I once had a conversation with an acquaintance about a television show she had seen. Her description included the phrase, "and then they did science." I asked her to explain, and she described what the people on the show had done, and I replied, "Well, that's not science." I tried to explain what I meant. I tried to explain things like falsifiable hypotheses, and attempting to eliminate bias, and the like. She didn't understand.
Science isn't men in white lab coats with bubbling beakers. Science isn't pointing shiny instruments at things. Science isn't big expensive machines making measurements of incomprehensible quantities.
Those things can happen as part of the process, but they're not what science is.
Science is the courage to seek the truth. To separate truth from untruth. To exchange what you want to be for what is.
2008-03-08
2008-03-07
Epistemic Ethics
It occurs to me that before I go on using these terms much more, I should write down definitions.
So, first: Epistemic Ethics. Epistemic ethics has to do with assigning moral value to how much one cares about the quality and provenance of one's knowledge.
The idea is that being skeptical (or credulous) can make you a good (or bad) person.
Let me put it in context: Nowadays you can go into a grocery store, and buy broccoli that the merchant assures you was grown in a garden without pesticides. In a country with fair laws. By farmers who weren't being oppressed. That's called provenance. How did it get to you, where did it come from?
Implicitly, you're a bad person if you don't care where your broccoli came from. If you buy your broccoli at the other store, the one across the street, you get a little twinge of guilt and fear that it might have been grown in toxic waste by slaves (which isn't far from the truth, maybe, but that's not my point).
And yet there's a section in the first store, the one with the happy ethical broccoli, that sells herbal supplements for improving various complaints of physiology. Most of them say what they're for. But if they do, they also have to say "These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA." But that's not a very strong warning, is it? Face it, we've all come to think of the FDA as a lumbering inept government bureaucracy (mostly because it's true). So if they haven't gotten around to finding out whether this particular flower or root will help me go to sleep at night, who cares?
But what the warning really should say, in most cases, is, "These statements have not been evaluated by anybody."
The FDA, flawed as it is, is an attempt to put into practice a particular attitude. It's an attitude that has evolved over the past few millennia, and has proven itself to help people in getting at the truth. It shows up in philosophy, it shows up in the US constitution, and it shows up in the scientific method. It's hard to articulate, and many people have done a better job of it than I could do here, so I will only try to sum up: it's an attitude of intellectual humility, and mutual honesty. It's epistemic ethics.
When the FDA requires a pharmaceutical company to conduct rigorous double-blind clinical trials, it's attempting to enforce epistemic ethics. You can argue, with good cause, about how it's implemented and how the system has evolved, but you must admit that it's done a good job at reducing how often people can get away with making stuff up. It's introduced disincentives for people to proffer to other people junk knowledge.
Western medicine has flawed standards of proof, and questionable motives, yes. But it sure beats no standards of proof, and obvious motives.
And yet people have turned away from the attitude that brought about the FDA. They're forgetting the motivation because they're angry at the implementation. They're forgetting the moral root of the situation. They're buying products that bear the words "These statements have not been evaluated" as a badge of honor.
So, when I see a flower in a bottle, one aisle over from the morally upright broccoli, it bugs me. It bugs me that I might be living in a society where you can be a bad person for ignoring where your broccoli came from, but you get a free pass to ignore where your knowledge came from.
And that's a problem of epistemic ethics.
So, first: Epistemic Ethics. Epistemic ethics has to do with assigning moral value to how much one cares about the quality and provenance of one's knowledge.
The idea is that being skeptical (or credulous) can make you a good (or bad) person.
Let me put it in context: Nowadays you can go into a grocery store, and buy broccoli that the merchant assures you was grown in a garden without pesticides. In a country with fair laws. By farmers who weren't being oppressed. That's called provenance. How did it get to you, where did it come from?
Implicitly, you're a bad person if you don't care where your broccoli came from. If you buy your broccoli at the other store, the one across the street, you get a little twinge of guilt and fear that it might have been grown in toxic waste by slaves (which isn't far from the truth, maybe, but that's not my point).
And yet there's a section in the first store, the one with the happy ethical broccoli, that sells herbal supplements for improving various complaints of physiology. Most of them say what they're for. But if they do, they also have to say "These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA." But that's not a very strong warning, is it? Face it, we've all come to think of the FDA as a lumbering inept government bureaucracy (mostly because it's true). So if they haven't gotten around to finding out whether this particular flower or root will help me go to sleep at night, who cares?
But what the warning really should say, in most cases, is, "These statements have not been evaluated by anybody."
The FDA, flawed as it is, is an attempt to put into practice a particular attitude. It's an attitude that has evolved over the past few millennia, and has proven itself to help people in getting at the truth. It shows up in philosophy, it shows up in the US constitution, and it shows up in the scientific method. It's hard to articulate, and many people have done a better job of it than I could do here, so I will only try to sum up: it's an attitude of intellectual humility, and mutual honesty. It's epistemic ethics.
When the FDA requires a pharmaceutical company to conduct rigorous double-blind clinical trials, it's attempting to enforce epistemic ethics. You can argue, with good cause, about how it's implemented and how the system has evolved, but you must admit that it's done a good job at reducing how often people can get away with making stuff up. It's introduced disincentives for people to proffer to other people junk knowledge.
Western medicine has flawed standards of proof, and questionable motives, yes. But it sure beats no standards of proof, and obvious motives.
And yet people have turned away from the attitude that brought about the FDA. They're forgetting the motivation because they're angry at the implementation. They're forgetting the moral root of the situation. They're buying products that bear the words "These statements have not been evaluated" as a badge of honor.
So, when I see a flower in a bottle, one aisle over from the morally upright broccoli, it bugs me. It bugs me that I might be living in a society where you can be a bad person for ignoring where your broccoli came from, but you get a free pass to ignore where your knowledge came from.
And that's a problem of epistemic ethics.
2008-03-06
Foundations
There is no relief from Descartes's deceiving demon. If I dig at the roots of my epistemic foundations, that is the bedrock I always find.
Given the deceiving demon, what does an individual possessed of reason take as a maxim of action? Reason itself, alone, is inert, and must be moved from without.
Even alethetropy cannot have an absolute foundation. I want to use it as my pedestal, but when I push against it, it shifts.
Alethetropy, then, must be taken as a guideline, a rule of thumb. It can serve as a moral basis, but like any other, must it be accepted on faith?
Given the deceiving demon, what does an individual possessed of reason take as a maxim of action? Reason itself, alone, is inert, and must be moved from without.
Even alethetropy cannot have an absolute foundation. I want to use it as my pedestal, but when I push against it, it shifts.
Alethetropy, then, must be taken as a guideline, a rule of thumb. It can serve as a moral basis, but like any other, must it be accepted on faith?
2008-02-28
Bad skeptic!
There's a problem with modern skepticism.
When somebody objects to charlatanry on the grounds that its principles are wrong, that's bad skepticism. I've seen people object to homeopathy, for instance, by pointing out that the Law Of Infinitesimals contradicts known scientific fact. Bad skeptic! No biscuit!
The scientific mindset doesn't require you to prove how something works, or why something works, but that you prove THAT it works. Double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials (that old chestnut) do not prove that a researcher's reasoning is valid; they prove that some particular testable prediction was correct or not correct. With error bars.
Knowing WHY something is, is a very different thing from knowing THAT it is. The former is deep, and rich, and in some cases might in fact be impossible (maybe fully understanding quantum mechanics, say, takes, in some inescapable information-theory kind of way, two more square inches of cortex than you've got in your skull). The latter, though, we have a chance at, and sometimes may even get a firm grasp on.
But bad skepticism happens a lot. People who think themselves intelligent, un-gullible, alethetropic, or epistemically virtuous, often engage in bad skepticism. When they should know better.
It happens because of a deeper problem. I think it may be connected to the Myth Of Reason. We've allowed ourselves to get so cocky about being logical, that we've begun attributing to logic powers it doesn't have.
Which, if we do not correct it, will make us no better than charlatans ourselves.
When somebody objects to charlatanry on the grounds that its principles are wrong, that's bad skepticism. I've seen people object to homeopathy, for instance, by pointing out that the Law Of Infinitesimals contradicts known scientific fact. Bad skeptic! No biscuit!
The scientific mindset doesn't require you to prove how something works, or why something works, but that you prove THAT it works. Double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials (that old chestnut) do not prove that a researcher's reasoning is valid; they prove that some particular testable prediction was correct or not correct. With error bars.
Knowing WHY something is, is a very different thing from knowing THAT it is. The former is deep, and rich, and in some cases might in fact be impossible (maybe fully understanding quantum mechanics, say, takes, in some inescapable information-theory kind of way, two more square inches of cortex than you've got in your skull). The latter, though, we have a chance at, and sometimes may even get a firm grasp on.
But bad skepticism happens a lot. People who think themselves intelligent, un-gullible, alethetropic, or epistemically virtuous, often engage in bad skepticism. When they should know better.
It happens because of a deeper problem. I think it may be connected to the Myth Of Reason. We've allowed ourselves to get so cocky about being logical, that we've begun attributing to logic powers it doesn't have.
Which, if we do not correct it, will make us no better than charlatans ourselves.
2008-02-27
Wheelbarrow
This morning I saw
on Lexington Road
on the bank of a stream
by a well-manicured house
a wheelbarrow
overturned
rotting into the ground under a pile of brush.
We none of us can maintain our worlds
keep them in good repair
and proper order. All decays.
I am on Thoreau's railbed, I think.
And here is a graveyard
on and on.
Lives that came and went.
But produced, evidently, headstone-carvers
who survived them.
Someone made the wheelbarrow new, once.
So what I crave to know
is
is someone somewhere building a wheelbarrow today?
Will someone again build a wheelbarrow tomorrow?
on Lexington Road
on the bank of a stream
by a well-manicured house
a wheelbarrow
overturned
rotting into the ground under a pile of brush.
We none of us can maintain our worlds
keep them in good repair
and proper order. All decays.
I am on Thoreau's railbed, I think.
And here is a graveyard
on and on.
Lives that came and went.
But produced, evidently, headstone-carvers
who survived them.
Someone made the wheelbarrow new, once.
So what I crave to know
is
is someone somewhere building a wheelbarrow today?
Will someone again build a wheelbarrow tomorrow?
2008-02-21
Turning
What's on my mind? My mind. It slurs, sloshes. It's troubled, but not by trouble. Just turbulent. Waves. Eddies. I knock on the glass, and within I answer back with a smile, and bubbles. And swim away, drifting loose in the bowl. I mouth the words. He shakes his head in reply. This is real, he says. This is us. We're happening.
But if nothing comes of it? So much disappointment. So much guilt, embarrassment at hopes forgotten, expectations not just unfulfilled, but denied the honor of regret.
Slow, slow. And one says that's the way, and one says that's nothing, that's void. Lack.
And I won't know. Even in the final accounting. So the question remains, as ever, what to do, when the answer will never be known. Alethetropy assumes return, not question alone. So if there is no answer, if the sum is never taken, what then? Then, then. Then there is no alethetropy. Only as an exercise, only the subjunctive. But the subjunctive is. Its referent absent, still it is, and gives power. So is alethetropy. It is not something we can have. It is a direction, not a destination. All we can do is cast the rope ahead, for the next. The best we can give them, is that we looked about, opened our eyes, and tried to discern the light, before we let go.
But if nothing comes of it? So much disappointment. So much guilt, embarrassment at hopes forgotten, expectations not just unfulfilled, but denied the honor of regret.
Slow, slow. And one says that's the way, and one says that's nothing, that's void. Lack.
And I won't know. Even in the final accounting. So the question remains, as ever, what to do, when the answer will never be known. Alethetropy assumes return, not question alone. So if there is no answer, if the sum is never taken, what then? Then, then. Then there is no alethetropy. Only as an exercise, only the subjunctive. But the subjunctive is. Its referent absent, still it is, and gives power. So is alethetropy. It is not something we can have. It is a direction, not a destination. All we can do is cast the rope ahead, for the next. The best we can give them, is that we looked about, opened our eyes, and tried to discern the light, before we let go.
2008-02-20
Needle and thorn
Walk, before you die, among catbriar and pine. Drink their lofty dappled air.
A haze of vegetable steel. Twining vines, sharp points. To walk that path is to yield to its piercing embrace, enveloped, bound, penetrated.
I would, if I could, stand still. Let the questing soft climb enchain me. Become the heart of a swaying pillar of this bark-walled cathedral to the filtered sun. Be grasped caressed gently inexorably by sweet curling tendrils jade.
And my troubled turmoil rot, sink to loam, and feed the singing still forest mind.
A haze of vegetable steel. Twining vines, sharp points. To walk that path is to yield to its piercing embrace, enveloped, bound, penetrated.
I would, if I could, stand still. Let the questing soft climb enchain me. Become the heart of a swaying pillar of this bark-walled cathedral to the filtered sun. Be grasped caressed gently inexorably by sweet curling tendrils jade.
And my troubled turmoil rot, sink to loam, and feed the singing still forest mind.
2008-02-19
Running
Why am I running? Why am I running away from what I have to do?
I rationalize. I suggest, well, maybe it's for the best, because what you're supposed to do isn't really what you're supposed to do. But that doesn't sit well. First of all, it's obvious rationalization, and rationalization is an epistemic vice. Second, if it were true, I'd expect it to look more like doing something else, and less like just not doing this. I don't exactly have a bias toward action. And I feel like I should. I suppose it's possible that the right thing to do right now is nothing, but my upbringing tells me otherwise. My upbringing says, no, you only get to use that excuse if you're doing something more important, not if you're doing nothing at all. And then the rationalizer says, well, I'm always doing something; suppose breathing or daydreaming is the more important thing? And we go around again.
I also have learned helplessness. And what an apt learner I am. Even when I protest, it's always phrased as "Why can't I?" Never do I suggest that maybe I just could. There is implicitly some savage dark power shackling me. It must be dark, indeed. However I peer into the shadows, I do not see it.
Certainly we can't have evolved lazy. I admit, it makes sense to conserve resources. It makes sense to minimize risk. But there has to be evolutionary pressure to do what we must.
What if that's it? What if we have evolved to do what we must? And here, in the Age of Fructose, there is so little must to go around, action escapes us. We're content to sit in a great crowd, picking nits from one another's fur, and we don't get up to forage for fruit, because fruit is all around us. At our fingertips. Clinging to us. Weighing down our bellies and buttocks. Instead of hiding in the trees where it belongs, beckoning to us to climb.
I rationalize. I suggest, well, maybe it's for the best, because what you're supposed to do isn't really what you're supposed to do. But that doesn't sit well. First of all, it's obvious rationalization, and rationalization is an epistemic vice. Second, if it were true, I'd expect it to look more like doing something else, and less like just not doing this. I don't exactly have a bias toward action. And I feel like I should. I suppose it's possible that the right thing to do right now is nothing, but my upbringing tells me otherwise. My upbringing says, no, you only get to use that excuse if you're doing something more important, not if you're doing nothing at all. And then the rationalizer says, well, I'm always doing something; suppose breathing or daydreaming is the more important thing? And we go around again.
I also have learned helplessness. And what an apt learner I am. Even when I protest, it's always phrased as "Why can't I?" Never do I suggest that maybe I just could. There is implicitly some savage dark power shackling me. It must be dark, indeed. However I peer into the shadows, I do not see it.
Certainly we can't have evolved lazy. I admit, it makes sense to conserve resources. It makes sense to minimize risk. But there has to be evolutionary pressure to do what we must.
What if that's it? What if we have evolved to do what we must? And here, in the Age of Fructose, there is so little must to go around, action escapes us. We're content to sit in a great crowd, picking nits from one another's fur, and we don't get up to forage for fruit, because fruit is all around us. At our fingertips. Clinging to us. Weighing down our bellies and buttocks. Instead of hiding in the trees where it belongs, beckoning to us to climb.
write-once
You can't make the truth not be. Once it is written, it cannot be unwritten. You can add to the truth and thus change it, but you cannot remove what is, once it is. If you make a mistake, you can never not have made it. But you can fix it, if it's the sort of mistake that can be fixed, and thus bring the sum of some facet of the truth back to where it was. And, probably, that facet is what you wished to change to begin with.
The universe is write-once memory.
The universe is write-once memory.
2007-06-22
Open Letter
to the whole %*&# world:
NO.
I'm busy, God damn it.
How DARE you presume that what you want me to do right now is more important than what I want me to do right now.
NO.
I'm busy, God damn it.
How DARE you presume that what you want me to do right now is more important than what I want me to do right now.
2007-06-15
Epistemic conscience
What if all this creationist nonsense is a good thing?
What if it's keeping science honest?
Seriously.
The scientific method's great, but if there were no competing worldview, wouldn't scientists get lazy? Wouldn't they get sloppy about adhering to their own rules? Think of Church-dominated Europe, and the Borgias.
What if it's keeping science honest?
Seriously.
The scientific method's great, but if there were no competing worldview, wouldn't scientists get lazy? Wouldn't they get sloppy about adhering to their own rules? Think of Church-dominated Europe, and the Borgias.
2007-06-08
The Drunkard's Walk
Suppose you're expected to be in a particular place, but you keep wandering off. Well, if you keep wandering, and you wander randomly enough, you'll pass through the place you're supposed to be occasionally. Someone whose job it is to evaluate whether you're where you're supposed to be, and who always goes to look for you at that spot, will conclude that you're there, but not often enough.
Now suppose you could take a pill that makes you walk faster. Makes you run, even. You'll still wander, but you'll pass through that spot more frequently. Someone checking that spot will conclude that the pill makes you better able to stay where you're supposed to be.
So, how about you?
Are you feeding your kids amphetamines?
Now suppose you could take a pill that makes you walk faster. Makes you run, even. You'll still wander, but you'll pass through that spot more frequently. Someone checking that spot will conclude that the pill makes you better able to stay where you're supposed to be.
So, how about you?
Are you feeding your kids amphetamines?
2007-05-11
Making Tea
My dad thinks like me, at least a little bit.
This occurs to me because I just made a cup of tea. (Not properly, according to Douglas Adams, by the way. In Salmon of Doubt, which I recently finished, he stresses that one should use boilING water, not boilED water, and discusses warming the teapot and such. I poured water from the hot spigot on the water dispenser into a paper cup from my desk drawer. So the tea I'm discussing here is not British Kitchen Tea, but American Cubicle Tea.) I have this way I dunk the tea bag into the water. A long time ago I noticed that if you pour hot water over a tea bag, it wets the bag itself first, filling in all the little pores with surface tension, forming an airtight membrane. Depending on how the water splashes and such, you can get more or less water into the tea before the bag gets completely wet, preventing any more air from getting out and consequently any more water from getting in, especially since the air, now trapped by the hot water, is also heated, and so expands. If you do it just right you get a little inflated balloon full of hot air and dry tea.
So I have this habit where I fill the cup with hot water first, then lower the bag in, so that water flows in through the bottom of the bag while air can still flow out at the top.
I guess I assume that everybody would make the same observation, and that everybody would make tea this way (when they're not doing it in the kitchen and using a pre-warmed pot). But invariably I see people heading for the water dispenser with the little tea tag already dangling from the lip of the cup, and I have many times noticed little balloons floating on top of cups full of weak tea. Why doesn't everyone make tea the same way I do? I could assume that I'm just smarter than everyone else and be smug about it, but I think it's more realistic to conclude that I'm anal-retentive and that over-analyzing the way one dunks a tea bag is asinine.
A couple of weeks ago while I was visiting my dad, he made a cup of tea. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed him lowering the bag into the cup, letting water flow in the bottom while the air flowed out the top.
The way I think may be asinine, but I'm not the only one, and I know where I got it from.
This occurs to me because I just made a cup of tea. (Not properly, according to Douglas Adams, by the way. In Salmon of Doubt, which I recently finished, he stresses that one should use boilING water, not boilED water, and discusses warming the teapot and such. I poured water from the hot spigot on the water dispenser into a paper cup from my desk drawer. So the tea I'm discussing here is not British Kitchen Tea, but American Cubicle Tea.) I have this way I dunk the tea bag into the water. A long time ago I noticed that if you pour hot water over a tea bag, it wets the bag itself first, filling in all the little pores with surface tension, forming an airtight membrane. Depending on how the water splashes and such, you can get more or less water into the tea before the bag gets completely wet, preventing any more air from getting out and consequently any more water from getting in, especially since the air, now trapped by the hot water, is also heated, and so expands. If you do it just right you get a little inflated balloon full of hot air and dry tea.
So I have this habit where I fill the cup with hot water first, then lower the bag in, so that water flows in through the bottom of the bag while air can still flow out at the top.
I guess I assume that everybody would make the same observation, and that everybody would make tea this way (when they're not doing it in the kitchen and using a pre-warmed pot). But invariably I see people heading for the water dispenser with the little tea tag already dangling from the lip of the cup, and I have many times noticed little balloons floating on top of cups full of weak tea. Why doesn't everyone make tea the same way I do? I could assume that I'm just smarter than everyone else and be smug about it, but I think it's more realistic to conclude that I'm anal-retentive and that over-analyzing the way one dunks a tea bag is asinine.
A couple of weeks ago while I was visiting my dad, he made a cup of tea. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed him lowering the bag into the cup, letting water flow in the bottom while the air flowed out the top.
The way I think may be asinine, but I'm not the only one, and I know where I got it from.
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