Monthly Archives: February 2012
Carl Sagan: We Humans Are Capable Of Greatness
Courtesy of bdwilson1000‘s YouTube channel
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Fractal of the Midweek: The Sum of Nights
All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2012 Troy Loy
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TED – Shilo Shiv Suleman: Using tech to enable dreaming
Bringing magic back to the world, back to storytelling…through technology!
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I’m also skeptical of denialism
Creationists are given to rejecting much of science, specially targeting evolution, ironically misrepresenting it as a religion rivaling their own, while many of the political-minded on the right are prone to rejecting climate science as “political science” having goals and policy implications contrary to their ideology or party affiliation.
This rejection (for climate change)tends to take the form of one of three general positions:
- That climate change simply isn’t happening, and we don’t have to worry…after all, according to the religious, for example, God wouldn’t let the Earth go to crap until he decides to end it all…
- …that climate change is happening, but it’s a natural cycle and not us who are causing it…after all, it would be arrogant to think we humans could ever affect the world’s climate – the Sarah Palin argument…
- …or that it is happening, we do have something to do with it, but it’s far too late to do anything about it, so why waste time and effort dealing with it.
The tenacity with which any of these positions are held varies from a healthy skepticism open to evidence, to outright denialist certitude regardless of any evidence offered.
There are a number of arguments, far too many to describe in any detail in the scope of this post, used to support the above positions, and many of these arguments rely on the notion of a conspiracy by 90% of the world’s scientists, liberal environmental activists, the mainstream media, and a secret government that wants you to believe in the religion of global warming, to carry out a massive hoax and crash the economy for its evil leftist ends.
MuaHaHaHaHaHa!
Aside from the tendency of some to point at the so-called Climategate and Climategate II scandals, as proofs positive of this conspiracy (with the accused researchers having been exonerated of all academic misconduct, Here, Here, Here & Here), the whole notion of a conspiracy of this magnitude and scope, still sustained by right-wing news outlets and blogs, is just absurd on the face of it to those of us who do not share their political views, and even a few who do but aren’t given to conspiratorial thinking.
There is a tendency to project religious or political motives and interests onto science that disagrees with creationists or climate change outright deniers (I’ve no problem with genuine skeptics)alike.
Neither adequately understands the process and thinking of science, or why would their primary critiques of it involve their own idiosyncracies of thinking?
What is the real difference, though between science denial and science? I mean besides the seemingly obvious ones, like denialism being the rejection of a position, supported by flimsy evidence and unsound arguments…
I’d say honesty, if not in individual scientists then in the process and ethical values that make the scientific enterprise work, since unlike religion, and seldom in partisan politics, science depends on honesty — if not that of individual researchers, then their colleagues who expose them when research fraud is afoot.
This is because science is about finding facts, about how things are, and why they are, not what we ought to do — though science doesn’t involve political thinking in its process, once the facts are found, good science often has political implications, as Copernicus and Galileo discovered in their times, and is often a source of discomfort to those in authority at a given time, especially when the scientist relaying it is outspoken.
One of my homies, Kriss, has written a great piece on his blog about honesty in science, and how it is a virtue and a strength, not a sign of weakness, to not know it all.
I’m well-aware of the hubbub with Peter Gleick, and though he has been both ardently supported and roundly criticized (by other scientists I must add…)for his tactics in uncovering the Heartland Institute documents he leaked, I have little to add to the discussion, save that he has both the strength and courage to come forth and admit his misdeeds, a thing I don’t see happening with the still-unidentified hacker who stole and posted the CRU emails of Climategates I and II.
Steve Novella recently said that science is “a self-skeptical, self-correcting, but messy process.” Science may revise its findings, but it can admit when it’s wrong, correct itself, get a little closer to the truth, and move on.
Never admitting when you’re wrong does not equate to never being wrong.
But I don’t see that kind of intellectual honesty and ethical fortitude in ideologues whose objective is to discredit science — evolution, climate science, or science in general — using any underhanded, dirty, dishonest tactics at their disposal — for they are themselves subject to motives and vested interest, theological, political and financial, not a concern for truth nor a search for it.
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MNQ | Monday’s Noontide Query: Double-Edged / Cutting-Edge
Science, a multifaceted gem, a two-edged sword that can be the instrument of our ascension as citizens of the Cosmos, or the cause of our ultimate destruction, depending on how we choose to use it.
Science is innately morally neutral, though human beings are not.
We do not always act in our own best interests as a species.
This is especially true concerning our occasional inability to mobilize to political will to counter the problems that our science, and the technology it drives, can and does cause when used foolishly and profligately for short-term gains.
Science can be used for good or ill, bountifully or dangerously, depending on our degree of wisdom at the time, and what ill we do with it will not be reversed by applying ignorance to the problem…
Science has been used to cure diseases, to feed the world’s teeming billions, to raise our standards of living, giving the middle class greater luxury than a Medieval king, though perhaps with less gold in the cellar.
It has also been misused by ruthless, amoral people in the commission of hideous crimes against humanity in unethical experimentation, and to create polluting industrial processes and horrid weapons of destruction.
Weapons and processes that may spell our extinction if we aren’t careful.
But as for goodness or badness in itself, science has neither, though our economy and a thriving democracy depends on a good literacy in it by our citizen electorate, a literacy sadly lacking in many of us who need it most, the voting public.
Which cutting-edge science and resultant technology do you think looks the most promising in long-term benefits vs dangers?
Which appears the most dangerous or alarming in potential hazards?
Why do you think so?
MNQ is a question that I pose to you, my readers, and do feel free to comment…I’m not a baby-eating ogre, and I don’t bite…very hard. MNQ is published on Monday of most weeks at 12:00 PM.
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TED – Neil MacGregor: 2600 years of history in one object
The Cyrus Cylinder, an ancient artifact that says much for multiculturalism, despite its warts… 26 centuries of history can be traced through it, broken though it be.
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Caturday’s Astronomy Pix: February 19-25, 2012
Caturday’s Astronomy Pix is a weekly installment, published each weekend between 7:31 and 8:30 AM, with links to each daily entry on NASA’s website Astronomy Picture of the Day. I hope you enjoy looking at these often breathtaking images as much as I do.
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Fractal of the Week: Gate to the Void
All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2012 Troy Loy
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xkcd: Orion Nebula
A bit NSFW, but rather funny…
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
This means you’re free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). More details.
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Reason, Reasoning, & Unreasonableness
People are reasoning creatures, which is to say we use a process of reasoning, of thinking things through and reaching conclusions, skilled or not, reliable or shaky, for coming to decisions on which to act.
But being a reasoning creature does not always mean being reasonable.
The Enlightenment ideal of Reason just doesn’t seem to reflect the ways in which people often think, as a century of psychological literature shows.
It’s not that people can’t reason, just that most of us don’t do it very well, and many of us rely on “gut feelings” as a shortcut to action, which can often get people into a lot of trouble, themselves or others depending on the consequences of their actions.
Reasoning well is a skill set that must be learned and practiced to do it reliably and effectively, particularly the sort of reasoning used in scientific thinking, hardly exclusive to the sciences but requiring some effort and not easy to sustain indefinitely — It’s a very high-energy mental state.
Scientific thinking isn’t beyond most people — we use it whenever we scrutinize our options, figuring out and solving our problems in a useful manner. But we often don’t do it rigorously, skillfully, and the notion of the completely consistent critical thinker is simply not well-supported by the data… I’d even go so far as to say that it’s a convenient fiction.
We all like to think of ourselves as being the rational, objective, unbiased ones, but come those matters on which we are passionate, strongly opinionated, in which our personal prejudices and (often mistaken) prior beliefs hold sway, we are often less than objective, less than fair-minded, less rational than we might be otherwise.
Even as rationalists, skeptics, freethinkers, atheists and nonbelievers of other sorts, we can be blinded by our conceits. Vigilance and rigorous self-examination are needed.
It’s situations like this in which we can commit fallacies, deceive ourselves, and skew our understanding that we must be especially vigilant, use due care in our thinking, and closely examine our arguments for specious reasoning. If we don’t, those we argue with will happily point out the deficiencies in our arguments.
We must strive to know as many of our own biases as we can, and employ what means we can to offset them when they may come into play. Not an easy task, save for the most skilled and practiced thinkers.
Does this mean that we should throw out Reason altogether as useless and fatally flawed, that anything goes?
Of course not. We don’t need to throw the newly hatched larva out with the proverbial bathwater.
We need reason, we need reasoning, and we need to do it well, to carry out our agendas, meet our goals, and attain our objectives effectively and reliably.
But we must do so without sacralizing the ideal, without elevating it too highly, for even it is imperfect.
We must seek to improve our reasoning skills asymptotically toward perfectibility while mistrusting perfection itself.
Why should we not do better what we already as a species sometimes do best?
Reasoning well is important, more than those of an anti-intellectual bent are willing to accept, but it’s only one tool-kit among others that we can use to attain reliable knowledge, along with introspection, sensory experience, and our memories, this last absolutely crucial for retaining data of non-simultaneous phenomena for processing.
These are important, despite their fallibility, and these along with our ability to associate ideas and recognize patterns, are essential for making any sense of the world.
And if reason can sometimes mislead us when based on fallacies or mistaken data, we are not likely to fix problems it gets us into with the even more mistaken application of unreason.
It’s been said that even in a functioning democracy — and by that I mean any form of governance by elected representatives, with or without a constitutional guarantee of civil liberties, rights, and responsibilities to a given nation’s citizen electorate, no matter what you call it — 300 million people cannot possibly have a meaningful discussion.
I disagree.
I think that it’s not a fundamental inability for that many people to engage in productive discussion. The educational and technological means to enable it exist.
I think that with the right skills in argumentation and a good understanding of its conceptual foundations, available to anyone willing to learn, 300 million people, or however many, can have a meaningful dialogue.
The problem, I think, lies in ideological polarization and fervent partisanship, on both the Right and Left. The problem is not an inability, but an unwillingness to discuss things reasonably, to admit to errors in one’s own position.
Political, religious, and economic doctrines and our ideological commitments can blind even the sanest of us.
Even now there exist poisonous, stupid, dogmatic ideologies that let people kill others with a clear conscience, in thinking that they serve their God, their country, the Almighty Dollar, or some other higher cause.
Dogmatic thinking can blind us to flaws in our reasoning, make us cherry-pick our facts, and cause us to ignore or disregard our own concern for the truth of a matter — hobbling our capacity to be honest with ourselves and others.
The more “right” we consider our own views, the less likely we are to subject them to testing and public examination by others — why test what is certain? — and the more we compromise our objectivity for the subjective truths of our own (often less well-founded than we think) opinions.
To argue against reason with reason is inconsistent, and to argue against reason without it puts one out of the playing field altogether.
I’ll close this with a quotation attributed to Bertrand Russell, succinct and to the point:
“One’s certainty varies inversely with one’s knowledge.”
Well said, 3rd Earl Russell, well said.
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WLS | Web Links Sceptique for February 23, 2012
- on Measure of Doubt… How to want to change your mind…
- on Mashable… 5 Places to get digital textbooks…
- on YouTube… The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Atheism…
- by Daniel Loxton… Tribal Skepticism?…
- by Brian Cox… Why Quantum Theory Is So Misunderstood…
- on Gizmodo… Snow Art: Much Cooler than Crop Circles…
- on Gizmodo… Astronomers Discover a Planet Made of Water…
- on Wired Science… Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results May be Due to Bad Cables…
WLS 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.
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O Noes!! Troythulu has been tagged!!
This is pretty cool… I’ve been tagged by fellow blogger windupmyskirt to answer a list of eleven questions, only to spread teh bloggy-love myself by tagging eleven other victims — er, I mean bloggers — with my own questions!
MuaHaHaHaHa! *ahem*
I’ll begin by answering here:
1. Why did you start your blog?
I needed an outlet for my ideas, and thought the best way to vet them was to put them on an open, public forum so that they could be tested and improved. I also that it would be a good learning experience so that I could better myself as a person and skeptic. The fact that it’s allowed me to meet so many awesome people online is a big plus too. Skepticism has helped me out tremendously, and I see blogging as a way to pay back that debt.
2. Who is your favorite actor/actress?
My favorite actor is Christopher Eccleston, whose gritty and edgy role as Nine in the Doctor Who reboot was just, as Nine would say, “fantastic.” I’m also kind of partial to Indian actresses Amala Paul and Vidya Balan. I tend to favor actors and actresses who are comfortable in their own skins, and who show it when they perform.
3. Name your favorite band/musician?
Right now, my favorites are Enigma, Enya, and Jon Boswell, who does the Symphony of Science mixes using video clips and the voices of scientists and skeptics, past and present, to show the utter coolness of science and reason.
4. What is your favorite TV show?
Hands down, I’d say Doctor Who, both the Tom Baker years of the older series and the reboot with Eccleston, Tennant and Smith as Nine, Ten and Eleven. At one time I was a big Robotech fan, until I actually learned some physics and found out that Zentraedi were silly — and physically impossible as described — Square-cube law, anyone?
5. Who is your favorite scientist?
That’s a tough one, but if it’s scientists past, I’d say Carl Sagan and Ike Newton, and if scientists present, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking would rank about evenly on the awesome scale.
6. Name your favorite author?
I have four I’d rank together: Carl Sagan, Martin Gardner, Harlan Ellison, and Isaac Asimov, all of whom influenced my evolution as a writer, skeptic and science-junkie. Gardner’s books on pseudoscience and mathematics made a big impression on me in terms of my interests.
7. What do you do with your free-time when you are not online?
I either make fractals, or sit down in a comfy spot in my room or a reading desk at the local library to read and/or study. I also play tabletop role-playing games, like Steve Jackson’s GURPS, when my friends pay a visit. Sometimes I watch videos, whether television episodes or my Teaching Company course lectures.
8. If you had to live in another country, which country would you choose, and why?
I would say India. As an emerging economic power, India is rising quickly in the science and technology department. I love the culture(s), the people, and the history, my favorite period being that of the Gupta dynasty.
Any culture brilliant enough to invent the beautiful concepts of zero and infinity, and the decimal system of mathematics is tops in my book. That, and their traditional architecture is absolutely magnificent, easily the equal of anything in the West.
9. What three words best describe you?
Driven. Curious. Detached.
10. What is your biggest guilty pleasure?
Pleasure? What’s that?
Seriously, though, it’s one that makes me kind of annoying in face-to-face encounters…I like to argue, preferably productively, more like a debate or discussion than mere bickering and quarreling.
Those last two annoy even me and achieve nothing.
As David Hume put it, “Truth springs from argument amongst friends.”
11. If you were throwing a dinner party, and could invite any 10 people (living or dead) who would you invite?
Hmmm. Let’s see…
Dick Feynman, Carl Sagan, Johannes Kepler, Marie Curie, Eugenie Scott, Archimedes, Democritus, Elizabeth Loftus, James Randi, and Harriet Hall.
I’ve updated this post below with questions of my own, posed to the eleven other victims…er, awesome bloggers, and links to their sites listed below.
Update:
[1] What is your fondest memory from your childhood?
[2] If you could be one species, real or fictional, other than human, which would it be, and why?
[3] If you could take the place, assume the role, of any historical figure, who would it be?
[4] If you could have one comic book superhuman power, which would it be, and what would you do with it?
[5] What is your favorite genre of fiction, if any?
[6] Who is your favorite comedian, and why?
[7] What is your favorite movie?
[8] Which, if any, is your favorite genre of music?
[9] If you could live anywhere else in the world, at any point in time, where and when would it be?
[10] If you could keep as a pet any one kind of mythological beast, which would it be?
[11] What is your favorite form of visual art, your favorite artist, and why?
The following blogs have been tagged:
Krissthesexyatheist
Gideon Jagged
Ravens n’ Pennies
♥ Books, Crafts & Pretty Things
One Furious Llama
Left Hemispheres
Lousy Canuck
Virginian Opinions
Vikram Roy’s Blog
Millie Ho
Dexterity Unlimited
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Fractal of the Midweek: MandelBug
All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2012 Troy Loy
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Joe Nickell – Why Investigate the Paranormal | For Good Reason
The “Modern Sherlock Holmes” tells about his varied background, how he got to be the world’s foremost expert field investigator of the paranormal and supernatural, and why he doesn’t merely ‘debunk.’
Courtesy of JamesRandiFoundation‘s YouTube channel
