William M. Briggs

Whatever you do, don’t diss John Stuart Mill or Jeremy Bentham at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. You might just “offend” the friend of a student, and will thus be out on your keister.

Here’s what happened: according to the Alliance Defense Fund, Kenneth Howell, an adjunct, sent an email to his class explaining the dismal philosophy of utilitarianism.

It is crucial to understand that Howell’s class was in the Religious Studies Department, and the course was “RLST 447 Modern Catholic Thought”. The blurb for that course reads:

Traces the history of Catholicism in its interaction with the modern world from the sixteenth century to the present, concentrating on the uneasy relationships that Catholicism has sustained with the modern world. 3 undergraduate hours. 4 graduate hours. Prerequisite: RLST 127 or consent of instructor.

Now, anybody but a UI administrator or a modern student—defined as a student who already knows everything that she will be taught—would read that blurb and expect that the nature of the “uneasy relationships” the Catholic Church has with the modern world would be explained.

But, no. See, before the final exam, Howell sent an email to his class defining utilitarianism and its relationship to morality and the Catholic Church. He sent this because the material was to be part of the exam.

A friend of student—not the student—was frightened by Howell’s explanation. She was—I’m guessing it’s a “she”; the accused nowadays is not allowed to learn the name of his accuser; the “seriousness of the charges” trumps four-hundred years of English common law–she was offended!

I can think of no crime short of racism that is as horrific, as brutal, as soul-searing—scratch that: no soul here; make it awareness-searing—as being offended! The mental abilities of UI administrators allowed them to agree with this assessment of the egregiousness of Howell’s crime, and mere moments after the receipt of the email, Howell was shown the door.

Due to the ADF, the agitations of some students, and, amazingly, some other faculty members, the UI administrators did what they do best: cower. Howell was reinstated, in a weak way. The administrators were quick to acknowledge only one thing: they had done no wrong.

How about Howell’s class email? He said:

[B]y what criterion should we judge whether sexual acts are right or wrong? …Utilitarianism in the popular sense is fundamentally a moral theory that judges right or wrong by its practical outcomes…[A] man who is trying to decide whether he should cheat on his wife, if he is a utilitarian, will weigh the various consequences. If the cheating side of the ledger is better, he will conclude that it’s okay to cheat. If the faithful side is better, he will refrain from cheating…Utilitarianism counsels that moral decisions should NOT be based on the inherent meaning of acts. Acts are only good or bad relative to outcomes.

Thus far, an excellent summary. Howell then makes the sound logical deduction—this argument really does follow from utilitarianism—

If two men consent to engage in sexual acts, according to utilitarianism, such an act would be morally okay. But notice too that if a ten year old agrees to a sexual act with a 40 year old, such an act would also be moral if even it is illegal under the current law. Notice too that our concern is with morality, not law. So by the consent criterion, we would have to admit certain cases as moral which we presently would not approve of.

Howell then contrasts one of those uneasy relationships the Catholic Church has had with the world and explains “Natural Moral Law (NML)” and its relationship to certain activities between men. In a non-graphic manner, he suggests that these acts are sometimes injurious to the health of the practitioners, an empirically true statement.

To round out the Catholic viewpoint, he says,

Natural Moral Theory says that if we are to have healthy sexual lives, we must return to a connection between procreation and sex. Why? Because that is what is REAL. It is based on human sexual anatomy and physiology.

Since Howell’s gray matter is more densely packed than a UI college administrator’s, he had the sense to anticipate squeamishness, and so ended his missive:

All I ask as your teacher is that you approach these questions as a thinking adult….Unless you have done extensive research into homosexuality and are cognizant of the history of moral thought, you are not ready to make judgments about moral truth in this matter. [emphasis mine]

That last line, my dear readers, is what sunk him. How dare he imply that unless one actually study the history of moral thought, one cannot make judgments about moral truth! The darlings at UI don’t need to study. They already know!

Update Let’s not forget that the University of Illinois happily employs—with tenure!—terrorist Bill Ayers.

Away back in March, I predicted that if Obamacare passed, we citizens would eventually foot the bill for homeopathic treatments. This evidence for this forecast was inductive, in two parts.

The first was that rumors were had that homeopathic language was written into the bill (yes, in more ways than one). These vague insinuations could not then be pinned down, mostly because the bill was so long that our betters in Congress never bothered to read it to explain it to us.

The Senate had also previously meddled with the NIH to force it to pay attention to complimentary treatments. Complimentary in the sense of rarely efficacious and sometimes harmful. It created the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and gave it loads of our money to dispense. Which—can you guess?—it did.

Because government has broached these subjects before, and because certain of our betters are inclined towards the idea, it is likely that the bureaucrats in charge of writing the rules and regulations originating from the new law will include avenues for complementary treatments—like acupuncture, chiropractic, and homeopathy.

Our second piece of evidence was that other countries with socialized medicine, upon creating their own small panels of experts to decide the medical fates of their countries—this is, after all, the definition of socialism—included mandatory payments for homeopathy.

From a purely financial point of view, this might not be as insane as it first sounds. As I wrote before:

Usually, [people who use complementary treatments] needn’t have gone to a physician anyway. They have colds, minor aches and pains, or other maladies that will self correct.

If complementary procedures were just as expensive as standard ones, insurance companies would surely not cover them. But since they are cheaper, actuaries can estimate how many people will use a placebo therapy that would have instead gone to a physician. Perhaps oddly, if the number that would opt for, say, homeopathy (if it were covered) is large, then the insurance company will cover homeopathic treatments. This saves them money.

When the government takes over medical care, they will have to legalize these kinds of actuarial calculations. It must decide what will be paid for and what won’t…

Therefore, if there is any rationality left in government, they will probably come to the same conclusions that insurance companies have, and they will fund homeopathic and other integrative therapies.

As proof of this, we have a sub-headline from Der Spiegel, “With budgets strained, politicians are questioning whether the alternative treatments should be covered by state insurance systems.” Even a politician can see that we can save lots of money by switching real pills for water.

A well known benefit of socialism is that politicians in that system are smarter than any of their subjects, including doctors and physicists. Take Germany for example:

Rainer Hess, the chairman of the Federal Joint Committee, a body in Germany that determines which medications will be covered by the state health care system, says that even though homeopathy hasn’t been scientifically proven, Germany’s government-subsidized health care system is nevertheless required to reimburse patients who seek homeopathic treatments. Hess describes the situation as “extremely dissatisfactory.” He says numerous efforts have been made to eliminate payment for visits to homeopaths, but that “influential politicians have always hindered these efforts.”

How about England? Here’s a headline from the Daily Mail: “More homeopathy on NHS as health cash is squeezed.” The story continues:

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley yesterday rejected calls from MPs on the Commons science committee to ban funding of the unproven treatment.

He effectively gave the green light for spending on homeopathy to go up, because of his plans for patients to be able to ‘shop around’ until they find a GP willing to prescribe complementary therapies.

This means more patients will have access to such treatments. There will be no restrictions on the advertising of homeopathic treatments, he added.

Taxpayers pay about £4million a year for homeopathy on the NHS.

Nobody argues homeopathy “works” in the sense of being biological active (it certainly has a placebo effect). Which is why England’s “Department of Health said that efficacy was not the only important factor when deciding whether scarce NHS resources should be spent on a treatment – patient choice was essential too.”

Well, there is no need to continue, is there? The evidence is plain. We will soon be paying for people’s nerves to be assuaged with vials of distilled water.

I am, once more, reliving my Air Force days. I am strapped into a seat designed for a midget, jetting across the Wild Blue towards the shores of Lake Michigan, where I will deposit myself at the farthest reaches of the internet for two weeks. Dispatches might become irregular, responses will be slow.

According to reliable, but anonymous sources, well known to your author, the site WMBRIGGS.COM has finally climbed to the first page of the Google search results, when using the term “statistician.” Try it yourself.

Unenlightened engines, such as Yahoo and Bing, have not yet joined the revolution.

I am unable to verify the Googlgasm because they have my cookie, and searching for anything statistical always plops my name up first.

If this wondrous news can be verified—it is only tentative—it must mean that riches will soon be mine. Or so I have been told repeatedly by Search Engine Optimization mavens, who make their livings driving sites to top search spots, and who tout their services more vociferously than the Lemon Drop Kid.

In preparation of my upcoming wealth, I have begun to spend freely, not to say profligately. I figure whatever goes out the door now, will only come back to me treble. I’ve never been one for jewelry—mere shiny rocks from the ground—but I could always use a new hat. My eye is on a steel blue Borsalino fedora.

As a courtesy to the inevitable flood of new readers, I have compiled a page of my most awesome posts concerning probability puzzles, statistics, and the statistical analysis of global warming. Hardy perennials all.

When doing this, I realize how little we’ve covered some subjects and how much remains to be done. So stick around!

The page, found here permanently (see the upper-right portion of your screen), is reproduced for your delight and edification.

A collection of links to fundamental posts in probability, statistics, and statistical methods in global warming research.

Probability Puzzles

Monty Hall

St Petersburg Paradox

Two-envelope Problem I, II

One Son Born Tuesday

Prisoner’s Dilemma

Monkeys Typing Shakespeare

Statistics

How to fool yourself with Statistics I, II, III, IV

Confidence Intervals, Logic, Induction I, II

All Models Are Not Wrong

Randomness is a Matter of Information: why frequentism is wrong I, II, III, IV

Randomized Trials Are Not Needed

Predictive Statistics: GPA Case Study, I, II

Global Warming Statistical Applications

A Citizen’s Guide to Global Warming Evidence

What is—and what isn’t—evidence of global warming, Overview, I, II, III, IV, V, VI

Do not smooth times series, you hockey puck! I, II, III

Climate Model Uncertainty: I, II

Homogenization of temperature series I, II, III, IV, V

Hurricanes have not increased: misuse of running means I, II

Zombie attacks might increase due to global warming, study shows

If you have not yet done so, I want you to read David Stove, one of the best philosophers of the twentieth century, a man who wrote with such clarity and vigor that his writing has often been compared to Fred Astaire’s dancing.

His literary executor Jim Franklin maintains a Stove site, which contains a few reprints of Stove’s works. Unfortunately, as happens with all websites, several of Franklin’s links are now dead. But you can still buy most of Stove’s books.

An annotated list:

• Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists, preprinted twice as Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult, and Anything Goes. Popper and After is, somehow, on line freely.

  It is from this book that we learn how scare quotes—like those used around the word “truth”—can be used to devastating effect. Stove also teaches us how philosophers like Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn “sabotage logical expressions”, a technique used to imply truth while simultaneously denying it.

  The first part of Popper and After may be read by everyone. The second part is harder going and contains some hard-core philosophy.

• Evolutionary psychology, memes and Richard Dawkins’s theories in general, and other loose thinking in evolution are taken apart in Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution.

  This is not—I repeat: not—a criticism of evolution, a theory which Stove says is “overwhelmingly probable” (Stove is a strict logician; no empirical theory can be 100% certain, but it can be 1 – ε certain). It is instead an evisceration of the faulty arguments used by many evolutionary psychologists who purport to have conclusively explained every aspect of human behavior. Stove’s remarks are thus on par with Stephen Gould’s, who frequently claimed that some evolutionary psychologists are more adept at creating “Just So” stories than they were at creating testable theories.

  Stove also echoes philosopher Mark Midgley’s devastating critique of memes (see this; I cannot locate her works on line). Midgley is also not an anti-evolutionist. Memes are one of those toy ideas people, especially young people, like to play with that appear solid, but which dissolve like cotton candy in water when examined closely.

• If you are a statistician, logician, or mathematician of any kind, you must read The Rationality of Induction, Stove’s masterwork, a follow up to his Probability and Hume’s Inductive Scepticism. My copy is so marked up, I’m considering buying a new one so that I can start over undistracted.

  Not only does Stove amply demonstrate induction’s rationality, he is the first author to have successfully defined what the skeptical thesis of induction is, which is this:

  For all e and all h such that the inference from e to h is inductive, and for all tautological t, P(h|t.e) = P(h|t).

  I won’t explain that here; but to statisticians it should appear absurd that anybody would believe it. Yet some do. I had a paper once rejected in Bayesian Analysis by a referee who claimed that induction was a “problem”; that is, that the skeptical thesis was true. From a statistician! (Well, a philosopher who does statistics.)

• The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies. An extended critique of idealism, which is the theory that nothing exists except our thoughts. Plato was an idealist, Berkeley perhaps its greatest proponent.

  But there are many modern idealists; postmodernism is the most current incarnation. Idealism is also the basis of Stove’s contest—with cash prize!—to find the worst argument in the world. In short form, it is this: “We can know things only as they are related to us; therefore, we cannot know things as they are in themselves.” See this announcement.

  From the book, Franklin posts the chapter, “What is wrong with our thoughts.”

• On Enlightenment. This work, though historical examples, illustrates Stove’s conservatism, which is solidly in the Burkean tradition, a tradition which, as readers know, is not always found in America. From the blurb:
  

  Despite their best intentions, social reformers who attempt to improve the world as a whole inevitably make things worse….[T]oday’s social structures are so large and complex that any widespread social reform will have innumerable unforeseen consequences. For example, the welfare state may diminish individual initiative, the use of pesticides may increase the food supply while polluting the water supply, the popularizing of university education may lead to a decline in academic standards….[Government] powers must be limited in order to prevent large-scale damage.

• Cricket Versus Republicanism and Other Essays. Less philosophical, but entertaining works. His more polarizing essays are here: on race, on feminism.
• Roger Kimball brought Stove to the States with his edited volume of essays Against the Idols of the Age. If you’re only going to buy one book, or have only a cursory interest, make it this one. Each essay here appears elsewhere.

Is the Arizona law racist? Not only no, but obviously no. For the simple logical reason that a law cannot be racist, only people can.

For example, suppose our betters in Congress passed a law stating that self-identified whites shall be granted twenty bonus points on each SAT test. So-called race-norming laws, rules, or mandates like this are quite common.

By which is meant, awarding advantages to individuals because their self-reported race matches certain categories are often institutionalized as lawful. Interestingly, it is still, at least here in the States, “self-identified” and not externally measured race.

But it is the people who created the law, and those that follow or implement it, who are racist, if by racist we mean people with a prejudiced belief that one race is superior to others, or a person who discriminates based on race (dictionary definitions).

Those who created the bonus-point law must either have believed that non-whites are, for whatever reason, superior to whites in SAT test scores, or they just felt like discriminating against non-whites for reasons of race, or they shared both attitudes.

Two things are of especial note here. First, you cannot have a positive without a negative, for just the same reason you cannot have a one-sided coin. Our race-norming law positively discriminates for whites, and simultaneously negatively discriminates against non-whites. Thus, whether the law is “good” discrimination or “bad” depends on your perspective.

Second, the people who created this law are racist while the people who create another law which awards points to specific whites who suffer identifiable (or provable) specific acts directed against them are not. That’s confusing, so here’s an example.

A white person, while taking the SAT, is told arbitrarily to leave the examination room early by the proctor. Our second law states that if the proctor’s actions can be proved to be arbitrary, whether or not the proctor made his decision based on the race of the test taker, the test taker should be awarded, say, a re-test.

Suppose the proctor indeed kicked out the white person because he was white. Then the law allows for a re-test. But the law is not awarding a re-test because the test taker was white. It is allowing him this re-test because he specifically was wronged. Thus, those that created this law are not acting as racists.

The Arizona immigration law, SB1070, states that if a person is detained by the police for some normal reason (traffic stop, beheading, breaking and entering, etc.), that the police also determine whether there is “reasonable suspicion” that the detainee is in the States illegally.

The law cannot be racist, but were the authors of this law acting as racists when they created it? Suppose the “worst case” scenario, which is that all illegal aliens in this country are native (and not white) Mexican. That is, each person who broke the law to come here is non-white.

Empirically we know that some of these law-breakers will commit other crimes that warrant their detention by the police, just as there will be citizens who also commit crimes and must be detained. The illegals whose status’ are checked will, of course, be discovered and dealt with, presumably by deportation. Citizens will go to jail.

Each deported person, by our assumption, will be a non-white. But the extreme ratio of non-white deportees cannot be the result of a racist act, just because the ratio could be no other value, regardless of the intentions of the law’s creators. So it cannot be legal deportations which are causing concern.

Some worry that police will indiscriminately target non-whites for immigration checks, even though the law specifically forbids such actions. Thus, critics, such as the Big O, must argue that the law’s creators are racist because these critics feel that Arizona lawmakers know that some police will eventually violate their mandate and indiscriminately check non-whites. Or critics must argue that the lawmakers are not racist, but that police certainly will be. Or they can argue both.

This must be the case, because the law has not gone into effect yet (it does in two days). There is thus no evidence of racist acts except fear that some police might act in a racist fashion.

And so they might, but again they might not. And so they might (or not) in the absence of the law. But since there is no direct evidence—there are only counterfactuals taken as factuals—that racist acts by police will be many in number, it seems a good policy to implement the law and watch what happens.

Incidentally, and although it is irrelevant to the logical points made here, my feeling is that we ought to allow as many Mexicans to become US citizens as possible.

A primary justification for Bayesian probability is De Finetti’s representation theorem, which is stated like this.

You are to observe a sequence of 0s and 1s, “failures” and “successes” if you like. These 0s and 1s will necessarily come to you in a certain order, and you want to quantify the probability that you witness this order.

If you assume that the order in which the failures and successes arrive does not matter—but what does matter is the total number of successes (and failures)—-and if this sequence is embedded in an infinite stream of failures and successes, then the probability distribution of the total successes can be represented as (the integral of) a binomial distribution with parameter θ multiplied by a prior distribution on the possible values of θ.

Have all that? The assumption that the order doesn’t matter—called exchangeability in the parlance—is enough to prove both the existence of the binomial and its accompanying prior distribution. Ain’t that wonderful?

But it only works if there are an infinite stream of numbers coming at us. Let only a finite number arrive, and out goes representation. We know this through the work of Persi Diaconis, who discovered that approximate—not exact—representations can be had for finite data, but only if finite means very large.

If we only have one, two, or a small number of observations, then no representation theorems are possible. It’s not that we haven’t found them, but they cannot be found, an important distinction.

However, we need not despair, because we can still get where we need to go by turning the problem around. By seeing that the fundamental problem is representing uncertainty in finite streams of data, not infinite. Once we have the answer, we can let our data grow large. We will discover that, at the limit, the binomial representation pops out naturally.

Thus it is the binomial that is the approximation of finite situations, not the other way around. How do we start?

In front of you lies a box inside of which you are told has N items, M of which may—or may not—be labeled “success”. This implies that the other items may be anything but successes: we have no information, for example, that the “non-successes” are all identical in nature. These are our 0s and 1s.

How many successes are in the box? You don’t know, but you can quantify your uncertainty. Using a simple principle of logical probability, and the symmetry of individual constants, an axiom similar to the axiom of exchangeability, we can say that, given the evidence presented, the chance that there are no successes is the same as there are one, which is the same as there are two, and so on, up to N.

Suppose you take a handful of items from the box, where the handful is possibly smaller than N. It turns out that, given the evidence we have, the probability distribution that represents your uncertainty in the number of successes in your handful is represented by the hypergeometric distribution.

Unlike the binomial, which has unobservable parameter θ, the hypergeometric deals only with what can be or has been observed. Its parameters are all numbers you have seen.

In your hand now are a certain number of successes and non-successes, which is new evidence we can use to infer the likelihood that the remaining items in the box are also successes (or failures). We can work through the math and discover the representation of the probability distribution for the remaining items. This turns out to be a “beta-binomial” with fixed, observed, known parameters.

More data can be taken, and all the probability distributions can be updated systematically using just observed and known parameters.

What’s interesting is that as you let N grow to the limit, the standard binomial, beta, and beta-binomial results of Bayesian statistics are found. But then, as now makes sense, the parameters of these distributions become unobservable.

In the finite case, the parameters were all known numbers, but in the infinite case we have to wait until—well, we have to wait until we have reached an infinite number of observations until we can claim to have observed all the facts.

In the finite case, given the evidence and previous observations, the probability of future observations is always more spread out—it is more uncertain—than are future observations if you assume you will have an infinite amount of data. And since we never will see an infinite amount of data, standard results make us more certain than is warranted.

That’s the story in 750 words, but if you want to read more, and delve into the math, you can download this preprint. It’s a paper my friend Russ Zaretzki and I wrote, but was rejected (by the American Statistician) for “poor writing,” a damning criticism for papers supposed to appear in the “Teaching” sections.

This shows you that peer review sometimes works. Because the paper is poorly written. We’re having another go at cleaning up the notation, which proliferated rather profusely.

In no way is this article meant to be complete. It is more in the way of musings—a crude introduction—so that we can see where to go.

Is the universe a computer? Asked differently: is the universe discrete and finite? Are all physical manifestations the result of simple interactions on a very small, well-connected, discrete grid of blocks, where each block is allowed to assume only a finite number of states?

I like to think so—an opinion I state immediately, so that you can see where my biases lay.

Says Manfred Requardt:

There exists a certain suspicion in parts of the scientific community that nature may be “discrete” on the Planck scale. The point of view held by the majority is however, at least as far as we can see, that quantum theory as we know it holds sway down to arbitrarily small scales as an all-embracing general principle, being applied to a sequence of increasingly fine grained effective field theories all the way down up to, say, string field theory. But even on that fundamental level one starts from strings moving in a continuous background. It is then argued that “discreteness” enters somehow through the backdoor via “quantisation”.

The hunch is that even string theory is a manifestation of something deeper, and discrete. Requardt learned his suspicions at the knees of Konrad Zuse (which, we’re informed, is pronounced “Tsoosay”, which does not sound like the Greek deity).

Away back in 1967 Zuse proposed, essentially, that the universe is a computer, much like a cellular automaton. Think of it like a three? four? more?-dimension set of building blocks, all packed together. The blocks themselves are now called hodons. We merely assume that the hodons are all similarly sized and shaped, incidentally.

We have all heard of John Conway’s Game of Life. Well, Zuse surmised, the universe is like that, only more so.

Conway’s two-dimensional blocks were allowed only two states, and the laws governing their behavior were limited. Allow a larger (but still finite) number of states and blocks, increase the allowable rules, and rich behavior emerges. Zuse—and many others since—showed how, for example, particle interactions might be manifestations of automata.

Zuse mapped out a progression of mechanics, from classical, which is analog, to quantum, which is a hybrid of analog and digital, to what he called “calculating space”, which is entirely digital. A similar progression exists for mathematics.

Classical mathematics assumed a continuum, from which is derived the subject of analysis, which becomes differential equations in quantum mechanics, and finally difference equations and logical operators in calculating space.

Roughly before the twentieth century, mathematics was synonymous with physics. Or, that is, advances in mathematics usually were propelled by needs in physics. But then came Cantor and others, and with them an uncountably infinite amount of baggage, and math soon became “math for math’s sake.”

The push towards finiteness is, in a sense, a way of restoring mathematics to its historical role of providing physical understanding. Various infinities and continuums are less useful because what can’t be constructed is suspect.

Familiar example: Zeno’s “paradoxes” are now solved by recourse to limits, but disappear utterly under finiteness. Rather, they are shown to contain false premises. Take the dichotomy paradox, for example. From Aristotle, “That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.”

If the distance between start and finish is (arbitrarily) 1, then you must first go to point 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8, and so on ad infinitum: you’ll never arrive! This argument tacitly assumes a continuum premise. Replace it with discreteness, and the paradox vanishes.

The distance of start to finish is comprised of a finite, discrete number of steps. There may not even be a half way point! Suppose the distance is 3 units; then, with your first step, you may either end the walk (step to block 1), or go only 1/3 of the way (step to block 2).

There are, as with all ideas, objections to finiteness. But they are of an odd sort. “Where’s Pythagoras’s theorem?” ask critics. “Where’s geometry?” Well, they’re not there, for simple reason that triangles cannot be constructed discretely. Most geometrical objects are jagged, or, as we might now say, pixelated. Once more the computer analogy is useful.

You can read Requardt’s paper for his derivation of a “differentials” in a discrete world. Discrete versions are no longer the simple creatures of calculus; they do not obey, for example, the chain rule. They are harder to write down.

Polarizer, and poster child for self-esteem, Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science may also be read, but cautiously.

Again, this is just a tease. More to follow.

Since I am, by nature, a compassionate individual, I had been thinking of how we might Sokal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). It is for their own good.

Alan Sokal: remember him? He’s the physicist who submitted the scam article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to the oh-so-prestigious postmodern journal Social Text.

Postmodernists are intellectuals who are so jealous of the success of real scientists, that they pretend that scientists’ accomplishments are nothing special. They are the sort of people who authoritatively state, “There is no truth,” or “‘Truth’ is a social construction.” You may find postmodernists in any university English or Sociology department, the New York Times editorial desk, and in the current administration.

Anyway, Sokal typed up an article of complete gibberish larded with science words, such as:

As Althusser rightly commented, “Lacan finally gives Freud’s thinking the scientific concepts that it requires”. More recently, Lacan’s topologie du sujet has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism and to the psychoanalysis of AIDS. In mathematical terms, Lacan is here pointing out that the first homology group of the sphere is trivial, while those of the other surfaces are profound; and this homology is linked with the connectedness or disconnectedness of the surface after one or more cuts.

Painful, right? Stuff no serious person would ever read, and only the insane would take seriously. That Sokal was able to slip this rot though Social Text‘s five-hole demonstrated unequivocally that postmodernists are Aesopian foxes, people whose college physics classes left sour tastes in their mouths.

Humanities scholars here in the States started down their slippery slope and became postmodernists only after they opened the doors to a rabble of French and German philosophers. Men such as Heidegger and De Man; all of whom were mighty big fans of 1940′s-style National Socialism.

As long as postmodernists kept to themselves, churning out “literary theory” by the bucketful, they were thought to be harmless.

But some warned us that postmodernism can spread like a disease; that the chance of catching it increases as a function of the proximity of the uninfected to the carrier. And since most postmodernists reside inside universities, their hives exposed to scientists, it was only a matter of time before the infection spread.

And that is what happened. For example (thanks to reader John Moore), at the 11th Statistical Climatology Meeting, Demetris Koutsoyannis asked another scientist whether, as a rule, “original data should be available to the interested scientists or not?” That is, should raw data be shared so that people could independently verify extraordinary claims?

The answer—the only answer to this prior to the postmodernist infection—must be “Yes.” But the infected person answered, “No”, the data should not be available “because some could misuse them….[to] demonstrate a specific behaviour that they want to advocate.”

See what I mean? People cannot be trusted to come to their own judgments because those judgments might fall afoul of the party line, a line which, by definition, is socially constructed. Those in power decide “truth.” The disease rampages.

It’s always sad to witness the progression of morbidity, and worse when it happens to someone you love. Take PNAS, a journal which, prior the postmodernist pandemic, was lovely and pure. But the infection is now so strong that it has published an Enemies of Science list!

Anderegg et al., “Expert credibility in climate change.” Not one word in this article attempts to refute the theories its enemies; instead, it is one long, suppurating logical fallacy. I weep.

And then this: “Irrelevant events affect voters’ evaluations of government performance“, a piece by Healy et al. which would have been excised mercilessly by blarney-detecting white blood cells before the disease struck.

The American voter, says Healy, is irrational. Little things, like his favorite football team winning, will influence his vote. Via a goofy statistical model, they claim “that voting decisions are influenced by irrelevant events that have nothing to do with the competence or effectiveness of the incumbent government.”

This isn’t just bad statistics—a symptom common to many diseases, not just postmodernism—but bad reasoning. They emphasize their findings “have implications for understanding elite incentives and strategies to manipulate voters’ perceptions of their own well-being.” If the voter cannot decide rationally, perhaps he should not be allowed to decide at all. Keep the raw data from him!

Postmodern infections are best killed by inoculation using a dead virus, i.e. a Sokal-like spoof masquerading as genuine. I therefore say that we, dear readers, compose a scam article that, when exposed, will restore the critical senses of the editors of PNAS.

Suggestions for a topic?

Said the main-stream journalist on Journolist, “If they of the right wing don’t behave and treat our Golden Boy properly, we’ll call them racists. It matters not whom we pick to cast this dreaded appellation upon. We merely need distract them with persiflage.”

“See!” said the conservative journalist. “Main-stream reporters are nothing more than extensions of the Democrat party!”

Said the One in Glory, “Our mandate that people buy health insurance from a list of approved companies (whose executives are party members), is not a tax. Let not your heart be troubled that I must call it a ‘tax’ in court.”

“See!” said the conservative journalist. “They’re finally admitting it’s a tax!”

Said the left-wing producer of a show purporting to be unbiased, “What I hate about conservatives is that they are all fascists. Fox News is their organ. The government should use its mighty powers to ban Fox, lest people be confused by its broadcasts.”

“See!” said the conservative journalist. “It is one more instance of the pot calling the kettle black!”

Said our Lawyer in Chief, “White people are cowards on the subject of race. For this reason, I cannot bring myself to prosecute a non-white man who threated to brain ‘crackers’ at the voting booth.”

“See!” said the conservative journalist. “This administration has race on the brain!”

Said the feminist reporter, “That Sarah Palin. How I hate her. She is no woman. In her vast and monumental ignorance, she has turned ‘choice’ into a mockery and actually chose to keep her damaged child. Do not mention her lack of experience, lest our enemies recall suddenly that the One is even less equipped from the wisdom of trials.”

“See!” said the conservative journalist. “Pro-choice has always meant killing fetuses for the sake of convenience! They finally admit that Governor Palin knew how to run a government!”

Ah, it’s been a lovely week for conservatives, a time for them to wallow in glorious and well deserved indignation. All that they have predicted has come to pass, everything that they have feared has been proved true.

Employees of main-stream media companies really are active and tireless agents for Democrats. Reporters and producers really do spin their news in ways they feel are most favorable to their chosen causes. Leftists really are blind to their inherent fascistic tendencies when they seek to silence their enemies through unconstitutional legal means.

The Obama-Pelosi health-care mandate really is a tax; it really will benefit insurance companies willing to submit themselves to government—that is, Democrat—control. The current administration, and much of the left wing, really does have race on the brain; progressives really are unable to see the world except through colored glass. And “pro-choice” has really always meant unquestioning support for eugenical abortion.

Oh, the sputtering from conservatives after this tumultuous week! Troll the blogs and you will find hosts of people besides themselves with righteous anger shouting, “See! See!” There are hundreds of I-told-you-so articles, endless discussion. But what have we learned from the Jourolist, health care Court brief, and New Black Panther revelations?

Nothing.

We know this because conservatives are shouting, “I told you so!” And if they can say that, they must have already known that the alleged perfidious activities of their enemies were true. And since they already knew that, and the people they are telling they already knew that also already knew that, they are doing nothing but wasting their energy.

The mistake conservatives make is to react to pathetic feints, to wrongly assume that the mock blows of the left are the main attack. Thus, when a leftist reporter says, “Since you are for limited government, you are a racist”, it is foolish to respond to the ridiculous accusation, because the moment you even deny such idiocies, you are sunk.

Because while you are distracted in proclaiming your obvious innocence, he is moving behind the scenes to implement his plans. You will have missed your chance to explain why limited government is superior.

Ignore taunts and asinine questions—just as your opponents ignore logic and sidestep pertinent questions. Pretend you never heard them and spend your time speaking the truth. And stop wasting all your time shouting, “See! See!”

Said Prime Minister Robert Peel, “But after this natural burst of indignation, no man of sense, courage, or prudence will waste his time or his strength in retrospective reproaches or repinings.”

“Excuse me, miss. Would you care to participate in science?”

Sometimes being a statistician is enviable. In a flash of scientific brilliance, Australian statisticians have just completed a massive study of measuring the breast sizes, weights, and full ranges of movements of these feminine objects.

I don’t know what connections the very fine folks at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, commonly known as CSIRO, have with United States’ scientific survey agencies, but I would like to project my name as someone well able to conduct these kinds of studies in the USA. For example, I have my own tape measure. Vitae supplied on demand, of course.

Anyway, among other fascinating facts, CSIRO tells us that “Running makes the breasts sway in a figure eight, while cycling causes an up-and-down movement; a 16D pair move as much as 27 centimetres.” Unknown is what geometric objects are inscribed by playing a round of volleyball.

Dear readers, 27 cm is a lot: it is nearly a foot! That range of motion, starting from zero and soaring up some 10.6 inches, and then gracefully returning down the same path, must have been incredibly difficult to measure precisely. Just imagining the dedication required makes me break out into a cold sweat.

Another fact: “the average breast weighing about half a kilo, and making up four to five per cent of our body fat, or one per cent of our total body weight”. The question that naturally pops to mind is: what kind of specialty scale is necessary for this kind of work? One can only guess that “Made in Japan” is stamped on the apparatus.

But all these findings pale in comparison to the news that breast sizes are on the rise. “In 1960, the average bra size in Australia was 10B. Ten years ago, it was 12B. Today, it’s 14C.” I’m not certain of the conversion between American and Australian units; still, the results are tantalizing. Skipping ahead four full measures! Plus tacking on a whole cup.

The most important fact to glean from this remarkable finding is that Australian statisticians have been wielding their tape measures since at least 1960. Talk about job perquisites!

Why all this new flesh? Two reasons. Females in 2010 are eating more than females ate in 1960, and are eating more at all times of their lives. This growing consumption of comestibles has resulted in the thrusting forth in all feminine areas, stressing stitches body wide, not just the upper reaches.

Others speculate that our addiction to buying what used to be free—sipping water in bottles which have been trucked in half a continent away—is causing the increase. “Many of these bottles contain the chemical Bisphenol A (BPA) – a compound used in the production of plastics that damages the endocrine system, probably as it has a similar structure to human oestrogen.”

The chemistry is clear: more estrogen is positively correlated with larger ranges of “up-and-down movement.”

Men, it must be emphasized, also drink from these bottles, and thus also ingest structures “similar to human oestrogen,” presumably suffering the resulting feminizing effects. Come to think of it, this might account for the results of recent elections.

Careful readers will have noticed that we have not yet heard from evolutionary psychologists. Just the other day, in that eminent journal the New York Times, we learn what had to be true: that evolution has not ceased in humans. How could it have?

An as example, the article informs us:

Most East Asians also have a special form of a gene known as ABCC11, which makes the cells of the ear produce dry earwax. Most Africans and Europeans, on the other hand, possess the ancestral form of the gene, which makes wet earwax. It is hard to see why dry earwax would confer a big survival advantage, so the Asian version of the gene may have been selected for some other property, like making people sweat less.

Unknown is how ear wax relates to sweat. But I have no worries that evolutionary psychologists have found an artful way to tie less sweating to greater success in bed—which they must, of course, by the prescripts of the theory (prescripts, incidentally, which I do not question). After all, the dry-ear-wax gene can only be spread by people choosing, in greater proportions, bed mates with drier ear wax.

Now, as a consequence of being one, I have been around a lot of men, and I can assure you (if you are not one) that not one of us has ever commented on a prospective sexual mate’s ear wax moisture level. The selection pressure on ear wax genes must be minimal. But I have heard many rumors about the delectability of what the Australians have been measuring. And there the pressure must be great.

Could it not be, then, that breast sizes are increasing because the gene or genes associated with their circumference and heft are being selected for at a higher rate? There is—is there not?—ample evidence for this thesis.

Anybody willing to fund a grant to study this phenomenon in greater depth?