Richard Feynman on education in Brazil

From Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman:

In regard to education in Brazil, I had a very interesting experience. I was teaching a group of students who would ultimately become teachers, since at that time there were not many opportunities in Brazil for a highly trained person in science. These students had already had many courses, and this was to be their most advanced course in electricity and magnetism – Maxwell’s equations, and so on.

The university was located in various office buildings throughout the city, and the course I taught met in a building which overlooked the bay.

I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the question – the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell – they couldn’t answer it at all! For instance, one time I was talking about polarized light, and I gave them all some strips of polaroid.

Polaroid passes only light whose electric vector is in a certain direction, so I explained how you could tell which way the light is polarized from whether the polaroid is dark or light.

We first took two strips of polaroid and rotated them until they let the most light through. From doing that we could tell that the two strips were now admitting light polarized in the same direction – what passed through one piece of polaroid could also pass through the other. But then I asked them how one could tell the absolute direction of polarization, for a single piece of polaroid.

They hadn’t any idea.

I knew this took a certain amount of ingenuity, so I gave them a hint: “Look at the light reflected from the bay outside.”

Nobody said anything.

Then I said, “Have you ever heard of Brewster’s Angle?”

“Yes, sir! Brewster’s Angle is the angle at which light reflected from a medium with an index of refraction is completely polarized.”

“And which way is the light polarized when it’s reflected?”

“The light is polarized perpendicular to the plane of reflection, sir.” Even now, I have to think about it; they knew it cold! They even knew the tangent of the angle equals the index!

I said, “Well?”

Still nothing. They had just told me that light reflected from a medium with an index, such as the bay outside, was polarized; they had even told me which way it was polarized.

I said, “Look at the bay outside, through the polaroid. Now turn the polaroid.”

“Ooh, it’s polarized!” they said.

After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. When they heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t know that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the “direction of the light” is the direction in which you see something when you’re looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, “What is Brewster’s Angle?” I’m going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, “Look at the water,” nothing happens – they don’t have anything under “Look at the water”!

Later I attended a lecture at the engineering school. The lecture went like this, translated into English: “Two bodies… are considered equivalent… if equal torques… will produce… equal acceleration. Two bodies, are considered equivalent, if equal torques, will produce equal acceleration.” The students were all sitting there taking dictation, and when the professor repeated the sentence, they checked it to make sure they wrote it down all right. Then they wrote down the next sentence, and on and on. I was the only one who knew the professor was talking about objects with the same moment of inertia, and it was hard to figure out.

I didn’t see how they were going to learn anything from that. Here he was talking about moments of inertia, but there was no discussion about how hard it is to push a door open when you put heavy weights on the outside, compared to when you put them near the hinge – nothing!

After the lecture, I talked to a student: “You take all those notes – what do you do with them?”

“Oh, we study them,” he says. “We’ll have an exam.”

“What will the exam be like?”

“Very easy. I can tell you now one of the questions.” He looks at his notebook and says, “ ‘When are two bodies equivalent?’ And the answer is, ‘Two bodies are considered equivalent if equal torques will produce equal acceleration.’ “ So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and “learn” all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had memorized.

Then I went to an entrance exam for students coming into the engineering school. It was an oral exam, and I was allowed to listen to it. One of the students was absolutely super: He answered everything nifty! The examiners asked him what diamagnetism was, and he answered it perfectly. Then they asked, “When light comes at an angle through a sheet of material with a certain thickness, and a certain index N, what happens to the light?”

“It comes out parallel to itself, sir – displaced.”

“And how much is it displaced?”

“I don’t know, sir, but I can figure it out.” So he figured it out. He was very good. But I had, by this time, my suspicions.

After the exam I went up to this bright young man, and explained to him that I was from the United States, and that I wanted to ask him some questions that would not affect the result of his examination in any way. The first question I ask is, “Can you give me some example of a diamagnetic substance?”

“No.”

Then I asked, “If this book was made of glass, and I was looking at something on the table through it, what would happen to the image if I tilted the glass?”

“It would be deflected, sir, by twice the angle that you’ve turned the book.”

I said, “You haven’t got it mixed up with a mirror, have you?”

“No, sir!”

He had just told me in the examination that the light would be displaced, parallel to itself, and therefore the image would move over to one side, but would not be turned by any angle. He had even figured out how much it would be displaced, but he didn’t realize that a piece of glass is a material with an index, and that his calculation had applied to my question.

I taught a course at the engineering school on mathematical methods in physics, in which I tried to show how to solve problems by trial and error. It’s something that people don’t usually learn, so I began with some simple examples of arithmetic to illustrate the method. I was surprised that only about eight out of the eighty or so students turned in the first assignment. So I gave a strong lecture about having to actually try it, not just sit back and watch me do it.

After the lecture some students came up to me in a little delegation, and told me that I didn’t understand the backgrounds that they have, that they can study without doing the problems, that they have already learned arithmetic, and that this stuff was beneath them.

So I kept going with the class, and no matter how complicated or obviously advanced the work was becoming, they were never handing a damn thing in. Of course I realized what it was: They couldn’t do it!

One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions. Finally, a student explained it to me: “If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, ‘What are you wasting our time for in the class? We’re trying to learn something. And you’re stopping him by asking a question’.”

It was a kind of one-upmanship, where nobody knows what’s going on, and they’d put the other one down as if they did know. They all fake that they know, and if one student admits for a moment that something is confusing by asking a question, the others take a high-handed attitude, acting as if it’s not confusing at all, telling him that he’s wasting their time.

I explained how useful it was to work together, to discuss the questions, to talk it over, but they wouldn’t do that either, because they would be losing face if they had to ask someone else. It was pitiful! All the work they did, intelligent people, but they got themselves into this funny state of mind, this strange kind of self-propagating “education” which is meaningless, utterly meaningless!

At the end of the academic year, the students asked me to give a talk about my experiences of teaching in Brazil. At the talk there would be not only students, but professors and government officials, so I made them promise that I could say whatever I wanted. They said, “Sure. Of course. It’s a free country.”

So I came in, carrying the elementary physics textbook that they used in the first year of college. They thought this book was especially good because it had different kinds of typeface – bold black for the most important things to remember, lighter for less important things, and so on.

Right away somebody said, “You’re not going to say anything bad about the textbook, are you? The man who wrote it is here, and everybody thinks it’s a good textbook.”

“You promised I could say whatever I wanted.”

The lecture hall was full. I started out by defining science as an understanding of the behavior of nature. Then I asked, “What is a good reason for teaching science? Of course, no country can consider itself civilized unless… yak, yak, yak.” They were all sitting there nodding, because I know that’s the way they think.

Then I say, “That, of course, is absurd, because why should we feel we have to keep up with another country? We have to do it for a good reason, a sensible reason; not just because other countries do.” Then I talked about the utility of science, and its contribution to the improvement of the human condition, and all that – I really teased them a little bit.

Then I say, “The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate to you that no science is being taught in Brazil!”

I can see them stir, thinking, “What? No science? This is absolutely crazy! We have all these classes.”

So I tell them that one of the first things to strike me when I came to Brazil was to see elementary school kids in bookstores, buying physics books. There are so many kids learning physics in Brazil, beginning much earlier than kids do in the United States, that it’s amazing you don’t find many physicists in Brazil – why is that? So many kids are working so hard, and nothing comes of it.

Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek language, who knows that in his own country there aren’t many children studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to find everybody studying Greek – even the smaller kids in the elementary schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his degree in Greek, and asks him, “What were Socrates’ ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?” – and the student can’t answer. Then he asks the student, “What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?” the student lights up and goes, “Brrrrrrrrr-up” – he tells you everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.

But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty!

What this Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letters, then the words, and then sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has ever translated them into words the students can understand.

I said, “That’s how it looks to me, when I see you teaching the kids ‘science’ here in Brazil.” (Big blast, right?)

Then I held up the elementary physics textbook they were using. “There are no experimental results mentioned anywhere in this book, except in one place where there is a ball, rolling down an inclined plane, in which it says how far the ball got after one second, two seconds, three seconds, and so on. The numbers have ‘errors’ in them – that is, if you look at them, you think you’re looking at experimental results, because the numbers are a little above, or a little below, the theoretical values. The book even talks about having to correct the experimental errors – very fine. The trouble is, when you calculate the value of the acceleration constant from these values, you get the right answer. But a ball rolling down an inclined plane, if it is actually done, has an inertia to get it to turn, and will, if you do the experiment, produce five-sevenths of the right answer, because of the extra energy needed to go into the rotation of the ball. Therefore this single example of experimental ‘results’ is obtained from a fake experiment. Nobody had rolled such a ball, or they would never have gotten those results!

“I have discovered something else,” I continued. “By flipping the pages at random, and putting my finger in and reading the sentences on that page, I can show you what’s the matter – how it’s not science, but memorizing, in every circumstance. Therefore I am brave enough to flip through the pages now, in front of this audience, to put my finger in, to read, and to show you.”

So I did it. Brrrrrrrup – I stuck my finger in, and I started to read: “Triboluminescence. Triboluminescence is the light emitted when crystals are crushed…”

I said, “And there, have you got science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of other words. You haven’t told anything about nature – what crystals produce light when you crush them, why they produce light. Did you see any student go home and try it? He can’t.

“But if, instead, you were to write, ‘When you take a lump of sugar and crush it with a pair of pliers in the dark, you can see a bluish flash. Some other crystals do that too. Nobody knows why. The phenomenon is called “triboluminescence.” ‘ Then someone will go home and try it. Then there’s an experience of nature.” I used that example to show them, but it didn’t make any difference where I would have put my finger in the book; it was like that everywhere.

Finally, I said that I couldn’t see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything. “However,” I said, “I must be wrong. There were two Students in my class who did very well, and one of the physicists I know was educated entirely in Brazil. Thus, it must be possible for some people to work their way through the system, bad as it is.”

Well, after I gave the talk, the head of the science education department got up and said, “Mr. Feynman has told us some things that are very hard for us to hear, but it appears to be that he really loves science, and is sincere in his criticism. Therefore, I think we should listen to him. I came here knowing we have some sickness in our system of education; what I have learned is that we have a cancer!” – and he sat down.

That gave other people the freedom to speak out, and there was a big excitement. Everybody was getting up and making suggestions. The students got some committee together to mimeograph the lectures in advance, and they got other committees organized to do this and that.

Then something happened which was totally unexpected for me. One of the students got up and said, “I’m one of the two students whom Mr. Feynman referred to at the end of his talk. I was not educated in Brazil; I was educated in Germany, and I’ve just come to Brazil this year.”

The other student who had done well in class had a similar thing to say. And the professor I had mentioned got up and said, “I was educated here in Brazil during the war, when, fortunately, all of the professors had left the university, so I learned everything by reading alone. Therefore I was not really educated under the Brazilian system.”

I didn’t expect that. I knew the system was bad, but 100 percent – it was terrible!

Since I had gone to Brazil under a program sponsored by the United States Government, I was asked by the State Department to write a report about my experiences in Brazil, so I wrote out the essentials of the speech I had just given. I found out later through the grapevine that the reaction of somebody in the State Department was, “That shows you how dangerous it is to send somebody to Brazil who is so naive. Foolish fellow; he can only cause trouble. He didn’t understand the problems.” Quite the contrary! I think this person in the State Department was naive to think that because he saw a university with a list of courses and descriptions, that’s what it was.

Getting the science right on GMOs

Contrary to the saying, all is not fair in love and war, especially when the war isn't literally a war, but a political struggle. There are things we shouldn't do, even if they seem helpful in the short run. Unfortunately, Kamil Ahsan, a PhD candidate in developmental biology at the University of Chicago, doesn't get it. In The New Scientism, Ahsan demands that scientists relax their scientific standards to help in the fight against the evil agricultural-biotechnology (ag-biotech) firms that are using genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to exploit farmers in developing nations. Ahsan is wrong on just about every point: scientists and the scientific establishment are, by and large, not part of the problem. The truth has a liberal, even revolutionary, bias, but Ahsan's calumnies risk alienating one of the left's most valuable allies.

Ahsan sensibly worries that the vast amount of money from Big Pharma and ag-biotech firms is corrupting scientific inquiry. He is not alone. Simple Google searches* will reveal that these issues are being discussed inside the scientific community, in the pages of Scientific American as well as papers in PLOS and ISPUB, etc. Google Scholar reports about 1.5 million results (not all of them original papers) just in the scientific literature. Ahsan links to an earlier article, Llewllyn Hinkes-Jones's Bad Science: Free-market academic research policies have unleashed medical quackery and scientific fraud, forcing consumers to pay premiums for discoveries we’ve already funded as taxpayers, which competently and accurately covers both the economic and scientific problems of big money in science. Many of the links Ahsan himself provides show that the scientific community is concerned about this issue. For example, in the Nature article, GM crops: Battlefield, Emily Waltz investigates whether critics of studies suggesting saftey issues with GMOs "fight fair." There is a real problem, and a problem that requires deep public debate, but the scientific establishment is not a monolithic entity on the wrong side of the issue; there is considerable support in the scientific community for resisting the corrupting effects of money on scientific inquiry. Ahsan does not focus on this important issue. Instead he unleashes a barrage of calumny to discredit the scientific community and subordinate science to his own political agenda.

*pharmaceutical/biotechnology industry influence on science

Ahsan asserts that the scientific community absolutely refuses to legitimize criticism: "To [the scientific establishment], any criticism of this historical narrative [of the "march of technological improvement despite the opposition of a supposedly anti-science public"] is tantamount to wholesale opposition to science." But Ahsan does not cite any criticism of this supposed "historical narrative" and does not cite any response to such criticism. Without support, Ahsan is simply poisoning the well. Ahsan follows with a nonsequitur fallacy: "[D]efenders of science lump together global-warming-denying conservatives, anti-GMO activists, and grassroots environmental activists, treating each as disturbingly anti-science. This simplistic analysis is rooted in the arrogant assumption that science is somehow above criticism — indeed, that it’s above politics entirely." The conclusion simply does not follow from the premises. Furthermore, Ahsan does not provide support for the premise that "defenders of science" really do lump these groups together, and Ahsan makes no mention in his article of the vague category "grassroots environmental activists." Simple assertions without evidence not only fail to persuade, they seriously undermine the author's credibility.

Ahsan seems incapable of an honest reading of anyone he disagrees with. For example, he cites Michael Shermer:

But try telling that to Michael Shermer, who, writing in Scientific American, sees in every critique of corporate behavior an anti-science temper tantrum: "Try having a conversation with a liberal progressive about GMOs . . . in which the words 'Monsanto' and 'profit' are not dropped like syllogistic bombs. . . . The fact is that we've been genetically modifying organisms for 10,000 years through breeding and selection."

Try as I might, bending over backwards to be charitable, tilting my head and squinting, Ahsan's interpretation does not have anything to do with the quotation he interprets. Shermer is not talking about every critique, he is talking about one specific attitude, dropping the words "Monsanto" or "profit" like "syllogistic bombs." Shermer juxtaposes these "syllogistic bombs" with a scientific statement; presumably he intends to mean that those who criticize Monsanto ignore or falsely deny that GMOs are ubiquitous and long-standing, not that Monsanto is a model of corporate social responsibility. There are many other examples where Ahsan labels the legitimate back-and-forth of critical inquiry as arrogant obstinacy. Ahsan clearly cannot engage honestly with disagreement.

Ahsan conflates three distinct issues. The first is scientific: are GMOs safe? Can we eat them? Do they have negative effects on the environments and the ecosystems where they are grown? The second is economic: what are the effects of the business practices of ag-biotech companies that are providing GMOs, especially to low-income farmers in developing nations. The third is an issue of political strategy. As documented in several of the links Ahsan provides (e.g. Nina Fedoroff's Scientific American article, Can We Trust Monsanto with Our Food?), anti-GMO activists claim that GMOs are harmful; scientists consider these claims entirely without scientific merit, indeed anti-science. These issues are obviously interrelated, but they are still distinct.

It is one thing to allege that because of the corrupting influence of ag-biotech money, scientists are getting the science wrong on GMO safety. But this is not Ahsan's focus. Instead, Ahsan asserts that because Monsanto and other ag-biotech corporations exploit developing-world farmers, the scientific establishment should therefore, and for that reason only, not label anti-GMO activists, who are struggling against this corporate exploitation, as anti-science:

A rigid defense of “the science” prevents scientists from recognizing that Monsanto monopolizes seed production, dictates market prices to the exclusive benefit of rich farmers, drives the emergence of superweeds, allows the spread of transgenes to wild crops in other countries, and uses the state to boost its profits.

Acknowledging these facts should produce a thorough rethinking of the politics of GMO research and the ethics of GMOs. It should prompt a response to anti-GMO activists that doesn’t cast them as malevolent and anti-science, or conflate the movement to label GMO foods with celebrities who refuse to vaccinate their children. [boldface added]

This passage is the crux of Ahsan's thesis. If Ahsan really believed the problem was that money is corruption of science, then he himself would be defending "the science"; instead, he attributes problems directly to the defense of "the science." He asserts we should not consider the scientific claims of anti-GMO activists on their scientific merits, but on their political merits. Essentially, Ahsan is not decrying the corruption of science, he is lamenting that the wrong side has corrupted science, and hopes that the correct side will do so, indeed that the scientific establishment has an obligation to corrupt its standards of evidence and analysis in the service of the left.

It is not the scientific establishment but Ahsan himself, with breathtaking hypocrisy, who is arrogant, obdurate, and resistant to criticism. The truth is simply this: scientific criticism should be scientific. Moral, political and economic criticism should be moral, political, and economic. Neil deGrasse Tyson makes this point crystal clear:

If your objection to GMOs is the morality of selling non-prerennial seed stocks, then focus on that. If your objection to GMOs is the monopolistic conduct of agribusiness, then focus on that. But to paint the entire concept of GMO with these particular issues is to blind yourself to the underlying truth of what humans have been doing -- and will continue to do -- to nature so that it best serves our survival. That's what all organisms do when they can, or would do, if they could. Those that didn't, have gone extinct extinct.

In life, be cautious of how broad is the brush with which you paint the views of those you don't agree with.

We gain nothing and risk much by distracting the conversation away from the corruption of scientific inquiry, a conversation that can only help the left, towards a insistence on rigid short-term political loyalty. Shame on Ahsan for writing this piece, and shame on Jacobin for publishing it.

A real space drive?

If this pans out, and the preliminary results are encouraging, we may actually have a working space drive that will put the whole solar system within reach: Nasa [sic] validates 'impossible' space drive [link fixed].

Either the results are completely wrong, or Nasa has confirmed a major breakthrough in space propulsion. . . . British scientist Roger Shawyer has been trying to interest people in his EmDrive for some years through his company SPR Ltd. Shawyer claims the EmDrive converts electric power into thrust, without the need for any propellant by bouncing microwaves around in a closed container. . . .

[L]ast year . . . a Chinese team built its own EmDrive [ and confirmed that it produced 720 mN (about 72 grams) of thrust, enough for a practical satellite thruster. . . .

[A] US scientist, Guido Fetta, has built his own propellant-less microwave thruster, and managed to persuade Nasa to test it out. The test results were presented on July 30 at the 50th Joint Propulsion Conference in Cleveland, Ohio. Astonishingly enough, they are positive. . . .

A working microwave thruster would radically cut the cost of satellites and space stations and extend their working life, drive deep-space missions, and take astronauts to Mars in weeks rather than months.

See also 10 questions about Nasa's 'impossible' space drive answered [link fixed].

Who knows: I might live at least to see people explore the solar system!

Cheating

(via Daniel Florien)

Modeling and Control of Complex Dynamics

via Daniel Little

Boudry on Plantinga

I rag on philosophers often as being obscurantists, nit-pickers, and lovers of gratuitous complexity. But sometimes there are exceptions. I have some expertise in English composition as well as both general and religious philosophy, and Maarten Boudry's review of Alvin Plantinga's book, Where the Conflict Really Lies. Science, Religion and Naturalism, is a masterpiece of philosophy and perfect compositional technique. The review appears in the International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Group Newsletter, September/October 2012starting on page 21 [linkrot fixed]. (via Larry Moran)

Lattice Enhanced Nuclear Reactions

This is how you do some science.



h/t to Steve Bannister

The evolution of altruism by individual selection

Jerry Coyne reviews Michael Price's review of A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution, by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. Basically (and I can't do justice to Coyne's comments), the evidence suggests that "altruism" as we actually see it looks like a standard evolutionary "arms race" between cooperators and would-be "free riders", which is explainable by individual selection.

The historical method

The First Rule of Historical Method is: don’t believe everything you read. A believable history has to be constructed from several converging lines of evidence that have been critically and skillfully examined, and not every piece of evidence is equally trustworthy. Humans are notorious liars, eager exaggerators, and happy to believe almost anything they agree with. Skepticism is a virtue—but unfortunately a rare one, even rarer than honesty.

— Richard Carrier

(via Open Parachute)

Science, art, and philosophy in a nutshell

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (Go to the red dot under the original for the usual bonus.)

Sex at Dawn

The Infamous Brad has an interesting review and summary of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. The book investigates the sexuality and mating behavior of human beings from the disciplines of primatology, history and anthropology and biology. According to Brad, the authors collect exhaustive data to conclude that monogamy is entirely an due to agricultural society where inheritance and male ownership of property dominate the economic relations. If Brad is as good a reviewer as it appears (and he appears to be very good indeed), the authors have made a rock-solid case against monogamy being in any sense "natural".

College upperclassmen still fail at scientific reasoning

College upperclassmen still fail at scientific reasoning

Most of us develop a sort of intuitive logic about how the natural world works. Unfortunately, a lot of that informal reasoning turns out to be wrong, which complicates scientific education. But as students make their way through the science education pipeline, they should gradually start moving beyond the informal reasoning of their earlier years. Or at least that's what we'd like to think; instead, a new survey of college students, some in advanced biology classes, indicates that most end up with a confused mix of formal and informal reasoning. ...

The end result, the authors conclude, is that "faculty are unknowingly speaking a different language from their students." They think that when they mention lost energy, the students know what they're talking about, or that their students' poor choice of wording doesn't represent a failure of logic. As a result, they see little reason to speak more carefully or devote instructional time to clearing up misconceptions. And, even if they wanted to, most biology textbooks consider principle-based reasoning beyond their scope.

Pornography, ethics and science

I'm not really a big fan of the whole pornography debate. But it illustrates a persistent problem in ethical discussions. When we approve or disapprove of an activity, we seem to have an innate tendency to relax our scientific and critical standards regarding purported science that confirms our position, and crank the skepticism up to 11 regarding purported science that disconfirms our position. To say that everyone has an "innate tendency" to do something is not, however, to say that everyone actually does it. I'm saying only what Feynmann said: You are the easiest person to fool; you have to make a conscious effort to not fool yourself. We must consciously work to counter our innate confirmation bias.

As best I can understand, the anti-pornography position is that pornography is inherently and specially exploitative. It is nonsense from this position, then, to invoke "volunteerism" as a justification for either pornography or many kinds of scientific studies of pornography and sexuality. In just the same sense, it is nonsense (under more widely accepted standards) to "volunteer" to sell your kidney to a stranger. Because selling your organs so obviously violates your material self-interest, we see your attempt to volunteer as merely a response to desperate exploitation. Again, in just the same sense, it is ethically unacceptable to volunteer to sell your children into slavery; we have a moral obligation to ameliorate the conditions that make such a choice thinkable.

I don't know that I agree, but as an ethical position it is definitely philosophically respectable. I'm all for choice, but circumstances do substantially affect the choices available to a person; I believe — unlike one of my instructors — that only a few, extraordinary people can individually choose their way out of poverty, exploitation and degradation. There are choices we cannot in good conscience ever ask a person to make. If they do make that choice, their circumstances are definitely fucked up, and caring and engaged human beings have a moral obligation to change the circumstances.

The conceptual and philosophical problem, however, comes when our notions of what is intrinsically good and bad come into conflict. Our tendency seems to be to move from an essentially "propagandistic" argument, an argument attempting to change the listener's beliefs about what is intrinsically good and bad, to an instrumental argument, an argument about whether the behavior in question causes conditions we all agree are good or bad. It's certainly possible that some behavior one finds intrinsically bad also has bad effects. But if you find some behavior intrinsically bad you ought to bring extra skepticism of arguments that confirm your position, and extra charitability to arguments that challenge your position. You have to actively and consciously counter your own bias.

It is definitely the case that people who are not generally skeptical are vastly more prone to giving in to confirmation bias. What creationists, abortion opponents, gay rights opponents, New Age woo-woo heads, Libertarians and others who are not generally skeptical accept as "good" science (and reject as "bad" science) is ridiculous to a neutral observer. Abortion causes breast cancer? Give me a fucking break. But people who are otherwise skeptical also fall into this trap. The tendency is both innate and strong; it's easy to let one's conscious skepticism relax or weaken.

If you have good science for the instrumental badness of some activity you consider intrinsically bad, by all means present it, but first bend over backwards to consciously make sure you're not fooling yourself. You should know in your bones that in such cases you're especially prone to confirmation bias. The junk science isn't persuasive; it appeals only to people who are already predisposed to your position. All it does is let you feel self-righteous; it lets you feel that your position is somehow "objectively" true. If that's what you want to do, well, it's a free country, but you will earn no respect from me or anyone else who values skepticism as both intrinsically and instrumentally good. (Of course if you don't want my respect, you're under no obligation to earn it, but you do have to earn my respect to obtain my cooperation. Votes do occasionally matter.)

Many cases for the intrinsic value of activities, irrespective of their instrumental consequences, stand on their own. You could make a completely airtight economic case for the economic value of selling organs; you will not budge a micrometer that selling one's organs is intrinsically bad. And my position will stay firm not because it is "dogmatic" but because it is not based on the instrumental value.

If you believe some activity is intrinsically bad, and some people are apparently choosing to do it anyway (or at least they are not being actively "gun to the head" coerced), then the only logical conclusion is that some element of circumstances is forcing them to a desperate pseudo-choice. This conclusion suggests that ameliorating the conditions that make the choice immediately plausible is the best way to reduce or eliminate the activity. If abortion is bad, make sure that women only get pregnant when they want to be pregnant. Duh. If selling one's organs is bad, make sure that people aren't so desperately poor that they need to sell their organs to survive with what's left. And if pornography is bad, make sure women have realistic economic alternatives.

Sometimes you can affect the "demand" side of the equation, but this approach always leaves an uncomfortable moral choice. It is, for example, relatively easy to make sure that the transplant infrastructure does not perform paid transplants, and we actually do so. But this approach entails that there are some poor people who will die who would otherwise have chosen to sell their organs. Similarly, if most women who "choose" to perform in pornography are forced to do so because of dire economic circumstances, if they are faced with the choice of pornography or starvation, then eliminating pornography entails those women will starve. I want to be perfectly clear: I am not arguing here either for the selling of organs or the permission of pornography. I am making much a narrower case: Simply removing the a bad choice does not resolve the underlying circumstances that make the choice plausible.

That's fundamentally why I'm a communist. I see a lot of bad shit going on, and hey, pornography might be among that bad shit. If so, then we have common cause: most of the bad shit in this world is caused by the exploitation of labor or the direct effects of that exploitation. Get rid of exploitation and you'll solve a whole host of problems.

Metaphors and the brain

This Is Your Brain on Metaphors:

Symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech: we understand them. We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when he orders all of them on deck. We understand that Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” isn’t really about a cockroach. If we are of a certain theological ilk, we see bread and wine intertwined with body and blood. We grasp that the right piece of cloth can represent a nation and its values, and that setting fire to such a flag is a highly charged act. We can learn that a certain combination of sounds put together by Tchaikovsky represents Napoleon getting his butt kicked just outside Moscow. And that the name “Napoleon,” in this case, represents thousands and thousands of soldiers dying cold and hungry, far from home.

Subway science map

Totally, incredibly, awesomely cool, in a totally geeky way.


click to embiggen

The Original Post (with commentary)

Also check out the Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense:


click to embiggen

(via Ken)

R.I.P. Sprit

Ya done good, kid.

Scientific naturalism

Tim Kowal responds to my criticism of his post chiding atheists' "intellectual procrastination":

We are certain some element or elements of a theory — a set of statements about the world — are false if the theory entails false statements about observation.

There cannot be any "true" statement about reality once one rejects the concept that truth can transcends the empirical world. You are correct that there are as many models of truth and reality as there are religions--more, even. This is a debate for the respective adherents to those models. But to reject any truth that is not empirically observable is to cut oneself off at the knees. At the very least, atheists must posit that objects in the world have causal relationships with one another, that the future will resemble the past, and so on. Religion is simply an organized, systematic way to organize these transcendental truths.

Atheists certainly don't reject causation and induction, but they don't give an account for how they can know it. They simply refuse to acknowledge the transcendental truths they rely upon. This is disingenuous.

I'm never encouraged when readers cannot read and understand simple declarative sentences in the English language. But after blogging for more than 30 months and discussing religion and philosophy on the internet for a decade, I'm rarely surprised. Much as I dislike repeating myself, I will do so. Even if it were true (which it's not) that "Atheists... don't give an account of how they can know" about causation an induction, it is necessary to acknowledge that we do not have such an account before we can begin to create one. Organizing wildly contradictory religious "models" — models that give no account of knowledge more sophisticated than an invisible sky-fairy magically putting ideas into our heads — in some systematic way and leaving the resolution of those contradictions to some vague debate on unspecified grounds just avoids beginning that search for truth. Even if atheism were to bring nothing at all to the philosophical table, it would be rational and sensible to reject religious thought and admit profound ignorance. If after millennia they are unable to give us anything at all better than magical sky-fairies and consensus by the sword, then we are rationally entitled to explicitly acknowledge we are starting from nothing at all.

But of course there is something. There were atheists before scientific naturalism, but it is no surprise that atheism has flourished under scientific naturalism, which does not just recognize the failures and vacuity of what passes for "epistemology" in religion but gives us a powerful way of explaining features of the world both gross and subtle in a more sophisticated way than invoking magic.

Even an inattentive reader should note the glaring contradiction in Kowal's comment: in almost the same breath he complains that atheists "don't give an account" of knowledge while also undermining the account we do give, i.e. empiricism. Just this discrepancy alone forces the reader to choose which of two uncomfortable interpretations is the most charitable: either Kowal is insane, he is simply too stupid to detect this rather obvious contradiction, or he is intentionally trying to deceive his readers. If he does not like the epistemic account that scientific naturalism does in fact give, let him say so: to critique an account he does not acknowledge the existence of too greatly shocks the mind of those unpracticed in religious doublethink and cognitive dissonance.

Worse yet, Kowal must reach decades back to the beginning of the 20th century (or perhaps to the middle of the 18th) to find a natural epistemology he can criticize with cognitive abilities deficient in competence or honesty.

It is simply false that modern scientific naturalism — the sort of naturalism practiced for centuries by actual scientists and explicitly described by at least some philosophers of science for decades — "reject[s] any truth that is not empirically observable." Even the most misguided of the logical positivists and naive empiricists would not have gone so far: even they admitted truths derived from an empirical foundation, even if those derived truths were themselves not empirically observable.

But of course problems with the naive empiricism of the 20th century were anticipated in the 18th by David Hume (objections that Kowal mentions without crediting Hume, an atheist). We cannot directly observe either causality or consistency over time, and much to the dismay of the naive empiricists, we cannot rigorously deduce these features of the world from the directly observable evidence. (There are a lot of other problems with logical positivism and naive empiricism, not the least of which is that the systems themselves are neither observable nor deducible from observation.)

Philosophers are little better than theologians, and it is unsurprising that anyone who reads only philosophy might think that this naive view constitutes the core of scientific thought. There are intelligent philosophers who have propounded more sophisticated concepts, but their work is buried in a mound of bullshit exceeded in scope and elaboration only by theology. The atheist criticism that finding the diamonds of theological sensibility is simply too difficult to be worth the trouble applies equally to philosophy*. Kowal's misunderstanding of scientific naturalism is excusable and correctable in a way that his "bad food and not enough of it" contradiction about the very existence of a natural epistemology is not.

*I have for various reasons decided to go to college in my old age. Despite my interest, I've rejected philosophy as a subject of academic study: the bullshit to sense ratio is too high for me to have any hope of making a meaningful contribution to anything but the edifice of bullshit itself. There is too little bullshit in science for a person to make a substantial contribution on the basis of only clarity and honesty: science demands competence, competence I lack both the time and alas! natural talent to develop. Economics and political science seem just about right: enough bullshit that an honest man of mediocre competence can make a contribution; enough sense (I hope) that the contribution can be meaningful.

Modern scientific naturalism shares two features of theology. First, both systems make guesses about how the world might be. We do not directly know the world is causal, and we cannot (as we have discovered) deduce the world is causal from what we do directly know. In order to talk about causality, we have to introduce the concept without knowledge or even any real confidence as whether it's actually true. Second, despite their protestations of universal truth, scientific naturalism and theology are dynamic: one way or another, when these systems fail to correspond to the world of experience, both actually change.

But — and this is a very substantial but indeed — from these similarities scientific naturalism departs radically from religious faith. In religious faith, our core guesses about God (and thus God's world) are upheld "come what may". Our articles of faith are utterly immune from change (until an authority changes them). Anything and everything else might change — we might even deny experience itself (who are you going to believe? the Pope God, or your lying eyes?) — but our articles of faith are immune from public criticism.

Under scientific naturalism, however, none of our guesses are immune from criticism. Everything is, at least formally, subject to change. Similarly, no authority can declare any guess as immune from change; no one requires the permission of any authority to change any part of any theory.

More importantly, a theory that predicts more (in a specific sense) is, under scientific naturalism, considered worse than a theory that predicts less. A theory that predicts that we will see an object move is worse than a theory that predicts that we will see an object move in a particular direction at a particular velocity. The first theory predicts more: our theory is consistent with observation if we see the object move up or down, left or right, fast or slow; the second theory predicts less: movement in one direction only and at one velocity only.

In contrast, it is no fault under theology if our core faith predicts more or less. God's love is equally compatible with slavery or abolition; His hatred of homosexuality equally compatible with loving gay marriage as with discord; His contempt of women equally compatible with women's demonstrable competence as with their failure; His divine creation equally compatible with life-friendly physical law as with constant miraculous intervention; His intention to create a race of beings to worship and adore Him equally compatible with a 6,000 year-old universe with the Earth at its center as with a universe of such cosmic scale and scope that all of human history is no more significant than the mold in my shower is to all of terrestrial civilization.

Our scientific naturalistic theories about the world are true because they explain and predict this world; they are valuable because they predict only this world. Theology is compatible with any old world we might find ourselves in: change the laws of physics, remove them altogether, transform billions of light years of galaxies, clusters and superclusters to a uniform distribution of a hundred stars or even lanterns in a quintessential firmament, chop scores of elements from the periodic table and rearrange them with a throw of the dice, and not one word of the vast edifice of theological bullshit created over the last ten thousand years would have to change.

Kowal admits that theology and religion lack any epistemic system. In his own words, all we can do is organize and systematize all the contradictory models and theories about the world: we can do nothing to choose between these theories other than a handwaving mention of some vague debate (a "debate" that throughout history has all too often been conducted through the media of murder, rape, slavery, torture, conquest, oppression and genocide). Indeed scientific naturalism has developed a way to choose between these models and — while Kowal complains in that we have no way to choose — he complains in the same breath that our epistemic system is fatally flawed because it does choose, and it chooses against the arrant superstitions and vacuous bullshit of theology.

When Glendower famously boasted, "I can call spirits from the vasty deep," Hotspur astutely retorted, "Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?" Answers are easy: I can answer any question, or so can any man; but are they true? Theologians can indeed answer any question, but we suffer not from a lack of answers but from a surfeit. We know that scientific materialism can not just answer some questions, but we can know that those answers and only those answers are true. If, by applying some distinction we are left with some questions entirely unanswered, with every candidate so far rejection, that is but a small price to pay for knowing that other answers really are true. Answers are easy: we can always think up more answers and test them out.

It would of course be disingenuous or at least incomplete to extol the virtues of scientific naturalism without mentioning legitimate philosophical objections.

Science is, of course, a human endeavor, and its pursuit susceptible to the ordinary intellectual and moral vices typical of human beings. Our scientific knowledge is dependent on what we choose to study, the kinds of knowledge we choose to pursue, and our answers are dependent on the questions we choose to ask. Science is no universal panacea, a machine we can put questions into and be confident of always or even often get true answers. The best we can say about science is that sometimes it makes some distinctions. But just sometimes is incomparably better than never, and that sometimes is on the basis of ordinary logical thought and the evidence of our senses, not the pronouncements of ridiculous men in silly hats or the elimination of dissent by the sword and the prison cell.

Strictly speaking, scientific naturalism does not separate theories into true and false, it separates theories into definitely false, not definitely false and bullshit: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." We cannot know the theory of universal gravitation with the certainty we know that "there are infinitely many prime numbers" is a theorem of the axioms of arithmetic. If for this reason you don't want to label scientific naturalism as knowledge, so much worse for your view of knowledge. When you can demonstrate the truth of General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics with deductive certainty, let me know. Until then, I'll happily trade certainty of nothing for confidence in not just something but quite a lot while you play solipsistic games you could pursue without distraction if you put out your eyes and stopped up your ears.

We cannot apply scientific naturalism to scientific naturalism without circularity. But scientific naturalism as a method is not itself a theory about the world; it is simply a language game we play, a game we play not because we can somehow prove it itself is "true" but because we find it useful, a utility that — because we are uninterested in the what appears to be its the sole utility for justifying abominable behavior — that religion has never and apparently cannot provide.

Indeed it is the theologians whom we must accuse of intellectual procrastination. They have, to be sure, been diligent about providing answers, but after ten thousand years we are still waiting for them to give us a way — any way, however imperfect, that appeals not to our prejudice but our reason — to separate the the meaningful answers from the bullshit and the true answers from the false.

Evolution is hard!

A really good article on evolution by the inestimable PZ Myers: It's more than genes, it's networks and systems:

What's left out in the 101 story, and in creationist tales, is that: evolution is about populations, so many changes go on in parallel; selectable traits are usually the product of networks of genes, so there are rarely single alleles that can be categorized as the effector of change; and genes and gene networks are plastic or responsive to the environment. All of these complications make the actual story more complicated and interesting, and also, perhaps to your surprise, make evolutionary change faster and more powerful.

If biologists can figure out this:



and hundreds of other pathways like it, then there's simply no excuse for economists to complain about complexity.

The Facts In The Case Of Dr. Andrew Wakefield

The Facts In The Case Of Dr. Andrew Wakefield

(via PZ Myers)

Five cheap magic tricks

5 Cheap Magic Tricks Behind Every Psychic:

1. Don't strain credulity
2. Stick with one trick
3. Have more than one way to do the same trick
4. Tell everyone they can do it
5. Include a disclaimer