When is Science News?

Noticed this before, but prompted to share it …. The menu at the top of the Guardian Home Page typifies what’s wrong with science media reporting:

Science appears as a sub-category of news at the second level, not a higher level sibling of news, alongside, say Culture, Business, Technology and more.

GrauniadMenu

Science “news” –  is predominantly about the process of science of interest to scientists and those with a particular interest in science – things suggested or published as a result of research or experiment. Without gaining the authority of a wider scientific community they are not in themselves new additions to the body of known science, but rather candidates competing for attention (and funding).

Still of wider interest for publication, sure, but better couched for what they are. Wonder how things got that way? Must check out other media channels.

[Post Note : Good one from Sabine Hossenfelder on Facebook. I know it’s only the Daily Mail, but some scary members of the public read this stuff:

I don’t know about the APS, but the German Physics Society allows every member to give a talk at their meetings, pretty much regardless of what the talk is about as long as at least the title has something to do with physics. They clump these people in the alternative session where they can discuss their conspiracy theories among each other. Somebody should have told the daily mail folks that a talk abstract on the website of a society page is not an indicator for scientific quality… It’s kinda funny though.

“UFO expert Nigel Watson, author of the Haynes UFO Investigation Manual, told MailOnline that Dr Brandenburg is not the first to suggest Mars was ‘murdered’ by nuclear explosions.”

Very funny, agreed, but it illustrates the point – that science requires “authority” not simply freedom of publication.]

Nagel’s nowhere man seeks free-will and moral responsibility

I’ve picked-up where I left off with Thomas Nagel’s View From Nowhere, having put it aside to deal with some domestic priorities and then being captivated by Rebecca Goldstein’s latest.

So back to Nagel. After some good stuff about his problems with the unsatisfactory incompleteness of reductionist objectivity generally, he embarks on a review of various modern philosophical view points grappling with the subjective-objective dualism in various forms; idealisms, Kantian transcendental-realism, Wittgensteinian word-games, and so on. True to form, he opines:

I change my mind about [x]
every time I think about it,
and therefore cannot offer any view
with even moderate confidence.

Specifically here [x] is free-will / autonomy, but this is very much Nagel’s style – to claim progress only in identifying problems with accepted “objective” views, but feigning that he has no alternative to offer. Understandably, those “philosophy-jeerers”, who are his real targets, simply point to the lack of progress with philosophical answers as justification for their charge of irrelevance. Anyway, having now established that the exclusion of the subjective causes problems for explanations of free-will and ethical responsibility, he continues:

[The] sense of an internal explanation [for my autonomous action] exists – an explanation insulated from the external view which is complete in itself and renders illegitimate all further requests for explanation of my action as [simply] an event in the world. As a last resort, the libertarian might claim that anyone who does not accept an account of what I was up to as a basic explanation of action, is a victim of a very limited explanation of what an explanation is – a conception locked into the objective standpoint and which therefore begs the question against the concept of autonomy. Why aren’t these autonomous subjective explanations really just descriptions of how it seemed to the agent – before, during and after – to do what he did; why are they something more than impressions?

Of course they are at least impressions, but we take them to be impressions of something, something whose reality is not guaranteed by the impression. Not being able to say what something is, and at the same time finding the possibility of its absence very disturbing, I am at a dead end.

[…]

I have to conclude that what we want is something impossible, and that the desire for it is evoked precisely by the objective view of ourselves that reveals it to be impossible.

[…]

the interaction between objectivity and the will yields complex results which cannot necessarily be formed into a unified system. This means that the natural ambition of a comprehensive system of ethics may be unrealisable.

I’m much impressed again, as I was with Goldstein earlier, that Godel is telling us something here. If we exclude the subjective – to preserve objective consistency in our epistemology and ontology – we must accept an incomplete model of ethics. ie a realistic world model (including ethics as well as ontology and epistemology) must include or integrate the subject, not treat it as the other half of a dualism, the awkward part, best attacked with spurious charges of moral relativism, etc.

Particularly notable also that he exemplifies the “libertarian” as a victim of inadequate understanding. One of my issues with humanism in its more strident forms is the easy scientistic acceptance of determinism, with free-will as “an illusion”, combined paradoxically with the active personal interest in righting all forms of humanitarian wrongs against individual freedoms. Either humans have potential freedom, constrained by the misguided power of responsible others, or they don’t. Which is it?

The Perverse Love in Revolution #whatsofunnybout

I’m banging on these days about the centrality of “Love” in so many humanist messages, whether philosophical or religious. The original “common ground” on all sides.

Given my opinion of the moronic Russell Brand (***), about whom I blogged several times earlier in the year when he hit the media with his half-baked guff about “the hegemony of the political classes”, I’m not about to send him or his publisher £13.50 for a copy of his book on the subject, of which the reviews and counter-reviews so far only confirm my opinion. His main qualification to speak on the topic seems to be the vague visual resemblance to Che Guevara(*). But kudos to the creativity of the front cover (**):

russell

We need to help change our politicians and political process through …. love …. not revolution.
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding, Russell?

(If we drop the R, the same Love exists in evolution.)
(**)And of course the same visual word game in the title was used by Ron Paul in the US in 2008.)

[Post Note : (*) And how did I forget his @RustyRockets twitter avatar is a Che-a-like anyway. Only went to look at the progress of the PARKLIFE! trolling campaign, which I’d not noticed since the original tweet a couple of days ago. Magic. And for posterior completeness, the original Craig Brown review and the original original Earthman Johann tweet.]

[Post Post Note : and Brand hits back with his own witty self-deprecating you-tube parody. Look, fair play to Brand for getting the question of proper democratic participation higher on the agenda, though with devolution and reform agendas all around us in recent years, it was already there. However fucked-up typical western democracies are, non participation cannot be a healthy message – unless you have a serious alternative to offer, and love is a perfectly serious alternative of course.]

[(***) Post Post Post Note – Fair play to Rusty Rockets.]