Science – Page 31 – a sibilant intake of breath

Environmentalism and the anthropocene

The term ‘environmentalist’ is not consistently applied. In some circumstances, it is such a generic concept that it would include virtually everybody. If you don’t think we should fill the Grand Canyon with radioactive waste, perhaps you are an environmentalist. In other places, ‘environmentalist’ is a dirty word that politicians feel the need to distance themselves from, using labels like ‘conservationist’.

At the same time, there is enormous disagreement on the scale at which changes in environmental policy and behaviour need to take place. There seem to be people who genuinely think that things like plastic grocery bags are the true environmental scourges of our age (a sort of local environmentalism), but who do not see the planet as a whole as imperilled by human behaviour.

The term ‘anthropocene’ refers to the new geological era in which humanity is the most powerful force affecting what happens on Earth. We are much more influential now than the slow forces that made the climate change in the past. Barring an impact from a meteor or asteroid – or perhaps some kind of megavolcanic event – humanity will remain firmly in charge for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps we need another word for people who recognize this: that in an important sense there is no ‘wilderness’ left, and that the fate of the entire planet now comes down to human decisions. Recognizing this doesn’t mean that you care a lot about nature or wilderness – or even about humanity. It is just a recognition that on this spinning ball of iron (with a glaze of water on the surface and a whiff of atmosphere around) there are about seven billion bipedal primates who are running the show, albeit without a great deal of long-term thinking, ethical deliberation, or wisdom.

The Moral Landscape

Traditionally, science is understood as having limited authority on ethical questions. While scientific knowledge is useful for understanding the world better – including in ways that change our moral thinking – the idea that you can have a scientific answer to a moral question is usually rejected. That position is itself rejected by Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values. Harris argues that we can use science to develop an objective sense of what is good for human beings and what is not, and that we can judge various practices using that scale. The book sharply and effectively criticizes both religious perspectives on the nature of the world and moral relativism. Indeed, the author’s principle project seems to be the development of a non-religious alternative to relativism, based around cognitive science. For the most part, his argument strikes me as a convincing one. That, in turn, has some important implications for political debates.

Harris’ book is a complex one that makes many different arguments and points. Often, he is able to illustrate his logic through clear examples, though some of them feel a bit cliched. He could also have devoted more attention to criticizing intuitive moral reasoning within western societies. He manages some elegant and convincing rebuttals, such as his response to the scapegoat problem on page 79 of the hardcover edition.

One key element of Harris’ argument is the view that it is the conscious life of animals that matters, when it comes to the basis of ethics: “[Q]uestions about values – about meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose – are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures”. He argues this point convincingly, and suggests that we can build from that claim and from factual understanding of cognitive science to robust ethical judgements. Harris pays relatively little attention to non-human animals, but that is clearly an area into which such thinking can be extended, when it comes to questions like factory farming or veganism. Harris says that: “The only thing wrong with injustice is that it is, on same level, actually or potentially bad for people”. A richer ethical theory might incorporate the interests of other conscious organisms in some way.

Some of Harris’ concerns do seem a bit exaggerated. For instance, when he walks about the danger of “the societies of Europe” being “refashion[ed]” into “a new Caliphate”. He also has a bit too much faith in the power of brain scans as they now exist. Being able to track which parts of the brain receive more blood flow than others is useful, but doesn’t necessarily allow us to develop nuanced pictures of complex ideas and thought processes. As such, his argument that since functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of people thinking about mathematical equations resemble those of people considering ethical propositions, we should consider that evidence that the two are similar things.

Ultimately, the argument made in The Moral Landscape is utilitarian. We can come to know the basics of what makes up a good human life, and we should arrange states and global society so that people can experience them (and so that they avoid experiencing the worst things, like slavery and total personal insecurity). He makes the important point that we cannot expect to know all the consequences of particular choices, but we can nonetheless reach firm conclusions about important problems. Societies that provide education for women are better than societies that keep them in ignorance. That claim can be justified, according to Harris, by carefully examining the mental lives of people living in both kinds of society.

In particular, Harris highlights how societies that are based upon secular ethics consistently do better in measurable ways than those which are most explicitly modeled on religious ethics. “Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands”, Harris explains, “which are consistently the most atheistic societies on earth – consistently rate better tan religious nations on measures like like expectancy, infant mortality, crime, literacy, GDP, child welfare, economic equality, economic competitiveness, gender equality, health care, investments in education, rates of university enrollment, internet access, environmental protection, lack of corruption, political stability, and charity to poorer nations, etc”. He attributes the claim to P. Zuckerman’s 2008 book Society Without God.

Harris’ purpose is not a dispassionate one, focused on description. He says clearly that: “[c]hanging people’s ethical commitments… is the most important task facing humanity in the twenty-first century”. I am not sure if I quite agree. You can argue that people need to change the fundamental basis of their ethical views in order to deal with a world of 6.7 billion people. Alternatively, you can see the problem as the disconnect between the choices people make and the ethical views they already possess. If people could directly see the consequences of their choices, I think their existing ethical systems would often drive them to behave otherwise. It is because the consequences are mostly hidden – largely imposed on people in other places, and in the future – that people often make choices that are so oblivious to the harm they are forcing upon other conscious creatures. Harris argues that “one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-moment failures of our ethical intuitions”. I think that is especially true when it comes to economics, public policy, and the environment.

Legal chess positions versus IPv6 addresses

Based on recent minimal research, it seems like there are probably more legal chess positions than there are addresses in Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). Wikipedia explains that there are 3.4 x 10^38 IPv6 addresses, and explains that Claude Shannon estimated the chess figure at 10^120, though other estimates exist.

If there are more chess positions than IPv6 addresses, it means you could devise an algorithm to represent the address of an internet-connected machine using IPv6 as a legal chess position, and that there would be enough chess positions to represent every possible IPv6 address. For instance, you could devise a set of rules that would produce an exhaustive set of chess positions, then generate the whole set and start numbering them using IPv6 addresses. You would start with a legally set up board, then assign IPv6 addresses to the positions that can be achieved through every possible move. Then, keep going until your rules have produced the gigantic complete set of possible legal chess positions. It would be like a rainbow table.

That would be a neat way to express the addresses in a human-readable form. It also means that you could translate the address of any device into a playable chess game, though a lot of them would be very lopsided, in terms of which colour has the advantage.

Ahead of the curve

When confronted with a crisis like the ongoing nuclear accident in Japan, individuals are faced with some difficult choices. Usually, the authorities tell them to take very modest precautions, like not drying your laundry outdoors if you live close to the plant. Individuals themselves can take additional precautions, but risk causing knock-on effects if they do.

An obvious example is trying to move farther from the accident site. It probably improves your personal safety to be farther away, but may be an ineffective approach if everyone tries to do it at once. That actually creates a stronger personal incentive to take early action. If you leave early – before most people are excessively concerned – you might actually make it. If you wait until the government tells everyone to leave, you might find yourself stuck in a relatively chaotic mass of scared people.

A less dramatic example is avoiding certain potentially risky activities, like consuming products from pastured animals. After nuclear accidents in other places, things like milk, wool, and meat have been contaminated. It is pretty clear why that is a risk – animals that graze across a wide area of pasture get exposed to whatever level of fallout has accumulated over all that land. The same is probably true of fish and other marine organisms that either filter large amounts of water or eat other animals that do.

All told, the situation in a disaster area may be a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma. The best choice for you may be to flee and/or take precautions, but doing so could cause problems for others. Furthermore, trying to do either of those things at the same time as everyone else is more difficult than taking action before others do. That risks creating a ‘run on the bank’ scenario, however, as people farther and farther from the disaster area rush to deplete pharmacies of potassium iodide, or to purchase air-filtering equipment.

On sexual education

A friend of mine works for an organization that teaches sex education classes in high schools. After a recent presentation, there was a barrage of complaints from parents who were offended that their high-school-aged children were being told how to put on condoms, and that masturbation is a risk-free alternative to sex. I can somewhat understand the psychology of parents, insofar as I can recognize the signs of people struggling desperately to retain control of something they feel as though they own. At the same time, I think their complaints should be dismissed completely.

Human bodies are incredibly complex things, which is why medical school is one of the most challenging intellectual undertakings people can take on. At the same time, every human being possesses such a body and has a right to understand at least the most important things about it. Those include understanding their own nature as sexual beings (and, yes, twelve-year-olds are already sexual beings), as well as knowing the facts about human sex and reproduction. They have the right to know about the risks associated with different sexual acts, and the mechanisms that are available for reducing those risks. They also have the right to know about the psychology and sociology of human sexuality: that being gay isn’t a sign of being unhealthy, that there is a whole spectrum of preference when it comes to sexual acts and partners, and that standards of sexual morality vary across time and space.

There is an especially insidious argument made sometimes that suggests that children should be made fearful of sex, in order to keep them from trying it. Firstly, this argument fails on a factual basis. Keeping kids ignorant will not stop them from experimenting. What it will keep them from doing is taking precautions like using barriers and contraception, talking with their parents and doctors, and generally making informed choices. This argument also fails from a moral perspective. For one group of people to decide that a thing should not be done, then agree to use misinformation to trick everyone else into acting that way, is insidious, paternalistic, and duplicitous. By all means, if you can use logic and evidence to convince people to agree with your views, do so. If you need to lie to them, however, there is a good chance that your perspective is actually incorrect.

Parents obviously have a role in keeping their children safe and in shaping their views about the world. At the same time, they have no right whatsoever to keep their children in ignorance about something as important as their own health and safety, or the functioning of their own bodies and reproductive systems. When schools cave to parental pressure and intentionally maintain the ignorance of some children, they are making the same kind of ethical mistake as fundamentalist governments make when they ban heresy or censor the news. One person’s patronizing impulse doesn’t create a valid justification for the suppression of important knowledge and information. Children should be educated about sex, and it should be done by taking the best scientific evidence we have available and making it as comprehensible as possible for people who have their level of general education.

More controversially, I think it is appropriate to tell students that sex is a natural and joyful part of human life, not something they should be fearful or ashamed of. It can be argued that this steps outside the bounds of science and objectivity, but I would question that on the basis of Sam Harris’ general argument about science and ethics. It is possible to distinguish between societies that enable human flourishing and those that suppress it, and those distinctions are valid in a way that can be demonstrated scientifically. Societies that treat sex exclusively as something shameful, dangerous, and secret seem likely to be comprehensively worse than those that treat it as something positive with risks that can be managed in intelligent ways.

On the stability of personality

One of the most interesting questions arising within biology, psychology, and philosophy is: “What are we?”.

We aren’t a particular collection of atoms and molecules, because that is constantly in flux. With every breath we take and meal we eat, we incorporate matter from the world into our bodies. At the same time, we lose matter whenever we exhale or excrete. A carbon or nitrogen atom that is in your brain or bone today could be in your blood tomorrow and in the air or your local river tomorrow. There are probably hardly any of the atoms you were born with still inside your body, and few of the atoms inside your body now will be there when you die.

We also aren’t disembodied souls or spirits. Our minds and the experience of mental life are fundamentally tied to our physical brains in predictable ways. There are structures within the brain that operate the various features of mental life, and our experiences are related to them. These things change in response to physical stimuli, such as exposure to psychoactive drugs or a brick to the head. There isn’t some abstract ‘I’ that enjoys cycling and coffee, but which dislikes intense heat and polka music. Rather, those preferences reflect changeable facts about my mind and brain. If I fell in love with a polka musician, my feelings about the genre could change. Similarly, with a few more spectacular crashes, my ardour for cycling could diminish.

There is one partial answer to the identity question that has arisen from psychology. Psychologists have identified a ‘Big Five’ set of personality traits that vary between individuals but which tend to remain stable for a particular individual over time. If you test a group of young children, you will find that they score differently from one another on the five traits. But if you come back decades later and test the results, they will likely score similarly to how they did as children.

As described by Wikipedia, the traits are:

Openness – (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious). Appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience.
Conscientiousness – (efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless). A tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behaviour.
Extraversion – (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved). Energy, positive emotions, surgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation in the company of others.
Agreeableness – (friendly/compassionate vs. cold/unkind). A tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.
Neuroticism – (sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident). A tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability.

Thinking about myself, I can pretty easily estimate where I lie with respect to others on each of these:

I think I am unusually open. If someone offered me an interesting job in Paris or Tokyo tomorrow, I would take it. At the same time, I am not the sort of person willing to devote their entire life to the search for novelty. I do enjoy learning and using difficult words, spending time on reflection, and considering abstract problems. I would find myself hopelessly frustrated and bored in a life with no novelty, even if it was very comfortable.
I also think I am unusually conscientious. I have been following a personal strategy for years that has involved a fair bit of investment and delayed gratification. I like keeping to-do lists, and I rarely miss appointments or allow things to ‘fall through the cracks’. I rarely lose things.
I am on the borderline between introversion and extroversion. At the wrong sort of party (with dancing), I am likely to be at the edge, but I am likely to be right in the middle of a party that is to my liking (with talking). I am generally comfortable around people and open to talking to strangers. At the same time, I definitely need solitude and time to myself. I would never be happy in a life that afforded no opportunities to be alone.
Compared to most people, I don’t think I am especially agreeable. I tend to be critical and judgmental and I do not care very much about feelings for their own sake. At the same time, I think having people of that sort is defensible and necessary. For injustice and wrongdoing to be stopped, there need to be people who will speak out against it. Similarly, if we give excessive attention to how people feel, we risk ignoring the facts in any particular situation.
I am more neurotic than most. I wouldn’t be the person who I am if I didn’t worry about climate change every day. To reverse the tautology, If I didn’t worry about climate change every day, I would not be the person who I am. I don’t usually feel much anger, but I do get anxious and sometimes depressed. I worry a lot, and my moods vary a great deal.

All this seems like an important part of the answer to the identity question. These personality traits tend to remain stable across the course of a normal human life (if you get a railroad spike through your head all bets are off about the stability of your personality). They are not substantially altered by common but important occurrences like adolescence, emergence into adulthood, marriage, reproduction, or aging. Even though the traits probably arise from a combination of genes and experience (studies suggest that about half of the explanation for how we score is genetic), this nonetheless seems like a valid and useful way to understand the meaning of an individual.

Recognizing checkmate

There comes a time in most games of chess (those not doomed to end in a draw) where one king can no longer evade the opposing forces and stands checkmated. This position can be expressed with mathematical precision and is undeniable for anyone who accepts the current rules of the game.

Nothing quite so clear-cut exists when it comes to logical arguments, but there can be cases where it comes close. For instance, if there are two theories about what is causing some effect, testing can be used to develop strong confidence about which cause explains it. If my computer will not turn on and the problem could be either that the hard drive has been removed or there is no electricity, I can undertake trials to determine the cause. I can check that the power cord is plugged in. I can test the socket by putting something else into it. I can open up the computer case. I can try booting from a DVD or a network drive.

Similarly, it is possible to forcefully rebut a logical argument on the basis of logic itself. This mostly applies to very narrow computer-science-type problems, but it is still worth recognizing. For instance, we can evaluate self-contained logical statements like: “Object X is either part of Group A or Group B. It is part of Group A. Therefore, it is not part of Group B.”

More often, we combine logic with factual claims about the world. The patient cannot be having an allergic reaction to the antibiotics, because they have not been administered yet. My keys cannot be in my apartment, because they are here in my hand. The atomic bomb cannot detonate, because the plutonium pit has been removed.

To me, it seems that there are some large and important questions where we have basically achieved checkmate, when it comes to how certain we can be that one perspective is correct and another is not. For example, the claim that the universe is 6,000 years old is demonstrably false. The case is closed. We know the universe to be billions of years old. The same goes for the fact that evolution takes place.

Less certain, but still very close to checkmate, are positions including: “The Earth’s climate is being altered by human activities.”.

Then there are positions that are very certain, but which involve less concrete claims, such as: “There is no evidence the universe was created by a sentient being.” and “There is no evidence of any kind of divine being that cares about human behaviour.”. The only real rebuttal to these arguments is that people have strong feelings or intuitions that contradict them, but feelings are neither logic nor evidence.

Ultimately, it is important to keep proving and re-proving claims that we believe to be true. Oftentimes, we find that we were basically right but that there was more complexity than we expected. Other times, we discover that we have been more comprehensively wrong. Awareness of our own fallibility is a critical part of the advancement of knowledge.

At the same time, we should not allow ourselves to be paralyzed with uncertainty, especially when it is those last lingering wisps of uncertainty that remain alive only because people have strong feelings about a subject. Every human decision involves dealing with some level of uncertainty, and yet it is demonstrably the case that it is better for people to act once they have done their due diligence than it is for them to dither forever while evaluating evidence and arguments. When one is in checkmate, the only sensible thing to do is to accept it and start thinking about what the lessons of the game have been. It is frustrating for me – then – that there are still vast numbers of people who believe that the planet is 6,000 years old, all the world’s land animals were once on one big boat, every organism was created in its current form and doesn’t change, or that all the climate change we are observing is caused by natural forces. How can we continue to improve humanity’s understanding of the world when there are people who will never accept that they have been checkmated, no matter how many times you point out the pieces blocking every possible avenue of escape for their king?

Global emission pathway, made manifest

Over lunch yesterday, I had an idea for a climate change art installation that would represent the task that needs to be completed and, crucially, the kind of raw work that needs to go into it.

The central feature would be a steel bar extending up diagonally to the right, shaped like historical and projected future global greenhouse gas emissions, expressed in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. It would be anchored at the point of the present, but flexible and free-standing beyond that.

Toward the far end of the bar would be some physical mechanism for bending the whole thing downward. People who saw the installation would contribute physically to the process, which would take weeks or months. Some ideas for mechanisms:

A pulley system with a large array of blocks and tackle, allowing people to slowly wrench the bar downward
Platforms attached to the bar onto which weights could be progressively moved, lowering it
A chain attached near the end of the bar, connected to a large wheel that can slowly be turned

Whatever the mechanism, there would need to be a ratchet system in place to make sure the bar would not swing violently upward if something went wrong.

At the beginning, the whole setup would look like a business-as-usual projection, with annual emissions rising right out to 2100 as humanity continues to exploit coal and unconventional oil and gas (the conventional stuff plausibly being already exhausted by then). At the end, it would look like the curves from the Copenhagen Diagnosis, bent down to carbon neutrality.

An important part of the installation is that the process of moving the bar should be physically hard work for the people viewing the exhibit. It should be uncomfortable in formal clothes, and leave people feeling the strain of it for a couple of minutes afterward. With weights, it could be calibrated to the different strength levels of visitors. Some could move 1kg, some 10kg, some 20kg.

The installation would illustrate how a task that is impossible individually becomes possible when two things happen: when lots of people make an appropriate contribution, and where someone sets up a mechanism that directs and coordinates those actions.

I don’t think you could do this in North America. Some tourist would drop a weight on their foot and sue you and the gallery for millions of dollars. Maybe it could be done in England. If the city of Oxford was willing to take on the liability risks involved in Luminox, maybe there would be some English venue willing to tolerate those associated with a big steel bar under increasing tension.

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.