Books and literature – Page 19 – a sibilant intake of breath

Questioning religious beliefs

In The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris repeatedly questions the societal taboo against critically evaluating religious beliefs. For instance, people are hesitant to raise evidence or arguments that contradict religious claims, as well as point out instances in which different claims made by the same religion contradict one another.

This is at least a bit different from evaluating religiously motivated actions, as was discussed here earlier. As in that case, however, I think Harris argues convincingly that it is wrong to put religious beliefs into a special category deserving special respect. Of course, this is a provocative claim, given that many religious beliefs simply cannot stand up in the face of evidence and critical examination, and people find it awkward when important parts of their religious belief structure are shown to be in a state of obvious contradiction with the kind of every-day mechanisms they use to evaluate new information. People tolerate the fact that claims are made in holy publications and from the pulpit which cannot be made with any credibility in a newspaper or political speech.

The idea that religious beliefs deserve special protection often comes from religion itself. Religions are often extremely hostile toward ‘heresy’, which is understandable from a kind of institutional evolutionary perspective. In many circumstances, faiths that maintain theological and ideological coherence are likely to attract more adherents and last longer than those that tolerate a broad variety of views. Faiths of the latter kind are probably more likely to fragment and fracture, and they are also probably less likely to attract extreme devotion, dedication, and efforts to convert the masses. It is no coincidence that the first commandment (though the notion that there are a clear set of ten is disputed) is that you should make sure not to honour the wrong god. It also doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that the more dogmatic forms of Christianity (to choose one example) are winning more converts around the world than the more progressive forms.

Of course, humanity has a whole has an enormous interest in understanding the world well. It is demonstrably the case that our understanding of things like physics and biology allow us to live richer, healthier, and more fulfilling lives. Particularly in cases where scientific claims based on evidence and reason contradict religious claims based on someone’s supposedly divine authority, I think it is bad for humanity when large numbers of people place the religious claim above the scientific one. There are plenty of contemporary examples. Access to contraception and sex education demonstrably improves the kinds of lives people live, and yet one major force preventing those things from being universally available is religious beliefs that oppose them (arguably, with a hidden patriarchal motivation).

Ultimately, people possess a right to understand their own bodies and control their own sexuality and reproduction that is more important than the religious preferences of others who would seek to restrict and control those rights within the general population, especially among women.

If we lived in a world that took the kind of evidence that Harris finds convincing more seriously – things like the psychological consideration of what effect various circumstances have on human flourishing – I think we would ultimately find it preferable to a world where we continue to rely upon the kind of ‘evidence’ that supports substandard education and medical care for women, or the prohibition of promising types of medical research, or the teaching of utterly refuted theories about the history of life on Earth. People often argue that we should give respect to religious beliefs in the name of ‘tolerance’. While that argument might be somewhat convincing when it comes to benign beliefs, like the existence or non-existence of the Easter Bunny, it seems indefensible in the case of beliefs that have large and harmful effects on the lives of a great many people. Those beliefs – whether religiously motivated or not – deserve to be challenged honestly, openly, and vigorously.

Feynman and the Trinity test

This post have been revamped in response to a perceptive comment. The old version is available here.

In Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, American physicist Richard Feynman speculates that he may have been the only person who watched the Trinity Test relatively directly, using a windshield to exclude ultraviolet light. Everyone else, he claims, was looking through something akin to welding goggles.

This claim is contradicted in chapter 18 of Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, in which Rhodes claims that Ernest Lawrence considered watching the test through a windshield, but decided to step out of the car and watch it directly, and that Robert Serber also watched with unprotected eyes.

Feynman does come up a few times in Rhodes’ Pulitzer Prize-winning book. He is quoted on the limitations of human understanding (p.32-33 paperback), the boundaries of science (35), and the status of Seth Neddermeyer‘s plutonium implosion setup in 1943 (479). The book also describes Feynman coining of the term ‘tickling the dragon’s tail’ to describe Otto Robert Frisch‘s dangerous criticality experiment (611), and fixing a shortwave radio being used during the Trinity test itself (668). In one of his books, Feynman describes how he began fixing neighbourhood radios as a small boy.

Quite possibly, people other than Feynman did watch the test without welding goggles and he never found out about it, or at least learned of it after the wrote the speculative comment in his book.

iTunes 10.1.1 (4) bug

One really annoying bug exists in iTunes 10.1.1 (4). When you buy a track from the iTunes Store, it doesn’t go into Apple’s default ‘Recently Added’ smart playlist. This makes it so you have basically two different ‘inboxes’ for new songs, podcasts, etc. You need to remember whether you bought a song on iTunes, ripped it from a CD, or downloaded it as a free podcast, etc.

It would be better if songs you purchased appeared in ‘Recently Added’ along with everything else. It would be especially useful when traveling and listening to previously-downloaded podcasts.

Now or Never

Tim Flannery’s slim book Now or Never: Why We Need to Act Now to Achieve a Sustainable Future does not mince words, when it comes to describing the seriousness of the situation humanity now finds itself in, with regards to the diminishing capacity of the planet to sustain human flourishing:

There is no real debate about how serious our predicament is: all plausible projections indicate that over the next forty to fifty years humanity will exceed – in all probability by about 100 percent – the capacity of Earth to supply our needs, thereby greatly exacerbating the risk of widespread starvation, or of being overwhelmed by our own pollution.

Flannery, previously known for his book The Weather Makers, describes the latest climatic science as detailed by James Hansen before scoping out some of the options that exist for mitigating its seriousness, if humanity acts quickly enough.

Flannery is also forthright on the matter of just how difficult it will be to prevent unacceptable amounts of climate change – hinting (but never saying directly) that geoengineering may be required. The book places a strong emphasis on the possibility of drawing carbon dioxide from the air and into biological sinks, and considers the role that carbon markets and offsets could play in driving such actions. It does not adequately consider the issue of certainty, however. To be really worthwhile, the carbon needs to be removed from the atmosphere indefinitely – something that cannot really be ensured by planting trees (which could burn or be cut down) or enriching soils with carbon (which could be re-released).

All in all, I wasn’t hugely impressed with Flannery’s argument. He seemed overly focused on defending livestock agriculture, too bullish on pyrolysis and biochar as sequestration techniques, and overly eager to attribute intentions to nature. At many points, Flannery brings up the Gaia Hypothesis, which I think is often dangerously misleading in its implications. There is no reason to believe the Earth ‘prefers’ one state or another, or that it will always respond to shocks by moving back in the direction of how it was. Rather, there is evidence from the paleoclimatic record that when the climate system is pushed aggressively enough, it can swing into dramatic new states, in a way that could be profoundly hostile for humanity and most of the planet’s other species.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the inclusion of responses written by prominent individuals including Peter Singer (who very effectively rebuts Flannery’s argument that meat eating isn’t too problematic) and Bill McKibben. In his response, Gwynne Dyer neatly responds to some of the book’s Gaia language, while also making a key overall point:

Whether you want to dress [knowing human manipulation of the climate] up as human beings becoming the consciousness of Gaia, or just see us as the same old self-serving species we always were, we are taking control of the planet’s climate. This billions-strong human civilization will live or die by its success in understanding the global carbon cycle and modifying it as necessary to preserve our preferred climate.

Those key points – the seriousness of the risk of climate change and the importance of taking action in response – have not yet really been absorbed by either the general public or the world’s political elite. If that is to change in time for the very worst possible outcomes to be avoided, that needs to change quickly. By helping to publicize those key facts, Flannery certainly seems to be helping that process, even if there are valid criticisms that can be raised against some of his perspectives and proposed responses.

Outliers: The Story of Success

One thing that sets apart the writing of Malcolm Gladwell is the ease with which it is devoured. His books always provide the reader with the sense that they are taking in important new information, and doing so unusually quickly and easily. In Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell argues convincingly the the level of success people achieve has an enormous amount to do with the conditions in which they lived. How your parents raise you is important, as is the cultural legacy you inherit. Even arbitrary-seeming things like when in the year you were born can have a demonstrable effect, particularly in sports.

This book has been analyzed to death in the popular press, so there isn’t much point in me recapping it. Talking about highly successful people like Michael Jordan and Bill Gates, Gladwell argues that:

[They] appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don’t. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky – but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

In the course of his examination, Gladwell reaches practical conclusions for both individuals and societies. As an individual, if you wish to prosper you must practice an exceptional amount – effort put in can be the most important factor. For society at large:

To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success – the fortunate birth dates and accidents of history – with a society that provides opportunities for all.

He provides some concrete examples of how that could be done: for instance, by delaying the streaming of young children by talent, by providing summer school for low-income children, by encouraging children to assert themselves around and question adults, and so on.

I only have a few quibbles with the book. Sometimes, Gladwell uses vague language. What does it mean to say that $X were ‘involved’ in mergers and acquisitions during the 1980s? Occasionally, he speculates beyond what the evidence he includes can justify. I also think Gladwell is wrong to say that a Boeing 747 contains “212,000 kilograms of steel”. Aluminum is a lot more likely.

Gladwell’s book is engaging, using techniques that many academics would shun as showmanship. For instance, Gladwell sometimes makes a bold promise early in a chapter, saying he will prove an unlikely-seeming statement to be true (“it is possible to… predict the family background, age, and origin of [New York City’s] most powerful attorneys, without knowing a single additional fact about them”), or adds a bit of theatre (“in this chapter, we’re going to conduct [an aircraft] crash investigation”). Partly through such techniques, the book gets across some interesting examples and arguments quickly. It is particularly interesting to see him explain situations in which things that seem like disadvantages – like anti-Semitism in New York law firms – turn out to be highly advantageous to the people who you would expect to be disadvantaged (because they ended up going into areas of law shunned by the established firms, which became important and profitable).

Gladwell’s message is simultaneously empowering and disempowering. By revealing some apparently important underlying dynamics, he may help readers decide how to focus their energies. At the same time, he points out how a lot of the characteristics our lives will have emerge predictably from pre-set characteristics which we cannot alter or control. Indeed, by influencing our thinking about the sources of success, Gladwell affects the inputs that go into our reasoning about ethics. In particular, if people achieve high levels of financial success largely because of arbitrary factors outside their control (or fail financially for the same reasons), the argument for income redistribution looks a lot stronger.

[Update: 7 February 2011] I reviewed another of Gladwell’s books previously: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.

High school science

Talking with Emily the other night, I was reminded of something that happened to me while I was attending Handsworth Secondary School, in North Vancouver. I can’t remember which grade it was in, but I had a large group lecture in ‘science’ (back before they were split by sub-discipline) and one topic covered was buoyancy.

The lecture was taught by Mr. Salkus, one of the two or three teachers who I remember being seriously important for me in high school. At the end, he presented a problem to the class: working out how many five gram helium balloons of a set volume it would require to lift him. Naturally, his weight was provided.

Because I left elementary school having read all the science books I could handle, I started high school with quite a head start in chemistry, physics, and biology. I remember the The Usborne Illustrated Dictionary of Chemistry and the The Usborne Illustrated Dictionary of Physics being favourite childhood texts. (Parents, buy them for your children!) As a result, I was allowed to take Science 8 and Science 9 simultaneously, and move to Science 10 in 9th grade.

One problem with this approach is that my math lagged behind. Math also wasn’t a subject I was particularly strong in. Along with French and gym, it introduced Cs into my high school report cards. I remember, in Chemistry 12, having my brilliant lab partner explain that a problem could be solved easily using an integral, but having no idea how such a thing was done. (Later, as an undergrad, I had a similar experience in an early economics course with regressions.)

So, at the time of this balloon lifting problem, I was not comfortable with algebra. I knew that an algebraic equation would be the way to work out the answer: first by comparing the density of air and helium, then by working out the net lift from each balloon. What I didn’t know was the mathematical technique for doing this properly. Instead, I solved it using an arithmetic kludge.

A prize had been promised to whoever got the answer right, and I remember submitting mine (one of only a small few who did) with nervousness, given that I knew my approach to be somewhat faulty. The next lecture, however, Mr. Salkus gave me a mini Toblerone bar, along with the two students who had actually solved the problem correctly. Maybe he realized that my math classes had lagged behind my science classes; maybe he just felt inclined to reward my effort. In any case, it was one of the things that made me remember him as an unusually good teacher.

Spending your cognitive surplus

One book I have been meaning to read is Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

Apparently, Shirky argues that rising affluence in society has left people with leisure time that has often been misused on fundamentally unproductive tasks like watching television. Now, we have better opportunities to use our down time for something more meaningful, such as contributing to public understanding and discussion on important issues. New forms of collaboration, particularly the internet, make it easier than ever to coordinate with like-minded people around the world.

How do readers of this site spend their cognitive surpluses?

The Best American Essays 2010

For those without a great deal of time to spend reading GQ and The Atlantic Monthly, an anthology like this one prepared by Christopher Hitchens is probably a good idea. It covers a range of topics – from the political to the scientific to the literary.

As I mentioned before, I found John Gamel’s piece on eye disease especially compelling. Steven Pinker also has an interesting piece on personal genomics, which involves a fair bit of discussion on the genetic influence on personality (something I am meaning to write about at greater length soon). I hope I live to see the day when my entire genome can be sequenced for $1,000 or so.

Perhaps the most educational essay is Frederick Starr’s “Rediscovering Central Asia,” which relates some of the cultural and scientific history of the region that now includes Afghanistan and former Soviet Republics like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Starr argues that Westerners have been wrong since September 11th, 2001 to see the place as doomed to be a backwater forever, and just a source of dangerous fanatics:

Donning a bush jacket and filming at dawn and dusk, [Dan Rather] presented the region as inaccessible, backward, exotic, marginal and threatening – in short, the end of the world…

Even though the Central Asia of Rather’s depiction was and is an evocative image, it carries some bothersome implications. On the one hand, it conjures up a place where the best the United States and the world community can hope for is to limit the damage arising from it. That means destroying whatever threatens us and then getting out. The problem is that the thinking behind such an approach can then become self-fulfilling: a place we judged to be hopeless becomes truly so, and even more threatening than before.

If anything, I think many in the west overestimated the potential for transformation in Afghan society following September 11th. At least, they severely underestimated how much time and effort it would take to put the country on any kind of durable liberal footing.

Increasingly, it does look as though the wisest course after September 11th might have been to capture or kill as many members of Al Qaeda as possible, without overthrowing the central government and making an under-resourced effort to establish a state that respects human rights or democratic principles. Now, it seems plausible that all that will arise from that effort will be a relatively brief and bloody pause in Taliban control, in the space between the dramatic arrival and more subdued departure of NATO armies.

John Gamel on vision

For Christmas, I received The Best American Essays 2010, edited by Christopher Hitchens. So far, the most interesting among them has been “The Elegant Eyeball” by John Gamel, originally published in The Alaska Quarterly Review.

Despite being slightly astigmatic, I had never given much thought to eye health or ocular diseases. What was most startling and unsettling about Gamel’s account was the description of the pain associated with maladies like dry corneas or glaucoma. For some reason, I had assumed that eye illnesses simply involved the painless loss of sight, not the sort of agony he describes.

Ultimately, the essay is a reflection on the inevitability of deterioration and death in human bodies – the way time invariably takes away the most precious, necessary, and appreciated of human faculties. Gamel describes one patient – a professor of anthropology at Stanford – who responded to Gamel’s ultimate inability to stave off his macular degeneration with a mixture of realism and humility: “Why so sad, doctor? You look like you just lost your best friend. Who do you think you are – a magician, a god who turns old men into young men?”

Gamel does describe one area where there has been significant progress: in the use of intentional retinal scarification using lasers, to reduce the rate and seriousness of sight loss associated with diabetes. He describes how the treatment has helped hundreds of thousands of people to read and drive for years after diabetic retionopathy would otherwise have blinded them.

Such successful extensions aside, the resounding message of Gamel’s piece is that our own sense of the inevitability of our extending lives and vitality is an illusion. As such, we had best make full enjoyment of our vision while it remains acute.

Social consequences of a real lie detector

In The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Sam Harris raises the possibility of an accurate lie detector based on neural imaging: a machine that could accurately determine whether a statement someone makes accurately reflects their belief on the matter at hand.
Harris discusses the social consequences of the existence of such a machine, and generally thinks they would be positive. They would, for instance, reduce the number of false convictions and false acquittals in the criminal justice system.

Personally, I think the social and cultural effects of such a machine would be extremely widespread, if there was general confidence in its accuracy. Inevitably, there would be calls to test how genuinely all sorts of people feel about things. Does this proposed Catholic bishop really believe in key elements of Catholic doctrine? Does this politician honestly intend to fulfill a particular promise? Does the man who just proposed marriage to a woman really think she is the most beautiful woman he has seen? Does he really want children? Does he really intend to stay with her into old age? Has be been entirely faithful during their courtship? Would he have taken the opportunity to sleep with someone else, if it had arisen?

Of course, the machine could then be turned on the other partner.

If it ever became culturally acceptable to subject people to impartial evaluation on these sorts of questions, it would have countless direct and indirect effects. For one thing, I think it would make hapless pawns more important. Rather than having cynical mob lawyers who know all about the family’s murders but exploit the legal system in every possible way regardless, there would need to be a lot more ignorant people defending important individuals and institutions. Similarly, corporate CEOs would no longer be able to hedge strategically to avoid liability, which could significantly affect the safety and availability of many products in the long-term. For instance, people would have a lot more trouble selling placebos as medicine.

To a large extent, I think society is based around the general acceptance of various kinds of lies. If the people who ran or represented the world’s governments, churches, and corporations had to be scrupulously truthful at all times, the public understanding of how the world operates would change radically. I don’t think this is because people are terribly ignorant about reality. More it is because there are many deceptions which we are comfortable with accepting. For instance, that we are already doing an adequate amount to help those who are starving around the world; that our governments do not commit war crimes or contribute to genocides; that our meat doesn’t get produced in exceptionally cruel ways; and so forth.

There would also be small-scale consequences. To me, it seems that politeness is fundamentally bound up with deception. At the very least, ‘being polite’ requires withholding genuinely held beliefs that would be offensive to other parties in a conversation. At most, it requires actively lying to them. The existence of an effective and credible lie detector would strip people of the ability to be polite. It is possible that would be liberating – allowing people to really express themselves without fear, and granting a better perspective into the real thoughts of others. It is also possible it would be devastating: breaking up businesses, families, and long-standing marriages when people learn things that they simply cannot handle – especially with the full knowledge that they are true (or as much confidence as the accuracy of the equipment allows).

All this relates to some of the issues raised by the film The Invention of Lying, which I commented on before. To have any hope of surviving in this world, we need to be able to accept the possibility that a person could be wrong about something. When someone says that the elevator has arrived, we check before stepping through the open doors into the elevator shaft. Even a perfect lie detector would do nothing to protect us from honestly mistaken beliefs. What it would probably do is have profound social and cultural effects, as a huge number of people found themselves in a position where they either had to submit to the test or foster the widespread view that they aren’t genuine in the claims they are making.