Tag: science

Mailvox: dating site science

AA asks about a new study purporting to demonstrate that religion only benefits people where it is a free rider:

What do you think about the newly released study that claims that religious beliefs only make people happier due to cultural factors? According to the new study of almost 200,000 people in 11 European countries, people who are religious have higher self-esteem and better psychological adjustment than the non-religious only in countries where belief in religion is common . In more secular societies, the religious and the non-religious are equally well-off.

“The results suggest that religiosity, albeit a potent force, confers benefits by riding on cultural values,” study researcher Jochen Gebauer of Humboldt University in Berlin and colleagues wrote online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.

Do you think this study indicates the truth or is there any other valid reasons why religion creates better lifestyles for people in need of purpose?

My initial assumption is that this study is the usual propagandistic garbage put out by pseudoscientists who are dishonestly attempting to bolster their preconceived opinion with a false sheen of science. No doubt it is the sort of quasi-scientific study that purports to “prove” that all conservatives are racist, low IQ child molesters and therefore all decent human beings have no choice but to vote for Nancy Pelosi.

[Stops to read the referenced article about the study.]

Bingo. Here is the money quote:

“Gebauer and colleagues wanted to know if larger cultural forces contribute to the well-being of spiritual sorts. They turned to eDarling, the European version of dating websites like eHarmony or Match.com. Users of eDarling answer a question in their profiles about how important religion is to them; while setting up their profiles, they also complete psychological surveys asking them how “calm,” “cheerful” and “content” they feel, among other measures of happiness, life satisfaction and self-esteem.”

No doubt in their next study, Gebauer and his colleagues will report the astonishing news that contra all the media reports, there is no epidemic of obesity in America as only two percent of the women on eHarmony report themselves to be “overweight”. Not only is the ridicuous study entirely based on a notoriously unreliable form of self-reporting – it’s a DATING SITE, for crying out loud – but it contradicts many studies based upon more concrete metrics for measuring psychological health, such as alcoholism, suicide rates, and prescriptions for drugs used to treat depression.

Here, for example, is a study that uses the objective measure of hypertension as a metric and directly contradicts the conclusions of the eDarling-based study.

“With the help of a large Norwegian longitudinal health study called HUNT, researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) were able to find a clear relationship between time spent in church and lower blood pressure in both women and men.

“We found that the more often HUNT participants went to church, the lower their blood pressure, even when we controlled for a number of other possible explanatory factors,” says Torgeir Sørensen, a PhD candidate from the School of Theology and Religious Psychology Centre at Sykehuset Innlandet (Inland Hospital). “This is the first study of its kind in Scandinavia. Previous research from the United States has shown that there is a possible link between people who attend church and blood pressure.”

In fact, if we are to take dating site science seriously, we can conclude that there are other, more important factors in making people happy. For example, OKCupid relies on the same sort of self-reporting “science” and concludes that women’s self-confidence increases with weight and age.

“Curvy women pass skinny ones in self-confidence at age 29 and never look back. They also consistently have the highest sex drive among the groups.”

So there is the scientific utopia of which so many secularists dream. Obese and godless old women rutting confidently, and often, with each other. Oh sweet Sappho! Do you understand the significance of this? Do you realize what this means? There is now a scientific basis for Lesbian Dorito Night!

Mailvox: science and free will

CG asks about the implications of time delay in decision-making:

I have read a number of scientific papers asserting that free will doesn’t exist. The Libet experiment, where a person pushes a button, but the brain registers the signal 7 seconds before the time the person made the choice, is one of the more well-known studies. What do you make of these scientific assertions that free will doesn’t exist? You didn’t really address it in The Irrational Atheist or on your own blog.

No, I didn’t bother, because the sort of experiments cited are not evidence that free will doesn’t exist. In fact, any scientific assertion that free will does not exist on the basis of these experiments does nothing more than demonstrate that scientists receive insufficient training in basic logic.

To make this argument, they are assuming that free will relies solely upon “the person” and not “the brain”. Or to put it more precisely, that “the person” is the conscious aspect of the mind and “the brain” is the unconscious. But the unconscious part of the mind is a part of the same mind as the conscious one! Relying on this false distinction is akin to insisting that because I reacted reflexively to movement out of the corner of my eye before I realized it, I did not move.

But clearly I did move. And I decided to move. I merely did not consciously decide to move. The observable fact of the matter is that we make unconscious decisions every single day, and they are an important aspect of our free will. To demonstrate that free will does not exist, it would be necessary to demonstrate that all humans exhibit the same unconscious reactions to the same stimuli; any variance in the reactions would indicate that humans are agents possessing the ability to make choices even if they are not consciously aware of the choices they are making.

The core mistake they are making here is to assume that everything unconscious is therefore determinate. That is an observably false equivalence.

There is nothing even remotely remarkable about this experiment. Having been a 100m sprinter, I’ve always been perfectly aware that the body moves before the conscious mind realizes it. I was usually in the middle of my second stride out of the blocks before I realized I was already running. In most of my races, I never even consciously heard the gun.

And every martial artist knows that if you’re thinking about your next strike or block, you will be too slow. By the time you consciously see the window and decide “it’s open, therefore I should attack it”, it’s already too late. The fundamental goal of martial arts training is to train your body and free your mind so that you enter a state where you are making the correct decisions without thinking about them. This is the state that most athletes recognize as being “in the zone”.

WND column

Quis procuratiet ipsos scientodes?

A few years ago, when I published “The Irrational Atheist,” one of the most controversial statements I made was that Sam Harris’ Extinction Equation, which postulates that the combination of increasingly deadly technologies with religion meant that the human race was at risk of eliminating itself, was an indictment of science, not religion. Religion, after all, has been around for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years, during which time the human race has prospered and multiplied.

Science, on the other hand, only dates back to the 17th century. And as I pointed out in the book, during that time it has produced, either directly or indirectly, the only serious threats to the existence of the human race that man has known since, depending upon your perspective, he was either being hunted by saber-toothed tigers or being drowned to near-extinction during Noah’s flood.

The Obama administration is anti-science!

I rather look forward to seeing how completely the science blogs are going to attempt to ignore this aspect of what is actually a very legitimate philosophical question about the extent to which science should be suppressed:

The US government has asked the scientific journals Nature and Science to censor data on a laboratory-made version of bird flu that could spread more easily to humans, fearing it could be used as a potential weapon.

The US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity asked the two journals to publish redacted versions of studies by two research groups that created forms of the H5N1 avian flu that could easily jump between ferrets – typically considered a sign the virus could spread quickly among humans.

Of course, it should also be interesting to see the contortions that Sam Harris and other science fetishists will perform in an attempt to blame the dangers of science on religion. I not only don’t have a problem with the idea of suppressing science, I think it is entirely obvious that science is going to be increasingly suppressed by governments around the world and that suppression will prove politically popular.

The ironic thing is that scientific progressives have managed to place themselves completely on the wrong side of history while simultaneously believing they are history’s vanguard.

A scientific saint is exposed

English atheists like Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins like little better than to portray saints of the Catholic Church as being frauds. Which makes it rather satisfying indeed to see that one of the secular saints of the High Church of Atheist Science has been exposed as an unapologetic fraud:

In a surprising justification for duping millions of viewers, the TV star argued that owning up to splicing archive film with real Arctic scenes during the programme would have spoiled the mood. His blunt remarks came as more footage from the series was exposed as a sham.

Speaking after our exclusive story yesterday revealed shots of a polar bear and her newborn cubs were staged in a zoo using fake snow, Sir David, 85, said: “The question is, during the middle of this scene when you are trying to paint what it is like in the middle of winter at the pole, to say ‘Oh, by the way, this was filmed in a zoo’.

“It ruins the atmosphere, and destroys the pleasure of the viewers and destroys the atmosphere you are trying to create.

Ah, I see. “Ruining the atmosphere” is apparently a legitimate basis for deceiving people under the agnostic ethic. Remember that when you’re dealing with an agnostic in the future. If afterwards, she happens to complain that you were not truthful about [insert inconvenient truth here], you can simply explain that you were entirely justified in the deceit because telling him the truth would have ruined the atmosphere and destroyed her pleasure.

It’s rather amazing that the man could have reached 85 years of age without understanding the difference between “documentary” and “dramatic re-enactment”. And it is certainly informative to note that “This type of filming is standard practice across the industry when creating natural history programmes.”

Now, I haven’t had much interest in natural history documentaries – or rather, fakumentaries – since Marlin Perkins stopped ordering poor Jim to molest crocodiles in the river. But this confirms what I have always assumed, which is that they are little more than movies primarily designed for entertainment under the guise of being educational.

Warning signs of junk science

ESR makes some excellent points here:

I’ve seen a lot of “scientific” panics ginned up from nonexistent or scanty evidence over the last several decades. There’s a pattern to these episodes, a characteristic stench that becomes recognizable after a while. I’ll describe some of the indicia, which I’ve culled from episodes like the Alar scare, the ozone-hole brouhaha, the AIDS panic (are you old enough to remember when it was predicted to become endemic among heterosexuals in the U.S.?), acid rain, and even the great global cooling flap of 1975.

So. Here is a non-exclusive list of seven eight symptoms to watch out for:

Science by press release. It’s never, ever a good sign when ‘scientists’ announce dramatic results before publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. When this happens, we generally find out later that they were either self-deluded or functioning as political animals rather than scientists. This generalizes a bit; one should also be suspicious of, for example, science first broadcast by congressional testimony or talk-show circuit.

Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of eschatological panic. When the argument for theory X slides from “theory X is supported by evidence” to “a terrible catastrophe looms over us if theory X is true, therefore we cannot risk disbelieving it”, you can be pretty sure that X is junk science. Consciously or unconsciously, advocates who say these sorts of things are trying to panic the herd into stampeding rather than focusing on the quality of the evidence for theory X.

Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of moral panic. When the argument for theory X slides from “theory X is supported by evidence” to “only bad/sinful/uncaring people disbelieve theory X”, you can be even more sure that theory X is junk science. Consciously or unconsciously, advocates who say these sorts of things are trying to induce a state of preference falsification in which people are peer-pressured to publicly affirm a belief in theory X in spite of private doubts.

Consignment of failed predictions to the memory hole. It’s a sign of sound science when advocates for theory X publicly acknowledge failed predictions and explain why they think they can now make better ones. Conversely, it’s a sign of junk science when they try to bury failed predictions and deny they ever made them.

AGW/CC was obviously bogus from the very start, which is why it has been so laughably easy to predict the failures of its models and anticipate its scandals. It is interesting to note how many other aspects of science are easily shown to be junk science this way, beginning with TE(p)NSBMGDaGF and including other notorious non-sciences such as string theory and macroeconomics.

This quote in the comments was particularly apt: “Prediction is everything, and it must work more than once. Explaining everything after the fact is merely making up complicated stories.”

No skepticism in science

An illuminating admission in the contemplation of a potential explanation for all that missing “dark matter”:

You probably want to put on your skeptical goggles and set them to maximum for this one. An Italian mathematician has come up with some complex formulae that can, with remarkable similarity, mimic the rotation curves of spiral galaxies without the need for dark matter.

Currently, these galactic rotation curves represent key evidence for the existence of dark matter – since the outer stars of spinning galaxies often move around a galactic disk so fast that they should fly off into intergalactic space – unless there is an additional ‘invisible’ mass present in the galaxy to gravitationally hold them in their orbits….

Conceptually the idea makes little sense. Positioning gravitationally significant mass outside of the orbit of stars might draw them out into wider orbits, but it’s difficult to see why this would add to their orbital velocity. Drawing an object into a wider orbit should result in it taking longer to orbit the galaxy since it will have more circumference to cover. What we generally see in spiral galaxies is that the outer stars orbit the galaxy within much the same time period as more inward stars.

But although the proposed mechanism seems a little implausible, what is remarkable about Carati’s claim is that the math apparently deliver galactic rotation curves that closely fit the observed values of at least four known galaxies. Indeed, the math delivers an extraordinarily close fit.

For me the most interesting thing isn’t the idea itself, about which I have no opinion, it is the way the Slashdot submitter described it: “As usual, these are extraordinary claims that divert from the consensus, so keep a healthy skepticism.”

This permits us to infer something that we have previously observed on many occasions: scientists and science fetishists do not maintain a healthy skepticism about claims that concur with the consensus. And the fascinating thing is that it is quite easy to factually demonstrate that scientists place more and blinder faith in the various scientific consensuses than religious people do in the tenets of their various faiths. Once more, we are given evidence that the false claims of atheists who subscribe to the cult of science are based on psychological projection.

Speaking of which, I found this Slashdot comment to be amusing: “The creationists trail real science and keep changing their story, but never, ever, ever admit error. What they believe is always the absolute truth and always has been and if you remember having hours long arguments with them over something which they now believe to be the case but didn’t then, your memory is faulty!”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it! As for dark matter, at this point, logic dictates that it most likely will turn out to be a spectacular example of the classic theoretical epicycles to which scientists have been increasingly given ever since medieval astronomers noticed that the observed planetary orbits didn’t correspond well with their Ptolamaic theories.

UPDATE: Fascinating to see that physicists now appear to be making the same mistake as economists: “Not sure about the summary, but the paper is extremely simple. I’ll summarize it: It is commonly assumed that galaxies are evenly distributed. This would mean that if you picked any galaxy at random, you could pick other galaxies whose gravitational pull totally balanced out the effect of the first one. So, overall, no distant galaxy would ever affect anything. What is observed is that galaxies are NOT evenly distributed. There is, indeed, left-over gravitational pull.”

And that, my dear and Dread Ilk, is precisely why anyone schooled in picking apart the flaws of one discipline is actually very well suited to pick apart the flaws of another discipline, even when he knows virtually nothing about that other discipline. Human error tends to follow readily identifiable patterns.

Exposing the injectors

The rabid “vaccinate everyone for everything” crowd likes to mock the vaccine realists as “anti-vaxxers” and “anti-science”, but the dishonesty and hollowness of their position is exposed every time the facts about vaccination manage to leak out into the mainstream:

Natasha Bita, a journalist for The Australian has just won a Walkley Award (the Australian equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize) for an in-depth article series on the CSL Afluria flu vaccine, a shot that caused convulsions in one percent of Australian infants who received it.

To put this vaccine scandal in perspective, the CDC states that ‘seizures can occur after vaccination,’ 33% of infants who have a first seizure will have more seizures and 10% of infants who have one seizure can develop epilepsy. According to the Merck Manual (the largest-selling medical textbook), seizures are a symptom of encephalitis, which the Merck Manual defines as a vaccine adverse reaction. Vaccine-induced encephalitis can leave a spectrum of permanent brain damage in its wake – post-encephalitic syndrome (aka epilepsy and autism). In other words, kids that have convulsions from Afluria can have lifelong neurological disabilities.

Incredibly, the defective CSL flu vaccine Afluria is still on the market in the US: FDA-approved and CDC-recommended. The only concession US vaccine authorities have made to this Afluria scandal is to raise the recommended age for this vaccine, but even that feeble response is colored by a direction to give Afluria to young kids anyway if no other flu vaccine is available.

One thing that few American pro-vaxxers understand is the extent to which their pro-vaccine enthusiasm is viewed as lunacy by the rest of the medical world. For example, the US vaccine schedule involves 2.4 times more vaccines before the age of two than the UK schedule. In the period in which infectious diseases were all but eliminated, children received ONE-FIFTH as many vaccines as they do now. It is profoundly and shamefully dishonest to pretend that it is in any way necessary to give FIVE TIMES MORE vaccines to children in order to accomplish what was already accomplished with a much more limited vaccine schedule.

What the irrational pro-vaxxers fail to realize, in their futile and stupid attempts to launch deceptive, emotion-based attacks on those who demonstrably know more about the relevant facts of the matter than they do, is that their efforts are counterproductive. Instead of engaging in reasoned discussion, they simply point and shriek like the global warming crowd. Not only are they completely unconvincing, but they are losing, as vaccination rates continue to fall.

When intelligent and concerned parents are told they are stupid and anti-science when they are merely asking intelligent and relevant questions instead of having their questions answered in a respectful manner, they are not going to obediently fall in line and get their kid injected. Instead, they are quite correctly going to conclude that there is no chance in Hell that they are going to pay any attention to what the hysterical pro-vaxxers say in the future.

Most pro-vaxxers simply haven’t thought through the costs and benefits to the average family. Nor have they ever considered that many families that don’t adhere to the vaccine schedule are doing so with the medical approval of their pediatricians who have seen one of their children have an adverse reaction. Once you’ve seen one child collapse unconscious or have a seizure, how completely and utterly stupid do you have to be to blindly proceed with the recommended vaccine schedule with that child or any of your other children?

Some vaccines make sense. Others don’t. That is the reality that the pro-vaxxers will have to get their heads around before anyone in the vaccine reality camp will pay any attention whatsoever to their emotion-laden rantings. Consider this: the fact that children need water in order to live is not a rational basis for drowning them on behalf of their health.

And just to be clear, I think it makes sense to vaccinate for tetanus, polio, and after the age of four, measles. It may make sense to vaccinate for some influenzas if a sufficiently deadly variant were to arise and begin spreading. But it makes no sense to vaccinate against most of the other diseases which are so seldom fatal and are so easily treated without hospitalization. I am not an “anti-vaxxer”, I am simply a vaccine realist. If the rabid vaxxers were as genuinely concerned about saving lives as they claim, they would occupy themselves with banning automobiles, not injecting children with various toxic substances.

The secularist’s dilemma

It’s hard to feel a whole lot of sympathy for the secular scientists who, in their ignorance of history, failed to understand that by attacking Christianity, they were opening the door to much less reasonable opposition:

Professors at University College London have expressed concern over the increasing number of biology students boycotting lectures on Darwinist theory, which form an important part of the syllabus, citing their religion. Similar to the beliefs expressed by fundamentalist Christians, Muslim opponents to Darwinism maintain that Allah created the world, mankind and all known species in a single act.

Steve Jones emeritus professor of human genetics at university college London has questioned why such students would want to study biology at all when it obviously conflicts with their beliefs.

He told the Sunday Times: ‘I had one or two slightly frisky discussions years ago with kids who belonged to fundamentalist Christian churches, now it is Islamic overwhelmingly.

What is particularly ironic is that the only reason all of those Islamic students are at English universities is because the secular humanists have lobbied for and defended open immigration for decades. It should be interesting to see what form the cognitive dissonance will take once the Islamic students start beating up their professors for theological impurity as they are known to do in their own countries. I suspect our brave secular scientists will be recanting their belief in Darwinian evolution faster than you can say “Neo-Darwinian synthesis”.

It’s rather like watching a Lovecraft novel in real-time. “We’re just going to open this little dimensional gate here. I’m sure whatever walks through will be friendly and behave in perfect accordance with my beliefs.”

No doubt all this will inspire an even more fervent attack on the danger to science posed by Christian Creationists and stickers on elementary school textbooks by the usual suspects. Then again, it may not be long before the first Somalis begin to show up in the Fowl Atheist’s biology classes…. It is funny. It is also well-merited. But don’t be mistaken, it is going to be ugly indeed. The only good that may eventually come of it is that the secularists may finally get on board with the great clash of civilizations that has been inevitable ever since the oil-hungry West woke the sleeping giant of expansionist Islam. But it’s entirely possible that they may prefer the collapse and/or subjugation of the West to the restoration of Christendom, once they realize that their shiny, sexy, secular society isn’t going to happen.

The future of eugenics

Steve Sailer contemplates a potential problem in human progress:

In general, the 19th Century British were just more effectual at dog breeding than are moderns. I strongly doubt that they had better techniques. They just had better goals. For example, the reporter goes to visit a man who has been breeding a healthier English bulldog for 40 years, but nobody much cares.

That reminds me that you occasionally read, although less often now than a decade ago, of somebody claiming that genetic engineering of humans will, Real Soon Now, change everything. I pretty much asserted that back in the 1990s.

Well, maybe, but leaving aside all the technical questions and consider this: humans have near-complete control over dog breeding today, and yet we are lousier at it than a century ago.

What Sailer clearly fails to keep in mind here is that the decline of canine breeding results can be blamed upon the democratization of dog breeders and the insidious pressures of the free market. Naturally, the breeders have oriented themselves towards the lowest common denominator, which is not necessarily the most efficient, effective, or objectively desirable by any scientific standard.

The new eugenics will not be left in the hands of interested amateurs, but will instead be based upon a sound foundation of genetic science and guided by scientific technocrats making wise, science-based decisions. What could possibly go wrong?