Sam Harris and Ezra Klein on intelligence and race

Recently atheist activist Sam Harris and journalist Ezra Klein had a discussion about intelligence and race. The background is that Harris had Charles Murray, the author of The Bell Curve, as a guest on his podcast, Klein's Vox site published an article critical of that interview, and Harris felt that that article was unfair.

Having read through the transcript of Harris' and Klein's conversation, I must say that it went reasonably well, considering the topic. Harris' discussion with Noam Chomsky, for example, was much worse, as his first argument went completely over Harris' head, and they just went in circles from that moment on.

The frustrating thing is that at the bottom of what Harris is trying to argue there are quite a few ideas that are valid. Yes, scientific results should be accepted for what they are instead of being pushed aside for fear of being politically incorrect. But his otherwise reasonable points are completely overshadowed by his tendency to make it all about how mean his critics are to him for calling him biased and his inability to see that making it all about how his critics are mean to him while bracketing out how this discussion fits into its historical and political context in the United States is his own unacknowledged bias at work.

What is in my eyes particularly ironic, however, is that while Harris makes it all about how unfair his critics are, he argues at the same time that the science should be the focus. So I tried to have an eye on how the scientific evidence was discussed, and as far as I can tell it seemed to go as follows:

Klein sometimes brings up evidence that shows that intelligence (as measured by IQ or similar tests, which is another whole can of worms) is strongly influenced by the environmental conditions under which somebody grows up, e.g. when children from disadvantaged backgrounds are adopted by affluent families, and cites, by name, relevant scientists who argue that at the very least there is at this moment no evidence yet for any significant genetically determined IQ difference between groups. (And I have no idea where such evidence could even potentially come from, unless there is behind this the usual misunderstanding of what heritability means.) Harris never addresses those arguments, as far as I can tell. His counter-arguments appear to be:

(1) "genes are involved for basically every[thing]". But that is so trivially true as to be meaningless. Genes are involved for the development of fingers, still there are no differences in the number of fingers between different populations. And even if we are talking about traits that vary, it gets us nowhere, because it doesn't necessarily follow that the genes determine more than, say, 5% of the variation. And even if intelligence is strongly heritable it says nothing about significant differences between groups either, as he readily admits that variation within is much stronger than between.

(2) Then there is Harris' sports example, where he says that West Africans dominate certain running sports. He argues "if you have populations that have their means slightly different genetically, 80 percent of a standard deviation difference, you’re going to see massive difference in the tail ends of the distribution, where you could have 100-fold difference in the numbers of individuals who excel at the 99.99 percent level". Now I get that this might be a valid argument to explain the underrepresentation of a group with a hypothetically slightly lower mean at excelling at the >99.9% level under the Utopian assumption of complete equality of opportunity, but then we would be talking about Field Medal winners or Nobel laureates. As an explanation for lower societal achievement on average, i.e. why members of a group are vastly overrepresented in prisons and have vastly lower household wealth than the majority, it is a non-starter and thus irrelevant to the discussion from the get-go.

(3) Harris cites unnamed scientists who, he says, do not want to have their names published because of fear of being called racist, but who are said to agree with him. Not knowing who they are one is, of course, unable to confirm what they said or meant as well as to assess their qualifications, their potential agendas and biases, and if they are even from a relevant field of research. (Note that according to Wikipedia Charles Murray, with whom that whole discussion started, is a "political scientist, author, and columnist" working for a conservative think tank. That is, he is not an expert in the areas of population genetics, human cognitive development, comparative assessments, or any other field of relevance.)

I find that a bit disappointing. For all Harris' claims that the science is clearly on Charles Murray's side, it rather looks to me as if his argumentation runs simply as follows: There are differences in IQ between groups, and these differences must obviously have a genetic component, because everything has a genetic component. And that's it, at least as far as one can tell from the conversation with Klein.

Reading The Varieties of Religious Experience: Lecture 2

In his second lecture, James defines what he would 'religion' consider to be for the purposes of the lecture series.

He stresses right at the beginning that religion is such a complex phenomenon that anybody who thinks they can come up with a clear and simple definition is fooling themselves. He then mentions two aspects, the organisational structure (the church with its office holders and buildings) and the personal beliefs and feelings of each believer, and he excludes the former from consideration to focus his efforts on the latter.

That is unsurprising, given his psychological approach, and fair enough. A historian would perhaps be most comfortable addressing religion as an organised body while excluding personal psychology from their considerations. What I find interesting to observe, however, is that one aspect of religion as I see it is not even mentioned. To me, schools of thought that make truth claims, be they ideologies, religions, or scientific, philosophical, scholarly, and engineering communities, have three main components:

• The people who adhere to the school of thought; they are the focus of James' lectures,
• The institutional framework (research institutions, churches, political parties, think tanks, journals, internet fora, conferences, etc.); this James mentioned but excluded from consideration, and
• The actual body of knowledge or belief system; it appears to remain unexamined so far.

Because 90% of the lectures are still to follow I don't want to dwell on this too much, but I find it interesting even at this stage that James appears curiously incurious about the first question that would come to my mind when faced with a school of thought: are its beliefs true? I guess I will see if he will go there later or if he will remain completely disinterested in that question throughout.

After having settled on the personal relationship of an individual human to the divine as his focus, James clarifies that believing in an actual personal god is not a criterion for him. He mentions 'Emersonianism' and Buddhism as examples of  systems that work to produce religious feelings without having personalised deities. I had never heard of Emersonianism, but it appears to be a variant of pantheism, seeing the whole universe as divine and (believe it or not) benign.

Finally, James spends an astonishingly large part of his second lecture on discussing what mindsets he considers truly religious and what mindsets he does not. Again and again he negatively contrasts the philosophical, Stoicist acceptance of the way the world is with the Christian ideal of a joyous embrace of whatever happens, no matter how terrible. Although he sometimes calls the ascetic or highly spiritual Christian 'extreme', the language he uses leaves no doubt that he considers mindless exultation in the face of, say, seeing a loved one dying terribly to be an admirable state of mind, as evidence that religion is a positive force for humanity.

Again I hesitate to immediately reject his argumentation given how little I have progressed into this book, but even here I cannot help wonder if this view does not rely quite a bit of conflation of many different injustices or tribulations to which, really, we would be justified to react in very different ways. We are not merely talking about "the universe is unfair, and a truly wise person will accept that they can only do their best and be happier for it". No, depending on what we are talking about and if we assume gods to exist we may reasonably take very different stances - and I would actually say that religious bliss is the appropriate stance in none of the various cases.

We cannot always get all we wanted. Some things are unachievable, and sometimes we have to compromise with other people. Accepting that is just a sign of maturity. (Embracing such compromises joyously would seem to be a bit twee, though.)

Then there are the evils we do to each other, such as theft, bullying, rape, murder, etc. Really one of the most frustrating facets of human existence is how much needless misery we cause each other, both deliberately and accidentally, given that we would have quite enough misery left to deal with even if we were all perfectly nice to each other (see next point). Point is, in this case the perpetrators generally have a moral responsibility to do better, and joyously accepting their bad deeds is both unreasonable and counterproductive, as it will set perverse incentives and reward bad actors.

What James must really be talking about, however, would have to be 'natural evils', harm to us that is no other human's fault, everything ranging from having to die of old age across natural disasters to people being born with a genetic disorder. Under the (atheist) assumption that there is no god behind these phenomena, that they just happen, James' preferred stance of a joyous embrace would be ridiculous. Stoicist acceptance of what cannot be undone while trying one's best to undo these evils is a more sensible approach.

But what if we assume that natural evils are caused or at least allowed to happen by an omnipotent god who could, with the snap of their metaphorical finger, deliver us from such needless suffering? Does it make sense, under this assumption, to write, "dear superior intelligence running the universe, please accept my heartfelt thanks for making me slowly die of an untreatable, incredibly painful disease; and while on that topic, thanks also for that landslide that crushed my best friend when we were twelve years old"?

I can't say that this would feel sane to me. I would have some very serious questions about the moral character and motivations of such gods, if I believed for a moment that they existed. But then again, James acknowledges himself that there are some people who are unable to have religious feelings as he defined them. I assume I am one of those people, for better or for worse.

And note also that there are presumably many people who would consider themselves religious but who do not feel what James considers to be the religious impulse at its most pure.

What exactly is new about New Atheism?

On Sunday I went back to the book fair with my family, and of course I bought another few books. One of them is a collection of essays written by Bertrand Russell. As its title is Why I am not a Christian it is unsurprising that its first chapter is his talk of the same title, which he originally gave in 1927.

Summarising in order, the talk makes the following points:

He starts by giving his definition of Christian. For Russell this requires at a minimum belief in the existence of a god, in immortality, and that Jesus Christ was "the best and wisest of men".

Next, Russell disposes of several common arguments for the existence of God, observing along the way that the most frequently used arguments have become less respectable over time. The first cause argument falls flat the moment somebody asks "who made God?", because if God is allowed not to have an explanation then one could just as well allow the universe not to have an explanation.

The natural law argument does not work because it conflates human laws, which are prescriptive and indeed have law-givers, with natural laws, which are merely descriptive, merely scientific descriptions of what happens instead of prescriptions of what should happen. As such they do not need a law-giver. Russell also points out that science has shown them to be largely "statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was." Finally he adds a Euthyphro style argument, that laws are not really laws if God just made them up, but that God is not required if they are truly laws of nature.

The argument from design was destroyed by Charles Darwin, and in that context Russell also introduces the argument from evil to show that the world does not look as if it was created by a benevolent, omnipotent being.

The moral argument is quickly disposed of by applying the Euthyphro dilemma.

Russell calls the argument for the remedying of injustice, i.e. the idea that god must exist or else there would be no ultimate justice in the world, very "curious", and I can only agree. I have only once seen it used in seriousness, and it is such blatant wishful thinking that it hardly needs refutation.

Having dealt with the existence of God, Russell transitions to the character of Christ. He calls "excellent" several of Jesus' teachings that I would consider unrealistic, for example 'turn the other cheek', but sarcastically points out that Christians do not actually follow those teachings. ("I have no doubt that the present Prime Minister, for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense.")

As an aside, Russell mentions that "historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all".

More importantly, Russell says that there are "defects" in the teachings of Jesus the character of the gospels, most prominently that he mistakenly believed that the end of the world was imminent and that he believed in and took "a certain pleasure" in hell, i.e. eternal torture. The undeserved killing of a fig tree also gets a mention.

At this point Russell has explained why he is not a Christian. He now deals with the idea that even if religion is wrong it should still be promoted because it makes people behave morally by pointing out that it does the exact opposite. "You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step towards the diminution of war, every step towards better treatment of the coloured races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organised Churches of the world."

The talk ends by arguing that fear of the unknown and of death is the foundation of religion, and that it is time to dispose of it and build a good world on a new foundation: "Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations."

-----

Russell was certainly an excellent writer, at least to my taste. He was concise, clear, and to the point. But really what struck me most when I read this talk / essay is that there really is no New to what has been called New Atheism these past fifteen years or so, i.e. the movement often considered personified by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens.

Because what really is its claim to novelty? Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is the claim that religion is not just wrong but harmful, and that its influence should be reduced. But go back a few paragraphs and you will see that Russell said the same in 1927.

Another idea is that its novelty might be in the view that science in particular has made belief in gods untenable, a position that is often derided as 'scientism' by philosophers who believe that they have a monopoly on refuting religious beliefs. Again, nothing new: where today some New Atheist might argue from evolution, astrophysics and neuroscience, a hundred years ago an atheist like Russell argued from evolution and astrophysics. And to be honest, neuroscience has found nothing in the last thirty years that refutes the concept of an immaterial soul more thoroughly than what people could already observe in the bronze age, for example that a strike to the head or drinking alcohol confuses our thinking.

Even rather specific side-issues have remained surprisingly unchanged. Richard Carrier et al. have in recent years made a lot of waves with the argument that Jesus never existed, and would you not know it, ninety years ago Russell mentioned this idea in a tone that suggests it was fairly widely accepted among educated people.

Really I don't think that arguments for or against gods have made much progress since 1859, and if somebody wanted a short but reasonably thorough introduction to atheist thought they would even today be well served with reading Bertrand Russell's Why I am not a Christian.

Discussions of diversity and equality are generally very depressing

Somebody at Google circulated an opinion piece on Google's diversity efforts, which was ultimately published by Gizmodo. A public discussion ensued. And as always with what is called "cultural" issues I find the way it goes very depressing. Perhaps surprisingly that is not because of some particularly backwards or intolerant position taken by this or that participant (although that too, see #6 below), but rather because much of what goes on in these kinds of discussions seems so futile.

One of the most fundamental problems is that there is not actually one controversy, there are numerous controversies going on at the same time, and people mix them all up. Just checking out two articles or posts and following their links to perhaps another three, it seems to me as if at least all of this is being discussed at the same time, in no particular order:

1. Whether there are psychological differences between men and women.

2. If such differences exist, to what degree they are genetic/developmental or socially conditioned.

3. Whether there are cognitive differences between men and women to the degree that the average man is objectively better at abstract problem solving and thus more suited for being a software engineer than the average woman.

4. Whether there are cognitive differences between men and women to the degree that the average man is objectively better at abstract problem solving than the average woman, but because software engineering is really a collaborative and thus people-oriented activity, at which women are said to excel, the average woman makes a better software engineer than the average man.

5. Whether different levels of representation of men and women in different fields of work are now largely due to job preferences as opposed to discrimination, meaning that trying to achieve parity in all fields is futile.

6. Whether women are, and I quote, "inferior" in sports. Yeah, I have no idea what that has to do with anything either, but I believe the choice of terminology speaks volumes.

7. Whether Google (and by extension many other companies) now has been captured by "the left" and has adopted "political correctness" to the degree that nobody dares to speak their mind for fear of being shamed, ostracised, and fired.

8. Whether Google was justified in firing the author of the memo for being disruptive and/or violating its code of conduct.

9. Whether circulating this memo to colleagues falls under the Free Speech guarantee of the US constitution.

And I am sure I have missed some. For what it is worth, the way I understand the original memo it was clumsily trying to argue mostly #5 and #7 and potentially #3, or at least it is widely read as arguing the latter.

In light of this it is unsurprising that so little is achieved and that so many people are at each others' throats. Of course there are many other topics where people will have heated discussions, but it is because their opinions differ very strongly (e.g. economic policy, environment, energy), not merely because they are completely talking past each other.

But with these equality / diversity issues I regularly see people go ballistic at each other who seem to pretty much agree on policy goals (e.g. better representation of currently underrepresented groups), general political outlook and acceptance of empirical reality (e.g. differences in mean innate cognitive abilities between groups of humans are negligible compared to variance within those groups) and should consequently be able to hash their differences out in a more rational manner.

One person says "maybe it is mostly job preferences now" but the other hears it as "I want to excuse under-payment and harassment of women"; or one person says "what he wrote could be read as if women don't make good engineers, and that creates a hostile work environment" and the other hears it as "nobody is allowed to have a different opinion than me; burn, heretic!" Makes me despair of political discourse.

Cogent Spam and, while we are at it, ARTOAJ spam

In the last two weeks several of the blogs I read have discussed an attempted 'hoax' publication that aimed to repeat for gender studies what Alan Sokal did for postmodern cultural studies in general when he made up a nonsense paper and got it published in a well-respected journal catering to that field. In the present case, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay made up a deliberately nonsensical paper on the "conceptual penis as a social construct", but that is where the parallels end.

It seems as if they first submitted it to a relatively low ranking journal, were actually rejected, and then got it published in an even more obscure and, crucially, pay-to-play journal called Cogent Social Sciences. They then immediately went public explaining their hoax and declaring, "we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified". However, many people immediately pointed out it is not as easy as that.

They also, and actually first, discuss the problem of crappy pay-to-play journals, but as has been discussed elsewhere, we don't really get to use this experiment to prove two potential reasons why the paper was published at the same time. If it was published because Cogent Social Sciences is such a low quality journal that it will accept anything, then the stunt proves nothing about gender studies as a whole. Conversely, if the paper was published because the field of gender studies has no standards except the requirement to see maleness as evil, then it proves nothing about crappy publishers.

More concerning, however, seems to be the discussion that the 'hoax' has spawned. From a feminist perspective I have seen a blog post and an essay that both argued that the people celebrating it as a success can only be motivated by a hatred of feminism and a fear of women in power. I am not really sure where that comes from; the possibility should at least be entertained that the underlying motivation is the one that is stated, i.e. being fed up with postmodernist gibberish and the politicisation of academia.

On the other hand, I found it really frustrating how many people who are supposedly rationalists, skeptics, and generally science-savvy do not appear to understand at all the problem of crappy pay-to-play journals. Over and over, even in comments under articles that explained in detail what is going on here, people would write something to the effect of "but a social science journal accepted it, so there". Argh. If some guy operated a website called International Journal of Evolutionary Biology Research out of his garage, and a creationist paid him $200 in publication fee to get a nonsensical paper posted on that website, would that show that all of evolutionary biology is nonsense? Quite so. Then why the failure to appreciate the same problem in this case? Blind tribalism?

I was a bit torn at first when I had a look at the Cogent Open Access website myself. It looks much more professional than most obscure pay-to-play publishers I have seen so far, and I could at that moment not remember them spamming. Then again, I also never heard of that publisher before. Looking into a few papers they published in an area that I can judge I was not exactly overwhelmed, but okay. Just a few days ago, however, on some whim I looked into my junk mail folder, and what would I see but a spam eMail from Cogent Biology?

Again, it is not the worst I have seen, but let's count the ways in which it raises red flags for me:

1. Well, first of all, it is a spam message, randomly soliciting papers from huge numbers of researchers who did not sign up to receive these message. This is not a practice generally associated with serious publishers.
   
2. Promise of quick review and, in particular, suprisingly fast publication after acceptance.
   
3. Suspiciously broad scope of the journal.
   
4. Bragging about being 'indexed' in services that either are the usual suspects, or I have never heard of, or are mere utterly non-discriminating search engines like Google Scholar, as if any of that were a mark of quality.
   
5. Unprofessional random bolding, italicisation, and colouring of words across the text of the message.

Add "greetings of the day!" and two more font colours and it would be utterly standard for the field. In other words, this clinches it, at least for me: I think publishing the 'hoax' paper in Cogent Social Sciences demonstrates absolutely nothing about gender studies (and nothing that we didn't already know about publishing).

Note, by the way, that the two following statements are completely independent:

• This so-called hoax was a dud, and the people who celebrate it either don't understand its problems or exhibit a disconcerting failure of skepticism.
  
• Gender studies as currently practiced is largely bollocks.

It is entirely possible to believe both at the same time, although personally I do not consider myself qualified to have an opinion on the second statement. More to the point, even if the second statement could be proved beyond doubt, it would not at all disprove the first. It is curious how many people do not seem to appreciate that, as they appear to try to demonstrate the success of the hoax by pointing at completely different papers that they also consider ridiculous.

---

While on the topic of science spam, on Monday I received a particularly hilarious instance:

Good Morning.....!

What a professional salutation.

Can we have your article for successful release of Volume 6 Issue 5 in our Journal?

Wait, what article are you talking about, specifically? Also: no.

In fact, we are in need of one article to accomplish the Issue prior 10th June; we hope that the single manuscript should be yours. If this is a short notice please do send 2 page opinion/mini review/case report, we hope 2 page article isn't time taken for eminent people like you.

So basically: send us whatever you want, we just want stuff!

Your trust in my efforts is the highest form of our motivation, 

Gibberish alert!

I believe in you that you are eminent manuscript brings out the best citation to our Journal.

I believe in you that you are poor at constructing English sentences. And this is just beautiful: they come right out and say that this is about what is best for their randomly capitalised "Journal" as opposed to what is best for science or the author. Ye gods.

Anticipate for your promising response.

Ding! Gibberish!

Regards,
Sophia Mathis

If that is really the name of the author of that message I will eat my hat.

Agricultural Research & Technology: Open Access Journal (ARTOAJ)

The names keep getting more ridiculous. I guess all the good ones are taken? Now for the finale:

*Note: Wanna get more citations for your articles publish with us as i-books, e-books & Videos.

"Wanna". Somebody thought they could emulate what a serious academic publisher would write and they came up with "wanna get more citations". The mind reels.

How not to convince a scientist that comic artists make good science communicators

Thanks to RationalWiki I found a blog post by a comic artist on science communication. It left me confused at several levels. As always I write the following not in any official capacity, and my opinion is mine alone and not necessarily shared by any person or institution I am affiliated with.

I don't know much about science, and even less about climate science.

This right here may well be the core problem of what follows.

So as a practical matter, I like to side with the majority of scientists until they change their collective minds. They might be wrong, but their guess is probably better than mine.

On the other hand, this is a very insightful paragraph. It would be helpful if we could all respect each other's expertise a bit more. Unless I have good reason not to, I assume that fully qualified primary school teachers know more about teaching primary school children than I do, plumbers know more about plumbing than I do, and so on.

That said, it is mind-boggling to me that the scientific community can't make a case for climate science that sounds convincing, even to some of the people on their side, such as me. In other words, I think scientists are right (because I play the odds), but I am puzzled by why they can't put together a convincing argument, whereas the skeptics can, and easily do. Shouldn't it be the other way around?

The implication is that it is the climate scientists' fault that there are climate change denialists, because scientists are poor communicators. Fair enough, many of us scientists probably could be better communicators. But in this context the argument only works if one assumes that everybody is rational and open to evidence in the first place. The fact is, it is just a really, really uncomfortable idea that our daily comforts like driving the car to work or cranking up air conditioning might be destroying our collective future. It is understandable that many people would reject such an idea regardless of how good a case could be made.

Whether denialists actually do make a better case than scientists is, of course, yet another matter. I do not think so, but then again, I am also a scientist, so I may not be representative.

As a public service, and to save the planet, obviously, I will tell you what it would take to convince skeptics that climate science is a problem that we must fix. Please avoid the following persuasion mistakes.

A comic book author telling scientists how to communicate science. Next up: a dentist telling comic artists how to draw, followed by a philosopher telling structural engineers how to design a bridge.

1. Stop telling me the "models" (plural) are good. If you told me one specific model was good, that might sound convincing. But if climate scientists have multiple models, and they all point in the same general direction, something sounds fishy. If climate science is relatively "settled," wouldn't we all use the same models and assumptions?

And why can't science tell me which one of the different models is the good one, so we can ignore the less-good ones? What's up with that? If you can't tell me which model is better than the others, why would I believe anything about them?

So as his first point the author assumes that there can only ever be one model in any area of science, and all the rest should be discarded. That is not how this works. That is not how any of this works. I am currently envisioning somebody applying the same logic to molecular phylogenetics: "If evolution was settled, wouldn't you all use the same model of character evolution? Why do you still have GTR, JC, F81, and all those other models?"

And how is it "fishy" if scientists have several models that "all point in the same general direction"? Logically, wouldn't the exact opposite look fishy, if each model lead to a different conclusion?

2. Stop telling me the climate models are excellent at hindcasting, meaning they work when you look at history. That is also true of financial models, and we know financial models can NOT predict the future. We also know that investment advisors like to show you their pure-luck past performance to scam you into thinking they can do it in the future. To put it bluntly, climate science is using the most well-known scam method (predicting the past) to gain credibility. That doesn't mean climate models are scams. It only means scientists picked the least credible way to claim credibility. Were there no options for presenting their case in a credible way?

Just to be clear, hindcasting is a necessary check-off for knowing your models are rational and worthy of testing in the future. But it tells you nothing of their ability to predict the future. If scientists were honest about that point, they would be more credible.

This seems more like a personal hang-up than a general problem. How many members of the general public will think "ah, the scientists say that their models work well if tested against past observations, but precisely that is a very good reason not to trust their capacity to predict the future"? Cannot imagine it would be many.

And I find the comparison with investment advisors a bit misguided; we are not talking stock performance here, where one tries to predict the future of one particular investment. We are talking something more comparable to macro-economic modeling, and while there is certainly a lot of motivated reasoning in economics such high-level processes can be predicted with some confidence. It would be hard to say where exactly IBM shares will be in two years, but it should be no problem to provide a prediction on whether inflation will go up or down if the central bank of a country prints a lot more money. (Even I know that increasing the amount of money raises inflation, all else being equal.) Likewise, it might be hard to say exactly how much rain Madrid will have in the year 2100, but it should be no problem to provide a prediction on whether temperature will go up or down if CO2 levels in the atmosphere are doubled, and by how much approximately. (Apparently up by between 1.5 and 4.5C.)

3. Tell me what percentage of warming is caused by humans versus natural causes. If humans are 10% of the cause, I am not so worried. If we are 90%, you have my attention. And if you leave out the percentage caused by humans, I have to assume the omission is intentional. And why would you leave out the most important number if you were being straight with people? Sounds fishy.

This is, again, very strange. If somebody says, "I will now push you over the cliff edge" they have your attention, but if they say "get back, quick, the cliff is crumbling under your feet!", you ignore them? What? I at least would say that even if warming were natural we should not ignore it but still prepare for flooded coastal cities and failed harvests.

There might be a good reason why science doesn't know the percentage of human-made warming and still has a good reason for being alarmed. I just haven't seen it, and I've been looking for it. Why would climate science ignore the only important fact for persuasion?

No idea where the idea comes from that climate science ignores this factor. It is widely agreed among the climate science community that humans are the main factor in what is currently happening, and in turn that expert consensus is widely known to exist.

Today I saw an article saying humans are responsible for MORE than 100% of warming because the earth would otherwise be in a cooling state. No links provided. Credibility = zero.

Why credibility = zero? Does the author not know that the earth underwent some noticeable cooling during the early modern period? Little ice age, anyone? There is also a good argument to be made, based on the timing of previous glacial cycles, that we are due for the start of another ice age, although of course such a change would take hundreds to thousands of years. I haven't looked into it deeply, but the idea that the earth would be cooling a bit if not for the use of fossil fuels is, in fact, at the very least credible to me given these considerations.

4. Stop attacking some of the messengers for believing that our reality holds evidence of Intelligent Design.

What "messengers"? What has any of this to do with Intelligent Design - where does that suddenly come from?

Climate science alarmists need to update their thinking to the "simulated universe" idea that makes a convincing case that we are a trillion times more likely to be a simulation than we are likely to be the first creatures who can create one. No God is required in that theory, and it is entirely compatible with accepted science. (Even if it is wrong.)

Ye gods, the simulated universe... Although I cannot find the link again I once read a very nice analogy for it. "Look, we can do simulations - so probably we are also simulated" is entirely equivalent to some Renaissance philosopher seeing the first paintings that used realistic perspective and concluding that because the real world also has perspective we must be paint pigments on another being's canvas.

It is all about getting caught up in enthusiasm about a new technology, with no evidence being involved anywhere along the chain of reasoning. There is no evidence that something like us could even be simulated, and it seems rather implausible that somebody would be motivated to run such a simulation. I guess one could play the mysterious ways card regarding the simulator's motivations, but then we are deeply in religious apologetics territory.

But still, the main point is that point #4 is completely besides the point.

5. Skeptics produce charts of the earth's temperature going up and down for ages before humans were industrialized. If you can't explain-away that chart, I can't hear anything else you say. I believe the climate alarmists are talking about the rate of increase, not the actual temperatures. But why do I never see their chart overlayed on the skeptics' chart so we can see the difference? That seems like the obvious thing to do. In fact, climate alarmists should throw out everything but that one chart.

Sorry to say, but reading this item I cannot help but think of the term Not Even Wrong. Of course temperatures go up and down naturally, so no scientist is ever going to "explain that away". The implied claim that climate scientists assume no non-anthropogenic climate change has ever taken place is shades of crocoduck, a ridiculous straw-man that would only be brought up by somebody who has not made the slightest effort at understanding the science in question. Scientific publications "produce" the very same charts of natural change, that is where the denialists get them from. The question is, do I have to "explain away" the fact that people die of natural causes all the time before I can object to somebody trying to kill me?

And why rates of increase? Of course a higher rate of change is a problem because it gives us less time to adapt and wildlife less time to move with their climate zone, but ultimately that is not all that "alarmists are talking about". Yes, if Miami is going to turn into Atlantis it may matter whether rates of change are different to, say, the onset of the current interglacial, but first and foremost it matters that the population of Miami will have to move, right?

6. Stop telling me the arctic ice on one pole is decreasing if you are ignoring the increase on the other pole. Or tell me why the experts observing the ice increase are wrong. When you ignore the claim, it feels fishy.

Maybe I missed something, but to the best of my understanding ice is shrinking on both poles. But even if this refers to some reference saying that ice is growing in some part of the Antarctic (a weblink would have been helpful), nobody would claim that every place on earth will experience the same effect with the same effect size. It is, for example, entirely to be expected that it will get drier in one place but wetter in another. In fact, the reason the former place is now drier is most likely that the rain it usually got is now falling in the latter place!

7. When skeptics point out that the Earth has not warmed as predicted, don't change the subject to sea levels. That sounds fishy.

This must either refer to some isolated incident that is not referenced or represent a misunderstanding: It sounds like a garbled version of the observation that the ocean has absorbed some of the warming that was expected to be absorbed by the atmosphere.

8. Don't let the skeptics talk last. The typical arc I see online is that Climate Scientists point out that temperatures are rising, then skeptics produce a chart saying the temperatures are always fluctuating, and have for as far as we can measure. If the real argument is about rate of change, stop telling me about record high temperatures as if they are proof of something.

This is merely a repeat of #5.

9. Stop pointing to record warmth in one place when we're also having record cold in others. How is one relevant and the other is not?

I already touched on this with regard to #6. North America seems to have unusually cold winters precisely because the north pole has unusually warm ones, due to shifting air currents. Truth be told, this objection really astonishes me. Some denialists sound as if they would be surprised by workplaces being empty at the same time as when beaches are full of people. "So are there more people or less people? You don't make sense!"

10. Don't tell me how well your models predict the past. Tell me how many climate models have ever been created, since we started doing this sort of thing, and tell me how many have now been discarded because they didn't predict correctly. If the answer is "All of the old ones failed and we were totally surprised because they were good at hindcasting," then why would I trust the new ones?

This is partly a repeat of #1 and partly a severe misunderstanding of how science works. "If Newton's theory of gravity was superseded by Einstein's theory, why should I now trust Einstein?"

Also, this.

11. When you claim the oceans have risen dramatically, you need to explain why insurance companies are ignoring this risk and why my local beaches look exactly the same to me.

To the best of my understanding, even Donald Trump's Irish golf course has lobbied the local government for a sea wall to protect against rising sea levels...

Also, when I Google this question, why are half of the top search results debunking the rise? How can I tell who is right? They all sound credible to me.

Yes, when I google about health, the search results variously suggest certified pharmaceuticals, homeopathy, reiki, acupuncture, chiropractics, and much more. There are quacks on one side and science-based medical research on the other. How can I tell who is right? I am so confused!

12. If you want me to believe warmer temperatures are bad, you need to produce a chart telling me how humankind thrived during various warmer and colder eras. Was warming usually good or usually bad?

You also need to convince me that economic models are accurate. Sure, we might have warming, but you have to run economic models to figure out how that affects things. And economic models are, as you know, usually worthless.

To be fair, the author may not realise that the last time global temperatures underwent several degrees of change we did not have billions of people living in coastal areas that are going to be flooded, or billions of people to be fed by crops that will suddenly find themselves under heat and drought stress.

13. Stop conflating the basic science and the measurements with the models. Each has its own credibility. The basic science and even the measurements are credible. The models are less so. If you don't make that distinction, I see the message as manipulation, not an honest transfer of knowledge.

Once more this probably refers to an unreferenced incident, so it is difficult to address. More generally, every mathematical description of a system is a model. If I say, "every day this plant grows 5 mm" I have formulated an (admittedly simplistic) model. It not sure how that is so much less credible than a chart showing the plant to have a stem height of 4.3 cm, 4.8 cm, and 5.3 cm on successive days. It is merely a different way of expressing the same pattern.

14. If skeptics make you retreat to Pascal's Wager as your main argument for aggressively responding the climate change, please understand that you lost the debate. The world is full of risks that might happen. We don't treat all of them as real. And we can't rank any of these risks to know how to allocate our capital to the best path. Should we put a trillion dollars into climate remediation or use that money for a missile defense system to better protect us from North Korea?

Yet another instance of what was presumably an unreferenced incident experienced by the author. I would not know how any serious climate scientists would ever have to propose Pascal's Wager, given that the action of CO2 as a greenhouse gas has been established for more than a century and that evidence of rising sea levels, shrinking glaciers, rising atmospheric temperatures, and increasingly extreme weather events are all around us. But then again, I am not even a climate scientist myself, so I don't know very much how they generally argue.

Anyway, to me it seems brutally wrong to call skeptics on climate science "anti-science" when all they want is for science to make its case in a way that doesn't look exactly like a financial scam.* Is that asking a lot?

This is a hilariously naive understanding of denialism. Sure, everybody everywhere is totally open to argument and merely "want[s] for science to make its case in a way that doesn't look exactly like a financial scam". Financial and political interests or tribal instincts do not exist. Riiight.

So in summary, I am sure that many scientists, me included, could learn a lot more about how to communicate. This post, however, was the equivalent of "hey medical profession, you could convince people not to use homeopathy if only you admitted that magic works, and you should stop all that double-blind experiment nonsense, because that just looks as if you have something to hide".

Promiscuity

Recently I participated in an interesting discussion on the internet. The main topic was how some people reject scientific evidence if it contradicts their religious or ideological commitments, but the example was the nexus of evolutionary biology, male and female reproductive strategies, and differences between men and women.

It seems rather self-evident that males of nearly every species can potentially, if they are lucky and pursue the "right" strategy to achieve that end, have many more children than females. That is, after all, how female is defined in biology: it is the sex that makes the greater investment in offspring, usually at a minimum by producing a few large, immobile gametes, while the male is defined as the sex that makes the lower investment into each individual potential descendant, usually at a minimum by producing many small, mobile gametes. On top of that many species have layered additional female investment into the developing offspring, be it by giving live birth (or its botanical counterpart of producing seeds instead of spores), producing milk, or providing paternal care.

It is at this stage that the situation can, rarely, be flipped, e.g. by male sea-horses taking over the pregnancy, or male ratites raising the young; or paternal care can be shared by the sexes. But for most species, the female is the bottleneck, so to speak: How many offspring a female and a male can have is capped by the female's fertility.

It follows logically that a male can increase its number of offspring by being promiscuous, while a female cannot. The conclusion for reproductive strategies is that males in your modal species should evolve to be non-discriminating with regard to sexual encounters, and to maximise the number of partners. Females, on the other hand, do not get anything out of such behaviour. (Unless other considerations come into play, such as earning money with prostitution, or using casual sex as social glue, as it said the bonobos do.)

Whether, for example, human men are more interested in having many partners or more willing to cheat than women is a testable hypothesis. But the answer to that question is not really what I want to dwell on.

What interested me was that a lot of people who argue from reproductive strategies as discussed above write things on the lines of "men cheat more than women" or "men are more promiscuous than women". Also quite interestingly, rarely somebody will pop up who argues the opposite, claiming that "women cheat more than men". Honestly I do not understand the logic for that latter claim, as it does not even have the advantage of making sense from an evolutionary biology perspective; the idea that it is based entirely on misogyny is at least not easily dismissed.

But really for present purposes both claims can be treated as equivalent: I think both of them are, equally, mathematically impossible.

Yes, perhaps it can be shown that men are wired to seek more partners; maybe that is even biological as opposed to cultural. But that does not mean that they will be successful at having more partners, and that is unfortunately what being promiscuous means. Wishing is not doing.

Assume equal numbers of men and women, and disregard homosexual pairings, as neither of these factors are what those who claim "[gender] cheats more than [other gender]" are concerned with. Make a row of female circles on the left and a row of male circles on the right. Now draw lines between female and male circles to indicate pairings.

You can end up with very different network structures, of course. You could have three quarters of all men unpaired, while a quarter of them is paired with four women each, a harem scenario. You could first have each man paired with one woman, and very women also paired with lots of men, a prostitution / men cheat a lot scenario.

But it is simply impossible to have more average promiscuity on the left than on the right, or vice versa, because obviously all connections start on the left and end on the right, meaning that promiscuity is in all cases = number of people of that gender / connections, and we assumed equal numbers of men and women.

Arguments could perhaps be made about the median, but that is not what people intuitively mean or understand when somebody says, for example, "women cheat more than men". Claims like those just don't make any sense, and one doesn't even have to collect evidence on that. They fail right out of the gate, on basic logic.

Fun with trendline charts

Via Pharyngula I was recently lead to an American blog that had produced the following chart of average annual global temperatures, apparently in an attempt to demonstrate that we need not worry about the greenhouse effect:



This is just so totally awesome, I thought I would do a few myself. First, did you know we don't need to worry about overpopulation either?



Indeed there is absolutely no population growth at all! Next, watch my daughter grow up:



Finally, I tried my hand on one of those Kurzweilian charts of exponential technological progress:



Seems like we won't see a technological singularity any time soon. Checkmate, futurists!

The historicity of Jesus

One topic that regularly comes up in parts of the blogosphere I read is whether there was a real human being at the root of the Jesus character of the Bible or whether, alternatively, such a person never existed. What the alternative looks like in detail is a bit unclear and depends on who is arguing; one of the favourites seems to be the idea of Jesus as originally a divine being in some other realm. Then the gospels were written as allegorical teaching material or fantasy novels, and a few generations later all Christians had weirdly forgotten that those were only novels and became wrongly convinced that Jesus had actually walked the earth.

Both those who argue for an entirely mythical Jesus and those who see a real life human doomsday cult leader at the root of Christianity make their cases with a lot of conviction, in fact with so much certainty that one would usually assume they must be really sure that they got it figured out. Unfortunately, again, both sides do so, and I am clearly not qualified to evaluate the Ancient Greek source material and suchlike.

For what it is worth, I lean towards the assumption that there was a human cult leader named Jesus (I understand it would then have been something like Yoshua?) at the root of Christianity, obviously in my personal opinion without any actual virgin birth, divinity, resurrection or other miracles involved. My main problem with the mythicist position is that it seems really hard to explain the content of the gospels under their hypothesis. Just to pick the three first items that pop into my mind, and of course none of these thoughts are original to me:

Reading Stormfront, Book One of the Dresden Files

The last three weeks have been a bit full; first field work, then meeting, then moving house, and then a bad cold. But although we are still sitting between boxes waiting to be unpacked, I finally feel like writing something again.

At the last Lifeline book fair I bought a couple of books. Let's start with the first I read, Jim Butcher's Stormfront - Book One of the Dresden Files. Minor spoilers obviously ahead.

Will you only believe that the sky is blue if a recent peer-reviewed paper says so?

The usual disclaimer: The following is my personal opinion. It is not my professional opinion and much less necessarily the opinion of any other person or any institution associated with me in any way.

Sometimes I see the kind of discussion where one person will claim that science has refuted the existence of gods, and then somebody else will offer a challenge on the following lines:

If you are going to respond that that's because "science" has decided that there is no God, surely you can point me to a number of high profile papers in Nature or Science that clearly shows how such a conclusion was arrived at, scientifically.

Even if one is convinced that science has not and cannot disprove the existence of gods this argument seems very weak.

An interesting congruence of objectivist and singularitarian beliefs

In the latest instalment of his dissection of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism discusses, and quotes at length somebody else who discusses, the enormous complexity of production and supply chains that are needed to make items as simple as a pencil, let alone an engine, exposing the absurdity of Rand's belief that "the only thing that's essential to build a tractor, a railroad or an airplane is a rational mind".

I couldn't agree more; the Randian tenet promoted in her books, that all that matters is to be a rational capitalist, and that all company employees and public servants are merely superfluous parasites, falls apart the moment one tries to fit it against the reality of any economy more complex than early Middle Ages subsidence agriculture. And that is also all that needs to be said about those who seriously believe that they shouldn't have to pay taxes because they built all they have by themselves - I'd believe that if they had spent all their life on a lonely island and started by fashioning their own crude stone tools, but not if they are running a company in an industrial age society.

But what really only just occurred to me is that this tenet - if you are only rational and talented enough you can achieve anything, regardless of resource limits and laws of physics - is pretty much identical to a central assumption underlying singularitarianism:

Singularitarians believe that within the next few decades humanity will create a self-improving artificial intelligence which will then quickly achieve an unimaginable level of intelligence. Depending on their general outlook, they are then either hopeful that this event will usher in paradise on Earth, with space colonisation, inexhaustible wealth and immortality for all, or worried that the resulting god-like intelligence will squash us like insects.

In either case a necessary assumption is the same as Rand's: This self-improving supercomputer only needs to be intelligent enough, and then it will be able to achieve anything. Survivable space flight - laws of physics don't matter any more because it is just that intelligent. Solution of all the world's economic and ecological problems - resource limits somehow don't matter any more because it is just that intelligent. Immortality for all - biology doesn't matter any more because it is just that intelligent. Extinction of humanity - and we are helpless and cannot just take an axe to its power supply because it is just that intelligent.

Apparently quite a few Californian information technology entrepreneurs, who are of course the primary support base of the singularitarianism movement, are also libertarians in their political outlook. So perhaps that shouldn't have surprised me, but I just never before made the connection between these two belief systems.

Alter Wein in neuen Schläuchen

It often seems to me as if the milieu or class of technology-savvy and allegedly, according to themselves at least, "rational" people who amalgamate around institutions such as MIRI and Less Wrong and around futurism gurus such as Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil and Eliezer Yudkowsky believe pretty much the same things as people they would, as alleged rationalists in the computer age, most likely consider hopelessly backwards. The difference is that they cleverly tacked a 21st century terminology onto the same beliefs:

Intelligence is not actually magic

Reading once more a discussion of the singularitarian movement Less Wrong, it occurs to me that the principal mistake of singularitarians is not actually their belief in accelerating and unbounded progress. Yes, they are wrong about that too, but the core mistake is this:

They believe that intelligence is a kind of magic pixie dust that enables the being exhibiting that intelligence to achieve, well, pretty much everything it can imagine.

That is really at the core of their fear of hostile artificial super-intelligence, and of their hope for the fruits of building a friendly artificial super-intelligence. They believe that if somebody builds a sufficiently clever supercomputer then this supercomputer can achieve anything. Immortality. Space flight. Free energy. Exterminating all of humanity. Feeding all of humanity. And a pony.

A simple thought experiment should set this straight. Imagine a small island in the middle of the ocean. It is just a bare rock, without any plants, animals, iron ore, coal or whatever resources beyond rock. Now plop down on this island the superest super-intelligence you can just about imagine, and imagine that it wants to leave the island.

Will it succeed? Well no. How could it? There are no resources whatsoever, and rocks don't swim.

The same principle applies if we swap the island for our planet. It is well possible that no matter how super-intelligent a friendly intelligence is, there will still not be enough resources on this planet to work out a way to provide eight billion humans with a lifestyle that is both comfortable and sustainable.

It is well possible that it is quite simply physically impossible for a fragile biological organism to fly to a distant star and survive the journey, full stop, and that even a super-intelligence could only concede that fact.

It is well possible that immortality, even as "brain-uploading", is an unachievable dream, and that even a super-intelligence could only concede that fact.

It is well possible that fusion power cannot be produced economically outside of a star, and that even a super-intelligence could only concede that fact.

And it is actually pretty likely that an evil artificial super-intelligence could be stopped in its tracks by taking an axe to its power supply, just like the most intelligent human could be knocked out or shot by one of the stupidest.

Because intelligence is not magic pixie dust. It is perhaps best defined as the capability to solve problems efficiently, but it cannot solve unsolvable problems, and it does not somehow make the laws of physics go away.

Your mileage may vary on certain internet discussion memes

I do consider myself to be an advocate of equality for all, of feminism, and of inclusiveness. However, when reading controversies around these issues on the internet I have to admit to finding myself somewhat alienated by the behaviour and culture of some of the people who aim to promote those very same goals.

The problem is that at least some activists for Social Justice, as apparently for some strange reason equality is called these days in some parts of the internet, appear to have embraced a set of, for want of a better word, memes that carry the risk of inoculating against even legitimate criticism and argument, or which at a minimum can be very two-edged swords.

Again, I am mostly on board with the actual aims: slurs should not be used; under-represented groups should be made to feel welcome, and their representation should be increased; there should be no unearned privileges; everybody should be able to feel safe, everywhere. Really all that stuff should, of course, be obvious. It is what is generally known as "being a civilised person" and "not being evil".

But all of us make mistakes, all the time, and if we are not careful we may find it hard to admit them and instead dig ourselves in. It is thus important that we avoid deliberately equipping ourselves with a set of mental tools that make it even easier for us to deflect criticism without even listening to it.

In addition, any group of like-minded people runs the risk of developing its own memes, or other forms of coded language, that are opaque to outsiders. This allows for easy identification of ingroup members but can be counter-productive in that it makes it harder to convince those who have not already adopted those memes and language.

In particular, I am feeling somewhat uncomfortable when I run into the following:

Limits to growth

Economics is not usually the topic of this blog, but this week I read something that I found quite remarkable.

Nobel Prize winning macro-economist Paul Krugman is usually a source of common sense, for example when he points out that an economic crisis in which businesses and consumers are unwilling to spend is probably not the ideal time for the government to also stop spending because then nobody moves money around and the whole economy just goes into tailspin.

However, he does appear to share the conviction of most economists that (a) growth is always desirable and (b) can go on forever. So earlier this week he reacted, with a piece entitled Slow Steaming and the Supposed Limits to Growth, to Mark Buchanan's admittedly provocative-sounding article Economists are Blind to the Limits of Growth by making the following argument:

After 2008, when oil prices rose sharply, shipping companies -- which send massive container ships on regular "pendulum routes", taking stuff (say) from Rotterdam to China and back again -- responded by reducing the speed of their ships. It turns out that steaming more slowly reduces fuel consumption more than proportionately to the reduction in speed: [...]

So what happens when you switch to slow steaming? Any one ship will carry less freight over the course of a year, because it can do fewer swings of the pendulum (although the number of trips won't fall as much as the reduction in speed, because the time spent loading and unloading doesn't change.) But you can still carry as much freight as before, simply by using more ships -- that is, by supplying more labor and capital. If you do that, output -- the number of tons shipped -- hasn't changed; but fuel consumption has fallen.

And of course by using still more ships, you can combine higher output with less fuel consumption. There is, despite what some people who think they're being sophisticated somehow believe, no reason at all that you can't produce more while using less energy. It's not a free lunch -- it requires more of other inputs -- but that's just ordinary economics. Energy is just an input like other inputs.

Or, to summarise his rebuttal: We can save some energy, and therefore there are no limits to growth.

Real and difficult problems

One argument that I have come across surprisingly often in recent times is this: Many smart people have thought hard about topic X and found it difficult, therefore X is a real and difficult problem. Examples would include the hard problem of consciousness and Gettier problems.

A closely related and likewise frequently heard claim is that some person Y's work and opinion must be taken seriously because they know a lot about a topic, have given serious thought to it, and published many books on it; in this case I remember the claim being made with reference to some theologian who Richard Dawkins had interviewed and whom he had supposedly treated very dismissively and arrogantly, but I have not seen the interview myself, so I cannot judge.

The problem is that while it may well be true that topic X is a real and difficult problem, or that person Y should be taken seriously, neither conclusion follows from this kind of argument.

Still don't understand what supernatural means

Some time ago I wrote that I don't really understand what supernatural is supposed to mean. Recently I took the opportunity of a discussion on whether humanism should or should not include a commitment to naturalism to pitch the question of what the opposite - supernaturalism - would entail. Although a few answers were helpfully provided, I sadly find none of them very useful.

Basically, I have the suspicion that although the word is continually used in rather important claims, such as that science has nothing to say about the supernatural, or that, see above discussion, one should not carelessly dismiss the supernatural, nobody actually has a clear definition of the concept supernatural.

Of course, a lot of people have examples that pop into their heads when they hear that word, and they would be tempted to reply with "something like demons and telekinesis". But that is not actually a definition, and my question is one step further back. Why would it be considered to be useful to call demons and telekinesis supernatural as opposed to natural? What is the difference between demons and horses, or between telekinesis and gravity, that would make it meaningful to call the first in these pairs supernatural and the second natural and, and this is where the important consequences come in, justify the conclusion that they are consequently beyond the scope of science?

To see what I am getting at, imagine that there is a thing or process called Ulkjam. You have never heard of it before, but I know all about it except whether it should be classified as natural or supernatural; that is what I want to know from you. You can ask me about all of its characteristics and attributes, and I will be able to answer. So what would your question(s) be to help you figure out as quickly and decisively as possible whether Ulkjam is supernatural or not?

So far, nothing useful has come up:

Consciousness and the Fallacy of Composition

I wrote some time ago that I consider the Just World Fallacy to be perhaps the most pernicious fallacy there is, but lately it seems as if the Fallacy of Composition is popping up in discussions everywhere. Its influence is certainly not as destructive socially and politically, but it seems awfully widespread, and it seem to easily confound the thinking of otherwise smart and reasonable people.

What is the Fallacy of Composition? It is the mistake of concluding that the whole must have some property that its parts have individually or, perhaps more relevantly for present purposes, that the whole cannot have any properties beyond those of its parts. For example, one would be mistaken to conclude that birds cannot fly from the fact that individual feathers or leg bones are incapable of powered flight. So far, so obvious.

Where I increasingly notice the effect of this fallacy is in discussions of mind, consciousness and artificial intelligence. The funny thing about it is that the same mistake appears to be made by people on the most extreme ends of the spectrum, that is mind-body dualists and religious believers on one side and straight-laced rationalists and physicalists on the other side.

Techno-optimists are strange

Recently a post by PZ Myers at his blog Pharyngula, originally about how frequent intelligent life can be assumed to be in the galaxy, got derailed into an argument about whether the colonisation of space is possible and if yes, how. And I got drawn into it for some time, because I find the airy-fairy, dewy-eyed assumption that it is rather bizarre.

It is, of course, not just in that thread that I have run into the same line of thinking, and everywhere we look we can observe other types of techno-optimists. They fall into several categories, although those are partly overlapping and partly nested. Perhaps a small taxonomy as I grasp it:

Transhumanists are those who believe that we will become able to improve ourselves, perhaps through genetic engineering or cyborg implants, to the point where we will transcend the human condition. Immortality of some kind and freedom from disease are obvious items on their wish-list.

Singularitarians believe that humanity will achieve a stage of technological progress after which everything will be so different that we just cannot imagine how seriously different everything will be. Why and how varies; there are those who see technological progress as accelerating exponentially and simply anticipate the singularity as some moment when that acceleration becomes unprecedentedly fast. Many others believe in the coming of the Messiah the development of self-improving artificial intelligence which will conveniently solve all our problems for us.

Finally, Cornucopians are quite simply those who believe that the combination of human ingenuity and, usually, the incentives provided by the free market (praise be upon it) can magically overcome any limitation or shortage that we will ever be faced with. They include people who promote that ideology quite explicitly but in a wider sense also all those who reply, when for example the unsustainable use of resources is brought up, with the naive mantra that "they" will think of something once those resources really run out. (The irony being of course that if what is meant with "they" are scientists then the scientists have long thought of something: we should stop wasting so many resources. Sadly nobody wanted to hear that answer.)

Anyway, no matter how precisely the individual techno-optimist imagines our glorious future to be brought about, the colonisation of space is perhaps the most ludicrous idea of all.