Tag: science

Mailvox: the hypocrisy of the anti-scientist

One can’t truly appreciate how effectively Dominic has argued the atheist case without comparing it to the conventional talking points usually presented by the average atheist:

Yeah, heaven forbid that we actually learn from our mistakes! Tell me vox, if you have such distrust of our present snapshot, how about you jump off your roof to test it?

But you won’t. And I’ll tell you why. While you know it can be wrong, and certainly is at some points, the chance that it’s wrong regarding your fall is abysmally low. So low that you won’t stake your life on it.

You similarly will not trust historical evidence that says humans flew , for you know well that the chance of them lying as opposed to science being wrong on the subject is really, really huge.

When someone testifies to you that he has seen a dragon in your backyard, you will, like a true hypocrite, impose upon the scientific principles of biology and non-observation of dragons despite the fact that you know full well it can be wrong.

And I’ll tell you why. You know it can be wrong, but you’re pretty sure it isn’t. When we bet, we bet on good odds, not bad ones. There’s the difference between probable and plausible that you’re unable to grasp. There’s a chance that your car will crash, your aeroplane will be hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists, you’ll be mugged while walking, etc. Does that prevent you from going out ?

You just happen to forget this game of odds when it suits you. It’s called hypocrisy, and you play this game well.

The amusing thing about the average atheist is the way they illogically attempt to simultaneously deny the relevance of historical and testimonial evidence while appealing to it under the misapprehension that it is science. I don’t refrain from jumping off my roof because science has confirmed that the effect of Earth gravity will draw me to the ground at 9.8 m/s and I have performed a rapid calculation involving my mass, the distance of the fall from the roof, and reached a conclusion that I will not jump. Instead, I rely upon the testimonial evidence of others, which simply states “don’t jump off the roof or you will hurt yourself.”

The amusing thing about this atheist’s example of flight is that scientists of the early 20th century refused to believe the historical evidence that the Wright Brothers had, in fact, flown, in part due to their reliance upon the scientific consensus of the time which insisted that heavier-than-air flight was impossible. In fact, Lord Kelvin, the leading scientist and President of the Royal Society of England, in 1895 stated unequivocally that “Heavier than air flying machines are impossible”.

If someone testifies that he has seen a dragon in my backyard, I may or may not believe him depending upon his historical record of truthfulness. Science won’t enter into it at all. I have already seen far too many things take place that I previously thought to be impossible to place more confidence in “the scientific principles of biology and non-observation of dragons” than in the truthfulness of an individual known to have been reliably truthful in the past.

The problem with atheists who make a fetish of science is that they simply don’t understand that science is not a universal tool ideal for all purposes, but is rather more akin to a hammer. A hammer works very well for driving nails and rather less well for cutting down trees. But preferring the use of a saw when the task at hand involves cutting down a tree does not make one intrinsically anti-hammer, nor does it make one hesitate before picking up a hammer to drive a nail.

Scientific evidence and historical evidence are complimentary, not intrinsically adversarial. They may overlap at times, they may conflict at others, but in no case are they the same thing and both types of evidence are capable of being wholly unreliable if applied in an inappropriate manner. It is far from hypocrisy to recognize the limits to a type of knowledge and restrict one’s use of it to the situations when it is relevant, especially since doing otherwise is misguided at best and quite possibly delusional.

TIA: it is science

Okay, you can all stop sending this to me now. Look, I don’t think anyone should have been terribly shocked by news of the scientific link between atheism and autism which supports my original hypothesis from four years ago:

People with ‘mild’ forms of autism are more likely to be atheists, according to a controversial new study – and more likely to shun organised religion in general. The study, which looked at posts on autism forums, focused on people with high-functioning autism such as Asperger’s. The study, from University of Boston, speculates that common autistic spectrum behaviours such as ‘a preference for logical beliefs’ and a distrust of metaphor and figures of speech, could be responsible.

The amusing thing about the vehement reaction by many atheists to my description of their observable tendency towards socially autistic behavior is that it was not only based on my personal observations over the years, but also by the Asperger’s Quotient results proudly reported by dozens of the Internet’s most militant atheists. But the link should have always been obvious because it is logically inevitable. Even if one believes that a god is nothing but a social construct, it should not be hard to grasp that a degree of social dysfunction would tend to inhibit one’s understanding of those constructs.

Now, obviously god-blindness will take a variety of forms, just as color-blindness does. My belated discovery of my own very mild color-blindness has, in some ways, helped me understand what Brent Rasmussen once described as a missing sense more than my longtime agnosticism ever did. You can explain it to me all you like, you can walk me slowly and patiently through all the lines on the image, but I am still not going to see it. Even if I trust that it is there, I simply cannot see it and no amount of desire allows me to detect it. It is perhaps worth recalling that just as my color-blindness is totally undetectable by others whereas the total or red-green versions are readily observable to anyone paying attention to the individual’s behavior, god-blindness is not going to automatically translate into full blown New Atheist social autism.

What is slightly misleading about the article’s description of these socially autistic individuals is that what is described as a “preference for logical beliefs” should actually be phrased as a “preference for beliefs that appear to be logical”. For, as we have repeatedly seen, socially dysfunctional atheists tend to be extraordinarily illogical, to such an extent that they will deny the existence of straightforward dictionary definitions in use for hundreds of years in order to cling to their pseudo-logic.

It’s not so much logic as static rules that appeal to them. Where the cognitive deficiency is revealed is in their inability to understand that the decision tree they have adopted with quasi-religious fervor is insufficiently dynamic. I suspect it is somehow related to their concomitant emotional immaturity, as I see a similar problem with static decision trees all the time in children’s soccer.

For example, you might tell a young defender to closely mark #12 because he is the most dangerous striker on the other team. Then you will watch in disbelief as that defender obediently stays wide and out of the play at #12’s side instead of moving into the center and attacking the other striker who has the ball and is heading for a shot on goal. What the young defender doesn’t understand that the order to mark the one player is a conditional one and that the order should no longer be considered in effect once a greater danger to the goal presents itself. So, it’s necessary to keep building more and more complex decision trees as the player develops until the light bulb goes off, the logical bases underlying all the various trees are finally understood, and the defender can begin thinking and analyzing the situations for himself rather than simply attempting to identify which branch of the decision tree applies to the present situation.

An inability or dislike for processing dynamic if-then situations has nothing to do with logic per se, it is simply a need for clear-cut rules that remove any necessity for active thinking. To the socially autistic, both “Science” and “Reason” are perceived as The Legitimate Rulegivers and they represent far more than the simple tools they are to the neurotypical. Of course, it is more than a little ironic that those who claim to be freethinkers and paragons of logic are actually exhibiting illogical behavior that is fundamentally based on an aversion to thinking.

Kill only in ignorance

Unsurprisingly, the advance of technology is rapidly forcing pro-abortion feminists into severe logical contortions:

The Council of Europe is due to consider a draft resolution in October which recommends that all its 47 member states – including Britain – instruct hospitals to “withold information about the sex of the foetus” from parents. The move is a bid to prevent the practice of selective abortion, which they say has reached worrying proportions in some former Soviet states…. Now, a survey of maternity units in England discloses that several are already refusing to share the information.

What a pity scientists never managed to find that gay gene. Then we would be presented with the spectacle where women only possessed “the right to choose” so long as she was carrying a normal male child. But how interesting that a woman’s “right” to her own body doesn’t appear to extend to the knowledge of what is in it.

There goes another “constant”

And with it, apparently, the Standard Model of physics:

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.

“We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing,” he said. “We now want colleagues to check them independently.”

If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a “cosmic constant” and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

And, of course, this is a totally awesome discovery, because everyone knows what this means. HYPERSPACE! But is it even properly considered science, when it is “a totally unexpected finding”? Obviously, science will now be brought to bear on it, at least the replication aspect.

But what is the hypothesis for this faster-than-light neutrino movement that was being tested?

Mailvox: holding scientists accountable

BT wonders if the Italians are taking a science fetish one step too far in holding scientists accountable for their failure to correctly predict an imminent earthquake:

I know you are skeptical about the scientific community. But don’t you think that this is an extreme step- unless somebody can prove that they deliberately did not carry out their duties, isn’t it unfair to expect them to be superknowledgible? Can we see this as a result of the secular society going too far by putting science in an infallible pedestal that they are now expecting the scientists to answer every question? Just like may be how the priest sorcerer would have been held accountable for any “false prophesies” in the old clans on questions of winning battles or where to cultivate?

This actually represents an interesting attack on Naturalism. If we are to take the Naturalist perspective, which insists that science is not only the “most reliable source of knowledge” but “the best description of reality”, then obviously scientists must be held more responsible than other individuals who depend entirely upon less reliable sources of knowledge such as personal experience, testimonial evidence, hearsay, and documented historical evidence.

If an accountant can be held liable for failing to properly advise his clients about the probable consequences of information he possesses on the basis of one of these less reliable sources of knowledge, than obviously scientists should similarly be held liable for their similar failures when damages are suffered by the public, especially when the public is paying their salaries.

It would certainly be interesting to see a scientist who subscribes to Naturalism, or more likely, a science fetishist, to simultaneously attempt to argue that a) science is the most reliable source of knowledge but b) scientists should not be held responsible for avoidable damages suffered by other parties caused due to the inherent unreliability of science.

It’s an intriguing question, because this dichotomy between claims made on the behalf of science and the legal responsibilities of those who utilize it fundamentally calls into account the basic validity of science as a source of knowledge.

Gamers > Scientists

Many people have sent me this link about gamers doing scientists’ work for them, so I figured I better post it just to end the incoming barrage. But it’s hardly any surprise to anyone who has read TIA and been able to compare the intellectual difference between a minor game industry figure and a world-famous scientist.

Gamers have solved the structure of a retrovirus enzyme whose configuration had stumped scientists for more than a decade. The gamers achieved their discovery by playing Foldit, an online game that allows players to collaborate and compete in predicting the structure of protein molecules.

After scientists repeatedly failed to piece together the structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus, they called in the Foldit players. The scientists challenged the gamers to produce an accurate model of the enzyme. They did it in only three weeks.

Ten years versus three weeks. Yeah, that sounds about right. In truth, there are few groups more different than gamers and scientists, especially if you’re talking about the most elite group of gamers known as the game designers. (There is no such thing as a game designer who isn’t a gamer, although it would surprise you how many other people in the game industry don’t play anything. There are unfortunately an awful lot of John Sculleys in the industry these days.) The major difference is not that game designers are smarter and wealthier than scientists, although that’s also true, but that game designers could not possibly care less about academic credentials whereas few scientists appear to care much about anything else, unless it is attaching their name to something someone else intends to publish in an scientific journal.

I once had a European head-hunter ask me how I could possibly have gone into game development when I didn’t have a degree in it… never mind that there weren’t any degrees or courses in it at the time and I still, to this day, have never met a single person in the industry who formally studied game design or development in college. More than a few of the most successful guys in the industry dropped out of college if they ever even went; not dropping out during my sophmore year to focus on selling my 16-channel, 44 KHz, stereo sound board is one of my few big regrets now.

By the way, I’m presently working with Markku on a new game design which is based on the boundless evil of cats and may be the first mobile game inspired by a Tanith Lee short story. I don’t know when we’ll have the first alpha available, but if you’re interested in being a tester and you’ve got an Android device, let me know.

Putting science back into political science

Now here is a proposal for a scientific approach to politics I would absolutely get behind the idea of bringing back the states as the laboratories of democracy:

What do politicians do when they think they have a great idea? They just go and implement it. It’s like someone thinking he’s got a cure for cancer and immediately injecting it into everyone he can. That’s a madman, not a scientist. You always have to at least try out your idea on monkeys to make sure it doesn’t kill them.

Were farm subsidies first tried on monkeys? Social Security? Bank bailouts? No, the unscientific politicians went straight to trying all their ideas on humans, and now we have a bunch of bankrupt people instead of harmless bankrupt monkeys.

But the problem with testing political ideas on monkeys is that forcing them to go billions into debt would violate animal-cruelty laws. The only ones we’re allowed to do that to are people.

So we have to just observe the effects of the politicians’ policies — but that’s not so simple. Many say the Obama stimulus was a failure; others say we’d be even worse off without it. With the data we have, we can’t prove who’s right.

In science, when testing things on people, you always use a control group. If you have a drug you think will cut cholesterol, you give it to one set of test subjects. If everyone in the group that took the drug turns purple and starts choking but the control group is fine, we scientifically conclude there’s a problem with the drug. We have an economy that’s turning purple and choking. Did the stimulus cause that? If we had a control group that looked fine, we’d know.

So what we need to do is isolate part of the country to be the control group. They’ll be free from new taxes, won’t take part in government programs and regulations and can have all the guns they want. In the rest of America, politicians can go crazy with every Keynesian idea, ban trans fats and salt and just generally control everything. Then we can compare the results of the two groups and finally have a scientific answer on what works.

The only serious problem with the proposal is that everyone with half a brain or more would want to live in the unfortunately named control group. And even the liberals would start to figure it out eventually, as can be seen by their ongoing migration from the liberal states they’ve ruined to more conservative states.

Here’s the ironic thing. Due to their tendency towards the political left and their increasing dependence upon government spending, some of the biggest opponents of a scientific approach to politics would probably be scientists and the science lobby.

But it would certainly be amusing to see all the leftists in the experimental groups arguing that the policy would have worked if only it hadn’t relied on a population full of morons like themselves.

PS – For those who are following the Memorial Debate, I have just sent off my Round Two post to Dominic. So, we’re on schedule.

Homecare or die

At this point, I won’t be surprised to see it reported soon that daycare leads to sterility, Satanism, suicide, and supporting the Green Bay Packers:

n an article for The Biologist journal, Dr Sigman cites studies which show higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol in children who go to day care. The increase only appears up until the age of three or so, but Dr Sigman says it is still important, as the brain develops rapidly during these years. High levels of cortisol are linked to lower resistance to infection in the short-term and heart disease in the long-term.

Of course, no sooner will the reports be published than the supporters of these kiddy concentration camps will argue that while there is a broad consensus that day-care influences the suicide rate in the short term, there is no evidence that this has long-term detrimental consequences.

Throw in the fact that the median male worker now makes less than he did in 1968, and a very solid case can be made that mothers with young children not only should not work, they should probably be legally barred from working if they are married or cohabitating.

Of snakes and science fads

You will likely recall my citation of Cabal as a poster snake for his claim that Darwinism is a meaningless expression that only exists in creationist literature. Not only was this easily demonstrated to be false, given frequent uses of the term by famous creationists such as Richard Dawkins, but thanks to the Google Ngram Viewer we can see precisely how ludicrously dishonest a claim it was.

The Google Ngram viewer shows the number of times a term was used in various books from 1800 to 2008. This is the tracking of the term Darwinism. Notice how use of the term rises rapidly from 1860 to 1910, then from 1945 to 1998.

Now, what could the two fall-offs that begin in 1928 and 1998 have in common? My initial suspicion is economics. As per socionomic theory, in times of economic contraction, people are less attracted to the purely materialist position for which Darwinism is the primary justification. Everyone is too busy surviving to care much about prehistoric matters or the philosophies that can be derived from them; even the scientists are forced to turn their attention to subjects that provide more immediate grant-generating possibilities and more practical applications. Furthermore, I also surmised that the greater decline in the post-1998 decline may be related to the likely motivation behind Cabal’s claim, because it is apparent that the secular humanist movement has decided to try to move away from the albatross that the term “Darwinism” has become.

However, this latter theory appears to be incorrect, as the use of the term “evolution” has also fallen off at a similar rate of decline. This would tend to support the socionomic theory and disprove the propaganda-related one. And this raises an even more interesting possibility, which is that this relatively recent dropoff may mark the beginning of the abandonment of Darwinism, evolution, and particularly natural selection as real scientific concepts and the end of a 148-year quasi-scientific fad.

Courtier science

I have repeatedly pointed out that the profession of science does not create wealth, but is utterly dependent upon societal wealth and the willingness of the people to spend money on it. Scientistry is basically a potentially more useful National Endowment for the Arts. This action by the Turkish government will likely mark the first of many reminders that modern government-funded science will no longer be deemed important enough to justify its existence as the economic contraction continues to reduce tax revenues and the ability of the average individual to pay his bills:

The decree, issued on 27th August, which was just after the start of a nine-day holiday in Turkey, says that one-third of the members of the academy will now be appointed by the government and a further one-third by the Council of Higher Education, which is also a government body. Only the remaining one-third will be elected by current members. The president and vice-president of the academy will in future be appointed by the government rather than by sitting members. In addition, honorary members will lose their voting rights and the age at which members are deemed honorary will be reduced from 70 to 67.

TÜBA has issued a statement that says the government’s decree effectively ends the Academy and replaces it with a new Academy of Sciences that will be under the control of the government. They add: “There is no science academy in the world where the majority of members and the president are appointed directly by the government.”

The academy has been given no reasons for the changes, but the government has the right to make changes to the academy’s structure because the academy is publicly funded.

The Turkish scientists aren’t upset because they are losing an imaginary independence that never existed in the first place, they are upset because those who hold the purse strings are finally exercising the control they have had all along. This should prove an object lesson for science fetishists who have long dreamed of a war between religion and science, imagining that government would naturally side with the scientific elite.

This was always a ridiculous notion, since both the money and the popular support upon which government depends are generated by the religious masses. Scientists had better pray that the coming years don’t bring about a genuine war between religion and science, in the Muslim world or in the West, because it is readily apparent that the scientific world not only can’t hope to win, it can’t even support its own existence and is dependent upon access to the wealth of the other side.