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Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » Further Thoughts on the Ethics of Skepticism - 0 views

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skepticism Ethics Polarisation

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • My recent post “The War Over ‘Nice’” (describing the blogosphere’s reaction to Phil Plait’s “Don’t Be a Dick” speech) has topped out at more than 200 comments.
  • Many readers appear to object (some strenuously) to the very ideas of discussing best practices, seeking evidence of efficacy for skeptical outreach, matching strategies to goals, or encouraging some methods over others. Some seem to express anger that a discussion of best practices would be attempted at all. 
  • No Right or Wrong Way? The milder forms of these objections run along these lines: “Everyone should do their own thing.” “Skepticism needs all kinds of approaches.” “There’s no right or wrong way to do skepticism.” “Why are we wasting time on these abstract meta-conversations?”
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  • More critical, in my opinion, is the implication that skeptical research and communication happens in an ethical vacuum. That just isn’t true. Indeed, it is dangerous for a field which promotes and attacks medical treatments, accuses people of crimes, opines about law enforcement practices, offers consumer advice, and undertakes educational projects to pretend that it is free from ethical implications — or obligations.
  • there is no monolithic “one true way to do skepticism.” No, the skeptical world does not break down to nice skeptics who get everything right, and mean skeptics who get everything wrong. (I’m reminded of a quote: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”) No one has all the answers. Certainly I don’t, and neither does Phil Plait. Nor has anyone actually proposed a uniform, lockstep approach to skepticism. (No one has any ability to enforce such a thing, in any event.)
  • However, none of that implies that all approaches to skepticism are equally valid, useful, or good. As in other fields, various skeptical practices do more or less good, cause greater or lesser harm, or generate various combinations of both at the same time. For that reason, skeptics should strive to find ways to talk seriously about the practices and the ethics of our field. Skepticism has blossomed into something that touches a lot of lives — and yet it is an emerging field, only starting to come into its potential. We need to be able to talk about that potential, and about the pitfalls too.
  • All of the fields from which skepticism borrows (such as medicine, education, psychology, journalism, history, and even arts like stage magic and graphic design) have their own standards of professional ethics. In some cases those ethics are well-explored professional fields in their own right (consider medical ethics, a field with its own academic journals and doctoral programs). In other cases those ethical guidelines are contested, informal, vague, or honored more in the breach. But in every case, there are serious conversations about the ethical implications of professional practice, because those practices impact people’s lives. Why would skepticism be any different?
  • , Skeptrack speaker Barbara Drescher (a cognitive pyschologist who teaches research methodology) described the complexity of research ethics in her own field. Imagine, she said, that a psychologist were to ask research subjects a question like, “Do your parents like the color red?” Asking this may seem trivial and harmless, but it is nonetheless an ethical trade-off with associated risks (however small) that psychological researchers are ethically obliged to confront. What harm might that question cause if a research subject suffers from erythrophobia, or has a sick parent — or saw their parents stabbed to death?
  • When skeptics undertake scientific, historical, or journalistic research, we should (I argue) consider ourselves bound by some sort of research ethics. For now, we’ll ignore the deeper, detailed question of what exactly that looks like in practical terms (when can skeptics go undercover or lie to get information? how much research does due diligence require? and so on). I’d ask only that we agree on the principle that skeptical research is not an ethical free-for-all.
  • when skeptics communicate with the public, we take on further ethical responsibilities — as do doctors, journalists, and teachers. We all accept that doctors are obliged to follow some sort of ethical code, not only of due diligence and standard of care, but also in their confidentiality, manner, and the factual information they disclose to patients. A sentence that communicates a diagnosis, prescription, or piece of medical advice (“you have cancer” or “undertake this treatment”) is not a contextless statement, but a weighty, risky, ethically serious undertaking that affects people’s lives. It matters what doctors say, and it matters how they say it.
  • Grassroots Ethics It happens that skepticism is my professional field. It’s natural that I should feel bound by the central concerns of that field. How can we gain reliable knowledge about weird things? How can we communicate that knowledge effectively? And, how can we pursue that practice ethically?
  • At the same time, most active skeptics are not professionals. To what extent should grassroots skeptics feel obligated to consider the ethics of skeptical activism? Consider my own status as a medical amateur. I almost need super-caps-lock to explain how much I am not a doctor. My medical training began and ended with a couple First Aid courses (and those way back in the day). But during those short courses, the instructors drummed into us the ethical considerations of our minimal training. When are we obligated to perform first aid? When are we ethically barred from giving aid? What if the injured party is unconscious or delirious? What if we accidentally kill or injure someone in our effort to give aid? Should we risk exposure to blood-borne illnesses? And so on. In a medical context, ethics are determined less by professional status, and more by the harm we can cause or prevent by our actions.
  • police officers are barred from perjury, and journalists from libel — and so are the lay public. We expect schoolteachers not to discuss age-inappropriate topics with our young children, or to persuade our children to adopt their religion; when we babysit for a neighbor, we consider ourselves bound by similar rules. I would argue that grassroots skeptics take on an ethical burden as soon as they speak out on medical matters, legal matters, or other matters of fact, whether from platforms as large as network television, or as small as a dinner party. The size of that burden must depend somewhat on the scale of the risks: the number of people reached, the certainty expressed, the topics tackled.
  • tu-quoque argument.
  • How much time are skeptics going to waste, arguing in a circular firing squad about each other’s free speech? Like it or not, there will always be confrontational people. You aren’t going to get a group of people as varied as skeptics are, and make them all agree to “be nice”. It’s a pipe dream, and a waste of time.
  • Weiye Loh on 13 Sep 10
     
    FURTHER THOUGHTS ON THE ETHICS OF SKEPTICISM
Weiye Loh

Essay - The End of Tenure? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...Shea-t.html

Academia

shared by Weiye Loh on 07 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • The cost of a college education has risen, in real dollars, by 250 to 300 percent over the past three decades, far above the rate of inflation. Elite private colleges can cost more than $200,000 over four years. Total student-loan debt, at nearly $830 billion, recently surpassed total national credit card debt. Meanwhile, university presidents, who can make upward of $1 million annually, gravely intone that the $50,000 price tag doesn’t even cover the full cost of a year’s education.
  • Then your daughter reports that her history prof is a part-time adjunct, who might be making $1,500 for a semester’s work. There’s something wrong with this picture.
  • The higher-ed jeremiads of the last generation came mainly from the right. But this time, it’s the tenured radicals — or at least the tenured liberals — who are leading the charge. Hacker is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books and the author of the acclaimed study “Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal,”
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  • And these two books arrive at a time, unlike the early 1990s, when universities are, like many students, backed into a fiscal corner. Taylor writes of walking into a meeting one day and learning that Columbia’s endowment had dropped by “at least” 30 percent. Simply brushing off calls for reform, however strident and scattershot, may no longer be an option.
  • The labor system, for one thing, is clearly unjust. Tenured and tenure-track professors earn most of the money and benefits, but they’re a minority at the top of a pyramid. Nearly two-thirds of all college teachers are non-tenure-track adjuncts like Matt Williams, who told Hacker and Dreifus he had taught a dozen courses at two colleges in the Akron area the previous year, earning the equivalent of about $8.50 an hour by his reckoning. It is foolish that graduate programs are pumping new Ph.D.’s into a world without decent jobs for them. If some programs were phased out, teaching loads might be raised for some on the tenure track, to the benefit of undergraduate education.
  • it might well be time to think about vetoing Olympic-quality athletic ­facilities and trimming the ranks of administrators. At Williams, a small liberal arts college renowned for teaching, 70 percent of employees do something other than teach.
  • But Hacker and Dreifus go much further, all but calling for an end to the role of universities in the production of knowledge. Spin off the med schools and research institutes, they say. University presidents “should be musing about education, not angling for another center on antiterrorist technologies.” As for the humanities, let professors do research after-hours, on top of much heavier teaching schedules. “In other occupations, when people feel there is something they want to write, they do it on their own time and at their own expense,” the authors declare. But it seems doubtful that, say, “Battle Cry of Freedom,” the acclaimed Civil War history by Princeton’s James McPherson, could have been written on the weekends, or without the advance spadework of countless obscure monographs. If it is false that research invariably leads to better teaching, it is equally false to say that it never does.
  • Hacker’s home institution, the public Queens College, which has a spartan budget, commuter students and a three-or-four-course teaching load per semester. Taylor, by contrast, has spent his career on the elite end of higher education, but he is no less disillusioned. He shares Hacker and Dreifus’s concerns about overspecialized research and the unintended effects of tenure, which he believes blocks the way to fresh ideas. Taylor has backed away from some of the most incendiary proposals he made last year in a New York Times Op-Ed article, cheekily headlined “End the University as We Know It” — an article, he reports, that drew near-universal condemnation from academics and near-universal praise from everyone else. Back then, he called for the flat-out abolition of traditional departments, to be replaced by temporary, “problem-centered” programs focusing on issues like Mind, Space, Time, Life and Water. Now, he more realistically suggests the creation of cross-­disciplinary “Emerging Zones.” He thinks professors need to get over their fear of corporate partnerships and embrace efficiency-enhancing technologies.
  • It is not news that America is a land of haves and have-nots. It is news that colleges are themselves dividing into haves and have-nots; they are becoming engines of inequality. And that — not whether some professors can afford to wear Marc Jacobs — is the real scandal.
  • Weiye Loh on 07 Sep 10
     
    The End of Tenure? By CHRISTOPHER SHEA Published: September 3, 2010
Weiye Loh

Democracy's Laboratory: Are Science and Politics Interrelated?: Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

Science Politics Democracy

shared by Weiye Loh on 07 Sep 10 - Cached
  • That science and politics are nonoverlapping magisteria (vide Stephen Jay Gould’s model separating science and religion) was long my position until I read Timothy Ferris’s new book The Science of Liberty (HarperCollins, 2010). Ferris, the best-selling author of such science classics as Coming of Age in the Milky Way and The Whole Shebang, has bravely ventured across the magisterial divide to argue that the scientific values of reason, empiricism and antiauthoritarianism are not the product of liberal democracy but the producers of it.
  • “The new government, like a scientific laboratory, was designed to accommodate an ongoing series of experiments, extending indefinitely into the future,” Ferris explains. “Nobody could anticipate what the results might be, so the government was structured, not to guide society toward a specified goal, but to sustain the experimental process itself.”
  • “Liberalism and science are methods, not ideologies. Both incorporate feedback loops through which actions (e.g., laws) can be evaluated to see whether they continue to meet with general approval. Neither science nor liberalism makes any doctrinaire claims beyond the efficacy of its respective methods—that is, that science obtains knowledge and that liberalism produces social orders generally acceptable to free peoples.”
  • Weiye Loh on 07 Sep 10
     
    Democracy's Laboratory: Are Science and Politics Interrelated? Mixing science and politics is tricky but necessary for a functioning polity By Michael Shermer   
Weiye Loh

Why Are the Rich So Good at the Internet? | Fast Company - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...e-rich-so-good-at-the-internet

Internet Income Inequality Social Divide

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • It even suggests the existence of a tipping point, where Internet use takes off at a certain income level.
  • even among groups that own the necessary technology, less wealth equates to less (and less varied) Internet usage.
  • The report, an umbrella analysis of three Pew surveys conducted in 2009 and 2010, compares Internet use among American households in four different income brackets: less than $30,000 a year; $30,000-50,000; $50,000-75,000; and greater than $75,000. Respondents--more than 3,000 people participated--were asked a variety of questions about how often they used the Internet, and what sorts of services they took advantage of (such as email, online news, booking travel online, or health research).
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  • As might be expected, the wealthier used the Internet more.
  • Almost 90% of the wealthiest respondents reported broadband access at home. Of those in the under-$30,000 households, that figure was only 40%. "I would expect some type of correlation," says Jansen. "But we controlled for community type--urban, rural, suburban--educational attainment, race, ethnicity, gender, and age." None was nearly so strongly correlated as income.
  • Age did have some effect, and rural regions were a good deal less wired
  • Once a modestly middle-class family buys a computer and Internet access, why is it that they spend less time researching products online than their wealthier counterparts, given that they have a tighter budget than the ultra-wealthy?
  • Jansen notes that for many questions Pew asked about Internet use, there appeared to be a tipping point somewhere in the $30,000-$50,000 range. Consider, for instance, the data on those who researched products online. Only 67% of lowest-income Internet users research products online. Make it over the hump into the $30,000-$50,000 bracket, though, and all of a sudden 81% of internet users do so--a jump of 14 points. But then as you climb the income ladder, the change in behavior begins to level out, just climbing a few percentage points with each bracket
  • "It would be interesting to look at what is going on at that particular income level," says Jansen, suggesting a potential tack for further research, "that seems to indicate a fairly robust use of technology and interest."
  • Jansen, like any careful researcher, cautions against confusing correlation with causation. It may be that people are using the web to make their fortunes, and not using their fortunes to surf the web.
  • Weiye Loh on 25 Nov 10
     
    Pew Internet has released a report finding that income is the strongest predictor of whether, how often, and in what ways Americans use the web.
Weiye Loh

The Inequality That Matters - Tyler Cowen - The American Interest Magazine - 0 views

www.the-american-interest.com/article-bd.cfm

Income Inequality Social Divide Economy

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • most of the worries about income inequality are bogus, but some are probably better grounded and even more serious than even many of their heralds realize.
  • In terms of immediate political stability, there is less to the income inequality issue than meets the eye. Most analyses of income inequality neglect two major points. First, the inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well. Bill Gates is much, much richer than I am, yet it is not obvious that he is much happier if, indeed, he is happier at all. I have access to penicillin, air travel, good cheap food, the Internet and virtually all of the technical innovations that Gates does. Like the vast majority of Americans, I have access to some important new pharmaceuticals, such as statins to protect against heart disease. To be sure, Gates receives the very best care from the world’s top doctors, but our health outcomes are in the same ballpark. I don’t have a private jet or take luxury vacations, and—I think it is fair to say—my house is much smaller than his. I can’t meet with the world’s elite on demand. Still, by broad historical standards, what I share with Bill Gates is far more significant than what I don’t share with him.
  • when average people read about or see income inequality, they don’t feel the moral outrage that radiates from the more passionate egalitarian quarters of society. Instead, they think their lives are pretty good and that they either earned through hard work or lucked into a healthy share of the American dream.
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  • This is why, for example, large numbers of Americans oppose the idea of an estate tax even though the current form of the tax, slated to return in 2011, is very unlikely to affect them or their estates. In narrowly self-interested terms, that view may be irrational, but most Americans are unwilling to frame national issues in terms of rich versus poor. There’s a great deal of hostility toward various government bailouts, but the idea of “undeserving” recipients is the key factor in those feelings. Resentment against Wall Street gamesters hasn’t spilled over much into resentment against the wealthy more generally. The bailout for General Motors’ labor unions wasn’t so popular either—again, obviously not because of any bias against the wealthy but because a basic sense of fairness was violated. As of November 2010, congressional Democrats are of a mixed mind as to whether the Bush tax cuts should expire for those whose annual income exceeds $250,000; that is in large part because their constituents bear no animus toward rich people, only toward undeservedly rich people.
  • envy is usually local. At least in the United States, most economic resentment is not directed toward billionaires or high-roller financiers—not even corrupt ones. It’s directed at the guy down the hall who got a bigger raise. It’s directed at the husband of your wife’s sister, because the brand of beer he stocks costs $3 a case more than yours, and so on. That’s another reason why a lot of people aren’t so bothered by income or wealth inequality at the macro level. Most of us don’t compare ourselves to billionaires. Gore Vidal put it honestly: “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”
  • Occasionally the cynic in me wonders why so many relatively well-off intellectuals lead the egalitarian charge against the privileges of the wealthy. One group has the status currency of money and the other has the status currency of intellect, so might they be competing for overall social regard? The high status of the wealthy in America, or for that matter the high status of celebrities, seems to bother our intellectual class most. That class composes a very small group, however, so the upshot is that growing income inequality won’t necessarily have major political implications at the macro level.
  • All that said, income inequality does matter—for both politics and the economy.
  • The numbers are clear: Income inequality has been rising in the United States, especially at the very top. The data show a big difference between two quite separate issues, namely income growth at the very top of the distribution and greater inequality throughout the distribution. The first trend is much more pronounced than the second, although the two are often confused.
  • When it comes to the first trend, the share of pre-tax income earned by the richest 1 percent of earners has increased from about 8 percent in 1974 to more than 18 percent in 2007. Furthermore, the richest 0.01 percent (the 15,000 or so richest families) had a share of less than 1 percent in 1974 but more than 6 percent of national income in 2007. As noted, those figures are from pre-tax income, so don’t look to the George W. Bush tax cuts to explain the pattern. Furthermore, these gains have been sustained and have evolved over many years, rather than coming in one or two small bursts between 1974 and today.1
  • At the same time, wage growth for the median earner has slowed since 1973. But that slower wage growth has afflicted large numbers of Americans, and it is conceptually distinct from the higher relative share of top income earners. For instance, if you take the 1979–2005 period, the average incomes of the bottom fifth of households increased only 6 percent while the incomes of the middle quintile rose by 21 percent. That’s a widening of the spread of incomes, but it’s not so drastic compared to the explosive gains at the very top.
  • The broader change in income distribution, the one occurring beneath the very top earners, can be deconstructed in a manner that makes nearly all of it look harmless. For instance, there is usually greater inequality of income among both older people and the more highly educated, if only because there is more time and more room for fortunes to vary. Since America is becoming both older and more highly educated, our measured income inequality will increase pretty much by demographic fiat. Economist Thomas Lemieux at the University of British Columbia estimates that these demographic effects explain three-quarters of the observed rise in income inequality for men, and even more for women.2
  • Attacking the problem from a different angle, other economists are challenging whether there is much growth in inequality at all below the super-rich. For instance, real incomes are measured using a common price index, yet poorer people are more likely to shop at discount outlets like Wal-Mart, which have seen big price drops over the past twenty years.3 Once we take this behavior into account, it is unclear whether the real income gaps between the poor and middle class have been widening much at all. Robert J. Gordon, an economist from Northwestern University who is hardly known as a right-wing apologist, wrote in a recent paper that “there was no increase of inequality after 1993 in the bottom 99 percent of the population”, and that whatever overall change there was “can be entirely explained by the behavior of income in the top 1 percent.”4
  • And so we come again to the gains of the top earners, clearly the big story told by the data. It’s worth noting that over this same period of time, inequality of work hours increased too. The top earners worked a lot more and most other Americans worked somewhat less. That’s another reason why high earners don’t occasion more resentment: Many people understand how hard they have to work to get there. It also seems that most of the income gains of the top earners were related to performance pay—bonuses, in other words—and not wildly out-of-whack yearly salaries.5
  • It is also the case that any society with a lot of “threshold earners” is likely to experience growing income inequality. A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more. If wages go up, that person will respond by seeking less work or by working less hard or less often. That person simply wants to “get by” in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure—whether spending time with friends and family, walking in the woods and so on. Luck aside, that person’s income will never rise much above the threshold.
  • The funny thing is this: For years, many cultural critics in and of the United States have been telling us that Americans should behave more like threshold earners. We should be less harried, more interested in nurturing friendships, and more interested in the non-commercial sphere of life. That may well be good advice. Many studies suggest that above a certain level more money brings only marginal increments of happiness. What isn’t so widely advertised is that those same critics have basically been telling us, without realizing it, that we should be acting in such a manner as to increase measured income inequality. Not only is high inequality an inevitable concomitant of human diversity, but growing income inequality may be, too, if lots of us take the kind of advice that will make us happier.
  • Why is the top 1 percent doing so well?
  • Steven N. Kaplan and Joshua Rauh have recently provided a detailed estimation of particular American incomes.6 Their data do not comprise the entire U.S. population, but from partial financial records they find a very strong role for the financial sector in driving the trend toward income concentration at the top. For instance, for 2004, nonfinancial executives of publicly traded companies accounted for less than 6 percent of the top 0.01 percent income bracket. In that same year, the top 25 hedge fund managers combined appear to have earned more than all of the CEOs from the entire S&P 500. The number of Wall Street investors earning more than $100 million a year was nine times higher than the public company executives earning that amount. The authors also relate that they shared their estimates with a former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, one who also has a Wall Street background. He thought their estimates of earnings in the financial sector were, if anything, understated.
  • Many of the other high earners are also connected to finance. After Wall Street, Kaplan and Rauh identify the legal sector as a contributor to the growing spread in earnings at the top. Yet many high-earning lawyers are doing financial deals, so a lot of the income generated through legal activity is rooted in finance. Other lawyers are defending corporations against lawsuits, filing lawsuits or helping corporations deal with complex regulations. The returns to these activities are an artifact of the growing complexity of the law and government growth rather than a tale of markets per se. Finance aside, there isn’t much of a story of market failure here, even if we don’t find the results aesthetically appealing.
  • When it comes to professional athletes and celebrities, there isn’t much of a mystery as to what has happened. Tiger Woods earns much more, even adjusting for inflation, than Arnold Palmer ever did. J.K. Rowling, the first billionaire author, earns much more than did Charles Dickens. These high incomes come, on balance, from the greater reach of modern communications and marketing. Kids all over the world read about Harry Potter. There is more purchasing power to spend on children’s books and, indeed, on culture and celebrities more generally. For high-earning celebrities, hardly anyone finds these earnings so morally objectionable as to suggest that they be politically actionable. Cultural critics can complain that good schoolteachers earn too little, and they may be right, but that does not make celebrities into political targets. They’re too popular. It’s also pretty clear that most of them work hard to earn their money, by persuading fans to buy or otherwise support their product. Most of these individuals do not come from elite or extremely privileged backgrounds, either. They worked their way to the top, and even if Rowling is not an author for the ages, her books tapped into the spirit of their time in a special way. We may or may not wish to tax the wealthy, including wealthy celebrities, at higher rates, but there is no need to “cure” the structural causes of higher celebrity incomes.
  • to be sure, the high incomes in finance should give us all pause.
  • The first factor driving high returns is sometimes called by practitioners “going short on volatility.” Sometimes it is called “negative skewness.” In plain English, this means that some investors opt for a strategy of betting against big, unexpected moves in market prices. Most of the time investors will do well by this strategy, since big, unexpected moves are outliers by definition. Traders will earn above-average returns in good times. In bad times they won’t suffer fully when catastrophic returns come in, as sooner or later is bound to happen, because the downside of these bets is partly socialized onto the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and, of course, the taxpayers and the unemployed.
  • if you bet against unlikely events, most of the time you will look smart and have the money to validate the appearance. Periodically, however, you will look very bad. Does that kind of pattern sound familiar? It happens in finance, too. Betting against a big decline in home prices is analogous to betting against the Wizards. Every now and then such a bet will blow up in your face, though in most years that trading activity will generate above-average profits and big bonuses for the traders and CEOs.
  • To this mix we can add the fact that many money managers are investing other people’s money. If you plan to stay with an investment bank for ten years or less, most of the people playing this investing strategy will make out very well most of the time. Everyone’s time horizon is a bit limited and you will bring in some nice years of extra returns and reap nice bonuses. And let’s say the whole thing does blow up in your face? What’s the worst that can happen? Your bosses fire you, but you will still have millions in the bank and that MBA from Harvard or Wharton. For the people actually investing the money, there’s barely any downside risk other than having to quit the party early. Furthermore, if everyone else made more or less the same mistake (very surprising major events, such as a busted housing market, affect virtually everybody), you’re hardly disgraced. You might even get rehired at another investment bank, or maybe a hedge fund, within months or even weeks.
  • Moreover, smart shareholders will acquiesce to or even encourage these gambles. They gain on the upside, while the downside, past the point of bankruptcy, is borne by the firm’s creditors. And will the bondholders object? Well, they might have a difficult time monitoring the internal trading operations of financial institutions. Of course, the firm’s trading book cannot be open to competitors, and that means it cannot be open to bondholders (or even most shareholders) either. So what, exactly, will they have in hand to object to?
  • Perhaps more important, government bailouts minimize the damage to creditors on the downside. Neither the Treasury nor the Fed allowed creditors to take any losses from the collapse of the major banks during the financial crisis. The U.S. government guaranteed these loans, either explicitly or implicitly. Guaranteeing the debt also encourages equity holders to take more risk. While current bailouts have not in general maintained equity values, and while share prices have often fallen to near zero following the bust of a major bank, the bailouts still give the bank a lifeline. Instead of the bank being destroyed, sometimes those equity prices do climb back out of the hole. This is true of the major surviving banks in the United States, and even AIG is paying back its bailout. For better or worse, we’re handing out free options on recovery, and that encourages banks to take more risk in the first place.
  • there is an unholy dynamic of short-term trading and investing, backed up by bailouts and risk reduction from the government and the Federal Reserve. This is not good. “Going short on volatility” is a dangerous strategy from a social point of view. For one thing, in so-called normal times, the finance sector attracts a big chunk of the smartest, most hard-working and most talented individuals. That represents a huge human capital opportunity cost to society and the economy at large. But more immediate and more important, it means that banks take far too many risks and go way out on a limb, often in correlated fashion. When their bets turn sour, as they did in 2007–09, everyone else pays the price.
  • And it’s not just the taxpayer cost of the bailout that stings. The financial disruption ends up throwing a lot of people out of work down the economic food chain, often for long periods. Furthermore, the Federal Reserve System has recapitalized major U.S. banks by paying interest on bank reserves and by keeping an unusually high interest rate spread, which allows banks to borrow short from Treasury at near-zero rates and invest in other higher-yielding assets and earn back lots of money rather quickly. In essence, we’re allowing banks to earn their way back by arbitraging interest rate spreads against the U.S. government. This is rarely called a bailout and it doesn’t count as a normal budget item, but it is a bailout nonetheless. This type of implicit bailout brings high social costs by slowing down economic recovery (the interest rate spreads require tight monetary policy) and by redistributing income from the Treasury to the major banks.
  • the “going short on volatility” strategy increases income inequality. In normal years the financial sector is flush with cash and high earnings. In implosion years a lot of the losses are borne by other sectors of society. In other words, financial crisis begets income inequality. Despite being conceptually distinct phenomena, the political economy of income inequality is, in part, the political economy of finance. Simon Johnson tabulates the numbers nicely: From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.7
  • There’s a second reason why the financial sector abets income inequality: the “moving first” issue. Let’s say that some news hits the market and that traders interpret this news at different speeds. One trader figures out what the news means in a second, while the other traders require five seconds. Still other traders require an entire day or maybe even a month to figure things out. The early traders earn the extra money. They buy the proper assets early, at the lower prices, and reap most of the gains when the other, later traders pile on. Similarly, if you buy into a successful tech company in the early stages, you are “moving first” in a very effective manner, and you will capture most of the gains if that company hits it big.
  • The moving-first phenomenon sums to a “winner-take-all” market. Only some relatively small number of traders, sometimes just one trader, can be first. Those who are first will make far more than those who are fourth or fifth. This difference will persist, even if those who are fourth come pretty close to competing with those who are first. In this context, first is first and it doesn’t matter much whether those who come in fourth pile on a month, a minute or a fraction of a second later. Those who bought (or sold, as the case may be) first have captured and locked in most of the available gains. Since gains are concentrated among the early winners, and the closeness of the runner-ups doesn’t so much matter for income distribution, asset-market trading thus encourages the ongoing concentration of wealth. Many investors make lots of mistakes and lose their money, but each year brings a new bunch of projects that can turn the early investors and traders into very wealthy individuals.
  • These two features of the problem—“going short on volatility” and “getting there first”—are related. Let’s say that Goldman Sachs regularly secures a lot of the best and quickest trades, whether because of its quality analysis, inside connections or high-frequency trading apparatus (it has all three). It builds up a treasure chest of profits and continues to hire very sharp traders and to receive valuable information. Those profits allow it to make “short on volatility” bets faster than anyone else, because if it messes up, it still has a large enough buffer to pad losses. This increases the odds that Goldman will repeatedly pull in spectacular profits.
  • Still, every now and then Goldman will go bust, or would go bust if not for government bailouts. But the odds are in any given year that it won’t because of the advantages it and other big banks have. It’s as if the major banks have tapped a hole in the social till and they are drinking from it with a straw. In any given year, this practice may seem tolerable—didn’t the bank earn the money fair and square by a series of fairly normal looking trades? Yet over time this situation will corrode productivity, because what the banks do bears almost no resemblance to a process of getting capital into the hands of those who can make most efficient use of it. And it leads to periodic financial explosions. That, in short, is the real problem of income inequality we face today. It’s what causes the inequality at the very top of the earning pyramid that has dangerous implications for the economy as a whole.
  • What about controlling bank risk-taking directly with tight government oversight? That is not practical. There are more ways for banks to take risks than even knowledgeable regulators can possibly control; it just isn’t that easy to oversee a balance sheet with hundreds of billions of dollars on it, especially when short-term positions are wound down before quarterly inspections. It’s also not clear how well regulators can identify risky assets. Some of the worst excesses of the financial crisis were grounded in mortgage-backed assets—a very traditional function of banks—not exotic derivatives trading strategies. Virtually any asset position can be used to bet long odds, one way or another. It is naive to think that underpaid, undertrained regulators can keep up with financial traders, especially when the latter stand to earn billions by circumventing the intent of regulations while remaining within the letter of the law.
  • For the time being, we need to accept the possibility that the financial sector has learned how to game the American (and UK-based) system of state capitalism. It’s no longer obvious that the system is stable at a macro level, and extreme income inequality at the top has been one result of that imbalance. Income inequality is a symptom, however, rather than a cause of the real problem. The root cause of income inequality, viewed in the most general terms, is extreme human ingenuity, albeit of a perverse kind. That is why it is so hard to control.
  • Another root cause of growing inequality is that the modern world, by so limiting our downside risk, makes extreme risk-taking all too comfortable and easy. More risk-taking will mean more inequality, sooner or later, because winners always emerge from risk-taking. Yet bankers who take bad risks (provided those risks are legal) simply do not end up with bad outcomes in any absolute sense. They still have millions in the bank, lots of human capital and plenty of social status. We’re not going to bring back torture, trial by ordeal or debtors’ prisons, nor should we. Yet the threat of impoverishment and disgrace no longer looms the way it once did, so we no longer can constrain excess financial risk-taking. It’s too soft and cushy a world.
  • Why don’t we simply eliminate the safety net for clueless or unlucky risk-takers so that losses equal gains overall? That’s a good idea in principle, but it is hard to put into practice. Once a financial crisis arrives, politicians will seek to limit the damage, and that means they will bail out major financial institutions. Had we not passed TARP and related policies, the United States probably would have faced unemployment rates of 25 percent of higher, as in the Great Depression. The political consequences would not have been pretty. Bank bailouts may sound quite interventionist, and indeed they are, but in relative terms they probably were the most libertarian policy we had on tap. It meant big one-time expenses, but, for the most part, it kept government out of the real economy (the General Motors bailout aside).
  • We probably don’t have any solution to the hazards created by our financial sector, not because plutocrats are preventing our political system from adopting appropriate remedies, but because we don’t know what those remedies are. Yet neither is another crisis immediately upon us. The underlying dynamic favors excess risk-taking, but banks at the current moment fear the scrutiny of regulators and the public and so are playing it fairly safe. They are sitting on money rather than lending it out. The biggest risk today is how few parties will take risks, and, in part, the caution of banks is driving our current protracted economic slowdown. According to this view, the long run will bring another financial crisis once moods pick up and external scrutiny weakens, but that day of reckoning is still some ways off.
  • Is the overall picture a shame? Yes. Is it distorting resource distribution and productivity in the meantime? Yes. Will it again bring our economy to its knees? Probably. Maybe that’s simply the price of modern society. Income inequality will likely continue to rise and we will search in vain for the appropriate political remedies for our underlying problems.
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » Further Thoughts on Atheism - 0 views

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Religion Evolution Science

shared by Weiye Loh on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Even before I started writing Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be I knew that it would very briefly mention religion, make a mild assertion that religious questions are out of scope for science, and move on. I knew this was likely to provoke blow-back from some in the atheist community, and I knew mentioning that blow-back in my recent post “The Standard Pablum — Science and Atheism” would generate more.
  • Still, I was surprised by the quantity of the responses to the blog post (208 comments as of this moment, many of them substantial letters), and also by the fierceness of some of those responses. For example, according to one poster, “you not only pandered, you lied. And even if you weren’t lying, you lied.” (Several took up this “lying” theme.) Another, disappointed that my children’s book does not tell a general youth audience to look to “secular humanism for guidance,” declared  that “I’d have to tear out that page if I bought the book.”
  • I don’t mean to suggest that there are not points of legitimate disagreement in the mix — there are, many of them stated powerfully. There are also statements of support, vigorous debate, and (for me at least) a good deal of food for thought. I invite anyone to browse the thread, although I’d urge you to skim some of it. (The internet is after all a hyperbole-generating machine.)
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  • I lack any belief in any deity. More than that, I am persuaded (by philosophical argument, not scientific evidence) to a high degree of confidence that gods and an afterlife do not exist.
  • do try to distinguish between my work as a science writer and skeptical activist on the one hand, and my personal opinions about religion and humanism on the other.
  • Atheism is a practical handicap for science outreach. I’m not naive about this, but I’m not cynical either. I’m a writer. I’m in the business of communicating ideas about science, not throwing up roadblocks and distractions. It’s good communication to keep things as clear, focused, and on-topic as possible.
  • Atheism is divisive for the skeptical community, and it distracts us from our core mandate. I was blunt about this in my 2007 essay “Where Do We Go From Here?”, writing, I’m both an atheist and a secular humanist, but it is clear to me that atheism is an albatross for the skeptical movement. It divides us, it distracts us, and it marginalizes us. Frankly, we can’t afford that. We need all the help we can get.
  • In What Do I Do Next? I urged skeptics to remember that there are many other skeptics who do hold or identify with some religion. Indeed, the modern skeptical movement is built partly on the work of people of faith (including giants like Harry Houdini and Martin Gardner). You don’t, after all, have to be against god to be against fraud.
  • In my Skeptical Inquirer article “The Paradoxical Future of Skepticism” I argued that skeptics must set aside the conceit that our goal is a cultural revolution or the dawning of a new Enlightenment. … When we focus on that distant, receding, and perhaps illusory goal, we fail to see the practical good we can do, the harm-reduction opportunities right in front of us. The long view subverts our understanding of the scale and hazard of paranormal beliefs, leading to sentiments that the paranormal is “trivial” or “played out.” By contrast, the immediate, local, human view — the view that asks “Will this help someone?” — sees obvious opportunities for every local group and grassroots skeptic to make a meaningful difference.
  • This practical argument, that skepticism can get more done if we keep our mandate tight and avoid alienating our best friends, seems to me an important one. Even so, it is not my main reason for arguing that atheism and skepticism are different projects.
  • In my opinion, Metaphysics and ethics are out of scope for science — and therefore out of scope for skepticism. This is by far the most important reason I set aside my own atheism when I put on my “skeptic” hat. It’s not that I don’t think atheism is rational — I do. That’s why I’m an atheist. But I know that I cannot claim scientific authority for a conclusion that science cannot test, confirm, or disprove. And so, I restrict myself as much as possible, in my role as a skeptic and science writer, to investigable claims. I’ve become a cheerleader for this “testable claims” criterion (and I’ll discuss it further in future posts) but it’s not a new or radical constriction of the scope of skepticism. It’s the traditional position occupied by skeptical organizations for decades.
  • In much of the commentary, I see an assumption that I must not really believe that testable paranormal and pseudoscientific claims (“I can read minds”) are different in kind from the untestable claims we often find at the core of religion (“god exists”). I acknowledge that many smart people disagree on this point, but I assure you that this is indeed what I think.
  • I’d like to call out one blogger’s response to my “Standard Pablum” post. The author certainly disagrees with me (we’ve discussed the topic often on Twitter), but I thank him for describing my position fairly: From what I’ve read of Daniel’s writings before, this seems to be a very consistent position that he has always maintained, not a new one he adopted for the book release. It appears to me that when Daniel says that science has nothing to say about religion, he really means it. I have nothing to say to that. It also appears to me that when he says skepticism is a “different project than atheism” he also means it.
  • Weiye Loh on 08 Mar 10
     
    FURTHER THOUGHTS ON ATHEISM by DANIEL LOXTON, Mar 05 2010
Weiye Loh

Most scientists in this country are Democrats. That's a problem. - By Daniel Sarewitz -... - 0 views

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Science Politics Religion

shared by Weiye Loh on 12 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • A Pew Research Center Poll from July 2009 showed that only around 6 percent of U.S. scientists are Republicans; 55 percent are Democrats, 32 percent are independent, and the rest "don't know" their affiliation.
  • When President Obama appears Wednesday on Discovery Channel's Mythbusters (9 p.m. ET), he will be there not just to encourage youngsters to do their science homework but also to reinforce the idea that Democrats are the party of science and rationality. And why not? Most scientists are already on his side.
  • Yet, partisan politics aside, why should it matter that there are so few Republican scientists? After all, it's the scientific facts that matter, and facts aren't blue or red.
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  • For 20 years, evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of wealth. These are the sort of things that most Democrats welcome, and most Republicans hate. No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science.
  • Think about it: The results of climate science, delivered by scientists who are overwhelmingly Democratic, are used over a period of decades to advance a political agenda that happens to align precisely with the ideological preferences of Democrats. Coincidence—or causation?
  • How would a more politically diverse scientific community improve this situation? First, it could foster greater confidence among Republican politicians about the legitimacy of mainstream science. Second, it would cultivate more informed, creative, and challenging debates about the policy implications of scientific knowledge. This could help keep difficult problems like climate change from getting prematurely straitjacketed by ideology. A more politically diverse scientific community would, overall, support a healthier relationship between science and politics.
  • American society has long tended toward pragmatism, with a great deal of respect for the value and legitimacy not just of scientific facts, but of scientists themselves.
  • Yet this exceptional status could well be forfeit in the escalating fervor of national politics, given that most scientists are on one side of the partisan divide. If that public confidence is lost, it would be a huge and perhaps unrecoverable loss for a democratic society.
  • A democratic society needs Republican scientists.
  • I have to imagine 50 years ago there were a lot more Republican scientists, when the Democrats were still the party of Southern Baptists. As a rational person I find it impossible to support any candidate who panders to the religious right, and in current politics, that's every National Republican.
Weiye Loh

Rationally Speaking: A new eugenics? - 0 views

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Eugenics Designer Baby Baby

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • an interesting article I read recently, penned by Julian Savulescu for the Practical Ethics blog.
  • Savulescu discusses an ongoing controversy in Germany about genetic testing of human embryos. The Leopoldina, Germany’s equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences, has recommended genetic testing of pre-implant embryos, to screen for serious and incurable defects. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has agreed to allow a parliamentary vote on this issue, but also said that she personally supports a ban on this type of testing. Her fear is that the testing would quickly lead to “designer babies,” i.e. to parents making choices about their unborn offspring based not on knowledge about serious disease, but simply because they happen to prefer a particular height or eye color.
  • He infers from Merkel’s comments (and many similar others) that people tend to think of selecting traits like eye color as eugenics, while acting to avoid incurable disease is not considered eugenics. He argues that this is exactly wrong: eugenics, as he points out, means “well born,” so eugenicists have historically been concerned with eliminating traits that would harm society (Wendell Holmes’ “three generation of imbeciles”), not with simple aesthetic choices. As Savulescu puts it: “[eugenics] is selecting embryos which are better, in this context, have better lives. Being healthy rather than sick is ‘better.’ Having blond hair and blue eyes is not in any plausible sense ‘better,’ even if people mistakenly think so.”
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  • And there is another, related aspect of discussions about eugenics that should be at the forefront of our consideration: what was particularly objectionable about American and Nazi early 20th century eugenics is that the state, not individuals, were to make decisions about who could reproduce and who couldn’t. Savulescu continues: “to grant procreative liberty is the only way to avoid the objectionable form of eugenics that the Nazis practiced.” In other words, it makes all the difference in the world if it is an individual couple who decides to have or not have a baby, or if it is the state that imposes a particular reproductive choice on its citizenry.
  • but then Savulescu expands his argument to a point where I begin to feel somewhat uncomfortable. He says: “[procreative liberty] involves the freedom to choose a child with red hair or blond hair or no hair.”
  • Savulescu has suddenly sneaked into his argument for procreative liberty the assumption that all choices in this area are on the same level. But while it is hard to object to action aimed at avoiding devastating diseases, it is not quite so obvious to me what arguments favor the idea of designer babies. The first intervention can be justified, for instance, on consequentialist grounds because it reduces the pain and suffering of both the child and the parents. The second intervention is analogous to shopping for a new bag, or a new car, which means that it commodifies the act of conceiving a baby, thus degrading its importance. I’m not saying that that in itself is sufficient to make it illegal, but the ethics of it is different, and that difference cannot simply be swept under the broad rug of “procreative liberty.”
  • designing babies is to treat them as objects, not as human beings, and there are a couple of strong philosophical traditions in ethics that go squarely against that (I’m thinking, obviously, of Kant’s categorical imperative, as well as of virtue ethics; not sure what a consequentialist would say about this, probably she would remain neutral on the issue).
  • Commodification of human beings has historically produced all sorts of bad stuff, from slavery to exploitative prostitution, and arguably to war (after all, we are using our soldiers as means to gain access to power, resources, territory, etc.)
  • And of course, there is the issue of access. Across-the-board “procreative liberty” of the type envisioned by Savulescu will cost money because it requires considerable resources.
  • imagine that these parents decide to purchase the ability to produce babies that have the type of characteristics that will make them more successful in society: taller, more handsome, blue eyed, blonde, more symmetrical, whatever. We have just created yet another way for the privileged to augment and pass their privileges to the next generation — in this case literally through their genes, not just as real estate or bank accounts. That would quickly lead to an even further divide between the haves and the have-nots, more inequality, more injustice, possibly, in the long run, even two different species (why not design your babies so that they can’t breed with certain types of undesirables, for instance?). Is that the sort of society that Savulescu is willing to envision in the name of his total procreative liberty? That begins to sounds like the libertarian version of the eugenic ideal, something potentially only slightly less nightmarish than the early 20th century original.
  • Rich people already have better choices when it comes to their babies. Taller and richer men can choose between more attractive and physically fit women and attractive women can choose between more physically fit and rich men. So it is reasonable to conclude that on average rich and attractive people already have more options when it comes to their offspring. Moreover no one is questioning their right to do so and this is based on a respect for a basic instinct which we all have and which is exactly why these people would choose to have a DB. Is it fair for someone to be tall because his daddy was rich and married a supermodel but not because his daddy was rich and had his DNA resequenced? Is it former good because its natural and the latter bad because its not? This isn't at all obvious to me.
  • Not to mention that rich people can provide better health care, education and nutrition to their children and again no one is questioning their right to do so. Wouldn't a couple of inches be pretty negligible compared to getting into a good school? Aren't we applying double standards by objecting to this issue alone? Do we really live in a society that values equal opportunities? People (may) be equal before the law but they are not equal to each other and each one of us is tacitly accepting that fact when we acknowledge the social hierarchy (in other words, every time we interact with someone who is our superior). I am not crazy about this fact but that's just how people are and this has to be taken into account when discussing this.
Weiye Loh

takchek (读书 ): When Scientific Research and Higher Education become just Poli... - 0 views

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Academia Education Politics Religion Capitalism

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • A mere two years after the passage of the economic stimulus package, the now Republican-controlled House of Representatives have started swinging their budget cutting axe at scientific research and higher education.One point stood out in the midst of all this "fiscal responsibility" talk:The House bill does not specify cuts to five of the Office of Science's six programs, namely, basic energy sciences, high-energy physics, nuclear physics, fusion energy sciences, and advanced scientific computing. However, it explicitly whacks funding for the biological and environmental research program from $588 million to $302 million, a 49% reduction that would effectively zero out the program for the remainder of the year. The program supports much of DOE's climate and bioenergy research and in the past has funded much of the federal government's work on decoding the human genome. - Science , 25 February 2011: Vol. 331 no. 6020 pp. 997-998 DOI: 10.1126/science.331.6020.997 Do the terms Big Oil, Creationism/Intelligent Design come to your mind?
  • In other somewhat related news, tenure rights are being weakened in Louisiana and state legislatures are trying to have greater control over how colleges are run. It is hard not to see that there seems to be a coordinated assault on academia (presumably since many academics are seen by the Republican right as leftist liberals.)Lawmakers are inserting themselves even more directly into the classroom in South Carolina, where a proposal would require professors to teach a minimum of nine credit hours per semester."I think we need to have professors in the classroom and not on sabbatical and out researching and doing things to that effect," State Rep. Murrell G. Smith Jr., a Republican, told the Associated Press.I think they are attempting to turn research universities into trade/vocational schools.
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » A Creationist Challenge - 0 views

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Creationism Evolution Logic

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The commenter starts with some ad hominems, asserting that my post is biased and emotional. They provide no evidence or argument to support this assertion. And of course they don’t even attempt to counter any of the arguments I laid out. They then follow up with an argument from authority – he can link to a PhD creationist – so there.
  • The article that the commenter links to is by Henry M. Morris, founder for the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) – a young-earth creationist organization. Morris was (he died in 2006 following a stroke) a PhD – in civil engineering. This point is irrelevant to his actual arguments. I bring it up only to put the commenter’s argument from authority into perspective. No disrespect to engineers – but they are not biologists. They have no expertise relevant to the question of evolution – no more than my MD. So let’s stick to the arguments themselves.
  • The article by Morris is an overview of so-called Creation Science, of which Morris was a major architect. The arguments he presents are all old creationist canards, long deconstructed by scientists. In fact I address many of them in my original refutation. Creationists generally are not very original – they recycle old arguments endlessly, regardless of how many times they have been destroyed.
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  • Morris also makes heavy use of the “taking a quote out of context” strategy favored by creationists. His quotes are often from secondary sources and are incomplete.
  • A more scholarly (i.e. intellectually honest) approach would be to cite actual evidence to support a point. If you are going to cite an authority, then make sure the quote is relevant, in context, and complete.
  • And even better, cite a number of sources to show that the opinion is representative. Rather we get single, partial, and often outdated quotes without context.
  • (nature is not, it turns out, cleanly divided into “kinds”, which have no operational definition). He also repeats this canard: Such variation is often called microevolution, and these minor horizontal (or downward) changes occur fairly often, but such changes are not true “vertical” evolution. This is the microevolution/macroevolution false dichotomy. It is only “often called” this by creationists – not by actual evolutionary scientists. There is no theoretical or empirical division between macro and micro evolution. There is just evolution, which can result in the full spectrum of change from minor tweaks to major changes.
  • Morris wonders why there are no “dats” – dog-cat transitional species. He misses the hierarchical nature of evolution. As evolution proceeds, and creatures develop a greater and greater evolutionary history behind them, they increasingly are committed to their body plan. This results in a nestled hierarchy of groups – which is reflected in taxonomy (the naming scheme of living things).
  • once our distant ancestors developed the basic body plan of chordates, they were committed to that body plan. Subsequent evolution resulted in variations on that plan, each of which then developed further variations, etc. But evolution cannot go backward, undo evolutionary changes and then proceed down a different path. Once an evolutionary line has developed into a dog, evolution can produce variations on the dog, but it cannot go backwards and produce a cat.
  • Stephen J. Gould described this distinction as the difference between disparity and diversity. Disparity (the degree of morphological difference) actually decreases over evolutionary time, as lineages go extinct and the surviving lineages are committed to fewer and fewer basic body plans. Meanwhile, diversity (the number of variations on a body plan) within groups tends to increase over time.
  • the kind of evolutionary changes that were happening in the past, when species were relatively undifferentiated (compared to contemporary species) is indeed not happening today. Modern multi-cellular life has 600 million years of evolutionary history constraining their future evolution – which was not true of species at the base of the evolutionary tree. But modern species are indeed still evolving.
  • Here is a list of research documenting observed instances of speciation. The list is from 1995, and there are more recent examples to add to the list. Here are some more. And here is a good list with references of more recent cases.
  • Next Morris tries to convince the reader that there is no evidence for evolution in the past, focusing on the fossil record. He repeats the false claim (again, which I already dealt with) that there are no transitional fossils: Even those who believe in rapid evolution recognize that a considerable number of generations would be required for one distinct “kind” to evolve into another more complex kind. There ought, therefore, to be a considerable number of true transitional structures preserved in the fossils — after all, there are billions of non-transitional structures there! But (with the exception of a few very doubtful creatures such as the controversial feathered dinosaurs and the alleged walking whales), they are not there.
  • I deal with this question at length here, pointing out that there are numerous transitional fossils for the evolution of terrestrial vertebrates, mammals, whales, birds, turtles, and yes – humans from ape ancestors. There are many more examples, these are just some of my favorites.
  • Much of what follows (as you can see it takes far more space to correct the lies and distortions of Morris than it did to create them) is classic denialism – misinterpreting the state of the science, and confusing lack of information about the details of evolution with lack of confidence in the fact of evolution. Here are some examples – he quotes Niles Eldridge: “It is a simple ineluctable truth that virtually all members of a biota remain basically stable, with minor fluctuations, throughout their durations. . . .“ So how do evolutionists arrive at their evolutionary trees from fossils of organisms which didn’t change during their durations? Beware the “….” – that means that meaningful parts of the quote are being omitted. I happen to have the book (The Pattern of Evolution) from which Morris mined that particular quote. Here’s the rest of it: (Remember, by “biota” we mean the commonly preserved plants and animals of a particular geological interval, which occupy regions often as large as Roger Tory Peterson’s “eastern” region of North American birds.) And when these systems change – when the older species disappear, and new ones take their place – the change happens relatively abruptly and in lockstep fashion.”
  • Eldridge was one of the authors (with Gould) of punctuated equilibrium theory. This states that, if you look at the fossil record, what we see are species emerging, persisting with little change for a while, and then disappearing from the fossil record. They theorize that most species most of the time are at equilibrium with their environment, and so do not change much. But these periods of equilibrium are punctuated by disequilibrium – periods of change when species will have to migrate, evolve, or go extinct.
  • This does not mean that speciation does not take place. And if you look at the fossil record we see a pattern of descendant species emerging from ancestor species over time – in a nice evolutionary pattern. Morris gives a complete misrepresentation of Eldridge’s point – once again we see intellectual dishonesty in his methods of an astounding degree.
  • Regarding the atheism = religion comment, it reminds me of a great analogy that I first heard on twitter from Evil Eye. (paraphrase) “those that say atheism is a religion, is like saying ‘not collecting stamps’ is a hobby too.”
  • Morris next tackles the genetic evidence, writing: More often is the argument used that similar DNA structures in two different organisms proves common evolutionary ancestry. Neither argument is valid. There is no reason whatever why the Creator could not or would not use the same type of genetic code based on DNA for all His created life forms. This is evidence for intelligent design and creation, not evolution.
  • Here is an excellent summary of the multiple lines of molecular evidence for evolution. Basically, if we look at the sequence of DNA, the variations in trinucleotide codes for amino acids, and amino acids for proteins, and transposons within DNA we see a pattern that can only be explained by evolution (or a mischievous god who chose, for some reason, to make life look exactly as if it had evolved – a non-falsifiable notion).
  • The genetic code is essentially comprised of four letters (ACGT for DNA), and every triplet of three letters equates to a specific amino acid. There are 64 (4^3) possible three letter combinations, and 20 amino acids. A few combinations are used for housekeeping, like a code to indicate where a gene stops, but the rest code for amino acids. There are more combinations than amino acids, so most amino acids are coded for by multiple combinations. This means that a mutation that results in a one-letter change might alter from one code for a particular amino acid to another code for the same amino acid. This is called a silent mutation because it does not result in any change in the resulting protein.
  • It also means that there are very many possible codes for any individual protein. The question is – which codes out of the gazillions of possible codes do we find for each type of protein in different species. If each “kind” were created separately there would not need to be any relationship. Each kind could have it’s own variation, or they could all be identical if they were essentially copied (plus any mutations accruing since creation, which would be minimal). But if life evolved then we would expect that the exact sequence of DNA code would be similar in related species, but progressively different (through silent mutations) over evolutionary time.
  • This is precisely what we find – in every protein we have examined. This pattern is necessary if evolution were true. It cannot be explained by random chance (the probability is absurdly tiny – essentially zero). And it makes no sense from a creationist perspective. This same pattern (a branching hierarchy) emerges when we look at amino acid substitutions in proteins and other aspects of the genetic code.
  • Morris goes for the second law of thermodynamics again – in the exact way that I already addressed. He responds to scientists correctly pointing out that the Earth is an open system, by writing: This naive response to the entropy law is typical of evolutionary dissimulation. While it is true that local order can increase in an open system if certain conditions are met, the fact is that evolution does not meet those conditions. Simply saying that the earth is open to the energy from the sun says nothing about how that raw solar heat is converted into increased complexity in any system, open or closed. The fact is that the best known and most fundamental equation of thermodynamics says that the influx of heat into an open system will increase the entropy of that system, not decrease it. All known cases of decreased entropy (or increased organization) in open systems involve a guiding program of some sort and one or more energy conversion mechanisms.
  • Energy has to be transformed into a usable form in order to do the work necessary to decrease entropy. That’s right. That work is done by life. Plants take solar energy (again – I’m not sure what “raw solar heat” means) and convert it into food. That food fuels the processes of life, which include development and reproduction. Evolution emerges from those processes- therefore the conditions that Morris speaks of are met.
  • But Morris next makes a very confused argument: Evolution has neither of these. Mutations are not “organizing” mechanisms, but disorganizing (in accord with the second law). They are commonly harmful, sometimes neutral, but never beneficial (at least as far as observed mutations are concerned). Natural selection cannot generate order, but can only “sieve out” the disorganizing mutations presented to it, thereby conserving the existing order, but never generating new order.
  • The notion that evolution (as if it’s a thing) needs to use energy is hopelessly confused. Evolution is a process that emerges from the system of life – and life certainly can use solar energy to decrease its entropy, and by extension the entropy of the biosphere. Morris slips into what is often presented as an information argument.  (Yet again – already dealt with. The pattern here is that we are seeing a shuffling around of the same tired creationists arguments.) It is first not true that most mutations are harmful. Many are silent, and many of those that are not silent are not harmful. They may be neutral, they may be a mixed blessing, and their relative benefit vs harm is likely to be situational. They may be fatal. And they also may be simply beneficial.
  • Morris finishes with a long rambling argument that evolution is religion. Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion — a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality . . . . Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today. Morris ties evolution to atheism, which, he argues, makes it a religion. This assumes, of course, that atheism is a religion. That depends on how you define atheism and how you define religion – but it is mostly wrong. Atheism is a lack of belief in one particular supernatural claim – that does not qualify it as a religion.
  • But mutations are not “disorganizing” – that does not even make sense. It seems to be based on a purely creationist notion that species are in some privileged perfect state, and any mutation can only take them farther from that perfection. For those who actually understand biology, life is a kluge of compromises and variation. Mutations are mostly lateral moves from one chaotic state to another. They are not directional. But they do provide raw material, variation, for natural selection. Natural selection cannot generate variation, but it can select among that variation to provide differential survival. This is an old game played by creationists – mutations are not selective, and natural selection is not creative (does not increase variation). These are true but irrelevant, because mutations increase variation and information, and selection is a creative force that results in the differential survival of better adapted variation.
  • Weiye Loh on 01 Mar 11
     
    One of my earlier posts on SkepticBlog was Ten Major Flaws in Evolution: A Refutation, published two years ago. Occasionally a creationist shows up to snipe at the post, like this one:i read this and found it funny. It supposedly gives a scientific refutation, but it is full of more bias than fox news, and a lot of emotion as well.here's a scientific case by an actual scientists, you know, one with a ph. D, and he uses statements by some of your favorite evolutionary scientists to insist evolution doesn't exist.i challenge you to write a refutation on this one.http://www.icr.org/home/resources/resources_tracts_scientificcaseagainstevolution/Challenge accepted.
Weiye Loh

Singapore Notes: The Relentless March Of The Gini Coefficient - 0 views

singaporedesk.blogspot.com/...march-of-gini-coefficient.html

Lies Statistics Income Inequality

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The Gini coefficient is a measure of statistical dispersion developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini and published in his 1912 paper "Variability and Mutability". Worldwide, Gini coefficients for income range from approximately 0.23 (Sweden) to 0.70 (Namibia) although not every country has been assessed.
  • No matter how the Department of Statistics jiggle the numbers, Singapore's Gini coefficient (ranked second highest in 2009) is an ugly reminder of the widening income disparity. The orange line is based on lower numbers adjusted for "Government benefits and taxes" to pretty up a gruesome picture. If they are referring to housing grants or GST relief payouts credited to the CPF account, we know neither provides the hard cash to put food on the table. Or pocket money for the school kid to stave off hunger pangs during recess time. NTUC's welcome largess of a 5 percent discount on 500 essential items like rice, cooking oil and detergent confirms the pitiful plight of the poor is very real. Never mind if the temporal relief is only good for 3 months, after which the general election should be over, and a new round of price hikes will be slammed in.
  • Meanwhile the holdouts against a minimum wage salvation are still preaching the skill upgrade gospel. MP Liang Eng Hwa repeats the official mantra, "Rather than cash handouts, training and increasing their productivity may help them break out of the low wage cycle."
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  • MM Lee once told NUS undergrads at a forum to ignore the UNDP readings, "Never mind your Gini coefficient. If you don't have a job you get zero against those with jobs." A social class divide appearing in Singapore, he claimed, was unavoidable in a maturing society. Citing the example of China, he said the country started as a classless society but has gradually evolved to favour those who have the right connections.
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » Kirsten Sanford - 0 views

skepticblog.org/sanford

Science News Newspaper objectivity Bias Representation Fairness

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • This Sunday before game-time you might want to set your Tivos to record Dateline. This week, supposedly, Matt Lauer interviews Dr. Andrew Wakefield and several other affiliates of the Thoughtful House Center for Children, along with Dr. Paul Offit and journalist Brian Deer.
  • Please, Matt… don’t go Jenny McCarthy on us. Don’t do the usual journalistic job of being “fair-and-balanced”. This is not a “he said, she said” issue. This is science. Do tell the world what the science supports.
  • Depending on how this major media outlet writes the script, it could either be a major affirmation of what many within the science community already know, or it could increase the divide between anti-vax’ers and science.
Weiye Loh

MDA says Aware needs distribution licence for DVD of 2009 meeting - 0 views

jg69.amplify.com/...icence-for-dvd-of-2009-meeting

AWARE Law Feminism Gender Equality Singapore Censorship

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • WOMEN'S advocacy group Aware's plan to distribute a set of DVDs of its dramatic extraordinary general meeting (EGM), held in May 2009, has hit a snag.
  • The Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware) has not been able to distribute the DVDs, as it is appealing against a requirement that it needs a government licence to do so.
  • The MDA has, in the meantime, given the DVD an M18 rating - meaning it should be seen only by those aged 18 and above.
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  • Aware planned to sell the four-disc DVD box set of the EGM only to its 600 members, as an official record of the event. But its executive director Corinna Lim, 45, said an MDA official contacted her 'a few days' after news of the $100-per-set DVDs broke last October, to ask if Aware had a distribution licence. Ms Lim, a former corporate lawyer, said Aware has appealed against the need for one. She argued that the licensing requirement applies to businesses, not non-profit organisations.
  • Section 6 of the Films Act states that a person must have a valid licence in order to 'carry on any business, whether or not the business is carried on for profit, of importing, making, distributing or exhibiting films'.
  • 'I really take the view that we are not obliged to have a licence, and if they make us have a licence, they would be setting a terrible precedent for Singapore. 'That means any organisation that wants to distribute to your shareholders or just your members would need a licence.' She noted that recordings of the EGM were online, such as on video-sharing site YouTube.
  • But MDA director of customer services and operations Pam Hu told The Straits Times yesterday that the MDA has required some religious and arts groups - and not just businesses - to possess the distribution licence. Ms Hu added, however, that the MDA is reviewing Aware's appeal and would notify the group of the outcome shortly.
  • On the M18 rating, she said this is because the DVDs 'feature discussion of homosexuality and Aware's sexuality programme, which stirs up strong emotion among the members'. 'This contributed to the M18 rating as it requires maturity to understand the issues discussed and not be carried away by the emotive passion of the meeting.'
  • Observers were divided on how to interpret the law. Singapore Management University assistant law professor Eugene Tan said the language of the law does not limit its reach and thus could apply to Aware. But Professor Ang Peng Hwa, of Nanyang Technological University's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, said Aware should not need a licence as it does not distribute films in its normal course of work. 'If it needs to have a licence, that means any company that does a corporate video will also need (one). MDA will be flooded with licensing (applications),' he said.
Weiye Loh

A Data State of Mind | Think Quarterly - 0 views

thinkquarterly.co.uk/...a-data-state-of-mind

Data Facts Health Care

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Rosling has maintained a fact-based worldview – an understanding of how global health trends act as a signifier for economic development based on hard data. Today, he argues, countries and corporations alike need to adopt that same data-driven understanding of the world if they are to make sense of the changes we are experiencing in this new century, and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.
  • the world has changed so much, what people need isn’t more data but a new mindset. They need a new storage system that can handle this new information. But what I have found over the years is that the CEOs of the biggest companies are actually those that already have the most fact-based worldview, more so than in media, academia or politics. Those CEOs that haven’t grasped the reality of the world have already failed in business. If they don’t understand what is happening in terms of potential new markets in the Middle East, Africa and so on, they are out. So the bigger and more international the organisation, the more fact-based the CEO’s worldview is likely to be. The problem is that they are slow in getting their organisation to follow.
  • Companies as a whole are stuck in the rut of an old mindset. They think in outworn categories and follow habits and assumptions that are not, or only rarely, based on fact.
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  • For instance, in terms of education levels, we no longer live in a world that is divided into the West and the rest; our world today stretches from Canada to Yemen with all the other countries somewhere in between. There’s a broad spectrum of levels
  • even when people act within a fact-based worldview, they are used to talking with sterile figures. They are used to standing on a podium, clicking through slide shows in PowerPoint rather than interacting with their presentation. The problem is that companies have a strict separation between their IT department, where datasets are produced, and the design department, so hardly any presenters are proficient in both. Yet this is what we need. Getting people used to talking with animated data is, to my mind, a literacy project.
  • What’s important today is not just financial data but child mortality rates, the number of children per women, education levels, etc. In the world today, it’s not money that drags people into modern times, it’s people that drag money into modern times.
  • I can demonstrate human resources successes in Asia through health being improved, family size decreasing and then education levels increasing. That makes sense: when more children survive, parents accept that there is less need for multiple births, and they can afford to put their children through school. So Pfizer have moved their research and development of drugs to Asia, where there are brilliant young people who are amazing at developing drugs. It’s realising this kind of change that’s important.
  • The problem isn’t that specialised companies lack the data they need, it’s that they don’t go and look for it, they don’t understand how to handle it.
  • What is so strong with animation is that it provides that mindset shift in market segmentation. We can see where there are highly developed countries with a good economy and a healthy and well-educated staff.
  • At the moment, I’m quarrelling with Sweden’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. He says that the West has to make sure its lead over the rest of the world doesn’t erode. This is a completely wrong attitude. Western Europe and other high-income countries have to integrate themselves into the world in the same way big companies are doing. They have to look at the advantages, resources and markets that exist in different places around the world.
  • And some organisations aren’t willing to share their data, even though it would be a win-win situation for everybody and we would do much better in tackling the problems we need to tackle. Last April, the World Bank caved in and finally embraced an open data policy, but the OECD uses tax money to compile data and then sells it in a monopolistic way. The Chinese Statistical Bureau provides data more easily than the OECD. The richest countries in the world don’t have the vision to change.
  • ‘database hugging disorder’
  • we have to instil a clear division of labour between those who provide the datasets – like the World Bank, the World Health Organisation or companies themselves – those who provide new technologies to access or process them, like Google or Microsoft, and those who ‘play’ with them and give data meaning. It’s like a great concert: you need a Mozart or a Chopin to write wonderful music, then you need the instruments and finally the musicians.
Weiye Loh

Science, Strong Inference -- Proper Scientific Method - 0 views

256.com/...strong_inference.html

Science Statistics Media Representation Methodolatry Falsifiability

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist's field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist's and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants.
  • Why should there be such rapid advances in some fields and not in others? I think the usual explanations that we tend to think of - such as the tractability of the subject, or the quality or education of the men drawn into it, or the size of research contracts - are important but inadequate. I have begun to believe that the primary factor in scientific advance is an intellectual one. These rapidly moving fields are fields where a particular method of doing scientific research is systematically used and taught, an accumulative method of inductive inference that is so effective that I think it should be given the name of "strong inference." I believe it is important to examine this method, its use and history and rationale, and to see whether other groups and individuals might learn to adopt it profitably in their own scientific and intellectual work. In its separate elements, strong inference is just the simple and old-fashioned method of inductive inference that goes back to Francis Bacon. The steps are familiar to every college student and are practiced, off and on, by every scientist. The difference comes in their systematic application. Strong inference consists of applying the following steps to every problem in science, formally and explicitly and regularly: Devising alternative hypotheses; Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them), with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will, as nearly is possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses; Carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result; Recycling the procedure, making subhypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain, and so on.
  • On any new problem, of course, inductive inference is not as simple and certain as deduction, because it involves reaching out into the unknown. Steps 1 and 2 require intellectual inventions, which must be cleverly chosen so that hypothesis, experiment, outcome, and exclusion will be related in a rigorous syllogism; and the question of how to generate such inventions is one which has been extensively discussed elsewhere (2, 3). What the formal schema reminds us to do is to try to make these inventions, to take the next step, to proceed to the next fork, without dawdling or getting tied up in irrelevancies.
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  • It is clear why this makes for rapid and powerful progress. For exploring the unknown, there is no faster method; this is the minimum sequence of steps. Any conclusion that is not an exclusion is insecure and must be rechecked. Any delay in recycling to the next set of hypotheses is only a delay. Strong inference, and the logical tree it generates, are to inductive reasoning what the syllogism is to deductive reasoning in that it offers a regular method for reaching firm inductive conclusions one after the other as rapidly as possible.
  • "But what is so novel about this?" someone will say. This is the method of science and always has been, why give it a special name? The reason is that many of us have almost forgotten it. Science is now an everyday business. Equipment, calculations, lectures become ends in themselves. How many of us write down our alternatives and crucial experiments every day, focusing on the exclusion of a hypothesis? We may write our scientific papers so that it looks as if we had steps 1, 2, and 3 in mind all along. But in between, we do busywork. We become "method- oriented" rather than "problem-oriented." We say we prefer to "feel our way" toward generalizations. We fail to teach our students how to sharpen up their inductive inferences. And we do not realize the added power that the regular and explicit use of alternative hypothesis and sharp exclusion could give us at every step of our research.
  • A distinguished cell biologist rose and said, "No two cells give the same properties. Biology is the science of heterogeneous systems." And he added privately. "You know there are scientists, and there are people in science who are just working with these over-simplified model systems - DNA chains and in vitro systems - who are not doing science at all. We need their auxiliary work: they build apparatus, they make minor studies, but they are not scientists." To which Cy Levinthal replied: "Well, there are two kinds of biologists, those who are looking to see if there is one thing that can be understood and those who keep saying it is very complicated and that nothing can be understood. . . . You must study the simplest system you think has the properties you are interested in."
  • At the 1958 Conference on Biophysics, at Boulder, there was a dramatic confrontation between the two points of view. Leo Szilard said: "The problems of how enzymes are induced, of how proteins are synthesized, of how antibodies are formed, are closer to solution than is generally believed. If you do stupid experiments, and finish one a year, it can take 50 years. But if you stop doing experiments for a little while and think how proteins can possibly be synthesized, there are only about 5 different ways, not 50! And it will take only a few experiments to distinguish these." One of the young men added: "It is essentially the old question: How small and elegant an experiment can you perform?" These comments upset a number of those present. An electron microscopist said. "Gentlemen, this is off the track. This is philosophy of science." Szilard retorted. "I was not quarreling with third-rate scientists: I was quarreling with first-rate scientists."
  • Any criticism or challenge to consider changing our methods strikes of course at all our ego-defenses. But in this case the analytical method offers the possibility of such great increases in effectiveness that it is unfortunate that it cannot be regarded more often as a challenge to learning rather than as challenge to combat. Many of the recent triumphs in molecular biology have in fact been achieved on just such "oversimplified model systems," very much along the analytical lines laid down in the 1958 discussion. They have not fallen to the kind of men who justify themselves by saying "No two cells are alike," regardless of how true that may ultimately be. The triumphs are in fact triumphs of a new way of thinking.
  • the emphasis on strong inference
  • is also partly due to the nature of the fields themselves. Biology, with its vast informational detail and complexity, is a "high-information" field, where years and decades can easily be wasted on the usual type of "low-information" observations or experiments if one does not think carefully in advance about what the most important and conclusive experiments would be. And in high-energy physics, both the "information flux" of particles from the new accelerators and the million-dollar costs of operation have forced a similar analytical approach. It pays to have a top-notch group debate every experiment ahead of time; and the habit spreads throughout the field.
  • Historically, I think, there have been two main contributions to the development of a satisfactory strong-inference method. The first is that of Francis Bacon (13). He wanted a "surer method" of "finding out nature" than either the logic-chopping or all-inclusive theories of the time or the laudable but crude attempts to make inductions "by simple enumeration." He did not merely urge experiments as some suppose, he showed the fruitfulness of interconnecting theory and experiment so that the one checked the other. Of the many inductive procedures he suggested, the most important, I think, was the conditional inductive tree, which proceeded from alternative hypothesis (possible "causes," as he calls them), through crucial experiments ("Instances of the Fingerpost"), to exclusion of some alternatives and adoption of what is left ("establishing axioms"). His Instances of the Fingerpost are explicitly at the forks in the logical tree, the term being borrowed "from the fingerposts which are set up where roads part, to indicate the several directions."
  • ere was a method that could separate off the empty theories! Bacon, said the inductive method could be learned by anybody, just like learning to "draw a straighter line or more perfect circle . . . with the help of a ruler or a pair of compasses." "My way of discovering sciences goes far to level men's wit and leaves but little to individual excellence, because it performs everything by the surest rules and demonstrations." Even occasional mistakes would not be fatal. "Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion."
  • Nevertheless there is a difficulty with this method. As Bacon emphasizes, it is necessary to make "exclusions." He says, "The induction which is to be available for the discovery and demonstration of sciences and arts, must analyze nature by proper rejections and exclusions, and then, after a sufficient number of negatives come to a conclusion on the affirmative instances." "[To man] it is granted only to proceed at first by negatives, and at last to end in affirmatives after exclusion has been exhausted." Or, as the philosopher Karl Popper says today there is no such thing as proof in science - because some later alternative explanation may be as good or better - so that science advances only by disproofs. There is no point in making hypotheses that are not falsifiable because such hypotheses do not say anything, "it must be possible for all empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience" (14).
  • The difficulty is that disproof is a hard doctrine. If you have a hypothesis and I have another hypothesis, evidently one of them must be eliminated. The scientist seems to have no choice but to be either soft-headed or disputatious. Perhaps this is why so many tend to resist the strong analytical approach and why some great scientists are so disputatious.
  • Fortunately, it seems to me, this difficulty can be removed by the use of a second great intellectual invention, the "method of multiple hypotheses," which is what was needed to round out the Baconian scheme. This is a method that was put forward by T.C. Chamberlin (15), a geologist at Chicago at the turn of the century, who is best known for his contribution to the Chamberlain-Moulton hypothesis of the origin of the solar system.
  • Chamberlin says our trouble is that when we make a single hypothesis, we become attached to it. "The moment one has offered an original explanation for a phenomenon which seems satisfactory, that moment affection for his intellectual child springs into existence, and as the explanation grows into a definite theory his parental affections cluster about his offspring and it grows more and more dear to him. . . . There springs up also unwittingly a pressing of the theory to make it fit the facts and a pressing of the facts to make them fit the theory..." "To avoid this grave danger, the method of multiple working hypotheses is urged. It differs from the simple working hypothesis in that it distributes the effort and divides the affections. . . . Each hypothesis suggests its own criteria, its own method of proof, its own method of developing the truth, and if a group of hypotheses encompass the subject on all sides, the total outcome of means and of methods is full and rich."
  • The conflict and exclusion of alternatives that is necessary to sharp inductive inference has been all too often a conflict between men, each with his single Ruling Theory. But whenever each man begins to have multiple working hypotheses, it becomes purely a conflict between ideas. It becomes much easier then for each of us to aim every day at conclusive disproofs - at strong inference - without either reluctance or combativeness. In fact, when there are multiple hypotheses, which are not anyone's "personal property," and when there are crucial experiments to test them, the daily life in the laboratory takes on an interest and excitement it never had, and the students can hardly wait to get to work to see how the detective story will come out. It seems to me that this is the reason for the development of those distinctive habits of mind and the "complex thought" that Chamberlin described, the reason for the sharpness, the excitement, the zeal, the teamwork - yes, even international teamwork - in molecular biology and high- energy physics today. What else could be so effective?
  • Unfortunately, I think, there are other other areas of science today that are sick by comparison, because they have forgotten the necessity for alternative hypotheses and disproof. Each man has only one branch - or none - on the logical tree, and it twists at random without ever coming to the need for a crucial decision at any point. We can see from the external symptoms that there is something scientifically wrong. The Frozen Method, The Eternal Surveyor, The Never Finished, The Great Man With a Single Hypothcsis, The Little Club of Dependents, The Vendetta, The All-Encompassing Theory Which Can Never Be Falsified.
  • a "theory" of this sort is not a theory at all, because it does not exclude anything. It predicts everything, and therefore does not predict anything. It becomes simply a verbal formula which the graduate student repeats and believes because the professor has said it so often. This is not science, but faith; not theory, but theology. Whether it is hand-waving or number-waving, or equation-waving, a theory is not a theory unless it can be disproved. That is, unless it can be falsified by some possible experimental outcome.
  • the work methods of a number of scientists have been testimony to the power of strong inference. Is success not due in many cases to systematic use of Bacon's "surest rules and demonstrations" as much as to rare and unattainable intellectual power? Faraday's famous diary (16), or Fermi's notebooks (3, 17), show how these men believed in the effectiveness of daily steps in applying formal inductive methods to one problem after another.
  • Surveys, taxonomy, design of equipment, systematic measurements and tables, theoretical computations - all have their proper and honored place, provided they are parts of a chain of precise induction of how nature works. Unfortunately, all too often they become ends in themselves, mere time-serving from the point of view of real scientific advance, a hypertrophied methodology that justifies itself as a lore of respectability.
  • We speak piously of taking measurements and making small studies that will "add another brick to the temple of science." Most such bricks just lie around the brickyard (20). Tables of constraints have their place and value, but the study of one spectrum after another, if not frequently re-evaluated, may become a substitute for thinking, a sad waste of intelligence in a research laboratory, and a mistraining whose crippling effects may last a lifetime.
  • Beware of the man of one method or one instrument, either experimental or theoretical. He tends to become method-oriented rather than problem-oriented. The method-oriented man is shackled; the problem-oriented man is at least reaching freely toward that is most important. Strong inference redirects a man to problem-orientation, but it requires him to be willing repeatedly to put aside his last methods and teach himself new ones.
  • anyone who asks the question about scientific effectiveness will also conclude that much of the mathematizing in physics and chemistry today is irrelevant if not misleading. The great value of mathematical formulation is that when an experiment agrees with a calculation to five decimal places, a great many alternative hypotheses are pretty well excluded (though the Bohr theory and the Schrödinger theory both predict exactly the same Rydberg constant!). But when the fit is only to two decimal places, or one, it may be a trap for the unwary; it may be no better than any rule-of-thumb extrapolation, and some other kind of qualitative exclusion might be more rigorous for testing the assumptions and more important to scientific understanding than the quantitative fit.
  • Today we preach that science is not science unless it is quantitative. We substitute correlations for causal studies, and physical equations for organic reasoning. Measurements and equations are supposed to sharpen thinking, but, in my observation, they more often tend to make the thinking noncausal and fuzzy. They tend to become the object of scientific manipulation instead of auxiliary tests of crucial inferences.
  • Many - perhaps most - of the great issues of science are qualitative, not quantitative, even in physics and chemistry. Equations and measurements are useful when and only when they are related to proof; but proof or disproof comes first and is in fact strongest when it is absolutely convincing without any quantitative measurement.
  • you can catch phenomena in a logical box or in a mathematical box. The logical box is coarse but strong. The mathematical box is fine-grained but flimsy. The mathematical box is a beautiful way of wrapping up a problem, but it will not hold the phenomena unless they have been caught in a logical box to begin with.
  • Of course it is easy - and all too common - for one scientist to call the others unscientific. My point is not that my particular conclusions here are necessarily correct, but that we have long needed some absolute standard of possible scientific effectiveness by which to measure how well we are succeeding in various areas - a standard that many could agree on and one that would be undistorted by the scientific pressures and fashions of the times and the vested interests and busywork that they develop. It is not public evaluation I am interested in so much as a private measure by which to compare one's own scientific performance with what it might be. I believe that strong inference provides this kind of standard of what the maximum possible scientific effectiveness could be - as well as a recipe for reaching it.
  • The strong-inference point of view is so resolutely critical of methods of work and values in science that any attempt to compare specific cases is likely to sound but smug and destructive. Mainly one should try to teach it by example and by exhorting to self-analysis and self-improvement only in general terms
  • one severe but useful private test - a touchstone of strong inference - that removes the necessity for third-person criticism, because it is a test that anyone can learn to carry with him for use as needed. It is our old friend the Baconian "exclusion," but I call it "The Question." Obviously it should be applied as much to one's own thinking as to others'. It consists of asking in your own mind, on hearing any scientific explanation or theory put forward, "But sir, what experiment could disprove your hypothesis?"; or, on hearing a scientific experiment described, "But sir, what hypothesis does your experiment disprove?"
  • It is not true that all science is equal; or that we cannot justly compare the effectiveness of scientists by any method other than a mutual-recommendation system. The man to watch, the man to put your money on, is not the man who wants to make "a survey" or a "more detailed study" but the man with the notebook, the man with the alternative hypotheses and the crucial experiments, the man who knows how to answer your Question of disproof and is already working on it.
  • Weiye Loh on 20 Mar 11
     
    There is so much bad science and bad statistics information in media reports, publications, and shared between conversants that I think it is important to understand about facts and proofs and the associated pitfalls.
Weiye Loh

Don't dumb me down | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...badscience.research

Science Journalism Communication Latour Statistics Humanities

shared by Weiye Loh on 09 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Science stories usually fall into three families: wacky stories, scare stories and "breakthrough" stories.
  • these stories are invariably written by the science correspondents, and hotly followed, to universal jubilation, with comment pieces, by humanities graduates, on how bonkers and irrelevant scientists are.
  • A close relative of the wacky story is the paradoxical health story. Every Christmas and Easter, regular as clockwork, you can read that chocolate is good for you (www.badscience.net/?p=67), just like red wine is, and with the same monotonous regularity
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  • At the other end of the spectrum, scare stories are - of course - a stalwart of media science. Based on minimal evidence and expanded with poor understanding of its significance, they help perform the most crucial function for the media, which is selling you, the reader, to their advertisers. The MMR disaster was a fantasy entirely of the media's making (www.badscience.net/?p=23), which failed to go away. In fact the Daily Mail is still publishing hysterical anti-immunisation stories, including one calling the pneumococcus vaccine a "triple jab", presumably because they misunderstood that the meningitis, pneumonia, and septicaemia it protects against are all caused by the same pneumococcus bacteria (www.badscience.net/?p=118).
  • people periodically come up to me and say, isn't it funny how that Wakefield MMR paper turned out to be Bad Science after all? And I say: no. The paper always was and still remains a perfectly good small case series report, but it was systematically misrepresented as being more than that, by media that are incapable of interpreting and reporting scientific data.
  • Once journalists get their teeth into what they think is a scare story, trivial increases in risk are presented, often out of context, but always using one single way of expressing risk, the "relative risk increase", that makes the danger appear disproportionately large (www.badscience.net/?p=8).
  • he media obsession with "new breakthroughs": a more subtly destructive category of science story. It's quite understandable that newspapers should feel it's their job to write about new stuff. But in the aggregate, these stories sell the idea that science, and indeed the whole empirical world view, is only about tenuous, new, hotly-contested data
  • Articles about robustly-supported emerging themes and ideas would be more stimulating, of course, than most single experimental results, and these themes are, most people would agree, the real developments in science. But they emerge over months and several bits of evidence, not single rejiggable press releases. Often, a front page science story will emerge from a press release alone, and the formal academic paper may never appear, or appear much later, and then not even show what the press reports claimed it would (www.badscience.net/?p=159).
  • there was an interesting essay in the journal PLoS Medicine, about how most brand new research findings will turn out to be false (www.tinyurl.com/ceq33). It predictably generated a small flurry of ecstatic pieces from humanities graduates in the media, along the lines of science is made-up, self-aggrandising, hegemony-maintaining, transient fad nonsense; and this is the perfect example of the parody hypothesis that we'll see later. Scientists know how to read a paper. That's what they do for a living: read papers, pick them apart, pull out what's good and bad.
  • Scientists never said that tenuous small new findings were important headline news - journalists did.
  • there is no useful information in most science stories. A piece in the Independent on Sunday from January 11 2004 suggested that mail-order Viagra is a rip-off because it does not contain the "correct form" of the drug. I don't use the stuff, but there were 1,147 words in that piece. Just tell me: was it a different salt, a different preparation, a different isomer, a related molecule, a completely different drug? No idea. No room for that one bit of information.
  • Remember all those stories about the danger of mobile phones? I was on holiday at the time, and not looking things up obsessively on PubMed; but off in the sunshine I must have read 15 newspaper articles on the subject. Not one told me what the experiment flagging up the danger was. What was the exposure, the measured outcome, was it human or animal data? Figures? Anything? Nothing. I've never bothered to look it up for myself, and so I'm still as much in the dark as you.
  • Because papers think you won't understand the "science bit", all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them - that is, the people who know a bit about science.
  • Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages.
  • Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn't about something being true or not true: that's a humanities graduate parody. It's about the error bar, statistical significance, it's about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it's about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence.
  • science journalists somehow don't understand the difference between the evidence and the hypothesis. The Times's health editor Nigel Hawkes recently covered an experiment which showed that having younger siblings was associated with a lower incidence of multiple sclerosis. MS is caused by the immune system turning on the body. "This is more likely to happen if a child at a key stage of development is not exposed to infections from younger siblings, says the study." That's what Hawkes said. Wrong! That's the "Hygiene Hypothesis", that's not what the study showed: the study just found that having younger siblings seemed to be somewhat protective against MS: it didn't say, couldn't say, what the mechanism was, like whether it happened through greater exposure to infections. He confused evidence with hypothesis (www.badscience.net/?p=112), and he is a "science communicator".
  • how do the media work around their inability to deliver scientific evidence? They use authority figures, the very antithesis of what science is about, as if they were priests, or politicians, or parent figures. "Scientists today said ... scientists revealed ... scientists warned." And if they want balance, you'll get two scientists disagreeing, although with no explanation of why (an approach at its most dangerous with the myth that scientists were "divided" over the safety of MMR). One scientist will "reveal" something, and then another will "challenge" it
  • The danger of authority figure coverage, in the absence of real evidence, is that it leaves the field wide open for questionable authority figures to waltz in. Gillian McKeith, Andrew Wakefield, Kevin Warwick and the rest can all get a whole lot further, in an environment where their authority is taken as read, because their reasoning and evidence is rarely publicly examined.
  • it also reinforces the humanities graduate journalists' parody of science, for which we now have all the ingredients: science is about groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality: they do work that is either wacky, or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory and, most ridiculously, "hard to understand".
  • This misrepresentation of science is a direct descendant of the reaction, in the Romantic movement, against the birth of science and empiricism more than 200 years ago; it's exactly the same paranoid fantasy as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, only not as well written. We say descendant, but of course, the humanities haven't really moved forward at all, except to invent cultural relativism, which exists largely as a pooh-pooh reaction against science. And humanities graduates in the media, who suspect themselves to be intellectuals, desperately need to reinforce the idea that science is nonsense: because they've denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of western thought for 200 years, and secretly, deep down, they're angry with themselves over that.
  • had a good spirited row with an eminent science journalist, who kept telling me that scientists needed to face up to the fact that they had to get better at communicating to a lay audience. She is a humanities graduate. "Since you describe yourself as a science communicator," I would invariably say, to the sound of derisory laughter: "isn't that your job?" But no, for there is a popular and grand idea about, that scientific ignorance is a useful tool: if even they can understand it, they think to themselves, the reader will. What kind of a communicator does that make you?
  • Science is done by scientists, who write it up. Then a press release is written by a non-scientist, who runs it by their non-scientist boss, who then sends it to journalists without a science education who try to convey difficult new ideas to an audience of either lay people, or more likely - since they'll be the ones interested in reading the stuff - people who know their way around a t-test a lot better than any of these intermediaries. Finally, it's edited by a whole team of people who don't understand it. You can be sure that at least one person in any given "science communication" chain is just juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they've got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk.
Jody Poh

UK lags in broadband quality - 1 views

divide digital

started by Jody Poh on 06 Oct 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

Miss Malaysia Toy Boy - 7 views

Yes, commodification has led to liberation. After all, capitalism is all about creating new markets for more production and consumption. Beauty has all along been commodified since the oldest trade...

started by juliet huang on 08 Oct 09 1 follow-up, last by Weiye Loh on 09 Oct 09
Valerie Oon

Ethics discussion based on new movie, "Surrogates" - 8 views

This movie upset me. I don't think the director developed the premise and plot to the potential it could have reached. Quite a shallow interpretation. But it does raise some intrigue. I'm a bit stu...

technology future empowerment destruction

started by joanne ye on 18 Oct 09 2 follow-ups, last by Valerie Oon on 28 Oct 09
juliet huang

tools to live forever? - 1 views

www.heraldsun.com.au/...story-e6frfinf-1225791751968

nanotechnology biotechnology

shared by juliet huang on 28 Oct 09 - No Cached
  • juliet huang on 28 Oct 09
     
    According to a news story on nanotechnology, in the future, the wealthy will be able to make use of nanotechnology to modify parts of their existing or future genetic heritage, ie they can alter body parts in non-invasive procedures, or modify future children's anomalies. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/business/fully-frank/the-tools-to-live-forever/story-e6frfinf-1225791751968 these will then help them evolve into a different species, a better species. ethical questions: most of the issues we've talked about in ethics are at the macro level, perpetuating a social group's agenda. however, biotechnology has the potential to make this divide a reality. it's no longer an ethical question but it has the power to make what we discuss in class a reality. to frame it as an ethical perspective, who gets to decide how is the power evenly distributed? power will always be present behind the use of technologies, but who will decide how this technology is used, and for whose good? and if its for a larger good, then, who can moderate this technology usage to ensure all social actors are represented?
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