think deviant - philosophy of science

a title goes here

2010-10-14T11:31:00.000-04:00

[I apologize for the whole "no posts last week" thing. I've been busy. I'll be back soon, I promise.]

women's intuition

2010-10-03T10:58:00.000-04:00

According to a recent study, there may really be such a thing as women's intuition, but it isn't what we might have thought. Instead, it could help explain why there are so few women in academic philosophy.

The study (via Leiter) is by Wesley Buckwalter (CUNY) and Stephen Stich (Rutgers).

The paper presents a series of gender-differentiated intuitions from common philosophical thought experiments. Not every thought experiment produces a statistically significant gender difference, but in those that do, the effect is marked.

The authors argue for the strong conclusion that this gender difference in intuitions about thought experiments is implicated in the gender difference in academic philosophy. (They are clear that this is not the only cause.)

Consider the predicament of a young woman in a philosophy class, who (like 71% - 75% of women in the Starmans & Friedman study) does not find it obvious that the characters in Gettier vignettes do not have knowledge of the relevant proposition. Rather, her intuitions tell her that the Gettier characters do have knowledge, though her instructor, whether male or female, as well as a high percentage of her male classmates, clearly think she is mistaken. Different women will, of course, react to a situation like this in different ways. But it is plausible to suppose that some women facing this predicament will be puzzled or confused or uncomfortable or angry or just plain bored. Some women may become convinced that they aren’t any good at philosophy, since they do not have the intuitions that their professors and their male classmates insist are correct. If the experience engenders one or more of these alienating effects, a female student may be less likely to take another philosophy course than a male classmate who (like 59% - 64% of the men in the Starmans & Friedman study) has the “standard” intuitions that their instructor shares. That male student, unlike the majority of his female classmates, can actively participate in, and perhaps enjoy, the project of hunting for a theory that captures “our” intuitions.

It is enough to convince me that I should be careful in presenting thought experiments as evidence, since my intuitions won't predict those of other people. (It's likely that gender isn't the only bias in the "received" interpretation of thought experiments. See this post.)

the 27th letter of the alphabet

2010-10-02T12:42:00.000-04:00

Geoff Pullum of Language Log writes that "one of the very worst things about the English writing system ... is that it very clearly employs 27 letters in the spelling of words but there is a huge and long-standing conspiracy to market it as having only 26." He explains:

One of the worst things about the forgotten letter is that it never stands for a sound in native English words. Indeed, it could be argued that it never appears as a letter within the plain form of any lexeme, and never occurs initially in any word in modern English. But it does appear as the first letter of the two-letter genitive singular suffix of regular nouns; as the second letter of the two-letter genitive plural suffix; as the middle of the three letters that spell the suffix identifying the negative form of auxiliary verbs; as the first letter in the written clitic forms of am, are, had, has, have, is, will, and would; and it has miscellaneous other uses. But though obligatory where it occurs, it never corresponds to any sound in native words.

If you're still confused, read the whole thing!

CFP: “The Regimen of Bodily Health: Nourishment and Natural Knowledge”

2010-10-02T00:36:00.000-04:00

I'm very excited that Steven Shapin is the keynote speaker at my department's grad conference! (Great job organizing, Jai!) See below for the call for papers.

CALL FOR PAPERS

“The Regimen of Bodily Health: Nourishment and Natural Knowledge”

HAPSAT 7^th Annual Conference

“The body” as both a material object and metaphor, provides a rich source of inspiration for both philosophical and historical studies of the production and transmission of knowledge. Lawrence and Shapin’s influential anthology, Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge (1998) broke new ground in this area with discussions of bodies as tools for philosophical inquiry, what it means for knowledge to be “embodied” in physical artifacts, and how bodily self-presentation can generate disembodied knowledge. The body also presents an arena for interplay of ideas about proper management of health and diseases and the application of scientific and medical expertise. Seventeenth century physicians, for instance, recommended a mixture of medicine and dietetics for consumptive patients; proper dietary regimes were often based on theoretical ideas about nourishment and health. Moreover, the body and our ideas of the body have been a political battleground: within the “culture of dissection” and public executions; as displays of ecclesiastical value and status; as technologically manipulable aspects of the self; as and as subjects of experimental philosophy.

On Friday March 18, 2011, HAPSAT, the Graduate Student Society at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, will host its seventh annual conference, The Regimen of Bodily Health: Nourishment and Natural Knowledge.

This year’s distinguished keynote is Steven Shapin (Dept. Of History of Science, Harvard University): “The Long History of Dietetics: Thinking about Food, Expertise, and the Self.” The keynote is jointly hosted by HAPSAT and the IHPST Colloquium Series.

We invite graduate students and recent graduates working in fields such as HPS, STS, history, sociology, philosophy, public health, anthropology, gender studies, and law, to submit paper and panel proposals that critically engage with this theme. For papers please email abstracts of up to 250 words to HAPSAT@gmail.com by December 1, 2010. For panels, please email a document with a 250 word abstract describing the panel as a whole in addition to individual abstracts for each paper (also 250 words). Each presenter will be given 20 minutes.

We welcome papers addressing, but not limited to, the following questions:

What is the relationship between embodied lives and disembodied knowledge?
How have health regimes influenced historical or philosophical ideas about the body?
Do philosophical ideas about the nature of the self, identity, and human agency affect society’s treatment of bodies?
To what extent have technologies of the body influenced science in practice (e.g. technologies of blood transfusion)?
How are food, bodies, and personal and institutional authority related within the modern medical establishment?
What is the relationship between personal appearance and epistemic authority?
How have ideas about the degenerate body (e.g. monsters, deformity, disease) been shaped by cultural or social beliefs?
How do different modes of food production and consumption affect the political relationships between bodies?
What sorts of new political relationships, and political philosophies, are likely to arise if technological advancement makes the transhumanist dream a reality?

We hope to be able to offer billeting and small travel subsides for graduate students travelling to Toronto for the conference.

For more information, visit the conference website (to be updated shortly). The pdf poster is also available.

How to steer a hurricane

2010-10-01T15:39:00.001-04:00

Duncan Geere of Wired describes how "microscopic plants less than half a centimeter across may be able to change the paths of 300-mile-wide tropical storms, due to their ability to change the color of the surface of the sea."

what is creativity?

2010-09-30T14:31:00.001-04:00

Steven Johnson argues that good ideas come from coffee shops. The basic idea seems to be that the kind of free-flowing discussion that happens in coffee shops is particularly conducive to the articulation of new ideas. I think that's right. More ideas come to fruition when people interact casually than when people sit alone in armchairs, and more (good) ideas come to fruition under the influence of caffeine than alcohol. But I suspect coffee shops are conducive to particular kinds of creativity -- especially combinatorial creativity or negation (pubs might be even more conducive to negation. Alcohol seems to fuel contrarians).

So what are some other forms of creativity?

Johnson describes one more, the "long hunch," where the glimmerings of an idea are not yet fully articulated. Often, he says, what's needed is to connect up a number of half-ideas together into one good idea. So the "long hunch" is just a slow drip form of coffee shop creativity. Not really a new kind at all. But Johnson's explanation of the "long hunch" isn't satisfying to me. I think something else is going on.

John Wilkins, who has clearly thought more about this than I have, suggests a candidate, what he calls deep novelty. First, some preliminaries:

we have a frame of prior contrasts in which we typically (and traditionally, since these are inherited from teachers and other cultural influences) set up our problems and thoughts.

Wilkins pictures these contrasts as dimensions in a space of possibilities, explaining that

If you think that God may or may not exist, for example, then believing God does exist is to assert a coordinate in a binary space. If you think God’s existence is a matter of confidence or likelihood, then you settle on (if you do) a coordinate on a continuum.

On this view, coffee shop creativity involves mixing up or applying contrasts in new ways. But there are clear limits to this kind of creativity. "Our semantic world is the sum of all the contrastive axes of that space," which means that it simply isn't possible to express any idea that doesn't fall into the existing contrastive spaces.

To be clear, "our beliefs at any time are the coordinates we assert," and the possible beliefs we have the tools to understand are limited to the sum of the contrastive axes. Anything inside this space will be the combination, permutation, or negation of something pre-existing.

But there's another kind of creativity: "something is deeply novel if an entirely new contrast is added to the space."

I think this is a much better way to understand what's going on with a "slow hunch." To use Johnson's example, Darwin may have had all of the pieces to evolution, but he wasn't able to articulate how they fit together because he didn't yet have the relevant contrast. Once he had the contrastive structure in place, he could fit all the pieces together.

There's one emendation I'd make to Wilkins' account: it's also possible to stretch, shrink, or otherwise reshape existing contrasts. A mundane example of this happened when I moved from the United States to Canada and saw the political spectrum to the left suddenly unfurl and go for ~~miles and miles~~ kilometres and kilometres.

The remaining question (perhaps for cognitive scientists?) is how we come to have new contrasts.

In my dissertation (which is mostly about other things), I suggest that novel contrasts sometimes come about in the development of new scientific instruments. It's a complicated story, but the basic idea is that instrument design puts our conceptual understanding of the functioning of the instrument into conversation with its actual material capacities. We reshape both our ideas and the material instrument with the intention of producing an acceptable degree of agreement between concept and material. We're then able to use the instrument to provide evidence for scientific explanations. And scientific explanations consist in the selection of one state of affairs from a specified set of possible states of affairs (a contrast class).

One day soon, I hope to have the semantic space to explain that more clearly.

a case study in why explaining anything is hard

2010-09-30T12:33:00.000-04:00

From Abstruse Goose:

perspective

2010-09-29T20:05:00.000-04:00

Dear Mom,

I plan to beat this average.

Love,

Your Son

(The longest doctoral program in the nation is the music program at Washington University in St. Louis, with a median length of 16.3 years, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

The link is here. Via Marginal Revolution.

fermi paradox

2010-09-29T10:48:00.002-04:00

SMBC gets it right again:
:

Science journalism how-to

2010-09-28T11:13:00.000-04:00

Last month, I wrote about misusing quantum mechanics.

Martin Robbins has taken it to the next level:

This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like "the scientists say" to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist.

In this paragraph I will state in which journal the research will be published. I won't provide a link because either a) the concept of adding links to web pages is alien to the editors, b) I can't be bothered, or c) the journal inexplicably set the embargo on the press release to expire before the paper was actually published.

"Basically, this is a brief soundbite," the scientist will say, from a department and university that I will give brief credit to. "The existing science is a bit dodgy, whereas my conclusion seems bang on," she or he will continue.

Hat tip to loyal reader ZM.

Whoa.

2010-09-28T09:29:00.000-04:00

via Swansontea:

on invoking the right to remain silent

2010-09-27T10:05:00.000-04:00

From Language Log:

In the recent case of Berghuis v. Thompkins the U.S. Supreme Court ruled five to four that persons being interviewed by the police are required to articulate their answers to the Miranda warning that they have the right to remain silent.

This is certainly contrary to my intuition. If someone tells me I have the right to remain silent, I would assume that remaining silent is enough.

Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, opined that Thompkins' mere silence in the face of questioning was not a clear and unambiguous invocation of his right to remain silent.

From the point of view of the questioning officer, requiring an explicit invocation of a right removes ambiguity. But how should suspects be informed that this is the case?

For the record,

Justice Sotomayer wrote the dissenting opinion, saying (1) that it is counterintuitive for defendants to speak after they are told they have the right to remain silent, (2) that in such cases detectives should presume that the suspects have invoked their rights to silence when they remain silent for almost three hours of questioning [as in this specific case], and (3), citing Miranda: "…the fact that an individual eventually made a statement is consistent with the conclusion that the compelling influence of the interrogation finally forced him to do so. It is inconsistent with any notion of a voluntary relinquishment of the privilege."

Vaccines don't cause autism

2010-09-26T10:45:00.000-04:00

In case anyone needs a reminder: vaccines do not cause autism.

The final two groups that were studied consisted of 256 children with ASD [autism spectrum disorders] and 752 matched controls. One very interesting aspect that looks as though it were almost certainly placed into the experimental design based on concerns of anti-vaccine advocates like Sallie Bernard is a group of children who underwent regression. Basically, the study examined whether there was a correlation between ASD and TCV [thimerosal-containing vaccines, i.e. mercury-containing vaccines] exposure. It also examined two subsets of ASD, autistic disorder (AD) and ASD with regression, looking for any indication whether TCVs were associated with any of them. Regression was defined as: "the subset of case-children with ASD who reported loss of previously acquired language skills after acquisition."

So what did the investigators find? I think you probably know the answer to that question. They found nothing. Nada. Zip. There wasn't even a hint of a correlation between TCV exposure and either ASD, AD, or ASD with regression: "There were no findings of increased risk for any of the 3 ASD outcomes. The adjusted odds ratios (95% confidence intervals) for ASD associated with a 2-SD increase in ethylmercury exposure were 1.12 (0.83-1.51) for prenatal exposure, 0.88 (0.62-1.26) for exposure from birth to 1 month, 0.60 (0.36-0.99) for exposure from birth to 7 months, and 0.60 (0.32- 0.97) for exposure from birth to 20 months."

(via Kottke)

The best magazine articles

2010-09-25T10:56:00.001-04:00

Kevin Kelly lists the best magazine articles (via).

Talk about a single-payer system

2010-09-24T10:41:00.000-04:00

From Marginal Revolution:

The UK's tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer.

More here.

That's... efficient.

A case for meat eating

2010-09-23T16:15:00.001-04:00

Simon Fairlie argues, contra vegans, that eating meat isn't bad in itself. It's current farming models that deserve our ire, not their product. From the Guardian (via Kottke):

But idiocies [like feeding human-edible grain to cows], Fairlie shows, are not arguments against all meat eating, but arguments against the current farming model. He demonstrates that we've been using the wrong comparison to judge the efficiency of meat production. Instead of citing a simple conversion rate of feed into meat, we should be comparing the amount of land required to grow meat with the land needed to grow plant products of the same nutritional value to humans. The results are radically different.

Efficiency is the ratio of useful work performed by a process as compared with the total energy expended. What we slot into those boxes says everything about our values. What vegans (the ones worried about efficiency) are up in arms about is that large tracts of arable land are being used to feed cows instead of people. Fairlie is saying that needn't be the case, and it would be best to compare the overall amount of land dedicated to growing food for humans in each case.

If pigs are fed on residues and waste, and cattle on straw, stovers and grass from fallows and rangelands -- food for which humans don't compete -- meat becomes a very efficient means of food production. Even though it is tilted by the profligate use of grain in rich countries, the global average conversion ratio of useful plant food to useful meat is not the 5:1 or 10:1 cited by almost everyone, but less than 2:1. If we stopped feeding edible grain to animals, we could still produce around half the current global meat supply with no loss to human nutrition: in fact it's a significant net gain.

It seems like there's a problem here. Vegans say that if we stop feeding human-edible grain to cattle, then we reclaim all of that land for growing human food. Fairlie is saying that we can do that -- and have our cattle too. We'll just have the cattle eat something else, something humans don't eat, like grass. But that land was doing something else before -- it's not as though there's an infinite amount of arable land just waiting for cattle to be put on it. We've gone from a system in which X acres feed humans directly and Y acres feed the cows that feed humans to a system in which X+Y acres feed humans directly, and Z acres feed the cows that feed humans. That's a net increase in acres, but whether there is a proportional increase in food for humans is complicated even in a simplified grain-and-cows model.

Part of what Fairlie is suggesting is that better (meaning more robust, sustainable, and efficient by some measure) agricultural practices would by their nature produce an opportunity to feed cattle: instead of dumping nitrogen onto the same fields year after year, we would actually rotate crops, and at least some of the crops in rotation would be food for cattle and not for people. But these better practices (and I agree that they are better) require more land to produce the same yield.

More than likely, Fairlie discusses much of this in the book (I haven't read it), so I don't mean to impugn him. I simply want to point out that this is a hard problem, and one whose solution depends on a fair bit of empirical work.

For most people who worry about such things and want to do something about it, the only plausible choice is to stop eating meat.

Links for 22 September

2010-09-22T10:07:00.000-04:00

How panhandlers use their money.
A brief history of publication.
Essays via the iTunes model.
Snark.
A lit review on serifs and readability.
A store for time travellers. (h/t SA)
Deleting one gene makes mice smart. (h/t GL)

Visual Representation in Science workshop

2010-09-21T18:23:00.000-04:00

Aaron of False Vacuum is organizing a workshop on Visual Representation to be held at IHPST in December. Here's the poster:

correlation

2010-09-21T17:04:00.000-04:00

I hope they don't start giving engineers "special treatment" at the TSA.

Nearly 20 percent of [right wing terrorists] had engineering degrees.

While terrorist groups probably have incentives to recruit engineers and others with specialized knowledge, the statistical anomaly holds for right wing terrorists, not left wing ones.

The engineer mind-set, Gambetta and Hertog suggest, might be a mix of emotional conservatism and intellectual habits that prefers clear answers to ambiguous questions — “the combination of a sharp mind with a loyal acceptance of authority.”

NYT

the world is awesome

2010-09-19T11:55:00.001-04:00

I'm straight-up stealing these links from Uncertain Principles because they're so good:

Ancient brew masters tapped antibiotic secrets

' A chemical analysis of the bones of ancient Nubians shows that they were regularly consuming tetracycline, most likely in their beer. The finding is the strongest evidence yet that the art of making antibiotics, which officially dates to the discovery of penicillin in 1928, was common practice nearly 2,000 years ago.'

(tags: science archaeology chemistry history news medicine)
Physics Buzz: How not to: The Fire Tornado

'In the last two weeks, both water and fire tornadoes have been widely covered by the media. First there was the dramatic shots from Japan of a so-called 'waterspout,' then there was the unbelievable footage of this fire tornado in Brazil, followed immediately by this one from Hawaii. And as any good physicists would have, we immediately thought 'I want to do that!'

Of course, APS requires me to tell you not to try this at home. So, here's how you would do this, if you were to find yourself attempting to do it, which you should absolutely under no circumstances try to do.'

city streets

2010-09-18T09:51:00.002-04:00

Via Kottke, Felix Salmon's diagnosis of the problematic status of bikes in New York:

Bikes can and should behave much more like cars than pedestrians. They should ride on the road, not the sidewalk. They should stop at lights, and pedestrians should be able to trust them to do so. They should use lights at night. And -- of course, duh -- they should ride in the right direction on one-way streets. None of this is a question of being polite; it's the law. But in stark contrast to motorists, nearly all of whom follow nearly all the rules, most cyclists seem to treat the rules of the road as strictly optional. They're still in the human-powered mindset of pedestrians, who feel pretty much completely unconstrained by rules.

The result is decidedly suboptimal for all concerned, but mostly for the bicyclists themselves. New York needs to make a collective quantum leap, from treating bicyclists like pedestrians to treating bicyclists like motorists. And unless and until it does, bike relations will continue to be marked by hostility and mistrust.

I've been a huge fan of city cycling since I saw it working in Holland. But it just doesn't work without the infrastructure and social conventions to support it. New York clearly doesn't have it figured out yet.

The problem in Toronto seems to be somewhat different. Cyclists usually stick to the roads, but automobile drivers aren't doing enough to accommodate cyclists, and that leads to a different, even more deadly kind of hostility and mistrust. As a result, I am not terribly comfortable cycling in the city (walking and TTC seem safer and more convenient, though that may be an illusion).

Mixed use streets aren't the culprit here. They work in Holland. North American cities are the culprit. We're too individualistic to be comfortable sharing anything, even public spaces like roads.

I've been the hostile jerk myself, occasionally. I'm a runner, and on a bad day it can be easy to externalize my frustrations on the pedestrians who are "in my way." Pedestrians are oblivious to their surroundings. I'm sure I'm no better when I'm walking: engrossed in conversation or with earphones in, I must miss most of what goes on around me. And then there are the walking clichés -- the four-abreast slow-walkers, the suit coming to a sudden halt to answer a text message, the woman walking out of a door without looking or slowing, the gentleman who meanders slowly to the left so that I don't know on which side to pass him, the dogs on leashes (and some without)... it's dangerous out there for a runner, let alone a cyclist.

The future has a name

2010-09-17T09:54:00.002-04:00

What will the first hand-held laser weapon be called? How about the first handheld that provides medical or environmental scans?

Virtually everyone (not just nerds) knows the answer. Phasers and tricorders ... and warp drives, transporters, and tractor beams. The future isn't determined, but if certain technologies come into existence, we already know what names they will have. Part of it is that engineers are actively seeking to build the devices imagined in science fiction. And part of it is that there's no better marketing than to evoke childhood memories.

Of course, it can go too far. Here's a recent headline, plus a bit of the article itself:

Tractor beams come to life

Their new technique can move objects one hundred times that size over a distance of a meter or more.

The device works by shining a hollow laser beam around tiny glass particles. The air surrounding the particle heats up, while the dark center of the beam stays cool. When the particle starts to drift out of the middle and into the bright laser beam, the force of heated air molecules bouncing around and hitting the particle’s surface is enough to nudge it back to the center.

That's really clever. But it isn't a tractor beam;

it can’t work in the vacuum of outer space.

I think the future is going to face the problem of meaning dilution for sci-fi words.

(Swans on Tea was there first.)

why things are broken

2010-09-16T14:34:00.002-04:00

TED is famous for its great talks. But sometimes, people give great talks at other venues. Fortunately, TED grabs up these talks too, and calls them "Best of the Web" talks.

Here's a great one by Seth Godin on why so many things in the modern world seem broken.

Seth Godin: This is broken

cool idea

2010-09-15T17:26:00.003-04:00

A more efficient air conditioner, via Kottke:

“We’ve discovered what we think is a new concept in air conditioning,” says Ron Judkoff, the principal program manager on the project. “We recognize its potential, but it has a ways to go before it’s out of the lab and available to consumers.”

The new, patented system abandons the power-hungry compressor-driven refrigeration process used in many domestic (and virtually all commercial) air conditioners in favor of a couple of high-efficiency pumps and fans. But it also uses water for evaporative cooling — a concept familiar to many people living in the arid West who have roof-mounted “swamp coolers.”

Swamp coolers work well when the outside air is dry, as evaporating water carries away heat, cooling and moistening the air that is re-circulated into the house.

The new system adds a desiccant to the standard swamp cooler setup to promote effectiveness even in humid heat.

economies of scale

2010-09-14T11:01:00.000-04:00

This might come as news to war hawks. Or stimulus hawks.

Peter Schiff puts things in perspective (Via Marginal Revolution).

But to repeat the impact of World War II today would require a truly massive effort. Replicating the six-fold increase in the federal budget that was seen in the early 1940s would result in a nearly $20 trillion budget today. That equates to $67,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. Surely, the tremendous GDP growth created by such spending would make short work of the so-called Great Recession.

To a degree that will surprise many, the US funded its World War II effort largely by raising taxes and tapping into Americans' personal savings. Both of those avenues are nowhere near as promising today as they were in 1941 Current tax burdens are now much higher than they were before the War, so raising taxes today would be much more difficult. The "Victory Tax" of 1942 sharply raised income tax rates and allowed, for the first time in our nation's history, taxes to be withheld directly from paychecks. The hikes were originally intended to be temporary but have, of course, far outlasted their purpose. It would be unlikely that Americans would accept higher taxes today to fund a real war, let alone a pretend one.

That leaves savings, which was the War's primary source of funding. During the War, Americans purchased approximately $186 billion worth of war bonds, accounting for nearly three quarters of total federal spending from 1941-1945. Today, we don't have the savings to pay for our current spending, let alone any significant expansions. Even if we could convince the Chinese to loan us a large chunk of the $20 trillion (on top of the $1 trillion we already owe them), how could we ever pay them back?

writing tips

2010-09-13T23:13:00.001-04:00

In keeping with today's "back to school" theme, Michael C. Munger has a great piece on writing in grad school.

Many of the graduate students who were stars in the classroom during the first two years—the people everyone admired and looked up to—suddenly aren't so stellar anymore. And a few of the marginal students—the ones who didn't care that much about pleasing the professors by reading every page of every assignment—are suddenly sending their own papers off to journals, getting published, and transforming themselves into professional scholars.

The difference is not complicated. It's writing.

Munger continues with 10 great writing tips (most of the tips are obvious, but obviously still needed, since most of us don't follow them!)

My favourite:

4. Give yourself time. Many smart people tell themselves pathetic lies like, "I do my best work at the last minute." Look: It's not true. No one works better under pressure. Sure, you are a smart person. But if you are writing about a profound problem, why would you think that you can make an important contribution off the top of your head in the middle of the night just before the conference?

Writers sit at their desks for hours, wrestling with ideas. They ask questions, talk with other smart people over drinks or dinner, go on long walks. And then write a whole bunch more. Don't worry that what you write is not very good and isn't immediately usable. You get ideas when you write; you don't just write down ideas.

The articles and books that will be read decades from now were written by men and women sitting at a desk and forcing themselves to translate profound ideas into words and then to let those words lead them to even more ideas. Writing can be magic, if you give yourself time, because you can produce in the mind of some other person, distant from you in space or even time, an image of the ideas that exist in only your mind at this one instant.

(h/t GL)

academic reading how-to

2010-09-13T22:49:00.006-04:00

For my friends who are starting grad school, preparing for quals, or just starting coursework again... the reading probably already looks pretty daunting. And it is. But here are a few tips on getting by.

First, Chad explains how to read scientific papers without reading every word. (Hint: it applies to HPS papers too!)

The first and most important point is to Know What You're Looking For. Different bits of information are found in different places and in different forms, so what you're looking for will determine where you look, and how you find it.
For example, if you're just trying to get a general sense of what a given paper is about, it's often enough to read only the introduction and conclusion. If you're just after a specific numerical result, it's probably in the abstract, or toward the end of the paper.
You should also be aware that what you're looking for may not be in the paper you're reading. If you want a sense of the context of a field, you're often looking for a reference to earlier work, possibly a review article. If you want the gory details of a measurement technique, you may very well be looking for some reference to an earlier or longer paper by the same group (a sentence of the form "using the method of [citation of earlier paper]"), or, even more annoyingly, some online supplement to the article you have.

(Of course, read the whole thing.)

Next, read Timothy Burke's How to Read in College.

Finally, check out John Bean's Helping Students Read Difficult Texts.

UPDATE

See also Jon's teaching tip on teaching critical reading in history.

deriving in the rain

2010-09-12T19:20:00.000-04:00

If you are caught in the rain, will you get wetter running to shelter, walking, or standing still?

This is the sort of thing I think about for the half-second it takes me to gear up for the dash to shelter when I'm caught in the open by one of Toronto's sudden downpours.

Standing still, I present a relatively small surface area to the falling rain -- in a vertical downpour, just my head and shoulders. When I move through the vertical rain, I collide with water droplets that would otherwise have passed me by -- but the same amount of water should strike my top surfaces (I move out of the paths of some droplets, but into the paths of others). Standing still wins in the first approximation.

On the other hand, I'll be in the downpour for a shorter period of time, so fewer droplets will strike my head after all. Running wins in the second approximation.

Jesse, of The Virtuosi derives mathematical support for the running side of things, concluding that "if you are Usain Bolt, you can reduce how wet you get by almost a factor of two by going from a meander to a sprint!"

11 September

2010-09-11T11:37:00.000-04:00

On 11 September 2001, over a span of a few hours, I wrote down some thoughts and reactions to what was going on. I read it every year. It feels important to do that. I haven't changed or omitted anything. That feels important, too. Here's what I wrote:

I am disconnected, today. It is the way I have always felt while watching disasters unfold on television, or even across a room. I become the observer and introspector at the same time. I become self-conscious. I maintain a calm exterior, my mind stops working smoothly. In fits and jerks, I move between the inner world and the outer, but there is no longer the feeling (illusion?) of connection between them.

Outside, people are confused, in disbelief, wonderment. Senses widen, experience deepens. Not for me. I watch from behind the one-way mirror of my eyes. Events occur, and I am in disbelief, but this is a secondary emotion. Most of all I feel disconnected from the reality of the situation. I am no longer a part of the world I live in; I am an observer. Impotent.

Murmers of a distantly religious nature fill the air. "God." I cannot tell if they are asking or stating a fact. No one seems to accuse Him.

As each new development breaks, bundles of intent onlookers clump near information outlets--television, radio, internet. The internet is clogged. The television signal is scratchy. No on knows anything, but the cameras roll and the people talk. 8:45AM EST, a small plane crashes into the World Trade Center. Half an hour later, while we are listening to the first rumors of this first incident, a passenger jet--an American 767 hijacked on its way from Boston to somewhere or somewhere to Boston--explodes into the other tower on live television. The explosion, recorded from such a distance, is silent. I am surprised at how movie-like the explosion seems. I had always assumed such things were exaggerated for effect.

People are indecisive. Myself included. None of us are sure whether to watch or get back to work. We waver between. More rumors float about: a plane has crashed into the Pentagon building. A fire burns in the nation's Mall. The Whitehouse evacuated; the President speaks from an elementary school in Florida.

The nation reels from the blow. All air travel comes to a halt. Tunnels in and out of New York are closed down. The Sears and other towers are evacuated. One of the towers collapses, the smoke too thick to pierce with distant cameras. Thousands had already been reported injured. Surely that number has grown. Trading stops on Wall Street. Markets closed.

It has been over an hour now. The news has settled slightly; people begin to digest, to think again. Theories sprout. Reactionary political statements are made.

The notion of going to war seems obvious to some, oddly distant and unlikely to me.

Strikes, actions, bombing--yes. But war? With whom? Bin Laden? Palestine? Terrorism itself?

I read: the second tower has collapsed. Another hijacked plane flies toward DC from the south. Will we shoot it down?

Another plane crashes 80 miles outside of Pittsburgh. A Palestinian Liberation group takes credit.

What the hell is going on?

An hour of conscious attempt to return to work, in addition to the conscious attempt to isolate myself from news outlets, has resulted not in a feeling of normalcy but in a feeling of inadequacy. I cannot ignore the situation--to do so simply feels wrong. At the same time, I have a responsibility to remain on task. And I cannot possibly be of any help to the situation, or to the gossip circles that coalesce so easily today.

Why is this violence so inevitable? Why does talking never seem to work? How is it that the perpetrators believe these acts of terrorism could aid their cause? Are these political acts? Spiritual? Symbolic? Is there a difference?

Blogs of note

2010-09-11T10:39:00.000-04:00

Blog fever has hit Toronto's HPS community, with the recent addition of The Bubble Chamber, there are at least half a dozen blogs written by my colleagues at IHPST.

Here are the Toronto blogs, in no particular order (I hope I haven't forgotten anyone):

Mike Thicke, Curtis Forbes, Michelle Hoffman, Jonathan Turner, Andrew Munro, Ellie Louson, Michael Cournoyea, and Rebecca Moore are all contributors to The Bubble Chamber (as time goes on, the list will grow).
Jaipreet Virdi discusses history of medicine, deafness, and quackery at From the Hands of Quacks.
Ellie Louson muses about grad school at Productive (adj).
Aaron Sidney Wright is a historian of physics who has been saying interesting things about scientific practice at his blog, False Vacuum.
Jonathan Turner writes about grad school, teaching, and Cold War defence research in Canada over at Boffins and Cold Warriors.
Sarah Kriger's Ramblings are more focused on writing, plays, and television than on her research, but it's still great stuff.
Allan Olley occasionally discusses his work on the history of computing on 4ll4n0.

While I'm at it, here are a few of my favourite non-Toronto HPS blogs:

Evolving Thoughts (John Wilkins)
Ether Wave Propaganda (Will Thomas)
Whewell's Ghost (group blog)
Honest Toil (Chris Pincock)
It's Only A Theory (group blog)

That makes for a lot of reading!

A new demarcation problem

2010-09-10T22:26:00.002-04:00

The demarcation between science and non-science (or science and pseudoscience) isn't clear.

That's been a source of worry for philosophers of science as long as there have been philosophers of science. Abstractly, the problem is one of splitting hairs: the very lifeblood of (some) philosophy. But answers to the demarcation question have definite and important implications far beyond the groves of academe. I won't bother rehearsing those implications now.

Swans on Tea points me to David Brin's take on things, which cuts against the grain. Rather than distinguishing between science and non-science, why not distinguish between skeptics and a deniers.

What discrete characteristics distinguish a rational, pro-science “climate skeptic” who has honest questions about the AGW consensus from members of a Denialist Movement that portrays all members of a scientific community as either fools or conspirators?

I urge you to read the whole thing.

See also this, from my colleagues at The Bubble Chamber.

Links for 9 September

2010-09-09T17:42:00.000-04:00

Your philosophic beliefs matter for your real world performance. (Via.)
Soon, helium will cost 10,000 times what it does today.
Small schools stand out because they are more variable. Lesson: look for the outliers at both ends.
Casino "carpets are deliberately designed to obscure and camouflage gambling chips that have fallen onto the floor."
Here's what white people really like -- according to their own OKcupid profiles. (h/t CH)
Worried about all those snakes you have on your plane? Try tylenol addled mice.
Reverse psychology.
A review of Merchants of Doubt. See also this.

(Apologies for seeming like a "best of Marginal Revolution" roundup this week.)

back to school

2010-09-09T17:36:00.001-04:00

For those of you starting a new school year, here are 9 evidence-supported study tips:

Adopt a growth mindset. "Students who believe that intelligence and academic ability are fixed tend to stumble at the first hurdle."
Sleep well.
Forgive yourself for procrastinating.
Test yourself.
Pace your studies. "the optimal time to leave material before reviewing it is 10 to 30 per cent of the period you want to remember it for."
Vivid examples may not always work best.
Take naps.
Get handouts prior to the lecture.
Believe in yourself.

That advice may seem obvious. Fine -- but let that serve as #10: you don't have to be original.

on sorting algorithms

2010-09-08T23:15:00.000-04:00

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

(this is how mergesort really works)

How big is the solar system?

2010-09-06T12:14:00.002-04:00

Big. Here is a 8,500,000,000:1 scale model of the solar system. (From/Via)

On an ordinary 72 dpi monitor it’s just over half a mile wide, making it possibly one of the largest pages on the web.

I had forgotten that Neptune is so much farther than Saturn.

How to raise an athlete

2010-09-05T13:08:00.002-04:00

1. Give birth between January and March.
2. Raise your future superstar in a small city.
3. Make them practice for 10,000 hours.

Sentences to ponder

2010-09-04T13:59:00.000-04:00

A nice observation from Ezra Klein via Marginal Revolution:

Campaigns are built to fool us into thinking that we're voting for individuals. We learn about the candidate's family, her job, her background -- even her dog. But we're primarily voting for parties. The parties have just learned we're more likely to vote for them if they disguise themselves as individuals. And American politics would work better if we understood that.

Can heavy metal singers actually sing?

2010-09-04T12:58:00.000-04:00

Some can. (via Kottke)

A classically trained voice teacher has a listen to Bruce Dickinson (of Iron Maiden) and Ozzy Osbourne (of course). Of Dickenson she says:

I have nothing but admiration for this singer. Listen how he starts off with a soft growl, then moves seamlessly into a well-supported, sustained high full-voice sound that then evolves into an effortless long scream! His diction is easily intelligible, regardless of the range he's singing in or the effect he's going for. He achieves an intensely rhythmic delivery of the lyrics without losing legato and musical momentum, something a lot of classical singers struggle with, especially when interpreting the many staccato and accent markings that crowd scores by Bellini, Donizetti, etc.

Click through for her assessment of Ozzy.

Markets in everything, personal services edition

2010-09-03T15:40:00.000-04:00

(Straight from Marginal Revolution) Markets in everything, personal services edition:

A number of people have been hiring “virtual” assistants in lower-wage countries to do all the tasks in their life that don’t require a personal presence. ...
[One man] has his assistant seducing women for him. His assistant, who is female and lives in India, logs onto his account on a popular dating site, browses profiles and (pretending to be him) makes connections with women on the site. She has e-mail conversations and arranges first dates. Then her employer reads the e-mail conversation and goes to the date.

"Gee you're nothing like I imagined you from your emails!"

we are all apprentices

2010-09-02T09:05:00.000-04:00

It's worth reading this essay by Kim Sterelny (via Evolving Thoughts).

It is long, so here is a précis:

Evolutionary psychologists seek to explain the origins of universal human traits, like markedly high intelligence, language, tool-use, and social structures. The details of these explanations vary greatly in timing and detail (e.g., was it cooking food or an environmental shift that made the difference?) but almost all such explanations begin with some common assumptions.

First, "human evolutionary change has been self-generated through positive feedback." This kind of structure helps to explain why the traits of interest are unique to humans and universal among them. The elements of the feedback loop are (a) complex social environments and (b) high cognitive ability. Notice how this works: selection for co-operation also selects for free-riders. But the drag of free-riders selects for vigilance. And vigilance is accomplished with higher intelligence. Higher intelligence allows for greater social complexity (and co-operation). And so on.

Second, "adaptive response to our complex environment depends on innate, evolved, special purpose cognitive mechanisms, for it is only such mechanisms that enable us gather and deploy the information on which action depends." This is commonly known as the "modularity hypothesis," "the idea that our minds are ensembles of innately equipped special purpose devices; devices which adapt us to the challenges posed to our foraging Pleistocene ancestors; challenges which largely persist today. Our minds are integrated arrays of devices each of which solves a particular problem with remarkable efficiency." (e.g., face recognition or cheater detectors.)

It is this second piece of the puzzle Sterelny takes issue with. In order for such modules to evolve, the information structure would have to remain stable for long periods of time. In some cases, this might be reasonable -- crudely (and slightly off-topic), tigers have always been about the same size and speed, so a tiger-avoidance module could stabilize. But many important features of our information environment have changed drastically, and too rapidly for (genetic) evolution to keep pace. We have become more sedentary and traded field for market and rocks for iPhones. "To the extent that the modularity hypothesis explains competent response to information-hungry problems by appeal to pre-loaded information, it is poorly posed to explain competent response to evolutionarily novel challenges."

Sterelny wants to trade out "modules" for "skills." Skills look a lot like modules: they are task-specific and fast. But there is a big difference: skills are learned wholesale, they are not modules just waiting for parameters to be set:

High volume, high fidelity, inter-generational cultural learning coevolves with social foraging. There is feedback. As the fidelity of social learning improves, social foraging becomes more effective, for technology and technique improve across the generations. As social foraging becomes more profitable, adults can more effectively support the next generation while they acquire skills and information. This loop depends on the fact that humans organise the learning world of the next generation. Humans (like many other organisms) modify their own environment. One important form of human niche construction is informational engineering. Humans of one generation act in ways that transform the learning environment of the next generation. Cultural learning is obviously central to human social life. But most cultural learning is hybrid learning; it is culturally enhanced trial and error learning. Very few humans acquire significant life skills just from instruction and demonstration; very few learn skills by unassisted exploration. Human children explore and experiment on their physical and social environment. But they often explore environments which have been shaped to make it easier or safer for them to acquire critical capacities.

links for the week

2010-09-01T13:16:00.000-04:00

TIME is VERY bullish on stimulus.

How to stop illegal advertising.

Sun may affect radioactive decay rates.

Sentences to ponder

2010-09-01T12:15:00.000-04:00

From Marginal Revolution:

Where I live [Los Angeles] is culturally neutral. If I lived in New Orleans I would have to embrace the local culture because it's so good. In California you can be your own person.

Doing away with formal peer review

2010-08-31T16:04:00.001-04:00

The New York Times considers some efforts to do away with peer review and marshall the connectedness of the web.

The most pressing intellectual issue in the next decade is this tension between the insular, specialized world of expert scholarship and the open and free-wheeling exchange of information on the Web. “And academia ... is caught in the middle.”

I think making work publicly available online is Very Good (I do some of that myself). But doing away with peer review is a Bad Idea.

Peer review is a barrier to entry -- and that's a good thing. It's a sort of curated, walled garden of approved content. When I am working firmly within my area of expertise, I am comfortable evaluating the quality and representativeness of the papers I read. But sometimes -- more often than I would like -- I find myself well outside my area of expertise, and without a good sense of the lay of the land. Essay reviews and general resources like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are helpful, but peer reviewed journals are key. Someone with expertise has okayed that content. Peer review is a proxy for knowing I'm not wasting my time.

If peer review is to be done away with, something else must replace it. If curation can be crowdsourced on the internet, I'm for it -- I'm certainly not fond of waiting for referee reports. But moderated internet comments like these ones simply won't do.

Degrees of art-hood

2010-08-31T11:03:00.000-04:00

From Robert Paul Wolff:

But whereas it seems to make a very great deal of difference, for example, whether the Gypsy Girl that hangs in the Denon Wing in the Louvre is truly by Frans Hals, it makes no difference at all whether my copy of Hamlet is an authentic First Folio or a cheap paperback edition meant for schoolboys and girls. The words are the same [leaving aside scholarly debates about variants, etc.], and that is all that matters.... This makes music and literature purer art than painting and sculpture.

This seems like a category mistake. Perhaps the easy duplication makes for purer intellectual property, but not purer art.

Launch of Spontaneous Generations 4:1

2010-08-30T16:56:00.000-04:00

I am extremely proud to announce the publication of the fourth instalment of Spontaneous Generation: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science. Here's the table of contents:

Vol 4, No 1 (2010): Scientific Instruments: Knowledge, Practice, and Culture

Focused Discussion

Scientific Instruments: Knowledge, Practice, and Culture [Editor’s Introduction]	PDF
Isaac Record	1-7

The Challenge of Authenticating Scientific Objects in Museum Collections: Exposing the Forgery of a Moroccan Astrolabe Allegedly Dated 1845 CE	PDF
Ingrid Hehmeyer	8-20

People as Scientific Instruments	PDF
Maarten Derksen	21-29

Equipment for an Experiment	PDF
Rom Harré	30-38

An Instrument for What? Digital Computers, Simulation and Scientific Practice	PDF
Wendy S. Parker	39-44

Great Pyramid Metrology and the Material Politics of Basalt	PDF
Michael J. Barany	45-60

Let Freeness Ring: The Canadian Standard Freeness Tester as Hegemonic Engine	PDF
James Hull	61-70

The Machine Speaks Falsely	PDF
Allan Franklin	71-84

Reading Measuring Instruments	PDF
Mario Bunge	85-93

Engineering Realities	PDF
Davis Baird	94-110

Conceptual Sea Changes	PDF
Paul Humphreys	111-115

Extended Thing Knowledge	PDF
Mathieu Charbonneau	116-128

Otto in the Chinese Room	PDF
Philip Murray McCullough	129-137

Humans not Instruments	PDF
Harry Collins	138-147

Apparatus and Experimentation Revisited	PDF
Trevor H. Levere	148-154

Material Culture and the Dobsonian Telescope	PDF
Jessica Ellen Sewell, Andrew Johnston	155-162

Taming the “Publication Machine”: Generating Unity, Engaging the Trading Zones	PDF
François Thoreau, Maria Neicu	163-172

Concepts as Tools in the Experimental Generation of Knowledge in Cognitive Neuropsychology	PDF
Uljana Feest	173-190

Articles

Domesticating the Planets: Instruments and Practices in the Development of Planetary Geology	PDF
Matthew Benjamin Shindell	191-230

“Old” Technology in New Hands: Instruments as Mediators of Interdisciplinary Learning in Microfluidics	PDF
Dorothy Sutherland Olsen	231-254

Opinions

Out the Door: A Short History of the University of Toronto Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments	PDF
Erich Weidenhammer, Michael Da Silva	255-261

Reviews

Ian Hesketh. Of Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate	PDF
Sebastian Assenza	262-265

Marc Lange. Laws and Lawmakers: Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature	PDF
Christopher Belanger	266-269

William Sims Bainbridge. The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World	PDF
Bruce J. Petrie	270-272

Steven Shapin. The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation	PDF
Michael Cournoyea	273-275

Learning From Artifacts: A Review of the “Reading Artifacts: Summer Institute in the Material Culture of Science,” Presented by The Canada Science and Technology Museum and Situating Science Cluster	PDF
Jaipreet Virdi	276-279

Aaron A. Cohen-Gadol and Dennis D. Spencer. The Legacy of Harvey Cushing: Profiles of Patient Care	PDF
Delia Gavrus	280-282

Adrian Parr. Hijacking Sustainability	PDF
R. Moore	283-285

Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker, eds. Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis	PDF
Julia Agapitos	286-288

David Pantalony. Altered Sensations: Rudolph Koenig’s Acoustical Workshop in Nineteenth-Century Paris	PDF
Sarah-Jane Patterson	289-291

Michael Strevens. Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation	PDF
Anthony Kulic	292-299

ISSN: 1913-0465

On mosques and the World Trade Center

2010-08-30T12:06:00.001-04:00

Irony abounds.

Via Alex Tabarrok (MR): The architect of the World Trade Center designed its plaza as "a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area."

Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca's courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city's bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really. Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites—the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca's.

There is much more in the original article, all fascinating.

predictions

2010-08-30T09:36:00.000-04:00

via Marginal Revolution

Robert Sloss predicted the iPhone in 1910

Well, more or less. Or is it an iPad? In 1910 Stoss published an essay called "The Wireless Century," intending to predict the world of 2010. In this world everyone carries around a "wireless telegraph" which:

1. Serves as a telephone, the whole world over.

2. Either rings or vibrates in your pocket.

3. Can transmit any musical recording or performance with perfect clarity.

4. Can allow people to send each other photographs, across the entire world.

5. Can allow people to see the images of paintings, museums, etc. in distant locales.

6. No one will ever be alone again.

7. Can serve as a means of payment, connecting people to their bank accounts and enabling payments (Japan is ahead of us here).

8. Can connect people to all newspapers, although Sloss predicted that people would prefer that the device read the paper aloud to them (not so much the case).

9. Can transmit documents to "thin tubes of ink," which will then print those documents in distant locales.

10. People will have a better sense of the poor, and of suffering, because they will have witnessed it through their device (not obviously true, at least not yet).

11. People will vote using their devices and this will empower democracy (nope).

12. Judicial testimonies will be performed over such devices, often from great distances.

13. People will order perfectly-fitting fashions from Paris; this guy should be in the Apps business.

14. Married couples will be much closer, and distance relationships will be closer and better.

15. Military targeting and military orders will become extremely precise.

The essay is reprinted in the Arthur Brehmer book Die Welt in 100 Jahren. The book is interesting throughout; a bunch of the other writers thought in 2010 we would be fighting wars with large zeppelins.

I'm not even going to try predicting what will be the case for 2110.

How do you feel?

2010-08-29T13:18:00.001-04:00

Suppose a small red noise surrounds a concept that is faster than granite and bends like the distance. You want to wear its talents and drink its red. But you can't bend the view that your rushing is a pleasure and your texture sounds like the feel of aroma. Suddenly a noise drips into a clear blur and the wind feels tight. You see a three-pointed scent out of the corner of your head and your spine goes fresh. This must be the smoothness that everyone is so loudly ignoring. The secret rubs its way through your hair and is lost in a thin, green odor.

From here. Comments indicate three major clusters of reaction:

1. Awesome.

2. Angry.

3. Confused.

Which are you?

How to misuse quantum mechanics

2010-08-29T09:54:00.001-04:00

(I should probably not engage in making fun of quackery -- especially quantum mechanical quackery -- but every once in a while I like to indulge. Feel free to keep on walking.)

Look here for a great example.

Step 1. Be an expert in something other than quantum mechanics.

Robert Lanza is considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He is currently Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, and a professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He has several hundred publications and inventions, and over two dozen scientific books: among them, Principles of Tissue Engineering, which is recognized as the definitive reference in the field. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/#blogger_bio

Perfect!

Step 2. Read about one or two experiments in quantum mechanics. (N.B. It is easier if you read only press releases, but see also Step 7 for ways to misuse the words of QM experts.)

Step 3. Re-describe the experiment, preferably without referencing the paper itself. (That would just be confusing!)

In 2002, scientists carried out an amazing experiment, which showed that particles of light "photons" knew -- in advance −- what their distant twins would do in the future. They tested the communication between pairs of photons -- whether to be either a wave or a particle. Researchers stretched the distance one of the photons had to take to reach its detector, so that the other photon would hit its own detector first. The photons taking this path already finished their journeys -− they either collapse into a particle or don't before their twin encounters a scrambling device. Somehow, the particles acted on this information before it happened, and across distances instantaneously as if there was no space or time between them. They decided not to become particles before their twin ever encountered the scrambler.

Step 4. Go off the rails. The easiest way to do this is to take metaphorical language literally.

It doesn't matter how we set up the experiment. Our mind and its knowledge is the only thing that determines how they behave. Experiments consistently confirm these observer-dependent effects.

Step 5. Generalize liberally from your literalized metaphor.

But what about dinosaur fossils? Fossils are really no different than anything else in nature. For instance, the carbon atoms in your body are "fossils" created in the heart of exploding supernova stars. Bottom line: reality begins and ends with the observer. "We are participators," Wheeler said "in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past." Before his death, he stated that when observing light from a quasar, we set up a quantum observation on an enormously large scale. It means, he said, the measurements made on the light now, determines the path it took billions of years ago.

Congratulations! You've succeeded in founding a new pseudoscience!

Step 6. Be sure to give it a catchy name.

Biocentrism (BenBella Books) lays out Lanza's theory of everything.

Step 7. Use the Lie of Juxtaposition. Quote real experts and then restate your position. Pretend the quote has relevance to your claims.

"We must re-think all that we have ever learned about the past, human evolution and the nature of reality, if we are ever to find our true place in the cosmos," says Constance Hilliard, a historian of science at UNT. Choices you haven't made yet might determine which of your childhood friends are still alive, or whether your dog got hit by a car yesterday. In fact, you might even collapse realities that determine whether Noah's Ark sank. "The universe," said John Haldane, "is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

Extra points for the errant Biblical reference. Nice job.

(Thanks to Greg for the original pointer.)

The Less Feature

2010-08-28T14:46:00.004-04:00

Scott Adams wants The Less Feature:

The other day I planned for a very simple trip from A to B. I started with Orbitz.... Over the next several hours I tried sorting by flight time, shortest route, and price. Then I tried JetBlue's site.... Then I tried United Airlines' site.... At some point in the process I crossed a line: The time to plan and book the trip took longer than it will take to fly across the entire country.

Worse yet, I don't have the slightest confidence that I got the best deal or the most convenient flight. And just to make things interesting, the flight's on-time rating is in the "rarely" range. That means I probably didn't book any flight at all....

I would pay extra to have fewer travel choices.

(cf. Trader Joe's, which has 4,000 SKUs. Most supermarkets have 50,000.)

the secret to retail success

2010-08-28T10:35:00.002-04:00

Straight from Kottke:

A ringing bell instead of an intercom signals that more help is needed at the registers. Registers don't have conveyor belts or scales, and perishables are sold by unit instead of weight, speeding up checkout. Crew members aren't told the margins on products, so placement decisions are made based not on profits but on what's best for the shopper. Every employee works all aspects of the store, and if you ask where the roasted chestnuts are he'll walk you over instead of just saying "aisle five." Want to know what they taste like? He can probably tell you, and he might even open the bag on the spot for you to try.

That's Trader Joe's, of course.

net neutrality

2010-08-27T20:33:00.000-04:00

On Google on (Wireless Non-) Net Neutrality

First, the wireless market is more competitive than the wireline market, given that consumers typically have more than just two providers to choose from. Second, because wireless networks employ airwaves, rather than wires, and share constrained capacity among many users, these carriers need to manage their networks more actively. Third, network and device openness is now beginning to take off as a significant business model in this space. In our proposal, we agreed that the best first step is for wireless providers to be fully transparent with users about how network traffic is managed to avoid congestion, or prioritized for certain applications and content.

Step one of "don't be evil": don't put yourself in a situation where evil is an easy choice.

regulating freedom

2010-08-27T14:27:00.003-04:00

For risks I can assess myself, I don't want regulations that prevent me from doing as I please. ... For risks I can't assess myself, I do want regulations that give me the confidence to do as I please. ... One kind of regulation makes me less free. The other kind makes me freer.

From, via.

It isn't easy being green.

2010-08-27T08:05:00.001-04:00

Scott Adams recounts some of the difficulties of building a green home.

Heating and cooling are the biggest energy thieves. And roofs and windows matter the most for heat transfer. Focus your research and budget there. Most of the information you find will come from manufacturers who have a financial interest in misleading you, and also of course from cartoonists who write opinion pieces after being misled by those same manufacturers. Good luck with your research.

It isn't just that manufacturers are misleading or that experts disagree. According to the New York Times, it's also that our intuitions aren't very good:

The top five behaviors listed by respondents as having a direct impact on energy savings (turning off the lights, riding a bike or using public transportation, changing the thermostat, “changing my lifestyle/not having children” and unplugging appliances or using them less) yield savings that are far outweighed by actions cited far less often, like driving a more fuel-efficient car.

The study is here.

In digest form: We focus on changing the way we move through the infrastructure of our lives, but we should focus on changing the infrastructure itself. Reducing our reliance on energy is good, replacing inefficient items with more efficient ones is better -- and you only have to do it once! But good luck figuring out the most effective changes to make.

Seeing reasons

2010-08-26T20:30:00.000-04:00

Seeing reasons (Amy Kind on Jennifer Church):

I can see the broken window, but can I also see why the window is broken? In this ambitious and interesting paper, Church argues for an affirmative answer to this question. Just as we can have perceptual knowledge of a state of affairs, so too can we have perceptual knowledge of the reason for that state of affairs.

Here is a key move:

Our experience of something as objective depends on our imagining alternative perspectives of it. Via the imagination, we can occupy perspectives and modalities different from the ones we are presently occupying, and it is these imaginings that serve to ground experiential objectivity.

The promise is to show that we can directly perceive reasons. Since the account entails that we automatically perceive alternatives, counterfactual accounts suddenly make all sorts of sense.

The challenge is to flesh out the mechanism in sufficient detail. (e.g., where do the alternatives come from? Plato's world of forms? Previous experience?)

In my view, explanation consists in the selection of one state of affairs from a specified set of possible states of affairs by giving evidence that meets specified acceptance standards. The key to understanding explanation, then, is in understanding how possibility spaces and acceptance standards are specified -- and these require a more detailed answer than Church seems to provide.

tornado made of fire

2010-08-26T10:56:00.000-04:00

From, via.

good advice is hard to take

2010-08-26T09:41:00.003-04:00

Here.

It is hard to be overworked by writing a book, by writing research articles or by playing golf. People are overworked dealing with email, context switching, money, and touchy relationships. This abundance of work makes people sad and boring. And this type of work tends to reproduce. The more you have, the more you will have.

Our productivity will keep improving. I can write software faster and better than ever. I can research prior work with ease. I can ask fancy mathematical questions on the Web and get answers in minutes. Instead of investing back this productivity into more silly work, we need to get smarter:
Focus on the essential: programming great software, writing a fun book, a set of inspiring lecture notes or an insightful article.
Automate, reduce or delegate. Reduce is best: doing fewer things is cool!
A focus on money or on personal disputes makes you stupid. Yet, that’s where success often takes you. Watch out!
Airplanes pollute. Travel takes you away from your family. Cars pollute and make you fat. Do you need all that junk?

(The first three are essential. The last one seems like an injection of other aspects of lifestyle into what should be a narrow topic.)

red eye

2010-08-25T08:00:00.002-04:00

Here.

Links for 24 August

2010-08-24T16:06:00.000-04:00

Greeks were tacky.
Lazy 20-somethings are now "emerging adults."
"Council hires ban bid taxi firm" -- one of the all-time great crash blossoms?
Jazz up your game of hangman.
Need some perspective?
Intelligent parking. (Plus, a roundup of parking policy from MR)

Whoa.

2010-08-24T15:40:00.000-04:00

On Neurath (from Jordi Cat).

Technology in teaching

2010-08-24T15:39:00.002-04:00

From Swans on Tea:

Education is not an industry that benefits greatly, efficiency-wise, from technology.

That is, educational efficiency is limited by brains, not computers. Although technology has helped in many areas of education (research, writing, etc.), it has remained flat in terms of actual learning. Why?

If it can’t help the professor teach a class, it’s not going to hold the cost of instruction to the level of inflation.

Who renders judgment?

2010-08-24T14:43:00.002-04:00

Brian Leiter doesn't like the "epistemic egalitarianism" of Wikipedia. Here he quotes Larry Sanger:

There was this attitude that experts should be disqualified [from participating] by the very fact that they had published on the subject—that because they had published, they were therefore biased.

The worry about epistemic egalitarianism is that true expertise is being missed or even suppressed. Leiter points to cases in which Wikipedians have overruled experts, and it is easy to equate this kind of egalitarianism with "teach the controversy," science-bashing movements, and other perversions.

Sanger gives a bit of context for where this attitude comes from:

There's a whole worldview that's shared by many programmers—although not all of them, of course—and by many young intellectuals that I characterize as "epistemic egalitarianism." They're greatly offended by the idea that anyone might be regarded as more reliable on a given topic than everyone else. They feel that for everything to be as fair as possible and equal as possible, the only thing that ought to matter is the content [of a claim] itself, not its source.

Having been a programmer, I can attest to the prevalence of this attitude, and add that it is usually coupled with a naive sense of entitlement to render judgment -- and that both the attitude and the habit are hard to overcome. A contractarian might view the recognition of expertise as a voluntary ceding of autonomy to an authority. Programmers usually have radical views about intellectual property, so it should be no surprise that they have radical views about authority generally. (I suppose that, like programmers, philosophers tend toward epistemic egalitarianism (modulo a general discomfort with Heidegger).)

But nowhere in either the attitude of epistemic egalitarianism or the habit of rendering judgment is any support for the kind of anti-expertise Leiter is worried about. We can dismiss arguments that rely on claims to authority without dismissing arguments made by authorities.

Eric Schleisser defends epistemic egalitarianism (toward science-as-expert) for its public policy implications:

Scientific authority can get willfully abused (Nazi medicine, eugenics, etc). But let's leave this aside.
A. Scientific expertise is fairly narrow and it can easily be misapplied in public policy domains. B. Few scientific experts are trained in neighboring fields as to judge the interactions among their expertise and other experts.
scientific expertise gets selected for by interested parties, including (alas) self-selection.
scientific experts are normal rent-seeking agents.
When scientific experts get it wrong in matters of policy they do not tend to run the costs of their errors.

Note that none of these (2-4) points mean we should not seek expert advice or base policy on scientific knowledge. (The fifth one may incline us to be very cautious about scientific experts.) But points 2-4 do encourage transparency of the sort that EE insist on in order to let (skeptical) non-experts weigh in on and scrutinize expert authority in decision-making processes.

Scientists aren't (and shouldn't be) disinterested in the social or political implications of their studies. My own interests -- in the way things work, in money, in electronics -- led me to become an engineer. Changing interests -- in how we come to know things, in dialog, in scientific practice -- led me to switch tracks and become a philosopher. To pretend otherwise would be foolish. But the fact that I have held these and other interests does nothing to diminish (or inflate) whatever small contribution I have made (or will make) to those respective fields.

A key challenge for social epistemology (of science) is in determining what sort of group (of scientists) is entitled to make knowledge claims. Some typical criteria are publication, peer-review, consensus, and diversity. The first three recognize some basic institutions of science, while "diversity" defends against accusations of bias: the more diverse the group of individuals who assent to some claim, the more likely it will be that any possible objection will have been considered. I gather that this is supposed to follow from the diversity of interests that connect to their decision to join the group in question.

This diversity effect has always left me a bit uneasy. While I concede that a person's stance likely blinds them to alternatives, it need not do so. Biases can be overcome. One way to help overcome a particular bias in a group is to add people without said bias to the group. Another way is simply to point out the bias. That won't always work, but I wouldn't want to rule out the possibility.

Childrearing

2010-08-24T12:41:00.000-04:00

Oh, McSweeney's! (via Uncertain Principles, I think)

When little Aiden toddled up our daughter Johanna and asked to play with her Elmo ball, he was, admittedly, very sweet and polite. I think his exact words were, "Have a ball, peas [sic]?"

And I'm sure you were very proud of him for using his manners.

To be sure, I was equally proud when Johanna yelled, "No! Looter!" right in his looter face, and then only marginally less proud when she sort of shoved him.

The thing is, in this family we take the philosophies of Ayn Rand seriously.

It is probably best that philosophers are so often ignored by society at large.

8 signs a P≠NP proof is wrong

2010-08-24T12:39:00.000-04:00

Here.

(N.B. I scheduled the next few posts to self-publish over the weekend while I was traveling. They didn't. Sorry for the then-dearth and present-glut.)

Going Galt

2010-08-17T10:47:00.000-04:00

Why have libertarians never built a utopia? Here.

... Libertopia would yield its residents a greatly reduced standard of living, compared to what they could get from a government. Of course, the ideal would be a nearby government jurisdiction that would provide the large-scale industry needed for a ready source of consumer goods, a home for contracted-in service providers, support for losers and so on, but would not be able to tax the Libertopians.
But once you think that you realise that a partial approach to this outcome already exists, and has millions of inhabitants across the US. They’re called suburban Republicans. The suburbs benefit from urban centers, but resist paying for them, mostly successfully. It’s not exactly Libertopia, but it’s obviously close enough to be more appealing than going Galt.

a nice couple of sentences

2010-08-16T11:37:00.000-04:00

Fuelled by grass, the Mongol empire could be described as solar-powered; it was an empire of the land. Later empires, such as the British, moved by ship and were wind-powered, empires of the sea. The American empire, if it is an empire, runs on oil and is an empire of the air. On the world's largest landmass, Iraq is a main crossroads; most aspirants to empire eventually pass through there.

From Ian Frazier (The New Yorker) via Kottke.

maintenance

2010-08-15T19:53:00.000-04:00

Charles Stross asks:

What is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain (not necessarily to extend) our current level of technological civilization?

Stross expects the answer to fall between 100 million and 1 billion. A few commenters question his upper limit, which is based on the population of industrialized nations, because those nations exploit the rest of the world for its labor and natural resources. But most commenters question his lower limit, some expecting that even 1 million individuals (with the first generation properly selected) might be enough to be technologically self-sustaining.

I think a more interesting question is: what is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain our current way of life?

I don't think a technological civilization can exist without, you know, civilization. And civilization means much more than technology. It also means janitors, politicians, beat cops, caretakers, librarians, athletes, judges, rock stars, journalists, and maybe even bloggers.

beauty

2010-08-15T19:29:00.000-04:00

Here.

extinction of the labour class

2010-08-15T19:26:00.000-04:00

Philip Greenspun wonders:

The U.S. has 15 million officially unemployed workers and additional tens of millions who aren’t working and aren’t looking for a job. Could these folks be the draft horses of the 21st century?

Here's the gist: worries about disappearing labor markets can probably be ignored; such worries are typical in times of technological change, but the reality is that in many cases demand for labor increases. But the nature of labor changes, and there are losers. Internal combustion engines eventually replaced draft horses in the early 20th century because the cost to operate engines dropped below the cost of feeding horses. Perhaps labor has now changed so that certain individuals simply haven't the capabilities to make it in the present market.

I have a fondness for outlandish comparisons, but even so, the comparison seems particularly crass. People aren't horses. There's an implication that these people don't deserve jobs because they don't have salable skills.

Let's take a closer look at the basic claim: there is a gap in the labor market large enough to swallow 5% of the population of the US. That is, these individuals are not qualified for the jobs that provide the level of compensation they desire. Furthermore, they are unwilling to take jobs that don't provide that level of compensation.

Now things seem more reasonable. If I lost my (hypothetical) $30,000/year job, I would be leery of replacing it with a (hypothetical) $15,000/year minimum wage job -- I wouldn't be able to pay my (hypothetical) bills. I'd keep looking.

Unlimited paid leave

2010-08-13T13:33:00.002-04:00

Here.

Just like grad school!

Short stuff for 11 August

2010-08-11T18:03:00.000-04:00

It appears Marc Hauser has been making things up. This sort of news just makes me sad.

What happens when you get rid of traffic lights? Order ensues. (M/R)

A graphical illustration of a PhD (via Uncertain Principles). If you're in grad school, spend a minute on the site -- it contains a number of good tips for writing PhD proposals, hunting jobs, and being productive.

A nice history of ecology. (via Evolving Thoughts)

I hate periodic tables of anything but elements. It is ironic, then, that a faux periodic table is so effective in organizing conceptual links between different kinds of visualizations (h/t Kottke).

Should Journals Get Rid of "Revise and Resubmit"?

2010-08-08T13:10:00.000-04:00

Leiter posts a reader question: Should Journals Get Rid of "Revise and Resubmit"?

"A philosopher writes: I think that journals should no longer give revise-and-resubmits. All decisions should be either accept or reject. A journal can certainly send an acceptance that reads 'we are pleased to accept your paper, and ask that you..."

Some reactions, from the obscure to the general:

Revise & Resubmit is sometimes the grade editors give when they aren't happy with their referees. Despite appearances to the contrary, editors generally want to get a decision to authors in a timely manner. But sometimes, referees do not cooperate. Useless or capricious referees are a fact of life, but editors (who are known to referees) cannot always overrule their recommendation. An R&R can be a way out for editor and author, especially if the editor directs the author to make reasonable changes (but to ignore requests to write a different paper).
There are occasions where an author (typically but not always new, or perhaps from an allied field) has jumped the gun and needs to spend more time with the paper before it can be published. Perhaps she has missed crucial literature or needs to add or remove sections before the paper is in the right form. In such cases, R&R is a signal that the journal wants the paper, and that the work IS worth undertaking.

When referee reports make it clear that a paper is of high quality but not right for the journal, it should be rejected, with an explanation from the editor and (if possible) a pointer to the right journal. Referees and editors should never ask authors to write a different paper and submit that instead.

An editor is typically looking for papers that are well-reasoned, interesting, original, and are responsive to existing literature. At top journals, they are also looking for papers that will stand the test of time. Papers can be rejected for offences to any or all of these sensibilities, and if possible, editors should say which.

"Accept" (typically with minor revisions) means the paper is fundamentally sound, but would be improved with slight changes.
"Reject" means the paper is fundamentally unsound, uninteresting, unoriginal, or unresponsive to the literature.
"Revise and Resubmit" should be reserved for those papers whose research is there, but which have serious flaws. Usually, the editor has major concerns about the structure of the paper or its responsiveness to literature. (Papers that are unoriginal or uninteresting should be rejected so that the author can try elsewhere. These problems will not be solved with revisions.)

dancing in context

2010-08-08T12:18:00.000-04:00

A few days ago, I noted that simply recognizing context as a factor in the dance of science wasn't very satisfying, because that "gives no flavour for how context interacts with the cycle elements" (observation, experiment, theorizing, and classification).

John Wilkins was nice enough to respond, first by pointing out that he's in the middle of a series (oops!) and second, that

... It is an empirical matter in each case what that context is. There are no generalisations that I think are unexceptional about this. Sometimes a science will run more or less independently of its culture, and at other times a science will be beholden to its cultural context independently of the internal issues of the science. [...] To think there is a general, universal and consistent cultural context for science is, I believe, a holdover of Comtean positivist thinking. You want to know what the relevant context was for the Hubble telescope, or for the discovery of aspirin? Go look. My schematic here merely indicates the general relations of external and internal movements in the science.

Yup. Good stuff, and I look forward to reading what comes next in the series.

Although context is frustratingly idiosyncratic, I think there are some areas at the fringes where it is possible to make definite claims about its relationship to scientific practice. But first, I want to say why I think context is such a hard problem.

It isn't clear what context is. I mean, it's a distinction between something and its surroundings, but what does that mean? What kind of distinction does "context" rely on? It isn't strictly foreground/background (that seems to imply salient/not-salient, and that's clearly not right). It's more like inside/outside. That seems to depend on solving the "demarcation problem:" what is science, and what isn't? Some activities count as scientific, others do not (I suppose measuring counts, but napping does not). Some interests are scientific, others are not (perhaps understanding counts but getting tenure does not). Things get fuzzy fast, and I'm not entirely certain a sharp line is desirable.

Still, even without a satisfactory notion of what context is, we can pick out cases of context affecting science. For example, legal restrictions make certain experiments impossible.*

I expect I'll have more to say about context at a later date, but that's enough noodling for today.

* For a sense of "possible" that is sensitive to legal matters. Typically, we would say illegal activities are "impermissible," not impossible, but I prefer to discuss "regulative possibility." This allows for an analysis that makes use of overlapping realms of possibility -- physical, technological, economic, ethical, and regulative to name a few.

the dance of scientific practice

2010-08-06T13:26:00.000-04:00

This is a fascinating picture of science. I like it as an emendation to the Baconian/Popperian cycles (described in the original article), but I do not like the final version, in which this cycle is simply plopped into a circle called "context." This gives no flavour for how context interacts with the cycle elements.

Then again, no one has yet done a good job of that, so I should not criticize.

reinventing the bookstore

2010-08-06T13:20:00.000-04:00

The New Sleekness on reinventing the bookstore. First, buy out a major chain (B&N is on the block). Then, get rid of all the mass market paperbacks and leave just the hardcovers on the shelves, hire staff who know about books, and sell print-on-demand and e-versions of all the hardback books in the store. That leaves lots of extra room left over for:

1) Expand the café to include actual meals from a relatively gourmet kitchen with table service (featuring produce from a rooftop or back-of-house organic garden, where possible).
2) Create a lounge area for leisurely reading
3) Create a cloistered co-working space for freelancers
4) Expand the children’s area (with short-term day care)
5) Hire a badass events coordinator for each store to bring in local artists, musicians and theatre troupes for performances, as well as authors, for nighttime events
6) Apply for a liquor license for those nighttime events

Seems like a reasonable start, but I imagine the success of 1-6 depends highly on the location of the original bookstore.

I want this house.

2010-08-05T18:27:00.000-04:00

This one.

radiation scare

2010-08-05T00:52:00.000-04:00

When a cancer patient is treated with radiation in a radiotherapy clinic, the tumour dies after absorbing a dose of more than 40 sieverts. During the treatment, healthy tissue and organs near the tumour get an incidental dose of some 20 sieverts, which is 20,000 times the recommended annual limit and at least five times the dose that proved fatal at Chernobyl.

How can tissue survive this friendly fire? A radiation dose is the same in principle, whether received in a hospital or elsewhere. But the critical point is that the therapeutic dose is spread over four to six weeks, giving cells time to repair the damage. Each day the healthy cells receive about 1 sievert, and just manage to repair themselves. The tumour cells receive a higher dose, and just fail to do so.

Allison goes on to advocate a change to radiation safety recommendations. Current international recommendations are "1 millisievert per year above the natural background level of about 2.5 millisieverts per year." The author suggests more granularity in the timespan portion of the limit, and a much higher overall limit: "I suggest the upper limit might be reset at a lifetime total of 5 sieverts, at no more than 0.1 sievert per month. That would be a fraction of a radiotherapy dose, spread over a lifetime."

Full story here.

Another entrant in the "Werner Hertzog reads..." meme

2010-08-04T13:03:00.000-04:00

Madeline

Is anthropology generalizing from self?

2010-08-04T12:11:00.000-04:00

Anthropology is biased toward the WEIRD -- Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies (and in particular, to undergraduates at the University of Chicago). The paper is "The weirdest people in the world?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2010), 33: 61-83 Cambridge University Press. Find it here.

The abstract:

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

The method:

We have organized our presen- tation into a series of telescoping contrasts showing, at each level of contrast, how WEIRD people measure up relative to the available reference populations. Our first contrast compares people from modern industrialized societies with those from small-scale societies. Our second telescoping stage contrasts people from Western societies with those from non-Western industrialized societies. Next, we contrast Americans with people from other Western societies. Finally, we contrast university- educated Americans with non – university-educated Amer- icans, or university students with non-student adults, depending on the available data. At each level we discuss behavioral and psychological phenomena for which there are available comparative data, and we assess how WEIRD people compare with other samples.

The findings:

1. Comparative projects involving visual illusions, social motivations (fairness), folkbiological cogni- tion, and spatial cognition all show industrialized popu- lations as outliers. (p. 69)
2. Although robust patterns have emerged among people from industrialized societies, Westerners emerge as unusual – frequent global outliers – on several key dimensions [including cooperation, anti-social punishment, self-concept, holistic-versus-analytic thinking, and moral reasoning]. (p.72)
3. American participants are exceptional even within the unusual popu- lation of Westerners [for example, in their individualism and attitude toward death]. (p. 76)
4. There are differences among typical subjects and the rest of the American popu- lation in unexpected domains. In some of these domains (e.g., individualism, moral reasoning, worldview defense in response to death thoughts, and perceptions of choice), the data from American undergraduates rep- resent even more dramatic departures from the patterns identified in non-Western samples. Further, contempor- ary American college students appear further removed along some of these dimensions than did their predeces- sors a few decades earlier. Typical subjects may be outliers within an outlier population. (p. 78)

And the conclusion:

The empirical foundation of the behavioral sciences comes principally from experiments with American undergraduates. The patterns we have identified in the available (albeit limited) data indicate that this sub-subpopulation is highly unusual along many important psychological and behavioral dimensions. It is not merely that researchers frequently make generalizations from a narrow subpopu- lation. The concern is that this particular subpopulation is highly unrepresentative of the species. (p. 62)

The responses:

The array of responses to this target article is telling. One suggests looking for genetic similarities to explain the WEIRD results, another suggests using the internet to increase sample diversity in the "convenience sample". Several papers amplify the worry in various ways, one by extending it to allied fields like neuroscience (i.e., WEIRD people have WEIRD brains), another by linking WEIRD-based findings to normative expectations "such as might be held by international criminal tribunals in “cognitively distant” war-torn areas" (p. 98), and still another suggesting that institutionalized chimpanzees badly misrepresent wild chimpanzee populations. A contrarian suggests that WEIRD people may be the best representatives of human nature, another says the problem isn't so much the WEIRD subjects as the WEIRD researchers. A few responses seem only tenuously linked to the target article: one discusses development as a mediator between evolution and culture, another decries the use of artificial situations in behavioural research. The last response is by a philosopher, who observes that most philosophers are WEIRD men, which means philosophers' intuitions may be quite different from everyone else's.

See also here for some nice commentary by Greg Downey, especially on the descriptor "WEIRD".

From the perspective of my admittedly non-academic Brazilian colleague, the truly outstanding characteristics of the US students were characteristics like their body types, the diminishing of gender markers, and the evidence of extraordinary peer-group conformity in bearing, expression and personal presentation. His observations are hardly scientific, but they suggest that focusing on ‘Western-ness’, education, economic system, wealth, and political system certainly doesn’t exhaust the parameters of difference and it might not even highlight the most salient, although it does correspond to patterns of the Big Variables in Western scholarship about difference (when I was in grad school, it was the Holy Trinity: gender, class and ethnicity).

WEIRD people are fat and sedentary, and the difference may begin in childhood, with the development of basic motor skills.

in other news

2008-07-04T23:10:00.001-04:00

The blog has been languishing lately, partly because I've been away, and partly because I've been squaring away my phd prospectus. It's not going to get better for a while, because I'm about to head off to Maine for the rest of the month. Before I go, though, one more thing:

Walmart has a new look. As Tyler says, way overdue.

Yeah. That second picture definitely feels more like the place I go to buy cheap socks.

alice and bob

2008-06-30T11:59:00.000-04:00

I wish I had thought of this first.

Alice: You are late. How was your day?
Bob: Sorry honey, I had to wait for t = infinity, it took forever.

(As I said once before, if you get the joke, you have no right to complain.)

29 June roundup

2008-06-29T11:46:00.001-04:00

A week of extremely exciting excerpts:

Americans arrested abroad: Tijuana, Guadalajara, Nuevo Laredo, London, Mexico City, Toronto, Nassau, Mérida, Nogales, Hong Kong. 7 of the top 10 crime hotspots for Americans are in Mexico.
Cloned T cells kick cancer.
Proprietary bacteria poop petroleum. [/.]
Bumper stickers bespeak bad behaviour. Other drivers get mad, but don't act out.
Comedy crushes Communism, via 3QD: "'Is it true that Marxism-Leninism is scientific?' 'No, surely not. If it were, they would have tested it on animals first.'"
Major microscopic mutation materializes: evolution in the lab
Terrifying trippy tune: thousand-year time travel [via, inspired by]

why you should throw books out

2008-06-28T11:36:00.000-04:00

Most people, if they aren't going to keep a book, pass it along to someone else. But that's irrational if the book isn't good, says Tyler Cowen. You should throw it out.

If you donate the otherwise-trashed book somewhere, someone might read it. OK, maybe that person will read one more book in life but more likely that book will substitute for that person reading some other book instead.

The question is whether the book is worth it. You've read it and can make an informed judgment. It is your duty to do so--else you will be encouraging the propagation of bad books to the detriment of the good. Particularly if, like me, you are more likely to keep good books and dispose of the bad. "But note the calculation is tricky. Sometimes a very bad book can be useful because it might appeal to 'bad' readers and lure them away from even worse books." Another confounder is that some of the books I know are bad are just the only book I know on a subject--can I really recommend against such a one?

This is not an idle question: my small graduate department once maintained a room-sized private library of books in the field. Private libraries are discouraged by the university library system (for good reason), and so when we ran out of office space, the library had to go. Now we have boxes and boxes of books--some good, some bad. The university library wants them. But would it be responsible to give them?

on knowing math

2008-06-27T23:21:00.002-04:00

A straight cut from 3quarksdaily:

During the Russian revolution, the mathematical physicist Igor Tamm was seized by anti-communist vigilantes at a village near Odessa where he had gone to barter for food. They suspected he was an anti-Ukranian communist agitator and dragged him off to their leader. Asked what he did for a living he said that he was a mathematician.
The sceptical gang-leader began to finger the bullets and grenades slung around his neck. "All right", he said, "calculate the error when the Taylor series approximation of a function is truncated after n terms. Do this and you will go free; fail and you will be shot". Tamm slowly calculated the answer in the dust with his quivering finger. When he had finished the bandit cast his eye over the answer and waved him on his way.

What's the lesson here? To remember your Taylor series? To never exaggerate your mathematical prowess to anti-communist vigilantes? That in Ukraine, even vigilantes know more math than I remember? Or that in Ukraine, even knowing math won't keep you out of a life of vigilantism?

every grad student should get one of these

2008-06-26T01:48:00.000-04:00

This Okiro! Asa Ichiban Taiyou Senshi - Charenjaa Kitto (Wake up! First Sun Warrior of the Morning - challenger kit) alarm clock wakes kids up "by turning them into Ultraman."

The commander wakes the child up at 6 a.m., and prompts players to put on the helmet and hit a "roger" button to acknowledge their wakefulness. Then, they are ordered to count to 10 in five different languages: English, Japanese, German, Swahili and Malagasy. At that point, the player is "allowed to take off the equipment and start the day"...

Awesome. (Hat tip Marginal Revolution)

on being left-handed

2008-06-25T22:48:00.002-04:00

10% of the general population are left-handed. Ford, Reagan, the elder Bush, Clinton, Gore, and now Obama and McCain are all left-handed [via MR].

Does my being left-handed increase my chances of becoming President of the United States?

juxtaposition

2008-06-23T15:50:00.000-04:00

Is Google making us stupid? Or smart?

Nicholas Carr for The Atlantic:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.

He thinks looking at stuff really fast on the internet has rotted his brain. It's a familiar story.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic.... Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

I empathize. A year ago, I was reading in preparation for area exams. From all appearances, at some point during the last stretch, when the details of dozens of readings were in my head, I sprained my brain. And I have since been hobbled in my attempts to focus. This blog--and the short, mostly non-academic readings I have done in keeping it up--have been my rehabilitation. It is anyone's guess whether it has worked--or if reading blogs has instead reinforced the bad habits Carr describes.

Or are they bad habits?

The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Of course, algorithms don't require people. Eureka! Science News, so I am told, has no human editor;

it is powered by the Eureka! news engine, a fully automated artificial intelligence.
Its sole purpose is to ensure that you have access to the very latest and popular science breakthroughs. To achieve this, it constantly surfs the web to gather, regroup, categorize, tag and rank science news from all major science news sources.
It computes relationships between science articles and news found on the web using a vector space model and hierarchical clustering. It then automatically determines in which category each news item belongs using a Naive Bayes classifier. Finally, it examines multiple parameters (such as timeliness, rate of appearance on the web, number of sources reporting the news, etc) for each news group. The result is an e! score which represents the relative importance of a news item.

Even if one accepts the breathless-techie claim that a modified naive Bayes classifier is an "artificial intelligence," one might argue that this service is parasitic on the work of human editors (such as those at each of the thirty-seven sources for e!), even if none are involved directly in this enterprise--which, by the way, does not write the news, it just ranks, formats, and displays the news.

If this is also what reading the internet is training my brain to do, it is likely not a good portent for my dissertation.

22 June roundup

2008-06-22T15:46:00.001-04:00

Forget abstinence only:more sex is safer sex.
Speaking of sex, Pisani's book The Wisdom of Whores has a lesson for social science: "I had the impression from the qualitative research...that waria were turning dozens of tricks a week, but [a quantitative] study showed they averaged only three. And since that figure came from 250 waria selected at random as the manual requires, it was certainly more accurate than the qualitative research..." The problem? Systematically bad sampling: "a waria who is hanging around on a street corner to be interviewed by a research team is a waria who is not with a client. 'You are talking to all the dogs, obviously.'"
Blowing out the birthday candles just got awesomer. [via]
Philosophy majors are on the rise. Pay, not so much. Why, then? Well, “That whole deep existential torment.... It’s good for getting girlfriends.”

prognostication

2008-06-20T13:59:00.000-04:00

Social Technologies predicts 12 Areas for Technology Innovation through 2025.

Personalized medicine
Distributed energy
Pervasive computing
Nanomaterials
Biomarkers for health
Biofuels
Advanced manufacturing
Universal water
Carbon management
Engineered agriculture
Security and tracking
Advanced transportation

The rules of prognostication are simple. Be specific, outlandish, and keep quiet about the ones that fall through. Social Technologies doesn't meet the bill. It's a terrible list. They aren't prognosticating so much as advertising. Here's my take on their 12 areas of innovation:

Nearly all cancers will be treated with retroviruses.
In China and India, energy will be generated locally, leapfrogging those nations past the United States and other Western nations beleaguered by increasingly desperate corporations and the inertia of distribution infrastructure.
In 2025, pervasive computing and the semantic web will be on the list of predicted tech innovations for 2050. The next computing revolution is that thousands of African children who have received One Laptop Per Child will earn One Dollar Per Day acting as the back-end to your Roomba.
Nanomaterials will be ubiquitous and cheap, but will turn out to be useful mostly for advertising.
Socialist countries will have to face the troubling fascist aspect of genetic determinism in their free healthcare plans.
After trillions of dollars have been wasted in developing biofuels, we will decide that trains were a good idea after all.
While some corporations spend billions trying to develop a homogenous system to allow customers arbitrary degrees of customization on their products, smarter corporations spend billions developing the enabling technologies they can sell to artisans for use in creating such products. The de-industrial revolution begins in your mom's craft room.
A salt shortage makes desalinization affordable.
Carbon management becomes a big business. On this one, the panel is right on. Of course, managing carbon doesn't actually do anything except redistribute wealth.
Kitchen counter genetic engineering to produce crop diversity becomes commonplace. Corporations that attempt to patent genes are laughed out of court. Intellectual property law follows an attribution model, and end-profits trickle up to the originator.
Everyone, everywhere, has cameras. They're always on and always recording, and no one cares anymore. Criminals subvert the nanomaterials so useful for advertising to disguise themselves as their own Second Life avatar.
The Netherlands outlaws cars. Most large cities outlaw cars in the downtown core (excepting electric cabs and emergency vehicles). Everyone in the city rides a bike, and fashion follows suit: flared legs and skirts are out, and to my general annoyance, capri pants become popular for both genders.

Yogi Berra has it right: prediction is very hard, especially about the future.

6 days, 10 states, 3000 miles

2008-06-19T15:46:00.004-04:00

For those of you wondering what I was up to while I wasn't posting over the past few weeks, I was driving from Toronto to Vancouver, presenting in Vancouver, and then flying back to Toronto. If you want to know more about it, look here.

think deviant, again

2008-06-12T17:41:00.000-04:00

Here is a sentence from Scientific American (via 3QD):

over the years we have developed a strong intuition for what counts as natural”—and the universe we see does not qualify.

The article is about the (apparent?) time asymmetry of the universe, and this sentence serves as a journalistic "hook", but it does represent a very strange paradox: How can the natural world mislead us about itself?

If the claim is that inborn intuition runs contrary to the actual universe, then there is no problem. If the claim is that our experience has been of an unusual part of the universe, even that may work (assuming we have some evidence that tells us about what "usual" is). But what can it even mean that our experience of the universe runs contrary to that very same universe? How would we ever know?

am I a man who explains things?

2008-06-12T00:15:00.000-04:00

Two months ago, the LA Times ran a piece on men who explain things. Specifically, men who explain things patronisingly. To women.

Solnit describes an experience she had at a party some years ago.

"So? I hear you've written a couple of books," [says the host of the party.]

I replied, "Several, actually."

He said, in the way you encourage your friend's 7-year-old to describe flute practice, "And what are they about?"

They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, my book on Eadweard Muybridge, the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.

He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. "And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?"

The book, of course, was Solnit's own. But this would never have occurred to the patron. When that fact finally sank in,

as if in a 19th century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless -- for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing.

I have been worrying over this anecdote for some time, but so far have avoided writing about it, because to do so would seem to implicate me in precisely the sort of crime described. As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am certainly guilty of the crime of holding forth on subjects about which I know little. But am I patronising about it? Or at least, am I equally patronising to men and women?

I like to think so. The trouble seems to be that women are more sensitive to patronising behavior. For good reason: women really are subject to it more. But given 'equal' treatment, is a different response an overreaction? Or is it justified? It's not an empty question. Patronising behavior has consequences for our basic assumptions about what goes on in the world:

One Christmas, [a nuclear physicist] was telling -- as though it were a light and amusing subject -- how a neighbor's wife in his suburban bomb-making community had come running out of her house naked in the middle of the night screaming that her husband was trying to kill her. How, I asked the physicist, did you know that he wasn't trying to kill her? He explained, patiently, that they were respectable middle-class people. Therefore, her-husband-trying-to-kill-her was simply not a credible explanation for why she was fleeing the house yelling that her husband was trying to kill her. That she was crazy, on the other hand....

Ha ha! Those crazy women!

Combating the lasting foolishness of patronisers is what feminism is all about. It's just too bad that the lessons grate so on those who (think they) have learned the lesson. Being combative, unfortunately, is part of the problem. Solnit describes the aftermath of making a point in dinner conversation:

His scorn was so withering, his confidence so aggressive, that arguing with him seemed a scary exercise in futility and an invitation to more insult.

Ouch.

Ironically, in the course of discussions of feminism, I have gained firsthand knowledge of this feeling (with the genders reversed). I make an observation questioning what I take to be a dogma, and receive a withering, emasculating glare--for, in virtue of being male, I have no authority in this arena. (This reaction is by no means universal, but it does happen.) Solnit complains that

Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't.

Of this, I am surely guilty. I'm not sure I've ever apologized for being wrong. But that's the wrong thing to be up in arms about. For to me, an explanation is a hypothesis--a reasoned inference from what I do know. Sometimes I am quite sure of things before I open my mouth, and my task is to recall the relevant supporting details. Other times, I am posing something quite tentative, in the hopes of gathering alternative views and further information. I don't think the difference is always (or even usually) entirely clear to anyone but me (that provides me deniability when I turn out to be wrong). My preference is to make declarative statements about states of affairs rather than about my beliefs. I rarely use phrases like "I think" or "I believe" except in clarification. This distinction--between states of affairs and beliefs--is at root of the ongoing dispute about the cause for the gender disparity in science and engineering.

Jake Young asks the question: does the machismo of scientific culture exclude women from scientific or technical careers, or do women's preferences for working with others (rather than tools) explain the difference? According to one of the studies, another traditional explanation, fertility decisions, is a factor in delayed acheivement, but not career choice. After quickly rejecting a fourth hypothesis (that there is gender disparity in innate ability), Jake notes that

A group populated largely by men is more likely to be chauvinistic because there is no one there to call them on their bullshit. Thus, the situation can become self-perpetuating.

Over on Cosmic Variance, Sean relays a story about Richard Feynman, a charming sexist if ever there was one. When it came time for lunch, he would turn to any woman who was about and ask her to fetch his sandwich. But he would also explain quantum physics to the same woman without any fuss about whether she would understand.

Once caught in the cycle, how do we get out?

june 1 roundup

2008-06-10T00:41:00.002-04:00

[obviously, this post is ill-named. I intended it to appear on June 1 while I was on the road to Vancouver for CSHPS, the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science, conference, of which more later. That didn't happen. Indeed, I missed a whole 'nother Sunday since. And yet, I have not changed the name. Go figure.]

A computer bug is partially responsible for the housing credit bubble. Or else someone would like us to think that's the case.
Optical computing gets closer.
The secret to good sci-fi? Low budget. Probably because then it is a labor of love, and movie executives have less sway.
Is it wishful thinking to hope that a sea of plastic trash plus plastic-decomposing bacterial equals unicorns and rainbows?
I will derive

informed consent, social contracts, and the veil of ignorance

2008-05-27T11:15:00.001-04:00

(I've scheduled a few posts to magically appear here while I'm away over the next few weeks. What follows is one.)

Massimo Pigliucci concisely describes the basics of ethical theory: there's contractualism, where

no contractualist really maintains that there ever was a non-social state of nature for human beings (if they did, they would be contradicted by evolutionary biologists), nor that the so-called social contract was an historical event (historians would go crazy with that one), nor that it is actually entered into voluntarily by most people (you are usually born into a society with a given contract, meaning a set of laws and customs

and there's the Rawls variation, which introduces a device he calls the "veil of ignorance," where you

assume that you arrive at the bargaining table with no knowledge whatsoever of your social status, economic power, ethnicity, religion or gender. Then, asks Rawls, what kind of society would you want to set up? The answer, he argued, is a society that would guarantee maximum liberty equally distributed among its members, as well as an equal distribution of wealth and power.

Contemporary America does nothing of the sort (that position is far to the left of any Democrat in office; Libertarians and Republicans need not apply).

There's a funny sort of dichotomy at work here: in the original contractualism, we are all bonded against our will to contracts that no one ever explicitly approved (but which we all purportedly would approve if we were in an imaginary situation disarmingly called a state of "nature"). In Rawls' version, we are asked what contract we would set up if we didn't know anything about our own particular qualities and abilities (his answer is a meritocracy).

One of the great principles of fairness under the rule of law is informed consent. We insist on seeing all the available information (certified by experts!) before making a medical, legal, or financial decision. Why, then, are ethics to be based on ignorance?

Is it truly impossible to reach similar ethical conclusions from a more realistic starting point--a situation in which some ethical system is in place and individuals have partial knowledge of their own status?

scientific images

2008-05-26T11:27:00.001-04:00

Sue me; I'm on vacation.

may 25 roundup

2008-05-25T11:24:00.004-04:00

Tomato Genetically Modified To Be More Expensive.
grade inflation: "I am going to warn you one last chance I am going to ask I want a better than a B-. If I see this [grade] I swear to god I am going to f---ing put you in a wheelchair when I see you..."
We must LOL, and so we shall. [via Torontoist]
What to do about high tuition costs at wealthy institutions: tax them! Uh, no. If the idea is to induce Harvard to lower tuition, don't ask for a share of their profits (which induces them to pass on their new tax burden to students by raising tuition). Lower Harvard's tax burden by a function of the difference between Harvard's tuition and the tuition at the University of Massachusetts. Use the revenues to subsidize UMass and further lower tuition there. That's a winning combination.
In other Massachusetts-related news, Jake Young gives us some of the science behind Senator Ted Kennedy's glioma.
Should we remove legal barriers to establishing low stakes prediction markets? Perhaps, but I predict we won't. Hah! See what I did right there?
Chemistry rocks.

transit

2008-05-24T11:18:00.000-04:00

In case it is not legible, the caption reads: "Amount of space required to transport the same number of passengers by car, bus or bicycle."

I wish I knew where I first saw this image. I hope the originator appreciates getting the message out enough to forgive my inability to give credit.

best of net: BODY RITUAL AMONG THE NACIREMA

2008-05-23T11:28:00.000-04:00

In this, the fourth installment of "best of net," I reproduce a section of Horace Miner's "Body Ritual among the Nacirem," originally published in American Anthropologist 58:3, June 1956. It is a seminal work in the field of anthropology, and though by now a bit dated, is nevertheless an instructive read. As always, go read the original.

The anthropologist has become so familiar with the diversity of ways in which different people behave in similar situations that he is not apt to be surprised by even the most exotic customs. In fact, if all of the logically possible combinations of behavior have not been found somewhere in the world, he is apt to suspect that they must be present in some yet undescribed tribe. The point has, in fact, been expressed with respect to clan organization by Murdock (1949: 71).[2] In this light, the magical beliefs and practices of the Nacirema present such unusual aspects that it seems desirable to describe them as an example of the extremes to which human behavior can go.
...
Nacirema culture is characterized by a highly developed market economy which has evolved in a rich natural habitat. While much of the people's time is devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of the fruits of these labors and a considerable portion of the day are spent in ritual activity. The focus of this activity is the human body, the appearance and health of which loom as a dominant concern in the ethos of the people. While such a concern is certainly not unusual, its ceremonial aspects and associated philosophy are unique.
The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such a body, man's only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of ritual and ceremony. Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in fact, the opulence of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centers it possesses. Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walled with stone. Poorer families imitate the rich by applying pottery plaques to their shrine walls.
While each family has at least one such shrine, the rituals associated with it are not family ceremonies but are private and secret. The rites are normally only discussed with children, and then only during the period when they are being initiated into these mysteries. I was able, however, to establish sufficient [504 begins ->] rapport with the natives to examine these shrines and to have the rituals described to me.

The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built into the wall. In this chest are kept the many charms and magical potions without which no native believes he could live. These preparations are secured from a variety of specialized practitioners. The most powerful of these are the medicine men, whose assistance must be rewarded with substantial gifts. However, the medicine men do not provide the curative potions for their clients, but decide what the ingredients should be and then write them down in an ancient and secret language. This writing is understood only by the medicine men and by the herbalists who, for another gift, provide the required charm.

The charm is not disposed of after it has served its purpose, but is placed in the charmbox of the household shrine. As these magical materials are specific for certain ills, and the real or imagined maladies of the people are many, the charm-box is usually full to overflowing. The magical packets are so numerous that people forget what their purposes were and fear to use them again. While the natives are very vague on this point, we can only assume that the idea in retaining all the old magical materials is that their presence in the charm-box, before which the body rituals are conducted, will in some way protect the worshiper.

Beneath the charm-box is a small font. Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution.[5] The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.

In the hierarchy of magical practitioners, and below the medicine men in prestige, are specialists whose designation is best translated as "holy-mouth-men." The Nacirema have an almost pathological horror of and fascination with the mouth, the condition of which is believed to have a supernatural influence on all social relationships. Were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers reject them. They also believe that a strong relationship exists between oral and moral characteristics. For example, there is a ritual ablution of the mouth for children which is supposed to improve their moral fiber.

The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious [6] about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures.[7]

In addition to the private mouth-rite, the people seek out a holy-mouth-man once or twice a year. These practitioners have an impressive set of paraphernalia, consisting of a variety of augers, awls, probes, and prods. The use of [505 begins ->] these objects in the exorcism of the evils of the mouth involves almost unbelievable ritual torture of the client. The holy-mouth-man opens the client's mouth and, using the above mentioned tools, enlarges any holes which decay may have created in the teeth. Magical materials are put into these holes. If there are no naturally occurring holes in the teeth, large sections of one or more teeth are gouged out so that the supernatural substance can be applied. In the client's view, the purpose of these ministrations [8] is to arrest decay and to draw friends. The extremely sacred and traditional character of the rite is evident in the fact that the natives return to the holy-mouth-men year after year, despite the fact that their teeth continue to decay.

You will have to look to the original to see conclusions about this backward people.

hypothesis-free research

2008-05-22T11:15:00.000-04:00

Whenever I wonder if philosophers of science are really necessary, I run into a story like this:*

The young scientist next to me shrugged and said that models were of no use to him because he did "discovery-driven research". He then went on to state that discovery-driven research is hypothesis-free, and thus independent of the preexisting bias of traditional biology.

What the young scientist means might more descriptively be termed "foreground-hypothesis-free," although that's hardly a catchy phrase. All of the hypotheses in the sort of experiment indicated (an undirected search for correlations within a large dataset) are relegated to the background: the identification and measurement of data represented in the set, together with the statistical apparatus and a single uber-hypothesis: correlations are interesting.

I can think of several words that better describe this class of research: thoughtless or shallow. Harsh? You bet.

* It should be noted, perhaps, that Jake Young is a PhD in neuroscience and the storyteller Steven Wiley is a practising biologist. So maybe this is a stronger case for the existence of philosophy of science than for philosophers of science.

two wrongs don't make a right

2008-05-21T15:56:00.000-04:00

Leif Wenar says it is "patronizing theft to buy natural resources." Tyler Cowan says "he proposes suing Exxon to create a chain reaction."

The only thing more patronizing than paying a pittance to the worlds poor for the natural resources we need for lip gloss and shave cream is suing on behalf of those poor people.

That said, Wenar is right that there's a problem. Here are my priorities:

Wherever possible, we should use renewable resources.
If renewable resources won't do it, we should do our best to keep the resources we've already "harvested" in the supply loop, preferably through reuse, but through recycling when the materials need to be reprocessed.
Whenever renewable resources are harvested, it should be in sustainable volumes, and prices should reflect replacement cost.
When non-renewable resources are harvested, the price should be high. I don't know how high.

I doubt a lawsuit is the way to settle the issue.

think deviant - philosophy of science

a title goes here

women's intuition

the 27th letter of the alphabet

CFP: “The Regimen of Bodily Health: Nourishment and Natural Knowledge”

How to steer a hurricane

what is creativity?

a case study in why explaining anything is hard

perspective

fermi paradox

Science journalism how-to

Whoa.

on invoking the right to remain silent

Vaccines don't cause autism

The best magazine articles

Talk about a single-payer system

A case for meat eating

Links for 22 September

Visual Representation in Science workshop

correlation

the world is awesome

city streets

The future has a name

why things are broken

cool idea

economies of scale

writing tips

academic reading how-to

deriving in the rain

11 September

Blogs of note

A new demarcation problem

Links for 9 September

back to school

on sorting algorithms

How big is the solar system?

How to raise an athlete

Sentences to ponder

Can heavy metal singers actually sing?

Markets in everything, personal services edition

we are all apprentices

links for the week

Sentences to ponder

Doing away with formal peer review

Degrees of art-hood

Launch of Spontaneous Generations 4:1

Vol 4, No 1 (2010): Scientific Instruments: Knowledge, Practice, and Culture

Table of Contents

Focused Discussion

Articles

Opinions

Reviews

On mosques and the World Trade Center

predictions

via Marginal Revolution

How do you feel?

How to misuse quantum mechanics

The Less Feature

the secret to retail success

net neutrality

regulating freedom

It isn't easy being green.

Seeing reasons

tornado made of fire

good advice is hard to take

red eye

Links for 24 August

Whoa.

Technology in teaching

Who renders judgment?

Childrearing

8 signs a P≠NP proof is wrong

Going Galt

a nice couple of sentences

maintenance

beauty

extinction of the labour class

Unlimited paid leave

Short stuff for 11 August

Should Journals Get Rid of "Revise and Resubmit"?