Tag: science

The return of Aristotelian anti-reductionism

And the intellectual surrender of scientific naturalism. Edward Feser considers the implications of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos as well as Philip Kitcher’s response to it at the New York Times:

Like other Nagel critics, Kitcher agrees that reductionism has failed.  The “Newtonian vision” promised a “cosmos in which everything would be explained on the basis of a small number of physical principles.”  But this, Kitcher says, is not what science has actually delivered.  It has given us “no grand theories, but lots of bits and pieces, generating local insights about phenomena of special interest.”  And the future of science promises to continue in this vein, taking us beyond “the illusion of unity” and replacing it with “an enormous and heterogeneous family of models.”

What about the specific aspects of nature emphasized by Nagel?  Kitcher doesn’t seem to dispute that they have not been explained the way reductionistic science and naturalistic philosophy promised.  He acknowledges that “we lack a physico-chemical account of life” and indeed that the problem of giving such an account “hasn’t been directly addressed by the extraordinary biological accomplishments of past decades.”  And he allows that scientists have an “incautious tendency… to write as if the most complex functions of mental life — consciousness, for example — will be explained tomorrow.”

So, what then is Kitcher’s alternative answer to the questions reductionist science and naturalistic philosophy have failed to answer, and to which Nagel offers a (partially) neo-Aristotelian answer?  He doesn’t have one.  Instead he suggests that we stop asking the questions.  More precisely, with respect to the nature of life, he proposes: “[D]on’t ask what life is (in your deepest Newtonian voice); consider the various activities in which living organisms engage and try to give a piecemeal understanding of those.”  He recommends taking a similarly piecemeal approach to answering questions about mind, and forgetting about whatever won’t succumb to this method.  “With luck, in a century or so, the issue of how mind fits into the physical world will seem as quaint as the corresponding concern about life.”  For “philosophy and science don’t always answer the questions they pose — sometimes they get over them.”

Well, “get over it” is, needless to say, not an answer we would accept in other contexts.  When you give the cashier a twenty for the three dollar coffee you just purchased and he hands you back seven dollars, “Get over it” is no answer to the question “Where’s the other ten?”  When you go into the hospital for an appendectomy and awaken to find your legs missing, “Get over it” is no answer to the question “What the hell did you do to me?!”  And, needless to say, “Get over it” is no answer Kitcher or any other naturalist would accept in response to criticism of a theological proposition.  So why should we give naturalists a pass we wouldn’t give to theologians, surgeons, and cashiers?

It’s worse than that, though.  For when someone offers you a unified explanation of the world — as Nagel does, in a very sketchy way, and the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition does in a rigorously worked out way (and a way that can incorporate what we’ve learned from modern science, as present day representatives of the tradition have shown) — it is no response whatsoever to say: “Well, I’ve got this alternative view of the world on which there is no unified explanation.”  The only thing to say to that is: “Um, thanks for sharing, but I’ve just given you a unified explanation.  So what you need to do, if your rejection of it is going to be rational, is to show me exactly what is wrong with it, and not just question-beggingly assert that there is no explanation, or that acceptable explanations have to fit into your Procrustean philosophical bed.”

Actually, it’s worse even than that.  For the main philosophical selling point of naturalism has, of course, always been the idea that it can explain everything its rivals can but in a more economical way.  The original claim was that we don’t need all that Aristotelian metaphysics (or the Cartesian, idealist, or other non-naturalistic metaphysics that replaced it) in order to account for rationality, sentience, life, etc.  Ockham’s razor and all that.  And Ockham’s razor, of course, says: Don’t multiply entities beyond necessity.   It doesn’t say: Don’t multiply entities when doing so would be tantamount to an embarrassing admission that naturalism can’t after all perform as advertised.  And if it turns out you do need the entities for explanatory purposes, then multiply away.

Nagel’s proposal is like that of the honest salesman who gives you a refund when his product doesn’t do what he said it would do.  I’m sorry ma’am, here’s your money back.  You should have stuck with Aristotelianism rather than that new-fangled Elixir of Materialism I was peddling.  In fact I now rep the Stagirite brand myself!

Kitcher’s proposal, by contrast, makes of naturalism (whatever his own intentions) something of a bait and switch.  Naturalism will explain mind, life, etc.?  A unified metaphysical picture of the world?  Did I say that?  Hmm, doesn’t ring a bell, lady.  Must’ve been some other salesman.  Anyway, the check’s cashed and you already signed the contract.  But hey, have a look at these really interesting recent findings of molecular biology.  Might lead to some new pharmaceuticals…

As usual, the scientists and their gaggle of male science fetish groupies are well behind the philosophers. Over the years, I’ve gradually come to understand that scientists have a lot more in common with IT guys than they do with software developers and designers. They’re pretty good with pushing the right buttons and fixing the little things, but they have no idea what is going on under the surface and don’t understand what the developers are talking about when they raise questions related to intent, purpose, and meaning.

Scientists aren’t stupid, and for the most part they aren’t midwits like nearly all their groupies are. (If you meet someone who loves, loves, loves science, and swears by it in a quasi-religious manner, but doesn’t work in a lab or research facility, the odds are that he simply didn’t have the brains to cut it.) But perhaps because their training is so specialized these days, scientists often appear to exhibit a strange inability to maintain logical coherency, let alone logical consistency, with regards to their expressed opinions and philosophies, which is something I don’t observe as often in non-scientists of similar intelligence.

A surrender of scientistry

Popular Science can’t take the dialectical heat and flees from open scientific discourse due to the inability of its writers to present arguments capable of standing up to public criticism:

Comments can be bad for science. That’s why, here at PopularScience.com, we’re shutting them off. It wasn’t a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter….

If you carry out those results to their logical end–commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded–you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the “off” switch. Even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story.

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

I found it amusing that below this article trying to justify its attempt to claim the right to be “championing science” without protest or criticism from its readers, the very first article listed is: “Republicans Block Proposal For National Science Laureate, Fearing Science”.  Whatever they are championing these days, it is not science.

It is wonderful news that some of the foremost defenders of scientistry are in full-blown retreat from the skeptics and scientodists. Their inability to defend their “bedrock scientific doctrine” and “popular consensus” is the direct result of their abandonment of scientody for ideological dogma and invented doctrine cloaked in an increasingly thin veil of faux science.

Comments aren’t bad for science. Comments are bad for those who are stubbornly clinging to outdated scientific paradigms that are showing obvious cracks.

Science badly needs a cleansing baptism of intellectual fire to burn away all the professional and academic scientistic barnacles that have affixed themselves to the ship of science and are now threatening to sink its credibility entirely. Genuine scientists, as opposed to the posers championed by the likes of Popular Science, may not be able to defend themselves rhetorically, but they have no need to do so.  Science is neither democracy nor holy doctrine, and it is the right of every thinking individual to accept or reject the declarations of scientists as he sees fit.

The Feynman Lectures online

For those who are interested in scientody rather than scientistry, the famous Feynman Lectures on physics are now online. “The Feynman Lectures on Physics was based on a two-year introductory physics course that Richard Feynman taught at Caltech from 1961 to 1963; it was published in three volumes during the years 1963 to 1965, and used as the introductory physics textbook at Caltech for nearly two decades.” In reading them, it’s not hard to understand why he is quite rightly revered as a minor secular saint of Science:

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an
approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far
as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of
approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws
as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or,
more likely, to be corrected.
The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following:
The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the
sole judge of scientific “truth.” But what is the source of
knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from?
Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it
gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from
these hints the great generalizations—to guess at the wonderful,
simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to
experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess. This
imagining process is so difficult that there is a division of labor in
physics: there are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce,
and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are
experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and
guess.
We said that the laws of nature are approximate: that we first find the
“wrong” ones, and then we find the “right” ones. Now, how can an
experiment be “wrong”? First, in a trivial way: if something is wrong
with the apparatus that you did not notice. But these things are easily
fixed, and checked back and forth. So without snatching at such minor
things, how can the results of an experiment be wrong.
Only by
being inaccurate. For example, the mass of an object never seems to
change: a spinning top has the same weight as a still one. So a “law”
was invented: mass is constant, independent of speed. That “law” is
now found to be incorrect. Mass is found to increase with velocity, but
appreciable increases require velocities near that of light. A
true law is: if an object moves with a speed of less than one
hundred miles a second the mass is constant to within one part in a
million. In some such approximate form this is a correct law. So in
practice one might think that the new law makes no significant
difference. Well, yes and no. For ordinary speeds we can certainly
forget it and use the simple constant-mass law as a good approximation.
But for high speeds we are wrong, and the higher the speed, the more
wrong we are.
Finally, and most interesting, philosophically we are completely
wrong with the approximate law. Our entire picture of the world has to
be altered even though the mass changes only by a little bit. This is a
very peculiar thing about the philosophy, or the ideas, behind the laws.
Even a very small effect sometimes requires profound changes in our
ideas.

It’s always fascinating to see how far a cult departs from the ideas of its inspirations. I think Richard Feynman would be even more disappointed to see how far today’s science fetishists have drifted from scientody in favor of scientistry that Jesus Christ would be to see the grotesqueries and abominations that are so often justified in his name. Jesus knew Man was hellbound of his own volition; Feynman was usually a bit more of an optimist.

The “global warming” cover-up

And here we have an excellent example explaining why modern scientistry is corrupted and why science-skeptics are more than justified in remaining skeptical of various government-funded “scientific” consensuses:

Scientists working on the most authoritative study on climate change were urged to cover up the fact that the world’s temperature hasn’t risen for the last 15 years, it is claimed.

A leaked copy of a United Nations report, compiled by hundreds of scientists, shows politicians in Belgium, Germany, Hungary and the United States raised concerns about the final draft.

Published next week, it is expected to address the fact that 1998 was the hottest year on record and world temperatures have not yet exceeded it, which scientists have so far struggled to explain.

The politicians justified their attempt to sweep the problematic observations that destroy the hypothesis due to their “fears that the findings will encourage deniers of man-made climate change”.  As they should. Isn’t declaring the hypothesis to be unsupported by the evidence exactly what scientists are supposed to do when the predictive models fail and the observations don’t support the hypothesis?

The skeptics are the real scientists, not the corrupt professionals who practice scientistry rather than scientody and serve as the mouthpieces for power-mad politicians.

The short answer: not so much these days

A PhD candidate quits academia and explains how professional academics have ruined science:

(1) Academia: It’s Not Science, It’s Business
I’m going to start with the supposition that the goal of “science”
is to search for truth, to improve our understanding of the universe
around us, and to somehow use this understanding to move the world
towards a better tomorrow. At least, this is the propaganda that we’ve
often been fed while still young, and this is generally the propaganda
that universities that do research use to put themselves on lofty moral
ground, to decorate their websites, and to recruit naïve youngsters like
myself.
I’m also going to suppose that in order to find truth, the basic
prerequisite is that you, as a researcher, have to be brutally honest –
first and foremost, with yourself and about the quality of your own
work. Here one immediately encounters a contradiction, as such honesty
appears to have a very minor role in many people’s agendas. Very quickly
after your initiation in the academic world, you learn that being “too
honest” about your work is a bad thing and that stating your research’s
shortcomings “too openly” is a big faux pas. Instead, you are
taught to “sell” your work, to worry about your “image”, and to be
strategic in your vocabulary and where you use it. Preference is given
to good presentation over good content – a priority that, though
understandable at times, has now gone overboard. The “evil” kind of
networking (see, e.g.,http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/networking-good-vs-evil/)
seems to be openly encouraged. With so many business-esque things to
worry about, it’s actually surprising that *any* scientific research
still gets done these days. Or perhaps not, since it’s precisely the
naïve PhDs, still new to the ropes, who do almost all of it.
(2) Academia: Work Hard, Young Padawan, So That One Day You Too May Manage!
I sometimes find it both funny and frightening that the majority of
the world’s academic research is actually being done by people like me,
who don’t even have a PhD degree. Many advisors, whom you would expect
to truly be pushing science forward with their decades of experience, do
surprisingly little and only appear to manage the PhD students, who
slave away on papers that their advisors then put their names on as a
sort of “fee” for having taken the time to read the document (sometimes,
in particularly desperate cases, they may even try to steal first
authorship). Rarely do I hear of advisors who actually go through their
students’ work in full rigor and detail, with many apparently having
adopted the “if it looks fine, we can submit it for publication”
approach.

Apart from feeling the gross unfairness of the whole thing – the
students, who do the real work, are paid/rewarded amazingly little,
while those who manage it, however superficially, are paid/rewarded
amazingly much – the PhD student is often left wondering if they are
only doing science now so that they may themselves manage later. The
worst is when a PhD who wants to stay in academia accepts this and
begins to play on the other side of the table. Every PhD student reading
this will inevitably know someone unlucky enough to have fallen upon an
advisor who has accepted this sort of management and is now inflicting
it on their own students – forcing them to write paper after paper and
to work ridiculous hours so that the advisor may advance his/her career
or, as if often the case, obtain tenure. This is unacceptable and needs
to stop….

(8) Academia: The Greatest Trick It Ever Pulled was Convincing the World That It was Necessary
Perhaps the most crucial, piercing question that the people in
academia should ask themselves is this: “Are we really needed?” Year
after year, the system takes in tons of money via all sorts of grants.
Much of this money then goes to pay underpaid and underappreciated PhD
students who, with or without the help of their advisors, produce some
results. In many cases, these results are incomprehensible to all except
a small circle, which makes their value difficult to evaluate in any
sort of objective manner. In some rare cases, the incomprehensibility is
actually justified – the result may be very powerful but may, for
example, require a lot of mathematical development that you really do
need a PhD to understand. In many cases, however, the result, though
requiring a lot of very cool math, is close to useless in application.

This is fine, because real progress is slow. What’s bothersome,
however, is how long a purely theoretical result can be milked for
grants before the researchers decide to produce something practically
useful. Worse yet, there often does not appear to be a strong urge for
people in academia to go and apply their result, even when this becomes
possible, which most likely stems from the fear of failure – you are
morally comfortable researching your method as long as it works in
theory, but nothing would hurt more than to try to apply it and to learn
that it doesn’t work in reality.

This is written by a PhD candidate at a European university, but the problems he cites are, for the most part, imported from American universities, in which the problems are reportedly even more severe.  It is worth recalling that most of the great scientific discoveries throughout history were made by amateur scientists, not the professional academic guild that tries to claim ownership of a method and a knowledge base that long pre-dated it.

And it’s not just sour grapes from a non-finisher either. One commenter adds: “I agree with everything the author said and more. I am just extremely
disappointed at myself for not having seen it all this clearly earlier.
It took a Master’s degree, a Ph.D degree and a post-doc at the best
institutions in the world, until I started to see academia for what it
is: a paper publishing business driven mostly by people who care nothing
for the advancement of knowledge.”

I think this is why it is helpful to think about science in the tripartite terms I labeled in TIA. One should never confuse scientage or scientody for scientistry.  “Science”, as it exists today, is something of a bait-and-switch. What the PhD candidate is describing is scientistry, the practitioners of which have tried to elevate themselves on the basis of the public’s high regard for scientage and scientody. This has led to observably absurd statements such as PZ Myers’s claiming that “science is what scientists do”.

The answer is simple. Defund scientistry. Get rid of the third-rate bureaucrats and managers that have increasingly replaced the first-rate minds that used to dominate science. Return science to the technicians and the amateurs of an earlier, more successful, age.

Another commenter adds an important observation: “Science is NOT a business, science is a charitable venture funded by
government. And government is famously incompetent at getting ANYTHING
done efficiently or sensibly, because government is also not a business,
it lives off the taxpayer, few of whom even follow what their money is
being spent on. So science is a big charade where bureaucrats hire
committees of “respected” academics to make collective judgments on
distributing the government funds, so all the conniving and deal-making
and back-stabbing are a natural part of the process. It happens wherever
government spends money, not just in science.”

That also explains why so many scientists hate libertarians.  They know we see through their scam. 

The collapsing charade of “global warming”

Never, ever, let the science fetishists forget that they staked the reputation of modern science on the “established science fact” of global warming.  Keep that in mind every time they bring up science to justify evolution by natural selection or any other quasi-scientific dogma, especially in light of the fact that they were not only wrong about the elimination of Arctic ice, but spectacularly wrong.

A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent. The rebound from 2012’s record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013. Instead, days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.

The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced to turn back. Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century – a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading….

The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has ‘paused’ since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.

Astonishing, isn’t it, that I, and the other skeptics, have been proven right yet again, despite the scientific consensus of all those scientists with their fancy academic credentials.  Thus proving, once again, that the material value of those credentials is somewhat less than an equivalent weight in toilet paper.

How is that possible? Because you don’t have to know a damn thing about the climate to know when corrupt human beings are putting forth falsehoods in order to justify claiming more money and power on their own behalf.

Fukushima: the truth leaks out

The story of the still-ongoing disaster in Japan that has been regularly reported on Zerohedge and other alt-right sites is finally beginning to leak out into the mainstream media:

A nuclear expert has told
the BBC that he believes the current water leaks at Fukushima are much
worse than the authorities have stated. Mycle Schneider is an independent consultant who has previously advised the French and German governments.He says water is leaking out all over the site and there are no accurate figures for radiation levels.

Meanwhile the chairman of Japan’s nuclear authority said that he feared there would be further leaks. The ongoing problems at the Fukushima plant increased in
recent days when the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) admitted that
around 300 tonnes of highly radioactive water had leaked from a storage
tank on the site….

“It is much worse than we have been led to believe, much worse,” said
Mr Schneider, who is lead author for the World Nuclear Industry status
reports.

At news conference, the head of Japan’s nuclear regulation
authority Shunichi Tanaka appeared to give credence to Mr Schneider’s
concerns, saying that he feared there would be further leaks. “We should assume that what has happened once could happen
again, and prepare for more. We are in a situation where there is no
time to waste,” he told reporters.

This is of no surprise to anyone with any experience of Japan.  The Japanese NEVER tell the truth about anything if the truth is expected to create conflict or drama. Everyone in the game industry who has ever worked with Nintendo, Sega, or Konami knows that they won’t even give you a straightforward “no” when a yes/no decision is scheduled.  You’re just supposed to figure it out on the basis of not receiving a “yes” and ignore all of the perfectly legitimate-sounding explanations.

Don’t be surprised when another “unexpected” emergency is announced once Tepco can’t keep a lid on the situation anymore.  This is potentially an extraordinarily ugly situation and it absolutely dwarfs Chernobyl.

Science is fiction

It is a little ironic that just as science fiction authors have managed to excise most of the science from science fiction, scientists are transforming professional peer-reviewed published science into science fiction:

A recently published ASAP article in the journal Organometallics is sure to raise some eyebrows in the chemical community. While the paper itself is a straightforward study of palladium and platinum bis-sulfoxide complexes, page 12 of the corresponding Supporting Information file contains what appears to be an editorial note that was inadvertently left in the published document:

    “Emma, please insert NMR data here! where are they? and for this compound, just make up an elemental analysis…”

This statement goes beyond a simple embarrassing failure to properly edit the manuscript, as it appears the first author is being instructed to fabricate data. Elemental analyses would be very easy to fabricate, and long-time readers of this blog will recall how fake elemental analyses were pivotal to Bengu Sezen’s campaign of fraud in the work she published from 2002 to 2005 out of Dalibor Sames’ lab at Columbia.

One commenter notes: “It should also be noted that this made it through at least three reviewers and an editor.”  Of course, it’s easy to justify the invented compound. Clinical equipoise.  In fact, that’s now my go-to excuse for everything.  If Spacebunny asks me why I didn’t take the trash out on Trash Day, I just shrug and say, “hey, baby, clinical equipoise.” 

Vaccines is safe because SCIENCE!

In addition to demonstrating that vaccines are not intrinsically safe, this posterior-covering action by the CDC should suffice to conclusively prove that the organization cannot be trusted with regards to its statements concerning vaccine safety:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has once again been caught removing pertinent but indicting information about vaccines from its website. This time it involves the infamous polio vaccine, up to 98 million doses of which have been exposed as containing a cancer-causing virus that is now believed to be responsible for causing millions of cancers in America, according to the CDC.

The information was posted on an official CDC fact sheet entitled Cancer, Simian Virus 40 (SV40), and Polio Vaccine, which has since been removed from the CDC’s website. Fortunately, RealFarmacy.com was able to archive the damning page before the CDC ultimately removed it, presumably because SV40 has been receiving considerable attention lately due to its connection to causing cancer.

This also explodes Orac’s attempt to utilize “clinical equipoise” in order to justify not performing scientific studies.  Due to that “equipose”, putting 98up to 30 million Americans at an increased risk of cancer may turn out to be little more that the tip of the iceberg.  I know that biologists and epidemiologists are not trained in logic or basic risk/reward calculations, but I would think that even those whose academic backgrounds are in the softer sciences could handle the math involved in balancing the potential risk to a few hundred, or a few thousand, children provided placebos versus the risks involved in administering a completely untested schedule combining dozens of vaccines to hundreds of millions of very young children.

Why the rabbits can’t think straight

An English professor and evolutionary psychologist attempts to explain the inability of certain rabbits to successfully engage in honest dialectic and why they are limited to rhetorical discourse:

Surveying the modern intellectual scene, the world of public discourse
among the educational elites, I conclude that dishonesty does not only
reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of thinking – but it actually reduces applied intelligence – probably by re-wiring the brain.

What I am suggesting is that, although the fundamental efficiency of
neural processing is an hereditary characteristic which is robust to
environmental differences and changes (short of something like
destructive brain pathology – encephalitis, neurotoxin, head injury,
dementia etc) – habitual dishonesty (such as is mainstream among the
modern intellectual elite) will generate brain changes, and a
long-lasting (although probably, eventually, reversible) pathology in
applied intelligence – such that what ought to be simple and obvious
inferential reasoning becomes impossible.

I mean impossible.

Habitual dishonesty (most notable political correctness) is a form of
learning; and learning strengthens some brain pathways and brain
connections; while allowing other pathways and connections to wither and
(perhaps eventually) perish.

Therefore, even on those rare occasions when a typical modern
intellectual tries to be honest and to think straight – they cannot do
it, because their reasoning processes have been sabotaged by their own
repeated habits of dishonesty – their attempts at honest thoughts will
be inhibited, and instead channelled down the usual lying pathways…

Thus, in modern intellectual life, honesty is punished and dishonesty is rewarded; honest brain pathways decay, dishonest brain pathways enlarge.

After years and years of conditioning in dishonesty, the typical modern
intellectual (whether journalist, scientist, lawyer, teacher, doctor or
whatever) becomes physically unable to think straight.

I’m far from the only one to observe that the trolls and anklebiters that seek to infest the blog are reliably dishonest.  But I had always thought it was a Machiavellian tactic and assumed that they knew they were lying.  After all, how many times can you have your positions methodically destroyed and still turn around and espouse it if one is not pathologically dishonest or simply playing a game?

However, in reading comments by the same individuals made when safely ensconced in their warrens, I observed that they not only espoused the same positions there, but genuinely appeared to believe that they had acquitted themselves well despite making absolutely undeniable blunders.  That’s when I began to realize that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way their minds worked.  It’s not so much that they will readily tell lies and espouse nonsense, but that they will continue doing so even when the falsity of their positions has been exposed and is observable for all to see.

This isn’t true of all rabbits. Rabbits like PZ Myers and McRapey know when they are shown to be wrong.  The avoidance patterns of their behavior and their swift reactions to when they are caught out betray this. They fear being seen to be wrong, which why they resolutely avoid public debate with anyone capable of calling them out and exposing them on their nonsense, but that very fear shows their awareness of it.  They may be dishonest at times, and will readily assume false postures, (e.g. “I’m done pretending to be nice”), but their dishonesty is not pathological and usually serves some sort of identifiable purpose.  This is very different from the behavior we often see from anklebiters here, where no amount of knowledge suffices to correct them and no rational purpose underlying their behavior can be discerned.

I don’t know if Charlton’s theory is correct. But it is certainly an area where a considerable amount of scientific research would be justified, and let’s face it, some of these brains could only be improved by dissection.  On the other hand, as Markku pointed out, there may be a spiritual element involved, as CS Lewis described in The Great Divorce.

“But, beyond all these, I saw other grotesque phantoms in which hardly a trace of the human form remained; monsters who had faced the journey to the bus stop-perhaps for them it was thousands of miles-and come up to the country of the Shadow of Life and limped far into it over the torturing grass, only to spit and gibber out in one ecstasy of hatred their envy and (what is harder to understand) their contempt, of joy. The voyage seemed to them a small price to pay if once, only once, within sight of that eternal dawn, they could tell the prigs, the toffs, the sanctimonious humbugs, the snobs, the “haves,” what they thought of them.”