METI matters

Is it unethical to try and contact aliens ? This guy says yes, it's much too dangerous and we should stop immediately. He has some very good points and it's a genuinely entertaining read. Unfortunately, and inevitably, he misses at least one TRULY OUTSTANDINGLY OBVIOUS point, but let's start with the good bits.

Our electromagnetic (EM) emissions leave Earth at the speed of light. EM that left Earth in 1930 has already swept over approximately the nearest 7,000 stars... Further, the Earth grows quieter annually as more information is transmitted via cable, the Internet, and satellites rather than terrestrially over the air. Unless ET’s receivers are both powerful and omnidirectional, they will not detect us. ET’s receivers could be omni-directional, but unable to pick up a signal so weak as the proverbial I Love Lucy. For example, the gigantic Arecibo radio telescope could not detect terrestrial TV transmissions, if broadcast from the distance of our nearest neighboring stars.

Which are very nice informatics to have in mind. 7,000 out of ~400 billion is not so many, and if our signals aren't powerful enough to be received by technologies comparable to our own, then this gives us little constraint on who's listening. Much the same can be said for listening :

The SETI Institute (SI) has only examined less than one star in 50 million in the Milky Way. Even then, this limited set has been studied in real time for only ten minutes each, only across certain frequencies, and only using certain detection algorithms. Jill Tarter, SI’s lead SETI scientist for most of its history, often likens this to having dipped a drinking glass into the ocean. The fact that no fish appear in that first dip of the glass, hardly means that the ocean is lifeless.

From which I think we can generalise an important point :

1. At present we have no meaningful constraint on the number of extraterrestrial civilisations in our own Galaxy with technologies comparable to our own.

Harder to infer is what we can say about civilisations greater than our own. I tend towards the view that the Fermi paradox is not yet resolved, that the Galaxy should have been colonised many times over by now, that the signs of a Galactic Empire would be obvious. There are some arguments against this, of course - that aliens aren't transmitting in ways we understand, that they keep us in a cosmic zoo, etc. The author glosses over this, which I found a bit strange if the goal is to convince the reader that the Galaxy is a dangerous place.

We next come to the point I think is very obvious. Surely the advanced aliens we should worry about would already be able to detect us ?

METI-ists argue that ET can surely monitor Earth already... [but] ET would have to deploy many millions of these gravity telescopes in order to reliably detect Earth’s leakage of the last 100 years. The ineffectiveness of ET’s conventional radio telescopes in detecting our leakage has been analyzed by Billingham & Bedford, who conclude that ET’s radio telescopes would not only have to be truly gargantuan, but pointed at Earth for an extremely long period of time in order to detect our leakage.

Right, but in order to inflict harm, you're going to need gargantuan resources ! So this is my second important point :

2. The resources required to harm or destroy a civilisation at a distance of multiple light years always exceeds the resources needed to merely detect it.

If this is not so, it needs to be robustly demonstrated, otherwise the case against METI collapses. Now he says very fairly :

As advanced as they might be, a carbon-based ET will probably not travel hundreds or thousands of LYs just to eat us. Big Macs cannot be that expensive on its home planet. Nor are they likely to spend 50, 500, 5000, or however many of their generations traveling here just to conduct a bombing run. They cannot hate us that much (or so we hope).

I would accept that aliens just might possibly enjoy sterilising planets just for the hell of it. But this takes resources - enormous resources. The author claims :

Contrary to sci-fi movies, ET would not need a space armada in the style of Independence Day to destroy life on Earth. A single bullet sized projectile filled with the right self-replicating pathogen or nano-grey-goo might do the job.

But this would have to be fired at relativistic velocities in order to guarantee that it would reach us - unless the aliens have mapped every bullet-sized bit of debris between us and them, any probe would otherwise need to make course corrections. And if they've done that, then they certainly already know about us. There's no way to avoid an ET with hostile abilities having gargantuan capabilities that exceed the capacity to detect us. Alternatively, they could have filled the entire Galaxy with missiles programmed to seek us out, so there could be such devices already lurking on our own Solar System :

We currently have no evidence for or against ET probes orbiting the sun because we have never looked for them. There could even now be literally thousands of probes sitting on asteroids transmitting messages to Earth (so many, because probes could have arrived from multiple civilizations; from the same civilization sending regular updates over the eons; or because they are von Neumann replicators). We would not know this simply because no one has ever systematically trained a radio telescope on the ecliptic.

But if they were so close and hostile they would already have detected us and wiped us out !

Let's return to the extrasolar scenario. Sending a blob of deadly goo is speculative in the near-magical vein, but it gets worse :

Alternatively, ET might employ a fairly small kinetic projectile accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light. The asteroid that did in the dinosaurs was traveling at about 6 miles a second, or a mere 0.003% of the speed of light--a very lazy crawl. Such projectiles could be launched from ET’s home systems, just as we have launched Pioneer, Voyager and New Horizon into interstellar space from ours.

Egads, just because it has a low mass doesn't mean a relativistic projectile doesn't require stupendous amounts of energy. And while a single replicator doesn't require much initial energy, it would seem to make the construction of alien-detecting equipment an obvious first step - if you could do this for free, why wouldn't you ? It would make no sense not to do so if you wanted to wipe out other civilisations. So I maintain that the burden of proof lies firmly on those who think there's a way to harm other species living many light years way without first being able to detect them.

Korbitz, acknowledging a total lack of evidence uses that very lacuna to argue in favor of METI: “Given this vacuum of knowledge, we do not currently have reason to believe that Active SETI is inherently risky.” With equal cupidity one might walk in the woods, cloaked in complete mycological ignorance, and commence eating whatever mushroom happens to look delicious.

Yeah, but worrying about aliens with capacities bordering on the magical makes no sense - you might as well worry about being eaten by swamp demons. Better stay away from that swamp in case a demon eats you. What demon ? The magical one with the flaming sword. You know, the one that we can't prove doesn't exist. Or we might as well say that we shouldn't even look into space at all in case the aliens can sense what we're doing and don't like it. Really, one can say, "but they might have an unknown capacity to do me harm" in literally any situation at all. Again, justify how they could inflict harm without already having detected us, and then we'll talk.

Finally :

If they would transmit from Arecibo today, as Shostak and Vakoch proposed to the board of the SETI Institute, they must also reserve Arecibo, or its equivalent, for that future date. Of course, they have not. In fact, Arecibo will probably be decommissioned long before then.

That, sir, is simply mean.

Give all of our culture, religion, technology and science away for free and ET might laugh up its sleeve at such fools. Why should they bother to respond? What more would they have to gain, especially since communication might involve significant risk that either the intended recipient or an eavesdropper in our star’s foreground or background might be hostile? 

Ooo-kaaaay.... he wants us to sell things to aliens. Good grief.

Reviewing METI: A Critical Analysis of the Arguments

There is an ongoing debate pertaining to the question of whether Earth should initiate intentional and powerful radio transmissions to putative extra-terrestrial (ET) civilizations in the hope of attracting ET's attention. This practice is known as METI (Messaging to ET Intelligence) or Active SETI.

Critically critical

A very nice article criticising critical thinking. Or rather, criticising the idea that we can and should teach it as its own course.

Those who tend to buy into the view that critical thinking is a general skill can fall into two main traps. The first is to view the contexts for thinking critically as interchangeable. This is what we see when science lessons become projects involving cardboard boxes and LEDs. The precise science covered is not considered important because students are developing their skills of creativity, critical thinking, problem solving and so on.

I'm not sure what these kinds of projects are - I never heard of such things before. However, I agree with the general sentiment :

If you view these skills as being highly domain specific, then these students have merely developed the ability to think critically, creatively and so on in the domain of cardboard boxes and LEDs. The value of this to the student then becomes debatable, especially when contrasted with actually learning some science.

I would suggest that wherever and however critical thinking is taught, it should be explicit. If it's explicit, it can become habitual and reflective : you can think about whether you're applying the lessons learned and whether they are indeed correct. If you make things too implicit, there's a risk of this domain specificity business : poetry becomes a bunch of random words with no greater meaning; Shakespeare fares little better; science becomes a bunch of nuts and bolts that are only useful in highly limited ways. So make it explicit in order to make it habitual and general. That doesn't necessarily mean it needs its own dedicated lesson though.

The second trap is to think that, because these skills are general, you can teach a discrete critical thinking course or bolt a critical thinking module onto the curriculum that deals with these strategies in the abstract or in model contexts.When we start to consider the kinds of strategies that may be more generally applicable, we often alight on maxims such as ‘look at the problem from different perspectives’ or the kinds of rules-of-thumb embedded in logical fallacies.

I'm in two minds about this. I found the "Calling Bullshit" course to be excellent. But is assessing the truth of a statement, or whether it's misleading or not (as the course teaches) really critical thinking or just a peculiar variety of analytic thinking ? I don't know. I do further agree with the idea that a small set of rules is nowhere near enough :

Let’s imagine you wade into a discussion between two public health officials about the health impacts of smoking with your pithy observation that ‘correlation is not causation’. You are likely to get short shrift. Why? Because they have a lot more contextual, domain-relevant knowledge. Now consider someone making claims that school exclusions cause knife crime based upon statistics showing rising levels of both. Here, the maxim that ‘correlation is not causation’ may point you in the right direction. It is plausible, for instance, that the same thing that causes students to be excluded from school is causing the knife crime. Armed only with your maxim, how will you know when to apply it and when not to apply it? The only way you can figure that out is by learning lots about the evidence behind smoking or knife crime. In other words, the way you ultimately establish a reasoned position is by learning about the domain in question. The maxim alone could lead you as often into error as to the truth.

Likewise, those lists of "fallacies" that repeatedly go viral are always fraught with difficulties : ad hominem isn't a fallacy if character is the relevant factor; arguments from authority aren't automatically wrong; slippery slopes are only sometimes slippery. But just because these maxims are tricky, does that mean we cannot teach how to assess the truth in a more general way ? Are there fundamental rules for deciding what's true ? Or am I again confusing this special sort of analytical thinking - let's call it critical appraisal - with genuinely critical thinking ?

Again, I don't know. I would say at the very least we should teach critical thinking explicitly in philosophy classes, which can examine different kinds of knowledge. I would also say that if there is a dedicated course which is sorely missing, it's statistics. I don't mean the kind you learn about in maths lessons where they teach you about the binomial and Gaussian distributions, but a more general look at how to interpret data. That's pretty close to the idea of a critical thinking course, but not quite the same - not everything revolves around numbers, after all.

If critical thinking just represent the highest levels of performance within a traditional subject discipline, then we do not need critical thinking courses or a special focus on critical thinking. We just need to teach our subjects really well. 

Seems reasonable. I remain on the fence about it - surely, sheer knowledge is not enough. But regardless of whether critical thinking is something we can disect to find the true basis of rational analysis that we could apply to all domains, we surely should teach classes explicitly dealing with the kinds of situations where we suspect critical thinking is in trouble. Don't expect someone who can deconstruct a sonnet to be able to apply the same things to political speeches. Teach them about politics instead : how elections work, how candidates are selected, what happens outside of public debates. Don't expect someone who can correctly install electrical cabling in the walls of your house to be proficient about deconstructing opinion pieces in newspapers, or be adept at spotting clickbait. Teach them about it instead. (By "instead", I of course mean "separately".) That would seem to avoid the issue altogether.

Teaching children how to think etc.

Another decade, another article in The Conversation illustrating the irony that advocates of critical thinking seldom think critically about it. There are two interlinked but distinct concepts that we have to consider about critical thinking. Firstly, how general are these skills and, secondly, how transferable are they?

Science is just fine, thanks

Now I know for sure that IAI is a seriously good website : comments that are better than the original article. Why does Sabine Hossenfelder keep writing junk like this ? "Everyone is wrong except me ?" Seriously ? That's nuts. You can't treat an entire discipline full of philosophically-minded researchers as though they were idiots. It doesn't make any sense.

"It's getting harder to probe the fundamentals of physics without multi-billion dollar instruments... a new particle collider is a dead end." Of course it's getting harder - that's a sign of progress. How can you be so sure a new collider won't probe new physics ? Got any better experiments we could do instead ? If not, then either a) humbly accept that you can recognise a problem but don't yet have any solutions or b) shut up about it. There's no point yelling, "YER DOING IT WRONG BUT I DON'T KNOW HOW OR WHY WHAT YOU'RE DOING IS WRONG BUT YOU ARE AND I DON'T LIKE IT !". That's just pointless.

"We need to be better at choosing which kinds of experiments to do." Really ? Mind telling us how ? That'd sure be helpful.

"We need better ways of proposing hypotheses instead of mindless speculation." Well, ditto. Where do you suppose new ideas are ever supposed to come from if not from free-ranging, playful speculation ? You want "different ideas, but no, not those ideas, the other ones...". The hell ?

"Physicists don't think about the kind of experiments they're doing because they haven't been taught how." Did you accidentally talk to a chatbot by mistake ?

"Don't tell me I don't have any better ideas... we need to focus on resolving inconsistencies." MY GOD ! SUCH WISDOM ! WHOEVER COULD HAVE THOUGHT OF SUCH A REVOLUTION ! I can only assume that this level of banality is a deliberate attempt to provoke outrage.

Better to quote the comments than the article :

This is written like someone who has absolutely no knowledge of how experimental physics works nowadays. I'm assuming that the author isn't as ignorant on the subject matter as that, and this is just a very manipulative way to spread (while not exactly outright lies) misinformation about *how everyone else is wrong*. I'm sorry, but until I see some due diligence, I'll give the argument here no weight. Or more accurately, I'll give it the weight it deserves: mediocre troll, kinda boring. I'm sad my view gave you money for this trash meant to elicit reactionary, knee-jerk reactions.

...

I am not sure if Dr. Hossenfelder is suggesting anything different other than to urge increased caution with experimental choice. This, however, does not imply fundamental problems with the philosophy of science. There may be sociological problems, political problems in particular, but not problems of basic epistemology. Of course, this begs the question as to what Dr. Hossenfelder means by "philosophy". Does she mean, as I have speculated, epistemology, or perhaps ethics, morality, metaphysics, logic, or aesthetics? Perhaps this is where I find myself confused. I should be confused, because Dr. Hossenfelder has not defined "philosphy" enough for this article to make sense enough to interpret it properly.

...

OK, maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't saying "I am the only physicist who has at least come up with an idea for what to do" kind of beg the question of exactly what that idea may be? If you're not going to explain it here, shouldn't you at least point us to where you DO explain it? As it stands, this rant seems to be a content-free waste of time. If you don't want to be accused of having no suggestions, you need to say what your suggestions are. I sure hope you don't think "resolving inconsistencies" counts, because that is a pointless prescription unless you can say how to do it.

Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

In the foundations of physics, we have not seen progress since the mid 1970s when the standard model of particle physics was completed. Ever since then, the theories we use to describe observations have remained unchanged. Sure, some aspects of these theories have only been experimentally confirmed later.

The fluffy kittens of Brexit

Another nice video from IAI about post-truth. This one is much more analytical than philosophical. There's a rather long intro, but there are also several very interesting and novel points.

1. In the Philippines, Duterte uses social media and troll factories to attack critical voices. Why bother with physical interventions when enough coordinated trolls can ruin the credibility of a source ? There's not even any need for direct censorship, because these attacks fulfill the same function. When journalists say they're under attack, the regime simply says, "no, there are real people voicing real concerns". Freedom of expression is being used as a guise for disinformation, which is just another way to shut people up.
2. Self expression is not the same as empowerment. Social media gives an unprecedented scope for self expression, even in countries which still have some direct censorship. But this doesn't necessarily give you any direct influence : the link between expression and empowerment is broken. Worse : the more you express yourself, the more manipulatable you are. Although still crude, the ability to micro-target individuals for persuasion is a whole new arena for propaganda not available in the previous century.
3. Something's changed in the audience demand - it no longer seems to matter as much if politicians lie. You can't hold someone to account if they don't care that they've been held to account (a sort of ignorance-based Stoicism, I guess). Even the Soviet Union would at least pretend to be offended if accused of lying - modern Russia doesn't even do that. Why have the nature of lies changed ? Previous ideologies, even the really bad ones, were based around the notion that they were making evidence-based improvements. They needed to cloak themselves in the language of truth. Following the collapse of Communism, a new ideology of nostalgia took hold that didn't need (and indeed would prefer to actively disregard) the truth, because the truth wasn't appealing. 
4. In the West, this change took longer and wasn't due to any single event, though wars and economic recessions play contributing roles. But the effect is the same. The old political definitions are less meaningful. This leads to populism not as an ideology, but a strategy : politics of pure feeling, sending out different messages to appeal to different groups. In this way politicians can collect disparate, deliberately very loose groups that cannot possibly hold together for more than a moment, but that's sometimes enough. Use this to rally them for one campaign and then let it fall apart, because by then you've already won.
5. The head of the digital aspect of the Brexit Leave campaign used exactly this strategy. Forget such notions as left and right, or major issues like immigration that people have already decided about. Instead, look for other, much less obvious unifying factors. In this case, the most successful advert was about... animal rights. Apparently this cuts across traditional political boundaries (I even remember someone on Google Plus - an undecided voter - raising this very issue). Then unify all the different groups with their targeted messages, all under one overall theme, and bring them together just for one crucial moment - which is all you need.

The War Against Reality

When information is a weapon, everyone is at war. With political campaigns using our data to tap into our deepest fears and desires, freedom and democracy are under attack too.

When in Japan...

When in Japan, feel free to drop your phone and wallet on the street. You'll get it back no trouble. But lose your umbrella and I'm afraid it's gone forever, and whatever you do, don't get cancer. Well, that one's true anyway, but even more so in Japan.

With an inner-city population fast approaching 14 million people, millions of items go missing here each year. But a staggering number of them find their way home. In 2018, over 545,000 ID cards were returned to their owners by Tokyo Metropolitan Police  – 73% of the total number of lost IDs. Likewise, 130,000 mobile phones (83%) and 240,000 wallets (65%) found their way back. Often these items were returned the same day.

Lost umbrellas, on the other hand, are rarely retrieved by their owners. Of the 338,000 handed in to Lost Property in Tokyo in 2018, only 1% found their way back to their owner. The vast majority – about 81% – were claimed by the finder, which is a peculiarity in itself. 

Perhaps, then, honesty is not always front of mind. In fact, Japan has a complicated history with honesty, says Behrens. 

Take healthcare. Until 10 or 20 years ago, it was quite normal for doctors in Japan to withhold diagnoses from their patients. Instead, they would only tell their direct family. So, a patient would not know whether they had cancer, for example, let alone what their prognosis might be. “Japanese people believe you might lose the will to live, so immediate families try to present [the idea that there is] nothing wrong,” says Behrens... it leads some, such as Behrens, to believe that the Japanese aren’t fundamentally more honest than the rest of us.

“After the nuclear reactors at Fukushima failed because of the 2011 earthquake, the area was sealed off for months due to high radiation,” says Tamura. “The thefts only occurred because there was absolutely no one, no police force or anyone around to witness the wrongdoing.” Tamura describes the concept of hito no me; the ‘societal eye’. Even without a police presence, no theft will occur while there is hito no me. But left in a place where there is no one watching, thefts do occur.

On the one hand, there's the Doctor Who quote :

Fear doesn't have to make you cruel or cowardly. Fear can make you kind.

But on the other, there's a different Doctor Who quote :

Goodness is not goodness that seeks advantage. Good is good in the final hour, in the deepest pit, without hope, without witness, without reward. Virtue is only virtue in extremis. 

Does the law and influence of society make us more moral ? It would seem not - it only enforces arbitrary norms.

But on the other other hand, "seeking advantage" isn't the same as "fortuitously being rewarded". The Japanese don't get significant rewards for handing in lost property, which would seem it's more a case of "fear leads to kindness" here. Goodness in extremis is only the purest form of goodness, not goodness itself. Good actions are good actions regardless of why they were performed, but that doesn't mean the people taking them are fundamentally good. So the law can only make us do good things, not actually become better.

I don't like this.

On the nth hand, I remember playing a game called Black & White, which claimed (or at least used the slogan as a hook) that how you behaved as a virtual God would reveal your true character, since there were no real consequences to you regardless of how you acted. That always struck me as dubious. That I might enjoy reigning lightning bolts down on tiny little ragdoll-physics peasants doesn't mean I'd ever do it in reality, even if I had no fear said peasants could ever hurt me. Some things are fun because and only because they have no consequences, because they're fantasies.

Is a similar mindset at work when nobody's watching ? Do certain crimes now become - falsely but genuinely - perceived as victimless ? Or are people just a bunch of dicks ? I dunno.

Why Japan is so successful at returning lost property

For most, losing a wallet or purse is more than an inconvenience. While smartphones now let us make contactless payments, hold our travel cards and help us to find our way home, there's still something reassuringly secure about carrying physical ID and bank cards.

Plato's lawnmower : post-post truth

A rather nice discussion from philosophers on sociologists on the nature of truth in a post-truth world. Are we all suffering from our obsession with who's right and who's wrong ? It's a 40 minute discussion, but easily condensed into a 4 minute read in text form. First I'll present a summary and only add my own thoughts at the end.


What the philosophers said

Philosopher Hilary Lawson opens by saying that essentially yes, we're fighting over the mantle of truth but this is fundamentally an illusion. The idea of truth is appealing - we can use it to justify our actions, good and bad, but it's at best a valuable and powerful fantasy. Stories, he says, are not descriptions but tools. They enable us to hold the world in specific ways and ask different questions. For example, when you find a glass, you can ask different questions about it than if you view it as a collection of silicon atoms. This changes how we interact with the world. But, just as you can have a better or worse lawnmower, it isn't possible to have a "more true" lawnmower, and neither can you have language and analysis which is "more true" either.

Marxist and materialist Paul Mason agrees with the idea that language is a representation, not the truth of the world itself. He says that knowledge and cognition is an active process, not a passive record of what happens. He goes further by saying that we can't ever have fully accurate knowledge because reality itself is always in flux - no two glasses are ever the same. Truth is a quality of human thought, not reality. However, we can make accurate and testable measurements : objective reality is out there, it's us who have limitations.

Sociologist Ella McPherson, I'm afraid, did not seem to have all that much to contribute that I could even understand. She says that only certain people are suffering from the obsession with the truth, and that truth has always been defined by the majority. Anyone in a minority knows that there's no such thing as "the" truth.


The discussion moves to the idea of post-truth. Lawson is asked about whether he thinks, given his idea of representations, that the facts don't matter. He's asked about whether a birth certificate would be sufficient evidence to prove where Obama was born. He rambles off on one about "frameworks" and the need to engage with people on their own terms. A birth certificate, he says, does constitute contradictory evidence within the framework of a Birther, and therefore it should be taken to disprove their conspiracy theory.

Mason says he doesn't use the word post-truth. With the kind of Marxist attitude normally seen in Existential Comics, he says that the successes of capitalism have been based on the scientific method. That we are now seeing bouts of irrationality, he says, are symptoms that capitalism is in decline, underpinned by the hard right who are using this to their own ideological ends. We're not so much in a post-truth situation, in his view, in which we are one in which ideologues are trying to break the system apart. He says this is how totalitarianism works, that it's not just when people stop believing a particular truth, but when they stop believing things can even be verified*. He dodges the question of what comes after capitalism and totalitarianism, but says we should defend the scientific method and also mathematics. Mathematics is not just an abstraction, but actually a description of reality.

* I have to interject here that it isn't at all clear to me how this is in any way different to the idea of post-truth.

Lawson responds that we do have to defend empiricism and rationalism, but we do not have to accept that there's an underlying truth. He says the evidence of this is from the 10,000 years of civilisations all claiming that they've found "the" truth. He values the method, accepts that there's value to the fiction, but says we should keep the application of empiricism without needing to accept that we've got "the answer". We can keep the method but abolish the truth.

McPherson says that we are indeed in a post-truth world. She says it's a case of Western imperialism and arrogance. We've outsourced our verification to big institutions like the state and the media. We need to re-engage with decision making and verification for ourselves, and that ultimately this post-truth crisis will be good for us. Even when totalitarian regimes are controlling information, she says that there's a benefit in the ordinary people learning to circumvent their controls as this is how things change.


Finally we move to what post-truth means in today's world. Lawson is asked about climate change. Mason accepts that it's true than man causes climate change, while Lawson says there are "closures and narratives". He says truth is a theological notion, that we should abandon the concept, but double down on the scientific method of rationalism and empiricism. He thinks we're getting it exactly wrong when we do the opposite, clinging to the idea of truth but abandoning rationality.

Mason says that we don't need a new narrative, although he admits the right has a powerful emotive one. Narratives are hypotheses, and in a sense they are provisional truths. The problem, he says, is that we've come to see science as a social construct, that is has been abused by the right. The left, meanwhile, has "drunk the Kool Aid" on relativism, and the right is exploiting this for all it's worth.


What I say

Personally I think there's much value in emphasizing the method rather than the results : the findings of science are evidenced-based and provisional, after all. But do we have to go as far as saying that truth is a construct or non-existent ? That seems excessive. After all, to even have a discussion about truth requires that we acknowledge certain similar meanings, certain fundamental truths if you will, of language. If things can only be said to be better or worse, still we must ask : by what standard ? Is there a Platonic form for lawnmowers ?

Yes, history is replete with examples of civilisations claiming they found various socio-political truths that turned out to be nothing of the sort, but they also found out a great deal that has stood the test of time : things fall down, rocks are hard, liquids change shape, laws of motion, that sort of thing. All these things will be true for all eternity. It's perfectly reasonable to say that linguistic descriptions (or representations if you prefer) are not the same as the reality. That is unavoidable. But surely, "the map is not the territory" does not mean that some maps are not more accurate than others : maps, unlike lawnmowers, can indeed be said to be "more true". Surely our linguistic and mathematical descriptions are the same : the more true they are, the better they are (simplifications notwithstanding). Language is the way we express and describe a much deeper understanding of the world - we don't have to consciously deconstruct everything the whole time, we know what is meant by "glass" in different contexts. Our descriptions are not required or expected to be perfect.

Nor do I understand the point of this business about engaging in different frameworks whilst simultaneously insisting that empiricism is better. If a worldview insists on emotional-based reasoning and decries logic and reason, then working within that framework will get us nowhere - you will never find a contradiction to hold its believers to account. It feels hypocritical and paradoxical to say that empiricism is better but not more true.

When it comes to the media and fake news, I cannot agree that it's better to value empiricism over the results, and I certainly don't agree that post-truth is going to be somehow good for us. Much of the modern world depends on scientific findings that require extreme efforts to verify; too many falsehoods make people angry and vulnerable, not more skeptical or rational.

Precious little was said in the debate about facts or data. Yes, the mantle of truth can be abused. But reality is all too real, and doesn't much care if you believe in it or not. Cars can crash. Fires burn things. Climate change happens. Saying that these things are anything other than correct is wrong. The people who say such things do not have some kind of nobly different worldview, they're just trying to break things. In the end I have to fall back on Richard Dawkins : in a debate, it is possible for one side simply to be wrong. We are not beholden to think that this is always the case, for there are indeed vast areas in which the situation is infinitely more complex. But if we resort to saying that this is never true at all, I think we would be making a catastrophic mistake.

Tribal Truths and New Wisdoms

From populist demagogues to liberal elites, Fox News to the BBC, the warring tribes of our troubled world agree on few ideals and still fewer facts. Yet they all share the belief that they are right. Are we all suffering from the illusion that we can uncover the truth?Should we embrace a world of competing facts while still seeking a progressive and stable society?

A mysterious mystery that's observationally observable

Consciousness is a default topic on this blog because it's bloody interesting. How can something so utterly non-physical arise from atoms bashing about ?

One explanation is that it doesn't - that it's all some sort of illusion. What sort ? One idea is that it's no more illusory than icons on a computer monitor : it's a kind of description of the underlying neural processes, and our conscious thoughts have the same type of control over those processes as opening a new window. Another, stronger version is that it's a more like a rainbow - perceptible, but having no actual control over anything at all. And today we come to the strongest interpretation of all : that we only think we're having experiences, but actually we're not.

As far as I can tell, this is as daft as it sounds. We think we're thinking but not actually thinking ? Ha humm, riiiight. Descartes, get your coat, we're leaving. "I think, therefore I am thinking !" Slam door, exit stage right.

I came across this idea is this nice rebuttal article (IAI isn't a site I've encountered before but it looks like one to pay attention to) so I'm doing this the wrong way round. Still, there seem to be two aspects to this. The first charge is against neuroscientist Michael Graziano. According to IAI author Bernardo Kastrup (philosopher and computer scientist), Graziano makes some very odd claims indeed. In his essay at The Atlantic, Graziano writes :

The human brain insists it has consciousness, with all the phenomenological mystery, because it constructs information to that effect. The brain is captive to the information it contains. It knows nothing else. This is why a delusional person can say with such confidence, “I’m a kangaroo rat. I know it’s true because, well, it’s true.” The consciousness we describe is non-physical, confusing, irreducible, and unexplainable, because that packet of information in the brain is incoherent. It’s a quick sketch. 

That opens up a philosophical can of worms. Our perception clearly isn't the same as reality because it's limited, but we have no way to describe reality except through perception. But lunatics have perception completely at odds with everyone else. Objective reality is a necessary assumption without which we're lost.

What’s it a sketch of? The brain processes information. It focuses its processing resources on this or that chunk of data. That’s the complex, mechanistic act of a massive computer. The brain also describes this act to itself. That description, shaped by millions of years of evolution, weird and quirky and stripped of details, depicts a “me” and a state of subjective consciousness. 

This is why we can’t explain how the brain produces consciousness. It’s like explaining how white light gets purified of all colors. The answer is, it doesn’t. Let me be as clear as possible: Consciousness doesn’t happen. It’s a mistaken construct. The computer concludes that it has qualia because that serves as a useful, if simplified, self-model. What we can do as scientists is to explain how the brain constructs information, how it models the world in quirky ways, how it models itself, and how it uses those models to good advantage.

While I quite agree that our conscious thoughts and perception can be wildly inaccurate (more on that in a minute), I don't think it makes any sense to say that "consciousness is a description" and also that "consciousness doesn't exist". First, the two claims are mutually exclusive. You cannot have a description that doesn't exist, because that's stupid. Second, if consciousness does exist (which it self-evidently does) but is merely a description, that doesn't help with the weirdness of it in the slightest. That's the whole point people are confused about : how the hell do we get non-physical, purely subjective awareness out of an apparently objective, external, physical reality ?

Kastrup addresses another Graziano essay which is unfortunately paywalled on New Scientist :

 Graziano argues that consciousness is merely a model the brain constructs of itself, so it can “monitor and control itself”.  Consciousness seems immaterial—his argument goes—simply because, in order to focus attention on survival-relevant tasks, the model fails to incorporate superfluous details of brain anatomy and physiology. In Graziano’s words, “the brain describes a simplified version of itself, then reports this as a ghostly, non-physical essence.” 

This is all very reasonable. The problem is that it has nothing to do with phenomenal consciousness. Graziano’s authoritative prose disguises a sleight of hand: he implicitly changes the meaning he attributes to the term ‘consciousness’ as he develops the argument. He starts by talking about subjective experience—i.e. phenomenal consciousness, which is what science can’t explain—just to end up explaining something else entirely: our ability to cognize ourselves as agents and metacognitively represent our own mental contents. 

IAI graciously gives Graziano the chance to respond. Much of what he has to say seems perfectly fine, but he makes one very strange claim indeed :

Among the most common and puzzling reaction I get goes something like this: ‘Graziano says that consciousness does not exist; that we lack an inner dialogue; that getting stuck by a pin, or walking into a wall, is ethereal’. None of these statements are true, of course, but I do often hear them coming from the nonscientific, or often pseudoscientific, political side.

But you said it so explicitly in The Atlantic : "consciousness doesn't happen"; "the brain insists it has consciousness". If this is different from saying that "consciousness doesn't exist", then I'd very much like to know how.

Let's suppose that Graziano has been misinterpreted, that he does think consciousness exists but is merely of the rainbow-like descriptive quality. In that case, much of what else he has to say has merit.

The brain builds models of things in the world around you and models of its own internal events, and in every case, probably without exception, the models are simplifications; they are not perfectly detailed or accurate. Let’s follow this logic. You claim to have a conscious experience. You make that claim because you think it’s true – your higher cognition has hold of that information. You think it’s true because it resonates with your deeper, intuitive models constructed beneath the level of higher cognition. What you intuit, think, and claim, are based on information constructed in the brain.

I think that is perfectly reasonable - self-knowledge has all the same errors as other kinds of knowledge. When I move my arm, I have no sensation of the electrical currents directed by my brain to move it. All kinds of bodily processes are under my conscious control without me being aware of them. You can be mistaken about your own emotions. And you can have implicit, unconscious bias where you'll act differently than your stated beliefs. But then Graziano takes a stranger turn :

There is no wiggle-room about it. It must be true. But that information is almost certainly not perfectly accurate. Therefore, we know – I would say with certainty – that whatever consciousness you actually have, it is different from the consciousness that you think you have. That’s a thought and a half. People always have a hard time wrapping their minds around it.

With the caveat that consciousness is a spectrum, not a binary state (e.g. dreams), I don't think that's possible. I can certainly be mistaken about my own deeper beliefs, desires, and external perceptions. Happens all the time. But mistaken about my own conscious thoughts ? I don't think so. I cannot think I'm thinking something different from what I'm actually thinking - not at the highest level of consciousness, anyway. I can certainly be mistaken about what my brain is doing, but that's a different prospect.

Some of the attributes of consciousness that you claim to have, you probably don’t have. Some of the attributes of consciousness that you actually have, you probably don’t know that you have. 

Yes, that's fine. I may be mistaken about how much control consciousness gives me - I may feel I'm consciously in control when I'm actually not (I don't believe that argument but I do respect it as a legitimate point of view). If that's all he's saying, then fair enough.

My interest as a scientist is this: what parts of the consciousness that we think we have are accurate, and what parts are inaccurate? Literally, physically, the brain processes information through the interaction of billions of neurons. But when we introspect, when we dip into our intuitions and thinking, we report something totally different – not electrical impulses and synapses, not interacting chunks of information, but something amorphous and ghost-like.

Which is all well and good, but is absolutely at odds with the statement that consciousness doesn't happen. I have to suppose that the author went mad when he wrote that, because he unambiguously believes that consciousness does in fact exist ("An internal dialogue? Sure, of course we all have it. A mind spinning with thoughts and sensory impressions? Yes.") A pity the New Scientist article is paywalled. Comparing the Atlantic and IAI pieces, Graziano seems tremendously confused.

Kastrup next takes aim at an Aeon piece by philosopher Keith Frankish. Kastrup goes to considerable lengths to ram home the point that you can't merely think you're thinking : you must, unavoidably, actually be thinking. And Frankish does makes some really outlandish and I think utterly pointless claims :

The sound seems to be in the air, the taste in the wine, the pain in your toe, and so on. But it is generally agreed that this can’t be right. For science tells us that objects don’t have such qualitative properties, just complex physical ones of the sort described by physics and chemistry. The atoms that make up the skin of the apple aren’t red... It seems, then, that the qualities of colour, sound, pain and so on exist only in our minds, as properties of our experiences. Philosophers refer to these subjective qualities of experience as ‘qualia’ or ‘phenomenal properties’, and they say that creatures whose experiences have them are phenomenally conscious. 

It is phenomenal consciousness that I believe is illusory. For science finds nothing qualitative in our brains, any more than in the world outside. The atoms in your brain aren’t coloured and they don’t compose a colourful inner image. (And even if they did, there is no inner eye to see it.) Nor do they have any other qualitative properties. There are no inner sounds, smells, tastes and pains, and no inner observer to experience them if there were. 

Riiight. That's just bollocks, isn't it ? Yes, perception is not the same as reality, but it's not completely unrelated either. An apple viewed under the same conditions will always look red. Our perception isn't so subjective that an apple could spontaneously appear to be a psychotic turtle or an exploding toaster : we'd have to work very, very hard to cause those sorts of mistakes. The redness is indeed in our minds, but it arises from distinct and entirely physical characteristics of the apple. As for there being no inner eye or mental life, that is positively mad. It literally doesn't make any sense at all. I can't be just pretending that redness exists. True, redness could well be my brain's way of describing the signals it processes, but that doesn't for one moment mean I have no inner perception (nor does an inner perception require that atoms physically have redness - indeed the whole point is that mental perception is non-physical). Kastrup adds :

Bewilderingly to me, he then makes a remarkable admission: “But how does a brain state represent a phenomenal property? This is a tough question.” Well, this is the only salient question, isn’t it? And Frankish’s entire case rests on the answer. He continues:
“I think the answer should focus on the state’s effects. A brain state represents a certain property if it causes thoughts and reactions that would be appropriate if the property were present.”
This blatantly begs the question again. Only under the assumptions of eliminativism or illusionism do effects sufficiently account for the question Frankish is leaving open. What defines experience is precisely that, regardless of its effects, there is something it is like to have it.

Well exactly. The whole point is what that inner experience really is and how it arises. Saying that we don't have inner experience is absurd. From a perspective of tackling what consciousness is, it doesn't matter a jot that our mental descriptions of the external world are in some sense inaccurate - the fact is, we have non-physical mental descriptions.

Frankish raises a fair point regarding free will :

There is absolutely no reliable evidence for nonphysical effects in the physical world – no confirmed cases where a nonphysical feature diverts an electron, triggers a chemical reaction, makes a neuron fire, or produces any other physical change. 

As I've already admitted, this is a difficulty. But I don't see how we would go about measuring physical effects induced from non-physical causes. Free will means I can move about however I choose, and I hold to the common sense notion that I do this using my conscious thought. I admit I don't know how the two domains interact. But I also point out that it's damn hard to construct an experiment where we could pin down the moment a conscious choice has a direct physical effect at the subatomic (or other) level. Furthermore :

If our sensations are nonphysical features, then it looks like they don’t have any effects on anything, even on our own thoughts and reactions. We would think and act in exactly the same way (including believing that we are phenomenally conscious) if we didn’t have them or had completely different ones. This is a strange conclusion.

That's just the idea that consciousness is a rainbow-like illusion. But it presupposes that free will just isn't a thing, which Kastrup points out is circular logic. But I digress - free will is not necessarily the same as consciousness anyway.

Frankish then dives into some truly ghastly, torturous analysis that confounds the bleedin' obvious with total nonsense. It's as though these "illusionists" desperately don't want to believe in consciousness but ultimately can't bring themselves to deny it, because its existence is as obvious as a brick to the face.

Illusionists agree with other physicalists that our sense of having a rich phenomenal consciousness is due to introspective mechanisms. But they add that these mechanisms misrepresent their targets... your introspective system misrepresents complex patterns of brain activity as simple phenomenal properties. The phenomenality is an illusion. 

The idea, then, is that introspection tracks the impact objects make on us. The red quality you seem to experience is an expression of your response to the apple – your active ‘redding’, as the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey puts it in his book Seeing Red (2006). However, introspection doesn’t represent phenomenal properties as properties of us but as powers in objects to create that impact.

What in the world does he mean by "illusion" here ? Look, this isn't difficult. Objects have characteristics which induce mental states via perception. Those states are necessarily limited and imperfect. But for god's sake man, to claim those states don't exist is preposterous ! Of course they are illusions in the sense that there are no atoms of justice or molecules of mercy, but to pretend that there's no inner eye with which to see redness is ridiculous. To simultaneously claim, "the apple is not really red, that's just a mental description" and also "there are no mental descriptions" is just gghhaaaargh. Stop it.

Illusionists agree, then, that there is more to conscious experience than access consciousness: there is a level of self-monitoring involving the illusion of phenomenality. We might call it pseudo-phenomenal consciousness... representations of phenomenal properties are simplified, schematic representations of the underlying reality, which we can use for the purposes of self-control. We should no more expect to find phenomenal properties in our brains than to find folders and waste baskets inside our laptops.

You're a bunch of bloody nutters. You take a perfectly obvious concept and twist it into something outrageously complicated. Again, you can't say, "mental descriptions are just representations" and then say, "mental descriptions don't exist".

If we observe something science can’t explain, then the simplest hypothesis is that it’s an illusion, especially if it can be observed only from one particular angle. This is exactly the case with phenomenal consciousness. 

The hell are you on about mate ? What in god's name do you think "illusion" means ? Is it something I can see or isn't it ? START MAKING SENSE ! Illusionism is, as far as I can tell, either an utterly pointless rebranding of what we all knew already, or a self-contradicting mass of totally confusing hogwash.

If I had to try and work out what an illusionist meant, I might pose the following questions :

• What do you mean by illusion ? Something that is non-physical, a trick of perception, something that doesn't exist at all, or something else entirely ?
• Do you deny we have an inner mental life and images, or not ?
• If we have mental lives, in what sense are they illusory ? 
• If we don't have mental lives, how can I be fooled into thinking that they're - in some very loose sense - real ?
• Everyone already accepts that mental perceptions are fundamentally different to external reality. The difficulty is that one is physical while the other is non-physical. What new explanation do you offer as to how one arises from the other ? What property of your sort of "illusion" in any way helps explain what mental perception actually is ?

EDIT : Kastrup responds to Graziano's response here, which pretty much boils down to what I've said. Illusionism is self-contradicting and doesn't make any sense. "I'm not really thinking. I just think I'm thinking". Daft.

Sorting out sortition

Do we really need elections to count as a democracy ? No, says Belgian historian Van Reybrouck - the important thing is that we have rule by the people, not that we cast votes.

I'm going to skip over much of the preliminaries about the problems democracy is currently wreaking across the world. I have some quibbles here - I don't think representative democracy has persisted by sheer force of habit, or arose so arbitrarily. There are definitely issues better handled by experts, and it should be contrasted against direct democracy, which is impractical in a modern society. The potential advantage of representative democracy is that, ideally, it will elect people who will stand for you but will be much more informed, dedicated to the task of figuring out the solution, and so will ultimately allow you to run your life unimpeded but not disinterested in what happens in government. Choosing a representative does not automatically surrender all participation in the democratic process, and I think it's a bit extreme to depict it as such.

But let's jump in to the proposed alternative. Although largely concerned with who gets to make the decisions, Van Reybrouck is also concerned with how they make them. I like this.

A much better way to let the people speak than through a referendum is to return to the central principle of Athenian democracy: drafting by lot, or sortition as it is presently called. With sortition, you do not ask everyone to vote on an issue few people really understand, but you draft a random sample of the population and make sure they come to the grips with the subject matter in order to take a sensible decision. A cross-section of society that is informed can act more coherently than an entire society that is uninformed.

This elegantly solves the problem of partisan politics by utterly doing away with political parties. When the central hierarchy of a party is powerful enough that it can essentially dictate how its MPs vote, especially when commanding a large majority, the entire strength of group-based decision making is rendered impotent. Other proposed alternatives (such as voting for ministerial positions individually) place an enormous burden on the electorate, which sortition neatly circumvents. And of course, choosing randomly has a guarantee of getting a truly representative sample of people rather than the absurdity of only allowing the very wealthiest to become politicians.

But there's more :

The drawing of lots is not a miracle cure any more than elections ever were, but it can help correct a number of the faults in the current system. The risk of corruption is reduced, election fever abates and attention to the common good increases. Voting on the basis of gut feeling is replaced by sensible deliberation, as those who have been drafted are exposed to expert opinion, objective information and public debate. Citizens chosen by lot may not have the expertise of professional politicians, but they add something vital to the process: freedom. After all, they don’t need to be elected or re-elected.

There is much to be said for the idea that randomness, though it may not help get the very best possible choice, does helps reduce bad choices : if you can't choose wisely, choose randomly. Surely a randomised choice is far less likely to ever land upon the kind of expert psychopathic bullshitters that (all too often) dominate political leadership positions. And without a political party for them to administer, participants could focus exclusively on the decision-making process instead of internal management issues.

(I'm less sure whether avoiding pressure to be re-elected is a good thing or not. I think those who make the decisions do have to be accountable to the public in some way, otherwise that valuable freedom becomes a license to do as they please on a whim.)

Of course, randomness only reduces the lunatics, and does not guarantee that those selected will actually have any kind of understanding of the issues before them. How to address this ? He gives an example from Ireland :

Participants listened to experts and received input from other citizens (more than a thousand contributions came in on the subject of gay marriage). The decisions made by the convention did not have the force of law; the recommendations first had to be passed by the two chambers of the Irish parliament, then by the government and then in a referendum. By talking to a diverse cross-section of Irish society, politicians could get further than they could have by just talking to each other. By exchanging views with elected officials, citizens could give much more relevant input than they could have in an election or a referendum.

Of course, there's absolutely no reason that politicians can't listen to experts and citizens as well - they do. Theoretically, being professionals, they ought to do better than random members of the public... but factor in the deranged selection process (featuring a serious financial commitment, a need to be persuasive to an often uninformed audience, and an almost obscene dedication to one's political tribe) and the all-powerful party machinery, and any advantage goes out the window. I also like the mixture of procedures used, rather than just relying exclusively on one method. It's a bit surprising, then, that he doesn't elaborate on the results of that particular case. Did it actually do any good or not ?

Likewise :

Juries for criminal trials that are chosen by lot prove that people generally take their task extremely seriously. The fear of a chamber that behaves recklessly or irresponsibly is unfounded. If we agree that 12 people can decide in good faith about the freedom or imprisonment of a fellow citizen, then we can be confident that a number of them can and will serve the interests of the community in a responsible manner.

I have no idea if it's been done, but to properly evaluate this, we'd need a case-by-case comparison of trials assessed independently by multiple different methods. Otherwise, how can we say which method is better ?

What if this procedure had been applied in the UK last week? [Brexit] What if a random sample of citizens had a chance to learn from experts, listen to proposals, talk to each other and engage with politicians? What if a mixed group of elected and drafted citizens had thought the matter through? What if the rest of society could have had a chance to follow and contribute to their deliberations? What if the proposal this group would have come up with had been subjected to public scrutiny? Do we think a similarly reckless decision would have been taken?

Here we would have to factor in the enormous torrent of information coming from the media, stronger than in this example than in most others. I don't think it's at all straightforward to say what the result would be. Half of the populace is stupider than the average, after all...


Sortition has many advantages over choosing representatives by popularity contest, and I like it a lot. But it has one huge, glaring deficiency that's completely neglected in the article : it totally eliminates choice. As a replacement for elections, that's not something I can stomach. I like the feeling that I have a voice in politics, a direct influence - however small. Take that away from me and I'd be left wondering whether this new system would really be democratic at all - yes, anyone could write to the MPs, but hardly anyone would get heard because the torrent of information would have to be reduced to something manageable.

What about as a supplement rather than a replacement ? That's much more credible. Regular consultation with citizen assemblies might help, and/or they could be given some kind of limited but direct authority. More research and trials are needed to see what problems such assemblies are capable of dealing with. I highly doubt they'd be any good at economics or other specialist areas, otherwise we wouldn't need specialists. And I'm not clear from this article whether the idea is to replace the entire political body with one randomised set that deals with all topics, or if we should have multiple groups that can really focus on different areas. But that's an incompleteness rather than a flaw.

So for now I'm sticking to my idea of looser political parties with an emphasis on competitive-collaborative decision making. The selection process is important, but how decisions are reached matters too. Of course, one could always combine this with sortition, but I would rather the voters had at least some say in policy, however limited. Sortition got a lot going for it, but it needs refinement. Or perhaps I should just buy the book.

Why elections are bad for democracy | David Van Reybrouck

Brexit is a turning point in the history of western democracy. Never before has such a drastic decision been taken through so primitive a procedure - a one-round referendum based on a simple majority.

What crisis ?

I've mentioned that I'm skeptical of the so-called "replication crisis" before, and this article, ironically, only reinforces that skepticism. The chief editor of the Lancet, after a symposium on reproducibility and reliability, had this to say :

A lot of what is published is incorrect. I m not allowed to say who made this remark because we were asked to observe Chatham House rules. We were also asked not to take photographs of slides. Why the paranoid concern for secrecy and non-attribution? Because this symposium on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research touched on one of the most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations. The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, poor methods get results.

But what exactly is being claimed here ? Either scientists are unknowingly using poor methods/data, or they're doing so in full awareness of what they're doing.

If they don't know what they're doing wrong, then what's the problem ? This is perfectly normal scientific practise, which by its very definition learns from its mistakes. No-one ever told me I had to publish results which were correct - blimey, if that was a requirement, nobody would ever publish anything. It's part and parcel of the whole scientific edifice to challenge existing findings. Research is supposed to be controversial and uncertain. That's the whole point of it.

What should be correct is only that if someone uses my exact method with the exact same conditions on my exact sample, then and only then should they get identical findings (and you can't really even do that in psychology, where conditions can never be fully and exactly reproduced). A paper should stand up to its own scrutiny - the reviewer should be able to say, hand on heart, "I can't find anything obviously wrong with this", but it would be absurd to demand they could say, "these results shall stand for all time and can be extrapolated wildly." The (admittedly few) examples of reproducibility studies I've looked at don't even seem to try and account for this, freely using different samples and/or methods.

And if scientists are ignorant but journal editors are not, why aren't journal editors intervening ? If they really believe the methods being used are known to be flawed, why the hell aren't they doing something about it ? It's not like it's a huge burden to at least say, "this correlation is weak, you should note that somewhere". Or, if the reviewers and editors didn't know about the problems either, then those problems can't have been obvious, and there's no fundamental problem. In that case the whole "crisis" would be just another, routine example of science improving itself.

But this whole thing has been so widely reported that it's not really credible that either authors or reviewers don't know about it either. So what if they're committing the errors knowingly ? Is that even possible ? I can see how the pressure to publish could drive authors to make mistakes and even try for outright fraud, but I cannot for the life of me see what would encourage a reviewer or editor to accept this. And even those authors who do try and deliberately push through dodgy results ought to be only the most desperate, because eventually the results will be discredited by someone else. Half of all authors behaving like this ? Come on, that's silly.

What of the reviewers ? In my experience, most reviewers tend to be overly thorough. Are they massively overworked in the life sciences, such that they're missing rudimentary problems ? I suppose it could be, although reviewing is supposed to be a semi-voluntary activity. It doesn't seem plausible.

The whole thing just doesn't sit right. Neither prospect - that authors are ignorantly making daft mistakes but no-one's telling them about it, or that half of all authors are deceptive little shits - seems at all credible. Is it not, perhaps, infinitely more likely that results aren't reproducible simply because biology is very, very complicated ? Am I missing something here ? If so, please tell me what it is, or else I'll only keep making the same mistakes. Just like the academic authors, apparently.

Science Publication Is Hopelessly Compromised, Say Journal Editors

A lot of what is published is incorrect. Quite an assertion, since it refers to medical progress as a swamp of distortions masquerading as fact, evidence, peer-reviewed science. Who says so? Why, none other than the Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet, among others.

Diversity matters

For all the difficulties that meritocracy is fraught with, the basic principle of hiring people based on skills and not other attributes is sound enough. It's usually implicitly accepted that if this was done, diversity would be a beneficial side-effect (so long as different groups are given equal opportunities of education, experience etc.). But it can also be an important goal in itself : groups are more than the sum of their parts. Merit doesn't just lead to diversity- sometimes it can be the other way around.

Osama Bin Laden made his declaration of war on the United States from a cave in Tora Bora in February 1996. Images revealed a man with beard reaching down to his chest. He was wearing cloth beneath combat fatigues. Today, given what we now know about the horror he unleashed, the declaration looks menacing. But an insider in the foremost US intelligence agency said the CIA "could not believe that this tall Saudi with a beard, squatting around a campfire, could be a threat to the United States of America". 

Richard Holbrooke, a senior official under President Clinton, put it this way: "How can a man in a cave out-communicate the world's leading communications society?" Another said: "They simply couldn't square the idea of putting resources into finding out more about Bin Laden and al-Qaeda given that the guy lived in a cave. To them, he was the essence of backwardness." 

Now, consider how someone more familiar with Islam would have perceived the same images. Bin Laden wore cloth not because he was primitive in intellect or technology, but because he modelled himself on the prophet. He fasted on the days the prophet fasted. His poses and postures, which seemed so backward to a western audience, were those that Islamic tradition ascribes to the most holy of its prophets.

As for the cave, this had even deeper symbolism. As almost any Muslim knows, Mohammad sought refuge in a cave after escaping his persecutors in Mecca. To a Muslim a cave is holy. Islamic art overflows with images of stalactites. Bin Laden modelled his exile to Tora Bora as his own personal hijrah, and used the cave as propaganda. As one Muslim scholar put it: "Bin Laden was not primitive; he was strategic. He knew how to wield the imagery of the Koran to incite those who would later become martyrs in the attacks of 9/11."

When a problem is complex, no one person has all the answers. We all have blind spots, gaps in our understanding. This means, in turn, that if you bring a group of people who share similar perspectives and backgrounds, they are liable to share the same blind spots. And this means that far from challenging and addressing these blind spots, they are likely to be reinforced.

I don't really have much to add except that getting the right kind of diversity of opinion is difficult. While network analysis in society is very interesting, I do wonder to what extent networks are just consequences of the procedures people choose to adopt more than they are causes of them. I suspect most are a complicated mixture of both. Still, even in those cases, the availability of who communicates with whom must play a role in fostering different ideas and getting relevant information to those who could benefit from it.

Some forms of diversity are surely better than others. For example, at least in simulations, it's been shown that a core of just 10% of diehard fanatics are enough to convince the rest, regardless of the network structure. So combine 10% who believe abortion is a mortal sin, 10% who think it's an essential right, and 80% open minded, and watch the fireworks. I'm quite confident you'll want to be at a safe distance.

Perhaps the diversity required is subtler than that. Maybe it's not about the particular issue at all, but a broader set of worldviews and different ways of approaching problems. That way you try and minimise the destructive fanaticism. You do want people who are going to stand up and disagree with the majority, but I can't think of any situations in which it makes any sense at all to disagree with the evidence.

(Caveat : irrational viewpoints sometimes get lucky. It's a bit of a dilemma as to how to incorporate metadata with direct evidence, e.g. that people have always done things a certain way tells you nothing about why they started doing that, but its persistence might suggest you should keep doing it. They may have stumbled onto a solution to a problem too complicated to fully analyse.)

EDIT : There was something nagging at me about this one, and I've realised what it was. You might think that having a bunch of specialist experts would be the best way to solve any sort of specialist technical problem, so why does diversity matter at all ? The answer, of course, is that expertise and many other attributes are uncorrelated. There's absolutely no reason* why someone of an Islamic, Christian, poor, black, white, lesbian, etc. etc. background can't become proficient in just about anything. Background by itself doesn't determine expertise or knowledge, but it does influence the way you think and give you access to different knowledge. Sometimes apparently unrelated background knowledge turns out to be more important than the professional training.

* At least in principle, leaving aside a host of complex cultural and other correlated factors.

EDIT 2 : In one of Lindybeige's excellent videos (I forget which one), he makes a throwaway comment to the effect that you wouldn't expect a female perspective on engineering to be any different than a male one. He's got a point : there's no such thing as female engineering or female physics; the Universe runs independently of gender. But this misses a more important point. Even if, for the sake of argument, male and female brains are identical, society still genderises them. Men and women and any other demographic you care to specify experience life differently, giving them different knowledge and perspectives. Thus apparently completely unrelated factors can indeed be important considerations in forming a group to tackle a specific task.

The CIA, 9/11 and collective blindness

When the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) failed to prevent the September 11, 2001 attacks, many asked whether more could have been done. But the true reason why the agency was blind to the signs may be a diversity problem, writes Matthew Syed.

Something fishy's going on

Fish get a raw deal, don't they ? The intelligence of the octopus is by now well-known, but fish are still often looked down on as almost proverbially stupid. True, "bird brain" is an insult, but the three second memory span of the goldfish is legendary. And it's totally absurd when you think about it - what would life be like with a three second memory span ? Unlivable, probably. Certainly everything you ever did would have to be purely instinctual.

Of course, there's lots of evidence that fish aren't anything like as stupid as are popularly supposed. So, having recently read the excellent Other Minds (a short book by a naturalist/philosopher about the mental lives of octopus), the first thing I read from my Christmas list this year was What A Fish Knows. Both of these books are top of their game, lively and engaging from start to finish. I give them both 10/10. As they both appear to be hugely successful, are readily available and are short reads, I'll keep this brief - they're well worth reading in their entirety.

Other Minds does an excellent job of dispelling popular notions of how octopus intelligence is often sensationalised, without ever dismissing the fundamental point that octopus are indeed intelligent. For example, they've been known to turn off lights outside their tank by squirting water at them. The octopus probably isn't anywhere near clever enough to know that that will work in advance, but simply demonstrating its standard behaviour of squirting water at anything it doesn't like. All the same time, they do show genuine problem-solving behaviour - using shells for camouflage, waiting until their keepers aren't watching to plan their escape, and opening screw-top jars. They are undoubtedly thinking about what they're doing, not just flailing their many arms around wildly.

Being a philosopher, the author of Other Minds is particularly keen to examine what the intelligence of his subjects means for such notions as free will. For example, cephalopods demonstrate split-brain behaviour. Bizarrely, if a pigeon learns something with one eye and then sees it again with the other, it won't won't respond the same way. Its memories are stored in different sides of the brain. This isn't the case for humans (except in cases of surgery), whereas the octopus is a sort of halfway-house in which some information is shared across the brain, but not all.

This has weird implications for what it means to be a thinking entity. Either we're highly mechanistic constructions after all, or, if we have something of a more spiritual animating force, then it apparently can't access both parts of the octopus brain at once. Goodness only knows what the conscious experience of an octopus is like - and it's even weirder considering that the octopus brain is hugely different to those of vertebrates.


Let's keep this light and move on to What A Fish Knows. It turns out that a fish knows... everything. Or at least, as a group, fish display the same range of diversity of traits as any other animal group.  The author does an excellent job of keeping things concise but thorough, breaking down what a fish knows into its emotions, what it senses, thinks, desires, and how it behaves. Like Other Minds, the author covers basic biology as well as the mental aspects. And the physiology of a fish turns out to be quite important in understanding how they think.

Inhabiting a world quite alien to our own, under the same eternity of selection pressures they've evolved the same degree of characteristics as any other animal group. They sense a world we can never inhabit in ways we quite literally can never imagine. Unless we start enhancing our bodies with silicon sensory apparatus, we will never know what electroreception or hydodynamic imaging feel like. Perhaps they're similar to our own senses. or perhaps sensing an electrical field is as different from the other senses as sight is to hearing. We may never know -  so much for Mary's room.

Fish don't just have an array of powerful senses at their disposal, they also demonstrate problem-solving behaviour. They compete and co-operate socially, even doing the equivalent of pointing to items of interest to their fellow fishes. They use tools (rocks to open shells) and build elaborate nests to attract mates and raise young.

Fish even co-operate in a sort of democratic way. As well as assessing the environment for themselves, they also respond to what other fish are doing. It turns out to be quite difficult to fool a fish - and, rather unlike human decision-making, this seems to scale well for larger groups. The larger a shoal, the less likely it will follow a robotic fish towards a source of danger : one idiot isn't enough, although if enough fish commit, others will follow.

It's fair to say that these aquatic residents think and feel, even if they don't always express it in mammal-like ways. They show signs of distress and undoubtedly experience pain; any residual reluctance in the biological community to accept this apparently coming from a long-standing historical bias*. Trout, if you want a suitably ridiculous factoid to blurt out during one of those bits in a conversation when everyone goes quiet, fake orgasms. And their memory ? Well in goldfish it lasts at least a year, not three seconds.

* The view that animals don't really think or feel seems to be a particularly strong blind spot for certain scientists. It's a particularly hard bias to overcome, since we can't even prove to each other that we ourselves are sentient.

One thing I did wonder about memory was about spontaneous recall. Once, many years ago, a dog of mine lost her toy in some woods just beyond the field behind my house. The next day she very suddenly became excited and jumped around by the garden gate. Eventually we let her out and she disappeared into the woods like a shot, returning swiftly with her lost toy. I cannot imagine that there was anything going on in her mind that wouldn't resemble the human processes of suddenly remembering something out of the blue, having a distinct mental concept, an inner life on which to act.

None of the memory experiments described in the book seem to relate to this. Rather, they're about habituating fish to certain conditions, e.g. learning that there's food in a red tube but not a black one, stuff like that. Months later they still "remember" this. But is this really memory, or just a conditioned response ? For example it's been claimed that ant colonies possess "memories" that outlast individual ants, but the experiments there seem to be more about changing the ant's behaviour depending on the conditions. That's not necessarily at all the same as having a mental image of a lost toy and its location, something specific which allows agency and intent - you might as well say that if you slash a tyre, the car "remembers" its traumatic experience and demonstrates this by driving badly.

No-one seems to have come up with a test for spontaneous recall in fish, though I'll grant that this is much harder than testing habituation. Though perhaps at least one observation does demonstrate this. Fish that live in rockpools sometimes have to escape to new pools as they dry out. Fish that have swum over the pools at high tide are more successful than those which don't, suggesting they have true mental maps - i.e. true memories, not mere habits to general circumstance. You can't generate a conditioned response merely by looking at something once.

Anyway, it seems very unlikely indeed that all fish behaviour is pure instinct. Some of the memory tests are more specific, and some behaviours require novelty, not just applying learned responses. And fish can learn from watching each other too : archer fish become much more accurate at shooting water jets at prey after watching more experienced fish first. Tigerfish learn the best hunting techniques (leaping out of the water to catch birds) by watching each other. These are so specific behaviours, requiring such careful and precise actions to achieve the desired results, that it seems to be inevitable that they are thinking about what's going on, mentally planning their actions and imagining the perspective of their peers.

The author also points out that size makes no difference to intelligence. Although there doesn't seem to be the equivalent of a fish chimpanzee, i.e. one with a broad range of problem-solving skills, even the smallest fishes can display behaviours ordinarily associated with larger animals. And they don't just apply them in very limited cases, but more generally. Cleaner wrasse, when presented with two coloured plates of food, can learn that it's better to eat first from the colour corresponding to the one from which food is removed soonest. They even solve this problem faster than chimps. And some fish can recognise not just other individual fish, but also humans.

To me, this kind of thinking blurs the line between instinct and genuine intelligence. The fish are clearly doing something more than mechanistic responses. As the author points out, "brain size be damned, if it's critical to a species survival then that species will most likely be good at it." It makes sense for a cleaner wrasse to understand that disappearing food must be eaten quickly, but it takes more than gut instinct to generalise this from visiting sharks to coloured plates. That's true intelligence, in my book.

What of the slower-learning chimps ? That doesn't necessarily make them overall stupider, because chimps (who can solve some puzzles faster than humans) can do things that fish can't. When we see an animal doing something apparently very stupid, like albatross who can't work out if a chick is theirs if it falls out of the nest, we should perhaps be forgiving - their world is some ways very different to ours. We have absolutely no conception of what it's like to soar thousands of miles across the sea under our own power, and I daresay that if we found ourselves with the body of an albatross or a little fishy, we'd be dead within a week. Perhaps the responses of an animal will only ever make sense from the perspective of that animal, their world being just too different for us to ever fully comprehend it.

Or perhaps not. The most interesting thing for me was not the amazing senses or complex behaviour of fishes, but a fundamental similarity they share with humans : fish suffer from optical illusions. That classic one where one line looks longer than the other even though it isn't ? Yep, fish have the same problem. Fish can be trained to select the longest line for a food reward, but when then presented with the illusion, they respond much as humans do - incorrectly. I find this astonishing. These radically different creatures, mostly endothermic, silver-scaled denizens of the deep dark depths, separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution from me, are at least in some ways thinking in a very similar way. Fish have mental lives and intelligence - they are not thoughtless automatons, nor are they so wholly alien. If we can't yet know the mind of a fish, we do at least know that they have minds.

What a Fish Knows

This is the most delightfully charming work of nonfiction I have read in a long time! I have heard on numerous occasions that fish are nothing more than "water vegetables", lacking feelings of pain, memory, familial love and social structure.

Believing in science does not make one a scientist

I have certainly encountered the ironic phenomenon if people who believe, in the religious sense of the word, in scientific findings. Not necessarily in the scientific method - I don't think it's possible to have that kind of belief about a system which is fundamentally built upon recognising one's own errors - but in the current expertise of the day.

In the study, 270 college students were asked to rate their agreement with a series of scientific facts and nonfactual statements. Scientific facts included statements such as “A typical cumulus cloud weighs about 1.1 million pounds,” while nonfactual statements included common false beliefs such as “Humans only use about 10% of their brain.” 

The researchers found that participants who were more politically liberal tended to agree more with the scientific statements, compared to participants who were more conservative. However, liberalism was also associated with a greater belief in nonfactual statements.

So a preference for scientific discoveries is not necessarily associated with a more critical attitude. But isn't that an inherent problem with deferring to experts ? If you accept that experts are the most reliable and are then given a statement that sounds like it came from an expert, it would be a bit weird if you weren't inclined to accept it. It would be inconsistent to say, "experts know better than me" and then also say "I know better than the experts".

“It is possible that whereas more conservative persons may be unduly skeptical, more liberal persons may be too open and therefore vulnerable to inaccurate information presented in a manner that appears scientific,” the researchers wrote in their study.

The study also found that liberal participants reported greater agreement with pro-truth statements, such as “It is important to me to align my opinions and my actions with true information,” which in turn was associated with their increased agreement with scientific facts.

I think it would be much more interesting to see how the groups respond to information that contradicts their existing beliefs. I haven't read the paper, but it seems that neither group had any reason to judge if they were being unduly skeptical or too open minded. You need a lot more information than the raw statement than that : you need the metadata of where it came from, how widely it's supported, the counter arguments, etc. Give them the information in context and you might be in a position to judge people's critical-mindedness, and whether they change their minds in a reasonable way or not.

But I cannot for the life of me imagine anyone actively choosing to disagree with the idea that they should align their actions with the truth - there must have been some very bizarre people in that study. Mind you, last night we were playing, "Pick Your Poison", a game where players vote on two options of horrible things they'd rather do if they were forced to choose. It's a card game where one player selects the two options, with the aim being to choose them such that there's a 50-50 split in the vote. One example was especially bizarre. At least two people genuinely thought they would rather accidentally murder their best friend than get their grandmother addicted to heroin.

People are weird and I don't understand them.

Study finds liberals are more accepting of scientific facts -- and nonfactual statements

New research provides evidence that political orientation is a predictor of belief in scientific and unscientific statements. The study, published in Psychological Reports , found that more liberal college students tend to be more accepting of both types of statements compared to their conservative counterparts.