Year: 2016

We could do the experiment, but I’d have to kill you afterwards.

Excuse me, could I borrow your brain for a moment? This story about a crisis in psychology due to lack of repeatability has been doing the rounds on social media since yesterday.

For physical sciences, repeatability is an indicator scientific quality; a key part of science “senso stricto”. Life however is not a repeatable experiment, except where that life is expendable. So in life-sciences you can arrange for repeatable procedures where the individual lives can be manipulated and terminated, but a new experiment is a new life, a new individual. For more complex researches, either in the direction of multiple generations, the development of individuals and the evolution of species, or in the direction of higher functioning levels of conscious life in humans and higher animals, strict repeatability becomes a tougher proposition. Tougher to arrange for physically without indirection or intermediation, and more doubtful ethically depending on the kinds of manipulations of life and consciousness involved.

We could do the experiment, but I’d have to kill you afterwards.

Of course high quality scientific research should always strive to be as repeatable as possible, with clear boundary conditions as free as possible from extraneous, intermediating or (god-forbid) subjective effects, and failing that with clear recognition of and accounting for any such effects, so that repeatability and sensitivity to boundary conditions can be judged.

However, it is part of the scientistic turn to hold more complex and more highly evolved levels of nature to the same exclusive standards of objectivity and repeatability as pure physical science. Academic researches can still gain the “scientific” seal of approval even when they are not pure science – or at least pure science cannot be the sole arbiter of academic quality. Pure politics and rhetoric are one end of a scale remote from pure science, but scientific researches elsewhere on that scale are not necessarily “bullshit”. The “scientific” seal of approval itself does come with a fair helping of politics for funding support and the like.

Objectivity, repeatability and evidence are all fine attributes, but it’s fetish to hold all academic endeavours to account to the same standards of objectivity, repeatability and evidence.

Kicking Away The Ladder?

As an engineer, I’ve always found  engineering analogies for evolution particularly engaging. One of the reasons I’m a big fan of Dan Dennett’s scaffolding, cranes and sky-hooks. In learning and in the philosophy of knowledge – epistemology – building in stages commonly uses the idea of ladders between levels – often with the idea that having reached one level, the ladder that got you there appears to now be redundant – “just” a piece of history. It can be pulled-up or kicked-away now you are safe and secure on your new level.

In fact the status of the ladders and steps that got us where we are are, are maybe better illustrated in this graphic from New Scientist:

Ladder

I think the intent here was that the earlier steps were uncertain, faltering and difficult and the later structures get more solid over time. Engineering-wise counter-intuitive that the more solid stuff is higher up in the edifice? But I see a view that says the older steps and ladders – behind us in time – are falling into disrepair when they’re no longer being maintained and used for current work – and the edifice collapses.

The accompanying story is the usual “hype” – a 2016 story “bigger than Higgs and Gravitational Waves”. Bigger also, because it’s a new, even heavier, mass-causing particle beyond the standard model. I still don’t buy that the Higgs Boson or any other mass-causing particle can “have” mass, but that’s by-the-by. (The stories of the double-bump indications of the new massive “particle” have been circulating for a while.)

My real problem with the news item is seeing the completion of the standard model as “the end of a road” – something now behind us – the new stuff, any new particle, being somewhere beyond it. The further out we get, the bigger the problem with presuming our existing models are complete as well as correct. There are still enough indications of doubt and unexplained indications in both the standard particle and standard cosmological models, that no amount of confirmation of the components of our existing models should be presumed for future endeavours. Simply constructing the new from what we believe we know about the existing. Imaginative research and testing should continue to work on the scope of the existing models – with potential new directions branching off from lower down, behind us historically.

Treating them as “job done”, they will simply fall into disrepair.

Refreshing George Davey-Smith @mendel_random

Interesting Life Scientific from Jim Al Khalili interviewing George Davey-Smith today.

Refreshing scientist. In epidemiology – causes and effects of disease in populations – driven originally by the “natural, common sense” of the topic. A minefield of statistics and correlations, naturally, and the individual psychology of group effects. Refreshing not just because of the value of natural sense, but a clear understanding of epistemological effects vs presumed ontology – at root the all-too-easily-dismissed anthropic problem – as well as the recognition of distinct individual and group effects.

A keeper for further follow-up. (Must also join up with recent “Cognitive science isn’t epistemology, and moral psychology isn’t ethics.” line from Massimo Pigliucci.)

Time, time, time. So much listening and writing to be done!

“Newton’s” 2nd Law of Thermodynamics?

The tag-line in my @psybertron twitter bio is “Keeping science (and humanism) honest”.

The humanism is relevant because so much “new-humanism” is of the scientistic “New-Atheist” kind (see previous post). The humanism is parenthetical to the science. It’s the scientism – a puffed-up version of science that really doesn’t understand itself or its real place in the human world – that has always been my main target. An environment where polarisation – “science good (rational) / religion bad (irrational)” – is seen as good enough to engage any argument.

One of my recurring themes is memetics – how in these days of ubiquitous communication it’s the bad ideas which fit existing prejudices and accepted patterns of ideas that spread best.

It’s the “fittest” ideas that spread. It’s not the good ideas that spread.

Great example from Brian Clegg via John Gribbin today on Facebook. The very idea of Newton is already a great and readily accepted icon for enlightenment science – so let’s hang any old “2nd Law” on to him, that’ll work.

There are many Newton, Galileo, Einstein and more examples.

The two topics are connected. 90% of (popular) science writing (including social-media opinion and mainstream-media science-celebrity (*), present company excepted) is crap, because 90% of everything is crap. That is, the problem is not confined to science, but in these days where scientists are encouraged to write for their public, the growth in scientific communication tends towards this low common denominator. Popular science writing is not science. It’s predominantly political rhetoric; how well informed and carefully argued it is becomes increasingly irrelevant to its success as popular science communication.

This is a natural (but bad) consequence of evolution. It needs to be actively countered by humanity. Less is more.

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[Aside – related to this is the “evidence-fetish”, a part of the mis-placed scientism problem. I’m all for the “ask for evidence” campaign where arguments offered are supported by scientific claims – in health, environment and energy areas, say – but it creeps into every debate. Just this morning John Simpson on BBC R4 Today interviewing someone in the Brexit / Remain debate challenged his interviewee with “there’s no evidence” that it will take 10 years to sort out leaving EU. Of course there’s no bl**dy evidence – that will require 20 years of hindsight, and even then it will never be a reproducible situation, so its value will be limited anyway. This is science – and John Simpson – holding back human progress by filling our air-time and attention-spans with irrelevance (and inaccuracy).]

[Post Note : And later today, a case in point. Bill Nye “The Science Guy”.
Hat tip to Massimo Pigliucci.
(*) Science media celeb = “star of edutainment”.]

[Post Note : And this from THE arguing in defence of public engagement,

Challenging:
“You’re a professor at university, FFS.
Stop wasting your time on YouTube.”

Confronting the “critics of public engagement”:
Contrary to my “less is more”? Timely, but worse than I thought:

Philip Moriarty
“cannot sing [Brian] Cox’s praises enough.”

We are at opposite ends of this spectrum. Sure, “telegenic stars of edutainment” inspiring interest in science through mass media – Sagan-wise – is to be lauded, but please, please, please don’t confuse any content with scientific knowledge and information. It’s scary how much I disagree with that Philip Moriarty THE article:

“This is a particularly vitriolic example from a few years back: “Brian Cox doesn’t dumb-down science. He does worse. He makes it disposable.” The author sneeringly claims that “Cox has single-handedly turned the fine art of science presenting into a Katie Price impersonation competition”.

I try to avoid the vitriolic rhetorical “rants” of the likes of Paul “Lord” Harper – but that’s me ;-)]

New Atheism, the Scientistic Turn

Pretty much right on my 15 year agenda here at Psybertron is this 2013 paper:

New Atheism
and the Scientistic Turn
in the Atheism Movement,
by Massimo Pigliucci.

Lots of good stuff – in a 13 page learned, professionally-referenced philosophy paper but starts with:

New Atheist “movement” from a particular angle:
what I see as a clear, and truly novel, though not at all positive,
“scientistic” turn that it marks for atheism in general.

“Not at all” positive. ie largely negative, notice. And towards the end:

 Scientia *includes* science sensu stricto, philosophy, mathematics, and logic – that is, all the reliable sources of third person knowledge that humanity has successfully experimented with so far.

In turn, when scientia is *combined with* input from other humanistic disciplines, the arts, and first-person experience it yields understanding.

Hear hear. Exclusively narrow science – the kind I call objectively greedy reductionist (after Dennett) – misses out on a large and important part of real world understanding. The more scientistic new atheists – and many vocal public scientists – regularly fail to appreciate this in their statements and arguments, even if they pay lip-service to the arts and humanities.

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Post Note:
The above is a link I came across thanks to the exchange below,
concerning another Massimo Pigliucci paper in TPM

TPM @philosophersmag
Cognitive science isn’t epistemology isn’t epistemology, and moral psychology isn’t ethics. New from @mpigliucci at TPM Online. http://www.philosophersmag.com/index.php/footnotes-to-plato/109-the-problem-with-cognitive-and-moral-psychology

(Having scanned the paper ….)

Ian Glendinning @psybertron
@philosophersmag @mpigliucci @judystout1
how is “rationalising not rational” any different to being post-hoc?

Judith Stout @judystout1
@psybertron @philosophersmag @mpigliucci
Rationalizing is to make excuses. Rational is based on reason or logic.

Ian Glendinning @psybertron
@judystout1 @philosophersmag @mpigliucci
err, no.

Massimo Pigliucci @mpigliucci
@psybertron @judystout1 @philosophersmag
err, yes.

And whaddya know,
Massimo was an evolutionary biologist before he was a philosopher of science.
Interesting new source, perhaps.

On Fitness @BenCobley

I tried to remind Ben Cobley today of an earlier conversation, when he used the word “fit”.

It’s a conversation I would like to continue with Ben, with whom I share many common views, since I think it helps us both. (When he – again – appeared to be “unaware” of the point we were discussing he assumed some passive-aggressive challenge on my part! Said I was “having a pop” ….

I have and continue to put a lot of effort into this dialogue. This was start of today’s conversation (latest first):

@psybertron you’ve lost me there – not aware I’ve ever even talked about that latter sense.

@bencobley No, quite the opposite. Just pointing out you keep using fit whilst denying “fittest” surviving in cultural evolution.

@psybertron is there something wrong with it in your eyes?

@bencobley that word “fit” again.

Being reasonable & being rational are different. Reasonable means fitting in with people around, while rational means fitting in with *me*.

Below is the last conversation 7 /8 days ago with Ben Cobley – but there have been previous occasions when I’ve talked “memetics” in problems with what gets understood in our culture. It’s a word I know he’s uncomfortable using, but the basic concept that ideas – and what constitutes rationality – spread through their evolutionary “fitness” is a key interest of mine – and his – whatever word he or I use for it. “Fit” is the word (Latest first)

(I am of course talking from 60 years of real empirical experience, and observing Ben’s own use of language in specific individual conversations, and using his choice of words – “fit” – how am I talking theory? I found this brush-off quite offensive.)

@bencobley no I’m talking real, existing reality. (Using words, obviously.)

ViewConversation 7d

@psybertron not necessarily – because fitting in isn’t a question of logic, it’s a political phenomenon, to use the lingo but not the logic.

@bencobley you used word “fit”. In evolutionary sense fit is about best fit to prevailing conditions – scientific logic prevails. QED?

@psybertron it’s less I’m not convinced by memes as I’m prejudiced against the word. There’s clearly something there, but I react against it

@bencobley as you said before, you’re not convinced by memes. (Memetic is just adjective – concerning memes)

@bencobley 2/2 cause of this problem is memetic. Exclusively scientific rationality is EASY to understand and communicate – but not good.

@bencobley 1/2 2nd part, you and I agree good rationalism is more than this – problem is too many see scientific logical rationale as whole.

@psybertron I don’t understand your first bit, but the second bit I’d say is a part of a bigger whole, of rationalism.

@bencobley that “fit” is memetic. The dominant fashion is “scientistic” – objective reductionism.

@bencobley problem is not logic per se, but the “objects” it works with.

What on earth is ‘rational thought’ anyway? There’s logic certainly, but logic works in straight lines – it cannot cover the whole.

It reminds me of the Engels line: “Everything must justify its existence before the judgment seat of Reason, or give up existence.”

In other words everything must fit in to the way I think or is illegitimate. This is how authoritarianism lingers in our world.

ViewConversation 8d

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Post Note : What’s the point I’m trying to get us to agree, so we can move the conversation on ?

[START]

Ideas spread and catch-on because they “fit”
with the prevailing patterns of though and rationality
in their environment (what I call memetics)
and
NOT necessarily because they are “good” ideas.

And that includes thoughts and ideas
about reason, rationality and belief themselves.

[END]

And of course the previous conversation was not so long before that.

No Platforming, Balanced News & Safe Spaces?

Being discrete? – hard to appreciate in these days of social-media with everything?

Discretion? – Cowardice or Valour @WallyFlea – declining an immediate battle is standard tactics in bigger picture strategy. (Read Sun-Tzu or Clauswitz – or compare Napoleon at Borodino with Napoleon and the Muscovites for a topical example.)

Compare rejection of sharing or giving a platform – with “balance” in news stories always having a spokesperson or statement from the opposing view. (eg scientific claims vs religion or homeopathy say). People who reject “no platforming” are often the first to object to such “false” (politically-correct) balance.

@PeterTatchell‘s rejection by Christchurch Canterbury students union? Peter is an establishment figure – a national treasure – thanks to his years of campaigning getting “radical” issues accepted in the mainstream. I agree with his agenda to “de-radicalise” LGBT issues – they’re just a normal (*) part of society’s arrangements, let’s keep ’em that way. But then he / we have to get used to the idea that students reject the establishment – it’s their job. Part of learning, part of experimenting with alternatives.

Of course, for this reason, the place of learning is a “safe space”; safe enough that students’ mistakes can be left behind – bar the odd embarrassing photo (*) – and; safe enough that their experiments needn’t damage the rest of society – until something genuinely novel or revolutionary breaks out into real life. The progression of roles child – student – adult – parent may not map easily to particular years of age across global cultures, but the pattern remains. There was a time you had to be an adult to vote and affect the rest of our lives. Real life is not a risk-free repeatable experiment.

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(*) Normal – needs unpicking – but that’s another topic for another day.

(*) Oops – see social media. But the point is student identity should not remain as a millstone around their adult necks.

Gravitational Waves – The End of Physics?

It’s odd that this piece should have the tag line a “Cynic’s View” – since it is properly sceptical in my view. I think the “pessimism” is in the wrong place. It’s not “the end of physics” because there’s nothing new to discover, and only details being confirmed (aside from the possibility of new astronomical observations). It may be the end of science because physics is walking blindly into a cul-de-sac and bricking up the exit through which it entered.

Higgs Boson, Gravitational Waves – “secrets of the universe” ? Hardly. Strongly predicted and indirectly detected, they must be the worst kept secrets of a standard model universe. Hard to detect under earth conditions, that’s for sure and for well understood reasons, but barely any doubt they existed according to those models.

Rather than working to fill holes in the standard models, the questions science should be asking are what might be wrong with them. There are plenty of signs something remains fundamentally wrong rather than simply incomplete. If as has been suggested, Einstein didn’t actually believe in Gravitational Waves despite their being predicted by his theories, that suggests to me that Einstein knew this too. As I’ve said before, Einstein was right …. when he knew he was wrong.

Ultimately this is about the pace of scientific progress which looks slow recently compared to the early 20th century heyday, but that may just be our relative perspective. The problem is the pace and force with which we are being driven up the blind alley – a natural consequence of memetic behaviour.

So, how Darwinian is cultural evolution? #DarwinLecture

Attended the Newcastle (North East Humanists) Darwin Day event last night. Durham University Research Fellow in Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, Dr Thom Scott-Phillips asking the question “How Darwinian is Cultural Evolution?”

For someone whose strongest reading recommendation was “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” by (my hero) Dan Dennett, in support of the idea of memes and memetic evolution, I didn’t totally warm (*) to Scott-Phillips and his thesis that cultural evolution isn’t Darwinian.

And again to his credit, he emphasised the is-not-ought distinction between science and ethical choices – the seemingly slippery slope from “Social Darwinism” to Eugenics, the Nazis and such like – but I still felt his science was on the autistic side.

Sure not all cultural evolution is strictly Darwinian – not literally the same on the Variation – Selection – Reproduction “process” test as presented. And yes, “memes” can be hard to pin down objectively. But then neither are genes and biological evolution always entirely objective and Darwinian – (don’t believe that?) There are wide spectra and many levels for each of those three process components between individuals and populations, between literal physical “copying” in reproduction (say of stories and jokes) and communication of their essential messages. The memes are in the semantics (meaning), not any particular level of syntax (physical encoding), reproduction can be at any (physical or rhetorical) level between these. Irony matters.

The “cultural” (ie non-biological) messages are both communicated and evolved. It’s a matter of degree which processes are most significant on the Darwinian scale. We need the concepts of fidelity, fecundity and fertility applied to the right objects and populations. (Points made by a couple of good questioners, who challenged Scott-Phillips’s thesis on the night. Fidelity – how accurately each copy is made, syntactically or semantically, and Fecundity – how many copies in each “generation” – but also how distributed in populations in space and time, and Fertility, – biologically, reproducability depends on the “fertility” of the offspring generation of the “species”. Another minefield for over-simplified science.)

It’s central to my own agenda, and nothing personal, but Scott-Phillips is typical of a vocal class of scientists that pay lip-service to keeping is distinct from ought – focussing on the objective science they know best, whilst having the (human) right to hold ethical opinions. Having a “moral compass” arrived at with (human) society at large, that can nevertheless somehow be based on that same (independent) objective rationality underlying their science. (The brief sojourn into “trolleyology” towards the end of the evening only served to show how inadequate such reasoning really is. Science is simply incoherent when it comes to rational morality – too greedy-reductionist to coin a Dennett phrase. Humanism is a lot more than science.)

Some very good stuff on folk-physics and folk-psychology but nothing on how common “templates” emerge whether evolution is strictly Darwinian or more chaotically driven to “strange attractors” in the “problem space”. Essentially common stories, common causal folk explanations, common practices (like blood-letting) arising independently in different populations at different times without any apparent “communication” possible between them. Too dismissive of “intuition” – not allowed to inform the debate on the relation between folk knowledge and some apparently more “objective” rationality in the scientific method.

Not to mention the whole nature-nurture debate. Not to mention Scott-Phillips own history and inspiration from the first BHA Darwin Day to his current career. Not to mention … a good deal more in my notes.

In summary, some very good good content, allowed me to learn a few ways to better organise my own thinking, and inherently interesting. A good event.

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Notes

(*) Not the best evening for extraneous reasons:

  • Light, sound, staging, visuals, speaker refreshment, audience mikes not really up to the event. Organising and stewarding provided well by NE Humanists, but the whole in-theatre experience handled single-handedly by BHA’s @Ian_M_Scott (Again, full-marks for enthusiastic commitment, but the boy needs help; A first attempt for such an out-of-London event, so teething troubles hopefully.)
  • And sad to hear Richard Dawkins had suffered a minor stroke so was unable to participate as chair, but full marks to Matt Ridley for stepping in. He has a sufficiently commanding presence and assured knowledge that he could provide his own suggestion to the tough audience questions Scott-Phillips made clear really didn’t want to address, and to managing the audience participation generally. (Matt’s the man, after Dennett and Pinker maybe, to go to for nature-nurture arguments in non-biological evolution.)

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[Post Notes 12 June 2016 – Scott-Phillips also speaking on Evolutionary Psychology at BHA 2016 in Birmingham this weekend:

Three good signs of progress there in Scott-Phillips story. (See my comments above from Newcastle.) In fact, that confirmation-bias point is important. Much-maligned science of “Evo-Psych” brings rhetoric in from the cold. Real progress. Confirmation-bias is just another word for fidelity and fecundity – no point challenging every copy of an idea, it needs to be reproduced and reinforced many times before we have “a thing” worth evolving. Evolution is mostly about many cycles of conservatism, with small injections of mutation. All mutation is death / chaos / nihil.

Actually Lucy’s “not even wrong” comment is a sign of popularity of the scientistic dogma – that ethics is somehow entirely within a single Darwinian view of science. Now that, in fact, is the dangerous meme.

OK, good to end on some sensible conclusions.

Real human progress needs real human conversations. Looking forward to the video recording being published.]