Why?

Over at The Austin Atheist Experience, there is a long thread dedicated to one guy. What I wouldn’t give to have an internationally known organization dedicate a thread to me. This guy has the opportunity to ask the entire world whatever he wants, and he is using it to play the “why” game like a little kid.

And he is losing the game.

At one point he even calls one of the responses a “book”, and tells the responder he didn’t bother reading it. The response is about 3 short paragraphs long. I admit it is rather long to read the entire thread at this point, but if you were Corey, you would have had these responses come in over a period of days. Alright, I don’t think I need to point out the ridiculousness of this thread.

So why am I blogging about it and why did I add my comments to it? Under normal circumstances, if you determine someone is unreasonable, you ignore them. Exceptions to this are, if it is your boss, and you don’t have good prospects of getting another job soon; if it is your child and they have not learned how to be reasonable yet; if it is someone who is around your children or maybe just your friends and could potentially influence them negatively. Each of these requires a measured response.

Internet threads are carried on by people who think a person like Corey deserves a chance to be heard and a chance to consider other opinions. Also, the internet influences many people, so leaving an unreasonable statement unaddressed gives the impression that it has merit. All of this is a matter of degree and you have to decide for yourself if you are someone who should participate.

What I’d really like to address is how we end up with people like Corey. He apparently has some level education, some free time, and a computer. Where did we go wrong? My personal theory is that we don’t teach the history of science correctly. Mostly we don’t even teach much history past 1776 or so.

When we teach the history of scientific innovation, we teach the heroes, Einstein, Newton, Galileo, that guy who cross bred peanuts. Obviously I should have been paying more attention, but look at a curriculum of any public school and show me where it talks about the tedious work done by grad students sifting through data. Show me the words “peer review” used anywhere.

If you remember science class, you probably remember being given some flasks and a Bunsen burner and told how to do an experiment, and you were told how it should turn out. That’s not scientific investigation, that’s a demonstration of what science has already figured out. What you weren’t told, or at least this wasn’t highlighted, even though it is what science actually is, were the thousands of failed experiments someone did before they proved whatever it is you were learning that day. If it hadn’t been proven yet, it wasn’t being taught. That was real science in the making. That’s what scientists do, not High School kids. If you got to discuss ongoing science in your class, you were lucky.

Corey is really stuck on the word “prove”, so I have to stop and address that. You can skip this paragraph if you are a reasonable person. Math has proofs. They are absolutely proven, WITHIN THE DEFINITION OF MATH. 1 + 1 = 2 because we define those characters that way. Science, history, and just about everything else can only deal with probabilities. You don’t need to understand the entire theory of probability to understand that 99.9% certain is better than a 50/50 chance.

The history of science is full of people who made claims based on sitting in a room and thinking something through. They also did a few experiments, but we generally only teach about the ones that were successful. It is also full of people stealing other people’s ideas. It is full of people manipulating their data and making claims that took years to disprove. It is full of people who were very right about some things and very wrong about other things. None of that matters when you are discussing what science really is.

What’s important is that a major value within science is: question everything. This includes your own work. If you discover something that no one else has, the first thing you do is ask others to check your work. If you don’t ask, they will anyway. If you don’t publish your data and your methods, you shouldn’t be listened to.

Anyone can find flaws with how science is done. The difference between a scientific approach and just about any other approach is that science welcomes those questions. It refines its methods based on that input. Anything else would be unreasonable. Corey.

Taxi

I’m taking a course online about the economics of the poor. These two people share the lecturing. In this last week, Banerjee was discussing institutions. There are no sweeping conclusions, which is refreshing in this world of point-counterpoint where any one failure is taken as proof the entire system is about to collapse and everyone and everything related to it must be thrown out, burned and made to suffer. Instead he presents his case and sometimes presents the case of people he does not agree with and discusses the pros and cons of each.

Also, it comes out of MIT, so the students are expected to know things like when was South Africa colonized or be able to find Brazil on a map. Also refreshing. They are also expected to know a little bit of statistics and economics. I didn’t do so well in that area. It was a different experience than reading a book, even an informative non-fiction book. Usually, I, and I suppose most of us are consumers of knowledge. We hear it on the news, or maybe a documentary or book, and we either accept the conclusions or not. In this class, I was presented with relatively new information and participated in forming a conclusion.

Anyway.

He was discussing institutions. He was presenting the idea that much of the world we know was formed by the few colonizing nations from 400 years ago. The US was a colony then became a colonizer. Most of Africa was colonized at some time, mostly by the British. Some countries were difficult to live in for the Europeans, so instead of settling there and setting up institutions, they just expropriated the resources. For the most part, those that were settled are still doing well and the ones that had their riches exproprieated are still poor. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any good answers for how we can setup healthy institutions in those poor countries.

He did however have some interesting observations. He travels all over the world and notes that countries everywhere have very similar laws but differences in how they are enforced and implemented. Even with those differences, there are basic values of civility that are common to almost everywhere in the world. He told the story of how it is possible to go almost anywhere, at least anywhere that has some minimum of population, and you can hail a cab.

The story was not out of the ordinary, and that was the point. Think about it. Would you take a job that involved driving around a city, picking up strangers, taking them to remote destinations at all hours and completing a cash transaction with them? Most of us wouldn’t, but this happens all the time, everywhere. I wish I could say that no one ever got hurt or robbed while doing this, it does happen. But most of the time it doesn’t. It is not a high risk job with an excessive mortality rate.

 It is a safe and normal thing mainly because almost everyone wants it to be a safe and normal thing. Although many of us could easily take advantage of the system and get a free ride and maybe even a little extra change, we don’t. Most of us don’t even think about why, we just know it is wrong. If we think about it, we know that if we started doing that, others would too and then the system wouldn’t be there at all and there wouldn’t be anything to exploit.

He goes on to talk about how small changes will most likely continue to improve the plight of poor nations. Again, this is something everyone wants without having to think about why. There may not be an agreed upon way to do it, but we can make improvements here and there and improve situations for a few at a time. It may be that what we are doing today will have an impact for 400 years.

Betrand Lets Me Off the Hook

I wrote a review on Spinoza’s Ethics a while back. I was so disappointed in it that I didn’t even finish it. This could be considered unfair and someone made some scathing comments on my inability to comment adequately or fully understood the philosophy. My disappointment stemmed from the introduction I had to Spinoza from the author Durant as well many general statements from a variety of sources. Durant promised that if I gave it my full attention, I would love the work. Others have agreed. Others also rarely discuss his dependence on their being a perfect being, called God. Most mention that he is a pantheist but few deal with how he reconciled his pantheistic philosophy with his religion.

Bertrand Russell, in History of Western Philosophy is quite clear about all of this and praises Spinoza for both writing a well thought out piece like Ethics and for living its precepts. He also notes how unacceptable his conclusions are for today’s mind. In his time, his biggest problem was being called an atheist. Many find him interesting for this very reason and I think fail to see that he wasn’t one because they are too enamored with how he so confounded the authorities of his day.

That he forwarded not only philosophy, but the human condition is unquestionable. That he still has something to offer to the discussion of ethics today is less apparent. That he lived a life free from argument and handled adversity well is evident. That we should all apply his philosophy and do the same for no other reason than it worked for him is to make a choice with no basis. That we should even suffer through a comprehensive study of his works and attempt to fully embrace his mathematical system of precepts and corollaries is doubtful. Bertrand flatly states that you shouldn’t.

Whereas Durant suggests three passes through Ethics, Russell suggests skimming the ideas Spinoza has about how the mind works and focusing on his summaries and applications. Spinoza felt that a person could, just by sitting and thinking about it, come to conclusions about how human beings function and how the universe is structured. By doing that, you may come up with something that is internally sound but it will most likely also be wrong. With the limited science he had to work, Spinoza did an amazing job, but we have significantly more science available to us today and if you have to choose, your efforts would be better focused on the more modern.

Frankenfoods are coming to kill our children, get your pitchforks and torches!!

The very first article I read about HR933 explained the legal language and explained how “The Right” is getting a good laugh out of the “The Liberal” reaction. I can’t find that article now because it is buried in what I think is an over-reaction. Before you take a side on this one, do some research.

Fueled by sites like “Infowars” and “NaturalNews”, fear mongering is rampant over the Farmer Assurance Protection Act. It has been labeled the “Monsanto Protection Act” and claims are everywhere of how it “slipped through”. I’m 5 pages into Google and can’t find one article that is not inflammatory. It seems to be the worst kept secret in Washington. Even sports fans in Arizona have noticed it.

If you want to give in to the fear, here are 5 TERRIFYINGfacts. Fact 1 is just unsubstantiated claims and the rest are how government currently works. We should be changing how government works, but screaming about this bill is not going to accomplish that.

If you haven’t seen the Act, here’s a simple summary, “What it says is if you plant a crop that is legal to plant when you plant it, you get to harvest it,” Blunt told Politico. “But it is only a one-year protection in that bill.”

Here’s the legalese.

My biggest problem with this is those who are against it are assuming that farmers are stupid. They assume, and sometimes say it outright, that farmers are slaves to Monsanto. Not so. Farmers are running a business. They can choose their suppliers. If they suspect a product is going to be difficult to market, they aren’t going to plant it. This provision says that one judge can’t stop a farmer from cultivating the food that they planted. It says the FARMER can REQUEST that they bring their crop to market and the Secretary of Agriculture has the final say, not a federal court judge. It says the Secretary will REVIEW and ANALYZE the case.

To believe that this is terrifying is to believe that our government would authorize the harvesting of poison after they have seen sufficient evidence of the poisoning. Not one of the articles I read stated any specific poison or gave any links to data explaining exactly what is so frightening about GMOs. One article alluded to “unintentional” proteins. I’m not defending GMOs, corporations or factory farmers, I’m only asking for reasons to be so alarmed.

The most balanced articles I’ve found so far are a rating of“mixture” on snopes.com, And this one.

 The Corvalis Advocate notes that all farming, since the beginning of the Agricultural revolution in the Fertile Crescent, has been altering the environment. Monsanto seeds aren’t flying everywhere and changing everything. I know of only one case of a farmer being sued by Monsanto, and that farmer deliberately plowed around a small patch of Monsanto seed in his fields to encourage that seed to spread. In other words, he wanted it to crossbreed with his existing corn and improve his yields.

If liberal, caring, organic loving people give in to this kind of discussion, we only contribute to the lowering of the standards for reasonable discourse. Liberalism accepts that no single person is always right. It puts the value of listening above the values of giving witty retorts and crushing your opponent with rhetoric. It looks for evidence, not conspiracy.

Much has been said since this last election about how the Republicans have come unmoored from their traditions, and that is no doubt true, but it seems to me that liberals have also lost their foundations and are giving in to the dichotomous thinking and thoughtless speech habits of those we denigrate. Perhaps a review of our history would be helpful.

 

The Rise of Science

Bertrand Russell wrote History of Western Philosophy during World War II. He covers every important philosopher and some non-philosophers from the Greeks up to his time. One of the more interesting chapters is The Rise of Science in the 17^th century. He points out that before that time, the great philosophers of the Middle Ages like Aquinas or Averroes or Erasmus could have conversed with Aristotle and Plato. The language barriers would have to be overcome, but conceptually they were still on the same level. After Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton, when philosophy and science diverged, the gap widened, and the ancients would have been clueless about things that are now taught in elementary school. 

 

Russell commends Copernicus for being bold enough to question Ptolemy, who said the sun revolves around the earth, and dedicated enough to collect the data and do the math to explain why he was doing that. These two forces; making bold hypotheses and the dedication to gathering empirical evidence led to modern science. You can apply this to just about every internet discussion ever, whether it’s aliens are coming or Obama is a socialist or that that bunny costume is cute or creepy.

Bold hypotheses are made, usually with no evidence. When challenged, the discussion turns to the openness of someone’s mind, how they laughed at Columbus and other useless statements. If the hypothesis is challenged, the response is to defend the right to state a hypothesis. If the evidence or lack of it is challenged, the challenger is accused of any number of thought crimes. If an attempt is made to explain the scientific method, science itself is attacked for being an entrenched bureaucracy of gatekeepers uninterested in any original ideas.

All of us were born into the world that has already absorbed the way of thinking that we call “modern”. Russell, Wittgenstein and Popper worked this out for us. They did it so well that we don’t bother discussing their arguments anymore. Just like we don’t need to understand Tusi’s couple or the stellar parallax to explain how we know the earth revolves around the sun we don’t need to regurgitate a definition of critical rationalism. Everything is fine until someone breaks the rule that you can have an idea but you need some evidence if you want others to go along with it.

Either part of that rule could be broken. Encouraging innovation is important. Allowing people to explore crazy ideas can be useful. Even when someone is wrong, we don’t want to suppress their creativity. Part of that encouragement of creativity should also include the hard work of bringing an idea to fruition. An idea alone does not have much value.

With so many important inventions in the last couple centuries, we have come to put a lot of emphasis on the idea people. It’s easier to remember that brilliant breakthroughs lead to progress than it is to remember all the testing, all the mistakes, all the tedious gathering of data that went into making that breakthrough a reality. Too much hero worship and not enough acknowledgment of the grunt work in my opinion. Ideas and innovation should be encouraged, but a crazy idea should still be called crazy and whatever other judgments between the extremes of crazy and brilliant should be considered, based on evidence.