Doggerel #187: "[Scientist] Recanted on His Deathbed!"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

There's no shortage of these urban legends, and always a shortage of evidence to back them up. That, however, is a complete red herring that develops from the delusion that scientists are more authoritative than evidence.

Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur are frequent victims of this doggerel. The problem is that the theories they birthed aren't confined to them. The success of a scientific theory is its explanatory and predictive power. Evolution is still the only way to look at biology that ties it all together. It's grown beyond Darwin's knowledge. The same is true with the Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease: We not only know that germs cause various diseases, we know the various types of germs, how and why many cause disease, and how to combat and contain these diseases. The "alternatives" pitched by the people who tell these stories typically rely heavily on coincidence, or simply don't bother to explain or predict the myriad details the mainline theories do.

That's why deathbed recantations, even if they did happen, are completely worthless. The ultimate authority in science is the evidence. Either a theory works or it doesn't. Theories are not proclamations from on high that can be revoked by royal decree. The only thing that can tear down a theory is evidence that contradicts its predictions. To find that, you have to understand the theory and what it explains.

Pointless Question #64

If Rule 34 is, well, you know, what are Rules #1-33?

The Skeptic as a Blithe Spirit

Since having a hotlink to TV Tropes is too much of a temptation for some of my readers, I'll skip it and give the gist of it: A Blithe Spirit is a person, usually the main character of a story, who ends up changing everything by being a free spirit in a stuffy environment and proud of it. That's how I've started viewing the skeptic versus woo battle: We're a force of creative chaos made to disrupt stagnant order.

Really. Although the woos like to pretend they're the innovators, everything they do seems to include all sorts of mechanisms designed to prevent anyone from questioning them. Unfalsifiable beliefs mean never having to say, "I was wrong." For a skeptic, being wrong is an opportunity: It means there's more to the universe than we thought. That means there's a mystery begging to be solved.

That's not how it is for the woo: For them, being wrong is a personal failing. If someone takes a prudent course, doing everything logically, and ends up having to change his opinion when unexpected evidence comes in, it's something to rub in their face. Of course, the whole problem with woo is that they do everything recklessly: They prefer their biases over clarity, which is why they embrace so many fallacies, especially ones founded on an idea of being infallible. Because of this attitude, a skeptic's curiosity is something to be vehemently opposed and shot down. That's why they react so negatively when we ask fundamental questions.

If you're careful and logical about how you think and what you believe as a result, being wrong and changing your mind when new evidence comes forth is nothing to be ashamed of. Being right on what boils down to a basis of luck is nothing to be proud of, either. We know science isn't magical or perfect. It's the best answer we could think of for dealing with the fact that we aren't perfect. Despite this keen awareness of our flaws as mere mortals, we remain optimistic about the process: With enough careful evidence gathering and communication, we can make steady progress into understanding the world around us and use that understanding to help one another. Being wrong and making mistakes is an inherent part of that process.

From my experience with woos, they're much more cynical and homeostatic. They don't accept the scientific method because they can't accept the risk of being wrong about their favorite topics. Many of the fallacies they employ are designed to protect their beliefs in the face of logic and contradicting evidence. That's why every failure is accompanied with an ad hoc hypothesis to explain it away. The natural result of this is that all woos are stuck in an eternal rut, and why I display such passion for getting them out of it, along with no small amount of frustration when they spout doggerel to resist even the tiniest bit of introspection.

A side effect of this is a climate I often perceive among the newage (rhymes with sewage) crowd: If there's a point of disagreement, they'll just agree to disagree, rather than debate the merits of their position. When scientists disagree on a subject, they get adversarial. This is because the truth is easier to find when everyone's willing to find weakspots in various theories. If our best ideas are wrong, that means we have to find out what weird thing is deviating from the expected, and figure it out. Science is not a field for those with easily bruised egos. Without this no-holds barred approach, woos can't expand beyond their inflated egos. They usually don't debate amongst themselves because they've learned to protect their feelings by not rocking the boat.

So I try to rock it for them.

Viva La [Civilization] Revolution!

My brother and I have been playing some games of Civilization: Revolutions on our PS3s. It's fun. One annoyance I have: The AI's usually not much of a challenge in the long run. About the only problems I have with 'em is maintaining some defenses in the early game while the computer sends in legion armies. I've heard it gets them for free at times.

So, anyway, my PSN ID is BronzeDog (no space). Feel free to drop friend requests. We can also talk other multiplayer games if you like. Of course, we also have Civ4 on our laptops, though fair warning: My brother's tends to overheat and shut off. He's got bad luck with laptops.

Something of Interest

Got this from a commenter named "Celestial" over at NeuroLogica: It's a post about some psychological quirks marketers can use for manipulation. Of course, these techniques can be used to inform and encourage good things as well.

The Dave Mabus Thread

Since I saw a few spammers on other blogs, I decided what the heck: Dave Mabus, if you're going to spam my blog, spam here. If, for example, you want to claim Randi owes you the million, try posting a copy of your application. If you want to thumb your nose at PZ and "the atheist movement," how about you stay and discuss the philosophy, rather than post links to a non-discussion area?

You should note that I've never deleted your spam, and only repeatedly invited you for discussion, which you've shied away from. It's far more amusing to laugh at desperation than it is to delete the annoyance. That's why an even formerly "banned" troll like WoMI still had lots and lots of comments after I "banned" him: When he wasn't flooding with copy-paste insults that made my browser worry he set up an infinite loop, he was just too hilarious to delete. Of course, if you actually have something cogent to say, you shouldn't care whether we laugh at you or not.

Something I Saw Yesterday

I figure if I've got insomnia tonight, might as well catch up on my blogging. One guy I sometimes watch on YouTube was going on about Florida license plates. You've probably seen PZ cover the issue enough. Being from Texas, I expressed sympathy in the comments, since we're dealing with all the BOE crap, lately. I got a little reciprocation. Afterward, I made a trip to the grocery store and saw something that just covers Texas's problems so well:

I was behind a blue pickup truck with a bumper sticker roughly like this:

Texas Educators
One Voice, One (garbled) (garbled) Vote
www.texasedu(garbled..............)

Something had dented the sticker right in the middle, rendering much of it illegible.

Work Time Fun?!

I have little to say about this, other than it's worked its way up to the top of my "That is Some Messed Up Shit" list.

---

I posted that a bit quickly. Here's another one that's twisted on a more individual level that happened to MarkCC of Good Math, Bad Math. Another one worthy of a high rank.

115th Skeptics' Circle

It's up at Effort Sisyphus.

Open thread as usual, except selling timeshares on Risa is FORBIDDEN!

Barking Up the Right Tree #1: Population

Welcome to a new series of mine, dealing with specific points I think skeptics should focus on when making arguments. Today's entry: It's populations of organisms that evolve, not individuals.

Yeah, animations of organisms changing over time are a nice way to show the history of a lineage, but possibly thanks to Hollywood, comic books, and so forth, (alongside Creationists using such instead of textbooks in their inane arguments) there's a lot of Creationists who think evolution is about magical transformations randomly happening to individuals. This, of course, is complete bumpkis.

Those animations? It's better to think of it as the net averaging of a lineage over the course of generations. Mutations and combinations that result in a big difference are pretty rare. Usually, evolution takes the form of very small differences: For example, a gene that makes teeth a little bit longer shows up and is beneficial. The slightly longer-toothed individual has more kids than average, who have more kids than average, and so on until that gene is commonplace in the species. From that changed population, a new, different trait may take root, and so on. New traits may make old, previously neutral ones more beneficial than usual, so those propagate, etcetera.

Nowhere is the process directed or able to foresee the future. Steps don't have to occur in a particular order. Older "models" of a species can stick around for extended times if they're isolated and/or still competitive enough. Nowhere is there a requirement for a "wonder monkey" that shows up as a paragon of momentous change, like they do in the comic books. Sorry, X-Men hopefuls, it's an incremental process, and advantages will generally be small.

Metaphor time, since Creationists are fond of bogus probability: A species's evolution from one form to another isn't settled in a single pull on a big slot machine. It's more like some of those videogame slot machines that allow you to lock individual wheels. Now imagine you've got millions of people playing the same game, and when one locks a beneficial wheel, that benefit spreads to the other players. To add to that, there's several ways to win the jackpot. There's no individual wildly improbable act being done. When you've got millions of players, one of them getting a favorable turn of the wheel is hardly extraordinary. When those small successes are allowed to persist and spread over generations, progress is expected.

So, to summarize: An individual organism getting a big improbable change is the stuff of comic books, not evolution. I think any Creationist who makes such an argument should be ridiculed for not knowing the difference between the beliefs of Magneto and real world scientists.

This Just Hit Me

It has been a whole month since I've eaten fast food.

Woo Enthymemes #3: "Words are More 'Real' Than the Things They Describe"

This enthymeme particularly bugs me, and most often comes up with Creationists: Many seem to think that a species can't change, like there's some barrier that trims out any mutations beyond some arbitrary limit to diversity. The problem is that "species" is a loose label humans invented for convenience.
Let's take horses, for example. If you were to introduce a person without preconceptions to a horse and a zebra, it probably wouldn't be surprising if he thought they were the same species, just with different fur patterns. They are in the same genus, so they do have a lot of similarity. But they are different species, since they can't produce fertile offspring. Take dogs as well: Thanks to human breeding efforts, they come in a vast variety of forms, but many can interbreed. Naturally, with that variety, it's not hard to convince some people that some breeds aren't dogs at all.

Given what humans have been able to do with canines, just how flexible is this "species barrier?" And where's the magical stop sign that prevents anything from going outside it? Or is there some magically unalterable "species" DNA that isn't subject to nonlethal mutations? The problem isn't finding these things: It's that many Creationists don't understand that our labels are based on convenience, not on immutable laws or some quintessence a particular group of critters are supposed to have. Life is a moving target, and is not tethered down by squiggles on a page or patterns of sound issuing from a human's mouth. Truename Magic does not exist.

There are a bunch of living things out there. We just lump them into categories to make it easier to talk about. Mr. Ed is a horse. Fido is a dog. We know Ed's DNA is compatible with these other things we call "horses" because they contain the same characteristics we use to define him as a "horse." Just because we invented a word to describe this compatibility doesn't mean the horses are now obligated to conform in every way. With enough time, some horses might lose some of those characteristics (but not all, since, say, becoming a protostome instead of a deuterostome would kill the offspring) and become incompatible, necessitating a new species or genus name.

The objects we describe are real. The words we use to describe them are a convenience. If something defies description, it's the description that's the problem.

Framing Wild Thread

I've had some time to groan over various comments from concern trolls over "framing." Yes, I know messages often need adjustment for the audience. There's no shortage of people who point that out. The big problem I have with those people is that they generally don't give constructive advice: Too often, they tell us to shut up, not what angles of approach we should use. Worse, many of them speak to my inspirations and role models as if it were impossible for them to have a positive impact on me. I tend to emulate those bloggers because they convinced me they were right, and that I could contribute to the blogosphere.

So, feel free to drop comments, preferably about good strategies for different audiences.

Creationist Invitational

Welcome to a comment thread where I have invited a Creationist. Or possibly several, if the first one ends up not accepting my invitation.

Drop any questions you have for me, and tell me how Creationism answers them. Expect evolution's/abiogenesis's/cosmology's answers and followup questions to Creationism's answers. (Usually asking for elaboration).

Going Over My Log...

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LOGON BronzeHive/SuddenLink... Connected before you even thought to ask!

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Quote of the Time Being #23

Provided by Scott, over at Orac's place:






RJ's comment #30 reminds me of a joke I heard recently which is actually quite on-point.

Two Taliban fighters are talking in Afghanistan. One of them comments, "Those American Marines are such incompetents, their marksmanship is pathetic!" The other one asks, "How do you know that?" And the first replies, "Well, I've talked to a bunch of our guys who were shot at by them - the Marines missed every time!"

If you don't see the connection, think about it for a bit. Hint: Selection effects.

What the Soul Means

As you will no doubt find out from the rest of this foamy post, I've ended up in a terribly, terribly cynical mood. And on my birthday. (Though I am glad I managed to regain my idealism after writing the first part.)

To a person like me, the soul is a convenient metaphor for all the intellectual and emotional complexities of a person. The part of a person that experiences joy and passion. The intellect that forms plans and watches for opportunities. The determination that allows them to grasp for a desired future and victory over adversity. An ideal society is one that allows every person the means to follow these. Even though such a society is more than likely impossible to achieve or maintain, I seek such an ideal. If it ever is achieved, we can only hope that we have such diverse souls of varied interests to maintain such a world logistically.

A farmer plants and grows his crop not only to provide for himself, but also to experience the joy of seeing his hard labor bring forth delicious, nourishing fruit. He can also take pride in knowing that by performing this task, he has allowed his fellow beings more time to pursue their passions, since they no longer have to perform a labor they may not enjoy as he does. Because specialized laborers can provide the basic necessities of life, other people can pursue other passions. Scientists can study increasingly subtle aspects of reality and tease out useful applications others can use. Artists can look at the world and use the tools available to society to present problems in such a way to motivate others to think of solutions or they can bring forth entertaining displays of color and sound to brighten other people's lives and expand their horizons. Police and government officials enforce laws so that individuals can feel safe and waste less time and effort engaging in security measures. Civilization is the tool we invented to make this possible, even if only imperfectly. The civilized world is a place where a soul is best able to express itself and find satisfaction. As social animals, we have an inherent desire for cooperative lifestyles such as this. By helping one another, we can enjoy greater and greater levels of freedom.

That is the basis for morality. Altruism manifests in those myriad forms. The farmer takes pride in knowing he can provide the necessity of food for his people. The scientist swells with joy when his discoveries provide new tools and insights that make life easier for others or makes the formerly impossible within another's grasp. The artist smiles when his work raises another's awareness of the world around them. The police officer gains satisfaction knowing that his vigilance helps us sleep soundly at night. A humble bureaucrat can smile if his good record keeping has prevented confusion between his fellows. Even someone who tries to produce something and fails can express his deepest gratitude for all those who provided the resources and opportunities he needed to explore his ideas, and society, in turn, can acknowledge even this person's honest efforts and intentions. Even if luck was unfavorable to him, his actions were centered around helping his fellow souls, and therefore worthy of praise. We all see farther when we stand on one another's shoulder's.

There are many people out there who despise this order the ideals it is founded upon. They are the fundamentalists, the alties, the frauds, and, to cover them all in a single word, the woos. They bite the hand of the farmer, saying we need to return to the ancient ways of parasite-ridden foods and scrounging for precious scraps of land to grow low-yield crops. They spit in the eye of the scientist, claiming their idle certainty and brief, careless glances are worth more than the insights built on the blood, sweat, and loving precision of generations. They spurn the artist who sees beauty in another soul's work and presents the quintessential truth of it so that others may be inspired to learn more and expand upon it. They ridicule and censor the writer for feeling the compassion and determination it takes to raise awareness of a problem and encourage others to seek solutions. They whine about the laws enforced by our protectors because those rights and liberties prevent them from doing harm to satisfy their selfish greed and hubris. They marginalize the bureaucrat, believing their biased memories to be more reliable than any records and their haphazard technique more perfect than procedures created to prevent confusion and discord. They mock the dreamer by claiming everything is known, and there is no room for new things. They stone the lovers for finding the comfort and joy they bring to each other more important than the production of offspring. They persecute the peacemakers, community builders, and teachers, for they believe the enrichment of these things we call souls is a meaningless endeavor in the face of hollow, efemeral pleasures.

The woo, and in particular, the fundamentalist, sees no value in the richness and depth of the soul. They crave the shallow and the empty, so they seek to suppress anything that might ignite a person's passion. They reject the social, secular world as a result. They seek to eliminate our social nature, replacing it with something akin to that of an insectine robot. Sameness is a virtue in their eyes, conformity the law. If they cannot enforce conformity on the world, they isolate themselves from it, forming insular tribes. Children are indoctrinated in tribalist ways, and taught that exposure to the outside world will turn them savage, so that they turn vicious towards peacemakers and foreign ideas instead of thinking about them. Foreign heroes are recast as villains, not based on the deeds they do, but are punished for meaningless technicalities like the genetics of the people they help or trifling details about the mechanisms behind their abilities. Love, being based on things beyond mechanical reproduction or the enforcement of random and arbitrary laws is treated as inferior to the conditional praise given for rigid obedience or the carnal lust for one's designated reproductive partner(s).

For us, a soul may only be temporary, but we seek to carry on parts of it to be remembered for generations. We feel sorrow for the loss of a loved one, and may hope they continue on in some as yet unknown fashion, but we can not allow our sorrow to lead to the sloth of believing our wishful thinking is true and absolute. Seeking out what truth really is will be far more useful to us than gambling.

When a fundamentalist speaks of the soul, however, they do not speak of the sum of a person. They speak only of an everlasting receptor of pain or pleasure. When one follows the arbitrary laws and believes in the random tenets of the faith, this receptor is sent to a place that pumps pleasure into it. It feels no sorrow for those who didn't make it because it is incapable of loving another. They speak of how our receptor will receive only pain, but even if we believed them, we would not embrace their beliefs: The joys of enriching ourselves and each other hold far more value to us than the empty promise of eternal carnal pleasure. We're not so cowardly that we would give up what we value most to appease the purposeless anger of a nihilistic stone idol.

These locusts grow fat on the labor of others. They enjoy the benefits science has brought to society in the form of tools everyone else uses in their craft, but they detest the discipline when it's personally inconvenient for them. They use the laws and bureaucracy established for the common good for their personal protection, but seek to rob others of those same protections with arbitrary, nonsensical exceptions. They attempt to conflate our restrained and perfectly legal responses to their hate and irrationality with their worst efforts to censor and bully us into submission. They harm others and yet claim to be the victims.

That is why I lay my heart and soul out on this blog for all to see.

What a Wonderful Present

I didn't want to wake up in the morning to read this on my B. I will very much embrace the meme of calling her "Cynthia Dumbar," even though it's not a terribly clever way to play on her name. I may change if someone figures out a better tweak. Either way, it looks like Texas could be heading into even deeper states of doominess than McLeroy could dream of.

One thing that strikes me about theocrats like her is how unpatriotic and ungrateful they are. They have no loyalty whatsoever to the founding principles of our nation or any of the similar ideals other developed nations have embraced. Her primitive mode of thought more readily belongs in one of those unfortunate third world countries filled with Lilliputian strife over which end of an egg you crack.

One particular aspect that sickens me is that she's being groomed to head public education, and yet apparently believes children are the property of parents, who are free to deny them the equality of opportunity public education is supposed to aim for. The implied newage (rhymes with sewage) subjectivism involved in denying them access to outside ideas and scientific consensus also strikes me as rather hypocritical: Lots of fundies like to make a big show about how they believe there's an objective truth out there, but whenever science illuminates it for everyone, suddenly they want the system to cater to every superstition out there. Because their random theory of randomness can't survive even the barest bit of scrutiny, they have to remove all sources that could cast doubt on chaos.

It leaves me to wonder if her brand of homeschooler wants to do away with human nature as social animals: Only meet the opposite sex to acquire a mate, reproduce, jealously guard offspring from any outside idea competition from your fellow species until they're old enough to mate and too old and isolated to consider there's something more to life than the rat race.

I'd rather be an intelligent social animal than just another mindless insect bot. My home state is DOOMED.

We've Always Been at War With Oceania

Imagine it's a few centuries ago, before the scientific revolution in medicine. Acupuncturists start complaining about chiropractors and the unearned popularity they have. They start emphasizing the strokes caused by chiropractors in their marketing campaign. Their campaign also emphasizes how relatively painless gently putting needles into a person's skin is, and how it doesn't cause side effects. All the while, just like the chiropractors, they neglect to demonstrate any actual effect though the scientific method. Instead, they, again, just like the chiropractors, rely entirely on anecdotal "trial and error" to determine what "works" without regard for observer biases. The acupuncturists' campaign is successful enough to wipe out chiropractic from serious consideration, and even set it up as an archetypal example of ridiculous quackery.

Now imagine it's centuries later. Acupuncture is still around. And they call aspirin "chiropractic medicine." They call chemotherapy "chiropractic medicine." They call surgery "chiropractic medicine." And they call vaccination by injection "chiropractic stealing ideas from acupuncture" because it involves a needle.

Welcome to the skeptics world in regard to the dead pseudoscience of "allopathy." One woo faction squabbled with a slightly worse but temporarily more popular woo faction and played a big part in killing them off. Once they killed off the enemy, they needed another enemy they could attempt to discredit to make themselves look good. Thus, homeopaths invented a tenuous connection between scientific medicine and homeopathy's slightly-more-evil twin, allopathy. Threatened by the genuine effectiveness of medicine coupled with the watchdog organizations that enforce that effectiveness, other woos jumped onto the propaganda bandwagon.

Really Annoying

Just a pointless meatspace complaint: My place is having a really hot summer. Finally got some rain today, which mostly only made it humid. Thankfully, my dad informed me that it's going to be absolutely frigid on Monday: A high of 83°F.

Naturally, a part of my brain wants to complain about global warming, but of course, not being a meteorologist, or even an informed layman about the topic, I know I should be wary about equating a heatwave (weather) with climate.

The Worst Kind of Woo

Now that the warm fuzzies I got from the fireworks display have worn off, I have a foamy rant to get out.

Saw a (supposed) swarm of trolls at a thread about chiropractors earlier today. A number spouted "get a life" and variants of that doggerel near the front of their comments. I couldn't see straight enough to read the rest. In fact, I'm surprised I was able to write calmly for the corresponding Doggerel entry: One of the few things I hate more than evildoers are people who demand I be unemotional about injustice and ridicule us skeptics for displaying even the slightest bit of compassion.

These people have somehow accomplished the contradiction of being militantly apathetic.

It's bad enough when they laugh at me for caring about people who are cheated out of large sums of money by psychic frauds, the topic of this thread was alternative medicine. People have died needlessly at the hands of chiropractors who ended up causing strokes. Worse still, previous commentators had mentioned babies and children who were "treated" by chiropractors.

Sometimes I wonder if they point and laugh when people cry at funerals.

We criticize because we actually give a shit about what happens to our fellow sapient beings. We're capable of sympathy. When someone is deceived for another's profit and receives no benefit, we feel sorry for the victim. We're fallible, just like they are, and we can conceive of the same happening to us. We're in the same boat, and we want everyone to have the same protections, whether it means watchdog organizations doing detailed, transparent examinations or giving everyone we can reach a lesson in critical thought. The latter is the whole fucking point behind our blogging about these topics.

These sociopathic fuckers couldn't care less about that. They're just in the trolling business for shits and giggles. Other people's emotions are nothing but their playthings to inflate their ego.

We tear down bad ideas because that's how science works: Come up with lots of ideas and tear down the ones that don't get evidence in their favor or have logical flaws. Whatever remains standing is likely to be true, and thus we can use that knowledge to better ourselves and help other people. Truth-filled ridicule is a tool to increase a person's awareness of logical fallacies.

For the nihilists, tearing everything down is its own purpose. Ridicule is its own end, and it consists only of hollow laughter directed towards anyone who expresses anything other than indifference.

So, to those of you who tell me to "get a life," I say this:

GET A FUCKING SOUL!*

*The soul I speak of is, of course, only a metaphor for all the physically-based mental and emotional complexities of a person.

Happy Fireworks!

I'm going to be seeing the local fireworks display tonight with my dad, who always brings his camera.

My birthday's on Monday, and I'm thinking about celebrating by having them over at my new place to view the wonder that is Hayao Miyazaki.

The Problem With Big Pharma Conspiracies

A while back, Orac introduced me to this cartoon. A generic pharmaceutical company tests a drug on rats and find no effects whatsoever, wasting the eight million dollars spent on research and development. So the marketing department sells it as an altie med product. I think that cartoon pretty well describes the medicine versus quackery battle just so well.

Pharmaceuticals have to do a very extensive song and dance to get approval from institutions like the FDA in the US, and analogous institutions overseas. They have to test on models, animals, and eventually, with even greater scrutiny and regulation, humans. These regulations exist because of scientific and ethical necessity. Those who understand the principles science and have a desire to help people demand watchdogs to keep an eye on the procedure.

In contrast, woos typically demand (and get) special exemptions from this oversight, often claiming that they're too poor and decrepit to actually bother testing their products before unleashing them on the public, therefore, they should have the right to haphazardly experiment directly on their consumers and cherrypick testimonials for marketing purposes. Of course, the only prep work they typically have to do for this consists of having an idea pop into their head. Then they can directly proceed to unregulated human experimentation. And being an altie means never having to say you're sorry.

So, given that state of the world, why would pharmaceutical companies bother with spending potential profits on the whole experimental phase that often ends in failure or recalls from unforeseen effects? If they were only after money, the altie situation would be much better. Take a look at homeopathy: Water, alcohol, or sugar pills and profit margin for nothing.

Speedy Q&A #4

Q. What is a "Scientific Fundamentalist"?

A. No matter what you say, I will NEVER stop doubting myself and relying on the sacred testimony of experimental data as a means of self-correction!

A Sagan of Skeptics' Circles

I missed a few:

#112 is up at Cheshire. No creepy smiles.
#113 is up at The Uncredible Hallq's place. No green body paint or shirt ripping.
#114 is up at Homologous Legs. No dirty commentary involving a play on the adjective.

Troll Roast?

I'm thinking about poking some trolls on their home turf to get a roast going on over here. I've done a few attempts over the last year, but they'd usually just do some hit and run. Any suggestions?

String Theory Thread

Pardon the pun in the title. I've seen a number of explanations on TV, as well as some science place's contest for quickie explanations, but I thought I'd go ahead and have a comment thread devoted to discussion, including going back to the basics. I do know it's not well regarded among many of my fellow skeptics as it is in the media, but I figure it's worth bringing up again, in the off chance something happened in the LHC when I wasn't looking. I like hearing about the tiny little bits of stuff the universe is made of, even if I don't understand it all.

I think it's a nifty idea, but nifty does not equate to useful or even meaningful.

The "Faith" of Not Knowing

Skeptico recently posted an excellent article I will probably link to plenty of times in the future. In fact I should probably add a link as a "see also" in the Doggerel Index. It gave me a bit of a flashback to an idiot troll calling himself "Mr. FreeThinker" who apparently thought "we don't know yet" counts as an extraordinary claim. This is, of course, to borrow a phrase from across the pond, utter bollocks.

I also had a flashback to a clip of Bill O'Reilly with Richard Dawkins. He essentially said that as long as us scientifically minded people don't know, he's free to believe whatever random stuff some guys just made up ex nihilo. That, of course, makes it a matter of pure, baseless faith.

Of course, science has given us great knowledge. We know evolution happened and have a damn good idea about many of the details. We know the Earth revolves around the sun. We know The Big Bang happened. The evidence for all of these things gives us >99% confidence. Of course, we can't know everything, since we can't shove the entire universe into an evidence locker or examine the whole of its lifespan. There are still unanswered questions, like what happened before the Big Bang, or even if that's a meaningful question.

Yes, we've got a lot of cosmologists doing mathematical calculations of what happens when you play Cat's Cradle with superstrings, trying to figure out those answers. Who knows, they might find and successfully test an answer. Right now, they don't, and many of my fellow skeptics have expressed doubts about the whole approach since testability is hard to come by. In any case, we don't know yet. Not knowing is only a mild irritation for most of us, and often exciting for those doing the research: They're going to get a surprise, no matter what the results are.

For faithheads, not knowing is somehow an indictment for science: Because science isn't perfect, they need to make up a perfect being to tell them what to believe. Of course, there are a lot of these fictional beings competing for dominance because evidence isn't involved. Seems to me you could pick one or a set at random and still be on equal ground with all the other stone idol roulette players.

Of course, I think the only winning move is not to play.

Woos and Victims

Used to, when I ran into woos espousing the power of positive thinking, the idea that if you want something bad enough, you'll get it, I'd just take it as fluffy naive stuff, and generally move onto more directly harmful sorts of woo. I ended up reevaluating that attitude around the time I started blogging. The particular triggering incident involved an advocate of The Secret who saw no problem with an implied reversal of the hypothesis: If you're doing badly, it's your fault because you obviously attracted misfortune with negative thoughts. It got up to sickening levels when rape victims and the Holocaust came up.

I haven't heard as much from the Secretards over the past year, and I hope that's a sign the hype is dying away. At least until the next positive thinking fad gets a guest on Oprah.

Blaming the victim is one of woo's favorite ways to deal with failure. Much of the time it's not deliberate: Most woos are true believers, and when their pet magic fails, one of the easiest excuses to formulate is "you're doing it wrong!" With science-based things, it's a possibility, but there's always something to examine to figure out where the problem lies. No such luck with woo: There's always large realms of vagueness, and many give excuses to claim what the victim was thinking.

Of course, the knowing frauds take full advantage of this meme: If they can blame the people paying for their services and make them believe they're the ones to blame, the huckster doesn't have to worry about getting any results whatsoever. They can prosper from inaction and deception.

Overbuilding

Not my usual topic, but it's something I've said to my dad once or twice: Okay, so we've got the F-22 Raptor. It's got stealth, supercruise, thrust vectoring, and can turn into a giant robot. This is all supremely nifty.

But really, who are we going to be using it against?

Yeah, I realize it's probably just in case relations with other developed countries goes really sour, or something like that, but it still feels off.

Free Energy Boondoggles

Well, NeuroLogica has a post up about our old friend, the Steorn device. The result of the evaluation by independent scientists is unsurprising: No free energy, and after two years, they're stopping. Apparently some cynics have come out of the woodwork to waggle their fingers spookily about cover ups.

First, let me just say that free energy would be profoundly awesome, not just from an energy policy perspective, but from a discovery perspective. The laws of thermodynamics look to be very firm on a fundamental level. Finding a consistent violation of any sort would tell us there's something we've really been missing out on. That's why it makes absolutely no sense that scientists would attempt to cover it up.

Those of us who live with the wonderful technology of developed nations should have some inkling that we're prospering because scientific knowledge informs us about how we can use our resources. Yeah, the oil companies want to stay on top, but they can't buy off everyone with a physics degree. A violation of the LoT's would have all the physicists stampeding over each other to find out what they can learn. Our understanding of physics would be torn down, and any clever physicist could get his name in the history books alongside Newton and Einstein if he could work out what allows the exception. And, naturally, they'd be able to make a lot of money and put the oil companies out of business.

So, all those woos out there who seriously think there's a cover up: Seriously, why do you consider nigh-infinite cynicism as a superior explanation than the possibility you just backed the wrong horse? Has it ever occurred to you that the people promising sunshine and lollipops are the ones lying and/or being stupid?

D&Dify Some Stuff #5

WANTED: Individuals of varied talents to join a new secretive group devoted to sabotaging aggressive military groups and retrieving stolen relics and confiscated arcane literature.

Uniform: Black and gray camo with hexagonal shoulder guard and individualized animal/magical beast mask. Each member is assigned a number.

Current members: Captains 16, 25, and 36.

Must have some talent for secrecy or stealth, or barring that, exceptional ability to avoid capture. Nonlethal methods of disabling opponents strongly preferred. We have a reputation to build.

Positions in higher demand:

Intelligence officer: 16 needs an ally to gather information on war machines in development, as well as tracking of goods stolen from recently invaded cities.

Meat Shield: Combat role of questionable glory: Must be able to protect softer, magically-oriented allies from enemy advances and be hardy enough to withstand the bulk of an assault.

Okay, now out of character: Been writing up a group like this made of some of my characters, and ideas for some additional members would be nice. The three mentioned captains are 12th level in 4th Edition stats, and have the Leader, Striker, and Controller roles filled, and need a Defender to round out. Feel free to drop in any character concepts, even if it's just for some of the lower ranks.

D&Dify Some Stuff #4

Tonight, on the Money Programme, we're going to talk about money... I always loved money...

Okay, seriously, I'm thinking about all the forms currency can come in, and for some worldbuilding stuff, I'd like ideas on what can be made into currency.

In one of my settings, I've got a chain of islands where the natives have learned the art of farming pearls. One form of currency comes in the form of rectangular pearl tiles with a hole in one end so that the tiles can be threaded together with a string. They've been known to snicker slightly when a foreigner wears it as jewelry.

Of course, pearls would probably be one of the upper tier, like gold or platinum, so I'd like ideas for what a culture with relatively little metal to work with could use for pennies.

Any other interesting forms of currency are welcome in the thread. I'll be skimming Wikipedia.

Woos and Memory

Is it just me, or do woos have no memory? Rhetorical question, of course, because I've heard no shortage of other skeptics complaining to a woo's virtual face that they'll just forget every point made in a thread when they move onto another.

Sometimes I wonder if they do this, not out of a desire to convince us, but in a rote effort to make themselves feel better. They collect a few alleged 'zingers' that are only applicable to straw vulcans and those unrealistic fictional guys in monster movies who deny the existence of the monster up until it eats them. They blindly repeat these 'zingers' by rote in a comment ritual, and fail to comprehend any deviation from their script. They don't want to work to raise their research to an acceptable level, they want to have an easy ritual to gratify themselves.

They present their case so that when we ask questions, even honestly and politely, they can reinforce their image of us as closed-minded for not instantly accepting their flawed, unexamined thinking. Because their way of thinking is centered around reinforcement, rather than questioning, they don't change anything as they gain experiences.

That's why so often, I'm left wondering if any given woo has ever had an argument with a skeptic: No matter how many threads they ramble in, they gain no experience.

Beware of God #2

This is going to be something of an outlier for the series: It's not about any specific sign, just a trend I'm noticing. In my town, there's an awful lot of church signs about the power of prayer.

Prayer was one of the things that confused me as a kid. If God's omniscient, the act is pointless, since he'd be able to just read my mind to know what I want or need. As a result of that little line of reasoning, I tended to think of anyone who went on about prayer excessively as a little too pagan to be a modern Christian. My old fallacies aside, it seems to me that prayer is a big problem for the religious.

If prayer is supposed to work as advertised, you'd think literalists would be able to do something with mountains. Even if they can't work like Level 30 Clerics, you'd expect that they'd at least be able to consistently demonstrate statistically significant events for medical stuff. No such luck, last I checked.

Of course, many of my fellow skeptics know all about the dilemma this forms when you consider the idea of a "divine plan": Is the magic man going to change the universe's planned future just for you? Does he need reminding of the details? What's up with that?

Woos and Fallibility

There's one constant theme I notice when we criticize woos for using personal anecdotes or mention various cognitive biases, they quite often take it as us calling them stupid and nothing more. If they paid attention instead of parroting doggerel, they'd realize that we're calling them mortal.

Contrary to the aphorism, "seeing is believing," seeing is not believing. Everyone has flawed senses and biases that color the information those senses receive. That is the principle reason science was invented: We have to be aware of our shortcomings and compensate for them. We use statistics to make sure the patterns we see are real. We work on the principle of falsification so that we always have an escape hatch from bad ideas. We know that we can make mistakes. When we do, we admit them, and redouble our error checking methods when we move on.

Many woos, however, commit the perfect solution fallacy when it comes to science: "Science was wrong before, therefore we should trust in ideas randomly dreamed up by ancient traditions and some guy who's never performed experiments." That's the nasty thing about woo: It sets double standards. They're free to form ad hoc hypotheses for whenever their favorite woo utterly fails, but any tiny perceived failure of science, real or not, invalidates the entire process.

Science is a process that enforces humility. The peer review process requires that every idea endures criticism and retesting. No one is above questioning. Woo is an ivory tower, and its occupants call us "arrogant" for dragging them down to Earth, stripping them of their place above the gods, and daring to suggest we're all the same.

Beware of God #1

Just about everyone's done commentary on a church sign or two, and only now do I come up with a series title that match up with my dog puns. I saw this one on the way back from going to the movie theater-SQUIRREL!




...I saw this one on the way back from going to the movie theater with my parents. It went something like this: "Do we give each other the love that we seek from God?"

If you're a fundie looking for love from God, you're barking up the wrong tree.

Not Having Fun

My cable modem isn't providing this "high speed internet" they repeatedly talk about. For a while, my dad was placating me with talk of how bandwidth gets spread out when everyone nearby is online, but we recognized that excuse was wearing thin when I was having trouble reading my blogs at 9 AM on a Wednesday. Something needs to change, soon.

At least Gmail and posting work well enough for now.

Speedy Q&A #3

Q. Why do scientists reject Creationism?

A. Because when you're testing hypotheses, the null hypothesis of "It's completely random" is among the first to go.

Religion Should Stay the Fuck Away From Love

I've been meaning to write something about this for a while, but I've been putting it off, partially because my connection's terrible this week. I'll add links later, when I can actually load the relevant pages. Recently, PZ posted about a Hindu/Muslim interfaith couple. They loved each other, but their community and family would have none of it, demanding that their marriage be annulled because of the difference in faith. They ended up committing suicide in the end. This is just one more reason why religion should stay the fuck out of matters of the heart.

I don't have much romance in my life, but I do have some passion for the topic. I'm a sucker for two people who love each other making it work against the odds. And I don't care if they're from different classes, opposite sides of a war, religions, or of the same gender. Heck, I'm fine and dandy if one's a sapient robot and the other's an alien. Biology isn't relevant, and frivolous cultural labels don't really matter to me. It's their lives, and if they want to spend it together, they should able to.

I especially detest the tribalism involved in objections based on religion or race. It really brings home how petty some people are. Stone idols with pointless demands should hold no sway over a person's heart. Let us continue to smash such frivolities with logic and ridicule.

Elements and Materials in Fantasy

No skepticism in this topic, just geekery.

Got a favorite classical element? Got some favorite non-classicals that different fantasy settings put alongside the standard four?

I've usually been a fan of Air, though lately I've been drifting towards Water. Non-classicals I like are Wood and Metal. Light and Dark tend to be good additions as well, but I prefer they be without the good and evil connotations.

Any particular fantasy materials you like, along the lines of mythril, adamantite, cold iron, etcerta?

Feel free to ramble on about any fantasy setting, homebrew or published.

Doggerel #186: "Empowering"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused abused, or just plain meaningless.

I've had a post about some stereotypes I tend to work by sitting in draft format for quite a while. One of those involves the type of "feminist" Oprah appeals to. They often fall into the "no wrong answers" crowd that rails against the high confidence of science. It often creates an atmosphere similar to that I experienced in my early school years, when self-esteem was all. Or rather, the comedic exaggerations of the fad.

There's a difference between empowering a person and giving the illusion of power. In the chaotic world, especially before the various revolutions in science, the illusion of knowledge in the form of superstition gave people the feeling of control over that chaos. False understanding helps coddle the believer's ego, but it does not solve problems.

Giving someone decision-making power without the proper ability to evaluate the choices can hardly be called empowerment. Additionally, many of those in the "no wrong answers" mindset want it both ways: They want to "empower" people to succeed without also empowering them to fail. Critical thinkers who point out logical flaws or misinformation are seen as the enemy for enforcing the harsh standards of meritocracy and pointing out the failures some woo has been empowered into making.

Worse, this "empowerment" is often tied to some traditionally underprivileged group: Instead of judging an issue on its merits, we're expected to defer to them because they belong to that group: We're supposed to treat some wootastic form of "women's intuition" or "eastern wisdom" as superior to scientific data because they say so. Those who wish for equality, and those who treat them fairly are vilified for daring to criticize them. Hypocrisy is quite natural for woos.

Possible Minefield Topic: Good Propaganda?

Yeah, skeptics like us usually talk about propaganda when it's obviously either a bad thing or at least being used for bad things.

But when, if ever, can we use it with a clear conscience?

I tend to think it's okay in the case of humor, when it's supposed to be obvious, as well as situations where you're dealing with a woo so thick you have to hold 'em up to a mirror in a desperate bid to provoke at least a couple neurons.

Pointless Question #63

Why do people drive on parkways or park on driveways? Don't these people know English?

The Lone Scientist

One annoyance that crops up every once in a while is some woo started by some guy who cloistered himself and thought up some fully formed idea of how everything works. It's straight from Hollywood myth, which exaggerated some aspects of early scientists. There were some who closed themselves off to perform experiments with infant fields and produce dramatic, unambiguous results. The time that's been possible is likely over.

Everything we study these days covers increasingly subtle details about the world's workings, and/or require massive data collection efforts. For subtle details, you need other researchers watching over your shoulder in the form of peer review, looking out for errors. For mass data collection, you can't work in isolation, and other people looking over that data will examine it to make their own discoveries. Science is now a team effort.

The only reason woos have for fostering the cloistered mad scientist model is the genre savvy appeal: In the movies, the lone scientist is always right because he's the poor underdog. And everyone loves an underdog. But life is not a movie. There is are no Rules of Cool or Drama. There are no Mary Sues or Marty Stus. Treating a pet woo as such will only irritate us in the manner of Wesley Crusher.

TV Tropes links omitted to save people time. That, and it's a Saturday night. Connection's slow.

False Bravado

It's sometimes hard to explain how I can tell the difference between false bravado and real bravado. Well, maybe not. Most of the people with false bravado don't have the science on their side. Thanks be to statistical mathematics for being able to explicitly quantify confidence.

Creationists always come across as the most desperate to me. Unfortunately, most don't even understand the issue, so they think their random theory of randomness actually has an edge over the reliability of evolution. If they weren't so wantonly repetitive it'd be merely sad instead of frustrating.

I suspect many anti-vaxxers are aware how poor their position is, since they have to change hypotheses every couple of weeks. They were certain it was thimerosal over here, and now I'm hearing it's Children's Tylenol + vaccines, the third most common element in the Earth's crust (after oxygen and silicon), a handful of antigens out of a child's daily dose of thousands "overloading" the system, and some weird Yin and Yang crap I rolled my eyes past that I think Happeh said a while back. They can't be all that confident if they have to change stories on a continuous basis.

Homeopaths are generally clueless in my experience. They aren't even aware of what we're complaining about: Coming up with new magical mechanisms doesn't help if you don't have a cure to explain.

Most conspiracy nuts I know seem to have a bit of double-think: They're absolutely confident in their theories, but when confronted with a skeptic, they usually have to flail around and change topics.

So, experiences to share?

Dreamcasting

Net's been pretty slow today, so I haven't been able to play catchup for the dead week. Not going to be fun having "high speed internet" only during off hours.

So anyway, alongside those books I'm willing to trade in, I've been cutting down on the clutter. So far, I'm pretty well down to just the videogames I want to hold onto, and I now have $76 worth of store credit at Game Exchange, plus whatever I'll get for my PS1 after I move my saves onto my PS3's hard drive.

I'm contemplating getting a Sega Dreamcast, or at least a region-free emulator, since I think that's within the capabilities of my laptop. I've heard of some good-sounding shmups for the system, like Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga, and a Darius title or two. I don't know much else, other than the fact that the local shop seems to attract the really crappy-looking crap. Any recommendations?

A Bit of Trading

Since I've been...

Wait a second... (Dons his +6 Robe of Defying Flames)

...Since I've been updating to D&D's 4th Edition, I was thinking of trading in some old 3.x splatbooks and such. Generally keeping some of the fluffier stuff and monster books, since the ideas don't get old, just the statistics. Anyway, here's a list in case any of you want to trade me an apartment-warming gift for some books.

3.0 Stuff:
Epic Level Handbook
Arms and Equipment Guide
Stronghold Builder's Guidebook
Magic (AEG book with weird spellcaster classes)
Enemies and Allies (NPC and iconic character stats)
Full set of the thin 3.0 class splatbooks.

Mongoose Publishing (3.0):
Ultimate Feats
Ultimate Arcane Spellbook
Ultimate Divine Spellbook
Ultimate Magic Items
Ultimate Games Designer Companion (Mostly about d20 rules for vehicles, armies, new skills, etcetera)
Encyclopedia Arcane (Thin book about constructs)
Power Classes: Artificer and Alchemist (Pamphlet-sized base classes)

3.5 Edition:
Player's Handbook (I've got one of the leather bound ones that's more up to date on errata, allegedly)
Expanded Psionics Handbook
The Book of Nine Swords
Weapons of Legacy
Dragon Magic
Spell Compendium
Magic Item Compendium
Complete Psionic, Adventurer, Divine, Champion, Warrior, Scoundrel (I'm keeping Mage and Arcane for now)

Sports and Superstition

I see a fair share of woo out there that claims increases in sports performance or pain relief, and in comes the endorsements from celebrity sports stars. Or at least I think they're supposed to be sports stars. I don't keep up with that sort of thing, so I don't know who's good or not. Anyway...

I'd take any endorsement for health or performance claims from sportsmen, and it may have to deal with a stereotype I have: Sportsmen are superstitious. I've read some commentary on one bit of flawed thinking that comes easily to a lot of people, and even I'm vulnerable to it at times: "The Zone" It's that place where everything clicks and you do everything right. And it's because you were wearing your lucky shirt.

Actually, no. Streaks of good performance as well as bad occur because of statistical clustering: When you're gathering data of something essentially random (and there's a lot that can influence physical skills over long periods), you can expect there to be some points where highs and lows gather, rather than a completely uniform distribution. When one of those coincides with some new behavior or object, a baseless superstition can form.

I don't know how much is exaggerated by the media, but there seems to be a lot of that mode of thought in sports, with all sorts of unusual warmup rituals, lucky charms, and taboos. I've heard about it with native American "Medicine" that would influence their combat ability, and recently with the "mana" of tribal Hawaiian warriors. This sort of thinking is pretty well ingrained in our heads: Pattern recognition is a skill that was useful in our evolution, and the costs of being overzealous with it were low enough for us to survive despite the associated flaws.

That's why we need the introspection of science and in particular, statistical mathematics. We're no longer fighting for mere survival, but for goals that require a greater precision with increasingly subtle and intricate principles. In medicine, of course, you've got one major source of that intricacy: The human body.

Pointless Question #62

So, I was just driving along the highway, and I look up to the sky, and see a rather lewd-looking cloud. I look all around, and geeze, the clouds are like FLCLying all over the place! Who makes this stuff?!