Group items tagged

Rather than using these facts to make sweeping statements about the difference between men and women, it's more useful to recognize that a lot of the generalizations people make about desire, especially male desire, just aren't true. At least in private, not all straight men are looking for thin, young ciswomen — or even for ciswomen at all. And what Internet porn can teach us is that while there may be some differences in sexual preferences between genders, there's enormous variation within them.

For some campaigners, such as Naomi Klein, Gleick was an unalloyed hero, who should be sent some "Twitter love", she wrote on Tuesday."Heartland has been subverting well-understood science for years," wrote Scott Mandia, co-founder of the climate science rapid response team. "They also subvert the education of our schoolchildren by trying to 'teach the controversy' where none exists."Mandia went on: "Peter Gleick, a scientist who is also a journalist, just used the same tricks that any investigative reporter uses to uncover the truth. He is the hero and Heartland remains the villain. He will have many people lining up to support him."

Others acknowledged Gleick's wrongdoing, but said it should be viewed in the context of the work of Heartland and other entities devoted to spreading disinformation about science."What Peter Gleick did was unethical. He acknowledges that from a point of view of professional ethics there is no defending those actions," said Dale Jamieson, an expert on ethics who heads the environmental studies programme at New York University. "But relative to what has been going on on the climate denial side this is a fairly small breach of ethics."He also rejected the suggestion that Gleick's wrongdoing could hurt the cause of climate change, or undermine the credibility of scientists."Whatever moral high ground there is in science comes from doing science," he said. "The failing that Peter Gleick engaged in is not a scientific failing. It is just a personal failure."

Literature teaches us about life. Literature helps us understand the world.

this belief in truth-from-fiction is the party line for those who champion the merits of literature. Eminent English professor and critic Harold Bloom proclaims, in his bestselling How to Read and Why, that one of the main reasons to read literature is because "we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are."

why would we expect literature to be a reliable source of knowledge about "the way things are"? After all, the narratives which are the most gripping and satisfying to read are not the most representative of how the world actually works. They have dramatic resolutions, foreshadowing, conflict, climax, and surprise. People tend to get their comeuppance after they misbehave. People who pursue their dream passionately tend to succeed. Disaster tends to strike when you least expect it. These narratives are over-represented in literature because they're more gratifying to read; why would we expect to learn from them about "the way things are"?

In 1950 Martin Gardner published an article in the Antioch Review entitled "The Hermit Scientist," about what we would today call pseudoscientists.

there has been some progress since Gardner offered his first criticisms of pseudoscience. Now largely antiquated are his chapters on believers in a flat Earth, a hollow Earth, Atlantis and Lemuria, Alfred William Lawson, Roger Babson, Trofim Lysenko, Wilhelm Reich and Alfred Korzybski. But disturbingly, a good two thirds of the book's contents are relevant today, including Gardner's discussions of homeopathy, naturopathy, osteopathy, iridiagnosis (reading the iris of the eye to deter- mine bodily malfunctions), food faddists, cancer cures and other forms of medical quackery, Edgar Cayce, the Great Pyramid's alleged mystical powers, handwriting analysis, ESP and PK (psychokinesis), reincarnation, dowsing rods, eccentric sexual theories, and theories of group racial differences.

The "hermit scientist," a youthful Gardner wrote, works alone and is ignored by mainstream scientists. "Such neglect, of course, only strengthens the convictions of the self-declared genius."

people have been talking about Phil Plait’s powerful talk, now known to the blogosphere as the “Don’t be a dick” speech (after Wheaton’s Law, an internet maxim that provided the theme of Phil’s presentation). In his talk, Phil argued that skeptics who have outreach goals should get serious about communication: In times of war, we need warriors. But this isn’t a war. You might try to say it is, but it’s not a war. We aren’t trying to kill an enemy. We’re trying to persuade other humans. And at times like that, we don’t need warriors. What we need are diplomats.

there many excellent reasons to tend toward treating people with respect and courtesy. It’s morally bad to be cruel (and usually unnecessary); it’s contrary to scientific and journalistic ethics (and the search for truth) to shout down legitimate alternate views; it blinds us to flaws in our own reasoning if we fail to seriously consider viewpoints we don’t like. Most importantly (this was the theme of Phil’s talk) science communication is more effective when it starts with warmth and respect.

a few skeptics are tempted to think there must be something special about those who don’t believe. That conceit hardly seems worthy of dwelling upon, and yet people have actually tried to convince me on this basis that it’s not worth teaching critical thinking. “The smart people already get it,” I’ve been told, “and the stupid people never will. Don’t waste your time.” I suppose it’s human to want to draw these lines through the world: on this side, the good smart people; on the other side, the bad dumb people. But the world is not nearly so simple.

Dozens of freshmen at Singapore Management University spent one evening last week learning how to "wiki," or use the software that lets large numbers of people write and edit class projects online. Though many said experiencing a public editing process similar to that of Wikipedia could prove valuable, some were wary of the collaborative tool, with its public nature and the ability to toss out or revise the work of their classmates.

It puts students in the awkward position of having to publicly correct a peer, which can cause the corrected person to lose face.

"You have to be more aware of others and have a sensitivity to others."

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?”

it’s odd that a narrative of crisis, of a systemic failure, in American education is currently so persuasive. This back-to-school season, we have Davis Guggenheim’s documentary about the charter-school movement, “Waiting for ‘Superman’ ”; two short, dyspeptic books about colleges and universities, “Higher Education?,” by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, and “Crisis on Campus,” by Mark C. Taylor; and a lot of positive attention to the school-reform movement in the national press. From any of these sources, it would be difficult to reach the conclusion that, over all, the American education system works quite well.

In higher education, the reform story isn’t so fully baked yet, but its main elements are emerging. The system is vast: hundreds of small liberal-arts colleges; a new and highly leveraged for-profit sector that offers degrees online; community colleges; state universities whose budgets are being cut because of the recession; and the big-name private universities, which get the most attention. You wouldn’t design a system this way—it’s filled with overlaps and competitive excess. Much of it strives toward an ideal that took shape in nineteenth-century Germany: the university as a small, élite center of pure scholarly research. Research is the rationale for low teaching loads, publication requirements, tenure, tight-knit academic disciplines, and other practices that take it on the chin from Taylor, Hacker, and Dreifus for being of little benefit to students or society.

Yet for a system that—according to Taylor, especially—is deeply in crisis, American higher education is not doing badly. The lines of people wanting to get into institutions that the authors say are just waiting to cheat them by overcharging and underteaching grow ever longer and more international, and the people waiting in those lines don’t seem deterred by price increases, even in a terrible recession.

In 2001, rumors were circulating in Greek hospitals that surgery residents, eager to rack up scalpel time, were falsely diagnosing hapless Albanian immigrants with appendicitis. At the University of Ioannina medical school’s teaching hospital, a newly minted doctor named Athina Tatsioni was discussing the rumors with colleagues when a professor who had overheard asked her if she’d like to try to prove whether they were true—he seemed to be almost daring her. She accepted the challenge and, with the professor’s and other colleagues’ help, eventually produced a formal study showing that, for whatever reason, the appendices removed from patients with Albanian names in six Greek hospitals were more than three times as likely to be perfectly healthy as those removed from patients with Greek names. “It was hard to find a journal willing to publish it, but we did,” recalls Tatsioni. “I also discovered that I really liked research.” Good thing, because the study had actually been a sort of audition. The professor, it turned out, had been putting together a team of exceptionally brash and curious young clinicians and Ph.D.s to join him in tackling an unusual and controversial agenda.

were drug companies manipulating published research to make their drugs look good? Salanti ticked off data that seemed to indicate they were, but the other team members almost immediately started interrupting. One noted that Salanti’s study didn’t address the fact that drug-company research wasn’t measuring critically important “hard” outcomes for patients, such as survival versus death, and instead tended to measure “softer” outcomes, such as self-reported symptoms (“my chest doesn’t hurt as much today”). Another pointed out that Salanti’s study ignored the fact that when drug-company data seemed to show patients’ health improving, the data often failed to show that the drug was responsible, or that the improvement was more than marginal.

Merchant of Doubt is exactly what its subtitle says: a historical view of how a handful of scientists have obscured the truth on matters of scientific fact.

it was a very small group who were responsible for creating a great deal of doubt on a variety of issues. The book opens in 1953, where the tobacco industry began to take action to obscure the truth about smoking’s harmful effects, when its relationship to cancer first received widespread media attention.

The tobacco industry exploited scientific tendency to be conservative in drawing conclusions, to throw up a handful of cherry-picked data and misleading statistics and to “spin unreasonable doubt.” This tactic, combined with the media’s adherence to the “fairness doctrine” which was interpreted as giving equal time “to both sides [of an issue], rather than giving accurate weight to both sides” allowed the tobacco industry to delay regulation for decades.

MacIntyre has often given the impression of a robe-ripping Savonarola. He has lambasted the heirs to the principal western ethical schools: John Locke’s social contract, Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Yet his is not a lone voice in the wilderness. He can claim connections with a trio of 20th-century intellectual heavyweights: the late Elizabeth Anscombe, her surviving husband, Peter Geach, and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, winner in 2007 of the Templeton prize. What all four have in common is their Catholic faith, enthusiasm for Aristotle’s telos (life goals), and promotion of Thomism, the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas who married Christianity and Aristotle. Leo XIII (pope from 1878 to 1903), who revived Thomism while condemning communism and unfettered capitalism, is also an influence.

MacIntyre’s key moral and political idea is that to be human is to be an Aristotelian goal-driven, social animal. Being good, according to Aristotle, consists in a creature (whether plant, animal, or human) acting according to its nature—its telos, or purpose. The telos for human beings is to generate a communal life with others; and the good society is composed of many independent, self-reliant groups.

MacIntyre differs from all these influences and alliances, from Leo XIII onwards, in his residual respect for Marx’s critique of capitalism.

Although it may be a form of arrogance to attempt the management of one’s own death, is it better to surrender that management to the arrogance of someone else? We know we can’t avoid dying, but perhaps we can avoid dying badly.

Dodging a bad death has become more complicated over the past 30 or 40 years. Before the advent of technological creations that permit vital functions to be sustained so well artificially, medical ethics were less obstructed by abstract definitions of death.

generally agreed upon criteria for brain death have simplified some of these confusions, but they have not solved them. The broad middle ground between our usual health and consciousness as the expected norm on the one hand, and clear death of the brain on the other, lacks certainty.

We can't expect people to be either as self-denying as conservatives or as altruistic as liberals seem to wantThe question: What can Darwin teach us about morality?

to some extent, we are a species with an evolved psychology. Like other animals, we have inherited behavioural tendencies from our ancestors, since these were adaptive for them in the sense that they tended to lead to reproductive success in past environments.

It does not follow that we should now do whatever maximises our ability to reproduce and pass down our genes. For example, evolution may have honed us to desire and enjoy sex, through a process in which creatures that did so reproduced more often than their evolutionary competitors. But evolution has not equipped us with an abstract desire to pass down our genes.

By Carlin Romano Standing up for science excites some intellectuals the way beautiful actresses arouse Warren Beatty, or career liberals boil the blood of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. It's visceral.

A brave champion of beleaguered science in the modern age of pseudoscience, this Ayn Rand protagonist sarcastically derides the benighted irrationalists and glows with a self-anointed superiority. Who wouldn't want to feel that sense of power and rightness?

You hear the voice regularly—along with far more sensible stuff—in the latest of a now common genre of science patriotism, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science From Bunk (University of Chicago Press), by Massimo Pigliucci, a philosophy professor at the City University of New York.

What is forgiveness? When is it appropriate? Why is it considered to be commendable?  Some claim that forgiveness is merely about ridding oneself of vengeful anger; do that, and you have forgiven.  But if you were able to banish anger from your soul simply by taking a pill, would the result really be forgiveness?

The timing of forgiveness is also disputed. Some say that it should wait for the offender to take responsibility and suffer due punishment, others hold that the victim must first overcome anger altogether, and still others that forgiveness should be unilaterally bestowed at the earliest possible moment.  But what if you have every good reason to be angry and even to take your sweet revenge as well?  Is forgiveness then really to be commended? Some object that it lets the offender off the hook, confesses to one’s own weakness and vulnerability, and papers over the legitimate demands of vengeful anger.  And yet, legions praise forgiveness and think of it as an indispensable virtue

Many people assume that the notion of forgiveness is Christian in origin, at least in the West, and that the contemporary understanding of interpersonal forgiveness has always been the core Christian teaching on the subject.  These contestable assumptions are explored by David Konstan in “Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea.”  Religious origins of the notion would not invalidate a secular philosophical approach to the topic, any more than a secular origin of some idea precludes a religious appropriation of it.  While religious and secular perspectives on forgiveness are not necessarily consistent with each other, however, they agree in their attempt to address the painful fact of the pervasiveness of moral wrong in human life. They also agree on this: few of us are altogether innocent of the need for forgiveness.

Chua argues that “Chinese” mothers “are superior” because they demand absolute perfection—and won’t refrain from berating, threatening, and even starving their kids until they’re satisfied.

Chua acknowledges that her argument will offend softy “Western” parents, who prefer to coddle rather than throttle their kids—parents who prioritize happiness over achievement.

Though I’m anything but permissive, even by Chua’s standards, I am one of those “Western” parents that absolutely does prioritize children’s long-term happiness over their achievements and performances.  Ironically, I adapted these values from a confluence of Eastern philosophy—particularly Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching and Buddhist teachings—and Western science, which provides ample evidence that success follows happiness, and not the other way around.

One of the most amusing things about Scientology

is the fact that the scriptures of the church are copyright and some are kept very secret. The business model is simple: you have to pay to read more

The Bible isn’t copyright. The Qu’ran isn’t copyright. If you want to publish your own version of a huge range of religious texts, you can. Pop over to Wikisource and you can read copyright-free editions of the Bible, prayers, the Apocrypha and the Tao Te Ching among many thousands of other religious texts (and why not some atheist/humanist manifestos too?). This enables scholarship: theologians, historians and others can make their own commentaries building atop these scriptures. Critical scholarship of the sort Biblical commentators do is helped by not having the threat of a lawsuit hanging over one if one quotes a bit too much from the text.

The Templeton Foundation claims to be a friend of science. So why does it make so many researchers uneasy?

With a current endowment estimated at US$2.1 billion, the organization continues to pursue Templeton's goal of building bridges between science and religion. Each year, it doles out some $70 million in grants, more than $40 million of which goes to research in fields such as cosmology, evolutionary biology and psychology.

however, many scientists find it troubling — and some see it as a threat. Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, calls the foundation "sneakier than the creationists". Through its grants to researchers, Coyne alleges, the foundation is trying to insinuate religious values into science. "It claims to be on the side of science, but wants to make faith a virtue," he says.