Henri 5, “The Worst Noël”

The Weekly Gnuz & Lynx Roundup for 12/29/2012

Srinivasa Ramanujan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This week, my family was able to see The Hobbit on Christmas Eve, or this Newtonmas, or Festivus, or Saturnalia, or Yule, or whatever else your favorite holiday this year would be… The kitties are doing well, and I’ve been poking around a bit online for tidbits of information, like research on the ancient Indian Gupta empire and its leading intellectual achievers, particularly the astronomer and mathematician Aryabhata, who is said to have invented the concept of zero and hypothesized that the Earth went around the Sun. Here’s hoping that you are all snug and warm, with lots of cool things to do. ^(;,,;)^

——————–Bloggy Lynx——————-

• Merry Newtonmas, My Awesome Peeps
• The Ubiquity of Belief: On the Outside, Looking In — A Skeptic’s Perspective
• Pale Blue Dot — Animation
• Coalition Building for the Skeptical Activist — TAM 2012
• The Face of Creation — Higgs remix
• Post Hoc Reasoning, Special Pleading and Ad Hoc Hypotheses
• Fractals of the Week: Mad, Mad Mandelbulbs for the Call’s 4th Bloggoversary
• Review of New CPAP Mask
• Follow @IndigenousX – 10K Followers in 5 Days for a Donation to the Indigenous Literacy Fund
• OBLIGATORY END OF THE YEAR LIST!

——————–Sciencey Gnuz & Lynx——————–

• Video: Are You a Psychopath? Take the Test …If you have to ask, the answer might not be pretty.
• Investigators fear Big Cats could be dying out in Scotland See the immediately following link too.
• Tetrapod Zoology: British big cats — How good, or bad, is the evidence?
• Remembering Ramanujan: India Celebrates its Famous Mathematical Son
• The Top 10 Science Stories of 2012
• The Poisoned Debates Between Science, Politics, & Religion This got my attention.
• Amazing Photos of Florida Panther and Cubs Bring a Bright Spot to a Deadly Year Yes, moar kittehs!
• Top five retracted science stories of 2012 For a change, I’d like to see the the top five retracted ideological claims!

——————–Strange Gnuz & Lynx——————–

• Man Takes all Day to Create Massive Snow Patterns Yes, human artists can make patterns this complex, no need for aliens or ‘snowing devils’. Beautiful work these are.
• Total Hooey: The Strangest Non-Stories of 2012
• Mountains of Madness: Scientists Poised to Drill Through Antarctic Ice and Into Gothic Horror
• Jury Awards 100 Million in Wrongful Death Suit to Parents of Misty Horner What’s the Harm? This is. Nuff said.
• Psychic Predictions for 2013 Watch all of the reasonably specific ones fail, just like this year’s.
• Britain is well-prepared to fight an apocalyptic zombie invasion Cool!
• PSYCHIC FAIL: The 2012 predictions that just never happened
• 4th Narconon Closure: Scientology Rehabs Collapsing This surprises me not. Scientology’s had this coming for a while.

——————–Bloggy Stats———————

• 120,423 steely gazes cast,
• 1667 comments approved,
• 1940 posts published, including this one,
• 179 WordPress subscribers,
• 1887 Twitter fellows,
• 13 on Facebook,
• 213 Tumblr fellows,

Lawrence Krauss: Our Godless Universe is Precious

Related articles

• Indian math genius Ramanujan’s theory finally proved right (firstpost.com)

Fractals of the Week: Mad, Mad Mandelbulbs for the Call’s 4th Bloggoversary

G’day….This week I had completely forgotten that this day marks the fourth year of this blog, originally founded in December 28 of 2008. This is really my third blog, with the first a WordPress site titled Troythulu’s Log, now extinct, and this site’s closer in time Blogger sister site The Collect Call of Troythulu. This site does predate I am Troythulu, but not by much. It’s been a long, wild ride, and I hope it gets wilder still. Thank you all who’ve motivated, corrected, admonished, and inspired me this whole time. There was much fooling with MB3D during this week and last, and here are some results of that bit of fractal lunacy, with a couple of wallpapers at the bottom for good measure. Despite the occasional slow rendering time, this app is incredibly rewarding.

Thank you, and enjoy the coming year!

Atop the Mountains Shorn

Crucible Blu

Atop Blood Mountain

Crucible Frost

Crucible Red

Crucible Electrum

All JPEG, PNG & GIF images in this post are original works by the author,created by

way of XaoS, Mandelbulber or Fractal Domains, and are copyright 2012 by Troy Loy.

Related articles

• Fractal Collection by Nicole Tomazi (mocoloco.com)
• What Are Fractals? (theepochtimes.com)
• Matt Parker’s Fractal Christmas Tree (aperiodical.com)
• For the Final Friday Fractal Feature… of 2012 (buddhakat.wordpress.com)

Post Hoc Reasoning, Special Pleading, and Ad Hoc Hypotheses

The powers of the paranormal, if they exist, cannot be very great if they are so easily thwarted by mere doubt. It seems as though, in the world of supernatural claims, doubt is the strongest magic of all. It can cancel anything, except science, which actually needs it to work. At least, this is the impression I get from the claims of paranormal believers when attempts to replicate initially successful parapsychology studies fail. And fail they have once the controls of the initial study are improved, reducing statistical significance closer to chance levels and shrinking effect-size to zero.

It seems to me that even with perfect methodology there would still be a chance for false-positive results, and that what these studies show is not what they are claimed to — only that something other than chance may be at work, and giving no indication of what that may actually be. It could be due to poor experimental design, inappropriate use of statistics, errors in reasoning, bad data collection, and rarely, but often enough to taint the entire field of study, fraud.

One thing never fails, though, and that’s the rationalizations offered for this failure to replicate. This post deals with a species of error in reasoning: Special Pleading, the Post Hoc [after this, or "after the fact"]fallacy, or Ad Hoc [for this (only)]hypothesis, and sometimes just “covering your ass by making shit up.” I also aim to show that it is not always a fallacy under the right circumstances.

This fallacy, regardless of its name, is an attempt to rescue a claim from disproof by inventing special reasons why it should be exempt from the usual standards of evidence, to deflect criticism without demonstrating that these alleged reasons are in fact true or actually exist apart from the claim they attempt to defend. Every attempt has been made to boil the following examples of its use down to their essence and to avoid committing straw-persons:

Psi phenomena are shy, or jealous. They do not work in the presence of skeptics. Skeptical doubt cancels them.

What about this one?

Successful replications do occur, but the doubt of skeptics reading the journals they are published in reaches back through time, retroactively changing the experiment and causing it to fail.

Or…

Psi is elusive and a delicate phenomenon. Imposing excessively strict controls (read: adequate ones) in a study impedes Psi’s natural functioning in a sterile laboratory setting.

What I find interesting about this sort of reasoning in its fallacious form is that it is considered acceptable in some circles.

Never mind that many of the replications are attempted by other believers and by those without an apparent bias against the paranormal, and another such rationalization goes something like:

They (believers or neutral parties who don’t get results) are burdened with a repressed skepticism that causes their replication attempts to fail, no matter what belief or neutrality they claim to have. These hidden attitudes unconsciously sabotage their efforts.

Never mind the fact that this argument is made on the basis of mere supposition and absent the use of a valid psychological test. Those who reason thus are essentially claiming to be able to read minds, the very thing that some of these replication attempts have failed to demonstrate.

This phenomenon, the success of some to get positive results in their studies and others to get negative results based on their belief systems, is in parapsychology known variously as the Shyness Effect, the Wiseman Effect, or, in a form broadly applying to any field of science where attitudes may unconsciously influence results, the Experimenter Effect, or Observer-expectancy effect, and this is one of the reasons for double-blinding studies and other forms of experimental controls.

A good example was a series of medical studies for a procedure known as the portacaval shunt, and in the analysis of these studies, it was discovered that those who were more enthusiastic about the procedure tended to get false-positive results more often than those not so inclined. And this was from a study assessing an experimental surgical method, not magic mind-powers.

Above were some examples of this form of argument used as a fallacy, but are Ad Hoc hypotheses always and everywhere bad reasoning?

Fortunately, no.

This can be a perfectly good way of reasoning, as long as at least one of the following conditions is met:

• The reason for failure to demonstrate something has already been shown, or can be, to exist independently of the hypothesis it is used to support. There must be valid evidence that it is true and relevant as a viable supporting reason.
• The Ad Hoc hypothesis is both interesting and fruitful in predicting new phenomena that could in principle be tested even without being true or existing itself. The key point is that it must be testable, whether by verification or falsification if a general or a particular claim.
• The Post Hoc reasoning is used to invent new and creative ways to test a claim, and as long as it is used to further inquiry and not merely to thwart the goal of critical reasoning by making up silly excuses as needed.

A good example of an Ad Hoc hypothesis that was both interesting and fruitful was Einstein’s addition to General relativity of the Cosmological Constant, which though he later rejected it and called it his “greatest blunder” has shown to be useful today in the concept of Dark Energy to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe. Another would be the the Lorentz contraction offered to explain the failure of the  Michelson-Morley experiment to detect the Earth’s motion through the Ether, later incorporated into Einstein’s Special relativity.

One thing to note about many forms of argument used as fallacies:

Philosophers and communications specialists may differ on this, but informal fallacies are not so much violations of argument form as they are violations of argument procedure, as attempts to subvert the rules and goals of constructive argument and critical discussion. In this sense, they are abused, often out of ignorance but sometimes out of intellectual dishonesty, as rhetorical devices masking themselves as cogent arguments when they are not. For ethical, productive argumentation, try to keep this in mind and avoid this yourself whenever possible. Happy debating.

Related articles

• The Power of Confirmation Bias (theness.com)
• 15 Bad Arguments We All Abuse (listverse.com)
• Logical Fallacies (comppost.wordpress.com)

“The Face of Creation” — Higgs Remix