If you live in New York and like to feel a part of the local intelligentsia, you simply have to read the New Yorker. Which I do, regularly, every week. I can't get through the whole thing, so I usually concentrate on the short essays of "The Talk of the Town" (gotta read that!), browse "The Critics" (about the latest in theater, books, movies and sometimes music), and always skip poetry and fiction (sorry, I've got better sources for the latter and I don't care too much for the former). The "Reporting & Essays" section is the real tough nut to crack: the articles there are very long and in-depth, and usually only one of the 4-5 published in each issue really grabs me. This week it was an essay penned by Nicholson Baker, about the Kindle, the Amazon e-book device that readers of this blog know very well I absolutely love. Ok, I was bracing myself for an irritating experience, as surely an essayist for the New Yorker would be too sophisticated not to complain about the Kindle.
I was not disappointed. Baker does give the reader a good description of how the e-ink technology works, and some background on how the idea of it (and therefore of the Kindle, the Sony Reader and several other e-reading devices) came about. But he immediately started complaining about problems that are, frankly, quite obvious even to aficionados such as myself. Oh, there are no color pictures, because the Kindle2 only manages 16 shades of gray (an improvement over the Kindle1, with four shades). Oh, there are "only" 300,000 titles available! And he starts listing a number of must-read books that cannot (currently) be found on the Kindle catalog. Oh, the resolution of the images is not up to print standards (duh!). Oh, there are occasional missing articles from e-versions of the New York Times! (The other thing you simply have to read if you live in New York.) Oh, there are no page numbers, replaced instead by "locations" (really, what's the difference?). And so on and so forth.
Now, let's imagine for a moment that we are back in the 15th century, to be precise just shortly after 1439, when Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg invented movable type printing. I can only imagine the complaints that Baker would have uttered in the local paper (which was, of course, copied by hand from the original dictation). What? Only one title on the catalog? (The Bible.) Oh, and the fonts are sooo boring compared to handwriting. And no colors! And the quality of the drawings, simply unacceptable. This movable type printing thing will never ever replace the amanuenses, it will simply die as yet another "modern invention" and things will keep being just the same as they have been throughout what they at the time didn't yet call the Middle Ages.
All right, let us be serious for a moment. Of course the current iteration of e-ink has limitations (but they are working on sharpening the definition and adding color). Of course the Kindle itself can be improved in a variety of ways, from its ergonomics to its resolution to its background (which is gray rather than white like in a real book). And yes we need more titles, both in the books department and for magazines and newspapers. Most importantly, there is quite a bit to complain about regarding Amazon's policies and business strategies, including the fact that one cannot share books with other people, or resell them, not to mention the recent incident about the recall of the Kindle edition of - of all titles! - Orwell's "1984," which showed Amazon's disturbing ability to simply erase your content remotely.
But it is hard not to think that Mr. Baker is taking his readers for a ride and can't possibly be serious about his evaluation of the Kindle. He actually strongly advises people to read books on an iTouch or iPhone, rather than on the K2. I happen to own an iPhone (of course), and yes I do have the Kindle free app for it, and yes I occasionally read books on the tiny backlit (but high-res and in color!) screen. So I can compare the two experiences, and the K2 beats the iP hands down as a dedicated reading device. As Amazon's Jeff Bezos put it, "We think reading is an important enough activity that it deserves a purpose-built device." Indeed.
A more reasoned position to take is that the current woes of the Kindle and similar tools will be fixed in the usual manner, by a mixture of competition from other companies (the New Yorker article lists seven other e-devices on the market now) and of legislation passed because of increasing pressure from consumer protection organizations. That's the way new technologies are introduced and quickly evolve or go extinct. But the Kindle, and more broadly e-reading, is the best bet for the future of both the book and the newspaper industries. People read more books when they own a Kindle (that's been my experience, as well as the experience of countless other users who commented on both the K1 and K2). And people's interest in newspapers and magazines just might be rekindled, so to speak, if they were available instantaneously and without having to kill trees (I am paying for K2 subscriptions to the New York Times, though it's available for free online, and the Huffington Post blog conglomerate, partly because they both update themselves automatically several times a day and I can read them at home, on the subway or at the restaurant). So, give it some time, Mr. Baker, and get back to us in a few years.
Oh, and of course, the irony of my own experience of reading Baker's article is that I was doing it, needless to say, on the Kindle.
About Rationally Speaking
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
New blog by Massimo: Gullibility is Bad for You (.org)
Those of you who know or follow me surely realize that I'm not exactly a guy with a lot of spare time on his hands. Yet, I just launched a second blog devoted to short entries (mostly a paragraph with an accompanying link) to document the fact that gullibility is bad for your health.
The idea came to me while writing my new book, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk (to be published by Chicago Press in early 2010) and more recently a short column for Skeptical Inquirer (due out toward the end of the year).
The question I was struggling with was: why skepticism? Why am I devoting so much of my time and energy to help fostering critical thinking and generally trying to advance a skeptical outlook in our society? I came up with three related answers:
1. Gullibility (which I think of as the logical opposite of skepticism) literally can kill. Just consider people who are unnecessarily dying of AIDS in Africa and elsewhere because their leaders bought into insane ideas about holistic medicine and Western governments' conspiracies to spread the disease.
2. When it doesn't kill, gullibility opens one up to being taken advantage of both emotionally and financially. The obvious example here is the case of people who fall prey to dubious figures like Sylvia Browne, John Edward, James van Praagh and the like, because these characters assure them that they can get in touch with dead loved ones.
3. Finally, there is what I would call "the Matrix argument." As you might recall, that movie was about Neo, who thinks he is living a perfectly normal life, which turns out to be a fabrication, a virtual world created by intelligent machines mercilessly exploiting human beings. In a crucial scene, Morpheus, who is trying to get Neo to help the resistance against the machines, offers him a choice between a red and a blue pill: “This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”
Taking the red pill is not just the only way to make the story in the movie continue, it also is the morally right thing to do. Welcome to gullibilityisbadforyou.org
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Memes, selfish genes and Darwinian paranoia
I’m reviewing a book by philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith entitled “Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection.” (This is not the book review, forthcoming.) Godfrey-Smith makes an excellent argument at some point in the book (chapter 7, on the gene’s eye view) that genes are not at all the sort of things Richard Dawkins and some other biologists think they are. For instance, contrary to the standard view, genes are not “unities of heredity” (and therefore do not last as “individuals”) for the simple reason that crossing-overs (the molecular processes that shuffle bits and pieces of genetic material, the real reason for sex) do not respect gene’s boundaries, but rather cut genes into pieces and shuffle them. Indeed, as Godfrey-Smith points out, for this and other reasons, sophisticated theoretical biologists are abandoning talk of “genes” altogether, referring instead to the more diffuse concept of “genetic material.” As PGS puts it, this is “a stuff, not a discrete unit.”
The interested reader will have to read PGS’s book or wait for my review (forthcoming in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews) to learn more about the issue of the nature of genes. But what struck me toward the end of that chapter is Godfrey-Smith’s unusual (and, I think, rather compelling) argument that talk of selfish genes (and memes) is one example of a broader “agent-positing” discourse that is shared by, of all people, some evolutionary biologists (though by all means not all, yours truly being one of many exceptions) and theologians!
Here is how PGS himself has characterizes the phenomenon: “Two explanatory schemata can be distinguished within the general agent-positing category ... The first is a paternalist schema. Here we posit a large, benevolent agent, who intends that all is ultimately for the best. This category includes various gods, the Hegelian ‘World Spirit’ in philosophy, and stronger forms of the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis according to which the whole earth is a living system. The second schema is a paranoid one. Now we posit a hidden collection of agents pursuing agendas that cross-cut or oppose our interests. Examples include demonic possessions narratives, the sub-personal creatures of Freud’s psychology (superego, ego, id), and selfish genes and memes.”
I must say that I am rarely struck by a novel enough idea that my first reaction is “wow.” This is one of those instances. There is something profoundly intellectually satisfactory in suddenly seeing disparate phenomena like Augustine’s god and Dawkins’ memes as different aspects of an all-too human tendency to project agency where there is none. Not to mention, of course, the admittedly wicked pleasure I’m getting from imagining Dawkins cringing at the comparison.
Godfrey-Smith refers his readers to another author, Richard Francis, who talked specifically about “Darwinian paranoia” in his 2004 “Why Men Won’t Ask for Directions: The Seductions of Sociobiology,” and points out that there are other ways of thinking about natural phenomena that do not require what Daniel Dennett called the intentional stance. Quoting Dennett: “Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do.”
The intentional stance works well when it comes to predicting what people might do (and in fact is at the basis of Dennett’s work on free will and consciousness), but it is treacherous when applied to things that do not have (conscious) agency. Again Godfrey-Smith on how to pursue research in biology while bypassing Darwinian paranoia altogether: “This is the kind of investigation where someone asks: suppose a population was like this, and such-and-such a mutation appeared, what would happen to it? Thinking this way does not require the idea that genes are ‘ultimate beneficiaries’ of anything.” And, I might add, would save us from a lot of unnecessary misunderstandings and acrimony generated by people who use agent-centered language much too easily and way too loosely.
The interested reader will have to read PGS’s book or wait for my review (forthcoming in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews) to learn more about the issue of the nature of genes. But what struck me toward the end of that chapter is Godfrey-Smith’s unusual (and, I think, rather compelling) argument that talk of selfish genes (and memes) is one example of a broader “agent-positing” discourse that is shared by, of all people, some evolutionary biologists (though by all means not all, yours truly being one of many exceptions) and theologians!
Here is how PGS himself has characterizes the phenomenon: “Two explanatory schemata can be distinguished within the general agent-positing category ... The first is a paternalist schema. Here we posit a large, benevolent agent, who intends that all is ultimately for the best. This category includes various gods, the Hegelian ‘World Spirit’ in philosophy, and stronger forms of the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis according to which the whole earth is a living system. The second schema is a paranoid one. Now we posit a hidden collection of agents pursuing agendas that cross-cut or oppose our interests. Examples include demonic possessions narratives, the sub-personal creatures of Freud’s psychology (superego, ego, id), and selfish genes and memes.”
I must say that I am rarely struck by a novel enough idea that my first reaction is “wow.” This is one of those instances. There is something profoundly intellectually satisfactory in suddenly seeing disparate phenomena like Augustine’s god and Dawkins’ memes as different aspects of an all-too human tendency to project agency where there is none. Not to mention, of course, the admittedly wicked pleasure I’m getting from imagining Dawkins cringing at the comparison.
Godfrey-Smith refers his readers to another author, Richard Francis, who talked specifically about “Darwinian paranoia” in his 2004 “Why Men Won’t Ask for Directions: The Seductions of Sociobiology,” and points out that there are other ways of thinking about natural phenomena that do not require what Daniel Dennett called the intentional stance. Quoting Dennett: “Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do.”
The intentional stance works well when it comes to predicting what people might do (and in fact is at the basis of Dennett’s work on free will and consciousness), but it is treacherous when applied to things that do not have (conscious) agency. Again Godfrey-Smith on how to pursue research in biology while bypassing Darwinian paranoia altogether: “This is the kind of investigation where someone asks: suppose a population was like this, and such-and-such a mutation appeared, what would happen to it? Thinking this way does not require the idea that genes are ‘ultimate beneficiaries’ of anything.” And, I might add, would save us from a lot of unnecessary misunderstandings and acrimony generated by people who use agent-centered language much too easily and way too loosely.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Massimo's picks
* I know, it's old news, but here is the best summary of the Sotomayor hearings.
* No, wait! This is the best summary of the Sotomayor hearings!
* Bill Maher on what's wrong with America.
* Why the space program has been dead for 40 years: NASA didn't think of hiring philosophers!
* Rachel Maddow exposes Pat Buchanan's ugly racism. Not a surprise, really.
* I don't particularly care for Chris Matthews, but this is a splendid example of a Republican (interviewed by Matthews) who simply refuses to accepts facts when he is staring right at them. Simply unbelievable.
* More Bill Maher, this time on why too much capitalism is really, really bad for America.
* Delightful little animated movie on the health care system.
* Texas fundamentalists are not content with challenging evolution, now they want to rewrite history.
* Cuckoo skeptical news: organization calls for boycott of horror movie about orphan.
* What it really means to have "fetal memories."
* Why former President Carter quit the Southern Baptists.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Republicans on health care: vicious, or just plain stupid?
Yes, yes, the title of this column is obviously partisan. But you have to wonder at what exactly the Republicans are doing in the midst of the health care reform debate. RNC Chairman and token black Michael Steele recently characterized, again, the Obama administration effort as socialism. I bet the guy hasn’t even bothered to look up the meaning of the word on Wikipedia. If one understands socialism broadly as a society in which the government both owns the means of production and has control over the distribution of goods, then no Western country is a socialist state. But of course all Western countries, including the US, feature a partial involvement of the state in the economy (see bailouts, which started under W.) and as a guarantor of services (including those obviously un-American things like social security and the maintenance of the national highway system).
Steele complained that “this is unprecedented government intrusion into the private sector.” Well, I don’t know about unprecedented, but Republicans don’t seem to have noticed that the almighty private sector has recently managed to bankrupt the country because of its endless (but not mindless, these people ain’t stupid) pursuit of greed. Steele added, again flagrantly demonstrating either his viciousness or his stupidity, that the current plan means “more debt our children will have to pay because this reckless administration has an unrestrainable urge to splurge.” This is rich coming from the chairperson of the very same party that has acted on its unrestrainable urge to splurge on open ended war efforts that have significantly decreased national and international security, or to waste money in huge tax cuts for the richest few in the country. Tax cuts whose cost is comparable to several of the initiatives that Obama wants to pursue with the rather different objective of making our lives a little better. Compassionate conservatism my ass.
Do the Republicans at least have a credible alternative to the much despised Democratic plans? Of course not. When asked directly at a recent press conference, Steele’s flippant reaction was: “Look I don't do policy, I'm not a legislator. My point in coming here was to establish a tone.” Right, and that tone included stating that he hopes health care reform is going to be Obama’s Waterloo. Bipartisanship my ass.
Ok, now that I got that rant out of my system, let’s briefly discuss two of the most common (and ridiculous) arguments the Republicans have been putting forth against health care reform: a) the “public option” favored by Obama means unfair competition against the private sector; b) Obama and the Dems want to “put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor.” Both objections are, to keep with my main theme, either outrageously disingenuous or (equally outrageously) stupid.
Let us start with the public vs. private straw man. First of all, Republicans seem to forget that health care is about the welfare of people, not about profit. So even if it were true that a public option were unfair competition for private insurers, who gives a hoot, if that results in better health care for more people? Secondly, since part of the Republican creed is that the private sector always does things infinitely better than the public one, then what are they worried about? Surely the perennially wise “market” will soon make clear for all to see who’s got what it takes to run national health care, no? Thirdly, what keeps being underestimated here is the simple and indisputable fact that we already have a public health care system, it comes in the two varieties of Medicare and Medicaid. The first one is an example of the much dreaded single-payer system, run by the federal government, and which kicks in when people are over 65. The second one aids poor people throughout the country, it is funded by both the federal and state governments and run by the latter. Guess what? These public programs are much more efficient in terms of costs and overheads than any available private option, and they deliver one of the highest quality health care systems in the world. Indeed, I do not understand why Obama and the Dems aren’t simply going for the obvious solution, expand Medicare/Medicaid to the entire nation and be done with it. Oh, and next time you hear a Republican making the stupid pronouncement that government-run programs are by definition bad, ask him why he is so darn proud of our largest government-run program: the US military.
Now for this business of putting a bureaucrat between us and our doctors. Perhaps Steele and his colleagues haven’t noticed, but we already have plenty of bureaucrats between us and our doctors. They are the administrators of HMO’s (so-called “Health Maintenance Organizations”) and other private health providers who do precisely what Republicans dread a federal middleman might do: judge whether you have “pre-existing conditions” (and can therefore be turned down from any benefit whatsoever), or if your doctor wants to apply a treatment that is judged to be too costly to the insurance company (regardless of whether it may benefit your health or save your life), and so on. The difference is that a federal employee will not have the same motivation to increase at all costs the already fat bank account of the insurance companies at the expense of your health. Incidentally, what Republicans and some Democrats want to deny you is precisely the sort of high-quality public health care that they regularly enjoy as members of Congress. Now, how disingenuous and hypocritical is that?
Look, I am not being naive here. I do not think that the government is the solution to all our problems, and I certainly do not think that the private sector is intrinsically bad. There are plenty of things that are best left to entrepreneurs (though I don’t think we should allow any private operation to become “too big to fail,” but that’s another story). I simply think that health care is one of those fundamental conditions that ought to be in place to allow us our constitutionally guaranteed pursuit of happiness (second section of the Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4th, 1776). For one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world to allow 50 million of its people to go completely uninsured, and for many millions of others to risk bankruptcy every time their families might be hit by a catastrophic illness is immoral. Serious health care reform including a public option is the decent thing to do, and Republicans are acting viciously by opposing it. It really is as simple as that.
Steele complained that “this is unprecedented government intrusion into the private sector.” Well, I don’t know about unprecedented, but Republicans don’t seem to have noticed that the almighty private sector has recently managed to bankrupt the country because of its endless (but not mindless, these people ain’t stupid) pursuit of greed. Steele added, again flagrantly demonstrating either his viciousness or his stupidity, that the current plan means “more debt our children will have to pay because this reckless administration has an unrestrainable urge to splurge.” This is rich coming from the chairperson of the very same party that has acted on its unrestrainable urge to splurge on open ended war efforts that have significantly decreased national and international security, or to waste money in huge tax cuts for the richest few in the country. Tax cuts whose cost is comparable to several of the initiatives that Obama wants to pursue with the rather different objective of making our lives a little better. Compassionate conservatism my ass.
Do the Republicans at least have a credible alternative to the much despised Democratic plans? Of course not. When asked directly at a recent press conference, Steele’s flippant reaction was: “Look I don't do policy, I'm not a legislator. My point in coming here was to establish a tone.” Right, and that tone included stating that he hopes health care reform is going to be Obama’s Waterloo. Bipartisanship my ass.
Ok, now that I got that rant out of my system, let’s briefly discuss two of the most common (and ridiculous) arguments the Republicans have been putting forth against health care reform: a) the “public option” favored by Obama means unfair competition against the private sector; b) Obama and the Dems want to “put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor.” Both objections are, to keep with my main theme, either outrageously disingenuous or (equally outrageously) stupid.
Let us start with the public vs. private straw man. First of all, Republicans seem to forget that health care is about the welfare of people, not about profit. So even if it were true that a public option were unfair competition for private insurers, who gives a hoot, if that results in better health care for more people? Secondly, since part of the Republican creed is that the private sector always does things infinitely better than the public one, then what are they worried about? Surely the perennially wise “market” will soon make clear for all to see who’s got what it takes to run national health care, no? Thirdly, what keeps being underestimated here is the simple and indisputable fact that we already have a public health care system, it comes in the two varieties of Medicare and Medicaid. The first one is an example of the much dreaded single-payer system, run by the federal government, and which kicks in when people are over 65. The second one aids poor people throughout the country, it is funded by both the federal and state governments and run by the latter. Guess what? These public programs are much more efficient in terms of costs and overheads than any available private option, and they deliver one of the highest quality health care systems in the world. Indeed, I do not understand why Obama and the Dems aren’t simply going for the obvious solution, expand Medicare/Medicaid to the entire nation and be done with it. Oh, and next time you hear a Republican making the stupid pronouncement that government-run programs are by definition bad, ask him why he is so darn proud of our largest government-run program: the US military.
Now for this business of putting a bureaucrat between us and our doctors. Perhaps Steele and his colleagues haven’t noticed, but we already have plenty of bureaucrats between us and our doctors. They are the administrators of HMO’s (so-called “Health Maintenance Organizations”) and other private health providers who do precisely what Republicans dread a federal middleman might do: judge whether you have “pre-existing conditions” (and can therefore be turned down from any benefit whatsoever), or if your doctor wants to apply a treatment that is judged to be too costly to the insurance company (regardless of whether it may benefit your health or save your life), and so on. The difference is that a federal employee will not have the same motivation to increase at all costs the already fat bank account of the insurance companies at the expense of your health. Incidentally, what Republicans and some Democrats want to deny you is precisely the sort of high-quality public health care that they regularly enjoy as members of Congress. Now, how disingenuous and hypocritical is that?
Look, I am not being naive here. I do not think that the government is the solution to all our problems, and I certainly do not think that the private sector is intrinsically bad. There are plenty of things that are best left to entrepreneurs (though I don’t think we should allow any private operation to become “too big to fail,” but that’s another story). I simply think that health care is one of those fundamental conditions that ought to be in place to allow us our constitutionally guaranteed pursuit of happiness (second section of the Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4th, 1776). For one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world to allow 50 million of its people to go completely uninsured, and for many millions of others to risk bankruptcy every time their families might be hit by a catastrophic illness is immoral. Serious health care reform including a public option is the decent thing to do, and Republicans are acting viciously by opposing it. It really is as simple as that.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Massimo's Picks
* Oprah is not only a purveyor of pseudomedicine, apparently she has quite regressive views on sex as well.
* A paradox of our times: Americans hold scientists in high esteem (though not vice versa), but reject much of what scientists say.
* FaceBook vs. MySpace: how cultural divisions and prejudices from the real world simply translate into cyberspace.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Scientific misconduct and the nature of science
I just finished reading an interesting book review by physicist Martin Blume in a recent issue of Nature. Blume was reviewing Eugenie Samuel Reich’s provocative book “Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World,” and the whole thing prompted some further thoughts about scientific misconduct, objectivity, and the peer review system that is crucial to the advancement of science.
Reich’s book is apparently very well researched (I take Blume’s word for it, since material physics is not my field), but she draws exactly the wrong conclusion from the case study she so thoroughly investigated. The biggest fraud that shook the scientific world wasn’t really the biggest (I would argue that Piltdown man, the fake missing link “discovered” in England in 1912 was much bigger), nor did it really shake the scientific world that much (I am a scientist, and I first read about this case through Blume’s book review). Still, it is an intriguing story in which a postdoc at Bell Laboratories, Jan Hendrik Schön, fabricated data concerning the properties of certain types of plastic (hence the title of Reich’s book) and got away with publishing papers in prestigious journals, including Nature itself, Science and several journals sponsored by the American Physical Society.
Reich, who is a journalist with a background in both science and philosophy, takes the moral of the story to be that “It seems like little more than blind faith to insist that all activity carried out in the name of science will always be self-correcting.” Well, yes, but as Blume points out, no serious scientist (or philosopher, for that matter) actually believes that.
The peer review process that is at the core of science’s ability for self-correction consists of two phases. The first one is the rather institutionalized practice that every editor of a scientific (or other scholarly) journal follows: when an author submits a paper for publication, the editor reads it and sends it out to a minimum of two reviewers who are chosen because they are experts in the particular field to which the paper is pertinent. The reviewers (who are anonymous to the author) send more or less detailed comments to the editor who then makes a judgment as to the suitability of the paper for publication.
But it is the second, more informal and open-ended, component of peer review that is really crucial. The first step relies on the expert advice of a small number of people (the editor and the reviewers), and it is subjected to conflict of interests (maybe one of the reviewers knows the author and dislikes her on personal grounds; or they have been in direct competition for grants, so that the reviewer has an interest in keeping the author from publishing). But after the paper is out everyone in the scientific community can read it, cite it (or not), and criticize it at meetings or in print. This second part of the peer review process is what really matters, because fraudulent papers in the long run end up in one of two categories: they are either completely forgotten because they didn’t really address an important topic at all (in which case the author gets away with the fraud, but there is no lasting damage to the scientific enterprise), or they are discovered because other people tried to replicate or build on the results and failed.
This is exactly what happened with Schön’s papers: they slipped through the first step of the review process, but spectacularly failed to pass muster during the second step. The failure of formal peer review in cases of fraud is not really that surprising, since the system is based on the assumption that authors are not just making stuff up. The aim of peer review is to reject or correct papers that are deficient in their methodology, data analysis, or in how well the author’s conclusions are substantiated by the empirical findings. Making stuff up doesn’t fall into any of those categories. Indeed, the real culprits there are Schön’s senior co-authors, who should have paid more attention to what they were signing off on, especially considering that some of the claims made by Schön were groundbreaking (like the discovery of superconductivity in plastic!).
Yet, contrary to Reich’s conclusion, these stories actually validate the scientific enterprise as particularly effective at uncovering fraud, when it really matters (i.e., for contributions that make a difference to science, as opposed to just adding a line to the c.v. of an individual researcher). The scientific peer review process (both formal and particularly informal) therefore is a bit like what Winston Churchill said of democracy: it is far from being a perfect system, but it is a heck of a lot better than any of the alternatives. Whatever works, as Woody Allen would say.
Reich’s book is apparently very well researched (I take Blume’s word for it, since material physics is not my field), but she draws exactly the wrong conclusion from the case study she so thoroughly investigated. The biggest fraud that shook the scientific world wasn’t really the biggest (I would argue that Piltdown man, the fake missing link “discovered” in England in 1912 was much bigger), nor did it really shake the scientific world that much (I am a scientist, and I first read about this case through Blume’s book review). Still, it is an intriguing story in which a postdoc at Bell Laboratories, Jan Hendrik Schön, fabricated data concerning the properties of certain types of plastic (hence the title of Reich’s book) and got away with publishing papers in prestigious journals, including Nature itself, Science and several journals sponsored by the American Physical Society.
Reich, who is a journalist with a background in both science and philosophy, takes the moral of the story to be that “It seems like little more than blind faith to insist that all activity carried out in the name of science will always be self-correcting.” Well, yes, but as Blume points out, no serious scientist (or philosopher, for that matter) actually believes that.
The peer review process that is at the core of science’s ability for self-correction consists of two phases. The first one is the rather institutionalized practice that every editor of a scientific (or other scholarly) journal follows: when an author submits a paper for publication, the editor reads it and sends it out to a minimum of two reviewers who are chosen because they are experts in the particular field to which the paper is pertinent. The reviewers (who are anonymous to the author) send more or less detailed comments to the editor who then makes a judgment as to the suitability of the paper for publication.
But it is the second, more informal and open-ended, component of peer review that is really crucial. The first step relies on the expert advice of a small number of people (the editor and the reviewers), and it is subjected to conflict of interests (maybe one of the reviewers knows the author and dislikes her on personal grounds; or they have been in direct competition for grants, so that the reviewer has an interest in keeping the author from publishing). But after the paper is out everyone in the scientific community can read it, cite it (or not), and criticize it at meetings or in print. This second part of the peer review process is what really matters, because fraudulent papers in the long run end up in one of two categories: they are either completely forgotten because they didn’t really address an important topic at all (in which case the author gets away with the fraud, but there is no lasting damage to the scientific enterprise), or they are discovered because other people tried to replicate or build on the results and failed.
This is exactly what happened with Schön’s papers: they slipped through the first step of the review process, but spectacularly failed to pass muster during the second step. The failure of formal peer review in cases of fraud is not really that surprising, since the system is based on the assumption that authors are not just making stuff up. The aim of peer review is to reject or correct papers that are deficient in their methodology, data analysis, or in how well the author’s conclusions are substantiated by the empirical findings. Making stuff up doesn’t fall into any of those categories. Indeed, the real culprits there are Schön’s senior co-authors, who should have paid more attention to what they were signing off on, especially considering that some of the claims made by Schön were groundbreaking (like the discovery of superconductivity in plastic!).
Yet, contrary to Reich’s conclusion, these stories actually validate the scientific enterprise as particularly effective at uncovering fraud, when it really matters (i.e., for contributions that make a difference to science, as opposed to just adding a line to the c.v. of an individual researcher). The scientific peer review process (both formal and particularly informal) therefore is a bit like what Winston Churchill said of democracy: it is far from being a perfect system, but it is a heck of a lot better than any of the alternatives. Whatever works, as Woody Allen would say.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Massimo's picks
* A delightfully naughty editorial by Maureen Dowd on, you guess it, Sarah Palin!
* Simon Blackburn's review of Karen Armstrong's The Case for God. Could have been a bit stronger, but still...
* The neurobiology of uncontrollable desires.
* More on neurobiology: why we can't keep our mouths shut when we really ought to.
* The various shades of sex in nature, though I think the author pushes the biology beyond what it actually says.
* Not only positive thinking may be overrated, but negative thinking might be good for you...
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
The problems with transhumanism
I have pondered writing about the transhumanism movement for a while, and the opportunity has finally landed on my desktop when I read a brief article by Kyle Munkittrick of the Institute for Emerging Ethics & Technologies. The article is in the form of a FAQ expressly addressing the question of whether aging is a moral good, and in it Munkittrick briefly explains and (thinks that he) refutes some of the standard arguments against transhumanism. Let’s take a look.
To begin with, what is transhumanism? It is a type of futurist philosophy aimed at transforming the human species by means of biotechnologies. Transhumanists think of disease, aging and even death as both undesirable and unnecessary, and think that technology will eventually overcome them all. I must confess that — despite being a scientist always fascinated by new technologies (hey, I am writing this on a MacBook Pro, I carry an iPhone with me at all times, and I read books on the Kindle!) — I have always been skeptical of utopias of any kind, not excluding the technological variety. Which is why I am using Munkittrick’s short essay as a way to clarify my own thoughts about transhumanism.
Munkittrick begins his own response to critics of transhumanism by stating that if anyone has a problem with technology addressing the issues of disease, aging and death then “by this logic no medical intervention or care should be allowed after the age of 30.” This, of course, is a classic logical fallacy known as a false dichotomy. Munkittrick would like his readers to take one of two stands: either no technological improvement of our lives at all, or accept whatever technology can do for you. But this is rather silly, as there are plenty of other, more reasonable, intermediate positions. It is perfectly legitimate to pick and choose which technologies we want (I vote against the atomic bomb, for instance, but in favor of nuclear energy, if it can be pursued in an environmentally sound way). Moreover, it is perfectly acceptable — indeed necessary — for individuals and society to have a thorough discussion about what limits are or are not acceptable when it comes to the ethical issues raised by the use of technologies (for instance, I do not wish to be kept artificially alive at all costs in case of irreparable damage to my brain, even if it is technologically feasible; moreover, I think it immoral that people are too often forced to spend huge amounts of money for “health care” during the last few weeks or months of their lives).
Munkittrick continues: “Transhumanists are trying to escape aging — and its inevitable symptom, death — because we actually acknowledge it for what it is: a horror.” Well, I personally agree with the general sentiment. As Woody Allen famously put it, I don’t want to be immortal through my work, I want to be immortal through not dying. But to construe death as a “symptom” to the disease of aging is far fetched, and biologically absurd. Aging and death are natural end results of the lives of multicellular organisms, and in a deep sense they are the inevitable outcome of the principles of thermodynamics (which means that we can tinker and delay them, but not avoid them).
There are several problems with the pursuit of immortality, one of which is particularly obvious. If we all live (much, much) longer, we all consume more resources and have more children, leading to even more overpopulation and environmental degradation. Of course, techno-optimists the world over have a ready answer for this: more technology. To quote Munkittrick again: “Malthus didn’t understand that technology improves at an exponential rate, so even though unaided food production is arithmetic, the second Agricultural Revolution allowed us to feed more people by an order of magnitude.” Yes, and how do we explain that more people than ever are starving across the world? Technology does not indefinitely improve exponentially, and it must at some point or another crash against the limits imposed by a finite world. We simply don’t have space, water and other prime materials to feed a forever exponentially increasing population. Arguably, it is precisely technology that created the problem of overpopulation, as the original agricultural revolution (the one that happened a few thousand years ago) lead to cycles of boom and bust and to the rapid spread of disease in crowded cities. This may be an acceptable tradeoff (I certainly don’t wish to go back to a hunter-gatherer society), but it does show that technology is not an unqualified good.
Yet, the transhumanist optimist can’t be stopped. Here is more from Munkittrick: “One of the key goals of transhumanism is to get the most advanced and useful technology to developing countries, allowing them to skip industrialization (and the pollution/waste associated) and go straight into late capitalist, post-industrial society, where population growth is negative and mortality rates extremely low.” Besides the fact that with the current global economic meltdown a late capitalist society doesn’t really sound that appealing, do we have any evidence that this is happening, or even possible? The current examples of such transition come from countries like India, China, and Brazil, and those don’t look at all encouraging, as the result seems to be increasing economic disparity and massive amounts of additional pollution. How exactly are transhumanists planning on skipping industrialization?
As for post-industrial societies having negative population growth, this is true of only a very few countries, and certainly not of one of the most massively polluting of them all, the United States. It is true that birth rates are dramatically lower in post-industrial countries in general, but this is the result of education not technology per se. It happens when women realize that they can spend their lives doing something other than being perennial baby factories. Despite this, the world population is still going up, and environmental quality is still dropping dramatically. Technology can surely help us, but it is also (perhaps mostly) a matter of ethical choices: the problem will be seriously addressed only when people abandon the naive and rather dangerous idea that technology can solve all our problems, so that we can continue to indulge in whatever excesses we like.
One last point: Munkittrick depicts what he thinks is an idyllic scenario of people living to 150 (this may not be possible without significant alterations of the human genome, which of course raises additional questions of both feasibility and ethics). He says that “any technology that would extend life beyond the current average of 70-100 would do so by retarding aging as a whole, that is, the degradation that begins to occur after about age 27. Maturation would occur at the same rate, peaking between 22 and 26 depending on the person, but after that preventative medicine and repair techniques would slow aging, resulting in a much longer “prime” age, say extending youthful adulthood (what we think of now as 20’s and 30’s) well into the 50’s and perhaps 60’s. Because these techniques will be far from perfect, aging will still occur to some degree. Like youthful adulthood, middle-age would presumably begin much later and last much longer. So lets say a person reaches genuine old age at 100, with all the problems that reduce one from ‘thriving’ to surviving, leaving them 50 years of old age instead of 20 or 10.” Hmm, I like the first part (extending my prime through my ‘60s), but the latter one seems ghastly. Both from a personal and a societal perspective, fifty years of old age are a hefty price to pay, and one that would be psychologically devastating and further bankrupt our resources. Now if we could consider euthanasia for the really old, non-functional and suffering people... but that’s another discussion.
I do not wish to leave the reader with the impression that I am a Luddite, far from it. But I do think that techno-optimists the world over really ought to fantasize less and pay much more attention to the complexities not just of the logistics, but particularly of the ethics implied by their dreams. Better and longer lives are certainly a worthy goal (though I personally would put the emphasis on quality rather than quantity), but this doesn’t license a mad pursuit for immortality. Besides, true immortality (the ultimate goal if you think of death as a “symptom”) must be unbearable for any sentient being: imagine having so much time on your hands that eventually there will be nothing new for you to do. You would be forced to play the same games, or watch the same movies, or take the same vacation, over and over and over and over. Or you might kill time by reading articles like the one by Munkittrick literally an infinite number of times. Hell may be other people, as Sartre said, but at least at the moment we don’t have to live in Hell forever.
To begin with, what is transhumanism? It is a type of futurist philosophy aimed at transforming the human species by means of biotechnologies. Transhumanists think of disease, aging and even death as both undesirable and unnecessary, and think that technology will eventually overcome them all. I must confess that — despite being a scientist always fascinated by new technologies (hey, I am writing this on a MacBook Pro, I carry an iPhone with me at all times, and I read books on the Kindle!) — I have always been skeptical of utopias of any kind, not excluding the technological variety. Which is why I am using Munkittrick’s short essay as a way to clarify my own thoughts about transhumanism.
Munkittrick begins his own response to critics of transhumanism by stating that if anyone has a problem with technology addressing the issues of disease, aging and death then “by this logic no medical intervention or care should be allowed after the age of 30.” This, of course, is a classic logical fallacy known as a false dichotomy. Munkittrick would like his readers to take one of two stands: either no technological improvement of our lives at all, or accept whatever technology can do for you. But this is rather silly, as there are plenty of other, more reasonable, intermediate positions. It is perfectly legitimate to pick and choose which technologies we want (I vote against the atomic bomb, for instance, but in favor of nuclear energy, if it can be pursued in an environmentally sound way). Moreover, it is perfectly acceptable — indeed necessary — for individuals and society to have a thorough discussion about what limits are or are not acceptable when it comes to the ethical issues raised by the use of technologies (for instance, I do not wish to be kept artificially alive at all costs in case of irreparable damage to my brain, even if it is technologically feasible; moreover, I think it immoral that people are too often forced to spend huge amounts of money for “health care” during the last few weeks or months of their lives).
Munkittrick continues: “Transhumanists are trying to escape aging — and its inevitable symptom, death — because we actually acknowledge it for what it is: a horror.” Well, I personally agree with the general sentiment. As Woody Allen famously put it, I don’t want to be immortal through my work, I want to be immortal through not dying. But to construe death as a “symptom” to the disease of aging is far fetched, and biologically absurd. Aging and death are natural end results of the lives of multicellular organisms, and in a deep sense they are the inevitable outcome of the principles of thermodynamics (which means that we can tinker and delay them, but not avoid them).
There are several problems with the pursuit of immortality, one of which is particularly obvious. If we all live (much, much) longer, we all consume more resources and have more children, leading to even more overpopulation and environmental degradation. Of course, techno-optimists the world over have a ready answer for this: more technology. To quote Munkittrick again: “Malthus didn’t understand that technology improves at an exponential rate, so even though unaided food production is arithmetic, the second Agricultural Revolution allowed us to feed more people by an order of magnitude.” Yes, and how do we explain that more people than ever are starving across the world? Technology does not indefinitely improve exponentially, and it must at some point or another crash against the limits imposed by a finite world. We simply don’t have space, water and other prime materials to feed a forever exponentially increasing population. Arguably, it is precisely technology that created the problem of overpopulation, as the original agricultural revolution (the one that happened a few thousand years ago) lead to cycles of boom and bust and to the rapid spread of disease in crowded cities. This may be an acceptable tradeoff (I certainly don’t wish to go back to a hunter-gatherer society), but it does show that technology is not an unqualified good.
Yet, the transhumanist optimist can’t be stopped. Here is more from Munkittrick: “One of the key goals of transhumanism is to get the most advanced and useful technology to developing countries, allowing them to skip industrialization (and the pollution/waste associated) and go straight into late capitalist, post-industrial society, where population growth is negative and mortality rates extremely low.” Besides the fact that with the current global economic meltdown a late capitalist society doesn’t really sound that appealing, do we have any evidence that this is happening, or even possible? The current examples of such transition come from countries like India, China, and Brazil, and those don’t look at all encouraging, as the result seems to be increasing economic disparity and massive amounts of additional pollution. How exactly are transhumanists planning on skipping industrialization?
As for post-industrial societies having negative population growth, this is true of only a very few countries, and certainly not of one of the most massively polluting of them all, the United States. It is true that birth rates are dramatically lower in post-industrial countries in general, but this is the result of education not technology per se. It happens when women realize that they can spend their lives doing something other than being perennial baby factories. Despite this, the world population is still going up, and environmental quality is still dropping dramatically. Technology can surely help us, but it is also (perhaps mostly) a matter of ethical choices: the problem will be seriously addressed only when people abandon the naive and rather dangerous idea that technology can solve all our problems, so that we can continue to indulge in whatever excesses we like.
One last point: Munkittrick depicts what he thinks is an idyllic scenario of people living to 150 (this may not be possible without significant alterations of the human genome, which of course raises additional questions of both feasibility and ethics). He says that “any technology that would extend life beyond the current average of 70-100 would do so by retarding aging as a whole, that is, the degradation that begins to occur after about age 27. Maturation would occur at the same rate, peaking between 22 and 26 depending on the person, but after that preventative medicine and repair techniques would slow aging, resulting in a much longer “prime” age, say extending youthful adulthood (what we think of now as 20’s and 30’s) well into the 50’s and perhaps 60’s. Because these techniques will be far from perfect, aging will still occur to some degree. Like youthful adulthood, middle-age would presumably begin much later and last much longer. So lets say a person reaches genuine old age at 100, with all the problems that reduce one from ‘thriving’ to surviving, leaving them 50 years of old age instead of 20 or 10.” Hmm, I like the first part (extending my prime through my ‘60s), but the latter one seems ghastly. Both from a personal and a societal perspective, fifty years of old age are a hefty price to pay, and one that would be psychologically devastating and further bankrupt our resources. Now if we could consider euthanasia for the really old, non-functional and suffering people... but that’s another discussion.
I do not wish to leave the reader with the impression that I am a Luddite, far from it. But I do think that techno-optimists the world over really ought to fantasize less and pay much more attention to the complexities not just of the logistics, but particularly of the ethics implied by their dreams. Better and longer lives are certainly a worthy goal (though I personally would put the emphasis on quality rather than quantity), but this doesn’t license a mad pursuit for immortality. Besides, true immortality (the ultimate goal if you think of death as a “symptom”) must be unbearable for any sentient being: imagine having so much time on your hands that eventually there will be nothing new for you to do. You would be forced to play the same games, or watch the same movies, or take the same vacation, over and over and over and over. Or you might kill time by reading articles like the one by Munkittrick literally an infinite number of times. Hell may be other people, as Sartre said, but at least at the moment we don’t have to live in Hell forever.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Massimo's picks
* A nice history of the "vaccines cause autism" nonsense by "SkepDoc" Harriet Hall. A must read.
* Get ready for the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, coming up in New York City on September 12!
* Study shows largest generation gap in the US concerning values since the Vietnam War.
* Chaos is good for your brain...
* Robert Wright has written a book on the evolution of god that is likely to upset a lot of people. So you really need to read it.
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