William M. Briggs

Dr Overlijden of Levenseindekliniek

A new contest is in order, if it doesn’t already exist. Each year we should recognize and award the person or group who invents the best new Orwellian Phrase. This is a word or words which appear to say one thing but which are in reality their own antonym.

I bruited this idea with a colleague, who was enthusiastic and suggested for a prize the same which Winston received at the closing of 1984. I was sympathetic but thought this lacked charity. But he pointed out that this was the point: the prize is not one which one would wish to win.

Except perhaps by the folks who are responsible for my entry for 2012. These are the Dutch doctors behind Nederlandse Vereniging Voor Een VrijWillig Leveseinde, an organization which will dispatch a van to your very own house filled with doctors itching to kill you. Oh, yes. Leveseinde, you see, means “life’s end” and the docs of NVVE want to be the ones who take you on that journey.

The phrase I enter is NVVE’s “Life’s End Clinic” or Levenseindekliniek. It would not be much of an entry, I admit, except for the addition of “clinic,” an act which abuses that word in a savage manner. Incidentally, this “clinic” (which is not yet fully operational) is a place for those who would rather not have the van park in front of their home and thus frighten the neighbors.

I envision it as the kind of building into which Edward G. Robinson strolled near the end of Soylent Green. Which means we now we have to wonder about Holland’s food supply chain.

NNVE’s front page proudly announces that “there were over 200 applications from people with a euthanasia request at this clinic. There are reportedly twice as many women as men” (“waren er meer dan 200 aanmeldingen van mensen met een euthanasiewens bij deze kliniek. Er meldden zich twee maal zo veel vrouwen aan als mannen.”). For some reason this brings to mind the phrase “Minorities and women strongly encouraged to apply” which appears at the bottom of every academic job announcement.

The leftward news site MSNBC called the Vans of Death “mobile euthanasia units”, which isn’t Orwellian but is at least sufficiently bureaucratic. “Old Jones was heard groaning last night. Dispatch the M.E.U.!”

The reporter claims all sorts of safeguards are in place. The death supplicant must cry not once, not twice, but thrice or more, “Kill me!” Various folks are interviewed. Documents are signed. And then a doctor—a person once thought to be have sworn a duty to preserve life—slips in a needle which kills you. Well, to be fair, it only puts you to sleep. Once your eyes are closed, that’s when the knife comes out and the Dutch “doctor” slits your throat.

Kidding! Actually, knives are far too messy so “a second injection follows, which will stop [your] breathing and heart beat.” A very long-winded way to say that the doctor actively kills you, that he commits homicide, that he purposely deprives you of your life, that the doctor has stepped just this side of being a murderer. That he gives a whole new meaning to “house call.”

MSNBC reports “The teams”—squads of white-coated killers—”would be allowed one procedure a week because of the emotional toll that each visit takes.”

I’m not sure what to think of that. Does it imply that these killers—for this is what they are—have retained some small scrap of humanity? It must be small because it only takes seven short days for their consciences to quiet enough so that they can kill again. Or is the one-scalp-a-week bag limit imposed so that the “teams” don’t begin to love their jobs too well? And don’t you claim that this isn’t possible, for all history tells us that it is not difficult to find individuals who enjoy killing.

Something has to qualify these people. Perhaps a desire to kill those who claim that they want to be killed will be a prerequisite for aspirants who wish to enter the growing specialty of euthanasia. As this field develops, we can imagine classes in Emergency Euthanasia covering topics like what to do when the needle is not at hand: see pillows, suffocation; tall buildings and the lower lumbar shove; the Ty Cobb upper lumber cranial contact.

Update I originally ended this piece with the unfortunate “Remind me not to visit the Netherlands anytime soon.” By this, believe it or not, I meant something along the Soylent Green line. I stupidly thought it implicit and did not add this. I hope it is obvious that I do not disparage all peoples of the Netherlands. I beg all your pardons. I blew it. I am sorry.

I do, however, disparage the doctors who ride around in shiny white (I’m assuming the color) vans willfully killing people. The Soylent Green business comes in from asking: what happens to the bodies?

This is a work in progress, and today is a busy day. This is just for fun and for you to play with.

The more complex the field of study, the more likely that any result, finding, or theory in that field is wrong. I am only considering science, i.e. that which explains and is subject to empirical verification. I exclude fields such as ethics, morality, philosophy which are fields that tell us “that empirical verification is a good”, and other statements which are not subject to verification.

There are three broad areas, or groupings, of complexity in science. Not uncoincidentally, this laddering also correlates with the fields’ dependence on statistics for evidence, from most to least. The groups are also, from least to most, though somewhat more loosely, ordered by connections with observation via prediction.

1. Behavioral: Education, Sociology, Politics, Psychology.
2. Biological: Economics, Evolutionary Psychology, Psychiatry, Neurology, Medicine (doctoring), Genetics
3. Physical: Climatology, Meteorology, Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, Mathematics

The demarcations between these areas are not abrupt, nor is the ordering within each group anything more than a crude, but still somewhat useful, guide.

Some explanation is needed. Why is Physics, the mother of all sciences, the field requiring the biggest brains, listed near the end and is therefore one of the least complex fields? Because Physics is not complicated in the sense I mean complex.

Physicists study the fundamental properties of the universe, it’s true, but it’s also so that these basics are not complex. They are amazingly difficult to comprehend, yes, but not convoluted. If under your consideration is just the interaction between two electrons, themselves encased in forces that are as precisely defined as possible, then your world view is narrow, constrained, and quite simple. It might be true, and usually is, that this simplicity is difficult to express and to understand, and that to reach this bare pinnacle requires years dedicated to its singular purpose, but that does not render the process under consideration complex in the sense we use that word here. We are only talking about what electron A and electron B will do in strikingly limited terms.

Too, the physicist has ample opportunity to verify his theories. If, under the circumstances he explicated, electron A goes where he predicted it to go, and electron B behaves as he expected, then the physicist has learned that the theory he entertained is probably right—but only probably. But if the particles go their own way, then the physicist must also venture down a new path and toss out or modify his theory. This deep, lasting, and intimate connection with observation is what keep physics honest.

Engineering tops physics because this field is defined as all sciences exposed completely and continuously to reality. It is less complex in the sense that the rules which govern the field are more worked out in advance, but it is also more complex in that engineering implies building something for human use, and human behavior is the most difficult thing of all to predict. More on that in a moment.

I cheated by putting Mathematics as the field which gives us our most certain beliefs, because math is not a science. Mathematics more properly belongs to philosophy. If you think not, and since science is that which is testable, try empirically verifying that, say, a triangle’s interior angles sum to 180^o or that, in reality, (if I may abuse the notation) alpeh₀ < aleph₁, which is to say one kind of infinity is larger than another kind of infinity. Report back to me when you reach aleph₀. Math is used in science and openly, but so are the other areas of philosophy and ethics, etc. It is just that these other branches more typically remain unacknowledged.

Now, a chemist can tell us with great precision what will happen when Na hits H₂O, but his, or any other scientist’s, ability to predict what John Smith (43) of Cleveland, OH will have for lunch next week Thursday is no better than any unschooled layman. The conceit of the sociologist is to abandon the question and substitute for it one which he believes he can answer: what will the “average person” will eat for lunch in OH. Enter statistics, through which, perhaps (but only perhaps), the sociologist can build a model which will do slightly better than just guessing. And only do better if the prediction is not too far out into the future. Or where the circumstances do not change, it being more of less a mystery what those circumstances are.

Plus the sociologist probably won’t bother to verify his model: won’t use it to make actual predictions. And neither will most of the educationists, psychologists, and so forth. Of course I do not mean all sociologists etc. nor do I claim the fields are sterile.

It is just that the probability of speaking nonsense is greater the more complex the field and the further that field is from empirical verification. Which is why climatology, which is simpler than meteorology, ranks below that field because climatology is further from empirical verification.

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Note: I tried everything I could think of to get the HTML to properly render the Hebrew letter aleph: render it it would, but it would put it in strange places, nowhere near where I put it, and super- or sub-scripted at random.

In her piece “In Praise of Insignificance” in Scientific American, Jennifer Ouellette says,

If one embraces an atheist worldview, it necessarily requires embracing, even celebrating, one’s insignificance. It’s a tall order, I know, when one is accustomed to being the center of attention. The universe existed in all its vastness before I was born, and it will exist and continue to evolve after I am gone. But knowing that doesn’t make me feel bleak or hopeless. I find it strangely comforting.

A cockroach is insignificant even to the extent that squashing it, i.e. depriving it of its life in an expedient and, for the roach anyway, awful manner, cannot be considered wrong. It can even be said to be good or necessary for the “greater good.” What, after all, is the life of one small bug when compared with the wellbeing of even one human being?

But then if that human being has admitted herself to be insignificant, to have willingly placed herself on the same moral and ontological plane as a filthy bug, why is her good to be placed above the roach’s? Don’t just pass this sentence by with a quick nod. Insignificant is a strong word, none stronger. Taken at its definition—which is what we are doing here, to see where it leads us—means meaningless, valueless, of no use, disposable.

Now it might appear to imply that if all accepted that they were insignificant, all would be allowed; that is, any behavior would be acceptable. But this is false; indeed, the opposite is true. No behavior would be allowed or acceptable.

When we examine questions of morality we quite naturally think about what our behavior would do or mean to somebody else; that is, we imagine ourselves acting in some way and then in some person or persons reacting. If we decided that “we are insignificant” then it appears that if I wanted to (say) hit you upside the head with a baseball bat, then that would be fine because your life is insignificant. (Richard Dawkins, for instance, famously admits that rape isn’t “wrong” in this sense.)

That is true in a weak sense, but we stepped over the hard part. The problem is that I have already admitted that I am insignificant too, which entails that I have no justification for my initial act. My pleasure is nothing, even the physical exercise gained in hefting the wood is meaningless. If I realize this, then I cannot justify to myself why I should act. Not just in swinging the bat, but for walking, talking, eating, any activity at all that isn’t automatic (eating is not automatic; it implies you have judged that to feed yourself is good, which admits significance). If I am to be logically consistent, then I must remain entirely impotent and always motionless.

You’ll notice that in these arguments, I sling around the word I, as if I have deduced that I exist, and the same for you. But if I exist, if I am aware of me and that there is a me, then this automatically implies significance (I at least know there is the rational creature me). It remains to be seen what are the limits and implications of this significance, of course, but that there is some significance, that there is an absence of insignificance, necessarily follows.

So it cannot be that we are insignificant nor can we imagine ourselves insignificant (we can say it, but we’re always either lying or deluded), though it is easy, as history has repeatedly proven, to think the other guy insignificant. Ouellette does not really believe she is insignificant, despite her claims. She informs us that she tells her husband daily that she loves him, a very nice thing. But it is only nice if she admits to being significant, which we have seen she must do. Of course, we haven’t proven that because are are significant saying “I love you” to somebody (and meaning it) is nice, though all of us believe it (and it can be proven).

Ouellette’s first argument is right, though: “If one embraces an atheist worldview, it necessarily requires embracing, even celebrating, one’s insignificance.” I mean her argument is right if you strike out the “celebrating” bit, for to celebrate and to enjoy a celebration presupposes significance. A real world running on atheist lines would contain no celebrations, indeed nothing but non-moving bodies, frozen in realization that nothing—as in no thing—they did matters or is justified.

In a talk at some “sustainability” something-or-other seminar—one this is sure: we’re not going to soon run out of climate conclaves—academic Donald Brown told his audience (25 min. mark) that the people who are not as afraid as he that the world will soon end are committing crimes against humanity. If Brown is right, this put yours truly well into the company of such noted transgressors as Mao, Stalin, Pot and other socialist dictators.

Or maybe Brown hadn’t meant that level of heinousness and instead envisioned lesser culprits, such as the guy who invented the car alarm or whoever it was that thought up the Sony Walkman (which has morphed into our ubiquitous present-day thinking suppression devices).

Anyway, here’s what happened.

Marc Morano at Climate Depot placed Brown’s image and his email in earlier articles on that site in posts which outlined Brown’s views on this and that climate topic. Brown thought that showing his publicly available email and head shot—which are not hidden and are trivially easy to find at Penn State—represented “intimidation.”

This, so Brown claims, led to him receiving emails some of which were scatological and others which threatened death. I unfortunately believe him. There are a lot of knuckleheads out there and the (pseudo) anonymity of the internet fills some with a pathetic false bravery. I wish these foolish souls would think better.

Of course, Morano himself hauls in plenty of scathing missives daily, as do others who run blogs expressing doubt that we should let government “solve” climate change.

Your truly hasn’t received any death threats, but I get plenty of things like this one from yesterday, “I know you are an extreme political right winger, but now you’ve become a ringleader of a hate group.” Ringleader—I presume my interlocutor did not mean in the Tolkienian sense—is a promotion of sorts, up from Lone Wolf. But I’ve still got a ways to go before I reach Mastermind.

Brown, who was dressed a priest (without the collar), early in his talk said that skepticism about climate change should be “encouraged.” But he wants it separated from “disinformation,” which he defines as that which departs from the “consensus.” Brown’s position is thus like that of the dictatorship which claims voting is every citizen’s right, but which produces ballots on which there is only one candidate.

He says that those who speak against the consensus are engaged in an organized “campaign” funded by oil companies and “right wing” groups. This might be true, but none of those funds have managed to trickle down my way. But now that I’m a Ringleader, perhaps I can expect a raise in pay?

Somehow Brown forgot to mention that the funding to spread the “climate catastrophe” message dwarfs, by at least one, possibly two, maybe even three, orders of magnitude any monies skeptics receive. Nearly every government dumps tens and tens and more tens of millions each year on the “problem,” a good chunk of which ends up in the pockets of people like Donald Brown. And then there’s the money sucked in and pumped out by Greenpeace, the Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra-blah-blah-blah. Skeptics run on alms, consensus members and their hangers on are clothed in gold.

The whole of his talk is to convince that a conspiracy exists to gull the public. In a separate work he hints of dark rooms and speaks of a “climate change disinformation campaign.” He claims skeptics “are guilty of exacerbating risks to our collective well-being and of undermining society.”

He claims the “moral outrage” caused by skeptics “should motivate a movement at least as ferocious as the Occupy Wallstreet movement.” And in his talk he says that climate skeptics are guilty of a “new crime against humanity. [Skepticism] is really evil stuff. It is nasty.”

Donald Brown is not the first to croak out this tune. He accepts the “consensus” as a given, as unquestionable in its outline, its warnings certain. But he is not simply filled with wonder that others doubt his faith, which would be natural. He is instead outraged. He wants action. He walks up to the line, over which is to ask that government silence his enemies, and hovers there. He would cross that line if he could be sure of support from enough of his colleagues.

Yesterday I made the point that Jim Hansen’s latest threat of doom was a conditional one. I also said that there was nothing wrong with this. And there isn’t. Nothing wrong with the structure of a contingent—which is to say conditional—prediction. I hinted, in a way, that better predictions were not so conditional. This is true in a sense which I did not include in my essay, because in fact, all predictions are contingent. And so is everything else.

To clarify, but briefly.

Any prediction is a statement that, given some set of information or evidence or revelation or knowledge, that “Y will happen” or that “There is a P% probability Y will happen.” You cannot just step onto to the street and announce, “The end is nigh” without there being some shared, or assumed shared, conditional set of knowledge which your listeners hold.

It also goes without saying that your audience must understand what “end” and “nigh” mean. If your prediction fails, there are more way to escape responsibility by disputing what you really meant by “end” than there are Democrats in San Francisco.

The knowledge of word (or mathematical or whatever) definitions are thus also part of the conditional knowledge which is at least tacitly assumed or sometimes explicitly given. For example, Hansen said (I’m paraphrasing) “If Canada sells it oil and the USA doesn’t do something, the Four Horseman begin their ride.” The conditionality is explicit in part, and stated boldly—in part.

The parts that are missing are where the trouble arises. Firstly, Hansen does not make it clear what “USA doing something” means. What exactly is “something”? This kind of seemingly precise vagueness is the trade secret of five-dollar psychics who pass off cold readings as genuine paranormal knowledge. Hansen’s prediction is in the form of, “I see a U. Maybe with an S or an A. Does that mean anything to you?” He lets his listeners fill in the meaning, which invariably is done in the most charitable way.

Secondly, Hansen’s unleashing of the apocalypse (this is his word) is blurry. He mentions food prices rising to “unprecedented” levels. What does that mean exactly? He also says that we’ll see more bad weather. Well, given inflation and the assumption that we’ve seen bad weather in the past, neither of these events can be said to be rare. Lack of specificity plagues his predictions of plague.

Now I suggested yesterday, in poor, even rotten, language that Hansen should have issued his prognostication in unconditional form. Since this is a logical impossibility, I was as wrong as can be. What I meant, but was too lazy or stupid to clarify, is that he should make his conditions explicit, testable, verifiable, measurable, real.

As should anybody who makes a prediction. This includes people who try to pass off failed predictions as “scenarios.” A scenario is a prediction like any other, but usually issued as a cluster. “If A happens, then Y_A will happen”, “If B happens, then Y_B will happen”, and so on. Well, in the end, if it clear what time horizon is meant, we look to see which of Y_A, Y_B, … actually occurred. Suppose Y_R did. We then look to see if R happened, too. If so, then we have a good prediction. If instead B happened, the forecast is a bust.

In other words, you cannot issue any statement without there being something to back it up. This is the conditionality. Regular readers met this earlier when we spoke of statements of knowledge and of probability. There are no unconditional statements of either, except in one sense, to be explained in a moment.

Above I gave a conditional statement of probability “There is a P% probability Y will happen” but left off the conditions though said they were always there. That means the true statement is really “Given X, there is a P% probability Y will happen.” If you doubt this, I challenge you to discover even one instance of a probability which is not conditional, which does not require a set of evidence or knowledge for its definition. (JH, this one’s for you.)

And the same with knowledge. As we’ve used a hundred times, we know it is true that “Socrates is mortal” only because we accepted the conditions that “All men are mortal. And Socrates is a man.” And because we knew that arguments like this lead to true conclusions. (We also knew what the words meant.)

But how did we know about arguments like this? Well, we just knew. There are some basic, or base truths, which we just know are true. I have earlier said that even these are conditional, and this is so. We say we know that “If x = y then y = x” is true conditional on our intuition.

Our friend Luis objected to the use of the word “intuition.” I can see his point. Let us instead say that all men have these basic truths written in their hearts.

I had thought the furor was over, that those who held ultramontane views about climatologists like James “Lock me up!” Hansen (see below the fold) had given up and gone home, the state of the world being so pleasantly clement and so on. But no. Many remain screwed up into tight little balls of pure fret.

Take poor Alec Loorz, who is nigh eighteen years upon this globe and who, so the Atlantic informs, became a climate activist at age 12 after watching An Inconvenient Truth twice in one evening. Now, I once performed a similar feat when I was that age with Star Wars but as much as I then lusted after a light sabre, I did not delude myself into thinking I was a Jedi Knight. Full disclosure: I still pine for a light sabre.

Poor Loorz is thoroughly American. Not only did he become an “activist,” he turned to that most modern of paths, the Way of the Lawsuit. So dedicated an adept is he that he managed to wangle four other “juvenile plaintiffs” to sue the “federal government in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.”

Incidentally, I say “poor Loorz” because I hate to pick on a kid and because, so the magazine says, poor Loorz has been “diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder” and it is not clear how much this malady drives his activism.

The five children “are demanding that the U.S. government start reducing national emissions of carbon dioxide by at least six percent per year beginning in 2013.” You will be interested in the name of the suit: Alec L. et. al vs. Lisa P. Jackson, et. al. The later named individual is the power-grubbing head of the EPA. It must have come as a pleasant shock to her to be sued to do what she most earnestly wants.

Skip all the legal mumbo jumbo and focus on what is tangible: the reduction of CO₂ by six percent each year. Supposing the lawsuit wins (it won’t), we would have to find a way to measure precisely how much CO₂ is emitted before we can know if the decrease from one year to the next is six percent. This being strictly impossible, we would have to resort to bureaucratic definitions of “emit” and “reduce” and of even what “CO₂” means.

This tool, if in the hand of a progressive government, would dwarf the fear factor of the IRS by three orders of magnitude. Think of the indulgences given to “minority owned” and “union staffed” businesses (as in Obamacare). Think of a weaselly EPA “investigator” sniffing around your home with his “greenhouse gas” detector, issuing non-disputable citations for “leakage.”

Somebody needs to tell poor Loorz that the Way of the Lawsuit is a one-way path to hell.

But poor Loorz is not entirely culpable. We can put some of the blame of folks like James Hansen, who peeked out of his cell yesterday to issue yet another conditional threat which promised (again) that end is near.

A “conditional” threat is one which says, “If we don’t do X, then the end shall come.” X can be anything the activist earnestly desires, such as X = “reduce CO₂ emissions by six percent,” or X = “enable the EPA to tax businesses on emissions,” and on and on. You’re hearing a conditional threat whenever you hear of “tipping points.”

One reason to be suspicious of environmentalist threats is that they are almost always in conditional form, and the X is always reduced to monetary or bureaucratic terms. Conditional threats can be valid, of course, but any physical theory worth its weight should be able to make unconditional predictions.

Hansen’s newest conditional threat is projected at Canada. “If Canada [uses its oil sands], and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.” Game over! Oh, Hansen also says the future he envisions is “apocalyptic.”

We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.

That’s high confidence, brother. That extreme cold weather in Alaska and other parts of the globe this past winter? Also global warming. Say, medium confidence.

Anyway, Canada will indeed use its lucrative and much needed oil sands. And the US of A will do…what exactly? Well, either we take those oils for our own use or we let China buy them. Both of these scenarios see the USA “doing” something. Do these somethings thus negate the conditional apocalyptic prediction?

Come on, Hansen, old boy. Let’s give us a real forecast. Cease these vagaries and put some dates and hard numbers on the doom you see so clearly.

Thanks to New York Times’s (yes) Russ Douthat who alerted us to the paper “Findings from a Decade of Polling on Ballot Measures Regarding the Legal Status of Same­ Sex Couples” by Patrick Egan (NYU).

Statisticians have long known that people when answering political questions lie like a rug, like their pants are on fire, like they are in a mighty hurry to be somewhere else. Not always of course, but especially over “controversial” topics. For example, I am a (part time) academic, a milieu where it is customary and expected to voice support “for” progressive causes. I cannot recall a single soul among my local associates who said at the time they were going to vote for George Bush.

I often use the tale that when Bush was battling Kerry, New York City polls had Kerry besting Bush by a multiple of three to five. The actually result was far smaller. You don’t tell the truth because you don’t know who could be listening. Just like on campus you musn’t let it be discovered that you are against gay “marriage” or that you are a climate skeptic (as to that, see “part time” above).

So when the pollster calls, people lie. The real question is: how much? Egan thinks he has an answer for gay “marriage.” This is:

1. “The share of voters in pre‐election surveys saying they will vote to ban same‐sex marriage is typically seven percentage points lower than the actual vote on election day.”
2. “survey estimates of the proportion of voters intending to vote against same‐sex marriage bans tend to be relatively accurate predictors of the ultimate share of ‘no’ votes.”

I find Egan’s wording confusing (he changes for and against in the sentences), so I’ve re-written his conclusion:

1. Votes to ban same-sex marriage are on average seven percentage points higher than polls indicated. So that if polls found (say) 45% will vote to ban SSM the actual vote will be 52% (on average).
2. Votes for SSM, i.e. votes to ban the SSM bans, match poll estimates on average. So that if polls found 55% against an SSM ban the actual vote will be 55% (on average).

These numbers aren’t far off actual polls and votes. Problem is, they don’t add up, and won’t unless in real cases there are large numbers of undecideds. So is must be that there is lying on both sides, with more coming from those who say they favor SSM. Egan says there is no “immediate evidence” in his data that people are lying to pollsters. But there’s plenty of experiential evidence. Certainly the scenarios I mentioned above are well known. And you yourself will know if you dare to voice opposition to SSM.

This is Egan’s Fig. 2. Each dot is a separate poll, taken over various states. This seems to me pretty good immediate evidence that many people, if they weren’t lying to pollsters, underwent an Obama-like evolution once they stepped behind the curtain. Or it could be that people all told the truth (in a way) but that supporters of SSM much more often stayed home on election day.

Egan has another intriguing result (his Fig. 3). Each of various states had the percent of gay and lesbian population estimated. Surely that is fraught with error, but never mind that. He then plots the average gap between poll-projected support and the actual vote to ban SSM. Regardless of the gays and lesbian estimate, this gap averages about 4%.

This, and a similar result found for automated versus human-contact polls, is the evidence Egan uses to say that people don’t lie to pollsters because of the subject matter. But I don’t buy it. Who trusts the computer which calls your house? Who trusts a pollster? Many people just don’t like being put on the record. Right, Mr Obama?

I like this kind of research and hope we can see many more papers who examine the outcome of actual elections versus polls. This will allow us to put real, not abstract mathematical, plus or minus bounds when giving out a poll result. When you hear a poll if you listen carefully you catch something like, “The margin of error is plus of minus four percent.” But that number is a theoretical calculation based on at least the assumption that everybody is telling the truth.

Because people lie, we need real margins of error discovered from real data. This would be an excellent masters of dissertation topic.

Also see this article from the Washington Post; via HotAir.

North Carolina voted 61 to 39 to amend its constitution to read that marriage is solely a union between a man and a woman. This was, as far as democratic elections go, a “landslide.” Even NPR called the result “overwhelming.”

According to a theory of government to which many claim they subscribe, this vote has decided what is right. That is, saying marriage is one man-one woman is now something which all from North Carolina must accept (if this theory is true). The day before the election they might have thought that marriage was between any group of humans who cared to call their grouping a “marriage”, but after the vote they surely must accept that they were wrong.

Yet somehow this is not so. There are many in that state who claim the result has not decided what is right. They agree that they will have to abide by the implications of the vote, but they say that the moral question was decided incorrectly. The Huffington Post reports that citizen Linda Toanone said, “”We think everybody should have the same rights as everyone else. If you’re gay, lesbian, straight — whatever.” The “evolving” Obama campaign said it was “disappointed.”

I only wish to make one point, a very small one, and only to those who were in the 39% or their supporters, to those people who say the vote “got it wrong.” If you say the vote is wrong you are admitting that there is some principle higher than democracy which decides what is right and wrong. You are saying that a true moral matter can, even must, be discerned in ways which are not appeals to the “People.” You are saying Rousseau and Mill were wrong.

Once you realize this, that there really are true and false moral questions that are true or false regardless of what anybody believes, you have made perhaps the most important step you can make, philosophically speaking. Although I am on the opposite side of you with this vote, I welcome you to the ranks of those of us who say that universals exist. It is now only a matter to discover what these universals are.

As to that, and to show that some of the “higher” principles which you might hold don’t work in this case, here is the case for and against so-called gay marriage:

The brief argument against is this: marriage, except in rare instances and very narrow circumstances (e.g. one man from many in a culture who holds a harem, concubines for the king), has everywhere and always been between a man and a woman; it is biologically natural, i.e. natural law says one man-one woman; and there are plenty of well known religious justifications we needn’t bother explicating. And notice I’m not giving any of the negatives, of which there are many.

Bad arguments for are these: (1) “Jesus never said it was wrong.” Neither did He say raping a child and cyanide poisoning were wrong. (2) Two consenting adults. Why two people in a union and not three, four, more? All history says two, but all history also says one man-one woman, and you can’t take just the part of history you like and ignore what you dislike. (3) Two people have a “right.” Any two? Like a man of 70 and a boy of 9? If you’re willing to draw a line here, you admit that lines can be drawn, which is the point of this article.

Better arguments for are these: (1) “Equality.” Not that this is a good argument, but this tune when sung rings pleasantly in the ears of us Moderns. The default reaction is to support that which is claimed to lead to equality. But here it begs the question, which is “Why should so-called gay marriage be allowed?” or “Is it moral?” It cannot be a matter of equality if we discover that so-called gay marriage is immoral or wrong. Chanting “Equality!” means you have already pre-decided the argument.

(2) Marriage is a contract. But all history and experience says it is not. It is a much deeper union. It is only so that the state steps in after the union and regulates certain matters arising from this union, but only matters relevant to the state’s purse and not those relating to the union itself. Note that many elevate these temporal financial considerations over marriage itself. The state historically has banned some unions (cousins, siblings, and on on).

(3) Some people are born gay. Regardless whether this is true, accept that it is for argument’s sake. This is still another question-beggar. Just because one has “no choice” in being gay does not mean that gays can marry; that, after all, is what we are trying to decide. The argument is worse still when we consider this (weak) analogy (others will suggest themselves to you). Some people are born who never grow higher than five feet. These people do not have a “right” to be placed on an NBA team because tall people can join these teams.

(4) The only argument which remains is the (perpetual) “I should have it because I want it.” More background is here: I, II, III, IV.

Incidentally, that many argue in favor of so-called gay marriage is a powerful argument against evolutionary psychological explanations of the behavior of human beings. What would Richard Dawkins think?!

Remember in the comments that we are ladies and gentlemen.

At the risk of losing the argument before it begins, let me ask you two questions. Number One: What do Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse-tung, serial killer and eater Jeffrey Dahmer, and Barack Obama all have in common? No, really. Think about it.

Answer: they all believe in gravity. They all hold (or held) the view that what goes up must come down.

Number Two: Do you, in the company of these men, also believe in gravity? No, really.

The two fallacies are blatant. Just because a man unworthy of emulation holds a truth is no reason for you not to believe that truth. All truths should be believed regardless who believes or disbelieves them. And to put Mr Obama in list implies he is just like the other vile men—although, to be fair, Mr Obama’s views on state control are said to be “evolving.”

The two fallacies would still be present if “gravity” were swapped with “bigfoot” or “equality.” A bad person holding a falsity is not an additional reason to disbelieve the falsity, though it is a good argument to further dislike the bad person. All falsities should be disbelieved regardless who disbelieves or believes in them. Plus, in Mr Obama’s defense, many good people believe wrong things; cf. atheism or diversity.

Another point, which flows from these: it is rational for you to distrust anybody who advances fallacious arguments of this (or any) type.

These logical facts being obvious, it is a mystery why Heartland Institute would choose to run the billboard pictured above (image from Boing Boing).

I fear Heartland, which had public opinion in its favor after being scammed by academic environmentalist Peter Gleick, will lose whatever goodwill it had gained. They not only ran the billboard using the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, but they aslso cycled the images of “Charles Manson, a mass murderer; and Fidel Castro, a tyrant.” The career paths are tacked on in case you have forgotten who these men are. Heartland said future billboards might have included “Osama bin Laden and James J. Lee (who took hostages inside the headquarters of the Discovery Channel in 2010).”

They did not include Barack Obama, but they used, in their non-apology (“We do not apologize for running the ad…”), in the same sentence with Kaczynski, Al Gore’s name, the inference being clear. And then they said this:

The people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society. This is why the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.

Alas, this is false, unfair, unsympathetic, and, worst of all, ungentlemanly. I gather this statement is what is known in modern political terminology as “doubling down.” This is when you make an error but do not admit it. Instead, you bluster and puff out your chest and dare people to cross the second line you drew in the sand, while secretly hoping they do not.

Once more: “We do not apologize for running the ad, and we will continue to experiment with ways to communicate the ‘realist’ message on the climate.” But this phantasmagorical billboard can scarcely be called “realist.” And it worsens the situation when they claim “what these murderers and madmen have said differs very little from what spokespersons for the United Nations, journalists for the ‘mainstream’ media, and liberal politicians say about global warming.” This is an open acknowledgement that they do not understand the fallacy they committed—and unfortunately still cling to.

Pretending they are a befuddled citizen, they ask their selves, “Are you saying anyone who believes in global warming is a mass murderer, tyrant, or terrorist?” And their answer, “Of course not.” But my dear Heartland, while you might not being saying it you have very clearly implied it. And this will certainly be the impression of nearly everybody who hears of your deed.

Yes, it’s true that the “other side” routinely calls skeptical scientists “Nazis or declare they are imposing on our children a mass death sentence”, but two wrongs, etc.

My suggestion to you is to do the manly thing. Apologize—at the least!—for being distasteful. If you do not, you will lose the public argument.

MSNBC reports this:

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers placed sensors on the heads of 9-month-old babies…and measured brain activity when infants were shown pictures of white and black faces expressing emotion. Five-month-old babies could differentiate between happy or sad faces in both races equally. Nine-month-old babies related better to their own race. Also, the 5-month-olds’ brain activity happened in the front of the brain; the older, more racist babies experienced activity in the back.

The paper is in the May issue of the journal Development Science. It’s called “Building biases in infancy: the influence of race on face and voice emotion matching” by Margaret Vogel, Alexandra Monesson and Lisa Scott.

The main finding is that babies’ “face recognition skills become tuned to groups of people they interact with the most.” Who would have guessed? The authors also say this: “This developmental tuning is hypothesized to be the origin of adult face processing biases including the other-race bias. In adults the other-race bias has also been associated with impairments in facial emotion processing for other-race faces.” Again, this is partly uncontroversial. Human beings are better at finding subtleties in the familiar.

Anyway, our trio gathered babies together whose “parents reported their infants having had little to no previous experience with African American or other Black individuals.” They did not do the opposite and find babies who never saw white faces. They had 24—count ‘em—5-month-olds and 24 9-month-olds. This makes 24 + 24 = 48, a simple math equation, but important to assimilate because of the authors’ admission that for the behavioral analysis

43 infants were excluded due to experimenter or technical error (n = 8), because they became fussy during testing (n = 1), because they exhibited a side looking bias (n = 14), because they failed to fixate both images during one of the test trials (n = 18), or because the infant was not Caucasian (n = 2).

I leave it as homework to discover what is 48 minus 43. For the electrophysiological analyses, they had 15 5-month-olds and 17 9-month-olds, but 19 these were added to the result from the homework question (how many were 5-months old or 9-months old we are never told); however, 23 of these 15 + 17 = 32 were excluded too. What we have here, in statistical terms, is small sample (get it? get it?).

For the behavioral analysis, babies were sat in front of a computer monitor on which was flashed images of smiling black or white women in pairs, some familiar some not. The amount of time babies looked at one or the other faces was measured. For the electrophysiological analyses, babies were subjected to mixtures of “happy or sad” black and white faces and voices.

If the babies didn’t buy any of this manipulation, “the experimenter viewing the infant via live video feed paused the experiment and presented digital images ⁄ sounds of ‘Elmo’ until they fixated the screen.” No word on how often that happened.

Oh, did I mention electrodes were glued to the kids? Indeed, “Trials were discarded from analyses if they contained more than 12 bad channels” from these electrodes. No word on how many were excluded. But they made the babies go through hundreds of trials; and “average of 95.93″ for one part of the study, etc.

Now, it appears that they did their t-tests based on the samples they would have had had they not tossed out the data. There are words about this being fairer. Or something. It is just not clear. But as larger samples make smaller p-values no matter what, they are biasing things in their favor.

Five-month-olds were not racist: the p-value just wasn’t small enough. But it’s the 9-month-olds where the trouble starts. Older babies spent on average “59.2%” of time looking at white novel faces but just “52.3%” of the time looking at the black novel faces (in the paired-faces experiments). Nine-month-olds also sparkled slightly more via the electrodes than did the 5-month-olds, but the difference is slight and only in on some but not all electrodes.

And it goes on. But it’s all—I hope the authors can forgive me for saying this—rather dull. The differences here are slight and, as said above, in some sense expected. The authors even manage not to include any speculation in their conclusions about “what it all means.” Overall, a fairly routine paper with a few (standard) mistakes. So why the fuss?

Well, it seems the authors just couldn’t help themselves and in the press release accompanying the publication said,

‘These results suggest that biases in face recognition and perception begin in preverbal infants, well before concepts about race are formed,’ said study leader Lisa Scott in a statement.

‘It is important for us to understand the nature of these biases in order to reduce or eliminate [the biases].’

Just couldn’t help themselves, I suppose. They went from something banal—babies can identify the familiar better the novel—to something asinine. All that was missing was the suggestion to create a government program to eliminate “racism” in babies.

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Thanks to Al Perrella for suggesting this topic.