to free up the flow of innate intelligence.

Maybe your chiropractor is really a quite rational physical therapist simply operating without a license and has never done any harm.  You know your acupuncturist is really on the level, because transdermal electrical stimulation works wonders on your pain.

The problem, as with my mechanic above, comes when satisfied customers encourage a ground swell of support, and studies showing that (the scientifically sound part of) some woo is effective.  Increasingly, woo promulgators are not only allowed to practice without any kind of “surgeon general says you are stupid” warning, but taken seriously as a form of actual real scientific medicine.  Only leave off on the science a bit you stodgy old skeptic, because we get results!

Are you already a skeptic?  Cool; but I bet you know someone who is into chiropractic.  Please, warn them before this happens.  And if you think I’m picking on the chiros a bit much, it’s because they routinely perform actions, on purpose, that can massively damage important nervous system components, all in the name of healing.  And they may even be covered by your insurance already.

Today I learned the answer, and it hit me like a smite of lightning.  Afterward, I wasn’t sure whether maybe I was the only Christian who didn’t get it, but I just checked with a couple friends and found out I’m in good company.

In superstitious times, forgiveness was obtained through magical rituals. Most of these assumed that guilt could in some fashion be transferred to an animal or other being, which was then killed or driven off to provide a symbolic expiation.

And then:

Jesus’ divine blood, shed once and for all, makes a more perfect sacrifice than an animal’s and does not need to be repeated. Still, at the heart of Christianity lies the same ancient superstition: that one person’s guilt can be transferred to another and then absolved by punishing that other.

Eureka!  So it turns out the answer is, it’s not supposed to make sense, it’s just the way the magic works:  You can shunt sin between people and animals like “guilt capacitors”.

Now I understand the point of ritual animal and human sacrifice too.  All this time I thought that sacrifices worked because killing an animal or person takes the being away from us and sends it up to God (who apparently has an insatiable need for slaughtered slaves, virgins, or fauna, depending on your tradition).  But it’s really just this transference of punishment deal.  God doesn’t want all our dead stuff, he just wants something to take the rap for our evil deeds, regardless of actual deservedness.

Come to think of it, I see why teachers of Christianity might not want to focus too closely on the mechanics of sacrifice.  Although elucidating in a historical way, the bare explanation could have made me question my faith a lot sooner.

OMGOMG etc

The precautionary principle can so easily be abused to the point that it becomes a zero risk bias .

This is a TED video from 2006, but I just now watched it. Michael Shermer talks about cognitive bias, pareidolia, and other interesting ways we fool ourselves.

Michael Shermer at TED.com: Why people believe strange things

It’s a delightful 12 minute refutation of stupidity.

Science is not–I repeat, not–a method for finding out the "truth" about anything. Without going into a great deal of detail, I would characterize science as a methodology that allows us to test our beliefs about how nature behaves with how nature actually behaves and to derive laws and theories with useful predictive power that allow us to predict how nature will behave under certain conditions. In fact, it could well be argued that science is a method of testing hypotheses, refuting them, and through that process coming up with hypotheses that better explain how nature works.

Word.

“In the study, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. … The researchers found that it was possible to predict from brain signals which option participants would take already seven seconds before they consciously made their decision.”

I was somewhat surprised by this finding, and look forward to follow-up research as well as independent confirmation. But most of my surprise was not due to the study itself, but rather how the results were interpreted as evidence against the existence of free will.

There’s more than one in-vogue argument surrounding free will. This post is not meant to address the deterministic issue (i.e. is there such a thing as choice in the universe); I intend to treat that fascinating question in a future post.

Here we are faced with evidence that the “me”/conscious/”in charge” part of us may not even be in the loop at all until after a decision is reached. Certainly big news! But something to assail free will?

For those accustomed to thinking of themselves as having free will, the implications are far more unsettling than learning about the physiological basis of other brain functions. [wired:Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them]

But since I have no control over what I think, believe, or decide, so what? … The lack of free will levels the playing field and makes all humans equal. [skepchick:Free will as illusion]

To me, there is a huge chasm between finding consciousness plays a later role in (at least some) decisions and concluding that there is no free will. Consciousness is already known to be a slippery thing, see anosognosia (my favorite), blind sight, confabulation, déjà vu. Our self-awareness gets sort of an “executive summary” of our sensory experience. Why should it be so hard to swallow the idea that the brain follows a similar pattern for decisions?

So maybe the part of me that believes it is in charge is actually more of an oversight committee. This still casts no aspersion on free will– it just gives us new data on what mental machinery is involved in making a decision. It’s still my brain, synapses wired by my experience. If we find the seat of decision-making is largely pre-conscious, we need not conclude we’re any less free, aware, or in-charge. After all, the seat of emotion was long believed to be the heart. Knowing otherwise has not sapped the vibrance from love or softened the sting of jealousy. We are still emotional creatures. And we are also decision-making creatures.

I wonder: how could we actually test for free will? You’d have to be careful that you’re not just playing to cognitive bias.

And what use then, consciousness? I’m pretty far afield of my expertise, but I could spin just-so stories all day about how an oversight, evaluating sort of self-awareness could be adaptive.

(Above photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ian_ruotsala/1491259727)

1. I am interested in full understanding of an issue; best gained by rational discourse, scientific inquiry, and criticism.
2. I am also a fairly rabid supporter of freedom of expression.
3. I am most strongly an advocate of critical thinking skills as a tool to identify and be skeptical of positions based on propaganda, bias, and fallacy.

Given the foregoing, the best way to really piss me off is to use the public’s weak grasp of #3 to hamstring the process of #1 by rallying around a steaming pile of #2.

I’d like to direct your attention to this podcast:

In the upcoming a pro-Intelligent Design documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (starring comedy actor Ben Stein), several notable scientists speak in support of science and evolution, including evolutionary biologist (and outspoken atheist) Richard Dawkins, science blogger PZ Meyers, and Skeptics Society founder Michael Shermer. As Swoopy finds out this week when she talks with Dawkins and Shermer, Expelled is not the film these scientists agreed to be a part of—nor were their experiences at advanced screenings what they expected….

I have not seen the film; my second-hand impression is formed after listening to the interviews above. The main drive of the film is to cast science in the classroom as a free speech issue, and argue that personal beliefs of teachers ought to be allowed into the curriculum at their own discretion. My first reaction to this idea is that someone who holds unfalsifiable beliefs that conflict with the knowledge of their field might not make a great teacher of that subject. But I suppose it’s plausible that a teacher can impart knowledge that they don’t hold to personally.

More generally, the idea that science class should be a place where a teacher instills their personal belief system to students is ludicrous on its face.

Teaching unscientific things in science class is similarly ridiculous. If enough people want it to happen, though, then the public school curriculum can be changed to mandate such things. Having tried this approach largely in vain, creationists are now going grassroots and saying damn the curriculum– just do what you want.

How can this feeble approach hope to succeed? The average person doesn’t have a very strong penchant for critical thought. Even those who do can very easily be influenced by propaganda and biased debate around a subject in which they are not deeply versed. Make a propaganda film that leads your audience along step by step, and they will follow.

I was reading an analysis at the Oil Drum about nuclear power use and scaling in France. As usual on TOD, the comments are brimming with insight and impassioned discourse. As a rebuttal to the modest conclusion of the article, one commenter linked to UIC Nuclear Issues Briefing Paper # 75, entitled Supply of Uranium. It looked like the start of a fine analysis, but then alarm bells sounded.

(Before I dive into details I just want to say that, based on my current understanding, I think fission should be much more widely employed as a power source than we have seen to date. But I firmly claim that I am neither a nutty nuclear zealot nor an anti-nuke hippie :P)

Now, as an appetizer to the main rant, let me start with this passage:

Changes in costs or prices [...] may alter measured resource figures markedly. At ten times the current price, seawater might become a potential source of vast amounts of uranium.

There’s nothing terribly wrong there, but when the viability of producing an energy resource is measured in “cost”, that’s a danger sign. Instead, (or in addition), I prefer to see some consideration given to Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI). Stated simply, EROEI is the net energy returned from an operation, rather than the net profit/loss. The reason this is important is that the P/L can be misleading in the short term– fortunes can be made while performing operations that make no sense in terms of energy production.

Looking at the EROEI instead gives an indication of the long term viability of an energy operation. At “ten times the cost” to extract, how much energy is being put into the endeavor? Are we still going to turn an energy-profit in the end and come out ahead? If not, then we’ve just converted some amount of energy (x) into some amount less than (x), which on its face seems a bit wasteful.

There are a lot of important details I’m omitting. Sometimes it makes sense to do a net-negative energy conversion, if for example your output energy is in a more useful form. There are also a lot more inputs to consider than the cost of pulling uranium out of the ground (e.g. cost of scaling out plants, keeping radioactive waste from creating a generation of atomic supermen, etc.) Here’s one essay at TOD addressing “peak uranium”, but on all fronts there’s plenty of contention. Even though I have done a very loose treatment of this issue, I hope it is sufficient to show that EROEI is a calculation that merits consideration.

What piqued my interest was not in the above passage, however, but the following (my emphasis):

From time to time concerns are raised that the known resources might be insufficient when judged as a multiple of present rate of use. But this is the Limits to Growth fallacy, a major intellectual blunder recycled from the 1970s, which takes no account of the very limited nature of the knowledge we have at any time of what is actually in the Earth’s crust. Our knowledge of geology is such that we can be confident that identified resources of metal minerals are a small fraction of what is there.

“A logical fallacy regarding growth?”, I thought. “Hot dog, I’m hooked!” I immediately tabbed out to google to learn all I could, only to find that there’s no such fallacy. This was certainly a bit deflating, but also reassuring in a significant sense: if logic supports boundless growth then it would come into conflict with Physics; a situation that can only end paradoxically.

After reading the rest of the relevant passages and the Appendix that expands on them, I came to understand that the author didn’t precisely mean there was a logical fallacy at play, but rather to malign the work Limits to Growth (and to be fashionable, the even-more-oft-maligned work of Malthus).

Neither work’s specific predictions about imminent doom came to pass; a fact that this author then leverages to refute all limited-growth hypotheses. But this is a fallacy of faulty generalization. It’s true that we didn’t run out of energy in the past, but not necessarily because a limit doesn’t exist. COR and Malthus’ predicted limits were incorrect– practically usable energy reserves often get revised upward due to new data, new technology, and new resource types becoming practical. So far, we have always found ways to bump up the limit faster than we have burned through it. Logically speaking, though, those past events make no prediction about whether this will continue to be the case. (Thermodynamically speaking, it cannot forever remain the case)

The paper’s author claims there is enough uranium in the crust and the ocean that we will always have bunches available, which is very likely true. However the paper refers to availability as the amount existing on earth, but then equivocates it to mean the amount practically recoverable by us, two very different things.

Scarcity of cheap uranium will indeed lead to higher prices, but not in an unbounded fashion. Once the real value that can be derived from the stuff is less than the market price, you’ve hit your limit to growth. Where is that limit? This is what I chiefly want to learn. It depends on a staggering number of factors, but it’s frankly idiotic to claim that something can’t occur simply because it has not yet done so.

Aside: I wonder if I can get DepletedCranium’s input on this. He has a demonstrated facility for debunking the alleged feasibility of many kinds of green energy, and he’s also all about the nuclear. Perfect combo IMO for this issue.

Everyone writes their own story of life. A staggering number of people choose to create a story where meaning comes from an external governor, a deus ex machina. A common conclusion of these folk is that non-theists, lacking this (arbitrary) anchor, must be adrift in life without purpose, moral values, or happiness.

But as writerdd quite eloquently observes, this need not be the case. Acknowledge and celebrate your own meaning.

Fortunately, I like Richard’s post on this subject, so I can just point at it and say “me too”.

Former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore and attorneys with the Foundation for Moral Law, representing several Pennsylvania Christians, argued in a brief filed today in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that the state legislature violated the state constitution in 2002 when it added “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the state’s “hate crimes” law …

Judge Roy Moore said about this important case:

“There is a dangerous trend surfacing in other countries and here in America where governments are trying to make it illegal to speak out against homosexuality …”

I think people should be able to say nasty things about homosexuality if they want, but not for the same reasons as Judge Moore:

even when such an immoral lifestyle is publicly paraded in the streets. … God alone has the ability to see, and the right to judge, the hearts and minds of men.”

Like most people (imo), he seems to simply be supporting free speech on a subject he agrees with. I assume if the bill had instead added penalties for hate speech directed at Christians, he would have found it reasonable.

An interesting facet to this story is how the contentious provision was attached to unrelated legislation to get it pushed through. For those who agree with any particular rider, this process is championed as a tool for the underdog. The opposition can equally well characterize it as a tool of asymmetric legislative warfare. But it gets used so often and to such a ridiculous extent that it loses any moral context and becomes business as usual– the easiest way to enact your agenda, sidestepping the quaint notion of debating a bill on its merits.

I support the One Subject At A Time Act, because I think that legislative compromise should mean coming to an agreement on something, not a back room quid pro quo. I’m not so naive to think OSTA would have only positive immediate results. In our current two-party feedback loop system, the minority party can use riders as a check against being steamrolled by the majority. But there must be a way to balance power that doesn’t involve this kind of trick.

Growing up I learned about the (US) Constitution and particularly the Bill of Rights. There may even have been some limp discussion about why certain rights were added and what they’re good for. But we never talked about what I now understand to be the most important yet commonly overlooked reason to codify fundamental rights and limitations on the exercise of power– the tyranny of the majority.

When we learned about democracy it was touted as the cutting edge political system in the world, where all could prosper. Since everyone gets to vote, the power and guidance of the state rests (in theory) with all the people, instead of some elite ruling class. Leaving aside the inevitability of governmental scope-creep, power-grabbing, and corruption, there is a fairly serious blind spot built in to this system– who is to say that the majority knows what’s best?

As a detour before I get into my real rant, let’s talk about taxes. In order for government to function it needs revenue. Assuming that there’s no lucrative state-controlled export fueling the economy, this means citizens will be paying taxes of some kind. I’m using a simplified model with easy numbers for illustration, a flat tax system where everyone (above the poverty line) pays the same percent of their income to the government: 10%. If you make $100 per week you pay $10. If you make $2000 per week you pay $200. The wealthy are still paying more in total but everyone is at the same rate. Mathematically speaking, it’s a fair, level system.

• Even though most people don’t love giving money away, the majority does understand the need for taxes. Some people would rather enjoy the benefits of the state but elect not to pay taxes at all. Well, the majority doesn’t take kindly to that. This is a pretty black and white example where majority rule comes up with the right answer: no free rides. If you make money, give up 10% of it or get out of our state!
• Now let’s add some economic inequality into the system. Those who have an above-average amount of wealth can never (by definition) be in the majority. If we have an unusual majority comprised of meritocrats or classic liberals, then they may be perfectly fine with the fact that their neighbor has a nicer house, and that everyone is paying the same percentage of their income to taxes.But the majority may just as well decide that those who have more ought to give up a bigger percent than those who have less. After all, the rich are ..well.. rich! Isn’t it unfair to let them off paying the same percentage as the poor when they’ll have more left over at the end of the day? So the majority invents tax brackets. If you make a lot of money then you should pay 40% of it in taxes (or 60% or 85%), and that way we can fund the government at the same level but reduce the majority’s rates to 7% (or 5%, or 2%), and try to give the poor a better quality of life.  But at the same time we have inadvertently created a system where the greater your achievements, the more screwed you get. The path of least resistance is mediocrity.. work hard enough to make ends meet but don’t reach for the stars because they’ll just get taxed away from you.
• Well the minority didn’t vote for those tax brackets, that’s for sure, but what can they do? Move away? Use an offshore tax haven? Create the republican party to fool a religious majority into voting for the interests of an economic minority? ;)In any case, the rich (like anyone else) won’t give up their earnings easily. Now we move into a tale of have vs. have-not, evil vs. downtrodden. When the minority becomes not simply a different point of view but an enemy, then the rosy picture of democracy loses a bit of luster. Now we have class warfare. The minority tries to escape or control the masses, and the majority starts pricing out torches and pikes.

No matter what your views are on economics, what I wanted to point out there was how something basic such as a decision on how to fund the government can quite easily turn very ugly over time, even though “democracy” and majority rule have been applied throughout the process.

To avoid a tyranny of the majority there must be boundaries. We can outline areas that are off-limits for the majority to infringe, even if they feel like it later on. This is the point of a bill of rights– these rights are ensured, protected; inalienable.

I have met very few people who believe that freedom of expression should be an inalienable right, which saddens me. Instead, most people I have encountered only believe in the freedom to express views that are not abhorrent to them. The rules are different depending on individual, culture, and state. It may be fine to speak out against the government, but not utter a disrespect for a certain religion or offend the moral majority’s sensibility. It may be taboo (or even dangerous) to go against the government. It might be ok to say whatever you want as long as it’s not “hateful” (in the US, hate speech is not protected by the first amendment).

It is easy for the majority to support expression that it agrees with. This is not freedom of speech, it is not a right that needs protecting. The majority cannot tyrannize itself (unless perhaps via a tragedy of the commons, a subject for another post).

To protect expression is to embrace that which offends. Not to accept or condone its content, but to champion the right for others to proclaim it (even when we are certain they’re idiots). To guarantee this (or any) right, the majority must choose to uphold it in cases they personally abhor, or else it becomes utterly meaningless. For how can we enforce even a codified protection when the majority chooses to vote it down?

And with that, I direct your attention to the international effort to stop criticism of Islam. (Hat tip to Infidel Guy.) If you live somewhere that nominally supports freedom of expression, take a moment and consider what life would be like when criticism gets banned.

I spent rather a long time contemplating the creation of this site. There seem to be many good reasons not to bother, including but not limited to:

• What do I have to say that merits reading; hasn’t everything of value been expressed before, by my intellectual and literary superiors?
• Aren’t I setting myself up for failure and facing an inevitable fate of blog-atrophy? Untended sites bleach lonely in the sun, soon colonized and eventually overgrown by spam comments. Abandoned pages linger in their decrepitude, the forlorn message of their prime lost to the entropy of an uncaring internet.
• Won’t people read the above bullet-point and think “What a pretentious git, thinks he can write all fancy..” ?
• What if my opinions anger people, and they burn down my internet?
• For that matter, who are these alleged people? Will anyone in fact find this site and stay long enough to care? Why are you here, if you are at all?

I’ll try not to be pretentious, and as for my writing I will consider it a victory if I can communicate without you dosing off or becoming irate too often.

I feel like a speck on the cosmic ocean, with a hat-tip to Sagan. I am filled with awe at the incomprehensibility of the cosmos, and the evident reality that our universe has evolved rudimentary internal sense organs (life) with which to discover itself. But I’m not a cosmic hippie, by any means. I doubt most of my posts will consist of “wow, check out this awesome space image”. Though there are many awesome images, there are already quite a number of interpages on which to find them.

Neither will you find me selling truth here. There are plenty of vendors for that already, so it’s a tough market to break into. There’s not much quality control, though, and I have come to doubt there’s much quality in the first place. Be skeptical of anyone who claims to possess truth (or a map of how to get there).

What I will do is talk about what I think, why (or whether) I believe it’s right, and, oftener than not, why I think other people are wrong. That last one not just because it’s fun to be mean, but because with a little careful reasoning it is often easy to refute even a subtle fallacy or cognitive bias. By contrast it’s a much harder task to show that something is right, or even likely to be right. But there are tools we can use.

I’m talking about science, and more broadly, reasoned discourse and critical thinking. I don’t claim to have a privileged frame of reference about these things; in fact I strongly request peer review and critique. See, I’m a bit of an odd duck– I’m not afraid of being wrong, and I’ll usually want to continue an argument until all sides come to the same understanding. Not to prove I’m right, but to find out if I am.

Of course if you’re paying attention you’ll see that I’ve already contradicted myself. According to 3 paragraphs up I claimed there’s no such thing as being right, rather one can only:

• Be logically wrong due to invalid reasoning
• Be very probably wrong due to contradictory evidence
• Be likely wrong due to a stronger theory running circles around yours
• Be not yet demonstrated as wrong by any of the above

Yep, that’s the best we can do: “not known to be wrong at this time”. So when I casually lob terms like right or true about, that’s usually shorthand for “as far as is currently understood” either by me, by some community consensus, etc. Is this unfortunate? Does lacking truth put us at a disadvantage to others who seem to spout it incessantly? I say no; in fact I believe we have the upper hand.

Truth, by definition, must be correct, immutable. Sounds good, right? But “correct” based on what? If you populate your head with truths then you run into trouble when incompatible information comes along. Your possible actions are basically:

• Accept both truths, and try to ignore the ever-growing friction of cognitive dissonance by believing that there is a smarter person (or being) for whom all these pieces fit harmoniously together. This is the solution of a child, who builds understanding up in pieces over time and, for the most part, trusts that adults have got the harder stuff covered. It also works for believers in the virtue of a higher power, such as a god, leader, or government.
• Choose to accept one truth and reject the other, based on some personal or social criteria. Keeping the first truth and rejecting someone else’s is the solution of a believer. Adopting the new truth and forsaking the old one is the solution of a convert.

That sounds a bit harsh perhaps, but this is the way almost everyone I know was brought up to think. It seems strange, almost like some unethical psychology experiment in how limiting critical thinking skills at an early age will affect society. But, I digress. To fill the vacuum of truth up with knowledge, we have figured out some clever frameworks to help us form and test theories, argue about them, account for our own bias, and collaborate on building a better understanding.

Science is an open-source approach to thinking. Many people collaborate using the same rules to amplify their individual efforts and achieve far grander results. Add together a lot of people and time, shake well, and now instead of dancing to make it rain we are measuring the exact age of the universe. Each person need not understand every facet of scientific knowledge to derive benefit from it. We can “believe” that (for practical purposes) it’s right. But if desired, all the tools and information are out there– each structure of theories ready to be scrutinized, improved, or replaced with a more compelling alternative.

So fine, we don’t get truth per se, but we do get an ever-refined understanding of the cosmos. And some other cool stuff falls out along the way such as modern medicine, and this intarnet.