- 01 and the universe
- Acinonyx Scepticus
- Amanuensis
- ASSAf Blog
- Botswana Skeptic
- Bomoko and other nonsense words
- Communicating Science, the African Way
- Defollyant's AntiBlog
- Effortless Incitement
- Ewan’s Corner
- Expensive Beliefs **new**
- Geekery
- Grumpy Old Man
- Health Frog **new**
- Hello Universe, This is Nessie
- Ionian Enchantment
- Limbic Nutrition
- Lenny Says
- McBrolloks
- Meh Blog **new**
- Nathan Bond's TART Remarks
- Orion Spur
- Other Things Amanzi
- Pickled Bushman
- Psychohistorian
- Reason Check
- Retroid Raving
- Roy Jobson **new**
- Scorched
- Shadows Hide
- Skeptic South Africa **new**
- Stop Danie Krügel
- Sumbandlila Mission Blog **new**
- Synapses
- Tauriq Moosa
- The Joys of Atheism **new**
- The Science Of Sport
- The Skeptic Black Sheep
- The Skeptic Detective
- Word of the Blog
Sunday, February 28, 2010
African science/skepticism blogrolling for February
The updated African science and skepticism blog roll for February... If you know of blogs not listed here, please let me know. Also: add it to your blog! Do a post like this one! (Email me, and I'll send you the HTML).
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Encephalon #80: The Twitter Edition
- @edyong209 asks: can a sniff of oxytocin improve the social skills of autistic people? Apparently yes: http://bit.ly/dqVSIV
- @neurocritic on on alien hand syndrome and agency error http://bit.ly/d8D3kY & on neuropsychoanalysis: http://bit.ly/bU3LyD
- @vaughanbell wonders whether you really can be frightened to death: http://bit.ly/d0ehYL
- @podblack on facilitated communication and Belgian Rom Houben. Newsflash: it didn't really work: http://bit.ly/aTHvWy
- @sharpbrains head honcho @AlvaroF interviews Michael Merzenich on brain training, etc. http://bit.ly/5kfG7w
- @sharpbrains says working memory is a better predictor of academic success than IQ: http://bit.ly/5Q3ZJ5
- @somatosphere has a summary of an interdisciplinary UCLA conference on the Cultural and Biological Contexts of Psychiatric Disorder: http://bit.ly/d1J1tT
- @researchdigest says swanky cars enhance men's appeal to women, but not women's to men: http://bit.ly/dr9krV
- @BrainBlogger on a BMJ article that concluded children with a high IQ have a reduced risk of mortality as adults: http://bit.ly/9T4Hhy
- @BrainBlogger argues the act of speaking in tongues as a verifiable language phenomenon: http://bit.ly/bOlKX2
- @jonahlehrer reveals sportspeople don't maximize gains like game theory predicts: http://bit.ly/bw769F. Von Neumann pissed.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
The Cost of Truth is Eternal Vigilance
A recurring theme on this blog is that it is unwise to rely on 'everyday' or uncritical thinking because our minds are liable to innumerable biases, failures of memory, and so on. An important part of being a good thinker, then, is to submit ideas - and especially our own - to critical scrutiny. I am not, obviously, immune to these biases, in fact, I am as liable to them as anyone else. I do work hard to scrutinize my beliefs carefully, though, and I regularly give up previously held beliefs as a result. To demonstrate not only the dangers of uncritical thinking, but also that I (try to) practice what I preach, here are two recent instances of having to change my mind. Both are pretty unimportant beliefs, but they illustrate the issues nonetheless.
I moved from Johannesburg to Durban in early 2007 and my fiancée did the same in early 2009. Possibly as a result of her comments about how much it has been raining in Durban, I came to believe that 2009 had been an especially wet year: I thought it must be the wettest since I'd moved here. I knew, of course, that the only way to establish this for sure was to look at actual statistics because our memories are flawed and we use the availability heuristic to make inferences about trends. But... I didn't bother to check for a while. When I finally did, it became quite clear that my intuitive sense about Durban's weather was spectacularly wrong. The wonder that is Wolfram Alpha let me create the following two graphs: the first shows the total estimated yearly precipitation (rain, for Durban's purposes) for the last 5 years, and the second shows (I think weekly) rainfall amounts over the same period.
As should be abundantly clear, 2009 is not the wettest year since I moved to Durban, it is in fact the driest. Now, it could be the case that 2009 had less total rainfall, but more rainy days, so I could have been misled for that reason. The second graph, though, is only mildly suggestive on that front and I can find no other data (that's free). So it seems fair to conclude that I was led astray by thinking intuitively when I should have known not to trust my intuitions about trends in complex, variable systems. (For detailed evidence that people are spectacularly bad at thinking statistically, see Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982).
The second example concerns bias and rather nicely illustrates the importance of blinding. If you had asked me a while ago what the best search engine was, I would have said: "Google - and by a wide margin". Until I found BlindSearch, that is. Branding biases our judgments and Google's brand is so powerful that being objective while knowing which search engine's results you're looking at is extremely difficult. BlindSearch remedies this problem: it lets you search Bing, Yahoo and Google simultaneously, presents the results in three columns, and blinds you to which search engine produced which results. You look through the results, vote for the one you prefer, and then only are the brand names revealed. I've now used BlindSearch dozens of times and a clear pattern has emerged: Google isn't nearly as superior as I once thought it was. While I still tend to prefer Google's results a plurality of the time, Bing and Yahoo do get my vote more often than I would have thought. For the sake of concreteness, here are ten searches I did with my vote listed next to it. I tried to pick topics that were either obscure or controversial to 'test' the search engines, since search terms with obvious results aren't exactly indicative of quality. Also, I verified some of these results by checking whether my vote stayed the same later (it did in all cases).
These are just two, small, inconsequential examples, of course. They illustrate an important point though: if you want to be right, you have be be skeptical, self-critical, willing to reconsider and admit error, cautious, and scrupulously careful with facts and arguments. Or, to corrupt a glorious quote misattributed to Thomas Jefferson: the cost of truth is eternal vigilance.
I moved from Johannesburg to Durban in early 2007 and my fiancée did the same in early 2009. Possibly as a result of her comments about how much it has been raining in Durban, I came to believe that 2009 had been an especially wet year: I thought it must be the wettest since I'd moved here. I knew, of course, that the only way to establish this for sure was to look at actual statistics because our memories are flawed and we use the availability heuristic to make inferences about trends. But... I didn't bother to check for a while. When I finally did, it became quite clear that my intuitive sense about Durban's weather was spectacularly wrong. The wonder that is Wolfram Alpha let me create the following two graphs: the first shows the total estimated yearly precipitation (rain, for Durban's purposes) for the last 5 years, and the second shows (I think weekly) rainfall amounts over the same period.
The second example concerns bias and rather nicely illustrates the importance of blinding. If you had asked me a while ago what the best search engine was, I would have said: "Google - and by a wide margin". Until I found BlindSearch, that is. Branding biases our judgments and Google's brand is so powerful that being objective while knowing which search engine's results you're looking at is extremely difficult. BlindSearch remedies this problem: it lets you search Bing, Yahoo and Google simultaneously, presents the results in three columns, and blinds you to which search engine produced which results. You look through the results, vote for the one you prefer, and then only are the brand names revealed. I've now used BlindSearch dozens of times and a clear pattern has emerged: Google isn't nearly as superior as I once thought it was. While I still tend to prefer Google's results a plurality of the time, Bing and Yahoo do get my vote more often than I would have thought. For the sake of concreteness, here are ten searches I did with my vote listed next to it. I tried to pick topics that were either obscure or controversial to 'test' the search engines, since search terms with obvious results aren't exactly indicative of quality. Also, I verified some of these results by checking whether my vote stayed the same later (it did in all cases).
- Science - Bing
- Islamic terrorism - Difficult call, but Yahoo
- Evolution - Yahoo
- iPad - Google (though it was close)
- Michael Meadon - Google
- Sex - Yahoo (though Bing doesn't work for some reason)
- Homeopathy - Google (by a large margin)
- Jacob Zuma - Bing (close)
- Richard Dawkins - Google (Yahoo sucked)
- Sitcky the stick insect - Google, by far (also wins on Olaf the Hairy)
These are just two, small, inconsequential examples, of course. They illustrate an important point though: if you want to be right, you have be be skeptical, self-critical, willing to reconsider and admit error, cautious, and scrupulously careful with facts and arguments. Or, to corrupt a glorious quote misattributed to Thomas Jefferson: the cost of truth is eternal vigilance.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Climate denial and arrogance
I recently became a bit more active on Twitter (find me at @michaelmeadon) and today I had an argument with one Ivo Vegter (@ivovegter), a South African journalist and, more to the point, climate denialist. Vegter is a staunch critic of climate science and he's penned several columns espousing his views, on Climategate, Copenhagen and one answering his critics (among others). I don't have either the time or the inclination to document all the misconceptions, false statements and fallacies Vegter makes in his columns, but I do want to hold forth on intellectual arrogance and share an analogy I put to him regarding expertise. Vegter, you see, is a journalist: he not only has no training in climate science, he has no scientific training at all. He is, apparently, "reasonably familiar with scientific subjects, and ha[s] read...a great deal on the subject of climate change." (Though this does not include, at least from what I can see, reading the scientific literature like respected science journalists do - c.f. Carl Zimmer and Ed Yong). Oddly, he claims "no particular expertise, nor qualifications to challenge professional scientists on matters of high science" but then does exactly that when taking sides between denialists (often non-climate scientist) and proper climate scientists.
As regular readers will know (I keep reminding you...) I recently wrote a long piece praising intellectual deference. The key premises of my argument there was (1) that the universe is hypercomplicated and (2) that intellectual rigor demands robust epistemic justification before forming an opinion. My conclusion was that, given (1), (2) is extremely difficult to fulfill. Intellectual responsibility, then, demands either agnosticism or deference to expert consensus when (2) is not fulfilled. I think it should be obvious that climate science is in fact preposterously complicated. To make up your own mind, all by yourself, about whether human activities cause global climate change, you would need to understand, at a minimum and as far as this particular non-expert can tell, the relevant physical and chemical processes that happen in the atmosphere and how they change, the history of and variations in climatic conditions, the extent and history of anthropogenic greenhouse gasses, and the mathematics that underlie climate models. To form justified opinions about these, in turn, you’d have to know and understand, including all the technical details, a vast body of literature about things like dendroclimatology, meridional overturning circulation, the net radiative forcing of anthropogenic aerosols, and the quasi-biennial oscillation.
Vegter, as far as I know at least, understands none of the above, let alone at an expert level. Yet he espouses an opinion contrary to scientific consensus. (While there is plenty we don't know, the vast majority of the relevant experts agree climate change is anthropogenic). Without properly understanding the methods of science, he claims, absurdly, that "Climategate" shows there is a warmist conspiracy. He adjudicates arguments between scientists and denialists - usually in favor of the latter. All of this, I think, is irresponsible and arrogant in the extreme. As I pointed out in my deference piece:
As regular readers will know (I keep reminding you...) I recently wrote a long piece praising intellectual deference. The key premises of my argument there was (1) that the universe is hypercomplicated and (2) that intellectual rigor demands robust epistemic justification before forming an opinion. My conclusion was that, given (1), (2) is extremely difficult to fulfill. Intellectual responsibility, then, demands either agnosticism or deference to expert consensus when (2) is not fulfilled. I think it should be obvious that climate science is in fact preposterously complicated. To make up your own mind, all by yourself, about whether human activities cause global climate change, you would need to understand, at a minimum and as far as this particular non-expert can tell, the relevant physical and chemical processes that happen in the atmosphere and how they change, the history of and variations in climatic conditions, the extent and history of anthropogenic greenhouse gasses, and the mathematics that underlie climate models. To form justified opinions about these, in turn, you’d have to know and understand, including all the technical details, a vast body of literature about things like dendroclimatology, meridional overturning circulation, the net radiative forcing of anthropogenic aerosols, and the quasi-biennial oscillation.
Vegter, as far as I know at least, understands none of the above, let alone at an expert level. Yet he espouses an opinion contrary to scientific consensus. (While there is plenty we don't know, the vast majority of the relevant experts agree climate change is anthropogenic). Without properly understanding the methods of science, he claims, absurdly, that "Climategate" shows there is a warmist conspiracy. He adjudicates arguments between scientists and denialists - usually in favor of the latter. All of this, I think, is irresponsible and arrogant in the extreme. As I pointed out in my deference piece:
It is extraordinarily arrogant to have (independent) opinions on complex questions without being willing to pay your dues first – that is, without studying the question for years, reading the scholarly literature, mastering the relevant techniques and mathematics, and so on. Thinking you are entitled to an opinion without paying your dues is the very epitome of intellectual arrogance. And it is especially arrogant – mind-bogglingly so – for a non-expert to have opinions that contradict the consensus of the tens of thousands of intelligent, diligent and dedicated people who have spent decades studying, debating, doing research on and thinking deeply about their respective disciplines. The bottom line: be an expert, defer, or suspend judgment.There is, I've noticed, an odd inconsistency in lay arrogance about science. I doubt very much Vegter would grab the knife away from a neurosurgeon and start cutting away himself. I doubt Vegter would tell an engineer she's Doing It Wrong and redraw her plans for a bridge. And yet Vegter seems perfectly willing to yell 'bunkum!', 'conspiracy!' and 'fraud!' when it comes to climate science, despite the fact that the topic is arguably much more complicated and the stakes several orders of magnitude higher. Why not watch MegaStructures on Natural Geographic and start an engineering firm? Why not browse through Gray's Anatomy, read a bit of Oliver Sacks and then branch out to neurosurgery? He's done neither physics nor physiology, but seems willing to advise climate scientists on the strength of his ignorance on the former, but not neurosurgeons on the strength of his ignorance in the latter. Why?
Quotes: Clifford on belief
I posted some quotes from WK Clifford's "The Ethics of Belief" a while back. Here are some more. (I'm not saying I endorse all of these - he's far too strong in places. Though, I like the sentiment and the prose is fun).
"No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe."
"If I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery."
"The credulous man is father to the liar and the cheat; he lives in the bosom of this his family, and it is no marvel if he should become even as they are. So closely are our duties knit together, that whoso shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all."
"'But,' says one, 'I am a busy man; I have no time for the long course of study which would be necessary to make me in any degree a competent judge of certain questions, or even able to understand the nature of the arguments.' Then he should have no time to believe."
"It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe."
Friday, February 19, 2010
Skeptics' Circle #130
I've not pointed to Skeptics' Circles in a while (naughty, I know). So here's the latest. the 130th edition of the Skeptics' Circle is up over at The Lay Scientist. Posts to check out: Martin on the 10:23 mass homeopathy overdose, Andrea's Buzzing About on the false distinction been 'natural' and 'artificial' chemicals, and Dubito Ergo Sum on Mike Adams' (of the quackery site Natural News) stupid views about skeptics. My contribution to this edition was "In Praise of Deference".
Andreas Moritz is (also) a quack
See: Orac's takedown of Moritz, published long before this whole snafu.
Update: Orac has taken on Andreas Moritz again.
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