What if we, the people, are just not rational?

Decision-making within the 35-home neighborhood where I live became a tad contentious.  The rhetoric got heated.  I followed Harry Truman's "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" and quit the governing board.

If a 35-home neighborhood can generate enough political heat for me to throw in that metaphorical towel, do you think I will be able to stand even one tweet from Adolf Trump?

What shocks me more than Drumpf  as the major party candidate is this: There are tens of millions of people who support him, despite all the horrible tweets of his, and despite all the horrible things he has said about a whole bunch of people not only this country but even outside the US.

We cannot dismiss this as a freakish outlier.  To me, this is all the more evidence that there is a wide gulf between the democracy that we idealize and the reality of it all.  This gulf has existed all the time; it is not anything new.  But, never before has it become this glaringly in our face, which means we can't really be in denial anymore.

When it comes to democracy in America:

[Maybe] the problem is that we were expecting too much out of it in the first place ... It's time to stop pretending that there's such a thing as a rational voter.

I agree.  Maybe it is time we lowered the expectations. And lowered it a great deal.  It is the unrealistic expectations that also then end up with the complications like the ballot measures that we regular people simply cannot even understand and, yet, are asked to vote on.  The same unrealistic expectations of rational voters thinking through issues is also how the Brexit screw-up happened.  It is the same story in any democracy, not only here in the US.

"Can ordinary people, busy with their lives and with no firsthand experience of policy making or public administration, do what the theory expects them to do?" Of course not. "Mostly," Achen and Bartels write, "they identify with ethnic, racial, occupation, religious or other sorts of groups, and often — whether through group ties or hereditary loyalties — with a political party."

Exactly.  Back in the old country, I was always shocked at how ethnic, religious, and other affiliations seemed to lead plenty--perhaps an overwhelming majority even--to vote.  I tell ya, my adopted country is no different from my old country!

The author writes, "it’s finally time to make peace with a simple fact of political life: Informed, individualistic rationality is a chimera."   I am ready.  I made my own peace with it a long time ago, which is also why until a month ago, I never ruled out Hitler winning on November 8th.  It is also why I was not that surprised that Bush won a second term.

The friend always asks me for some kind of a constructive takeaway.  Here, it is simple: Stop imagining about the utopia and work with the reality.  Do not deny the reality that you observe.  And, more than anything else, do not ever think that more education means a better democracy.  Nope!

For the good-government reform community, this suggests something equally radical: giving up on the deeply held belief that American democracy can be solved by giving citizens more opportunities to participate by emailing Congress or voting, and an end to thinking all would be better if more people would just "get informed on the issues. ...
It also means coming to terms with the fact that we don’t think for ourselves; we think together. And maybe that’s fine. Partisanship and group loyalties are inevitable, and they can even be good things if they can help us realize shared interests.

Have a nice day! ;)

Are humans also genetically modified organisms?

Not many days go by without GMO appearing in my Facebook feed.  Almost always, those are to oppose GMO (like here.)  Ironically, those comments are from friends who are otherwise trained in the sciences and in technology, and champion other scientific ideas that typically generate controversies--the GMO-opposing friends often post worrying about global climate change, and make snide remarks on the strange American fixation on denying evolution.

I have struggled to understand why people oppose GMOs even when an overwhelming majority of scientists around the world support GMO. I have blogged about this issue in the past, but it continues to be incomprehensible. So, here I am again on why people oppose GMO even though science says it is safe;)

negative representations of GMOs are widespread and compelling because they are intuitively appealing. By tapping into intuitions and emotions that mostly work under the radar of conscious awareness, but are constituent of any normally functioning human mind, such representations become easy to think. They capture our attention, they are easily processed and remembered and thus stand a greater chance of being transmitted and becoming popular, even if they are untrue. Thus, many people oppose GMOs, in part, because it just makes sense that they would pose a threat.

"intuitively appealing" is the key idea here.  Before we continue on with the GMO, think about that "intuitively appealing" again.  A narrative of a creator who created life is "intuitively appealing" and, therefore, people have a tough time letting go of it.  To think that the sun goes around the earth is "intuitively appealing" because, after all, we see that happening day in and day out.  To think that women are dirty because they bleed every month is "intuitively appealing."  To think that people who don't look like us are inferior is "intuitively appealing."  It is an endless list of "intuitively appealing" aspects of life, right?

Rational thinking and science are all about eliminating that "intuitively appealing" explanations.  Of course, we continue to refer to the sun rising and setting, but we also know that it is merely a part of the idiom.  Yes, there are societies that continue to shun women, especially during their "periods" but most of the world operates otherwise.  As I often remind students, education itself is all about questioning the "gut instinct."  If we lived by our gut instincts, you think we would have developed a protocol to eliminate smallpox, which required us to knowingly inject a mild version of that disease into our systems?

Yet, in the case of GMO, quite a few people--even the scientifically trained ones--vehemently oppose it.

Intuitions about purposes and intentions also have an impact on people’s thinking about GMOs. They render us vulnerable to the idea that purely natural phenomena exist or happen for a purpose that is intended by some agent. These assumptions are part and parcel of religious beliefs, but in secular environments they lead people to regard nature as a beneficial process or entity that secures our wellbeing and that humans shouldn’t meddle with. In the context of opposition to GMOs, genetic modification is deemed “unnatural” and biotechnologists are accused of “playing God”.

I suppose we should remind the GMO opponents that wiping out smallpox is "unnatural" and "playing God."  Ebola?  Hey, it is just nature that doesn't want us to live.  We humans are not like birds and, therefore, for us to fly is so "unnatural."  Space exploration is to intrude on the gods up in the heaven.  Speaking into the air and my father responding to me in real time from the other side of the planet is so "unnatural" and almost like we are gods with such abilities.

Oh well ... for now, my gut instinct directs me to go eat and I don't care whether it has any GMO in it ;)

Source

If ever you need proof that deep down we are animals ...

The students who make the ultimate mistake of listening to me know how much I emphasize that education, all of it and especially the sciences, challenges the gut-instincts we might have about many aspects of life.  About this planet and elsewhere.  Think about it--our gut instincts will tell us that the sun moves around the earth.  Our gut instinct will lead us to resist the idea that injecting a small dose of a virus in kids will help them develop immunity against diseases that could even kill them.

Education nukes that gut instinct.

But, deep down, we are animals.  And, like other animals, we rely on our instincts.  Right?

Ah well, I am merely channeling an essay by Isaac Asimov that was a part of our curriculum back in the high school years in India.  I remember how I was impressed then, as I am even now, that the progress humans have realized over the centuries has been through a systematic inquiry into those gut instincts and to essentially destroy those ideas.

Yet, science is hard to believe.  Those damn animal instincts just don't die ;)

We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge — from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change — faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts. There are so many of these controversies these days, you’d think a diabolical agency had put something in the water to make people argumentative.

Science is more than learning the periodic table, or mouthing off how humans evolved.

In this bewildering world we have to decide what to believe and how to act on that. In principle, that’s what science is for. “Science is not a body of facts,” says geophysicist Marcia McNutt, who once headed the U.S. Geological Survey and is now editor of Science, the prestigious journal. “Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.”

Our continued reliance on our gut instincts essentially means that we do not choose to believe in the laws of nature.

we subconsciously cling to our intuitions — what researchers call our naive beliefs.

They say "naive beliefs" but I prefer gut- or animal-instincts.

as we become scientifically literate, we repress our naive beliefs but never eliminate them entirely. They nest in our brains, chirping at us as we try to make sense of the world.
Most of us do that by relying on personal experience and anecdotes, on stories rather than statistics.

While our instincts provide us with narratives that absolutely convince us, "science tells us the truth rather than what we’d like the truth to be."

Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else — but their dogma is always wilting in the hot glare of new research. In science it’s not a sin to change your mind when the evidence demands it. For some people, the tribe is more important than the truth; for the best scientists, the truth is more important than the tribe.

Aha, now I have one more argument in favor of continuing to operate outside of tribes.  

On my own, if needed. 

In my ashram ;)

"Green Phonies": Practice what you teach? ... continued

This is the first ever post in this blog with the title of "Practice what you teach?" and yet I have added the "continued," in case you didn't notice it already ;)

Just to let you know that there was another place where I did--a decade ago, in September 2004, I authored this piece at Planetizen, in which I wrote about the difficulty in trying to achieve a consistency between what we say and what we do, and how to draw the line "between my academic life and personal decisions."

I recalled there:

Katie in the front row (of course!) asked me, "Francesca and I were talking the other day about you, Dr. Khé. How come you don't drive a small car but drive a gas-guzzling Jeep Cherokee instead?"

It has been ten years since, and I am all the more convinced about the moral of the story:

academic life means a continuous attempt to redraw the line that separates what I teach from how I live.

It does not mean that I drive a small car now.  Or, a hybrid, like a Prius.  Because, I remain convinced that there is no single identifying litmus test, like whether or not I drive a Prius, in order to understand how much I am helping the environment.

In fact, I have even made fun of Hollywood celebrities who flashed their Priuses when they were introduced.  Those celebrities, who are the very embodiment of material consumption, pretending to help the environment by driving around in Priuses was the best joke of all.  But, dammit, people so believe that a consumption hog who drives in a Prius is more "environmental" than one like me whose consumption is way minimal.

Is it possible at all to help people understand that a steak-eating, California almond-munching, Prius owner is not helping the environment?

According to recent psychological research, these outwardly symbolic displays of green values are, if anything, too powerful. They can fool outside observers into thinking that we're a lot more environmentally conscious than we are. Perhaps worse still, they may lead us to fool ourselves.

Which means, even though I have refused to be fooled, the joke is really on me.  How twisted!  It is all because of "symbolic significance fallacy":

 The idea, which grows out of a large body of research on cognitive biases and mental shortcuts, is that we tend to focus far too much on outward symbols (like Prius driving) in judging whether people are energy conscious. As a result, these powerful symbols bias us into overrating certain kinds of seemingly green behavior, and underrating other behaviors that may be quite green, but don't seem that way to us at first glance.

No surprise that I am not viewed as left-of-center, environmental, or any of those labels, which is really who I am.  The price we pay for being rational in this shallow, superficial world :(

What's the upshot of all this? First of all, Siegrist says the results should make us concerned about what he calls "moral licensing": The idea that doing something that is symbolically green, like driving a Prius, licenses you to do other things in your life that aren't (like driving it huge distances).

The bottom-line then?

as we move into a world full of hybrids, electric vehicles, rooftop solar installations, and much else, we should bear something in mind. Energy use calculations may not be very intuitive or easy to carry out, but the fact remains that there is only one way to evaluate whether someone is actually green: Substance.

Focus on the substance?  Crazy talk!  Focus on substance calls for people to engage in the hard work of thinking, which is increasingly rarer than smog-free days in Beijing!

The truth is out there ...

There is no faith in science.

Because, one does not need faith in science.  The scientific method in the pursuit of explanations should convince anybody that the truth is out there, and that the truth cannot be hidden for long either.  There is no concept of only a few divinely chosen few having access to the truth.

Well, that is what a rational mind would think.  But then there are the nutcases, at the extreme right wing as well as the extreme left side, who think that they know better.

And they even go one step beyond that when they claim that scientists are cooking up some conspiracy together.  Here in the US of A--not in some caricatured traditional society!

A Distinguished Research Professor of Marine Chemistry at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego writes about the exchanges he has had with climate change deniers, and concludes there:

 In “The Inquisition of Climate Change” (2011), James Powell wrote, “I have come to believe that in the denial of global warming, we are witnessing the most vicious, and so far most successful, attack on science in history.”
I now have a firsthand appreciation of this entrenched hostility to science, especially that related to global climate change and future warming. What I do not understand is the reason for this hostility. 

It is one heck of a bizarre society in which I live, with all kinds of lunatics waging wars against reason, convinced about their faith in whatever narrative it is that suits them.

What the deniers don't understand is this: yes, scientists might get something wrong.  But, it is the same scientific method to pursue the explanations that also then uncovers the mistakes.  Like in this case, in which a study claimed that "rats fed Monsanto's GM corn had suffered tumours and multiple organ failure."

The publisher of a controversial and much-criticised study suggesting genetically modified corn caused tumours in rats has withdrawn the paper after a year-long investigation found it did not meet scientific standards.

Tada!  The truth is out there!

A friend sent me a link to this note from the American Meteorological Society, in the context of the misleading ways in which a climate change denying group had gone about a survey:

Rather than take someone else’s interpretation of the survey results, read the paper yourself and draw your own conclusions.  It is freely available here as an Early Online Release.
A difference between the AMS and some organizations is the transparency and scientific integrity with which we operate.  This survey was conducted to satisfy scientific curiosity on an important topic and the results are published for all to see.  This is the way science is meant to work.

If only corporations and government, too, were as transparent in their processes as the scientific method is!  Oh, but should we wish for such transparency?

Have a little faith. This shot won't kill ya!

I do not hate going to the doctor's office.  But, I hate the part when I have to strip down to nothing for the examination.  I can't wait for the day when medical technology will have developed so much that I can stay fully clothed, in a gazillion layers!

"Continue doing whatever you are doing" the young doctor said at the end of it all.  "Everything looks very healthy."

But, of course, and now I can worry even more about living way past 100 until 120!

"Would you like a flu shot today?  I strongly recommend it."

In all these years, I have never had a flu shot.  My defenses, er, clothes were down and I was in a gown that seemed to open up at the wrong places all the time.  Feeling cornered, I said ok.

It is not that I am one of those paranoid about shots and vaccines.  Far from that.  I have all the faith in the scientific method.  Which is the very reason why I was at the doctor's office in the first place.

This faith in the scientific method is not the same as "faith" writes Jerry Coyne:

the “faith” we have in science is completely different from the faith believers have in God and the dogmas of their creed. To see this, consider the following four statements:

“I have faith that, because I accept Jesus as my personal savior, I will join my friends and family in Heaven.”

“My faith tells me that the Messiah has not yet come, but will someday.”

“I have strep throat, but I have faith that this penicillin will clear it up.”

“I have faith that when I martyr myself for Allah, I will receive 72 virgins in Paradise.”

I bet you can already see where he is going with this, right?

the third statement relies on evidence: penicillin almost invariably kills streptococcus bacteria. In such cases the word faith doesn’t mean “belief without good evidence,” but “confidence derived from scientific tests and repeated, documented experience.”
You have faith (i.e., confidence) that the sun will rise tomorrow because it always has, and there’s no evidence that the Earth has stopped rotating or the sun has burnt out. You have faith in your doctor because, presumably, she has treated you and others successfully, and you know that what she prescribes is tested scientifically.

A few years ago, my mother asked me why in the news experts suggest doing one thing and then change their stance later on.  She was referring to, if I remember correctly, studies on coffee's effects on health.  She was almost leaning towards "this is why I don't believe all these experts."  I told her that is how science works--we are constantly testing not only new ideas but even the old ideas.

To some extent, we can say that we don't have faith in the finding itself--all we know is that the scientific method leads us towards clarity.

One can dispel the “science as faith” canard in a single paragraph, and I’ll let Richard Dawkins have the honor:

There is a very, very important difference between feeling strongly, even passionately, about something because we have thought about and examined the evidence for it on the one hand, and feeling strongly about something because it has been internally revealed to us, or internally revealed to somebody else in history and subsequently hallowed by tradition. There's all the difference in the world between a belief that one is prepared to defend by quoting evidence and logic and a belief that is supported by nothing more than tradition, authority, or revelation.

So the next time you hear someone described as a “person of faith,” remember that although it’s meant as praise, it’s really an insult.

When my doctor suggested the flu shot, it was not based on blind faith.  He has the backing of the scientific method and all the evidence.  As a reasonably well-informed curious fellow, I, too, am aware of the benefits of a flu shot.  So, why then did I not get a flu shot all these years?  Blame it on the arrogance of youth, when we feel nothing can harm us.  Today, I was caught with my pants down, literally!

Oh well.  I decided to celebrate the clean bill of health by cooking something special ... and I loaded it up with butter and cheese too.  After all, the data suggests that I will live for a lot longer, and I have faith in that evidence ;)

Make up your own damn mind. About religion too!

The noble idea of liberal education is that students will not only have a broad understanding of the universe in which we are a tiny piece of cosmic dust, but also that they will be able to independently think--and think critically.

But, more and more it seems like that the rapid development and diffusion of information technology does a tragic run about this liberal education: it is now a lot more possible than ever before not to have a broad understanding and, yet, comment and critique without any independent, critical thinking:

The Internet-begotten abundance of absolutely everything has given rise to a parallel universe of stars, rankings, most-recommended lists, and other valuations designed to help us sort the wheat from all the chaff we’re drowning in. 

Even more is this:

“We exalt in being able to know as much as possible. And that’s great on many levels. But we’re forgetting the pleasures of not knowing. I’m no Luddite, but we’ve started replacing actual experience with someone else’s already digested knowledge.”

Wait a sec' if I am citing from somebody else critiquing this aspect of predigested knowledge, then am I not providing a classic example of what the author has set out to convince me about?  So, if the author is correct, then no reader will ever cite this essay?  Muahahaha, a paradox indeed!

Ok, seriously, I am sick and tired of uninformed people rating articles and news reports that I frequently bypass the listings that most media sites have--the "most emailed" or the "most viewed" ... I have come to seriously worry about the wisdom of crowds. Hey, wasn't it the crowd that elected Bush/Cheney for a second term?

we have to watch how much outside assessment we let in. There’s something heartbreaking about surrendering to strangers the delicate moment of giving order to the world. In those instances when we bring our cognitive reasoning to bear on our surroundings, when we aim our singularly human powers of evaluation at a piece of art or a fellow person, it’s a fundamental expression of the self. 

Well said.

One could make a similar argument about the role of religion, too, no?  After all, the overwhelming majority of believers follow that religion only because they were born into it.  And they accept the wisdom of the crowd to which they belong.

We look for articles and news reports that support our beliefs and then click on that "like" or "dislike" buttons.  For all purposes, the IT explosion has merely created a zillion different monstrous versions of Faux Noose, er, Fox News.

For the most part, whether it is religion or reading and thinking about the secular world, it turns out that:

Beliefs come first; reasons second.

So, beliefs first.  As one of the sleaziest characters, Karl Rove, put it, we then invent our own reality to support that belief!  Oh well, back to the point:

That's the insightful message of The Believing Brain, by Michael Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine. In the book, he brilliantly lays out what modern cognitive research has to tell us about his subject—namely, that our brains are "belief engines" that naturally "look for and find patterns" and then infuse them with meaning. These meaningful patterns form beliefs that shape our understanding of reality. Our brains tend to seek out information that confirms our beliefs, ignoring information that contradicts them. Mr. Shermer calls this "belief-dependent reality." The well-worn phrase "seeing is believing" has it backward: Our believing dictates what we're seeing.

But then, is to read Shermer also a confirmation bias?

A human ancestor hears a rustle in the grass. Is it the wind or a lion? If he assumes it's the wind and the rustling turns out to be a lion, then he's not an ancestor anymore. Since early man had only a split second to make such decisions, Mr. Shermer says, we are descendants of ancestors whose "default position is to assume that all patterns are real; that is, assume that all rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not the wind."

So, those of us who use reason can blame the beliefs first on those apes in the savanna, the evolution from whom retained this "believing is seeing."  Creationists of various stripes, on the other hand, can blame their respective gods :)

Can somebody in the crowd tell me what to think and do?  Muahahaha :)

BTW, thanks to my favorite go-to-site for the links to both these essays.

Economists on re-starting American manufacturing; start with a ball!

From America's Finest News Source:

Claiming that the nation's standing within the increasingly competitive global marketplace was perhaps not what it once was, the economists gently encouraged American producers to "wipe the slate clean" and rebuild their confidence by starting fresh with a plain, basic ball.
"You really shot for the moon and tried to do something grand, and we think that's just great," read a statement from the American Economic Association that was addressed to the nation's manufacturing sector. "But let's face it, the whole American manufacturing thing hasn't worked out quite as well as we'd hoped, so we think there's no shame in just paring down your ambitions slightly and focusing on making a really good ball, no more, no less

True, there has been an extensive shift away from manufacturing.  But, then we better not quickly jump into concluding that somehow goods manufactured elsewhere means economic ruin for America.  We do manufacture a whole lot of high value items.  Here is what Reason had to say about "Made in America"



Which is the same point that he Onion, er, America's Finest News Source makes through its typical straight-faced satire:

The response within the American manufacturing sector has thus far been overwhelmingly positive, with hundreds of aerospace, home appliance, and electronics corporations readily discontinuing their more complicated products in favor of a simple little ball.
"We switched our equipment over to ball-production two days ago and things couldn't be going better," said Daniel Akerson, chairman and CEO of General Motors. "We're making 15 tons of balls a day, they're coming out nice and round, and we're just overjoyed with how much we're accomplishing. I'd completely forgotten how great it feels to make a product you're actually proud of."

As a student remarked in her assignment, we should go around asking the question that Dr. Phil apparently asks on his show: "How's that working for you?"  Hey, it is working out great.  The problem is not in the loss of manufacturing, but in our inability to move our thinking beyond that.  And the political governance problems, like with, ahem, blowing up the Constitution itself ...

Larry Summers unites the left and the right :)

In graduate school, a professor once remarked that on some issues, if you go far enough, the left and the right will agree.  Yet again, he was proven right--in this case with Larry Summers.  Both the leftist Nation and the libertarian Reason have labeled Summers a liar, and for the same stuff he said.
The context is this PBS interview with Summers

According to the Nation: " Larry Summers is a clumsy public liar."  There, as simple as that!  Well, there is more than that:

Summers's claims about what caused the banking crisis were, likewise, aggressively misleading to plain deceitful. "Regulators didn't have the specific mandate for the consumer." Wrong. The Federal Reserve and other agencies had plenty of legal authority to protect consumers. They chose not to use it. Their dereliction actually occurred on Summers's watch, when he himself was Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton.
"Regulators didn't have authority in a comprehensive way to monitor the derivatives market." This is a flaming lie. The principal regulatory agency--the Commodity Futures Regulatory Commission--was actually preparing to impose stricter oversight on derivatives in the late 1990s when Larry Summers stopped it. Summers and Republican allies intervened in 2000 with legislation that castrated that agency and prohibited it from acting further. Derivatives exploded thereafter.
When Summers was finally asked about his own responsibility for encouraging the dangerous financial instruments, he responded with a mouthful of double talk. "You know, the situation's changed hugely.... So people were actually focused on a very different set of issues." Summers even tried to make it sound like he personally had wanted to tighten the oversight, but was blocked by "Congressional opposition."
Liar, liar, pants on fire.

Ok, that is from the left.  Next up, from the libertarian perspective, here is Reason:

More serious than Summers' well established habit of citing a fake consensus of experts to support his claims is that these comments embarrass an administration that is trying to promote the fiction that it is seriously interested in ending bailouts for gigantic banks. It might make intuitive sense that regulators would rather deal with a few big, identical institutions than with many diverse ones, but that's not the story the Democrats are using to sell their financial reform plan. So between Thursday and yesterday, somebody must have found a woodshed big enough to take Summers out to. Here's what he had to say on one of the Sunday talk shows:

"We must end too big to fail," he said on Face the Nation. "There is no one associated with the White House who believes "too big to fail" is acceptable, or that it's acceptable for financial institutions to rely on a bailout."

Glad that's squared away.

You can understand why I like these: After all, I identify myself as a libertarian Democrat :)

From ABC News, and not from the Onion

Hit&Run notes an ABC news item:

Here's a stimulus success story: In Arizona's 9th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that's what the website set up by the Obama Administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.
There's one problem, though: There is no 9th Congressional District in Arizona; the state has only eight Congressional Districts.
There's no 86th Congressional District in Arizona either, but the government's recovery.gov Web site says $34 million in stimulus money has been spent there.
In fact, Recovery.gov lists hundreds of millions spent and hundreds of jobs created in Congressional districts that don't exist.

ABC's reporter Jonathan Karl drily notes that Recovery.gov was created to foster greater accountability and transparency in stimulus spending.

We are not "in a war of reason against faith"

So, there I was reading David Brooks' rather strange column, and all of a sudden I run into the following sentences:

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.

I got ticked off.
As an atheist, I have never felt that I was involved in a war of reason against faith. On the contrary, I am sick and tired of the "faith" people's attempts--on a regular basis--to push science and reason to the remotest possible corner. If at all there is a war, there is only one warring faction and that is the "believers".

Second, I do not see myself as having "unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning" .... oh, please .... I walk around with doubts all the time. I just plainly refuse to accept through "blind faith" ideas that religions and religious people want me to believe. Brooks does not seem to understand that in reason and science we always leave room for possibilities. As long as the evidence we have leads us to certain conclusions, well, we can't adopt a position that will contradict that data, can we? On the other hand, as Keynes remarked, when the facts change we correspondingly change our minds.

Heather Mac Donald has a similar point:

As for non-believers’ purported faith “in the purity of their own reasoning,” I have no idea what Brooks is talking about. The new atheists are not on an intellectual purity crusade; they see the whole of human thought as evidence of the richness of the human mind. They embrace the gorgeousness and grandeur of music, art, and literature as a source of meaning and wisdom.

She adds a lot more. I liked this:

With all respect to David Brooks, this claim strikes me as nonsensical. The new atheists are arguing not against the view that morality is innate, but that it is the product of formal religious teaching. It is the theistic and theocon worldview that is challenged by what Brooks calls the “evolutionary approach to morality,” not the skeptical one. It is the theocons who assert that unless society and individuals are immersed in purported Holy Books, anarchy and depredation will rule the world.

Skeptics respond that moral behavior is instinctual, that parents build on a child’s initial impulses of empathy and fairness and reinforce those impulses with habit and authority. Religious ethical codes are an epiphenomenon of our moral sense, not vice versa. The religionists say that morality is handed down from a deity above; secularists think that it, and indeed the very attributes of that deity himself, bubble up from below. Children raised without belief in divine revelation can be as faithful to a society’s values as those who think that the Ten Commandments (at least those not concerned with religious prostration) originated with God.

I think that Brooks should restrict himself to writing about politics and economics, and not wade into philosophy, reason, and faith.

Meet the author of "Our Dumb Planet"

Next disaster: Pensions

A few months ago I blogged about reports that were quite forceful with arguments that underfunded pension systems will be the next disaster to hit us.  We might have made promises that might just become too difficult to keep.

This report in Reason is the latest to expand on that argument.  

 State, local, and private pension plans covering millions of government employees and union workers with “defined benefit” accounts are teetering on the brink of implosion, victims of both a sinking stock market and investment strategies influenced by political considerations.

From January to October 2008, defined benefit funds—those promising a predetermined amount of retirement money to the payee—averaged losses of 26 percent, according to Northern Trust Investment Risk and Analytical Services, making it the worst year on record for corporate and public pension funds. The largest public pension fund in the United States, the California Public Employees Retirement Security System (CalPERS), lost a staggering 20 percent of its value in just three months last year. In May 2008, Vallejo, California, became the largest city in the state ever to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, thanks largely to unmanageable pension obligations. The situation in San Diego looks worryingly similar.

We are all postmodernists now

The mainstreaming of pomo thinking has been largely a stealth project,
something Americans do without committing overt acts of academia. We thought we
were trying to clear away the cobwebs of shoddy analysis and elite hypocrisy,
but all along we were bringing the tools of critical thinking to the masses. Go
into any bar in the country, and you'll find somebody unpacking the assumptions
in someone else's text.

Tim Cavanaugh has a great point out at Reason. The postmodernist thinking of truth is subjective has taken over society so much that it is difficult anymore to convince people that facts themselves are different from how we interpret them. And, of course, some go one extra step and question the facts themselves. Which is what we find in the creationism issue, and how the media report the controversy--the media think it is their duty to report on the two sides of the evolution controversy, as if everybody is right on this and truth is subjective.

Debates on TV: deja vu all over again!

From "Hit & Run"

And speaking of Tuesday's debate, here's a YouTube clip of media theorist Marshall McLuhan appearing on the Today show in 1976 to comment on the debates between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Hosting the Today show? One Tom Brokaw, who seemed every bit as perplexed by complex thought and the English language as he does today (Edwin Newman, NBC's resident egghead, is also there). It's a really interesting clip, I think, especially because it shows how little has changed in the staging of political spectacle.

In many ways, McLuhan's criticisms of the debate format are more relevant now than ever given that we live in a radically deconstructed media environment. Phoney-baloney pseudo-events such as the presidential debates are even more
self-evidently agitprop for, well, phoney-baloney pseudo-events. (Note: The technical difficulties that Brokaw, Newman, and McLuhan refer to resulted in a 27-minute delay during which moderater Harry Reasoner "vamped" while the candidates stood like wooden puppets at their podiums.)

I like to record my phone calls ...

"But the other night I accidentally erased the tape, and I had to call the White House to get a copy"

It is a great joke. By Bob Barr--the Libertarian Party's candidate for the presidency. Reason reports on the jokes he delivered at the 15th Funniest Celebrity in Washington contest

• It is good to be back in Washington, D.C.! The home of civil liberties and personal... no, wait. That's an old card.
• Me, John McCain and Barack Obama are sitting there in a debate.
• I won't say we're close, but the last time he interviewed me, he asked me to rub neosporin on the claw marks Joe Scarborough had left on his back.
• I like to record my phone calls—as a former congressman and a former CIA guy, you like to have a record of things. But the other night I accidentally erased the tape, and I had to call the White House to get a copy.
• As a Libertarian, I can really picture a world in which there's no war. But George W. Bush would probably invade it, too.
• Being a Libertarian isn't always easy. We like to say, 'let the free market take care of everything!' I went on Jeopardy. I wound up with -$10,000.
• I know it just looks like I'm reading material. But I figured, hey, it worked for Sarah Palin. Why not for me, too?
• What's the difference between a bull dog and a hockey mom? A bull dog gets vetted.

Why did Biden include India with Russia, weapons & terror?

I didn't watch Biden's speech. Or any for that matter. Not planning to watch McCain or any of the speeches there too. Am getting my updates from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert :-)

But, a blog note at Reason caught my attention: that Biden talked about India as if it is a threat to America. The suspicious fellow that I am, well, I checked with the transcripts, and this is what Biden said:
And for the last seven years, the administration has failed to face the biggest forces shaping this century: the emergence of Russia, China and India as great powers; the spread of lethal weapons; the shortage of secure supplies of energy, food and water; the challenge of climate change; and the resurgence of fundamentalism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the real central front in the war on terror.

I think Reason is right. Biden is cuckoo to equate India and China with Russia as a great power, and more so when the immediate follow up is "spread of lethal weapons." Come on, for a guy who is reputedly a foreign policy specialist, Biden ought to know that neither China nor India has threatened any country with any of the lethal weapons they possess. It is very easy for the audience anywhere to conclude, upon listening to Biden, that Russia, China, and India are our targets in the "war on terror" as much as Al Qaeda or Iran is. And it was not as if he was talking without notes--Biden read from a prepared speech. Well, all I know is the tired and stressed out call center operators in India are not the same as the suicide bombers of Al Qaeda!

Let them eat (rice) cakes-2

I blogged about research evidence that while the poor, especially in Asia, are indeed eating more meat, this increased consumption is not the cause of the spike in food prices

But, then who cares for research and logic, eh, as the following excerpt from Reason shows:

In a recent interview about the current food crisis, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said, "If part of our problem is that the Chinese are going to eat meat and you've got to have corn and soybeans to feed the Chinese their meat, then why isn't it just as legitimate for the Chinese to go back and eat rice as it is for us to change our policy on corn to ethanol?"
Let them eat rice? So that American taxpayers can continue to pay people to turn corn into fuel?
Silly senator, corn is for food.

Olympics, jingoism, and the "wisdom" of crowds

I think the only time that the Olympics ever interested me was, well, never!
Strange events, almost scientifically sculpted and robotic athletes who are as professional as they can be. And then all the flag-waving, which essentially means that it is not about the sport anyway.

Matt Welch has a fantastic autobiographical piece on the 1984 Olympics, which were held in Los Angeles. It needs to be read in its entireity. But still, it is way too good for me not to excerpt the following:

Then Shane Mack struck out looking on a curve ball.

It was as if the Goodyear blimp had deflated in one second on the centerfield grass. People were either stunned into silence, or (as in our case) muttering bitter obscenities at the world in general. Then came a horrifying sound from somewhere behind my left shoulder. It was a grown man, a grown American man, and his two kids, clapping, and saying, in perfect English, "Hoo-ray Japan!"

My eyes nearly burned clean out of my skull. The Hulk, John McCain...they had nothing on the white-hot American rage I felt at that moment. I wheeled around, fangs bared, glared at this pleasant-looking man, and yelled: "SHUT UP, YOU...COMMIE!!!!"

The genie was seconds out of the bottle when I began to feel regret. A crowd of furious Americans, who had been taking our cues for several innings now, immediately erupted into a "YEAH!!!", then began to chant: "COM-MIE!! COM-MIE!! COM-MIE!!" Dodger Dog wrappers went zipping by my ear in the general direction of the offender. Confronted with a potentially violent mob of Angeleno nationalists, the alarmed fan fled the facility, ushering his two young kids to safety.

My friend was psyched. I, in the words of Bob Dylan, "became withdrawn." Harnessing (or having the illusion of harnessing) a crowd of thousands turned out to be much more frightening than fun. Going plum loco over an exhibition baseball game felt, well, loco. And taking the side of a snarling overdog against a hapless and vastly outnumbered minority suddenly felt like the opposite of how I ever again wanted to approach either social dynamics or political thought.

The ride home with my friend's dad was totally silent, as if we were keeping our lips sealed about some terrible crime. In the following days, I noticed everything began to look different. The crowd-whipping antics of Wally George were no longer funny. Republican politics in general, particularly the flag-waving, lefty-baiting strain, became revolting overnight. So did knee-jerk, anti-Ronnie Ray-gun rhetoric. Religious settings of all varieties—Southern California was then going through a big fundamentalist revival—became intolerable exercises in peer-and-God pressure. People who I had internally dismissed as outcasts at school I now externally sought after as friends. People whose approval I once craved were suddenly ridiculous to me. I started gravitating toward any book that challenged the accepted wisdom of a topic I thought I knew, starting with baseball. And any time I found myself in an overwhelming majority, my first question became, "What if we're wrong?"