Tag: science

Trolls are psychos

I’m sure it won’t come as a shock to anyone here to discover that scientists at the University of Manitoba have discovered that trolls really are horrible people. In fact, they are psychopathic and spend an inordinate amount of time on the Internet:

5.6 percent of survey respondents actually specified that they enjoyed “trolling.” By contrast, 41.3 percent of Internet users were “non-commenters,” meaning they didn’t like engaging online at all. So trolls are, as has often been suspected, a minority of online commenters, and an even smaller minority of overall Internet users.

The researchers conducted multiple studies, using samples from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk but also of college students, to try to understand why the act of trolling seems to attract this type of personality. They even constructed their own survey instrument, which they dubbed the Global Assessment of Internet Trolling, or GAIT, containing the following items:

I have sent people to shock websites for the lulz.

I like to troll people in forums or the comments section of websites.

I enjoy griefing other players in multiplayer games.

The more beautiful and pure a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt.

Yes, some people actually say they agree with such statements. And again, doing so was correlated with sadism in its various forms, with psychopathy, and with Machiavellianism. Overall, the authors found that the relationship between sadism and trolling was the strongest, and that indeed, sadists appear to troll because they find it pleasurable. “Both trolls and sadists feel sadistic glee at the distress of others,” they wrote. “Sadists just want to have fun … and the Internet is their playground!

Anyhow, one need have no sympathy for psychos like Andrew Marston, Hunt Stoddard, Greg Tingey, and Tad in his various identities. They are seeking attention and pleasure in the distress of others, which is why it is always a mistake to engage with them. That’s why I no longer bother to engage with them and simply ban them the moment it is obvious they have popped up again.

This also may explain why I am not inclined towards trolling. I test lower than the average on psychopathy, despite having other Dark Triad traits. And obviously I am not sadistic, since the only individual I take any pleasure in tormenting has repeatedly assured us that he actually enjoys the attention on the rare occasions that he notices it at all. It’s a real win-win situation.

“A nightmare for science”

It is remarkable how evolution enthusiasts can’t seem to reach the logical conclusion concerning their repeated inability to successfully debate creationists. Then again, if they had as solid a grasp on logic and statistics as they do on the various epicycles of their ever-evolving “theory”, they would not be evangelical evolutionists in the first place:

In a much-hyped showdown, “the Science Guy” tried to defend evolution against creationist Ken Ham, and proved how slick science-deniers can be. How did the guy who’s right go so wrong?

On many mornings, I wake up and think, “You know what this country needs? More culture war.” As I scramble up a couple eggs, I find myself wishing—fervently wishing—that we could spend more time reducing substantive issues to mere spectacle. Later, as I scrub the pan, I’ll fantasize about how those very spectacles might even funnel money toward some of the country’s most politicized religious groups.

Fortunately, Bill “the Science Guy” Nye has heard my wish—which, really, is the wish of a nation. Why else would he have traveled to Kentucky this week in order to debate Ken Ham, the young-earth creationist founder of Answers in Genesis, about the origins of the world?

Actually, there are two other reasons that Nye might have done so, and I’ve given both possibilities a great deal of thought in the past few days. The first is that Nye, for all his bow-tied charm, is at heart a publicity-hungry cynic, eager to reestablish the national reputation he once had as the host of a PBS show. When his stint on Dancing With the Stars ended quickly, Nye turned to the only other channel that could launch him back to national attention: a sensationalized debate, replete with the media buzz that he craves.

Possibility number two is that Nye is clueless—that, for all his skill as a science communicator, Nye has less political acumen than your average wombat.

After watching the debate, I’m leaning toward that second possibility. Last night, it was easy to pick out the smarter man on the stage. Oddly, it was the same man who was arguing that the earth is 6,000 years old. It was like watching the Broncos play the Seahawks. Nye never had a chance.

I didn’t watch the “debate”. I had no interest in it, surmising correctly, (as it turns out), that neither side would actually be debating, but were instead engaged in mutual preaching to their own choirs. And it is amusing to observe the wrestling with the temptation intellectual dishonesty poses to the evolutionists as a result of their frustration with their own inability to successful defend their faith

For example, the writer claims it is bullshit to distinguish between scientific evidence and historical extrapolation. He asserts: “We can use evidence from the present to extrapolate about the past.” Well, yes, but that doesn’t disprove Ham’s point, which isn’t so much a point as a basic fact. An extrapolation is not, by definition, an observation. Nor can a historical extrapolation be tested.

For some reason, science fetishists who understand very well that it is impossible to use science to prove that Abraham Lincoln succeeded George Washington as president do not understand that it is equally impossible to use science to prove that species X transformed into species Y. Extrapolation only takes us to the hypothesis part of the scientific equation, it does not get us past the necessary testing and observation aspects. Barring a time machine, it is history, not science.

And in the end, the author throws in the towel, admits defeat, and advocates a full-blown retreat:

You don’t need to be Sun Tzu to realize that, when it comes to guys like Ken Ham, you can’t really win. If you refuse to debate them, they claim to be censored. If you agree to debate them, you give them a public platform on which to argue that, yep, they’re being censored. Better not to engage at all, at least directly.

Needless to say, the side that dares not directly engage is the side that knows it cannot successfully make its case. And the more the evangelical Darwinians appeal to an increasingly threadbare scientific authority, the weaker their case is observed to be by all impartial parties. When they’re saying: “you don’t understand the biology” and their critics are saying: “you don’t understand the math”, well, as it turns out, we have an excellent means of determining whose claims are founded in fact and whose are not.

And what we can readily test and observe with these two competing hypotheses is that the scientific evidence here does not favor those appealing to scientific authority.

The implications of complexity

I find it remarkable that despite this apparent order of magnitude, (or more), change in the complexity of the DNA code, (now codes), even the genetic scientists who made the discovery are failing to grasp its obvious implications with regards to conventional Neo-Darwinian selectionism:

“For over 40 years we have assumed that DNA changes affecting the genetic code solely impact how proteins are made,” said Stamatoyannopoulos. “Now we know that this basic assumption about reading the human genome missed half of the picture. These new findings highlight that DNA is an incredibly powerful information storage device, which nature has fully exploited in unexpected ways.”

The genetic code is similar for all organisms and is stored in one of the two DNA strands as non-overlapping, linear sequence of nitrogenous bases Adenine (A), Guanine (G), Cytosine (C) and Thymine (T). These four letters are the ‘alphabet’ of the genetic code and are used to write code words. The code consists of three-letter words (also called triplets or codons). There are a total of 64 codons.

Now, researchers have found that the codons, which they refer to as duons, can be used for gene control. The team says that about 15 percent of codons could act as duons and that these bilingual genetic codes have shaped protein evolution.

At this point, one is beginning to wonder if the scientists are so focused on the evolutionary trees that even a copyright notice would somehow escape their attention. Copyright (c) 6000 BC God. All rights reserved. “Well, obviously that is a codal pattern that evolved early in a common ancestor and merely happens to look like alphabetical characters, from which the various divergent mutations didn’t happen to provide any selection advantages.”

Here is the point that so many die-hard evolutionists can’t seem to grasp. Let me try to walk them through the logic of my skepticism with a simple analogy.

Charlie has a car. Charlie is speaking to you in Minneapolis. Charlie says he left Chicago seven hours ago and drove to Minneapolis on a single tank of gas. However, in the car, you discover two receipts, both dated today, from gas stations in Colorado Springs and Sioux Falls.

Now, if you can understand how this indicates that Charlie’s story is false, you should be able to understand how adding an additional order of magnitude of complexity to the DNA programming process completely rules out the time-scale of the conventional Neo-Darwinian selectionist model. There were already real problems with the model, hence the development of hypothesized excuses such as Punctuated Equilibrium.

But by adding the time needed for another level of mutation on top of what was already required by the previous single-code model, I don’t see how it is possible to seriously insist that the conventional natural selection model can hold up in light of this discovery. Now, perhaps I’m missing something, but it seems to me that either the DNA mutation process has to take place considerably faster than has been observed over the past 50 years or a new model will be required.

My guess is that the initial explanatory defense will be that the mutations are more frequent, but more significant using the two-code process, but this is a defense unlikely to do more than buy a little time, as it will soon be possible to observe whether such mutations are actually taking place or not. Remember, the main reason that TENS has been able to survive so long is that its long timescales required resisted observation. If the timescales are shorter and the mutations selected more frequent, then we can observe and falsify them.

And, of course, even if the new, faster model turns out to be correct, this opens up a whole new can of worms that Jonathan Haidt correctly identifies as the likely consequences of a faster evolutionary model:

A wall has long protected respectable evolutionary inquiry from accusations of aiding and abetting racism. That wall is the belief that genetic change happens at such a glacial pace that there simply was not time, in the 50,000 years since humans spread out from Africa, for selection pressures to have altered the genome in anything but the most trivial way (e.g., changes in skin color and nose shape were adaptive responses to cold climates). Evolutionary psychology has therefore focused on the Pleistocene era – the period from about 1.8 million years ago to the dawn of agriculture — during which our common humanity was forged for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. But the writing is on the wall.

Science is more dangerous than religion

In TIA, I pointed out that if the New Atheists were consistent, they would be arguing for the elimination of science on the same basis that they argue for the end of religion. After all, it is science that presently poses the only serious dangers to Mankind and while it is science that is presently causing a tremendous number of casualties around the world.

Remember, the worst religious crime of the entire Middle Ages was the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in which King Charles IX of France ordered an estimated 10,000 Huegenots killed. Now Karl Denninger draws our attention to an article in Forbes concerning the estimated consequences of a single case of apparent “research misconduct”:

Last summer British researchers provoked concern when they published a paper raising the possibility that by following an established guideline UK doctors may have caused as many as 10,000 deaths each year. Now they have gone a step further and published an estimate that the same guideline may have led to the deaths of as many as 800,00 people in Europe over the last five years. The finding, they write, “is so large that the only context in the last 50 years comes from the largest scale professional failures in the political sphere.” The 800,000 deaths are comparable in size to the worst cases of genocide and mass murder in recent history. In their new article published in the European Heart Journal, Graham Cole and Darrel Francis continue to explore the extent and implications of the damage caused by the Don Poldermans research misconduct case.

This isn’t to say there are not benefits to science, of course, but the problem is that virtually no one ever pays any attention to its risks, which is precisely why this sort of human tragedy is possible. Moreover, the reason it can happen is because science as it is actually practiced falls very far short of the ideal Science that exists only in the minds of its fetishists.

Perhaps it would be wise for doctors to return to the pre-scientific concept of: First, Do No Harm.

It’s also worth noting that no priest or cleric has ever exploded a nuclear bomb in the name of Allah, Jesus Christ, or Damballah Wedo. There have been at least 2,084 nuclear explosions set off by scientists.

I see a fraud

Serial global warming scammer Michael Mann calls for the politicization of science:

It
is not an uncommon view among scientists that we potentially compromise
our objectivity if we choose to wade into policy matters or the
societal implications of our work. And it would be problematic if our
views on policy somehow influenced the way we went about doing our
science. But there is nothing inappropriate at all about drawing on our
scientific knowledge to speak out about the very real implications of
our research.

My
colleague Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, who died in 2010,
used to say that being a scientist-advocate is not an oxymoron. Just
because we are scientists does not mean that we should check our
citizenship at the door of a public meeting, he would explain. The New
Republic once called him a “scientific pugilist” for advocating a
forceful approach to global warming. But fighting for scientific truth
and an informed debate is nothing to apologize for.

If
scientists choose not to engage in the public debate, we leave a vacuum
that will be filled by those whose agenda is one of short-term
self-interest. There is a great cost to society if scientists fail to
participate in the larger conversation — if we do not do all we can to
ensure that the policy debate is informed by an honest assessment of the
risks. In fact, it would be an abrogation of our responsibility to
society if we remained quiet in the face of such a grave threat.

Actually, I welcome this development. It should completely destroy whatever vestiges of respect the average man holds for scientists. I mean, for a scientist who makes his living selling global warming in return for research grants to openly claim that it is a problem for those with short-term self-interests to engage in the public debate, well, we’re clearly not dealing with rocket scientists here.

Every time an idiot “climate scientist” calls for socialism in the name of science, a little more unwarranted regard for science is lost. And this is before the inevitable announcement that Mann and the 97 percent of climate scientists are shown conclusively to be wrong and the “fringe minority of our populace” is proven that its rejection of their consensus was not, in fact, irrational, but correct.

Unlike the socialists, the global warmists don’t have 100 years to obfuscate and explain away their failures. They have 10 more years, 20 at most. And we can hope, by then, that “because science” will have become irrevocably tarnished to the point that it is recognized as the logical fallacy it is.

More highly evolved

It should be interesting to see how those who are true believers in both a) the religion of TENS and b) the myth of human equality react to this scientific claim from Penn State that Africans are less evolved than Europeans:

Light skin in Europeans stems from a gene mutation from a single person who lived 10,000 years ago. This is according to a new U.S. study that claims the colour is due to an ancient ancestor who lived somewhere between the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Scientists made the discovery after identifying a key gene that contributes to lighter skin colour in Europeans.

In earlier research, Keith Cheng from Penn State College of Medicine reported that one amino acid difference in the gene SLC24A5 is a key contributor to the skin colour difference between Europeans and West Africans. ‘The mutation in SLC24A5 changes just one building block in the protein, and contributes about a third of the visually striking differences in skin tone between peoples of African and European ancestry,’ he said.

We already know that the three major continental groups are not even equally human on the genetic level, with Africans being the only pure homo sapiens sapiens. This new claim indicates that Africans are lower in the evolutionary order, not that the skin color gene can be described as a speciation event. Regardless, one wonders why those who stubbornly, and ignorantly, continue to insist on human equality despite these undeniable genetic differences which are much more than skin deep are not yet tarred by the label “science denier”.

What I find amusing is that the scientists have already leaped in with some strained explanations to cram natural selection into the process when it is very clear from modern human behavior that the rapidity of the growth of the mutation would much more likely have stemmed from sexual selection. There need not be any environmental advantage to lighter skin for it to be preferred. Of course, that would also be a hate fact, as it would be scientific evidence that whites are more attractive than blacks. That being said, a fact is a fact.

However, that’s not the intriguing stuff. Here’s a much more interesting thought. The 10,000 year time frame is not all that far off from Bishop Usher’s famous 6,000 year estimation for the Age of the Earth. But most forget that the bishop’s estimate was based on Adam, not the Earth. So, what if it can eventually be determined that the single genetic mutation was actually an artificial one? That would certainly set the cat among the equality pigeons.

Scientific evidence that gays can be cured

It’s not really a matter for debate anymore. It is eminently obvious that gays can be cured, and cure themselves, of their same-sex sexual orientations. Setting aside the obvious anecdotal examples, such as the new First Lady of New York City, the mutable nature of sexual orientation is statistically undeniable:

A controversial new study argues that a host of research on gay, lesbian and bisexual teenagers could be based on faulty data because of confused teens and “jokesters” who later said they were straight.

The report focuses on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a survey that followed a nationally representative group of tens of thousands of teens into adulthood. Add Health, as it is known, is considered one of the most important sources of data on the lives of young people, including those who are gay, lesbian and bisexual.

What caught the attention of Ritch Savin-Williams, a professor at Cornell University, was the fact that more than 70% of the teens who said they had ever had a “romantic attraction” to someone of the same sex later told researchers that they were straight.

Sure, the “jokester” theory is one possible explanation. As is the hoary old “cultural stigma” concept, although that idea looks increasingly shaky as increased media acceptance has produced more gay suicides and other indications of serious psychological problems than the closet ever did. But unless we’re to assume that the vast majority of all self-reported homosexuals are fakes, (which would call into question many assumptions about the size and significance of the homosexual population), we must conclude that most youthful homosexuals eventually grow out of their sexual abnormalities.

Which is entirely understandable. Sex aside, how much Erasure can any man be expected to take?

It is readily observable that there is no such thing as a static sexual abnormality. Was Ian Watkins always a pedophile? Was the thrice-married Meredith Baxter Birney always a lesbian? The dynamic sin model explains observable human behavior rather better than most of the scientific alternatives, particularly the static ones. Regardless, whether it is a simple choice or a curable psychological disorder, the idea that homosexuality is always and necessarily a permanently fixed orientation is demonstrably false. Any homosexual who dares to question this, much less dispute it, must be asked why they deny science. And statistics.

UPDATE: This objection on Twitter made me laugh. Critics, it might help to keep in mind you’re dealing with a superintelligence before you say something stupid, all right? I’m smarter than you are. Just assume that even if you don’t believe it; it may save you some embarrassment. That doesn’t mean I’m always right, it just means that you’re probably wrong.

Buttercup Dew: “Your logic doesn’t follow? I was “bisexual” as a teen, now
unambiguously homosexual. You decided conclusion and worked backwards.”

To which I responded: “No, my logic is correct. You prove the point. The fact of the delta is what matters, not the direction.”

The closing of the scientific mind

David Gelernter has a very good article in Commentary on the descent of science into, if not quite religion, something that is at the very least a distinct and readily identifiable philosophy:

The modern “mind fields” encompass artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind. Researchers in these fields are profoundly split, and the chaos was on display in the ugliness occasioned by the publication of Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos in 2012. Nagel is an eminent philosopher and professor at NYU. In Mind & Cosmos, he shows with terse, meticulous thoroughness why mainstream thought on the workings of the mind is intellectually bankrupt. He explains why Darwinian evolution is insufficient to explain the emergence of consciousness—the capacity to feel or experience the world. He then offers his own ideas on consciousness, which are speculative, incomplete, tentative, and provocative—in the tradition of science and philosophy.

Nagel was immediately set on and (symbolically) beaten to death by all the leading punks, bullies, and hangers-on of the philosophical underworld. Attacking Darwin is the sin against the Holy Ghost that pious scientists are taught never to forgive. Even worse, Nagel is an atheist unwilling to express sufficient hatred of religion to satisfy other atheists. There is nothing religious about Nagel’s speculations; he believes that science has not come far enough to explain consciousness and that it must press on. He believes that Darwin is not sufficient.

The intelligentsia was so furious that it formed a lynch mob. In May 2013, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece called “Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong.” One paragraph was notable:

“Whatever the validity of [Nagel’s] stance, its timing was certainly bad. The war between New Atheists and believers has become savage, with Richard Dawkins writing sentences like, “I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sadomasochistic, and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad….” In that climate, saying anything nice at all about religion is a tactical error.”

It’s the cowardice of the Chronicle’s statement that is alarming—as if the only conceivable response to a mass attack by killer hyenas were to run away. Nagel was assailed; almost everyone else ran.

Science is in desperate need of an intellectual cleansing, a return to the scientific fundamentals of its methodology. Indeed, both Science and Christianity are in much the same boat these days, as both Method and Faith have become corrupted by those who claim to speak in its name.

Mailvox: Atheist Philosophy in action

BH is bemused by a PhD’s resort to an amusing variant of the very atheist logic I mocked six years ago in TIA:

I’ve been parrying on FB with an honest-to-God PhD engineer at IBM who asserts “evolution must be true because GPS works.” His logic: because general relativity is learned from observing the stars, and the stars are billions of years old, therefore evolution is true.

Because I learned to eat crumbs that fall from the table of the most able Internet Cruelty Artist, I’ve been mercilessly pointing out his errors in reasoning, illustrating his absurdities, etc., while laughing at him.  He demanded acceptance with the premise that “ALL science requires that evolution be true.” (He repeated it over and over, comment after comment… gee, Aspergers much?)  So I asked him if my dentist needs to believe in evolution in order to clean my teeth.  ‘Yes, they need to understand that bacteria evolved 500 mya before they can clean teeth.’

I hadn’t personally encountered this level of idiocy before.

As I have occasionally noted, it takes a considerable amount of education to reduce a formerly intelligent individual to the level of a complete idiot. A PhD isn’t absolutely necessary, but it does appear to help. The IBM engineer is merely engaged in the usual bait-and-switch; he’s trying to defend evolution by cloaking it in the protective veil of real science that provides reliable results.

Mailvox: the Flat Gene Society

Physphilmusic inadvertently reveals the inner fascist that lurks within most cultural liberals:

I guess that is the root of our disagreement. It’s not that I don’t think genetics plays a significant role (although concerning exactly how much I probably disagree with you), it’s that if I adopted your strategy, I see no reason to stop at merely discriminating against blacks. Why not eugenics altogether? Your concern about genetics logically leads to this. You advocate measures which are effectively indirect, long-term forms of eugenics. But if you have no qualms about hurting a few people’s feelings, why stop there? Why not support the sterilization of people below certain IQ levels?

A focus on feelings is a reliable hallmark of those with no moral core at their center. The idea that opposing forced desegregation is necessarily indicative of hatred, much less a secret desire for genocide, is not only irrational, but exposes the ravenous, immoral beast at the heart of modern left-liberalism.

Observe the twisted left-liberal logic. First, there is the determination to deny reality. The genetic differences between the various human population groups either exist or not. The intellectual and behavioral limits imposed by those genetic differences either exist or not. And while for the last 50 years it has been de rigueur to claim that there are no genetic differences between various population groups, or that any differences are meaningless, advances in human genetics mean that is now the genetic equivalent of belonging to the Flat Earth Society.

Second, there is the illogical claim that recognizing those genetically imposed limits between various groups must necessarily lead to eugenics. This can only be true if one is operating from an immoral assumption of the right of some central authority to impose minimum capability requirements on the population. Needless to say, I completely reject this notion. The fact that some people are observably incapable of living in an advanced civilization does not justify harming them or treating them as sub-human. There is no reason they should not be able to live in the sort of society in which their predecessors have successfully lived for thousands of years.

Why stop with mere feelbad? Because human beings do not have the right to not experience hurt feelings. It is not possible to construct a legal system, much less maintain a society, on the basis of the avoidance of hurt feelings. However, humans of every genetic melange and intellectual capacity have the right to life, the right to self-defense, and the right to procreate. Segregation may advantage some and disadvantage others, it may cause many to feel hurt and rejected, but it does not intrinsically cause material harm to anyone; billions of people of every creed and color would not have historically self-segregated if it did. Sterilization and eugenics, on the other hand, obviously do inflict a considerable amount of direct and material harm on the individual.

Moreover, segregation is a natural and organic process. To fight it is to literally fight nature. Consider that despite its overall population being swollen by an alien invasion and relentless propaganda cheering the manifold blessings of diversity, London has seen its white-British population fall by 620,000 in only ten years, much faster than any of the experts expected. After fifty years of “civil rights” America is still unofficially segregated by neighborhood, by city, by suburb, and even by state.

Leo Tolstoy wrote about the great tides of human events that are totally beyond any human capacity to control. He used the example of Napoleon at Waterloo and showed conclusively how Napoleon didn’t know what was happening during the battle or even what units were involved in its most critical phases. In like manner, the precise way in which the inevitable reaction to the imposition of mass immigration and cultural invasion is impossible to predict, but no one with any sense of history can reasonably deny it is going to take place.

My opinion is that it would be much better for the governments of the West to align their actions with that inevitable reaction than to oppose it, but I have little hope that will be the case. Many will argue that because the reaction has not taken place yet, it will never happen, but one could have accurately said that prior to every large-scale event in human history.

Cry raciss all you like. It will change nothing. Deny the existence and the significance of human genetics until you turn blue. It will change nothing. Profess your undying allegiance to the religion of human equality with all the fervor of an early Christian martyr. It will change nothing. For as the white liberal aid worker raped in Haiti came to discover, there is no magical incantation that will save you from being out-group when the in-group turns against the outsiders.

The Flat Gene Society is even more ridiculous than the Flat Earth Society. At least those who belonged to the latter had the excuse of correctly observing what they saw with their own eyes. The Flat Gene Society requires ignoring science and history as well as the evidence of one’s own eyes.