Thursday, April 03, 2008
Why I hate April Fool's Jokes
by Ken Houghton
(link statements too painful for me to quote; Tim F. did here.)
Via Tim F. at Balloon Juice.
(link statements too painful for me to quote; Tim F. did here.)
Labels: Bushonomics, policy wonk, Science
Monday, March 31, 2008
What to do about Expelled
by Ken Houghton
There is much discussion (most of the best at Pharyngula) about Expelled, theCreation Science Intelligent Design Biblically-Inaccurate film about the origins of life or somesuch.
And Wisconsin is at the center of it (h/t this comment at Pharyngula).
I have an easy solution.
Now, this is no law-breaking: if the people really believe they are doing nothing wrong, they should have no problem having their photos taken and posted. (Indeed, they should mention it proudly to their friends, keeping bloggers from having to do things such as this.*)
And if they have a problem, well, shame is a tactic that has been tried in similar circumstances before.
*Fewer cat pictures on the Internet would be A Good Thing. Are you listening, Scott on Fridays?
Not what I promised (that will be post midterm), but instead a quick idea.
There is much discussion (most of the best at Pharyngula) about Expelled, the
And Wisconsin is at the center of it (h/t this comment at Pharyngula).
I have an easy solution.
- Go to where the film is playing.
- Take photographs of everyone who buys a ticket.
- Post same on the Internet.
Now, this is no law-breaking: if the people really believe they are doing nothing wrong, they should have no problem having their photos taken and posted. (Indeed, they should mention it proudly to their friends, keeping bloggers from having to do things such as this.*)
And if they have a problem, well, shame is a tactic that has been tried in similar circumstances before.
*Fewer cat pictures on the Internet would be A Good Thing. Are you listening, Scott on Fridays?
Labels: Creationism, movies, Science
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Defeating your own brain.
by Drek
I bring this up because of an excellent article that recently appeared in the Washington Post that deals with a particularly disturbing cognitive bias. This article reports on, among other things, some research performed by the Centers for Disease Control that came to a rather disquieting conclusion: it appears that efforts to contradict false information may actually end up reinforcing it. To quote from the article:
So, not only was the incorrect information retained, and not only was it retained as "accurate" knowledge, but it had somehow acquired the prestige of being supported by the Centers for Disease Control. Given that this was a study dealing with influenza, readers can be pardoned for not being too concerned, but what if this were instead dealing with information about HIV, tuberculosis, or anthrax? Would we feel as sanguine if citizens were coming to believe false information about those much more serious diseases? I suspect not. The unfortunate truth here is that this tendency for contradictions to reinforce that which they seek to discredit is a serious problem for our society. The medical implications are obvious- and may help to account for continued hysteria about vaccines- but the problems do not stop there.
We could talk about the political implications of this research. Indeed, the article itself does so, observing that this tendency to continue to believe discredited information, even to believe it more strongly, may account for a number of persistent myths surrounding the 9/11 attacks. For example:
In more general terms, this research may also help explain why the political right in the U.S. seems to so consistently kick the ass of the political left. With its reliance on soundbites and fireworks from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly, the right is ideally structured to keep punching out assertions of often dubious accuracy. And when the left attempts to combat them, it may end up simply strengthening its opponents. Heads I win, tails you lose. Perhaps if you are on the right wing you won't find this idea disturbing but you should, if only because it implies that the only way to carry out politics is to reduce it to the level of a deranged shouting match.
I mean, we're more or less there already, but it would sure be nice if we could at least try to make use of reasoned debate and discussion.**
Finally, this research has some fairly significant implications for those of us who teach, and especially those of us who teach sociology. One of the greatest problems we face in sociology is in leading our students to question their own society. We have to guide students into accepting the idea that their own society is not the only way, and probably not the best way, of living. Often this involves contradicting things our students believe or helping them to see that their own beliefs are, themselves, contradictory.*** Unfortunately, this may not actually be the best way to go about it, and in demonstrating how a previous belief is incorrect, we may do little more than reinforce it in our students' minds. It is, perhaps, no surprise then that many adults look back on their sociology classes as having been silly, obvious, or a waste of time. With the hazy perspective of years, they have forgotten all the things sociology tried to teach them, and perhaps remember only those things we sought to contradict. Only now, they remember them as being true.
I'm not sure what is to be done about this. Remaining silent won't work as silence is often taken as tacit approval. Nevertheless, we can perhaps avoid some of the consequences of this cognitive bias by spending less time contradicting bad ideas, and more time arguing for the good ones. This may, of course, be less satisfying sometimes but in the final analysis, do we want to feel good, or do we want to be effective? I prefer to think we want to be effective. And, if nothing else, we should be sure to talk about these cognitive biases whenever it's appropriate. We're all vulnerable to the mistakes they lead us towards, and our only real defense is being aware that they exist.
It's never easy to defeat your own brain but, from time to time, it's the very best thing you can do.
* I say "pseudo-flaws" because these biases were probably very useful in our evolutionary environment where the idea wasn't to reach the best conclusion, but rather the one that was good enough to keep you alive. So, for example, given a choice between alpha error and beta error, alpha error is the one to make. It's better to think you see a predator that doesn't exist than to miss the one that does. If you want to think more about this, I have pondered the matter at least once before.
** Sorry, folks. Sometimes my zeal for democracy as envisioned by political philosophers leads me to say some pretty naive things.
*** My favorite example being that common sense tells us both that "Birds of a feather flock together" and that "Opposites attract." It's pretty easy for common sense to appear to be correct when it covers all of the bases like that.
In a blog post a while back Brad Wright helpfully posted a list of cognitive biases common to human thought. For those who are not familiar, cognitive biases are shortcuts or pseudo-flaws* in human reasoning that can lead us to incorrect or unsupportable conclusions. Brad raises the question of how these biases affect discussions of religion, but I'm not really interested in that just now. Since all humans that we've checked (and we've checked a lot) appear to be susceptible to these kinds of biases, it's most likely the case that both the theist and the atheist are equally vulnerable. It may be that each group has its own "preferred" kind of bias, but that's not really an improvement.
I bring this up because of an excellent article that recently appeared in the Washington Post that deals with a particularly disturbing cognitive bias. This article reports on, among other things, some research performed by the Centers for Disease Control that came to a rather disquieting conclusion: it appears that efforts to contradict false information may actually end up reinforcing it. To quote from the article:
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."
When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.
Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.
So, not only was the incorrect information retained, and not only was it retained as "accurate" knowledge, but it had somehow acquired the prestige of being supported by the Centers for Disease Control. Given that this was a study dealing with influenza, readers can be pardoned for not being too concerned, but what if this were instead dealing with information about HIV, tuberculosis, or anthrax? Would we feel as sanguine if citizens were coming to believe false information about those much more serious diseases? I suspect not. The unfortunate truth here is that this tendency for contradictions to reinforce that which they seek to discredit is a serious problem for our society. The medical implications are obvious- and may help to account for continued hysteria about vaccines- but the problems do not stop there.
We could talk about the political implications of this research. Indeed, the article itself does so, observing that this tendency to continue to believe discredited information, even to believe it more strongly, may account for a number of persistent myths surrounding the 9/11 attacks. For example:
This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.
Similarly, many in the Arab world are convinced that the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 was not the work of Arab terrorists but was a controlled demolition; that 4,000 Jews working there had been warned to stay home that day; and that the Pentagon was struck by a missile rather than a plane.
...
A report last year by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, however, found that the number of Muslims worldwide who do not believe that Arabs carried out the Sept. 11 attacks is soaring -- to 59 percent of Turks and Egyptians, 65 percent of Indonesians, 53 percent of Jordanians, 41 percent of Pakistanis and even 56 percent of British Muslims.
In more general terms, this research may also help explain why the political right in the U.S. seems to so consistently kick the ass of the political left. With its reliance on soundbites and fireworks from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly, the right is ideally structured to keep punching out assertions of often dubious accuracy. And when the left attempts to combat them, it may end up simply strengthening its opponents. Heads I win, tails you lose. Perhaps if you are on the right wing you won't find this idea disturbing but you should, if only because it implies that the only way to carry out politics is to reduce it to the level of a deranged shouting match.
I mean, we're more or less there already, but it would sure be nice if we could at least try to make use of reasoned debate and discussion.**
Finally, this research has some fairly significant implications for those of us who teach, and especially those of us who teach sociology. One of the greatest problems we face in sociology is in leading our students to question their own society. We have to guide students into accepting the idea that their own society is not the only way, and probably not the best way, of living. Often this involves contradicting things our students believe or helping them to see that their own beliefs are, themselves, contradictory.*** Unfortunately, this may not actually be the best way to go about it, and in demonstrating how a previous belief is incorrect, we may do little more than reinforce it in our students' minds. It is, perhaps, no surprise then that many adults look back on their sociology classes as having been silly, obvious, or a waste of time. With the hazy perspective of years, they have forgotten all the things sociology tried to teach them, and perhaps remember only those things we sought to contradict. Only now, they remember them as being true.
I'm not sure what is to be done about this. Remaining silent won't work as silence is often taken as tacit approval. Nevertheless, we can perhaps avoid some of the consequences of this cognitive bias by spending less time contradicting bad ideas, and more time arguing for the good ones. This may, of course, be less satisfying sometimes but in the final analysis, do we want to feel good, or do we want to be effective? I prefer to think we want to be effective. And, if nothing else, we should be sure to talk about these cognitive biases whenever it's appropriate. We're all vulnerable to the mistakes they lead us towards, and our only real defense is being aware that they exist.
It's never easy to defeat your own brain but, from time to time, it's the very best thing you can do.
* I say "pseudo-flaws" because these biases were probably very useful in our evolutionary environment where the idea wasn't to reach the best conclusion, but rather the one that was good enough to keep you alive. So, for example, given a choice between alpha error and beta error, alpha error is the one to make. It's better to think you see a predator that doesn't exist than to miss the one that does. If you want to think more about this, I have pondered the matter at least once before.
** Sorry, folks. Sometimes my zeal for democracy as envisioned by political philosophers leads me to say some pretty naive things.
*** My favorite example being that common sense tells us both that "Birds of a feather flock together" and that "Opposites attract." It's pretty easy for common sense to appear to be correct when it covers all of the bases like that.
Labels: cognitive biases, Health Care, Politics, Science, Social Science, Sociology, teaching
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
"The thing about science fiction, though, is that you don't bet against it"
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Oh Joy, Another 'Copernican Principle' Post
by Tom Bozzo
But for a little more damnation by faint praise, let's just remember what's being promised by the method: a prediction within a factor of 39 of the start-to-present interval. As a practical matter, the real problem in many cases is not that too much fabricated information is being brought to bear, especially at the upper bound.
As a follow-up from the earlier post on the topic, in the Crooked Timber thread following Quiggin's post, commenter RB points to a letter to Nature's editor from 1994 by Johns Hopkins biostatistician Steven Goodman making the case that Gott's reasoning is an example of an old statistical fallacy. (Goodman posted it as a comment to Tierney's NYT blog.) Goodman's general thrust — 'lies, damn lies, statistics' — is correct, but he maybe goes a bit too far in deploying the f-word.
Simply put, the principle of indifference [i.e., the fallacy] says that it you know nothing about a specified number of possible outcomes, you can assign them equal probability. This is exactly what Dr. Gott does when he assigns a probability of 2.5% to each of the 40 segments of a hypothetical lifetime. There are many problems with this seductively simple logic. The most fundamental one is that, as Keynes said, this procedure creates knowledge (specific probability statements) out of complete ignorance.Actually, there is a more charitable version than this, which is how I'd previously set up the problem, and how Monton and Kierland characterize Gott's original argument. In my account, the uniform distribution of the observation point is explicitly part of the (assumed) information set; I've packed my free lunch as it were. If that doesn't sound like much, it's not. However, I would submit that the more useful thing to argue over is whether the uniform distribution assumption is warranted. As it happens, I said before that the assumption is strong before, and what I mean is that in practice it seems unwarranted for the array of amusing social applications that Gott can't seem to resist.
But for a little more damnation by faint praise, let's just remember what's being promised by the method: a prediction within a factor of 39 of the start-to-present interval. As a practical matter, the real problem in many cases is not that too much fabricated information is being brought to bear, especially at the upper bound.
Labels: Philosophy, Science, Social Science, Statistics
Not Necessarily the Doomsday Clock
by Tom Bozzo
So how do you get that 46 years?
Suppose you're observing an Event that occurs during a fixed time interval (potentially a strong assumption). Suppose also that Baldrick is flying your space-time conveyance and drops you at a random point in the interval (potentially a very strong assumption). Suppose third that you know nothing else about the event. Your "best guess" as to where you've landed, in the expected value sense, is the midpoint of the interval. So if you then get your bearings and figure out how long ago the event started, which is all the information you have, your best guess is that the event will end the same amount of time in the future. That isn't a very good guess, though, in the sense that there's a 50% chance that the "true" end will be sooner or later than that.
Applied to the human spaceflight program, dated to 1961 (questionable [*]), then by advanced mathematics about 46 years have elapsed since then and the information you have and the assumptions above lead to the result. QED.
What the astrophysicist J. Richard Gott did, in a short paper, was to construct interval estimates with high confidence levels -- statements that the unknown end date for the event should fall between A and B 95 percent of the time. For the spaceflight case, A is 2008 (next year) and B is AD 3,801. But saying that you're 97.5 percent confident that the human spaceflight program will end in the next 1,800 years or so doesn't have the same sense of urgency. More generally, 95 percent confidence results in a range from 1/39th the age of the event on the low side to 39 times the age of the event on the high side. Call this the "Copernican formula" if you will. The proof methodology (see this paper [PDF], helpfully linked by Tierney) uses only undergraduate-level mathematical statistics, so read it yourself if you're so inclined.
This leads me to strongly endorse John Quiggin's conclusion:
Reinforcing Quiggins's point on how posterior distributions may be influenced, had Gott's paper appeared a week earlier, he'd have missed on "Kiss" to the tune of 100 days, since the previous week of running time adds some 9 months to the prediction's upper bound. If it matters whether the production runs another week or another year, searching for information is not unlikely to be rewarded.
Meanwhile, if you wanted to make some inference on whether both "Kiss" and "Will" would be playing at some future date, forget about it. The most interesting contribution comes from Brian Weatherson (at CT and Thoughts, Arguments, and Rants), who derives a neat result showing that if you infer the probability of both plays running at a future date based solely on the length of time they've run together (the information the method admits), it follows that if "Kiss" (the shorter-duration event) is still playing at that date, then "Will" (the longer-running event) will also be playing with probability 1. Weatherson concludes that there must be "something deeply mistaken with the Copernican formula."
My own little gloss, pending peer review in the self-correcting blogithingy, is here in the CT comments. What seems to be happening in this case is that (1) Gott's method throws away the information on how long "Will" has been running, and (2) sneaks in an additional assumption that the "Kiss" and "Will" events must be dependent or correlated. There may be circumstances under which these extremely strong assumptions may be justified, Weatherson maybe goes a bit too far in suggesting that these but they strike me as implying more than diffuse information on anything other than the elapsed times of the events.
Last, since you are by definition still with me here in the unlikely event you are reading this, here's the brief rant portion of the post: How the frack did Gott get 5 frackin' pages in Nature for this, which looks a lot more like it merits a paragraph of Mathematical News of the Weird?! I've been turned down cold — not even this 'reject and resubmit' stuff Drek writes about for stuff a hundred times harder and at least somewhat more relevant, if I don't say so myself. (If you really have time to kill, you may note that part of what I'm talking about eventually came out via other researchers' efforts as part of this IIASA working paper a few years later.) And if that's happened to me, then so too must everyone except Nick Bostrom, as I infer from Tom's Anti-Copernican Principle. W. T. F.
And BTW, Nature, what's up with US$30 for an e-print? Surely the revenue-maximizing price — which given the approximately $0 marginal cost, is also profit-maximizing — is not set at levels that make the likes of me think about sending junior staff to the library (were there a business case for actually obtaining the paper). Just saying.
[/rant]
[*] It's not like Yuri Gagarin's rocket just materialized on the pad and blasted off. And remember, going back even a few years into the preflight stages of human space programs puts a century or two on the upper bound.
Just going to show what happens when you drop off even the post-paywall NYT op-ed page, reaction to John Tierney's report that we have 46 years to colonize Mars Or Else Civilization is Dooooomed has been relatively muted over the Intertubes. Prof. Bainbridge quotes the Ole Perfesser without comment (see Roy at Alicublog for the omitted analysis) but also Charlie Stross's excellent post on the grim case for space colonization.
So how do you get that 46 years?
Suppose you're observing an Event that occurs during a fixed time interval (potentially a strong assumption). Suppose also that Baldrick is flying your space-time conveyance and drops you at a random point in the interval (potentially a very strong assumption). Suppose third that you know nothing else about the event. Your "best guess" as to where you've landed, in the expected value sense, is the midpoint of the interval. So if you then get your bearings and figure out how long ago the event started, which is all the information you have, your best guess is that the event will end the same amount of time in the future. That isn't a very good guess, though, in the sense that there's a 50% chance that the "true" end will be sooner or later than that.
Applied to the human spaceflight program, dated to 1961 (questionable [*]), then by advanced mathematics about 46 years have elapsed since then and the information you have and the assumptions above lead to the result. QED.
What the astrophysicist J. Richard Gott did, in a short paper, was to construct interval estimates with high confidence levels -- statements that the unknown end date for the event should fall between A and B 95 percent of the time. For the spaceflight case, A is 2008 (next year) and B is AD 3,801. But saying that you're 97.5 percent confident that the human spaceflight program will end in the next 1,800 years or so doesn't have the same sense of urgency. More generally, 95 percent confidence results in a range from 1/39th the age of the event on the low side to 39 times the age of the event on the high side. Call this the "Copernican formula" if you will. The proof methodology (see this paper [PDF], helpfully linked by Tierney) uses only undergraduate-level mathematical statistics, so read it yourself if you're so inclined.
This leads me to strongly endorse John Quiggin's conclusion:
The real lesson from Bayesian inference is that, with little or no sample data, even limited prior information will have a big influence on the posterior distribution. That is, if you are dealing with the kinds of cases Gott is talking about, you’re better off thinking about the problem than relying on an almost valueless statistical inference.Indeed, if observing the passage of a year and nothing else, the upper bound of the interval moves out 39 years. That can be a big deal in many applied circumstances! For example, here's Gott himself writing in the New Scientist in 1997. A subhead of "Living proof" suggests he isn't engaged in deliberate leg-pulling as he recounts:
As another test, I used my formula on the day my "Nature" paper was published to predict the future longevities of the 44 Broadway and off-Broadway plays and musicals then running in New York; 36 have now closed - all in agreement with the predictions. The "Will Rogers Follies", which had been open for 757 days, closed after another 101 days, and the "Kiss of the Spider Woman", open for 24 days, closed after another 765 days. In each case the future longevity was within a factor of 39 of the past longevity, as predicted.In this application, a prediction within a factor of 39 of past longevity conceivably covers the range from total flops to huge hits to productions that will eventually be performed by automata in Wisconsin Dells. The "prediction" for the "Will Rogers Follies" is that it will (likely) close within the next 82 years. That's out on a limb. (And certain philosophers inclined to bash social scientists for theories with weak predictive value might put this in their pipe and smoke it.)
Reinforcing Quiggins's point on how posterior distributions may be influenced, had Gott's paper appeared a week earlier, he'd have missed on "Kiss" to the tune of 100 days, since the previous week of running time adds some 9 months to the prediction's upper bound. If it matters whether the production runs another week or another year, searching for information is not unlikely to be rewarded.
Meanwhile, if you wanted to make some inference on whether both "Kiss" and "Will" would be playing at some future date, forget about it. The most interesting contribution comes from Brian Weatherson (at CT and Thoughts, Arguments, and Rants), who derives a neat result showing that if you infer the probability of both plays running at a future date based solely on the length of time they've run together (the information the method admits), it follows that if "Kiss" (the shorter-duration event) is still playing at that date, then "Will" (the longer-running event) will also be playing with probability 1. Weatherson concludes that there must be "something deeply mistaken with the Copernican formula."
My own little gloss, pending peer review in the self-correcting blogithingy, is here in the CT comments. What seems to be happening in this case is that (1) Gott's method throws away the information on how long "Will" has been running, and (2) sneaks in an additional assumption that the "Kiss" and "Will" events must be dependent or correlated. There may be circumstances under which these extremely strong assumptions may be justified, Weatherson maybe goes a bit too far in suggesting that these but they strike me as implying more than diffuse information on anything other than the elapsed times of the events.
Last, since you are by definition still with me here in the unlikely event you are reading this, here's the brief rant portion of the post: How the frack did Gott get 5 frackin' pages in Nature for this, which looks a lot more like it merits a paragraph of Mathematical News of the Weird?! I've been turned down cold — not even this 'reject and resubmit' stuff Drek writes about for stuff a hundred times harder and at least somewhat more relevant, if I don't say so myself. (If you really have time to kill, you may note that part of what I'm talking about eventually came out via other researchers' efforts as part of this IIASA working paper a few years later.) And if that's happened to me, then so too must everyone except Nick Bostrom, as I infer from Tom's Anti-Copernican Principle. W. T. F.
And BTW, Nature, what's up with US$30 for an e-print? Surely the revenue-maximizing price — which given the approximately $0 marginal cost, is also profit-maximizing — is not set at levels that make the likes of me think about sending junior staff to the library (were there a business case for actually obtaining the paper). Just saying.
[/rant]
[*] It's not like Yuri Gagarin's rocket just materialized on the pad and blasted off. And remember, going back even a few years into the preflight stages of human space programs puts a century or two on the upper bound.
Labels: Philosophy, Science, Social Science, Statistics
Monday, July 16, 2007
"The most expensive film of all time" - Arthur C. Clarke
by Ken Houghton
UPDATE: This (caution: Times Select article) could be fun:
Courtesy of my Loyal Reader and The National Association of Manufacturers:
UPDATE: This (caution: Times Select article) could be fun:
With his arm outlined by the blue sky, he whacked away at the cable as a sound engineer recorded the dull thuds. ''You'll want to give your full might when you hit it,'' yelled Joseph Bertolozzi, a composer leading this expedition one day late last month. The cable swayed slightly with each stroke.
The purpose of the test was to check not the bridge's soundness but its sound. The rather bizarre scene on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Mid-Hudson Bridge near Poughkeepsie was part of Mr. Bertolozzi's audacious plan to transform the span into an orchestra, compose a piece for it, then actually perform the work live with a small army of percussionists. It is a musical undertaking on a vast scale and one that has brought oddly harmonious marriages among the worlds of art and government, music and engineering.
Mr. Bertolozzi, 48, has been meticulously harvesting a multitude of sounds from the structure: not just the cables, which on playback create woo-wooing effects or sounds like a bass guitar, but the spindles below guardrails, the rails themselves, the interior and flanges of innumerable I-beams, connecting metal plates and the grates between walkways.
Labels: Science
Monday, June 18, 2007
Dep't. of Declining Standards in Public Intellectualism
by Tom Bozzo
(*) If I needed 10,000 words written about nothing, Fish would be the first guy I'd call. Boy, that guy can blather.
Much (*) shorter Stanley Fish (behind the Times Select wall for the betterment of society):
If I elide the fundamental differences between science and religion, I can show that prominent atheist scientists (and one, uh, lovable lush) reason just as circularly as the religious!
(*) If I needed 10,000 words written about nothing, Fish would be the first guy I'd call. Boy, that guy can blather.
Labels: Atheism, Religion, Science, Tortured Logic
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Religion, Science, and the GSS: My Two+ Cents
by Tom Bozzo
Comments here and at Pharyngula suggest that, if anything, the Big Bang question (did the universe begin with a "huge explosion?") is more problematic in the translation of scientific theory into the GSS questionnaire. I can't see how the segment of the population that could argue whether "explosion" is an appropriate metaphor for the event at the beginning of the universe from a position of knowledge of the bleeding edge of cosmology would end up being a material fraction of the GSS sample, and Kim reasonably suggests that there's no reason to believe that confusion over the wording would be confounded with respondents' religions.
Evolution is another matter, as there is no serious scientific controversy at all. (**)
Still, the GSS data do beg some interesting questions. One concerns the result that college education leads to a much higher (though not exactly impressive) rate of belief in evolution overall, but conspicuously not for fundamentalist Christians. My inference-at-a-glance (***) is that the sample sizes are large enough to reject the hypothesis that fundamentalists with some college education exhibit the same attitude shift as is seen for other denominations, so the result looks to be "real." PZ Myers observes:
As for the behavior of the college-educated fundamentalists, an additional mechanism for the result is that fundamentalist students "learn" the correct answers in order to pass their secular science classes, and just don't update their personal beliefs accordingly. Some of this must be going on, at least insofar as I'd be very surprised if most college-educated fundamentalists, like most of the rest of the college-educated, passed through public university systems. At least in principle, the GSS survey could be augmented to determine whether this is true (though it's not like I'm holding my breath).
What evidence of conservative Christian youth faking their way through school on a large scale would do for the pretensions of academic culture warriors such as David Horowitz and Dinesh D'Souza is left as an exercise for the reader. (****)
One anonymous commenter makes some interesting remarks about the direction of causality between politics and religion, and suggests that group loyalties largely determine the positions. I don't know that this explains the differential education effects across denominations, though. I also think this commenter is wrong to imply that the Christian denominations share the same faith, especially in ways relevant to these questions; in particular, belief (and associated indoctrination) in the literal truth of the Bible is a pretty big interdenominational difference.
This commenter also notes that liberals and atheists may harbor beliefs based on bad science, citing genetically modified foods "fear mongering" and selective rejection of economics or social science "facts." Another commenter contends that science itself creates doubt on "myriad" subjects "from weight loss to how best to build airplanes." I call intellectual fouls.
It isn't anything like a core tenet of American liberalism that GMOs will kill us all dead, or even that anything resembling core results of economics that a supermajority of liberals would reject just because we don't like them (see Robert Waldmann's fine post on the not-so-simple economics of redistribution [via DeLong] for a few reasons why).
Weight loss is conceptually simple (expend more calories than you eat) — the "physics diet" — but difficult in practice because people who want to lose weight have myriad reasons for it, and react in myriad ways to different programs; there's also a lot of pseudoscience in this area.
"How best to build airplanes" led me to a WTF moment, since science makes no claims that imply that one aircraft design or another is "optimal." Perhaps the commenter is referring to controversies over how wings really work, in which case the commenter seems to be confusing the initial poking at the hornet's nest of a seemingly-settled issue with an ultimate aim of better resolving our understanding of things. (*****)
(*) Indeed, the term "solar system" wouldn't make much sense if the sun weren't at its center.
(**) Regular readers will know that we don't think "intelligent design" creationism is a scientific theory around these parts.
(***) One standard deviation for the number of expressions of disbelief in evolution for fundamentalists who have been to college is about six responses, which implies that it's unlikely the true rate of disbelief in evolution is much less than about 60%.
(****) Trick question! They're totally shameless, so it would have no effect on them at all. But it would be one for the "not even trying to resolve the contradictions" file.
(*****) This is not to say that scientific theorizing does, or even can, remove all doubt on any subject. Cf. Feyerabend, etc. We note that the factoid that a theory explains phenomenon X with precision Y is commonly abused.
A couple of commenters to Kim's post suggest that only the GSS question regarding the heliocentric solar system (*) is testing a matter of settled scientific fact, and that the evolution and origin-of-the-universe questions really are measuring the degree of controversy over the issues.
Comments here and at Pharyngula suggest that, if anything, the Big Bang question (did the universe begin with a "huge explosion?") is more problematic in the translation of scientific theory into the GSS questionnaire. I can't see how the segment of the population that could argue whether "explosion" is an appropriate metaphor for the event at the beginning of the universe from a position of knowledge of the bleeding edge of cosmology would end up being a material fraction of the GSS sample, and Kim reasonably suggests that there's no reason to believe that confusion over the wording would be confounded with respondents' religions.
Evolution is another matter, as there is no serious scientific controversy at all. (**)
Still, the GSS data do beg some interesting questions. One concerns the result that college education leads to a much higher (though not exactly impressive) rate of belief in evolution overall, but conspicuously not for fundamentalist Christians. My inference-at-a-glance (***) is that the sample sizes are large enough to reject the hypothesis that fundamentalists with some college education exhibit the same attitude shift as is seen for other denominations, so the result looks to be "real." PZ Myers observes:
on [evolution], they are completely refractory to education. What isn't in the data is whether that is because that group maintains its beliefs by sending their young off to bible "colleges" which reinforce erroneous ideas, or whether it's because people who start off as fundies and get a college education then stop being fundies.The GSS data actually show that fundamentalists are a larger fraction of the total respondents (31%) than the respondents reporting some college education (22%). So there may be evidence for the latter of PZ's possibilities — otherwise, the implication is that fundamentalists select into higher education at dramatically lower rates than the general population (about 27% vs. 37%, a big difference).
As for the behavior of the college-educated fundamentalists, an additional mechanism for the result is that fundamentalist students "learn" the correct answers in order to pass their secular science classes, and just don't update their personal beliefs accordingly. Some of this must be going on, at least insofar as I'd be very surprised if most college-educated fundamentalists, like most of the rest of the college-educated, passed through public university systems. At least in principle, the GSS survey could be augmented to determine whether this is true (though it's not like I'm holding my breath).
What evidence of conservative Christian youth faking their way through school on a large scale would do for the pretensions of academic culture warriors such as David Horowitz and Dinesh D'Souza is left as an exercise for the reader. (****)
One anonymous commenter makes some interesting remarks about the direction of causality between politics and religion, and suggests that group loyalties largely determine the positions. I don't know that this explains the differential education effects across denominations, though. I also think this commenter is wrong to imply that the Christian denominations share the same faith, especially in ways relevant to these questions; in particular, belief (and associated indoctrination) in the literal truth of the Bible is a pretty big interdenominational difference.
This commenter also notes that liberals and atheists may harbor beliefs based on bad science, citing genetically modified foods "fear mongering" and selective rejection of economics or social science "facts." Another commenter contends that science itself creates doubt on "myriad" subjects "from weight loss to how best to build airplanes." I call intellectual fouls.
It isn't anything like a core tenet of American liberalism that GMOs will kill us all dead, or even that anything resembling core results of economics that a supermajority of liberals would reject just because we don't like them (see Robert Waldmann's fine post on the not-so-simple economics of redistribution [via DeLong] for a few reasons why).
Weight loss is conceptually simple (expend more calories than you eat) — the "physics diet" — but difficult in practice because people who want to lose weight have myriad reasons for it, and react in myriad ways to different programs; there's also a lot of pseudoscience in this area.
"How best to build airplanes" led me to a WTF moment, since science makes no claims that imply that one aircraft design or another is "optimal." Perhaps the commenter is referring to controversies over how wings really work, in which case the commenter seems to be confusing the initial poking at the hornet's nest of a seemingly-settled issue with an ultimate aim of better resolving our understanding of things. (*****)
(*) Indeed, the term "solar system" wouldn't make much sense if the sun weren't at its center.
(**) Regular readers will know that we don't think "intelligent design" creationism is a scientific theory around these parts.
(***) One standard deviation for the number of expressions of disbelief in evolution for fundamentalists who have been to college is about six responses, which implies that it's unlikely the true rate of disbelief in evolution is much less than about 60%.
(****) Trick question! They're totally shameless, so it would have no effect on them at all. But it would be one for the "not even trying to resolve the contradictions" file.
(*****) This is not to say that scientific theorizing does, or even can, remove all doubt on any subject. Cf. Feyerabend, etc. We note that the factoid that a theory explains phenomenon X with precision Y is commonly abused.
Labels: public opinion research, Religion, Science
Friday, June 08, 2007
Scientific Knowledge in the US by Religion
by Anonymous
I was curious about how the numbers stack up by that other hot-button issue, religion, so I did a bit of Friday-afternoon playing myself. (Gee, I know how to have fun...)
In each graph, the wording of the question is at the top. The religious categories are based on self-reported religion, combined with a NORC-coded variable on the degree of fundamentalism of the respondent's denomination. For each of the "outcome" questions, I've combined the "don't know" and "no answer" respondents, but there are very few of the latter (i.e., <5). Click on each picture for a bigger view, I hope.
Without further ado (and with relatively little commentary), here are the responses to the two questions on heliocentrism, in concatenated form:
Here are responses to a question on the Big Bang:
And here are responses to a question on the origin of man:
Fundamentalists' beliefs about evolution don't seem to vary all much by education. Here are data from the same question, but limited to respondents with at least some college. (Caution: Ns get quite small for the smaller religious categories.)
I know one can't make causal claims from these data about the college "effect" or lack thereof. Nonetheless, I still find all this rather depressing, in a professorial angst, "it's all selection effects and we have no impact" sort of way.
Update: After I posted this, it occurred to me that I should look at a less religiously charged scientific knowledge question, e.g., on the experimental method. The question asks how best to test a new drug: with or without a control group. (This is explained in the question.) Ns are the same as in the other graphs.
Total: 79% w/control, 16% without, 4% DK
Fund prot: 76% w/control
Mod prot: 81%
Lib prot: 84%
Catholics: 75%
Jews/lib others: 82%
None: 85%
So, Fundamental Protestants are a bit below the other groups on this form of scientific knowledge, too, but the difference is less extreme.
The latest General Social Survey has been released, and it contains a new module on Americans' beliefs about science. Other sociobloggers have offered glimpses at these data, and in particular the two questions on heliocentrism. Omar gives simple frequencies, Jeremy breaks them down by gender, race, political identification, and education.
I was curious about how the numbers stack up by that other hot-button issue, religion, so I did a bit of Friday-afternoon playing myself. (Gee, I know how to have fun...)
In each graph, the wording of the question is at the top. The religious categories are based on self-reported religion, combined with a NORC-coded variable on the degree of fundamentalism of the respondent's denomination. For each of the "outcome" questions, I've combined the "don't know" and "no answer" respondents, but there are very few of the latter (i.e., <5). Click on each picture for a bigger view, I hope.
Without further ado (and with relatively little commentary), here are the responses to the two questions on heliocentrism, in concatenated form:
Here are responses to a question on the Big Bang:
And here are responses to a question on the origin of man:
Fundamentalists' beliefs about evolution don't seem to vary all much by education. Here are data from the same question, but limited to respondents with at least some college. (Caution: Ns get quite small for the smaller religious categories.)
I know one can't make causal claims from these data about the college "effect" or lack thereof. Nonetheless, I still find all this rather depressing, in a professorial angst, "it's all selection effects and we have no impact" sort of way.
Update: After I posted this, it occurred to me that I should look at a less religiously charged scientific knowledge question, e.g., on the experimental method. The question asks how best to test a new drug: with or without a control group. (This is explained in the question.) Ns are the same as in the other graphs.
Total: 79% w/control, 16% without, 4% DK
Fund prot: 76% w/control
Mod prot: 81%
Lib prot: 84%
Catholics: 75%
Jews/lib others: 82%
None: 85%
So, Fundamental Protestants are a bit below the other groups on this form of scientific knowledge, too, but the difference is less extreme.
Labels: public opinion research, Religion, Science
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Questions of Scale and the Uncertain Origins of Life
by Tom Bozzo
So, while it's technically conjecture to say so, if you can get some building blocks of life to self-assemble in a relatively limited experiment, it doesn't seem like a huge stretch of the imagination to think that scaling up the experiment by 20 or more orders of magnitude would get results that might actually impress an Easterbrook. Easterbrook, instead, chooses to preach to the Intelligent Design (sic) choir (**):
Moreover, if Easterbrook and/or the ID'ers were in some ways correct, one might imagine they might be disappointed to discover that we're The Sims 25 running on a really big computer.
------------------------------------
More (3/26/07): PZ Myers picks up on the Poor Man Institute's take and links a useful review post from last year of a book that covers the actual science!
Ginger Yellow notes in the comments that it's "boneheaded" for Easterbrook to scratch his head over how early life can survive the harsh conditions of the primordial Earth one sentence after you've said that building-block compounds float around in space. Perhaps needless to say (though Easterbrook didn't say it), there are many critters adapted to environments that would be decidedly hazardous to human health, as well as polymers such as prions that are resistant to heat and/or radiation damage.
(*) Interested readers may consult the intertubes for additional information.
(**) Unusually abundant in the Wired readership?!
(Cross-posted at Total Drek.)
Someone left last month's Wired at the gym, in which a variety of scientists and science journalists took on Big Unanswered Questions. Then there was Gregg Easterbrook, assigned to the question, "Where did life come from?" His review of the classic abiogenesis experiments starts off almost as if he doesn't have an ax to grind:
Famously, in 1952 Harold Urey and Stanley Miller mixed the elements thought to exist in Earth’s primordial atmosphere, exposed them to electricity to simulate lightning, and found that amino acids self-assembled in the researchers’ test tubes. Amino acids are essential to life. [Link in original.]You might think, hey, that's pretty cool! And pretty neutral so far, even if he doesn't mention that followers-on have managed to synthesize all the protein-forming amino acids in the lab. But pretty soon, Easterbrook is reminding us what those smarty-pants scientists didn't do, as if he were writing a Conservapedia entry with slightly above-average balance:
[Easterbrook, continuing directly:] But the ones in the 1952 experiment did not come to life. Building-block compounds have been shown to result from many natural processes; they even float in huge clouds in space. But no test has given any indication of how they begin to live - or how, in early tentative forms, they could have resisted being frozen or fried by Earth’s harsh prehistoric conditions.The thing Easterbrook might have noted, in a universe where he wasn't a hack, is that the "natural experiment" on Earth played out on a vastly greater scale. I'm too lazy to look up how much primordial soup Urey, Miller, and other researchers in the area sought to make (*), but let's assume for a realistic figure something on the order of a cubic meter (perhaps a lot less — that's a thousand liters, after all), allowed to stew for a relatively short time — on the order of weeks or years at most. Earth's oceans, meanwhile, have a volume on the order of a billion (10^9) cubic kilometers, or about 10^18 cubic meters. So imagine a quintillion versions of these experiments running simultaneously and interacting with each other. Moreover, nature ran its "experiment" for hundreds of millions of years.
So, while it's technically conjecture to say so, if you can get some building blocks of life to self-assemble in a relatively limited experiment, it doesn't seem like a huge stretch of the imagination to think that scaling up the experiment by 20 or more orders of magnitude would get results that might actually impress an Easterbrook. Easterbrook, instead, chooses to preach to the Intelligent Design (sic) choir (**):
Did God or some other higher being create life? Did it begin on another world, to be transported later to ours? Until such time as a wholly natural origin of life is found, these questions have power. We’re improbable, we’re here, and we have no idea why. Or how.The question of the nature of our origin is interesting, no doubt, but how does appeal to a designer help answer them? If you're going to push the 'why' question back beyond the ability of essential chemicals to form themselves, why shouldn't the action of the designer be subject to question?
Moreover, if Easterbrook and/or the ID'ers were in some ways correct, one might imagine they might be disappointed to discover that we're The Sims 25 running on a really big computer.
------------------------------------
More (3/26/07): PZ Myers picks up on the Poor Man Institute's take and links a useful review post from last year of a book that covers the actual science!
Ginger Yellow notes in the comments that it's "boneheaded" for Easterbrook to scratch his head over how early life can survive the harsh conditions of the primordial Earth one sentence after you've said that building-block compounds float around in space. Perhaps needless to say (though Easterbrook didn't say it), there are many critters adapted to environments that would be decidedly hazardous to human health, as well as polymers such as prions that are resistant to heat and/or radiation damage.
(*) Interested readers may consult the intertubes for additional information.
(**) Unusually abundant in the Wired readership?!
(Cross-posted at Total Drek.)
Labels: Conservapedia, Creationism, Journamalism, Science
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Shira may be closer to right than we think
by Ken Houghton
She's surely exaggerating—but maybe not by so much as we think.
The BBC reports that No sleep may mean no new brain cells:
And getting back to a normal sleep pattern doesn't solve the problem:
It's no secret that our children go to sleep late (and I sometimes later). Which puts the burden on Shira, who has commented recently that, after the past week of sleep deprivation, she "has no brain."
She's surely exaggerating—but maybe not by so much as we think.
The BBC reports that No sleep may mean no new brain cells:
The researchers compared animals who were deprived of sleep for 72 hours with others who were not.
They found those who missed out on rest had higher levels of the stress hormone corticosterone.
They also produced significantly fewer new brain cells in a particular region of the hippocampus.
When the animals' corticosterone levels were kept at a constant level, the reduction in cell proliferation was abolished.
And getting back to a normal sleep pattern doesn't solve the problem:
Sleep patterns were restored to normal within a week.
However levels of nerve cell production (neurogenesis) were not restored for two weeks, and the brain appears to boost its efforts in order to counteract the shortage.
Monday, February 12, 2007
For Tom
by Ken Houghton
The Secret of Newton's Laws Explained with Lego
Insert Inappropriate Joke Here
by Ken Houghton
With the obligatory disclaimer:
Stem cells used to boost breasts
[Kotaro Yoshimura, a surgeon at the Tokyo University medical school] said he believed the stem cell and fat combination, which can increase a woman's cupsize by two sizes, was a success.
"There have been no serious complications," he said.
During the operation, surgeons suck fat cells from the stomach or thigh, and this "slurry" is enriched so that there are higher numbers than usual of stem cells.
These are "master" cells which are capable of making new fat cells.
With the obligatory disclaimer:
However, Adam Searle, past president of British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons said the development should not be dismissed.
"The stem cell 'soup' is too non-specific to really focus on what you want."
Labels: Science, stem cell research
