Thus endeth Tebowmania

Peyton Manning decides to play in Denver:

ESPN’s Adam Schefter and Chris Mortensen are reporting that free agent quarterback Peyton Manning has told his agent, Tom Condon, to open contract negotiations with the Denver Broncos.

And barring an “unexpected snag” in contract talks, Schefter and Mort are reporting that Manning will become the next quarterback of the Broncos.

The Broncos will try to trade Tim Tebow.

Like Tiki, I am flabbergasted. Not that the Broncos chose to sign Manning rather than let it ride with The Miracle of Tebow, but that Manning chose Denver over San Francisco. Time will tell, of course, but if his goal was to win one more Super Bowl, I think it’s pretty obvious that San Francisco would have been the more certain bet.

I’d assume Denver will trade Tebow to Jacksonville; if nothing else, he’ll sell plenty of jerseys and tickets.

WND column

Slutgate and Society

Peggy Noonan complains about the coarsening of societal discourse, and in particular, the publicly demeaning and diminishing of women based on the fact that they are women, in her article titled “America’s Real War on Women.” As one would expect of yet another article about the difficulty of women’s lives written by a woman, it is long on emotion and short on logic. But it is also more than a little amusing. Noonan’s theory, you see, is that the Internet is to blame. Curse those inanimate objects and their iniquitous ways!

By the way, I should note that in addition to modifying the name of the column and changing the link to Roissy’s site, WND also edited the last sentence of the column. I have no objection to them doing so; their site, their call. That being said, here is the real final sentence:

What Peggy Noonan does not realize is that whereas men once assumed that a woman was a lady until proven otherwise, increasing numbers of them now quite reasonably assume that women are shallow and superficial sluts until they are provided with credible evidence to the contrary.

Criminalizing justice

Guilty for the crime of demanding a day in court:

The jury, which deliberated for more than two days, rejected a bunch of counts against Ravi, including the hate crime charges involving Clementi’s visitor (who testfied during the trial, identified only as M.B.). Because of this selectivity, one juror told the Trenton Star-Ledger, “You feel like justice has been served.” I don’t. Ravi is scheduled to be sentenced on May 21. In addition to a potentially lengthy prison sentence, he faces the likelihood of deportation to India, where he was born. Reprehensible as his conduct was, he does not deserve either of those punishments. Had Clementi not killed himself a few days after what he dismissively called Ravi’s “five sec peep,” leading to the completely unproven conjecture that Ravi’s spying drove him to suicide (a claim the prosecution never made during the trial), Ravi probably would not have faced criminal charges at all, let alone a possible 10-year sentence. Before the trial the prosecutors offered him a deal that involved no jail time and a chance to avoid deportation, which suggests even they do not believe he should be punished as severely as a violent felon. So in addition to all of the questionable crimes for which Ravi is about to be punished, there is one more: insisting on his right to a trial.

Setting aside the absurdity of the “bias intimidation” laws and the idea that the jury was capable of correctly reading, post mortem, the late roommate’s thoughts in the absence of any testimonial or documentary evidence, Jacob Sullum is right to note that the main reason Dharun Ravi is facing jail time is because he refused to be served up as the sacrificial victim demanded by the increasingly gay-influenced mainstream media.

While it makes practical sense to offer criminals far lighter sentencing in order to avoid the time and expense of trying them, it is a complete miscarriage of justice. Such a system rapidly devolves into one where even the completely innocent given massive incentive to plea guilty, not only because they avoid the risk of a disproportionate punishment, but also save themselves the expense of defending themselves.

The myth of the evolution myth

The New Scientist doesn’t understand what “a prediction” is, and in doing so, underlines the very point it is attempting to dismiss:

Cosmologists make precise predictions about what will happen to the universe in 20 billion years’ time. Biologists struggle to predict how a few bacteria in a dish might evolve over 20 hours. Some claim that this lack of precise predictive power means evolution is not scientific.

However, what matters in science is not how much you can predict on the basis of a theory or how precise those predictions are, but whether the predictions you can make turn out to be right. Meteorologists don’t reject chaos theory because it tells them it is impossible to predict the weather 100% accurately – on the contrary, they accept it because weather follows the broad patterns predicted by chaos theory.

The amusing thing is that in an effort to claim that evolution really is a predictive science despite the inability of scientists to use it to predict anything, the article then denies that the failure of any evolution-based predictions could falsify the theory. And it is telling that the primary examples it cites cannot be reasonably described as predictions, which relate to the future and not to the past.

“Most predictions relate to very specific aspects of evolutionary theory. If a eusocial mammal like the naked mole-rat had not been found, for instance, it would have proved only that Alexander’s ideas about the evolution of eusocial behaviour were probably wrong, not that there is anything wrong with the wider theory.”

Right, just like the failure of Keynesian theory to predict the simultaneous rising inflation and unemployment of the 1970s only related to the very specific aspects of the historical American economy, not that there was anything wrong with the wider theory. This article makes it very clear that evolution, or if one wishes to be more specific, the theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection is not a science when viewed from either a predictive or Popperian perspective.

Peggy Noonan’s real war

Peggy Noonan gets the vapors:

But the real war is against women in American public life, in politics and media most obviously, but in other spheres as well. In this war, leaders who are women are publicly demeaned and diminished based on the fact that they are women. They are the object of sexual slurs, and insulted in sexual terms. The words used are vulgar, and are meant to tear down and embarrass. Every woman in American public life knows of it. They talk about it in private. They’ve all experienced it.

Here are some of the words that have been hurled the past few years at public figures who are female: “slut,” “whore,” “prostitute,” “bimbo.” You know the other, coarser words that have been used. But the point is, these are not private insults. They are said in public. This is something new in American political life, that women can be spoken of this way.

Wait, I thought they wanted equality… they wanted equality, right? So, why shouldn’t one call a slut a slut? Now, I am thankfully not privy to the details of Ms Sandra Fluke’s sex life, but given that we know she is a 30 year-old unmarried woman who claims to spend $3,0001,000 on birth control annually, I think that “slut” is probably a significant understatement. According to the Internet – that same Internet which Ms Noonan holds responsible for giving her the vapors – a box of 12 Trojan Magnum XL Condoms is $9.29.

So, we can conclude that if Ms Fluke requires $1,000 annually, she must be having sex around 3,8751,292 times per year. Frankly, it’s amazing that she has any time to attend her law school classes, much less testify before Potemkin Congressional panels.

Noonan claims openly expressed male contempt for women is “the real war on women”, which is more than a little ironic, as her argument is only likely to generate more contempt, especially among the sort of men who tend to believe that the abortion of millions of female babies every year is an activity much more deserving of the title.

Comment update

Thanks to the HTML master MK – who has the same initials, but is NOT Markku of the Dread Ilk – the Blogger comments now closely resemble CoComment and are much more legible. He was not, however, able to recreate CoCo’s special mashup feature, which I’m sure everyone will regret. A few things.

1. Clicking on the post title now accesses the comments, embedded below the post.

2. Anonymous commenting is technically permitted. This doesn’t mean you should use it because it’s too confusing. Pick a name and stick with it; you don’t have to register, just use the Name/URL option and leave the URL blank. Anonymous comments will generally be shot on sight.

3. To post with the embedded comments, your browser must be set to accept third-party cookies. Otherwise, you’ll see the “post comment” box, you’ll be allowed to click both Preview and Publish, but the comments will not appear. I’m not crazy about this either; it wasn’t set to embedded previously because they didn’t work with my usual setup, but just set the cookies to flush when you close your browser and you’ll be fine.

4. At the bottom of the post, you can now cycle through the comments on the individual posts using the OLDER/NEWER text.

Science and the problem of the hammer

Stephen Law not only points out that science is fundamentally incapable of answering many questions and solving many puzzles, but that it wasn’t even involved in one of its landmark “experiments”:

KEY POINTS ARE:

(i) this is not a puzzle that can be solved by empirical research.
(ii) It’s a conceptual puzzle that requires a conceptual solution. It’s a puzzle that takes armchair reflection to solve.

So not every puzzle is a puzzle that is best solved by empirical investigation. Some of the deepest and most baffling puzzles can, in fact, only be solved by armchair reflection.

In fact, all sorts of interesting discoveries can be made from the armchair. Mathematical discoveries, for example, can be made from the armchair. They can be achieved by pure thought alone – without doing any data collection or laboratory experiments.

We can also RULE OUT certain hypothesis from the comfort of the armchair.

Suppose an explorer claims to have discovered a four-sided triangle on their travels. Should we mount an expedition to go and check whether this momentous claim is correct? Of course not. We can figure out, from the comfort of our armchairs, that no such triangle exists. Triangles, by definition, have three sides. So a four-sided triangle involves a contradiction. It cannot possibly exist.

This is a rather obvious example. It’s obvious that four-sided triangles are ruled out conceptually. They involve a logical contradiction. But sometimes what is ruled out conceptually is NOT so obvious.

Aristotle claimed that objects of different mass will fall at different speeds. A large, heavy metal ball will fall faster than a small, light metal ball.

Back in the late 16thC, Galileo proved that Aristotle was wrong. Some say he did this by dropping two balls off the top of the leaning tower of Pisa. The two balls landed at the same time. Neil Armstrong did the experiment with a feather and hammer on the Moon

But actually, Galileo probably didn’t perform that experiment. He actually performed a thought experiment – one that he describes in his book On Motion. And of course thought experiments can be run from the comfort of ones armchair.

Galileo reasoned like so…

Imagine two balls, one heavier than the other, connected by a string. Drop this system of objects from the top of a tower. If we assume heavier objects do indeed fall faster than lighter ones (and conversely, lighter objects fall slower), the string will soon pull taut as the lighter ball drags on and slows the fall of the heavier ball. But the system considered as a whole is heavier than the heavy ball alone, and therefore should fall faster than the heavy ball on its own. So Aristotle’s theory, just like the claim that there exists a four-sided triangle, generates a contradiction. Galileo could establish that it is false from the comfort of his armchair.

True, this is a scientist doing a scientific thought experiment, but it illustrates the point that highly significant discoveries can indeed be made from the armchair.

Of course, philosophers need to be scientifically literate. Scientific discoveries can be of philosophical relevance. But, at heart, philosophy IS an armchair discipline. And it is none the worse for that.

Philosophy is about conceptual investigation and clarification. Philosophers make conceptual discoveries. I have illustrated how they tackle conceptual puzzles – puzzles that the scientific method just isn’t equipped to solve.

They also probe what we take for granted, our common sense assumptions, sometimes with dramatic results. Philosophers may reveal that what we believe has quite shocking unacknowledged consequences, for example.

This can lead to important breakthroughs. Particularly in moral philosophy. Many of the most important developments over the last couple of hundreds years or so have come about because of philosophical reflection – questioning of, and thinking through the consequences of, some of our most basic moral assumptions and principles.

So philosophy, it seems to me, is not just fascinating, it is also hugely valuable. Blah blah…

Richard Dawkins thought the mirror puzzle and solution was science not philosophy (really? – the last two papers I read on it were in philosophy journals, and I cannot imagine they’d be published in a science journal as they were purely conceptual and involved no empirical claims). Richard wondered why what I do is labelled “philosophy” at all. It’s just thinking, he said.

It’s been conclusively demonstrated that Richard Dawkins doesn’t know much about history, theology, or philosophy. But I have to admit, I find it remarkable, bordering on astonishing, that he apparently doesn’t even know what philosophy is. No wonder he doesn’t believe in God, he doesn’t even believe in philosophy when it is being performed right in front of his face.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that due to their enthusiasm for science, the scientific-secular faithful is like the proverbial man with the hammer, always searching for a nail.

Of infidelity

The results of the Alpha Game survey on sexual fidelity. Here are three of the key observations:

1. 31% of women and 28% of men admit to cheating in their premarital relationships.

2. The risk of female sexual infidelity rises considerably with increased sexual experience.

3. The risk of both male and female sexual infidelity rises considerably with male sexual experience.

Mailvox: the autoneurotic atheist

EC wonders who is reading whom:

I love the blog and your book TIA; TIA is actually the best polemic I’ve ever read. Anyway, I saw that Edward Feser recently posted a blog article in which he says that the New Atheists engage in “mutual mental onanism”. That’s pretty close to your “atheist circle jerk”. So, who owes whom a royalty check here?

I think it is readily apparent that the use of the similar phrase – and it says much about the difference between Mr. Feser and me, mostly to his advantage, that he prefers the relatively genteel description “mutual mental onanism” to “bukkakelypse” – is nothing more than straightforward observation. It is simply an obvious metaphor for the autoneurotic activities of the leading New Atheists. The only significant difference between Mr. Feser’s independent observations and my own is my preference for the vulgate. It’s interesting to note that he also pins down the intrinsic anti-intellectualism of the Fowl Atheist’s misguided foray into philosophy.

“[T]hat Dawkins’ arguments are directed at ludicrous straw men has been demonstrated time and again (for example, here). Yet he resolutely declines to answer those who have exposed the numerous errors and fallacies in his writings — dismissing them as “fleas,” without explaining how exactly they have got his arguments wrong — or, in general, to debate anyone with expertise in the philosophy of religion. Meanwhile, the even more vitriolic P. Z. Myers’ main claim to New Atheist fame is his “Courtier’s reply” dodge, a shamelessly question-begging rationalization for remaining ignorant of what the other side actually says. New Atheists will ridicule their opponents, but actually read only each others’ work. Hence Christopher Hitchens derives his main arguments from Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss learns everything he needs to know from Hitchens, and Dawkins has his confidence in the atheist worldview bolstered from reading Krauss. And now this mutual mental onanism will be expanded across the National Mall. Somewhere Joycelyn Elders is smiling.”