Understanding the Assignment

The cover story for the January issue of The Atlantic is "The Most Powerful Man in Science." It's ostensibly a story about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but it's really a story about Secretary Kennedy's worldview and his feuding with the "medical establishment." And, as such, the phrase "trust in science" came up.

It was misplaced. Many people, and I would count Secretary Kennedy among them, don't have a problem with science; they has a problem with people. What they suspect is going on is that the policy prescriptions that they're receiving are not neutral, but motivated by people who stand to benefit. Opaque, technical studies are being used as weapons against them.

And once the specter of human dishonesty enters the picture, all bets are off. Because a study, or one hundred studies, can say whatever; once someone believes that the outcomes of the studies have been manipulated, none of it matters anymore.

Social trust is a tool, not a moral imperative. People have to feel that trusting other people comes with some direct benefit to themselves. The public-health and perhaps the broader scientific communities have a problem in the sense that people feel that not trusting them is the best way to go. High profile arguments, or even future data, aren't going to solve that. A sense that trust is rewarded with a better life will. 

Rationalizing

It's not hard to find someone who will pontificate against the tendency of social media and news platforms to present audiences with "rage bait" and other fare that's designed to drive interaction by making people angry. What I'm much more curious about is why people are so willing to take the bait, and/or reward other people for doing so.

I suspect that part of the reason why it's so much easier to find people willing to talk about the former than the latter is that railing against, say, Jubilee on YouTube for posting videos designed to drive thousands of hot-takes is a form of rage bait, and perhaps virtue signalling, in and of itself. It allows people to present themselves as righteous, and an audience can feel righteous along with them, feeling themselves superior to both the purveyors of the content, and the people who rush to engage with it.

Understanding why it comes across as so compelling and satisfying to react to (even if one hasn't bothered to fully understand, or even watch, read or listen to it) is unlikely to simply present other people as stupid or uneducated. Sure, there's still likely to be the ability for an audience to hold themselves as above whomever is being spoken of, and to declare themselves immune from such open manipulation.

But I also think that the truth of the matter, the reasons why it's so easy to spark people to outrage, especially by simply hinting that certain people are not simply Other, but bad people for that, is that it's dry, and technical. And so it doesn't offer a quick dopamine hit, or a fix of Meaning. Instead, it's simply a lesson in human psychology, something that people don't find all that interesting, judging by how little it appears in feeds or podcasts.

Questioning

I was listening to a podcast today, and the host brought up the Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis. Listening to him, it struck me that what may actually have been at work was an answer to a mystery that exists mainly in people's imaginations.

The general gist of the Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis is that the constants of nature, including the fundamental forces of gravity, electromagnetism, et cetera, have to be within very narrow parameters for "life as we know it" to exist, and this isn't something that can be easily (if at all) explained by the Anthropic Principle. For instance, if the strong nuclear force were the slightly-to-somewhat stronger nuclear force, and everything else were unchanged, fusion would work differently than it does in our current universe and so stars would operate differently.

The idea that the constants of nature being their current values purely by chance is highly unlikely gives rise to the Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis being part of an argument for Intelligent Design; something had to set the constants to their current values, and that something is an immensely powerful deity.

Fair enough, I suppose, but... how, exactly, do we know that there are lots of different possible values that these constants could have? After all, we have a sample size of precisely 1. And, given that the whole of the Universe and the Observable Universe are not the same thing, potentially less than that.

And in this sense, the Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis seems to be the answer to a question that there isn't actually enough information to ask. Rather, it's a solution to a question that comes into existence if certain assumptions that have been made about the nature of the physical laws of the Universe turn out to be correct... and even that assumes that scientists will be able to test them at some point.

Granted, I'm neither a scientist or a theologian, but I'm at a place in life where I'm okay with not knowing, and the very distinct possibility that no-one will ever know. It's a mystery to which I don't need a solution. The question is only as interesting as the answers that people produce to it. In part, because there are other, closer questions; ones that it does make sense that we may be able to answer, and those seem to be much more fruitful places in which to invest attention.

Feeling the Heat

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released it's most recent reports.. Cue calls for action from people the world over who are concerned about the impacts on Earth's climate, and, in theory, its capacity to support human life. It's pretty much a given that there's no chance of humanity managing to avoid at least 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. Even 2 degrees is looking pretty dicey at this point. And there's nothing surprising about this. I recall learning about the Greenhouse Effect in the 1980s. (Popular Mechanics noted the Greenhouse Effect, and the fact that burning coal contributed to it, in 1912.) As Bill Maher pointed out, our generation has pretty much done nothing to address the problem. People have had other priorities.

And this isn't likely to change anytime soon. Because as Bill Maher also pointed out, the younger generation has much bigger idols than climate activists. The people they want to emulate, and the lives they want to lead are at odds with working to preserve the temperature status quo, just as it was when I was a young person. Hectoring messages from climate hawks are not going to change this. Finding a way to align incentives might. And this, to my way of thinking, is really the only way that humanity doesn't find itself attempting to bail its way out of the boat that it managed to drill a hole in the bottom of. The message of "pay for climate stabilization now, or pay to remediate the effects later" may be spot on, but it doesn't make the costs any more palatable, or reduce the feelings of poverty that make people so reluctant to pay anything.

Unless climate activism finds a way to make paying for a transition away from cheap, but damaging, fossil fuels seem like a clear benefit, rather than a burdensome tax, their message will continue to fall on deaf ears.

Will You Two Cut It Out?

So it was a remarkably hot weekend here in the Seattle area, with temperature records being kicked to the curb for three straight days. Technically, the excessive heat continued into today, but 92° (33°C) is pretty low-key when compared to 108° (42°C). The weekend saw the highest temperatures recorded in the Seattle area, and literally doubled the number of days that the region hit high temperatures above 100° over the past 125 years.

Predictably, there is a chorus of voices holding this event out as incontrovertible proof of anthropogenic climate change. Which is unfortunate.

Not that there's anything to be done about it. People will hold out this or that even as either validation or refutation of anthropogenic climate change as it suits them and aligns with their viewpoints and interests. So I expect the next dumping of snow that lands on the area will inspire a counterargument based on that single event. (Although proponents of anthropogenic climate change will likely also point to it as proof of their own viewpoint.)

The bickering over which side is right misses the point. Mainly because it boils down to pitting the interests of different groups against one another in what basically becomes a zero-sum game (albeit one where both sides could lose). While policymakers and experts often speak of things in terms of their impacts on the aggregate, people live their lives as individuals. Promises of more and better new energy or fossil-fuel jobs aren't draws for people who don't see themselves as every qualifying for them, at least, not if they're going to earn the salaries that they're accustomed to. And given the United States track record of leaving people out in the cold when their primary skills are not (or are no longer) of use, it's understandable that people would place their individual livelihoods above more abstract concerns.

Accordingly, the best path to a solution likely doesn't lie in one side browbeating the other into submission. A solution that is designed to best meet the needs of all parties involved will likely be more useful. Of course, this is easier said than done, especially in an environment where the opposed parties feel that the other is acting in deliberate bad faith. But even where that is not the case, seeking compromise where questions of justice are involved is always a difficult task. But, in this case, the expected benefit would be the removal of an incentive to deny or otherwise dismiss the problem being solved.

Given that a runaway greenhouse effect, one that would turn the Earth into something akin to Venus, is unlikely, anthropogenic climate change is unlikely to be an extinction-level problem. At least, not for humans. Rather, it will simply become expensive to remediate. Whereupon there will be a new argument over who will pay the bill. Which is unfortunate, but a common facet of human nature.

The Knowledge

I came across an article on expertise (and the lack thereof) in Aeon a while back. The URL is telling, it says that "Real experts know what they don’t know and we should value it." Okay. I'll sort of grant that. So how do I, as a layperson, tell the "real experts" from the "ersatz experts, or even outright charlatans?" After all, if I had the subject matter expertise to know if someone was a real expert or not, I likely wouldn't often need to go to them for advise. And even if I did have a level of expertise that informed me of what I don't know, that, in and of itself, is not enough to inform me of whether someone else genuinely knows it.

The authors of the piece advice dividing questions into three categories (helpfully named levels one, two and three): those that anyone can answer with some time spent researching, those that require genuine expertise in order to answer and those that are effectively unanswerable.

Okay, so how do I determine what level a question falls into?

Knowing which questions fall into which category requires expertise.

So I need an expert in order to tell me if I need an expert to answer a question?

The key difference between these kinds of questions is ‘Would a competent expert well-versed in the relevant scientific literature be reasonably confident in the answer?’

But if I'm a layperson, how do I know this? This is another question that requires expertise; if I don't know the relevant scientific literature I can't answer the question.

And this goes back to one of the fundamental problems between laypeople and experts. Outside of a track record of good and/or bad advice, there's no real way for a layperson to quickly and accurately evaluate someone else's expertise.

In the end, the authors suggest that people with a track record of admitting to ignorance are better picks than those who are not. And there's something to be said for going with humility, even if it leaves the underlying question intact.

Being willing to take "I don't know" for an answer is helpful, but doing that requires only asking questions that can reasonably go unanswered. And that's really the difficulty. If someone needs an answer, "I don't know" isn't useful to them, and it's that need to know that leads them astray.

Snark Attack

This is one of those things that I wrote up, and then, for some reason never got around to posting. While I put it together only three weeks ago, it seems like forever ago. Time flies, I suppose, and never moreso than when you're old.

So this all starts with Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin taking aim at Greta Thunberg's speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

After she goes and studies economics in college, she can come back and explain that to us.

Personally, I think that the young Ms. Thunberg is sometimes held up as a sort of human shield for climate change activism, and so I understand the impulse to strike at her. That doesn't mean it's an impulse worth acting on, however. After all, anyone can snark about a teenage girl's apparent lack of understanding of economics. And given that Ms. Thunberg is said to be on the autism spectrum, she's something of a rather large sitting duck.

I'm going to admit to being something of a climate change fatalist. Not because I think that humanity can't do anything to combat or blunt the impact, but that people won't do anything. Secretary Mnuchin is correct when he notes that drastic measures to combat climate change are going to have serious economic consequences. And, at least for right now, people are more concerned that they'll be the ones left holding the bag. Developed nations don't want to give up the economic growth that they associate with fossil fuel use, and developing nations don't want to lose the chance to become fully developed in the near future. Of course, as global temperatures rise, there are are also going to be serious economic consequences. We'll see if the people who are betting that those consequences will be someone else's problem have guessed correctly.

The fundamental question is straightforward, although by no means easy: What does the "standard of living trendline" (for want of a better name) look like moving forward? We can imagine a trendline for a "carbon-restricted" future. It's generally understood by many people (although it should be said that this is open to dispute) that some sacrifices will have to be made to substantially lower carbon emissions and thus prevent or lessen certain climate change impacts. The end result of these sacrifices can be seen as a loss of efficiency in converting work into standard of living. So for a given level of effort, standards of living will be lower than they are today, in the aggregate. For defenders of the status quo, business as usual leads to the best trendline. There may be problems ahead, but human innovation and technology will solve them, and thus allow people to have a better standard of living than would be possible in a carbon-restricted future. Climate activists, on the other hand, see a catastrophic scenario, where climate change impacts cause a sudden and steep dive in standards of living; one that can't be recovered from in the foreseeable future, if ever.

Of course, there are people on each side of the debate who argue that some or all of the other side are knowingly acting in bad faith. President Trump, for instance, says of climate activists: "These alarmists always demand the same thing - absolute power to dominate, transform and control every aspect of our lives." Climate reporter Robinson Meyer, on the other hand, accuses "America’s elected and appointed rulers" of "concern-trolling about whether the planet is warming at all," rather than actually engaging with the problem. Once can make the point that they are both correct to varying degrees. In emergencies, there is an impulse to control things; one can imagine what a Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Combat and Reverse Climate Change Act might look like, if it's anything like the USA PATRIOT Act. (Of course, one expects that the actual title would condense into a similarly contrived initialism/acronym.) At the same time, simply coming out and saying that at this point, we'd rather privilege the economy over climate concerns is politically unpalatable, so politicians have to deny the problem, instead.

Right now, the resources and the social institutions are roughly aligned with the status quo. Whether that's because of wealthy people cynically protecting their own interests or out of a genuine understanding that carbon restrictions aren't needed is beside the point. At present, people like Greta Thunberg can bluster and demand, but they can't simply go and implement the changes they want to see in the world; and they aren't in a position to move the needle by being the change, either. While this may make them strident, I don't think it should also make them targets. But this is the way that arguments over interests have evolved in our society. And, as untoward as it may seem at time, people are rewarded for behaving in this way. I might think that snarking at Greta Thunberg should be beneath a cabinet secretary. But someone was applauding Secretary Mnuchin, and those people matter more to him than I do.

All Alone

I was reading an article on Slate that noted something that's been kicking around for about the past decade: That because of a general stigma against men being emotionally open, they tend to have few, if any, friends that they can really talk to about their feelings. The Slate article is effectively a follow-up to an article in Harper's Bazaar that says that many men have effectively become "emotional gold diggers," their investment in a toxic form of masculinity cutting them off from emotional supportive relationships other than their romantic partners, who eventually burn out from the emotion work that they're asked to do.

Stories on how modern (American) ideas of masculinity cut people off from emotionally supportive relationships with people in general and other men in particular are rife. And stories about the dire consequences are common. One story from Medium is pretty blunt about it:

Boys feel fierce love for their best friends → Add homophobia, the Man Box, etc. → Boys disassociate from loving best friends → Boys and men become emotionally isolated → Men enter the epidemic of loneliness → Men die.

And one thing that I noticed about the stories that I've read is that they tend to mention "research." But they tend to link to books on the topic, written by this or that author, rather than any scholarly research papers. Perhaps this is because itr's more or less assumed that the narrative is correct. I'd always presumed that there were just certain things that you didn't tell anyone other than a committed partner or spouse, and the idea that many heterosexual men are afraid to appear weak and/or homosexual is pretty much assumed in the culture.

But when I decided to perform a few Google searches looking for formal, peer-reviewed research on the topic, I didn't find anything. Now, this isn't to say that it's not out there. I'm not a particularly good web researcher, and it's entirely possible that the information I'm after is basically buried out there somewhere. But I was kind of surprised that there didn't seem to be anything that pointed to any formal studies on the topic, especially given the public health implications that many people have noted. Anecdotal evidence is all fine and good, but given that this topic has been around for several years, I'd expected more, especially given that the scientific community hasn't exactly shied away from studies that have effectively simply confirmed that water is wet.

It could be that this is a hard thing to study. I don't know, off the top of my head, how you'd structure something to demonstrate the destruction of love between male friends over time, and the lasting effects on their lives. Had I gone into Psychology as a profession, this would be the perfect time to invoke "If I want something done right, I should do it myself." I suspect that it would be fascinating.

How Will You Know?

I was reading a story on exorcism the other day. Now as someone who doesn't believe in spirits of any sort, possession isn't real for me, but I understand the people do believe and that possession is real for them. Which one of us is right, in the grand scheme of things, is a somewhat interesting question, I suppose. But what I'd much rather know is: How could you tell?

This, of course, is the $64,000 question with any sort of supernatural phenomenon, from hauntings to magic. If it doesn't have some sort of obvious physical impact on the material world, how can one tell that it's genuine? Of course, given that I can't actually prove that I'm not a brain in a jar, there's the bigger problem of how does one prove that anything is genuine, but going deep on epistemology makes my brain hurt.

In the end, this is what faith is all about, but it does raise an interesting question: Is the phenomenon of possession agnostic? That is to say, does one need to have a preexisting belief in possessing demons in order to be possessed? As near as I can determine, possession is a culture-bound syndrome; that is to say, it only manifests itself in specific cultures. This creates the ironic circumstance that people in cultures that don't believe in the supernatural have, in effect, an absolute protection against possession. In Christianity, you can come up with something of a rationale for this; the possession of non-believers would be a for of proof of the supernatural, and obviate the need for faith. A bit wonky for my tastes, but semi-logical enough. But in Buddhism, is there the same understanding of the necessity of faith? If not, it seems strange that māra will or can only possess Buddhists, and not other random people.

I'm not sure that it actually matters what the answer is. People believe in both possession and exorcism, and pointing out that it seems odd that these would be limited to believers will not deter them from that. And, of course, proving anything one way or the other would be difficult. But it's an interesting question.

Aspirations

While I will admit to being somewhat surprised to find it on Physics.org, I found this article to be an interesting one. I signed up for an online dating site back in the day, at the behest of an ex-girlfriend who'd roped me into helping her out with some speed-dating events that she was hosting, but never really put much time into it, and so I find data on how they work to be fascinating.

It turns out, that out of four online dating markets studied, sending a longer message to a more-desirable potential partner one aspires to doesn't increase one's chances of having that person message back. Except here in the Seattle area, where a longer message does, in fact, increase the chances of having someone who's otherwise "out of one's league" send a reciprocal message. (How the fact that the Seattle area is considered a difficult market for men plays into this, I don't know.)

Like most academic papers, this one is written in "science-speak," which I have to admit didn't put me off reading it. There's something about the incongruity of the sentence: "Here, we report results from a quantitative study of aspirational mate pursuit in adult heterosexual romantic relationship markets in the United States, using large-scale messaging data from a popular online dating site (see the “Data” section)," that I find remarkably amusing. Not being much of a romantic myself, I'm of the opinion that one can quite easily apply the tools of science to understanding how people go about seeking partners for themselves, and so I tend to find these sorts of studies to be quite helpful in understanding how people see the world around them.

Although perhaps "people" is the wrong word to use here. After all, this is a study of online dating messaging patterns in four big-city markets. There are an awful lot of people who wouldn't have been captured in this, and the way they go about things could potentially be quite different than the urban and suburban hopefuls who found themselves gamely sending messages to people more desirable than themselves.

So I suspect that it's more accurate to say that in reading this, I have learned something about the particular segment of society that I inhabit. And that's always useful.

The Conspiracy Conspiracy

I read an article on the BBC's website that purported to explain "Why so many people believe conspiracy theories," and I listened to the accompanying radio piece that they'd done on it. It was interesting, but I felt that it failed to really delve into the heart of the matter.

Did Hillary Clinton mastermind a global child-trafficking ring from a Washington pizzeria? No.

Did George W Bush orchestrate a plot to bring down the Twin Towers and kill thousands of people in 2001? Also no.

So, why do some people believe they did? And what do conspiracy theories tell us about the way we see the world?

As an examination of how conspiracy theories help bolster in-group and out-group identification, reinforce notions of self as "one of the good guys" and provide a certain level of salve in situations where things aren't going someone's way, the examination of conspiracy theories is useful and interesting.

But it never actually delves into what it means to genuinely know, for instance, that Hillary Clinton did not mastermind a global child-trafficking ring. Or that people have, in fact, landed on the moon. That is to say, it never touches on the epistemology of the situations at hand.

Following are three different statements:

• There was no international trafficking of children through the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria under the direction of Hillary Clinton.
• There is no available evidence of international trafficking of children through the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria under the direction of Hillary Clinton.
• I have no evidence of international trafficking of children through the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria under the direction of Hillary Clinton.

And those statements are, to a certain degree, independent of one another, as I have written them here. (Of course, this presumes that I can have something, yet it not be otherwise "available.") And this is important, because much of the discussion of conspiracy theories works under the assumption that either the first statement is unambiguously true, or that the truth of the second statement is de facto proof of the accuracy of the first.

Conspiracies happen. Here in Washington state, they are against the law.

RCW 9A.28.040
Criminal conspiracy.
(1) A person is guilty of criminal conspiracy when, with intent that conduct constituting a crime be performed, he or she agrees with one or more persons to engage in or cause the performance of such conduct, and any one of them takes a substantial step in pursuance of such agreement.
(2) It shall not be a defense to criminal conspiracy that the person or persons with whom the accused is alleged to have conspired:
     (a) Has not been prosecuted or convicted; or
     (b) Has been convicted of a different offense; or
     (c) Is not amenable to justice; or
     (d) Has been acquitted; or
     (e) Lacked the capacity to commit an offense; or
     (f) Is a law enforcement officer or other government agent who did not intend that a crime be committed.
(3) Criminal conspiracy is a:
     (a) Class A felony when an object of the conspiratorial agreement is murder in the first degree;
     (b) Class B felony when an object of the conspiratorial agreement is a class A felony other than murder in the first degree;
     (c) Class C felony when an object of the conspiratorial agreement is a class B felony;
     (d) Gross misdemeanor when an object of the conspiratorial agreement is a class C felony;
     (e) Misdemeanor when an object of the conspiratorial agreement is a gross misdemeanor or misdemeanor.

Clearly, if conspiracies were entirely figments of the imagination, it would make little sense to legislate against them.

And so the question becomes what makes one conspiracy (say, Watergate) worth believing in and another (the Brexit vote was rigged) indicative of flawed thinking. Because again, to use the Brexit vote, elections can be rigged and, supposedly, have been rigged in the past.

And this is where the epistemology piece comes into play. Whenever a person is dealing with a choice to believe or disbelieve information about something that they have no firsthand knowledge of, it effectively becomes a question of faith. And in this sense, what makes any flavor of spirituality any more rational than the idea of reptilian humanoids? But if one were to ask, "Wait. People actually believe in this stuff?" in regards to hagiography, they'd pretty much be kissing any chance of running for elected office in the United States goodbye. But when one looks at some of the more incredible acts attributed to saints, or other manifestations of divine intervention, is there any more proof of them than there is for reptile doppelgängers secretly running the world?

And I think this is why discussion of conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories rarely really get anywhere... they tend to simply come down to "this faith is flawed, because it doesn't line up with the faith the rest of us hold." In this, it may be seen as a corollary to the idea that "people aren't crazy because they hear voices, they're crazy because the rest of us don't." This winds up lending the entire enterprise an air of pushing conformity. It's fine to say that one's views on the world should line up with the world, but conventional wisdom has been wrong about the world before.

Of course, this isn't to say that all belief is equally valid under all circumstances. But merely arguing that someone is wrong about the way they view the world, especially when it's simply chalked up to sour grapes politics, doesn't do anything to move the needle. The fact that a person cannot, on command, come up with the evidence needed to obviate their faith is not universally regarded as proof that their faith is erroneous. To the degree that the discussion of conspiracies presumes that it does, it itself may be in error.

Digging Deep

There have been any number of claims that the Trump Administration attempted to "bury" a report on climate change by releasing it on Black Friday. As if this would somehow stop government watchers, on the lookout for just such a thing from finding it and shouting about it from the rooftops.

While I understand that the Trump Administration would want to avoid drawing attention to the report, attempting to somehow sneak it out seems like a pointless endeavor because the Trump Administration has no intention of making policy changes based on a) the report itself or b) critics talking about the report. And this is because President Trump draws quite a bit of his support from people who would find their livelihoods severely damaged by a wholesale shift to alternative energy sources. And while one could make the case that this refers to legacy energy company investors and executives, it's mainly coal miners and oil workers who one is likely to find at the President's rallies. And they are the people who depend most keenly on the health of the industry.

Given this, it's almost surprising that the report wasn't released with more fanfare; as this would have allowed the President to make a bigger deal of ignoring it and its conclusions.

Invisible

To begin with, it’s really hard to square humanity’s status as perhaps the only intelligent species in all of time and space with the idea that we are insignificant.
Michael W. Clune "I Don’t Believe in Aliens Anymore" The Atlantic. Wednesday 8 August, 2018

Perhaps this is strange, but I don't find it at all difficult. The Solar System contains some unknown number of what are effectively random rocks and chunks of ice. They orbit around the Sun and the various planets, and most people rarely give them a second thought. But some percentage of these extraterrestrial objects are large enough that, were one to collide with the Earth, our civilization would end in a heartbeat. And within some number of years, there would be no sign that we were ever here. And the Universe would never notice our passing.

But here's the thing it turns out that it's really difficult to pick meaningful signals out the background noise of the Universe. People understand homo sapiens to be "perhaps the only intelligent species in all of time and space," because we haven't been able to verifiably find any trace of another "intelligent" species. But until the invention of radio, anyone farther away than the Moon would have had a very difficult time detecting that humanity was even here. It's been forty-one years to the day since Voyager 1 lifted off from the surface of the Earth, and it isn't even a light-day away yet. Our ability to project the signs of our presence into the cosmos are is limited. To presume that other intelligent life forms would be visible to us, if they were out there, would also be to presume that they're better at projecting their presence than we are. I don't know that I buy that second presumption.

Science Says

In some instances, the analysts were given alternative phrases. Instead of “science-based” or ­“evidence-based,” the suggested phrase is “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes,” the person said. In other cases, no replacement words were immediately offered.
CDC gets list of forbidden words: Fetus, transgender, diversity

Now, to be sure, I'm not certain that this story is everything it's cracked up to be. The information comes from a "CDC analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly." Of course, one wonders why "hey people, don't use these words in budget documents" would effectively be classified (after all, unless the documents in question are classified, people would start noticing the omissions), but we live in a world where any group of people larger than two has apparently world-shattering secrets. But for whatever reason, we have an anonymouse scurrying to the press to reveal supposed inner workings of the Trump Administration.

I'm fairly certain when I see this story in my social media feeds, it's going to effectively be marked with "this is something that aligns with my prejudices." And what makes it interesting is that you can align it to Liberal and Conservative sensibilities. On the Liberal side, there will be shoutrage; how dare the Trump Administration attempt to muzzle scientists for political purposes! The word "censorship" is already being thrown around, although there aren't any legal, or even administrative, punishments threatened in the piece for analysts who don't comply. On the Conservative side, there is also likely to be some shouting. The Washington Post article is fairly clearing disapproving, and Red America will likely response with "what's wrong with the standards and wishes of the community?" In this, it becomes a two-fer. The Trump administration shows that it cares for what communities (of Trump voters) want and it shows the "Mainstream Media" as biased yet again. So one could make the case that the leaker could be on either side.

The most interesting bit of this is the: “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes,” part. Because it speaks to (and fits into people's prejudices about) the relationship between conservative communities, especially religiously conservative communities, and scientific institutions. For many religious conservatives, the Bible is more than a book of scriptures, it's a history of the world and a basis for all understanding of right and wrong (the parts of it that comport with what they actually want to do, anyway). Which isn't a problem in itself. It's when those two things become linked, as in "if the Bible isn't an accurate historical document, then its teachings of right and wrong are irrelevant," that the problem begins. While one can decide that the story of Adam, Eve and their sons is suspect in places (So... if Cain and Abel were Adam and Eve's two children, how did Cain find a wife and where did enough people to build a city in the land of Nod come from?) for many people the broader point is that the Judeo/Christian/Moslem God created the first people as separate from all the animals. Evolution, which argues against the specific creation of individual species, including humans, undermines, this. In some quarters, this is taken to mean that the scientific community has fallen for a ruse set by a supernatural adversary to lead people away from God. In others it's taken as proof that the scientific community is in on the deception.

The linking of science to the Culture Wars is unsurprising. The scientific method and academic studies often come to conclusions that undermine traditional understandings of the world at large, and to the degree that long-standing policy was based on a given traditional understanding, proponents of change (especially those who saw change as progress) looked to science as a "value neutral" means of demonstrating that theirs was the proper understanding of the world, and that policy needed to be changed, the current standards and/or wishes of the community involved be hanged. As science more and more came to be seen as having taken the "liberal" side of the culture war debate, a certain conservative distrust for scientists began to develop. This supposed Trump Administration edict, which supposes to prevent liberals using the scientific community to push "agendas" on unwilling communities by simply saying, "What you want doesn't matter, because science," can be viewed as the Trump Administration stepping in to protect the desires of people who don't like to consider things settled until their buy-in has been obtained.

The thing about culture war victories like this, however, is that they are fleeting. After all, the Trump Administration won't be office forever, and do the degree that it mollifies supporters and causes crises in opponents, it sows the seeds of a Democratic successor, who would simply rescind whatever ban was in place. And so the fight will go on, regardless of the outcome of this alleged skirmish.

Knowledge Based

Which is better: A short news story with an increased probability of leaving listeners (especially motivated ones) with misconceptions, or a long new story that people don't take the time to listen to all the way through?

Now, this is somewhat of a leading question, and I suspect you understand what the "correct" answer is. I was listening to Morning Edition on the radio this morning, when a story cane on about geoengineering to reduce global warming. Morning Edition is intended to be "drive time" radio, and so the stories are short. And that brevity can sometimes work against a full understanding of the issue at hand.

This morning there was a story about climate engineering in the service of cooling the planet, and how the researchers involved are weighing federal funding for their research. Whether or not climate engineering is the best way, or even a good way, to combat the overall warming of Earth's atmosphere is certainly open to debate, especially given that it's never been attempted on a large scale. So one can understand the importance of researching the issue. But now that President Trump is in office, backed by a Republican Congress, researchers have become more leery of accepting funding from the federal government.

Many environmentalists are suspicious of efforts to deliberately tinker with the climate. They think just talking about the possibility of cooling the planet will threaten the global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

So the last thing [Ted Parson] would want is for this research to be associated with the Trump administration.
Scientists Who Want To Study Climate Engineering Shun Trump

I pulled this particular quote from the story because it points to a particular facet of the climate change debate and its goals. Namely, the issue with carbon. For many people in the fossil fuels business, especially the rank and file workers whose job it is to help extract, process and transport the materials, climate activism seems like a direct attack on them and their livelihoods, hence the rhetoric of a "war on coal." From the environmental activism side of the equation, things look a little different. Workers in the fossil-fuel industry may be being asked to sacrifice their careers in the name of cleaner energy, but that's a means, not an end.

To the uninitiated, given those positions, climate geoengineering seems like a win-win. Energy workers can keep their jobs and the temperature of the atmosphere can be controlled. One can have one's cake and eat it, too. For climate scientists to appear to back away from an idea they saw as promising a year ago, simply because the current administration is more committed to fossil fuel industry employment than the previous one seems to undercut the idea that the problem is the effects of fossil fuels, and not the fossil fuels themselves.

Here is another quote, this one not taken from the radio piece, but from the accompanying article on NPRs website:

"I am more comfortable," [David] Keith[, a climate scientist at Harvard University] said, "taking money from clearly environmentally aligned philanthropies or philanthropists than I am taking money from the administration."

For someone who sees money as money, something that spends the same no matter where it comes from (or who writes the check), this statement could easily stoke their suspicions that climate scientists have an agenda, and that they are being less than honest about their findings. Why, after all, should money from a Clinton administration or "clearly environmentally aligned philanthropies or philanthropists" be any better than money from a Trump administration? It doesn't require a particularly suspicious mindset to suspect that climate scientists are more comfortable taking money from those they agree with ideologically, because they'd be more likely to accept ideologically-driven results.

All of this is not, I suspect, the intended takeaway from this piece. But if you know little to nothing about climate engineering initiatives other than you heard/read in this story, it could easily be the message you're left with, especially if you already think that something's not on the up-and-up. On the other hand, the alternative may not be workable. Giving an audience a working primer on the scientific concerns about climate engineering and then discussing climate scientists concerns about the current administration is a tall order of a drive-time news story with a three minute running time. I'm a fairly regular NPR listener (whenever I'm commuting) and I'm somewhat up on the debate over climate engineering. But NPR, and media outlets in general, can't count on their audiences always knowing the greater context. And it does their audience a disservice to leave it out.

I Digress...

As sometimes happens when I am incautious, I stumbled into an online argument over evolution. One of the arguments advanced for the "evolution did not happen," side was as follows:

Evolution was one of the things used to sponsor racism by accusing black people of being lesser evolved therefore being an animal and property and not human. All it takes to be ostracized or mistreated is to be dehumanized. That's what happens when people are objectified.

The idea that people of African descent were more advanced than monkeys, but less so than Europeans was well known, and well documented in colonial America, long before Darwin or even Lamarck. The fact that racists can use specific, cherry picked, aspects of a scientific theory to justify what they already want to believe is not the fault of or in that theory. White racists also used the story of Noah and the great flood to justify the enslavement of Africans, yet I haven't heard anyone seriously take that as proof that the Bible objectifies people, and therefore should be ignored in a color-blind society. So while I understand where my interlocutor was coming from, I have more respect for people who just say: "This theory makes me uncomfortable/doesn't make sense to me/doesn't square with the world as I observe it/contradicts other things I understand to be true, and thus, I choose to believe differently," than people who pick and choose which facts they consider relevant, so they can tell themselves that they're being objective.

But that, of course, is a recipe for being called closed-minded, incurious or even foolish. In other words, while I might have some respect for such a position, few other people do. Which is something of a shame. A Truth Reflex serves us little better as a society as it does for individuals.

Ask a Loaded Question...

"How Perceptions About Opportunity Vary by Race," in the Atlantic, is supposed to be about how people of different racial backgrounds understand differences in opportunities. But, when you look at the questions and the answers that were given, it becomes clear that people either aren't really thinking the question through, or don't understand the implications.

For instance, in answer to the question: "Do you think young people in the United States today need a 4‐year college degree in order to be successful, or not?" 49% of White people asked said "Yes."

But when asked: "Do you think African-­‐Americans have better, worse, or equal access to employment opportunities compared to other Americans?" 69% of White people asked said Equal or Better.

In 2012, the percentage of 16- to 24-year-olds who had dropped out of school was about 6.6% on average, but 7.5% for Black kids. At the same time, the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in degree-granting institutions (two or four-year) was 41% on average, but only 36% for Blacks. Therefore, one would suspect that African-­‐Americans would have lower access to employment opportunities than other Americans, because they are more likely to drop out of school and less likely to attend college. Note that the question does not stipulate "all other things being equal."

But when we use "Do you think [Fill in the Blank] have better, worse, or equal access to employment opportunities compared to other Americans?" as a proxy for people's perceptions of whether or not race has tangible impacts on life outcomes (which let's face it, is usually what it winds up being), you wind up with a question about how people feel about the country, rather than how they actually understand opportunity to work.

Because if I were to ask "Do you think college graduates have better, worse, or equal access to employment opportunities compared to other Americans?" I'm willing to bet that a lot of people would say "yes." After all, 53% percent of people in the survey said that going to college gives young people the best chance of success. So it stands to reason that groups with higher rates of college attendance would, on average, have better access to employment opportunities. The fact that many people seem unable to get that means that they aren't actually engaging with the question. And since we don't bother to interpret the question as it is actually written, why bother to ask it in the first place?

Why not just openly ask people "Do you think [Fill in the Blank] have better, worse, or equal life outcomes, when compared to other Americans, because of the fact that they are [Fill in the Blank]?" It's not going to get us around the tiresome arguments about moral and ethical superiority, whining or good versus bad life choices, but it does have the advantage of straightforwardly asking the question that we're actually looking to have answered and that people understand themselves to be answering.

Threat Context

The Volokh Conspiracy blog has the news that in an Oklahoma State University Department of Agricultural Economics survey, 80% of respondents would support “mandatory labels on foods containing DNA.” Now, for a lot of people, this is the time to cue the laugh track, but “Conspiracy” author Ilya Somin is more charitable, noting that both political and scientific ignorance are not primarily the result of stupidity, but rather rational reactions to the sheer amount of information available.

But given this, I’m not sure that I agree with his statement that: “The most obvious explanation for the data is that most of these people don’t really understand what DNA is, and don’t realize that it is contained in almost all food.” I suspect that what’s really going on is that people who answered the survey didn’t, for the most part, make the connection between deoxyribonucleic acid as they’d encountered the term in the past, and as they were encountering it right at that moment. The term “deoxyribonucleic acid” is not part of my daily lexicon - I suspect that this blog post honestly represents the first time that I’ve used it in a sentence since the mid-1980s. And I’m pretty sure that if you stopped me on the street in the middle of searching Downtown Seattle for something photogenic, I couldn’t repeat it back to you, if you asked me what the initialism “DNA” stood for in biology. I’m not a chemist or a geneticist, and it’s not a term that comes up all that much in youth care, social work or software. And so it doesn’t surprise me that a large number of people, when encountering the term outside of it’s usual context, assumed that it was “some dangerous chemical inserted by greedy corporations for their own nefarious purposes.”

Because that context, of corporations being willing to use opaque processes and procedures to boost profitability at the direct expense of public health and safety, is very usual. Professor Somin leaves out a third area of public rational ignorance, and that’s what goes on behind the doors of corporate boardrooms (or, more likely, legal departments). While that body of knowledge may be just as vast and complicated as government or science, for most of us, the real problem is that it’s hidden. Somin’s warning against “excessive and unnecessary warning labels on food products could confuse consumers, and divert their limited attention from real dangers,” is well-taken. But for many people, what agricultural and food businesses may by using as ingredients in foods (and the nefarious purposes of those same businesses) are the real, and hidden, dangers that they are attempting to turning their finite attention to.

It can be misleading to presume that everyone understand as term, even one that spends a lot of time in the public eye, in the same way that we do. When encountered outside of their usual context, the correct understanding of terms that most of us use only rarely likely falls outside of the realm of the instrumentally useful. Given vast body of knowledge that is the human experience, I think that we underestimate the ease with which we can catch people out with gotchas that they’re unprepared for in the moment. Public ignorance may be both pervasive and dangerous, but seeing it under every rock will not help us combat it.

Best. Study. Ever.

From the moment I saw the title, I knew this one would be good:

The Darwin Awards: sex differences in idiotic behaviour

Although, one has to admit, conventional wisdom is right on the mark here.

Sex differences in risk seeking behaviour, emergency hospital admissions, and mortality are well documented. However, little is known about sex differences in idiotic risk taking behaviour. This paper reviews the data on winners of the Darwin Award over a 20 year period (1995-2014). Winners of the Darwin Award must eliminate themselves from the gene pool in such an idiotic manner that their action ensures one less idiot will survive. This paper reports a marked sex difference in Darwin Award winners: males are significantly more likely to receive the award than females (P less than 0.0001). We discuss some of the reasons for this difference.

You just have to love science sometimes.

In Theory

When someone says to me: "It's just a theory," what I hear is: "I believe in science, and I don't want it to be amoral."

For my part, I was not raised within a religious tradition that required the Bible to be an inerrant historical document - it was a religious text, and that was that. So I could rely on science texts to tell me what is, and turn to scriptures to inform me as to what ought to be. And as it turns out, the broad majority of people tend to believe in the accuracy of the scientific method to explain the world to us - it's important to keep in mind that for many people their disagreements with the scientific community are not about the efficacy of science itself - it's with the honesty of the scientific establishment, which is often viewed as pushing Leftist and/or atheistic agendas.

For almost all of the few creationists I know, the understanding is that the Bible exists  to tell them both what was (and to a certain degree, what is) and what ought to be - and that these two things are inseparable. So if the Bible is not an accurate account of what was, then it is not a reliable guide of what ought to be. So threatening one is often viewed as an attack on the other. While for many of us there is no workable path from "Mankind evolved, over tens of thousands or millions of years from an apelike ancestor on the plains of what is now Africa," to, "There is nothing fundamentally wrong with rape, murder and/or genocide;" for people who understand that the literal historicity of the Genesis account is what makes the Ten Commandments any more compelling than any other rule someone might come up with, anything that undermines Biblical inerrancy is a dire threat.

And it's important to understand that many religious people do not have a problem with the idea science - but they are motivated to doubt the accuracy of scientific findings that fly in the face of the worldview that they hold. By the same token, a lot of effort goes into attempting to square their understandings with modern scientific practices, and any discoveries that appear to support their beliefs are widely touted.

In my estimation, if the religious were as scientifically ignorant as they are portrayed, they wouldn't bother attacking the bona-fides of the ideas that the disagree with - they'd simply discount the usefulness of the whole enterprise. The goal of the secular shouldn't be to use science as a weapon against the beliefs of others. It simply prolongs a fight that no-one can win.