Last of the Month Comments

One of my favorite “professional” blogs is Crooks and Liars. In particular, I like Mike’s Blog Roundup. This week, check out his section “Holy Crap!”. It lead me to some cool blogs, including this one. Also, there was a link to a nice article about a debate between Atheist Christopher Hitchens (and, in my opinion, a neocon) and Chris Hedges, who is a liberal Christian. Politcially, I have more in common with Hedges, but in terms of belief in the supernatural, I have more in common with Hitchens.

Cartoons
I don’t like to run my party down, but I think that the following two cartoons (Britt and Markstein) are fair:

Obama
Obama and Clinton are still in my good graces as they were two of the 14 “no” votes (as was Dodd).

Here Obama talks about his health plan:

Republicans
An interesting catfight to see “whose affair is worse”

Tom DeLay claimed recently that his adultery was better than Newt Gingrich’s because at least he didn’t do it while they were prosecuting Bill Clinton for lying about his own adulterous affair. Yeah, if you’re going to cheat on your wife, it’s much better to get it out of the way before you start demonizing someone else for doing the same thing.

Here’s DeLay on his moral superiority to Gingrich and why his adultery was better:

“I was no longer committing adultery by that time, the impeachment trial. There’s a big difference.”

Do you think there’s a big difference? I wonder if his wife thought there was big difference?

He also said it was okay because he later found Jesus.

“Also, I had returned to Christ and repented my sins by that time.”

I wonder if his wife agreed with that rationale, too. Try telling this to your wife — No, it’s okay honey, I found Jesus after I slept with that other woman.

Hmmm, “honey, uh, the Flying Spaghetti Monster has forgiven me for my roll in the hay with my yoga teacher…is it now ok?”

Day prior to leaving

Workout notes Last night, 4 miles with the group. This moring: 1100 yards of easy swimming, yoga, then 3 miles with Ms. Vickie. We then ate breakfast.

Tomorrow: pick up the rental car, head to Minneapolis to the FANS race; so today will see me pay bills and pack.

About FANS: yes, I am not ready to race, though I am ready to safely participate. I have no hard and fast goals, though I really want at least 62 miles (Uli Kamm award), but I don’t know how “not ready” I am. I’ll just guess:

• 62 miles: D (passing)
• 70 miles: C (ok, I’ll take it and feel ok about it)
• 80 miles: B (good, pretty happy)
• 90 miles: A (outstanding, better than expected)

For the record,

• I once hit 101 when I was in peak condidtion on a perfect day,
• I got 88 one month later (still tired),
• hit 85 at 24 hours at Leanhorse (blistered feet, gravel course, altitude, net evelation gain),
• 83 last year at FANS (fat, tired, out of shape),
• 81 at Ultracentric 2004,
• 76 at Houston (heavy rain, fat, out of shape, got sick),
• 75 at McNaughton in 2004 (100 miler on hilly trails),
• 71 at ultracentric in 2005 (nap, threw up).

My median is 82 miles, and I might be able to meet that, say, via 45 miles in the first 12 hours, and maybe 40 in the second. Last year saw me get 48 and 35.

Nevertheless, I am nervous (in a fun way) anxious and eager. We’ll see what Providence brings.

Issues

Why do people resist science?

An interesting article from the Dawkins.net site, and first appeared here.

These intuitions give children a head start when it comes to understanding and learning about objects and people. But these intuitions also sometimes clash with scientific discoveries about the nature of the world, making certain scientific facts difficult to learn. As Susan Carey once put it, the problem with teaching science to children is “not what the student lacks, but what the student has, namely alternative conceptual frameworks for understanding the phenomena covered by the theories we are trying to teach.”

Children’s belief that unsupported objects fall downwards, for instance, makes it difficult for them to see the world as a sphere — if it were a sphere, the people and things on the other side should fall off. It is not until about eight or nine years of age that children demonstrate a coherent understanding of a spherical Earth, and younger children often distort the scientific understanding in systematic ways. Some deny that people can live all over the Earth’s surface, and, when asked to draw the Earth or model it with clay, some children depict it as a sphere with a flattened top or as a hollow sphere that people live inside.

In some cases, there is such resistance to science education that it never entirely sticks, and foundational biases persist into adulthood. A classic study by Michael McCloskey and his colleagues tested college undergraduates’ intuitions about basic physical motions, such as the path that a ball will take when released from a curved tube. Many of the undergraduates retained a common-sense Aristotelian theory of object motion; they predicted that the ball would continue to move in a curved motion, choosing B over A below.



The authors went on to point out that people predict the motion correctly if the question is phrased in terms of water coming out of a hose; this is probably because we’ve all used hoses before. The article continues:

Part of the explanation for resistance to science lies in how children and adults process different sorts of information.

Some culture-specific information is not associated with any particular source. It is “common knowledge.” As such, learning of this type of information generally bypasses critical analysis. A prototypical example is that of word meanings. Everyone uses the word “dog” to refer to dogs, so children easily learn that this is what they are called. Other examples include belief in germs and electricity. Their existence is generally assumed in day-to-day conversation and is not marked as uncertain; nobody says that they “believe in electricity.” Hence even children and adults with little scientific background believe that these invisible entities really exist, a topic explored in detail by Paul Harris and his colleagues.

Science is not special here. Geographic information and historical information is also typically assumed, which is how an American child comes to believe that there is a faraway place called Africa and that there was a man who lived long ago named Abraham Lincoln. And, in some cultures, certain religious beliefs can be assumed as well. For instance, if the existence of supernatural entities like gods, karma, and ancestor spirits is never questioned by adults in the community, the existence of such entities will be unquestioningly accepted by children.

Other information, however, is explicitly asserted. Such information is associated with certain sources. A child might note that science teachers make surprising claims about the origin of human beings, for instance, while their parents do not. Furthermore, the tentative status of this information is sometimes explicitly marked; people will assert that they “believe in evolution.”

When faced with this kind of asserted information, one can occasionally evaluate its truth directly. But in some domains, including much of science, direct evaluation is difficult or impossible. Few of us are qualified to assess claims about the merits of string theory, the role in mercury in the etiology of autism, or the existence of repressed memories. So rather than evaluating the asserted claim itself, we instead evaluate the claim’s source. If the source is deemed trustworthy, people will believe the claim, often without really understanding it. As our colleague Frank Keil has discussed, this sort of division of cognitive labor is essential in any complex society, where any single individuals will lack the resources to evaluate all the claims that he or she hears.

This is the case for most scientific beliefs. Consider, for example, that most adults who claim to believe that natural selection can explain the evolution of species are confused about what natural selection actually is—when pressed, they often describe it as a Lamarckian process in which animals somehow give birth to offspring that are better adapted to their environments. Their belief in natural selection, then, is not rooted in an appreciation of the evidence and arguments. Rather, this scientifically credulous sub-population are deferring to the people who say that this is how evolution works. They trust the scientists.

This deference to authority isn’t limited to science; the same process holds for certain religious, moral, and political beliefs as well. In an illustrative recent study, subjects were asked their opinion about a social welfare policy, which was described as being endorsed either by Democrats or by Republicans. Although the subjects sincerely believed that their responses were based on the objective merits of the policy, the major determinant of what they thought of the policy was in fact whether or not their favored political party was said to endorse it. More generally, many of the specific moral intuitions held by members of a society appear to be the consequence, not of personal moral contemplation, but of deference to the views of the community.

Adults thus rely on the trustworthiness of the source when deciding which asserted claims to believe. Do children do the same? Recent studies suggest that they do; children, like adults, have at least some capacity to assess the trustworthiness of their information sources. Four- and five-year-olds, for instance, know that adults know things that other children do not (like the meaning of the word “hypochondriac”), and when given conflicting information about a word’s meaning from a child and from an adult, they prefer to learn from the adult. They know that adults have different areas of expertise, that doctors know about fixing broken arms and mechanics know about fixing flat tires. They prefer to learn from a knowledgeable speaker than from an ignorant one, and they prefer a confident source to a tentative one. Finally, when five year-olds hear about a competition whose outcome was unclear, they are more likely to believe a character who claimed that he had lost the race (a statement that goes against his self-interest) than a character who claimed that he had won the race (a statement that goes with his self-interest). In a limited sense, then, they are capable of cynicism.

Implications

In sum, the developmental data suggest that resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and will be especially strong if there is a non-scientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are taken as reliable and trustworthy. This is the current situation in the United States with regard to the central tenets of neuroscience and of evolutionary biology. These clash with intuitive beliefs about the immaterial nature of the soul and the purposeful design of humans and other animals — and, in the United States, these intuitive beliefs are particularly likely to be endorsed and transmitted by trusted religious and political authorities. Hence these are among the domains where Americans’ resistance to science is the strongest.

Emphasis mine. This really rings true for me. After all, who can be an expert on everything?

But read the whole article; it is excellent.

Dawkins: why does he attack religious liberals too?

Science, and the rationalist movement in general, face a “sinister challenge” from leftwing thinkers who promote cultural relativism, according to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

He told a packed Hay Festival audience that although the threat from creationists and the religious right is well-documented, science is also under threat from the other end of the political spectrum: “I think we face an equal but much more sinister challenge from the left, in the shape of cultural relativism – the view that scientific truth is only one kind of truth and it is not to be especially privileged.”

The author sites episodes where nonsense under the guise of political correctness harms science. The author continues:

Earlier in the debate, Prof Dawkins had revealed that last year he received a Christmas card from the archbishop of Westminster – although not one from President Bush.

The third panelist, the President of the Royal Society, Sir Martin Rees, felt that he should grasp this olive branch with both hands because scientists needed to form an alliance with moderate faith groups in order jointly to fight fundamentalist religion.

“He should send Christmas cards to a few more archbishops,” said Prof Rees, “on the grounds that if we give the impression that science is hostile to even the kind of mainstream religion that we have in this country, I think it will be more difficult for us to combat the kinds of anti-science sentiment that are really important.”

But with Prof Dawkins now seemingly set on training his formidable intellectual artillery on politically-correct lefty thinking, the chances that he will expand his Christmas card list to cuddly archbishops seem pretty remote.

Ok, to be sure, the post-modernists are unworthy of respect (think of Sandra Harding’s “Newton’s Rape Manual” remark, see also Science and Superstition). It is best to treat these folks like fundies.

But as far as the religous moderates, I see it this way: yes, we should seek to remove superstition. But as of right now, people are, in fact, superstitious! Example: while in Little League, I grew to be sure to wear my “lucky belt buckle” for games. Or think to the NFL: the Dallas Cowboys (back in the days when they were a good team) used to wear white jerseys all of the time (at home, and usually for away games as most teams wear dark at home). But they were so into their white jerseys that some teams who normally wore dark at home made it a point to wear white at home when they played the Cowboys! (New York Giants, Philadephia Eagles were two examples).

Superstition in sport is mostly harmless.

But superstition in science education IS harmful. The superstition of a real “hell” with everylasting flames and torment is harmful, especially to kids. The superstition that killing someone (or lots of someone) will result in an eternity in paradise is harmful.

Guess what? Religious liberalism is completely opposed to these superstitions!

True, I don’t buy resurected bodies, son’s of deities being sacrificed for our sins, etc. But sometimes the road to non-superstition follows a “gentle slope” upward, and sometimes one wins a long term war by starting out with essential tatical victories in the most important places.

I saw take the allies where we can find them.