The Refusers: Proving Orac's corollary to Poe's Law
The anti-vaccine movement has degenerated to the point where it is impossible to distinguish real from parody. It's just like Poe's law with fundamentalists, only this time with antivaccinationists.
I sometimes wonder if a basic variety of reality-checking is inherent in being able to say that you can no longer distinguish the real thing from a parody. Knowing that the distinction exists at all is pretty vital, too.
Not every day you open the paper and see news about how key concepts in human history may be upended.
Turkey: Archeological Dig Reshaping Human History - Newsweek.com
... it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple ... drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city. ...
... The temples offer unexpected proof that mankind emerged from the 140,000-year reign of hunter-gatherers with a ready vocabulary of spiritual imagery, and capable of huge logistical, economic, and political efforts.
Given that there's neuroscience to support the need to find something greater than the self (the "religion instinct" or "transcendent urge"), this makes sense. I'm expecting a lot more work to be done on this subject, both in terms of new research and re-evaluating everything that's already crossed our desks. (Is language itself a product of this, for instance?)
Before this, Turkey had Çatalhöyük; now, they have something to be even prouder of as far as historical treasures go.
First off. Ebert, as usual, nails it.
The gathering storm - Roger Ebert's Journal
We need to pull in our belts, pay more taxes, demand more value for our taxes, and say no to an ideology that requires converting our health money into corporate profits. We should to raise the lowest wages, and lower the highest ones. We have to return to the saying my father quoted to me a hundred times: "A fair day's work for fair day's pay." No, I don't think everyone should be paid the same wage. If you earn a lot of money, you have a right to a lot of money. If you earn it. But when Wall Street bosses are paid millions in bonuses for bankrupting their firms, and their political tools in Congress oppose a better minimum wage, that's plain wrong. It's rotten. People who defend it with ideology are strapped to a cruel ideology.
There's some other good notes in there about how Chicago really screwed itself to the wall when they privatized parking meters. How did they not think that would simply allow the company that controlled them to raise prices through the roof, with the city getting nothing but some chump change upfront? Why do we insist on, as Crass put it, bailing out the basement when there's holes in the roof?
As Paul Krugman also put it, it's time to make banking "boring" again and stop trying to create money out of nothing — with its concomitant consequences of taking blood from stones. (I like how one commentator tried to slap back at this by insisting that bubbles are nothing new. Well, sure, so is war and famine; that doesn't mean we should sit around and let them happen.)
Second, some insight into why things like this might be happening: people tend to focus on the messenger (are they like me?) and how closely the message matches their own existing beliefs than what the evidence itself suggests. The article itself is about climate change, but you could apply this to most any debate where there's evidence to be bandied about. Yes, that major snow- and rain-fall we've had on the East Coast actually confirms what's going on: a hotter overall climate = more evaporation = more precipitation in places that get it and less in places that don't.
Third, a truly amazing story about composer David Cope — wait, he's actually a music professor with a side gig in teaching computer science. He writes programs that compose music — and his compositions are startlingly, well, human. Play the samples in the article. That said, giving credit to anyone — or anything — other than Cope seems premature.
1.
One for the Loaded Questions Dept.: Do School Libraries Need Books?
My favorite line: "Books offer a place away from the inbox, where we can go to quiet our minds and reflect."
I'm a little dismayed at how much more difficult it becomes with every passing year to disconnect from all this stuff and just sit somewhere quietly with nothing but a book and our own mind for company. (Or another human being, for that matter.) The Kindle's got a wireless connection — bingo, instant distraction. Yes, you can turn it off, but that's not even the real point. I like the fact that a book is a thing in itself and nothing else, and you have to take it as it is and not change the channel, so to speak.
2.
Something else that came to me as I was shoveling out the driveway: "How does extreme weather affect the public’s understanding or misunderstanding of global climate change?" The way I understand it — warming means more melting, which in turn means increased precipitation in parts of the world where you have such things. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if we uncover plenty of good evidence that putting all that vapor and CO² into the atmosphere makes things all the more violent.
3.
And here's a bit of dismay about the "new global novel", which is inevitably going to be in English (since, so goes the thinking, if you're not published in English you aren't really published):
What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives.
The comments go on to argue whether or not this is the case for genre fiction (Stieg Larsson's books come to mind) or truly ambitious literary work (Jorge Luis Borges).
If I recall correctly this is something that has been already bemoaned about modern Korean literature (I can't remember the reference, assume it's someone else's): much of modern Korean writing relies heavily on words ported in from English and other languages rather than Korea's own native pool of cultural references and linguistic choices. Not long ago I read Young-Ha Kim's I Have The Right To Destroy Myself, and while I was stuck reading a translation (!) of the original I could see how that might be considered a case study for just such capitulation.
Most of the time I don't mind when people believe weird things. What I do mind is when people believe weird things that are counter-scientific — that is, when they fly right in the face of things for which we have plenty of evidence.
The former is things like belief in one or more (or no) gods. The latter is things like the Jenny McCarthy brand of antivaccination know-nothing-ism.
The former is something for polite debate and spirited discussion. The latter deserves to be dragged out into the open and exposed for being downright dangerous.
To wit: the Jenny McCarthy Body Count. I admit the name of the site's not terribly diplomatic (and the sea is also broad, salty, and rather damp). I'm also not sure diplomacy will work anymore, because the anti-vax movement and their associated counter-scientific cronies are not interested in playing nice and are not interested in debating the issues at hand. They are politicians in the bluntest and most cynical sense of the term. They want a captive audience that will help them bring that many more people around to their way of thinking.
Orac over at Respectful Insolence has been pounding on Jenny for a while now, underscoring how the anti-vax crew has no good evidence to support their position (c.f., this recent tidbit). What's become clearer over the last couple of years is how the anti-vax crew could, in the abstract, care less what evidence there really is for their position — it's just that much more fuel for the fire. And unfortunately, many people lap it up because they don't know and don't care that science isn't a popularity contest or a matter of what feels right or a question of who's the underdog (because the underdog is always right).
I am grateful that the public-facing portion of the scientific community is finally realizing that not everyone is going to play nice, and that the other side is far louder, mouthier, and more reckless than they would ever give them credit for. But they need to ramp way up and head off the next wave of counter-scientific lunacy before it gets traction enough to put people at risk.
[Also worthy of note: StopJenny.com]
Bad Astronomy is great any day of the week, but of particular note is a current post wherein Phil Plait pillories Deepak Chopra for an article in which Chopra slaps at "skepticism". "Skeptic" is apparently Chopra's word for "someone not gullible enough for me".
That the latter piece was written for the Huffington Post is all the more depressing; over the last several years they've turned into a breeding ground for alterna-"science" nonsense of all stripes (anti-vaccination being one of the most prominent and blatantly offensive).
Chopra blows awful hard on the trumpet of Wonder, the idea that having a cold sterile scientific worldview kills your sense of joy in life, an idea only slightly dumber than wrapping your noggin in tinfoil to keep out the alien radio waves. Plait himself is a beautiful example of how science evokes a sense of wonder: most every week there's a picture of the surface of another world, or the depths of the cosmos — images that cry out to be captioned with Douglas Adams's quote "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
I had a parallel discussion of sorts the other day, about (of all things) the Large Hadron Collider. No matter what happens, the results are bound to be interesting. If we don't discover the Higgs Boson, that's as monumental as if we do — either way, science moves forward, and everyone on both sides will gain something. Truth is not a zero-sum game — unless you're Chopra, and can only support your worldview by picking and choosing. (Anything with the word "quantum" is good, because you can fuzz up your definitions aplenty by simply attaching it wherever needed, even when it has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Anything with "evidence" or "skeptic" is bad, because it's that much harder to pull the wool over your own eyes when you have good experimental controls.)
Maybe it's the wording that's the biggest problem. One of the commenters put his finger on this:
A skeptic is not someone who says “It is not true”–that’s just another flavor of dogmatic. A skeptic is someone who says “How can I be sure it is true?” and lives honestly according to that fundamental uncertainty. This is why science is so closely associated with skepticism. It is not the handing down of dogmas about what does exist (NOR about what does not exist). It is a method for trying to attain certitude in a universe wherein certainty might not be possible.
Or maybe not. Saying things like this does not keep the woo-meisters (I love that word) from attacking the concept of science's perpetual inquiry itself as another kind of dogmatism — the dogmatism of uncertainty. At which point the word "dogmatic" has been redefined to encompass every possible stance, and the nature of the argument has been revealed to be nothing more than whoever can score the most points with whatever audience is looking on.
I go back to Holocaust denial a great deal as a reference point for this sort of thing, because I see the same mechanic there in a different form. It isn't about finding the truth. It's about gaining and keeping an audience who will support you, and by doing anything — lying, distorting facts, smearing opponents, stabbing your own people in the back — to get there. It's the other guy who's dogmatic and closed-minded, not you. It's the other guy who's Suppressing The Truth. It's the other guy who's Keeping You Down.
You never see Chopra grousing about how, say, aviation engineers need to have more of a sense of wonder and trust in the quantum unity of the cosmos, &c. Maybe because he really doesn't feel like having the plane he's flying in spontaneously depressurize at 37,000 feet while he's on his way to his next lecture gig?
Some of you might know Levitt & Dunbar's Freakonomics, a book in something of the Tipping Poing / Black Swan vein. The book's premise, since expanded into a regular New York Times feature, is that the economics of things are often counterintuitive and unintended consequences are a way of life.
Now they have a follow-up, entitled SuperFreakonomics, one chapter of which deals with global climate change, and it's ticking people off. Not because it's zinging those stuffed-shirt know-it-all scientists, but because it's grievously wrong in basic factual ways.
For one, it's ticking off Ken Caldeira, one of the very climate scientists L&D consulted for the book. He's livid because they took a great deal of what he said out of context, and turned his urging for rapid action on climate change into a wait-and-see approach. ("It is essentially immoral for us to be making devices (automobiles, coal power plants, etc) that use the atmosphere as a sewer for our waste products." Emphasis mine.)
Paul Krugman was also dismayed by what he read. He took the additional step of going back to the papers referenced by L&D and seeing what they actually said, and also found a good deal of misquotation or outright distortion. He was disgusted by the book's contrarian, everything-you-know-is-wrong approach — which is okay when you're dealing with relatively trivial issues like media punditry, but not when you're talking about an issue this, well, global. Other people have also weighed in and found the book seriously wanting.
Someone else (I can't find the reference right now) mentioned that this sort of thing happens when you have people who are not scientists per se, or who haven't bothered to learn much about how science works, weighing in on scientific issues. Then again, it's not as if they're appealing to an audience that is all that scientifically literate anyway. They seem to think science is a matter of scoring easy points and clever debating tactics, not assessing what the evidence indicates. And the vast weight of the evidence we have to date shows us that raising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere is a Really Bad Idea.
I was similarly annoyed with the vaccination-paranoia crowd (yes, Bill Maher, I'm talking about you), or the people who were convinced the Large Hadron Collider was going to create an earth-swallowing black hole for the same reasons. They clearly didn't understand what the LHC was doing, or why, or to what end, or how black holes are formed in the first place.
And they didn't care. They were speaking from their fears, much as other people are compelled to speak from their smugness or their ignorance. They believe that speaking from fear and ignorance gives their words the legitimacy of fact — especially when their audience is listening for the same reasons. That's like a guy dealing with the low gas gauge in his car by taping it to the "F" position and driving even faster.
One book that I wish could be updated for the present day is Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies: In The Name of Science. It was originally published in 1952 with some updates in 1957, and while it's remained in print it hasn't been given a formal new edition since — even if the vast majority of the kookery and crankery talked about within hasn't changed one whit. That puts it in fine company with Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, another book which remains more or less as-is since its original publication decades ago but only because some things never change.
Part of the reason I'd love to see Fads updated is because of this sentence in the foreword: "Today, science reporting in the American press is freer of humbug and misinformation than ever before in history." That may have been true in 1952. Today, it is most definitely not true. Science reporting has to fight damned hard against humbug and misinformation, simply because it's that much easier to be flooded by it.
Case in point: a piece in today's Science Times that gives entirely too much space to a very, very silly theory about why the Large Hadron Collider will not detect the Higgs Boson:
... the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
I Am Not Making This Up. (© Dave Barry)
Sure, it’s crazy, and CERN should not and is not about to mortgage its investment to a coin toss. The theory was greeted on some blogs with comparisons to Harry Potter. But craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe.
As per Carl Sagan: They laughed at Copernicus; they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. The wackiness of a theory has zero correlation with its potential correctness. And this isn't even Harry Potter physics; this is Cloudy With A Chance Of Meat Balls.
Other physicists who have chimed in are all pretty much holding their nose at how wretched the theory in question is; many are frankly embarrassed that it wasn't intended as parody (or at the very least indistinguishable from same). Something that the Times piece does not mention is how arXiv is often littered with rubbish like this, that it may well be to scientific papers what Fanfiction.net is to good writing, and that you need a good deal of patience and often a stiff drink or three to separate the signal from the noise.
Part of why I'm annoyed as I am with the Times article is because it plays a game I see in entirely too much science journalism. Crazy Thing X seems crazy, but only because all the Great Discoveries of the past also looked crazy! This ignores the fact that most real scientific work isn't of the eureka! variety; it's actually quite boring from the outside. It's the slow accumulation of observation and insight based on the work done by previous scientists. Breakthroughs, when they do happen, are treated with immense skepticism and have to be reproduced by other people to be credible.
What I resented most was the tone of the Times piece, the disingenuous "I dunno, I'm just sayin'" attitude. It smacks of the same anti-intellectual weaseling that characterized Charles Fort's books, which were amusing as fantasy but worthless as any kind of critique of scientific discipline. Martin Gardner wept.
The ever-excellent Orac takes his Cleats of Logic to the face of the "Obama=Hitler" crowd. He also does a nice bit of shoe-leather research in actually digging up the text of the debated legislation and examining it in detail, which is something I haven't seen done by many people on either side of the debate.
He gets most of his mojo from dismantling crank medicine, but talked earlier this month about the ways mainstream medicine can be undermined by crank-tastic influences — e.g., "pharma ghostwriting".
When a drug company pays a publisher to publish a fake journal (six, actually) reprinting articles favorable to its products, it's a threat to science-based medicine.
(Just so you don't think he's giving the boys on this side of the aisle a free pass.)
Magazine Preview - Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch - NYTimes.com
A 2003 study by a group of Harvard economists led by David Cutler found that the rise of food preparation outside the home could explain most of the increase in obesity in America. Mass production has driven down the cost of many foods, not only in terms of price but also in the amount of time required to obtain them. ... Cutler and his colleagues demonstrate that as the “time cost” of food preparation has fallen, calorie consumption has gone up ... They found that when we don’t have to cook meals, we eat more of them: as the amount of time Americans spend cooking has dropped by about half, the number of meals Americans eat in a day has climbed; since 1977, we’ve added approximately half a meal to our daily intake.
Sayonara, Mr. Fatty! hinted at many of the same things, too — and these are things I've suspected for a while but found difficult to articulate. We've made it surpassingly easy to overeat, to surround ourselves with calorically-dense but nutritionally-meager food, and to assume that such things can be substitutes for more time-established eating habits. (My mother has a rule about meals: you can eat as much as you like when you're at the table, but forget about snacks unless it's something like crudities.)
Among the other things Vertical sent me recently — and which I didn't review if only because I didn't feel I was competent to speak about them at the time — were a series of cookbooks by celebrity chef Kentaro Kobayashi. He emphasizes ease of preparation, but even an "easy" self-prepared meal is still that much more work than something you pull out of the freezer and stick in the microwave. And probably better for you on all counts.
Why We Get Lost in Books - Yahoo! News
Any avid reader knows the power of a book to transport you into another world, be it the wizard realm of "Harry Potter" or the legal intrigue of the latest John Grisham. Part of the reason we get lost in these imaginary worlds might be because our brains effectively simulate the events of the book in the same way they process events in the real world, a new study suggests.
Not too far from what I had suspected myself, actually.
This reminded me of something else I'd read, about how people with pronounced sociopathic tendencies process things that should have emotional heft with parts of their brains that are normally reserved for things like puzzles or linguistics. Perhaps those two portions of the brain are more intimately related than we think, and pass things back and forth between each other more freely than it might first appear.
For those with NetFlix: Carl Sagan's Cosmos is now available for instant viewing.
One of the blogs I read regularly is Respectful Insolence, written by a (thus-far-pseudonymous) oncologist. He is proud of the work he does, and he has no tolerance for those who attack his work out of stupidity, spite or miseducation. People who just don't know are bad enough; people who actively go out of their way to remain stupid are a whole 'nother brand of burning stupid entirely.
The blog itself is, like Ebert's blog, a source of a great many interesting and insightful commentators — and, unlike Ebert's blog, also a dumping ground for comments from the occasional wingnut. Sometimes they are relatively harmless, like the Libertarian-with-the-cap-L types who believe in "medical freedom" (and at the same time betray almost total ignorance of how medicine or science actually work); sometimes you get full-blown, raw-throated rage.
Most recently "Orac", as the doctor calls himself, has been following the increasingly sad story of Daniel Hauser, a young man with Hodgkin's lymphoma whose mother is refusing to allow him conventional treatment that may very well save his life. HL is, is caught early enough, extremely curable; I know a couple of people who have had it, been treated for it, and have gotten on with their lives. Daniel's mother refuses to let him be treated and has in fact gone so far as to abduct the kid and disappear with him (possibly to Mexico, home of a good deal of cancer quackery).
The post and the comments about this most recent turn of events have been terrific reading. For one, there has been a good deal of intelligent, informed debate about the ethics of the situation. The poster "James Sweet" is a good example of this: he's hesitant and uncertain about the benefits of forcing treatment on someone, but after people explain to him the situation is not as tentative as it might first appear (the kid is clearly not capable of making an informed decision; the mother's behavior amounts to endangering her child; etc.), he goes on to derive some good insights from the whole situation. I liked that: people were approaching a touchy, difficult subject and actually learning something.
And then came "Lee". His argument (against having the kid taken from his parents so that his life could be saved) was that "anyone should be able to turn down a good deal, even if he doesn't know how good of deal, even a life-saving deal". And "Has freedom been trumped by medical nazis [Godwin's Law!] in your part of the country. Doctors are smart but not smart enough to take away your decision making."
Good thing the other people in the thread didn't take this attitude lying down:
... you're cool with people dying for no "great cause" other than simple ignorance. and not ignorance amidst a culture where everyone is equally ignorant and no other options have yet been presented, but ignorance as an island in a country and culture where other options are known and widely practiced.
you seem to want to champion one's right to make one's own decision free of coercion, and that seems superficially very honorable. what i cannot understand is how you construe making a choice in ignorance to be a genuinely free and true choice.
dying to promote the "noble right of willful ignorance" is never a worthy death.
willful ignorance shouldn't be celebrated in any functioning society. when it is, and by the majority, that society is guaranteed to be on the brink of total social (and perhaps physical) total collapse. [*]
Go check out the whole thread, it's well worth it. Ditto the blog itself.
[* My feelings about "alternative" medicine are simple: there's no "alternative" medicine. There's stuff that can be demonstrated to work, and stuff that doesn't. The former we call, simply, medicine.]
I never thought much of Malcolm Gladwell, maybe because he reminded me entirely too much of Desmond Morris for his own good. Morris wrote The Naked Ape, in which he tried to use argument-by-analogy to draw rather shaky and tenuous connections between men in civilization and animals in general. Much of Morris's work was based on conceits about animals that were developed by observing them in captivity, which is a little like doing a general study of human child development and only using children born to parents in prison as the sample pool.
Gladwell's arguments are not much better: he creates a theory, and then uses singular examples as evidence for the theory, instead of looking at the evidence first. To wit: Blink, his book about the "science" of intuitive decision-making, which got savaged by Wesley Cecil in April 2006 Skeptical Inquirer. The opening anecdote for the book, about how an art expert saw in a second that a given piece of art was a fake after others had labored over it for long periods of time, doesn't even support his case.
Ditto Outliers, which used a similarly anecdotal approach, and suffered from the same flaws. The ideas expressed in each book are intriguing: Blink purports to deal with how people can make instant assessments of a situation, while Outliers tries to explain why certain people are successful and others are not — although the biggest wisdom you'll mine from the former is that some people are really good at making instant assessments of a situation (or not), and from the latter it's that some people are successful and others are not. In short, the books do not really explain anything, which not surprising given that they are mainly marketed to businessmen and not laypersons curious about science.
Outliers comes even closer to Morris's "man is an animal so why bother civilizing him" jungle turf:
In Gladwell’s account, individual traits play a smaller role in explaining success while social circumstances play a larger one. As he told Zengerle, “I am explicitly turning my back on, I think, these kind of empty models that say, you know, you can be whatever you want to be. Well, actually, you can’t be whatever you want to be. The world decides what you can and can’t be.” [*]
Well, duh. That's not even noncontroversial; that's a mere truism. The real question is, to what degree are we allowed to strive for things not immediately provided by our existing environment? That's a more nuanced question, and one that deserves a good book, but from what I've seen Malcolm Gladwell isn't going to be the one writing it.
Ebert goes to town on Ben Stein for the risible Expelled.
I used to like Ben Stein. After Expelled — for my money the worst "documentary" since those wretched "Prophecies of Nostradamus" scare reels in the 1970s — my respect for him reached subzero. Read the article and find out why, and check out this other exposé on the flick as well, which has some really wonderful rebuttals of the movie's claims under the title "Set Ben Straight."
In the next week or so I'm going to begin the next phase of the consolidation of all the disparate sites I've been managing. The individual book blogs are all going to get slurped up and redirected, along with the comments attached to them, and the domain names I had pointing to them will be redirected properly. I'll also be putting back the ad block that used to exist in the sidebar, although I have to learn a little about how to design proper MT-compatible widgets before doing that.
A big advantage to doing this is that all the news I'll be posting about everything will show up here, on the front page; you won't have to dig through a bunch of different places to see what I'm up to. If things ramp up the way I hope, then that'll be crucially important.
And now some links:
From the NY Times Paper Cuts blog, a piece about bookshelf etiquette:
I like to think of my bookshelves as an enormous store of potential energy — mental energy, that is: I have a non-working fireplace — and an insurance policy against the day when electronic readers have taken over, all the world’s bookstores have gone out of business, and I have to barricade my door against virus-infested zombies who want to drink my blood and ravage my (unread) copy of “Daniel Deronda.”
In my case, if I buy something and read it and realize I've finished with it, it goes into a shelf that's reserved for giveaways. I've donated sizeable chunks of my book collection to people a lot more starved for reading matter than I ever will be — like a friend of mine who lost most of his books when an upstairs apartment in his building flooded and drowned a good deal of his collection.
Also, the Brooklyn Museum is having an exhibition of Japanese woodcut prints!
Judging by the exhibition catalog, which has color reproductions of 213 prints, many quite beautiful, a larger and aesthetically superior exhibition could have been assembled from the Van Vleck collection. But Ms. Mueller’s intent was something other than a “greatest hits” show. She wanted to tell the history of the Utagawa school and, in so doing, convey something of the complexity of the Japanese printmaking business in general.
Las but definitely not least: I forgot to post something about Arthur C. Clarke's passing, but that's only because so much of what I wanted to say has been said better by so many other people. The one comment I could come up with was, "Sir Arthur now knows the Nine Billion Names of God."
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