Massimo's picks

* Ben Radford on a psychic predictably and shamelessly trying to take advantage of the recent solution of the Jaycee Dugard abduction case.

* Take a look at the new field of sentiment analysis...

* The Republican Party: it ain't what Republicans claim it is.

* A very interesting graphic comparison between US healthcare and the rest of the world.

* Classic Penn & Teller: signing up environmentalists to support a ban on water.

Definitions, definitions

Scientists are often assumed to be obsessed by definitions. After all, if you cannot precisely define a concept, say what a planet is, or what a biological species is, you literally don’t know what you are talking about, and how can you then possibly do science using that very same concept? And yet, the practice of science is very different, and to a surprising extent does not seem to depend on definitions of its objects of study.

Take the recent brouhaha concerning whether Pluto should be considered a planet or a different kind of celestial object (a captured asteroid perhaps, or a “planetoid,” whatever that may be). My colleague Neil deGrasse Tyson is a strong advocate of the Pluto-is-not-a-planet school, for which he has been chastised even by Jon Stewart. That idea won the day, and now the solar system only sports eight planets. But as I’ve argued in a Skeptical Inquirer column, the question is academic in the strictest sense of the word: it does not matter in the least to astronomy or planetology whether one officially designates Pluto as a planet or as a lesser entity. The interesting scientific fact is that Pluto has several distinctive characteristics from the other eight planets (most notably the shape and angle of its orbit around the Sun), characteristics that require an explanation that is different from the one found to be satisfactory in the case of the “other” planets.

The issue is even more complex, and the technical discussions more acrimonious, in the case of biological species. Biologists and philosophers of science have been debating it for decades, and the resultant literature is voluminous, intricate, and largely inconclusive. (A few years ago I suggested that this is because “species” is a particular kind of concept identified by philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein, and known usually as “family resemblance” or “cluster” concept: it does not admit of a simple definition in terms of a small set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Rather, it is fuzzy, made of a number of conceptual strands that intersect in a complex fashion.) As in the case of planets, however, this lack of an agreed upon definition has not stopped biologists from studying species, their characteristics, and even their modes of origin (i.e., speciation processes). How is this possible?

It turns out that there are two very different ways of thinking about “definitions,” ways that were beginning to be parsed by Socrates and Plato back in ancient Greece. Many of the early Socratic dialogues (those that more likely represent Socrates’ actual thinking, as opposed to using the figure of Socrates as a mouthpiece for the more mature Platonic philosophy) have at their core a discussion aiming at defining a particular term. So, for instance, Euthyphro is about the definition of piety, Meno is about courage, Protagoras about goodness, and Republic 1 about justice. In all of them, Socrates and his companions pretty soon find themselves engaged in a heated discussion along the lines of “what is X?” which they take to be central to making progress in whatever endeavor they happen to be pursuing.

A naive reading of these dialogues has brought some people to talk about the so-called “Socratic fallacy,” the idea that one cannot say anything about X unless one can precisely define X. This is obviously not true. Not only, as I mentioned before, can biologists happily proceed with studying species even though they don’t agree on a definition of species, but in every day life as well we talk about all sorts of things (skyscrapers, baldness, porn) even though we would be hard pressed to give an exact definition of those same things (what’s the minimum height of a building that qualifies it being a skyscraper? When is it exactly that a man turns from having sparse hair to being bald? And of course there is the famous quip by American Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart that he could not precisely define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it).

Besides, Socrates was too smart to fall into that sort of trap. Indeed, the way he went about examining concepts clearly shows that he did not commit the “Socratic fallacy.” The philosopher was famous for his method of “elenchus,” that is showing that someone’s understanding of an idea was mistaken based on the production of counter-examples that did not fit that person’s original explanation of the idea. For instance, in Euthyphro, the character that gives name to the dialogue at first claims that piety is to do whatever the gods wish. But Socrates quickly forces him to admit that that can’t be right, because in that case piety would simply be an arbitrary construct backed up only by (supernatural) force, not grounded in any inherent goodness. There must be something else to it, which Euthyphro is obviously missing. Socrates could not use the method of elenchus if he really thought that one cannot begin to talk about X unless one has a precise definition of X: in that case, how could one even think of a counterexample? A counterexample to what?

What Socrates is after, then, is not a precise a priori definition of a given concept, but rather a theory of the extent and applicability of that concept. This isn’t something that can be arrived at by simply consulting a dictionary, but it requires thoughtful philosophical investigation. The very same thing is true of modern science: not only is the absence of a precise definition no embarrassment to scientists, it is that very search for a theory of X (planets, species) that defines what science actually is. That search is also where scientists and philosophers talk to each other across the divide between the two cultures: whenever a philosopher identifies a problem with the way a scientist deploys a particular concept, the philosopher has uncovered a legitimate area for further conceptual (i.e., philosophical) and/or empirical (i.e., scientific) inquiry. For the scientist to shrug off the suggestion and dismiss it as “just semantic” is then a naive mistake, one made out of sheer intellectual snobbism, and therefore unbecoming to a true intellectual.

Massimo's picks

* Book suggestion: Kant, A Very Short Introduction

* Rachel Maddow's exposure (again!) of the lameness and hypocrisy of Rush, Newt and Sarah.

* One more op-ed by Paul Krugman on health care. And it's another must-read.

* The Washington Post on why American political discourse has always been crazy!

* Susan Neiman on taking back the language of morality from the distortions of the extreme right.

* New posts also available on my other blog, Gullibility is Bad for You...

An evening with paranormalists

A few days ago a local skeptic group here in Brooklyn organized a roundtable discussion on the concept of the paranormal. We thought this was going to be a chat about what people mean by that term, how one goes about investigating alleged cases of paranormal happenings, and so on. We were in for a surprise. Turns out that a couple of real believers in the ghosts and the afterlife showed up, a somewhat rare opportunity to sit down with “the other side” and have a probing conversation to find out about what brings people to believe weird things.

“The psychic told me things nobody could have known” was one of the first refrains of the evening. To which of course I immediately asked for examples of these allegedly unknowable things that the psychic somehow managed to know. The person in question explained that the psychic had described her grandfather’s character in fairly precise ways, though she couldn’t recall an example of any specific character attribute that was so unusual about her grandfather. Moreover, it turns out that she had never actually known her grandfather, and that her conviction that the psychic got it right was based on her comparing notes taken at the time with a conversation she had a year later with her sister, who had known their grandfather (presumably, as a child). Hmm, not exactly the sort of thing that would clinch a court case.

It got worse. The husband of this nice woman (himself a very nice man), said he absolutely knew that a dear friend of theirs who had died was still around, making his presence felt. Naturally, I asked for an example of such an extraordinary happening. “Well, one day I felt like a flick behind my ear, and I just knew it was him.” That’s it? No, there was more. His wife one day had been given a penny and had felt a strange sensation in receiving it. Upon turning it over, she discovered that the penny was made in the same year of their friend’s birth. How else would you explain such an extraordinary coincidence?

At that point I trotted out the standard skeptical arguments. I don’t know exactly what happened in those cases, because I was not there and it is not possible to investigate the matter thoroughly enough after all this time. Still, I suggested, you are making an extraordinary claim based on very scant evidence, and I can easily think of very ordinary explanations for what you just told me (e.g., I told them about the technique of “cold reading” by psychics, and another attendee talked about the confirmation bias of remembering hits and forgetting misses — to no avail).

“But you can’t prove it isn’t so.” Right, I cannot, I replied, but you cannot prove that there are no unicorns in the universe either, and yet you probably don’t believe in unicorns, or even seriously entertain the possibility of their existence. In other words, one has to provide positive evidence when making a claim for the existence of a phenomenon; relying on the fact that it can’t be disproved is setting the bar so low that pretty much anything would be able to jump over it.

At this point our paranormalist friends tried yet another common tactic: “But Benjamin Franklin spent the last years of his life trying to get in touch with the dead, and he was a really smart man, so...” I don’t know enough about Benjamin’s biography to actually comment on how he spent his last few years, though there certainly is evidence that he believed in an afterlife (then again, so do most people). But of course the broader point can be defused by simple counterexamples: the astronomer Johannes Kepler was a really smart guy, and yet he believed in astrology. Isaac Newton is considered one of the greatest scientists of all time, and yet he spent more time on alchemic experiments than on physics. And so on and so forth.

We could turn this discussion into a serious debate about epistemology and standards of evidence, but this isn’t what it is all about. We live in a country where a large number of people still don’t believe President Obama is a citizen, despite his birth certificate having been broadcasted all over the airwaves and the internet. On the other side of the political spectrum, plenty of liberals still believe that Bush and Cheney purposely caused 9/11 so that they could start their war on Iraq (as if they actually needed an excuse).

No, the problem is that people want to feel special. Being among the few who “get” that the government is conspiring against the nation, or that the 2008 election was a scam, makes some people feel better about the fact that they really have little or no control over such large events as wars and elections (and indeed, even, largely, over their own lives). At a more personal level, it was clear to me that our paranormalist friends really missed their dead friend, and naturally wanted to believe that he was still around, no matter how flimsy the evidence. I understand, I feel that way about my grandparents too, and it is painful every time I dream of them (which is often) and am reminded that I will never see them again.

But what is the problem with people lowering their critical threshold that much in order to accept comfortable beliefs? I think there is a problem, which is why I started a second blog self-explanatorily entitled “Gullibility is Bad for You.” At a societal level, we see the damage to our political discourse and social fabric that has been done by both the “birthers” and the 9/11 “truthers.” At a personal level, people waste money, time and emotional energy in pursuit of a chimera, and are easily taken advantage of by unscrupulous (or even well meaning but self-deluded) “medium” and “psychics.”

Still, it is really hard to tell someone that his beloved friend, or mother, or wife is gone, forever. That the only thing that remains is the memories, and even those will only last as long as the people who’ve met the person in question. It’s the perennial red pill vs. blue pill philosophical conundrum that Morpheus puts to Neo in “The Matrix.” For my part, I have decided a long time ago to take the red pill. But it is bitter.

Massimo's picks

* A philosopher's take on why atheists do care about religion.

* Hey! The Huff Post gets it right on pseudoscience, for once!

* The real problem with the Arab world: religious intolerance.

* Turns out, real atheists are happy people!

* An op-ed in the New York Times about Palin's poison and the sorry state of the American political debate.

* An old gem: Bill Maher interviews Noam Chomsky, back in 2004.

* For laughs: Daily Show's Larry Wilmore on how whites will soon be the new minority.

* Recommended book: Carl Sagan's The Varieties of Scientific Experience.

* The "death panels" are already here, according to Salon: they are held by health insurance companies.

* Why moderate conservatives are complicit in anti-health care violence and should do something to stop it.

* Fiji water: drink it if you'd like to ruin the environment and support a brutal dictatorship.

* 538's challenge to global warming skeptics: put your money where you mouth is.

Good point, Dr. Sagan!

I finally got around to reading Carl Sagan’s The Variety of Scientific Experience, a volume edited by his wife, Ann Druyan, and based on a series of Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology that Carl delivered in 1985 at the University of Glasgow. The title of the book is a direct reference, and gentle challenge, to William James’s somewhat frustrating The Variety of Religious Experience (also based on a series of lectures, those presented at the University of Edinburgh in 1901). Although James’ text is a classic in psychology and philosophy, James drew a rather simplistic distinction between what he called “healthy minds” and “sick souls,” both analyzed in terms of empowering religious experiences. Not to mention, of course, that he sarcastically suggested to his audience of scientists that their atheism was perhaps a result of a malfunction of their liver.

At any rate, Sagan’s essays are about the relationship between science and religion from a point of view very different from that of James. At the same time, it is so refreshing to read the words of a positive atheist, which do not in the least resemble the angry and inflated rhetoric of a Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins. On the contrary, Sagan’s tone is always measured and humble, and yet he delivers (metaphorically) mortal blow after mortal blow to the religious in his audience.

The science in the book is unavoidably a bit dated (though Druyan added notes here and there to update a few of the statements of fact). Then again, these essays are not about science per se, but about the meaning of science in our lives, and its conflict with the religious mind set. There are many precious passages that deserve thoughtful consideration, but one in particular struck me early on in the book (chapter 1). Sagan is talking about the sheer vastness of space: about a hundred billion stars just in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, which is one of more than 400 billion galaxies in the universe. That universe measures 46.5 billion light years across, and contains something of the order of 10 to the 80 atoms. Oh, and most of it is either empty or filled with dark stuff that is not part of galaxies, stars or planets.

After contemplating all this for a moment, Sagan says: “And this vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe, in my view has been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion, and especially no Western religions.” That seems exactly right, and something that is hardly discussed even in debates between atheists and theists: human religions are completely oblivious to the enormity of space. There is much talk about “intelligent design” and “anthropic principles” and other fanciful notions concocted to convince us that there is scientific evidence that this whole shebang was put in place by someone just so that we would eventually appear (and what a beautiful result he got for all his efforts!).

But Sagan’s observation makes it very clear that these people have no idea in what sort of place we really live. As Douglas Adams famously put it in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.” Indeed. What sort of intelligent engineer would create a contraption (the universe) that takes upwards of 13 billion years to generate Homo sapiens, all the while wasting 99.999999999999+ percent of the space in the universe? Or maybe, suggests Sagan, this vast amount of space and time hasn’t been wasted, and God has created many other worlds with people. But in that case, did Jesus come and die on the cross in every single one of them? Are there separate Hells and Heavens for different species of ET? The theological implications are staggering, and yet completely unaddressed.

Ah, the religious will say, but who are we to question God’s plan? He (or she, or it, as Sagan repeatedly writes) notoriously works in mysterious ways. But that is the ultimate cop out. It is simply a fancy, and frankly insulting, way to say “I haven’t the foggiest idea.” People have a right to believe whatever inane story they like to believe (as long as they do not try to impose it on others), but many religious people since Thomas Aquinas actually want to argue that their beliefs are also rational, that there is no contradiction between the book of nature and those of scripture. If so, then they need to answer Sagan’s question about why it is that the so-called holy books don’t tell us anything at all about how the universe really is.

Sagan imagines how God could have dictated his books to the ancient prophets in a way that would have certainly made an impact on us moderns. He could have said (I’m quoting Sagan directly here): “Don’t forget, Mars is a rusty place with volcanoes. ... You’ll understand this later. Trust me. ... How about, ‘Thou shalt not travel faster than light?’ ... Or ‘There are no privileged frames of reference.’ Or how about some equations? Maxwell’s laws in Egyptian hieroglyphics or ancient Chinese characters or ancient Hebrew.” Now that would be impressive, and even Dawkins would have to scratch his head at it. But no, instead we find trivial stories about local tribes, a seemingly endless series of “begats,” and a description of the world as small, young, and rather flat.

Sagan’s challenge is virtually ignored by theologians the world over. And for good reason: it is impossible to answer coherently while retaining the core of most religious traditions. The various gods people worship are simply far too small for the universe we actually inhabit, which is no surprise once we accept the rather obvious truth that it is us who made the gods in our image, not the other way around. We miss you, Carl.

Massimo's picks

* The Feds will seize creationist Kent Hovind's "dinosaur park" to help pay for the hundreds of thousands of dollars he owes the Government. Hovind claimed that God doesn't pay taxes, the courts disagreed.

* Recommended book: Aristotle for Everybody, by Mortimer Adler.

* An insightful essay in the New York Times about what we mean by happiness.

* A short cartoon video on the concept of open-mindedness, with some interesting examples of dialogue between a skeptic and a true believer.

* An op-ed by philosopher Julian Baggini on the perils of shielding ideas, any ideas, from criticism.

* Book review on a new take concerning the Roman emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Was he perhaps a bit more mundane than most people think?

* Does dowsing make sense? Not scientifically, and yet essayist Michael Brooks wish it did.

* Nice investigative piece by Rachel Maddow on the corruption surrounding the debate on health care.

* The somewhat oxymoronically named Christian Civil Liberties Union wants to burn books...

* A hilarious and yet absolutely maddening piece by Jon Stewart on just how stupid US Senators can be. Needless to say, it's on health care.

Let’s talk about bribery, I mean lobbying

When I moved to the United States almost twenty (!!) years ago, one of the fascinating aspects of my new adventure was to note what was different and what was similar between the US and Europe. There were (and still are) plenty of things that impressed me positively about this country (after all, I decided to stay). But one thing struck me immediately as odd, and I now think it represents the single most dangerous threat to American democracy: lobbying.

You see, in Italy we would call that bribery, it is done under the table, and governments fall because of it, with politicians going to jail. In the United States, on the other hand, bribery is legal under the misguided concept that groups and corporations have “personhood,” and are therefore entitled to Constitutional protections, including freedom of speech and political representation. (This is the same insane idea that for a long time allowed unrestricted protection of tobacco advertisement, to name one of the most egregious cases.)

National Public Radio, one of the few reasonably reliable media outlets left in the country, is running a series entitled “Dollar Politics” in which they ask: “Lawmakers juggle the work of crafting legislation with their other big job — raising money to get re-elected. And that money often comes from the industries that will gain or lose from that legislation. Is it just the way the system works, or is it bribery?” Well, clearly both! Lobbying certainly is the way the system works, but how on earth can anyone characterize this sort of system as anything other than bribery?

Just look at some of the facts. According to NPR, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (a lobbying group) whose rather ominous acronym is PhRMA, spent $3 million each week lobbying members of Congress during three months of debate on healthcare reform. Or consider so-called “blue dog” Democratic Senator Max Baucus, who has been single-handedly holding a healthcare bill hostage in his committee. He is not only in the pocket of various industries, but he has a long history of securing jobs for his former aids with the very industries which are helped by the legislation he writes. But Baucus has been elected by the people of Montana, and his duty should be to work for their interests, not for those of the healthcare lobby.

What we are told by politicians over and over again, of course, is that contributions from lobbyists buy access, not votes. Really? First of all, why should rich and powerful interest groups have more access to elected officials than you and me? Isn’t that a profoundly anti-democratic idea for the self-professed best democracy in the world? Second, if access didn’t buy votes then PhRMA, the NRA and other lobbying organizations would be a bunch of fools who are wasting a lot of money for nothing. If you believe that, I live not far from a beautiful bridge in Brooklyn that I can sell you real cheap.

What is particularly damning about this is that we are not even having a conversation about it. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, there was a lot of talk about cutting “pork” spending by Congress, reigning in the somewhat unfortunate (but actually not always unjustified) tendency of elected officials to attach spending provisions to any bill that has nothing to do with the bill itself and is meant instead to bring money to their own district (think Sarah Palin’s “bridge to nowhere,” of which she was in favor before she was against). That could easily be fixed with a stroke of the pen by simply passing legislature that prohibits any expenditure in a bill that is not directly related to the subject matter of the bill itself. Problem solved (but it won’t happen).

About lobbying, i.e. bribing, however, we are not even talking, except for the occasional NPR piece (but who listens to NPR except for cappuccino-drinking-Chardonnay-sipping-Kindle-reading-iPhone-wielding-MacBook-sporting liberals anyway?). A few years ago Greg Palast wrote a book with a wonderful title: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Although Palast focused on the corruption of the Bush administration in particular and on the Republican party more broadly, the Democrats are not immune from the disease either. Besides the already mentioned Baucus, take Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, who is at the forefront of the healthcare reform attempt. His office recently released a series of ads mocking Washington lobbyists, while at the same time inviting health care lobbyists to his fundraising events.

Here is just how duplicitous Dodd really is. In his ad one can hear the following quote from an article that appeared in Roll Call, a newspaper that covers Washington politics: “Financial industry lobbyist on Dodd's leadership: ‘It's very scary for lobbyists and for the industry in general.’” That seems to imply that Dodd is feared by lobbyists because he won’t tolerate interference from special interests. Think again. The point of the article actually was that Dodd is trying to show himself tough on lobbyists for the specific and limited goal of being re-elected, beyond which presumably things will go back to normal. This is the complete quote from the article, according to NPR: “‘If he'd won his election and he was looking at these issues with a full six-year term in front of him, he'd be taking different positions,’ the financial industry lobbyist said. ‘It's a scary thing for lobbyists and for the industry in general.’” Quite a different meaning when read in context, don’t you think?

Lobbying is bribery, it has nothing to do with fair representation in Congress, and it completely undermines American democracy. Tell your Senator and Representative about it, but don’t send them money, they are already paid to listen to you (and they have excellent public health care).

Massimo's picks

* Why healthcare cannot be entrusted to a free market, according to Nobel economist Paul Krugman.

* Also by Krugman, why the so-called "blue dog" Democrats are probably hypocrites, or at the very least highly logically incoherent. And why are they Democrats anyway?

* And now for some laughs on health care: Stephen Colbert.

* A new mechanism that allows evolution to occasionally leap forward.

* Why the infamous "report" by Senator Inhofe on scientists who allegedly don't believe in human-caused global warming is bogus.

* Sam Harris on why Obama's appointment of Francis Collins as Head of NIH is problematic.

* New York City Atheists is the latest group to get a bus campaign going, and the message is remarkably restrained!

* Why you shouldn't rely on the Huffington Post for health advice.

* Does language shape the way we think? Apparently, yes, in rather surprising ways.

* Accusing atheists of being "fundamentalists" is nonsense on stilts, says the Economist.

* Just for laughs: William Shatner does Sarah Palin...

* Don't forget my new blog: Gullibility is Bad for You!