This post is unfair!

Much to the displeasure of Ramesh and Anne, I constantly explore inequality and fairness.  In case they, or you, need a refresher, I will gladly point to the following samples:

• The birth of inequality
• The Student Affluence Test

Those two posts, among many, always lead to the same bottom-line: The best thing that you can do is to choose your parents well.  Of course, we do not get to choose our parents, which means that ...

It is not merely income inequality that results from this accident of birth in the correct (or incorrect) geography.  It shows up in various attributes of life, like even the lifestyle choices.  Things are different on the other side of the railroad track.

Like with health and life expectancy:



In the old country, the juxtaposition of the rich and the poor is perhaps best symbolized in Antilia.  Being born in the wrong place makes all the difference in one's life.  A luck of the draw, in which we are not even active participants given that it is pretty much determined at birth.

These are the kinds of intellectual and practical issues that led to me graduate school in the first place. Which is also where I got to read John Rawls--in a condensed form, because the book itself was way too big!

This video explains the importance of the Rawlsian argument, and why figuring out fairness is important and is also difficult.



As important as these ideas are, the fact that people prefer instant gratification and entertainment over reading and thinking, and the fact that thinking politicians have been replaced with demagogues, mean that we will never get to addressing the effects of being born in the wrong zip code, or the wrong country, or the wrong skin color, or ... and then we wonder why the world is so unfair!

The very miracle of being, and the responsibility that comes with it

Read the following sentences:

Many of the great problems we face today, as far as I understand them, have their origin in the fact that this global civilization, though in evidence everywhere, is no more than a thin veneer over the sum total of human awareness, if I may put it that way. This civilization is immensely fresh, young, new, and fragile, and the human spirit has accepted it with dizzying alacrity, without itself changing in any essential way. Humanity has gradually, and in very diverse ways, shaped our habits of mind, our relationship to the world, our models of behavior and the values we accept and recognize. In essence, this new, single epidermis of world civilization merely covers or conceals the immense variety of cultures, of peoples, of religious worlds, of historical traditions and historically formed attitudes, all of which in a sense lie “beneath” it. At the same time, even as the veneer of world civilization expands, this “underside” of humanity, this hidden dimension of it, demands more and more clearly to be heard and to be granted a right to life.

You read them?  You re-read them?

Aren't they profound ideas that have been so easily conveyed in such elegant sentences?

Now, think about the content in the following:

Life a century ago, to say nothing of life two millennia ago, was very different.  And growing up in East Asia or sub-Saharan Africa is a very different experience from growing up in Western Europe or in the United States.  Yet, the human brain and the human mind have not changed during these periods--scarcely blips in the history of our species, let alone the history of life.  As human beings, we do not differ fundamentally from the humans portrayed in the Bible or in Greek drama.  The most remarkable achievements of the past--the philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; the literary achievements of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides--reflect minds of the highest order; and note that I refer only to representatives of a tiny post in the world: Athens, a few centuries before the birth of Christ.
As human beings, despite the remarkable changes of recent times, we remain cognitive and emotional siblings of those who lived in Stone Age caves, those who settled the Fertile Crescent, and those who built the first cities in the Middle East, on the Indian subcontinent, and along the rivers and coasts of South America.  We can understand many of their pains, disappointments, fears, aspirations, desires, and dreams.  It would perhaps be more difficult for them to empathize with us, because the superficial appearance of our world is so alien from anything that they would have imagined.  

You read them?  You re-read them?

Both were written at about the same time.  The first excerpt is from Vaclav Havel's speech at the commencement event at Harvard, in 1995.  The second is from Howard Gardner's The Disciplined Mind, which was published in 1999.

Those excerpts are valid, valuable, even today. After all, their concerns are about humanity.  Havel says elsewhere in that address:

In our era, it would seem that one part of the human brain, the rational part which has made all these morally neutral discoveries, has undergone exceptional development, while the other part, which should be alert to ensure that these discoveries really serve humanity and will not destroy it, has lagged behind catastrophically.
Yes, regardless of where I begin my thinking about the problems facing our civilization, I always return to the theme of human responsibility, which seems incapable of keeping pace with civilization and preventing it from turning against the human race. It’s as though the world has simply become too much for us to deal with.

I tell ya, it is always a pleasure to read such great thinkers.  I will end this post with a few more sentences from Havel:

The main task in the coming era is something else: a radical renewal of our sense of responsibility. Our conscience must catch up to our reason, otherwise we are lost.
It is my profound belief that there is only one way to achieve this: we must divest ourselves of our egotistical anthroponcentrism, our habit of seeing ourselves as masters of the universe who can do whatever occurs to us. We must discover a new respect for what transcends us: for the universe, for the earth, for nature, for life, and for reality. Our respect for other people, for other nations and for other cultures, can only grow from a humble respect for the cosmic order and from an awareness that we are a part of it, that we share in it and that nothing of what we do is lost, but rather becomes part of the eternal memory of being, where it is judged.
...
Whether our world is to be saved from everything that threatens it today depends above all on whether human beings come to their senses, whether they understand the degree of their responsibility and discover a new relationship to the very miracle of being. The world is in the hands of us all. 

So, what are you going to do?

Finding meaning in life ... even in the lab

I read the following lines, re-read, and spent some time thinking on "the difference between staying and going":

I think that’s the fundamental difference between a plant and an animal, is that if an animal doesn’t like where it is, it can get up and move away. Plants have to stay there and take it. There are a lot of other differences between plants and animals of course, but I believe that seeps into everything about how different they are and I believe that I can look around me and see the things that stay. Better than a person who hasn’t devoted themselves to the same activities I have. I believe I know things about what it means to stay and endure and watch and grow. And I wouldn’t trade that for any other life. If everything I’ve done only brought that to me, if that was the only reward for everything I’ve done, then it would be worth it a hundred times over. You can do it too you know, look around you and think about the things that stay. And when you walk away, they’ll still be there and night will fall and rain will fall and the snow will melt and … in your mind you can inhabit another life and that’s the ultimate transcendence of yourself.

It is a wonderfully simple philosophical statement on life by merely reflecting on that one difference that plants and animals display between staying and going.  And what a contrast to Albert Hirschman's "exit" option on how we humans vote with our feet.

It is from an interview with Hope Jahren, who is:

an accomplished scientist and a tenured professor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in Honolulu. She has received three Fulbright Awards in geobiology, and is the only woman to have been awarded both of the Young Investigator Medals given in the earth sciences.

Jahren has many observations in that interview, on matters that are far beyond the sciences.  I suppose that is the quality that real thinkers have.  Consider, for instance, some that I often end up quoting:  Nabokov the butterfly specialist and a humanist/novelist.  Steinbeck the marine biologist and a humanist/novelist.  Feynman the physicist and a humanist.  Russell a mathematician and a humanist.

Jahren's comments reminded me of Feynman's "the pleasure of finding things out."

I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

When Jahren talks about her "a deep affection for trees" she is referring to more than mere trees.  It is the awe and the aesthetic and mystery and excitement and everything else that Feyman referred to, and more:

I don’t think they love me back and I don’t think they know me, and all that kind of stuff, but I love oak trees because there’s pretty much a species of oak that can live almost anywhere. They just seem so indestructible, and they just have so many things figured out that we don’t, like how to live on the planet for 100 million years without substantially wrecking everything or wrecking themselves. I wonder if we’ll be able to go 5 million more. So in some ways I feel like I can transcend all the stuff that human beings worry about, each other and money and how men and women treat each other, and all that kind of stuff. I feel like I can transcend that by looking at a being that figured it out.

A sincere scientist is as much into understanding what this life is all about just as a sincere humanist is.  There is that something that transcends what we see, and to inquire into that makes life absolutely meaningful.

Get ready ... for a lot of bullshit!

Ah, yes, after this topic, which is about the certainty that we all face, perhaps bullshit is one of my favorite topics.  After all, it takes a bullshitter to love bullshit ;)

People talk about the past golden age, like the golden age of cinema, or the golden age of cricket (no, not the bugs!).  We now live in a golden age, and of an interesting kind:

We are currently in a golden age of bullshit. The internet is awash with unchecked claims.

Well, I read that on the internet.  So, is that bullshit or the truth?  Isn't everything in the internet true anyway ;)

So, of course, curious people want to know who are the people who are most likely to believe the bullshit.  What is an individual’s propensity to believe in bullshit?  Develop "a Bullshit Receptivity scale (BSR)" then.  What does the research show?

Summarizing the results, Pennycook, et al., write that “[people] more receptive to bullshit are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to … conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.”

If you believed that, you probably rank way high in the scale ;)

Seriously, that makes sense, right?  So, what can be done to make sure people will be lower in the SBR scale?

Basically, the goal here should be to get people to slow down and more carefully examine the information being presented to them. To scan it, in other words, for bullshit.

To be engaged and to examine the information is nothing but the rational, critical approach that science employs.  The scientific method.  

if you love science, you had better question it, and question it well, so it can live up to its potential.

The unfortunate aspect is that the very scientific method of questioning anything leads the people with high BSR to believe that scientific research is all bogus.  Science, on the other hand, sniffs out bullshit.  But, sometimes the scientific method cannot be enough to tackle bullshit.  Why?

“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”

You want a real example?  Think about anything that Donald Trump says at any of his rallies.  They are all bullshit.  Now, think about all the work that has to go into refuting the errors.  A huge magnitude of energy will be needed to refute his bullshit.  You will be barely into the process when a new day dawns and Trump would have generated more bullshit.

If it is the golden age of bullshit, then Trump is certainly the man of the hour.

The world is reborn in humble facts

A few weeks ago, in an email exchange on science and the Upanishads--yes, this blogger will gladly dish out opinions, upon request, on all things considered!--I added the following editorial comment:

BTW, the article mentions Deepak Chopra ... I am one of those who make fun of Chopra because he is yet another in a long line of people who have sold mumbo-jumbo to gullible Westerners and made a whole lot of money. 

The likes of Chopra prove over and over again PT Barnum's old line that there's a sucker born every minute!

Chopra is fun to beat up on because he is seemingly everywhere--on television, in print, and even on Twitter.   His outpouring of wisdom has made it easy for websites to automatically generate Chopraisms; the title of this post was generated by this site, where you, too, can have hours of fun.

Oddly enough, in this more literate world, people seem to be as gullible as ever before.  It is almost as if literacy and education has got nothing to do with thinking.  But then, on many matters people prefer Chopraisms and more because they seem comforting and reassuring.  Like how perhaps alcohol and drugs could make it seem like the problems go away.

We are forever ready to accept as truth if we want to believe in it.  A few days ago, a "cousin-in-law" had posted on Facebook something about Donald Trump, just because the content put Trump in such a bad light.  It was yet another case of if something is too good to be true, well, maybe it ain't true after all.  Despite my intense hatred for the fascist Trump, I commented that it was all an urban legend and referred him to a site that had the facts on that.

People believe in bullshit all the time, it seems.  The same people who are quick to point out the bullshit in another's belief willingly submit to bullshit that is consistent with their preferred view of the world.

So, how might you – the reader – vaccinate yourself against it?

You better figure out how to vaccinate yourself against bullshit because it seems like bullshit has been increasing at exponential rates and the growth rate does not appear to be slowing down anytime soon.  Because:

We live in the age of information, which means that we also live in the age of misinformation.

So, what can you do?  Be on the alert, all the time.

Bullshit is much harder to detect when we want to agree with it.

Or, at least make sure you read this blog every single day--after all, it is a bullshit-free paradise ;)

Do not believe the hype about science education. It is humbug!

Students incorrectly believe that science classes are only about some random science thingys that they do not ever have to worry about once they pass the classes.  But, that is not really the students' fault--the teachers and the system, who convey such  notion, are the ones who are guilty of an enormous crime.

Of course, we learn about various scientific explanations--from grand ideas like evolution and big bang, to curious questions like why the penis is shaped the way it is, to everyday puzzles like what happens to the boiling point of water when you go from sea level to higher elevations.

What is behind all that content is the real McCoy.  Or, as Joe Biden might put it, the big fucking deal.  It is about students learning to doubt and then learning to ask questions in order to figure out the answers.

The most important goal in educating our children should be to encourage them to question everything, to not be satisfied with unsubstantiated claims, and to be skeptical of a priori beliefs, either their own, their parents’, or their teachers’.  Encouraging skeptical thinking in this way, as well as directing a process by which questions may be answered—the process of empirical investigation followed by logical reasoning—helps create lifelong learners and citizens who can responsibly address the demands of a democratic society.
And there is overwhelming evidence that one of the key collateral benefits of a more scientifically literate populace is that the seeds of religious doubt are thereby planted among the next generation.

That is from the talk that the physicist/public-intellectual Lawrence Krauss gave after picking up the 2015 Humanist of the Year award.  In fact, Krauss opened the talk with a Richard Feynman quote:

Permit us to question—to doubt, that’s all—and not to be sure…. It is our responsibility…to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

To doubt. To question.  Two actions that always trouble the establishment, whether it is science or politics or religion.  Especially religion, in which one believes without doubting and questioning.  A good Christian never doubts Jesus rising three days after he died.  In his Hindu faith, my father believes in the gods and godmen whose "miracles" he has even witnessed in person.

Science, on the other hand, makes us think about these very differently.  We begin to doubt the claims.  We question.  We ask for evidence.

The purpose of education may not be to destroy religious belief, but surely, as Richard Feynman alluded to in the quote I opened with, its purpose is to encourage doubt. In that arena we are sorely falling short.

We are falling way short.

[An] AP-GfK poll revealed that less than a third of Americans are willing to express confidence in the reality of human-induced climate change, evolution, the age of the earth, and the existence of the Big Bang. Among those surveyed, there was a direct correlation between religious conviction and an unwillingness to accept the results of empirical scientific investigation. Religious beliefs vary widely, of course—not all faiths, or all faithful people, are the same. But it seems fair to say that, on average, religious faith appears to be an obstacle to understanding the world.

Krauss offers examples from here in the US.  The old country is no different.  Well, it is way worse there.

I am so glad that Krauss added this:

Of course, science class isn’t the only place where students can learn to be skeptical. A provocative novel that presents a completely foreign worldview, or a history lesson exploring the vastly different mores of the past, can push you to skeptically reassess your inherited view of the universe.

As I have noted in many posts, in my dealings with students, I push them to question their views of the world.  "The academy has a far more important and subversive way" of dealing with such issues--the doubt and the questioning are all related to curiosity, and "curiosity is insubordination in its purest form."  There is no doubt about that.

Why does science fail in the popularity contest?

A few years ago, when visiting with the parents, my mother complained that science was one day reporting that coffee was bad and then changing it another day.  I told her that science is a work in progress and that as we know more we might have to revise what we previously knew.  She seemed disappointed and unconvinced.

What disappointed my mother is precisely what always excites me about science.  A refreshing feeling that we don't know and we are trying our best to find out.  What we know now is incredibly more than what people knew only a few generations ago.  And there is a good chance that quote a bit of what we now know will be overthrown in a couple of generations.  It is awesome.

But, we humans like a clear story, a story that does not keep changing.  We like narratives that provide us with a sense of certainty.  Religions offer that comforting feeling of certainty.  "Where did we humans come from?  God created us" is a simpler narrative with a remarkable sense of certainty.  To answer that question with "we evolved from apes, and in fact we could even be separate category of apes.  We are still searching for the missing links in the evolution. But then these are recent stories.  We have no idea where this universe came from" are not the answers that provide any certainty at all.

Writing about this incremental progress that science offers, David Barash, who is "an evolutionary biologist and Professor of Psychology and Biology at the University of Washington" notes:

The capacity for self-correction is the source of science’s immense strength, but the public is unnerved by the fact that scientific wisdom isn’t immutable. Scientific knowledge changes with great speed and frequency – as it should – yet public opinion drags with reluctance to be modified once established. And the rapid ebb and flow of scientific ‘wisdom’ has left many people feeling jerked around, confused, and increasingly resistant to science itself.

Exactly.  That's what my mother's question/comment was all about.

Perhaps we mourn the loss of certainty, of the sort that most religions offer to their followers. Perhaps it’s more a search for authority, of the sort once provided by our parents. Or a universal yearning for any reliable port – even if conceptual rather than maritime – in the storms of life’s unknowns. Whatever the underlying cause, people have difficulty accepting the unstable, shifting, impermanent reality of how the world is put together. And this difficulty, in turn, renders us uncomfortable with precisely the only stability and certainty that science offers: that paradigms come and go.

Paradigms come, and paradigms go.  That is how science works.

The loss of paradigms might be painful, but it is testimony to the vibrancy of science, and to the regular, unstoppable enhancement of human understanding as we approach an increasingly accurate grasp of how our world works.

I often mention in my classes about the increasingly accurate understanding, which is why I am confident that a couple of generations from now, humans will have that much better an understanding of this universe than we now have--unfortunately, I won't be around at that time! ;)

Denied the comforting blanket of illusory permanence and absolute truth, we have the opportunity and obligation to do something extraordinary: to see the world as it is, and to understand and appreciate that our images will keep changing, not because they are fundamentally flawed, but because we keep providing ourselves with better lenses. Our reality hasn’t become unstable; it’s just that our understanding of reality is of necessity a work in progress.

A work in progress, unlike the well-defined and unchanging holy word of god that the faithful believe in.

Science is a process, which, unlike ideology, is distinguished by intellectual flexibility, by a graceful, grateful (albeit sometimes grudging) acceptance of the need to change our minds, as our understanding of the world evolves. Most people aren’t revolutionaries, scientific or otherwise. But anyone aspiring to be well-informed needs to understand not only the most important scientific findings, but also their provisional nature, and the need to avoid hardening of the categories: to know when it is time to lose an existing paradigm and replace it with a new one. What is more, they need to see this transition as progress rather than a sign of weakness, which is more difficult than one might think. 

I suppose we have quite a bit of work ahead of us then.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Comedy Central,Funny Videos,Funny TV Shows