xkcd: Hotels

As I say when maintaining my internal monologue in a discussion… “Logical fallacy no.1…Logical fallacy no.2…”

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Fractal of the Month: Quanta

All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2011 Troy Loy

WPS | Web Picks Sceptique for September 29, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

• on Doubtful Newsblog… Antichrist and Antiscience?… the nuttery of the far religious right in American politics…

• on Lousy Canuck… What’s the Harm (of exorcisms)?… Plenty, I’m afraid…

• on Krissthesexyatheist… The Freedom To Tweet, or Not… on the dangers to freedom of speech, such as that is in many places…

• by Stephanie Zvan… Yay!– A Good (no, a Great)Reason to be Left Behind…on October 22…
  

• on Left Hemispheres… Random Quotes: “Dr” Keith Ablow…

• Azathoth, I love this… on Live Science… Glowing Millipedes, and Why They Do It…

• on Sciam… From Archimedes to us…a Fax sent to the Twenty-first Century…

WPS is a selection of links to blogs, news outlets, and cool little sites on the Web that relate to science, reason, skepticism, atheism, the fringes and borderlands of science, memes relating to science or skepticism, and anything that catches my eye or which I’m deluded enough to think might arouse the interest of you, my perspicacious readers. WPS is published weekly each Thursday on the Call.

***

Had to fix the links to Stephanie Zvan’s post and the one on millipedes.

MC Hawking — What We Need More of is Science [Repost]

From my archives…Not for the easily offended, but good…

Fractal of the Day: Lavenda

All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2011 Troy Loy

…Science said X was Impossible!!!

Image via Wikipedia

The above claim is part of an argument I’ve heard many times, with such examples of it’s truth offered frequently being the impossibility of heavier than air flight claimed by Lord Kelvin and the mistaken but popular notion, and never seriously entertained by the scientific community itself, that the flight of bumblebees was scientifically impossible.

It was not that bumblebee flight was thought to be literally impossible, but that it was not fully understood exactly how exactly it worked prior to research on the aerodynamics of bumblebee flight in the 1990s.

Note: Science has never claimed that any known phenomenon commonly observed and fully documented at the time is impossible.

This line of argument is often used as an example of how scientists have been proven wrong before in stating something to be impossible, to support the claim that therefore nothing is impossible, and that it necessarily follows that all such statements of impossibility have been or will inevitably be shown wrong.

It implies that whatever we want to be possible, whatever we imagine, merely in the imagining of it, trumps any and all past, present and future limits imposed by science on the possible and the plausible. It implies we can be godlike merely by wishing hard enough, or that even if the wishing doesn’t literally make it so, that it means it’s so.

Perhaps a better formulation of this entry’s title would be “(A) scientist (s) said X was impossible!” and it would probably be a better context to argue from than condemning the whole of science on whatever claim is being advocated.

Lord Kelvin was right about quite a bit, and made invaluable contributions to physics, but he was fatally incorrect in his calculations that to him showed the impossibility of heavier-than-air flight (birds, bats, insects, (and long ago, pterosaurs,) do (and did) it all the time), and his ignorance of radioactivity (then undiscovered) led him to conclude that the Earth could only be millions of years old, not the billions that it is.

This is why the authority of any given scientist must be always open to fair questioning and open criticism by others in the field, why a community of researchers are more likely to be correct than any one individual no matter how imminent, and why even then, science as a whole must always be scrupulously self-critical and open to correction.

No one researcher speaks for science as a whole with unquestioned authority despite any significance of their contributions.

The cold, hard truth is that scientists are human, and are permitted the right to be wrong by any reasonable person because of this. Being wrong, and being shown wrong by other scientists is simply how science moves forward, getting closer than before to the truth.

Because you cannot find out what is true unless you can also tell what is not…

…and in this, having inbuilt mechanisms for error-detection, science is unlike any other human social enterprise ever invented, which is why I find it among the very greatest of our ideas, the best of our various claims to ways of knowing.

Science can be and has been wrong, often grossly wrong, but step by step it leads us further toward what is more true than less, to a better understanding of what really is when it is allowed to work properly and unshackled by ideology.

Science does not discard findings that are useful, that repeatedly continue to be verified, that consistently withstand attempts to falsify them, findings that are enhanced, deepened, elaborated on by new knowledge, and which continue to make valid predictions of the world in their domain of operation.

We are bound principally by the laws of physics, and limited by our understanding of them, so those who understand them professionally have a good deal to justifiably say on what we can know to be impossible — pending further and better knowledge.

Expert critics of paranormal and fringe claims are expert critics, not because of a lack of understanding, or unfamiliarity with the subject they critique, but precisely because they understand their subject so well that they know exactly how and where proponents of these ideas go wrong in making their claims, knowing full well how they go astray in both data and theory.

One does not have to have a string of PhD.s in nonsense after one’s name to know why and how it is nonsense, but knowing the subject is essential to fair and objective criticism.

Science shows us our limits, our limits as human beings, and the limits of nature itself. It shows us our horizons, but it also opens up new and fantastic worlds to explore — fantastic all the more, because what it shows us is real — not merely the product of our imaginings and wishful impositions upon the universe. Knowing our limits and the limits of the world is good, not restrictive, because only by admitting these exist and addressing them may we overcome them.

Related articles

• Faster-than-light travel discovered? Slow down, folks (blogs.discovermagazine.com)
• Uncle Karl disses the evangelicals at last! (whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com)

I am a Pseudoskeptic [Repost]

You all may have noted that I’m reposting some of entries from my archives, those classics that didn’t get much airtime due to this blog’s obscurity at the time they were originally published. I’m going to be posting some new entries this week, of course, but the reposting is necessary to make time for study periods and other non-blogging necessities at home and at library.

This is also useful for showing some of the ‘best of Troythulu’ from this blog’s earlier days, and the evolution of my writing style, such as that is, over time.

So here it is, like yesterday’s entry, verbatim with all its warts. Enjoy.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I am not a genuine skeptic, but a pseudoskeptic and a pseudointellectual according to Neo-Velikovskians I’ve met online. Yep, I’m downright delusional and deranged, because I believe that…

…anecdotes are only useful for the purpose of forming hypotheses, not testing them,

…Nostradamus was not a prophet—he may have seen things, but not the future,

…there is such a thing as an objective reality, that exists regardless of our wishes, thoughts, and beliefs, and that this is the best,  most rational explanation for the evidence of our senses,

…the scientific community is not a sinister, monolithic conspiracy bent on hiding the truth of the paranormal, nor skeptics a ‘new inquisition,’

…President Barack Obama was born a United States citizen, and that his birth certificate proves this,

…claims of the paranormal can be most parsimoniously explained by conventional means without invoking supernatural powers or phenomena,

…coincidences are real, and that it would be an extraordinary coincidence if extraordinary coincidences didn’t happen as often as they do,

…the Fantasy-Prone Personality type exists as a real psychological phenomenon, even if it explains a person’s belief that they are psychic,

…you don’t have to be crazy, lying, stupid, or uneducated to believe things that just ain’t so,

…unlikely statistical correlation does not equate to paranormal causation, or scientific importance,

…conventional explanations are not weak or implausible & contrived just because they are not understood or known,

…evolution actually happened, and the Earth is billions, not thousands, of years old,

…while electromagnetism does play some astrophysical role in the universe, the principle large-scale binding force of the Cosmos is gravity,

…anthropogenic global warming, and the resultant climate change, are real, and need to be dealt with in a rational manner to stave off their detrimental consequences,

…Quantum mechanics, Classical mechanics, and the Special & General theories of Relativity are all valid descriptions in their own context as to how the universe works,

…conventional evidence-based medicine is not a conspiracy to make and keep you sick, and is safer and more effective than most alternative modalities,

…miracles do not really happen, the mundane actually exists and isn’t boring,

…black holes, quasars, neutron stars, dark matter and dark energy are all real astrophysical entities,

…impact craters on planetary bodies are made by (gasp!) impacts by meteorites, asteroids and comets over billions of years, not electrical scarring over minutes or hours,

…the supernatural and the paranormal probably don’t exist, just the natural, the normal, and those things we have yet to explain,

…looking for conventional explanations and eliminating them one by one is more rational than grasping for supernormal explanations first,

…personal testimony is not a reliable form of proof that something is real, works, or is true,

…skeptical organizations, while not perfect, are generally more factually correct, honest, objective, rational, and fair in their treatment of subject matter than organizations run by paranormal and fringe-science believers,

…meta-analyses are not an accurate way of demonstrating the validity of a set of studies if the component studies have incompatible methodological and statistical protocols, or are ‘tweaked’ or ‘fixed’ after the fact,

…relativism and false balance are not the same thing as objectivity,

…astrology is not a valid science, and has been falsified in every empirical test of it to date,

…the UFO phenomenon is more likely to be psycho-cultural than extraterrestrial in nature,

…open-mindedness is unquestionably a virtue, but not opening your mind so far that your brains fall out,

…Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, Nessie, Mothman, the Montauk Monster(s), Mokele Mbembe, the Mongolian Death-Worm, and other similar creatures probably don’t exist as real animals,

…free-energy or perpetual motion machines don’t work as claimed, much less at all,

…real science and the wonders of nature are far more interesting than the parochial claims of the paranormal,

…evidence does not have to be ‘absolute concrete physical proof’ to be acceptable in science, or to skeptics,

…claims of fact or statements about reality are not just opinion and immune to being considered wrong just because one wants to believe them,

…the burden of proof for a claim of fact rests primarily upon the one making the claim, not its critics,

…all views should get a fair hearing, but not all views are equally valid in truth content,

…human beings have the unalienable right to believe what they wish, so long as they don’t infringe upon the rights of others to believe what they wish,

…and finally…

…science and reason are superior to authority, ideology, intuition, faith, and mystical experience as ways of knowing the world.

Yessiree, I am just one big-time true believer for harboring all these crazy, irrational ideas… Fnord.

Fractal of the Day: Damocles

All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2011 Troy Loy

Yet Another Ancient Astronaut Claim in the News

Image via Wikipedia

Well, isn’t this nice… A report on Reuters alleges that “Mayan Documentary Will Show Evidence of Alien Contact”, and truth be told, I’d be much more inclined to take this seriously if they planned to show something like, oh, I don’t know… genuine artifacts of indisputably alien technology or even ET mummies, or something.

Due to the immense technological requirements of interstellar travel, such artifacts, if actually found, would have to be unlike anything on Earth, even from our most bleeding-edge research, and the biology of any alien bodies would also be unmistakably extraterrestrial, impossible to confuse with our own sort of life except by the most rank incompetent…

I would have hoped for something that we haven’t seen before…Sadly, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, according to the report.

No, instead they’re going to be showing the same crappy evidence as in works of fiction like “Morning of the Magicians,” and “Chariots of the Gods?,” misconstruing it with the same tired old arguments from ignorance, though it appears that they’re spicing it up by latching onto the whole 2012 Mayan calendar nonsense.

James Randi was so on point with his idea of unsinkable rubber duckies, since even long-debunked claims never go away for long, they just rise from the ashes given new life.

Color me disappointed on this one…There just doesn’t seem anything interesting to anticipate.

Yet another example of the media giving too much coverage and false balance to pseudoscience.

Accepting “I Don’t Know” As An Answer [Repost]

There is something that all of us do if we aren’t careful, mostly stemming from a deep discomfort of not having an immediate explanation or answer to something we want to know, but don’t–the argument from ignorance–a fallacy of thought by which we draw a conclusion not from data, but from a lack of data, from what we don’t know, a conclusion which more often than not turns out to be false when properly investigated.

One of the first things I had to learn as a skeptic was a tolerance for ambiguity, habits of thought by which I could say to myself “It’s okay to not have an answer for such-and-such a question right now.” It’s perfectly fine to say, “I don’t know…yet.”

There’s a great many people who are just terrified by the thought of not knowing everything with conclusive surety, even when that conclusiveness is wrong. So many people go to great lengths to convince themselves that they do, in fact, know what that strange light in the sky is, or what that creaking noise in the house late at night is, when they really don’t.

This is particularly true of those with a tendency to claim a event as being impossible to explain by natural or normal causes, and thus dismissing such causes prematurely, especially that dual bugaboo of paranormal and fringe-science advocates, coincidence and statistical noise.

A common argument is stated something like “X is so unlikely as to not possibly be due to the laws of chance(or nature)!”(read; the claimant’s understanding of those laws). In fact, it would be even more improbable that unusual coincidences don’t occur as often as they do, in accordance with the Law of Truly Large Numbers. For example, in a city of say, ten million people, one should by chance alone expect ten 1-in-1,000,000 coincidences to happen each day.

This and other seemingly counterintuitive results of statistics are well within the bounds of the laws of chance, with no need to invoke anything paranormal. Not yet.

Statistical correlation does not by necessity imply causation, nor scientific importance. For example, if I wanted to and was willing to juggle the numbers, I could draw a correlation between someone’s eye color and their IQ, but there would be no causative or scientific significance to it.

Yes, it’s tempting to think you have all the answers at your fingertips, but the I think that the best knowledge anybody can have is an awareness of their own ignorance and the admission that they, like anyone else, can be mistaken in their conclusions when shown evidence to that effect.

In my experience, I haven’t noticed any tendency to jump to conclusions in lieu of evidence in the more seasoned and better-known skeptics, though I have found it among some novice skeptics and many of the paranormalists I’ve met.

It’s the same whether we try to definitively explain a strange light in the moors as either a ghost or as swamp-gas without enough information–we are committing the same error either way.

Probabilistic, uncertain thinking and a tolerance for it can be difficult at first, but it gets easier with time and practice, becoming second nature. One can only learn when no longer convinced that one already knows without sound reason to think so. It’s how good science is done.

A wise man knows his own ignorance, while a fool knows everything.

Fractal of the Day: Lambent Cuprium

All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2011 Troy Loy

Symphony of Science: A Wave of Reason [Repost]

This is a repost of a release by Symphony of Science, an awesome video with a stellar cast. If I actually believed in heroes, these people would be them.

Sadly, I merely respect them, but they knew, and know, more than I. I owe a nod to Little Kitten from Podblack Cat for pointing me in its direction.

Skeptics and atheists together in the rationalist community are both cursed and blessed to live in interesting times indeed, for in no other era perhaps save the first Enlightenment has the world seen such a resurgence of reason and science in our global culture.

There are more organized skeptical groups, and like-minded individual grass-roots activists in the world today than at any previous point in the last couple of centuries.

And the advocates of unreason are lashing out in fear, rage, and desperation. It will be fascinating in any case to see which side comes out intact when the dust clears. But enough of my babbling–Enjoy.

melodysheep | November 22, 2010

“A Wave of Reason” is the seventh installment in the Symphony of Science music video series. It is intended to promote scientific reasoning and skepticism in the face of growing amounts of pseudoscientific pursuits, such as Astrology and Homeopathy, and also to promote the scientific worldview as equally enlightening as religion. It features Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Lawrence Krauss, Carolyn Porco, Richard Dawkins, Richard Feynman, Phil Plait, and James Randi.

More science music videos can be found at http://symphonyofscience.com.

Enjoy!

~John
john @ symphonyofscience.com

Lyrics:
Russell:
When you are studying any matter
Or considering any philosophy
Ask yourself only: what are the facts,
And what is the truth that the facts bear out

Sagan:
Science is more than a body of knowledge
It’s a way of thinking
A way of skeptically interrogating the universe

If we are not able to ask skeptical questions
To be skeptical of those in authority
Then we’re up for grabs

Shermer:
In all of science we’re looking for a balance
between data and theory

Harris:
You don’t have to delude yourself
With Iron age fairy tales

Porco:
The same spiritual fulfillment
That people find in religion
Can be found in science
By coming to know, if you will, the mind of God

Krauss:
The real world, as it actually is,
Is not evil, it’s remarkable
And the way to understand the physical world
is to use science

Dawkins:
There is a new wave of reason
Sweeping across America, Britain, Europe, Australia
South America, the Middle East and Africa
There is a new wave of reason
Where superstition had a firm hold

Plait:
Teach a man to reason
And he’ll think for a lifetime

Sagan:
Cosmology brings us face to face with the deepest mysteries
With questions that were once treated only
in religion and myth

The desire to be connected with the cosmos
Reflects a profound reality
But we are connected; not in the trivial ways
That Astrology promises, but in the deepest ways

Feynman:
I can’t believe the special stories that have been made up
About our relationship to the universe at large
Look at what’s out there; it isn’t in proportion

Russell:
Never let yourself be diverted
By what you wish to believe
But look only and surely
At what are the facts

Randi:
Enjoy the fantasy, the fun, the stories
But make sure that there’s a clear sharp line
Drawn on the floor
To do otherwise is to embrace madness

Fractal of the Day: Cyclonic Euclid

All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2011 Troy Loy

Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics w/o New Age Baloney [Repost]

TED – Brian Cox on CERN’s supercollider

This is an oldie, but a goodie…a great talk on the Large Hadron Collider.