"the truth shall make you horribly depressed"

Over on Panda's Thumb, Matt Inlay asks, "What's the difference between hope and wishful thinking?" To the pessimist, the answer is, "What difference?"

I've just finished Errol Morris's outstanding meditation--or is it Robert McNamara's disturbing meditation?--The Fog of War, which, over at The New York Observer, Ron Rosenbaum calls "...a classic of informed, foundational, epistemological pessimism." (More on Morris's documentary later.)

Rosenbaum decries our supposed "progress," but hastens to add,

Pessimism, it should be noted, doesn’t mean not trying to stop genocides: pessimism means genocides are unlikely to stop. Pessimism doesn’t mean passive-ism or pacifism; it can mean the opposite. It can mean the kind of preventive intervention in genocidal situations that comes from expecting the worst, not hoping for the best. Pessimism at its best is watchful skepticism.

It reminds me of Popper's distinction between utopianism and "tinkering" improvement in The Open Society. The former fails because of its historicist (and non-empirical) optimism; the latter may succeed because of its unrelenting lack of faith in the inevitability of progress.

Rosenbaum closes his comments on pessimism by referring to the videotaped beheading of Nick Berg (which I choose not to link to), which he claims is evidence of the double-edged sword of "progress."

But in some ways, I think I’ve resisted watching the beheading because to watch would be to lose the last shreds of optimism left in this pessimist’s soul. Pessimists don’t like being pessimists. We don’t need any more evidence for our point of view. We’ve got enough reasons to curse the darkness to last a lifetime.

Okay, back to vacationeering. The sun's out--and I'm too cheery, and too optimistic, to think like a pessimist for now.

hasta pronto

So I'm off to see the brother graduate; gone for the weekend, all of it. Blogging'll be light, if it happens at all. Meanwhile, check out some other worthy websites:

panda's thumb

pharyngula

mere orthodoxy

You're on your own. Don't do anything your psychiatrist didn't prescribe.

vermiscripters beware

Over on Slate, Steven E. Landsburg applies a cost-benefit analysis to this prickly question: Should we execute the "worms who write worms?"

His answer, after a little (admittedly rough) mathematical jiggery-hoo, is an unequivocal "you betcha."

So, virus authors, worm writers, password stealers, and trojan inflicters, watch your back. Sheriff Landsburg's got a long lasso and a short temper.

keep digging, Watson

At Eminence High School in Morgan County, Indiana, they like their crap piled higher and deeper. Twelve students are suspected of dumping manure all over school grounds, enough that a front loader had to be brought in to carry it all away. From Morgan County's resident Sherlock Holmeses:

Eminence High School has a 40-member senior class. Because "2004" was painted on the grass and parking lot, officials believed they could narrow the field of suspects.

In the grand tradition of "punish everyone, not just the guilty," which is often modus operandi* for school administrators, the senior trip (to the Indianapolis Zoo) has been canceled.

This is hardly creative, or smart, punishment. As a teacher, I try as much as possible to discipline according to "natural consequences"--i.e., you clean up your own mess-- which in this case wasn't possible due to immediate health concerns.

My suggestion: don't cancel the trip to the zoo. Let all forty seniors go, and let the ten asses who trashed the place help clean up after Kubwa, Tombi, or any of the other elephants.

[hat tip to the obscure store]

*Whooee! More Latin!

mens pulchrum

My brother is graduating this weekend, and I'll be flying to Los Angeles to witness and celebrate. Somehow, amid all the madness of finals and projects, while maintaining a semblance of a social life, he manages to find time to blog, along with other like-minded "classically educated, conservatively oriented Christian guys" over at mere orthodoxy. Even when I disagree, I'm intrigued.

My only wish is that they'd find time to blog even more. Social life is overrated.



(And no, I don't speak, read, or write a word of Latin, beyond mea culpa, which I use all too often.)

consciousness-raising

Over at Reason, Jesse Walker revisits the sad tale of David Reimer, a tragedy of pseudoscience gone awry.

I first learned of intersexuality when the Discovery Channel ran Is it a Boy or a Girl?, a rare sort of documentary combining a sympathetic perspective, scientific analysis, and matter-of-fact presentation. Before then, I assumed that girls and boys came in distinct, pink or blue packages. (I should have known better; when I was a wee infant, despite my mother's attempts to dress me in blue, manly attire, women would often remark on what a pretty little girl I was.)

According to Susan Glen, the documentary doesn't say enough. In her view, the Discovery Channel, trying to present both sides, ends up with nothing truly profound to say.

It's as though the film recognizes the rights of intersexed people to tell their stories, but it won't go so far as to validate those stories by challenging medical spokespersons.

This might be because Is It a Boy or a Girl? is part of the Discovery Channel's series on health and alternative medicine, but it's a little like leaving a quarter for a tip -- more insulting than not leaving a tip at all. And so, while this film could present some radical and revolutionary ideas, it doesn't: it could suggest that some people are both male and female, or neither male nor female; that the binary gender system is flawed and counterproductive; that the idea of forcing gendered conformity is unhealthy, naive, and antediluvian; that intersexuality is perhaps a more refined, sophisticated set of genders.

As a naive, binary sort of thinker, I might never have known intersexuality existed if I hadn't seen the program. To use a different cliche: at times, half a loaf suffices, if only just so.

"I've been ready for this my whole life."

A while ago, I mentioned that I'm on our school district's RIF list, and am cautiously optimistic that I'll be hired back. Yesterday's school paper (and yes, I wish there was an online edition so I could link to it) carried a two-page article on the situation, wherein yours truly uttered a particularly dorky quote:

It all falls down to how long are teachers willing to sit around and wait [sic]. A better question might be, how long can they afford to?

"Just put me in, coach," said Anderson. "I don't want to ride the bench."

And thanks, Outlook, for making me sound like Rudy Ruettiger.

fear itself

Richard B. Hoppe, over on Panda's Thumb, argues that evangelical fundamentalists promote "equal time" for Intelligent Design out of fear:

Not fear for themselves — they are too strong in their faith to be corrupted by evolutionary science. It is fear for their children and in particular, fear for their children’s souls. There is a genuine belief that accepting an evolutionary view of biological phenomena is a giant step on the road to atheism, and in learning evolutionary theory their children are in peril of losing salvation. Given the beliefs they hold, this is not a silly fear. From their perspective, atheism is a deadly threat, and evolution is a door through which that threat can enter to corrupt one’s child. No amount of scientific research, no citations of scientific studies, no detailed criticism of the Wellsian trash science offered in “teach the controversy” proposals, speaks to those fears. If one genuinely fears that learning evolution will corrupt one’s children and damn them for eternity, scientific reasoning is wholly irrelevant.

I can attest to this from personal experience, not only from when I came out of the theological closet and announced agnosticism to nervous parents, but long before that.

When I was in high school, a creationist group approached the administration with the plan to hold lectures on Intelligent Design. I attended the heated school board meeting, in which, despite threats (real or imagined) of an ACLU lawsuit, it was decided that the presentations could be held on school property, but not during school hours. At the time, I was completely oblivious to the larger political, social, or educational issues--but it was clear, to my then-Christian mind, that this was a triumph.

So much for my personal, historical perspective.

I disagree that scientific reasoning is "wholly irrelevant"--otherwise, creationists* wouldn't labor so hard to obfuscate, misrepresent, and distort the facts, constantly appealing to science when it, out of context, is in agreement with their position. People look up to scientists and respect scientific pronouncements.

I agree that fear is a strong motivating factor. But there's another angle.

Simplified creationist presentations, in their gee-whiz fashion, constantly equate ignorance and wonder. They'll say, "We don't know how the woodpecker could possibly evolve--isn't it amazing? Your body is an assortment of trillions of irreducibly complex machines--aren't you special?"

Wonder, as I'm sure even most ID-touting theorists would agree, isn't the exclusive province of the baffled.

Ultimately, we are here. No matter how we got here, that's reason enough to be amazed.




*I might be accused of conflating different strands of creationism--but I'm referring specificially to those who use ID as a prop for Christian apologetics.

classical music is dead, part xvii

Kudos to the little sister, who made this older brother's chest swell with pride as she deftly handled Mendelssohn alongside a local symphony orchestra. Much like the other concerto competition winners, she far outshined that collection of gasbags, sawhounds, and thimblefingers. I exaggerate only slightly.

One of my fellow concert attendees, a woman I know and respect, remarked, "The county is so full of musical talent!" Which is true, to a point, since most of it leaves the county upon high school graduation.

pass me a barrel and a paper bag

Girlfriend, right now, is plodding through a stack of essays, stories, cartoons, and assorted literary tidbits from my high school days. What's mostly leading to her amusement makes me think of other things:

1. I had such neat handwriting!

2. I was a bad--no, atrocious--writer in high school, not because I couldn't parse a sentence or pick through a thesaurus, but because I didn't have any real sense of the language--no feel for verbs, no intimacy with nouns. I was all adjectives and adverbs.

3. My students, bless their hearts, will improve, long after their days in my class have drifted away from their memories like dandelion seeds a-blowin' in the wind.

Maybe I'll post some of my old poems. And whatever other humiliating things I can dredge up.

lobotomized weasels

A sharp caveat to English teachers everywhere--which, if you didn't know, includes me--from Crispin Sartwell. As a colleague of mine puts it, this is what happens when we value institutions over people:

In Indiana this year, the junior-year English essay will be graded by computer, and similar experiments have been tried in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Oregon. The SAT and the ACT are planning to test the new computer-grading software as well.

At least our beleaguered test, the WASL, is still graded by humanoids.

[brought to you by hit and run]

pour out a little wrath

This is bad, bad, bad. The alleged crime: a thirty-one-year-old gets a faceful of french-fry oil from his teenage girlfriend in a spat over a Bible verse.

One has to wonder which particular verse led to such a violent outburst. Could it have been Matthew 5:39?


[thanks to Jim Romenesko's obscure store]

but wait... there's more!

Just when you thought you'd seen everything, along comes The Final Theory, which claims to debunk relativity, quantum mechanics, gravitational theory, magnetic field theory, the Big Bang, dark energy, and just about every other concept in physics.

Had enough of warped space-time, dark matter, time dilation,
dark energy, quantum mysteries, etc? Free yourself from these misconceptions and finally understand the simple, common-sense universe that we inhabit. See the truth for yourself .. read the free first chapter of the new book, The Final Theory, and start to open your eyes to the proper understanding of our world.

I can envisage the red suspenders, the top button unbuttoned, the sleeves rolled up, the crappy British accent. Infomercial science, oh yeah.

nerd!

Friday afternoons, Newscientist shows up in my mailbox. How did I ever live without the $51 annual subscription? Such insight, such droll humor, such British charm. Popular Science, eatcherheartout.

she blinded me with science

I decided to move this to a fresh posting, expanding on the original, because at 1800 words and counting, it was just getting too interesting to keep scrolling through comments.

First, let’s clarify what “science” doesn’t do.

“Science” does not define away intelligent causation—and neither does methodological naturalism; let’s not conflate concepts. MN ignores supernatural causation, a different beast entirely—insofar as intelligent and natural causes align, no problem.

There is disagreement among naturalists as to whether science depends on MN. Tom Clark argues that it doesn't—and that ID is bad science, no matter what its philosophical foundations. Most of the criticisms leveled at ID have little to do with philosophy, but with hypotheses, predictions, experiments, and the other nuts-and-bolts of the scientific method.

On the other hand, Steven Schafersman argues that MN is indispensable to science—but that science came before MN, and not the other way ‘round. He also carefully delineates the difference between MN and ON, and what the former doesn’t reduce to the latter, especially not in practical experience. (I’d quote him, but his site specifically asks not to.)

I’ll ask the rhetorical question: which has had more success in explaining the universe: the appeal to ignorance (we don’t know, but we will someday) or the appeal to divinity (God did it, I believe it, that settles it?) Should we return to the Scholastic perspective—that we already know everything there is to know, and our job is to categorize and record it? Or do we take the more honest epistemological position, that we don’t know, but we’ve expanded our knowledge vastly, even in the last half-century, so let’s keep trying?

ID proponents have the same optimism about their own research program—five years, let the federal largesse roll in, and let’s see what happens—but the question, obviously, is which optimism is best supported by the evidence.

(As for Dembski’s misuse of the NFL theorems, this summary, by Mark Perakh, mentions that the most stringent (and unrefuted) criticism comes from David Wolpert, a co-originator of those very theorems.)

I'm interested in this contention (again, from the comments on the last post):

However, the arguments for irreducible complexity and specified complexity don't depend on any one gap--rather, they just argue that no matter how much we know, there is a necessary explanatory gap. God might not be the direct cause of the complexity, but at some point the complexity can only be explained on a theistic hypothesis.

If God is not the "direct cause," then who or what is, and what does that really mean? Wouldn't that be a deistic, not a theistic, hypothesis?

It is possible, I grant, that MN advocates are keeping ID out of science because of prejudice. But with Behe’s and Dembski’s track record of distortion and misrepresentation of other scientists’ work, and with their own discredited arguments, it is more probable that what they are practicing is merely bad science. It fails not on a philosophical, but on a practical level. It just doesn’t work. ID as a position may be tenable, but that hasn’t been shown yet.

As a side note, I'm reading some articles by Wells and Dembski over at ISCID, and will have comments up soon.

[Update: fixed broken links. Apparently, pasting from Microsoft Word doesn't work, because blogger doesn't recognize slanty quote marks. *sigh.*]

none dare call it conspiracy

Over on Panda's Thumb, John M. Lynch delves into the process of publishing in an ID journal, and finds it lacking. As Lynch notes:

Indeed, equally as noticable [sic] is that the papers published offer no new biological data or experiments. Frankly, even if the peer-reviewing process is stringent, no attempt is being made to provide and test explicit design hypotheses within the biological realm.

More on this in the future.

physics is even stranger than that

Brukner, Taylor, Cheung and Vedral, of London's Imperial College, mathematically demonstrate that quantum entanglement in time is possibly just as real as entanglement in space. They even posit that while quantum nonlocality is "monogamous"--i.e., one particle in space is entangled only with one other particle--temporal entanglement can be "polygamous." In their words:

...two maximally entangled events can still be maximally entangled to two other events in time.... [I]t may be an indication that we need a deeper theory... [I]t appears that the next step should lie in exploring the consequences of combining entanglement in space and time in order to study how they relate to each other.

Apparently, one possible practical application would be to use temporal entanglement to boost the efficiency of RAM. Weird, weird, weird.

(This is also a shout-out to arxiv.org, a free resource from Cornell University wherein you can examine hundreds of papers from many major scientific fields. Check it out.)

[Adobe Acrobat Reader required]

lighten up already

Tim Kurkjian sends us to baseball's funny farm. My favorite quote, a la Earl Weaver:

Many years ago, one of Weaver's outfielders, Pat Kelly, decided that he was going to begin studying for the ministry and stated to Weaver, "Earl, I'm going to walk with the Lord." To which, Weaver said, "I'd rather you walked with the bases loaded."

physics is strange, when you're a stranger

From Newscientist, a report that "dark energy," the mysterious repulsive force that is accelerating the expansion of the universe, has "once and for all" been confirmed as real.

But what actually is dark energy? The new measurements are consistent with a kind of dark energy that is not changing very much with time. That could be an energy inherent to empty space, Einstein's "cosmological constant".

But the constraints are not tight, leaving numerous alternatives. These include a kind of weakening dark energy field called quintessence. Another option is a kind of energy that is getting more intense, which could eventually become so powerful that it tears everything apart, even atoms.

To the non-physicist layperson (which means "me"), it's phrases like "the energy inherent in empty space" that boggle the mind. How can something empty also contain energy? And don't get me started on quantum entanglement--I've been listening to Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos and it's still tough to wrap my literalist brain around what Einstein himself didn't want to believe.

Now, if physicists could only figure out what causes the accelerating expansion of the American waistline.

now that's dedication

Teachers, one routinely hears, go the extra-extra mile, putting up with low pay, bratty kids, unsympathetic parents, lousy administrators, faulty air conditioners, broken desks, blah blah blah. Yes, we're heroes, walking high above the world in golden boots.

But this takes the cake, slices it, and serves it on a silver platter.

Police say Seaman then returned to the rambling Tudor in the Ramblewood subdivision. She walked into the kitchen and slammed the ax into her husband's head.

Then she dragged her husband's body a short distance into the attached garage and began stabbing him with a knife and smashing him with a sledgehammer, police said.

The next day, Seaman taught her fourth-grade class, and then stopped at Home Depot a second time for cleaning materials to wipe up the mess, police said.

Because it's all about the children.

[thanks to the ever-entertaining obscure store]