John clued me to this article: The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science There is, alas, no scientific claim so preposterous that a scientist cannot be found to vouch for it. And many such claims end up in a court of law after they have cost some gullible person or corporation a lot of money. How are juries to evaluate them? Before 1993, court cases that hinged on the validity of scientific claims were usually decided simply by which expert witness the jury found more credible. Expert testimony often consisted of tortured theoretical speculation with little or no supporting evidence. Jurors were bamboozled by technical gibberish they could not hope to follow, delivered by experts whose credentials they could not evaluate. . . I have identified seven indicators that a scientific claim lies well outside the bounds of rational scientific discourse. Of course, they are only warning signs -- even a claim with several of the signs could be...

Robin Hanson comments on another mind change, this time the disappointment of psychiatrist Randolph Nesse, described as a Darwinian medicine pioneer, with expertise. I used to believe that you could find out what is true by finding the smartest people and finding out what they think. However, the most brilliant people keep turning out to be wrong. . . I also used to believe that you could find out what is true by relying on experts — smart experts — who devote themselves to a topic. . . I used to believe that truth had a special home in universities. After all, universities are supposed to be devoted to finding out what is true, and teaching students what we know and how to find out for themselves. Universities may be best show in town for truth pursuers, but most stifle innovation and constructive engagement of real controversies, not just sometimes, but most of the time, systematically. . . by...

Some will ask why we should listen to people like Herb Gintis (see previous post) since he has been so wrong in the past? Until the mid 1980s he was a Marxist. I've written about this before. This is a subject dealt with so many times here that I've taken to using the turn of phrase "cognitive kaleidoscope" as if everyone knows what it refers to. You may not if you haven't been following the extended discussion, but you can get the gist of it just from the words. But I think that Prometheus has missed the mark a bit by not giving sufficient weight to the fact that the apostates he cites weren't careful thinkers who formed pragmatic and provisional conclusions based on the evidence available, and then altered those conclusions in response to new and better evidence. They are dark-siders who took up arms to fight for a cause based on skimpy evidence floating in a lake...

Members of the hectoring classes and their supporters spend a great deal of effort seeking to justify themselves. In the process they conceal relevant information and offer mistaken analyses. Consider: Paternal policies fight cognitive bias, slash information costs, and privelege responsible subselves To help us avoid these biases we have hired representatives, who create agencies (like the FDA and the SEC) with committees and subcommittees that debate the issue: they put on seminars and conferences and write working papers and white papers and cost/benefit analyses, and invite comments, etc, in short, consider the matter in depth, and then decide to ban certain drugs or activities, and not others. We voters ratify this every 2 years, except when we change our mind, as with alcohol, tobacco, or thalidomide. Besides saving our lives, minds and fortunes, a side benefit is savings for us citizens in information costs, because we citizens don't have to read all the papers, and a good thing...

Intelligence may be even more distributed than we thought. How humans are able to move at all remains a puzzle. Our muscles are controlled by thousands of nerve cells in the spinal cord. This entire, complex system must work as a whole in order to successfully create a single motion. The new research shows that even if we repeat a certain motion with high accuracy, the involved nerve cells never repeat their activity patterns. This particular observation reflects the organisation of the nerve cells of the cerebral cortex. . . . "Our findings contradict conventional wisdom about spinal cord functions," says Rune W. Berg from Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology at the Faculty of Health Sciences. Until now, the general belief was that the spinal networks functioned mechanically and completely without random impulses. The new discovery enables researchers to use the theory on cortical networks to explore how spinal cords generate movements. It seems so. My body seems to...

Hal Finney finds thinking for himself to be an unreliable way to find truth. One of the problems that interests me is how best to learn the truth in controversial matters. . . One is to simply go along with what your peers believe. . . Another is to try to study the issue and become familiar with the arguments pro and con in some depth, and then to use your own judgment to determine the truth . . . Oversimplifying, I'd say that ordinary people use the first method, and smart people use the second method, but neither strikes me as very reliable on topics of controversy. . . Another method which I have found reasonably successful for certain matters is to try to learn the scientific consensus. . . It can reasonably be questioned whether this method is justified, whether scientific understanding can properly be viewed as an approximation to the truth. My answer is that science...

I've been having another one of those sensory cortex days, a day when the world is so beautiful and comfortable that I have trouble staying conscious, trancing out on one thing and then another - the sight of nearly anything in the all day beauty light of a sun low in the south shining through clear air, the sound of a goose honking as it passes, the smell of leaves moldering, two calves licking another that has been feeling poorly for a day or two, a grinning dog, a shower of leaves lazily drifting down to grass I had just raked clean - it's all just so, so good. And all the better for being unexpected, a surpise gift. Unfortunately, consciousness returns, but perhaps I can make some lemonade of it. Annie Dillard said it so well in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I've been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises....

Hal Finney at Overcoming Bias ponders the nature and consequences of present orientation. It relates to one of the most curious of human failures, our inability to successfully act in our own self-perceived best interest. Now it's not clear that this is actually a case of bias in the sense of inability to see the truth. It may be the case that we often take actions we know we will regret, and fully and correctly predict our attitudes and responses throughout the time in which we will experience the consequences of our actions. Yet we find that as we move from one time period to the next, we perceive that the actions that we have taken were not in our self-interest. Herb Gintis thinks it is. . . . humans, like all other animals, do not maximize fitness, but rather an objective function (which may be called a preference function) based on immediate costs and benefits, that has evolved...

I've been reading a new blog, Overcoming Bias: A forum for those serious about trying to overcome their own biases in beliefs and actions. It's a group blog, or forum as they style it (kinda old timey that), with some names I've paid attention to before such as Nick Bostrom and Robin Hanson, as well as a dozen other less familiar names, brought to us by Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. It has been threatening to be interesting and today has done so: The Martial Art of Rationality. Alas, our minds respond less readily to our will than our hands. Muscles are evolutionarily ancient subjects of neural control, while cognitive reflectivity is a comparatively more recent innovation. We shouldn't be surprised that muscles are easier to use than brains. But it is not wise to neglect the latter training because it is more difficult. It is not by bigger muscles that the human species rose to prominence...

One of the clearest examples of exploiting moral wiggle room, the subject of the previous post, is the pervasiveness of support for obviously mistaken public assertions of political activists, by fellow travelers, for instrumental reasons. Norm points out a recent example - something he has done numerous times over a long period of time. In this case it's another wheezing attempt to obfuscate terrorism that Norm outs for moral (and I'd add intellectual) turpitude. Since the connection between choices and outcomes isn't perfectly clear, fairness is no longer as compelling a consideration for some as advancing their political agenda. Roger Pielke Jr. notes another example of such behavior that is closer to my core concerns. For me the most amazing aspect of the repeated misrepresentation of science related to disasters and climate change is not that political advocates look to cherry pick science or go beyond the state of the science. What is most amazing is that in the...

Alex points to an interesting paper, Exploiting moral wiggle room: Experiments demonstrating an illusory preference for fairness : Subjects in economic experiments are often generous. This behavior is often interpreted as reflecting a preference for equitable, efficient, or otherwise desirable social outcomes. We show that a considerable proportion of such fair behavior may be driven by a desire to appear fair without actually wanting a fair outcome. To do so, we first demonstrate a high frequency of fair behavior in a modification of the standard dictator game, but then show that fairness decreases substantially when the connection between choices and outcomes is obfuscated. Specifically, we show that in a binary version of the dictator game, a majority of subjects choose the fair and efficient outcome. We then show that subjects playing the same game instead choose to maximize their own payoffs, at the expense of fairness and efficiency, when the recipients’ payoffs are uncertain, even if this uncertainty can...

I've been taking care of Nanette's ranchette for her while she and Chuck travel the world. They're doing a sort of post-retirement grand tour, having already done the retire to the ranch thing. I get the benefit of using her pastures for my stock, and she gets some peace of mind knowing that an uptight everything-must-fit manager is overseeing her dominion. She and Chuck stop by once or twice a year and I see that when they arrive all is in order. It's almost as if their own ranch is a B&B that they visit now and again. This is an emerging profession of sorts - ranch butler, a.k.a. mouse catcher - as more urban refugees buy up ranch land but have no interest or expertise in the grungy details. In general, I don't do television, but Nanette has a big screen and satellite programming. The last time she visited it was on the blink, a failure on my...

Or alternatively, a man of letters, an educated man but not, in the sense that has been discussed here recently, an intellectual since he is too well educated. OK, he might not like that and may think of himself as an intellectual or at least make common cause with those who do, but I beg to differ. He's insufficiently hedgehogish for that. One of the ideas I'm very fond of is that virtue isn't its own reward, it's a dominating strategy. More precisely, I am interested to see how far one can go towards showing that behaving ethically is actually a very good bet if one wants to come out ahead materially. . . The experiments of Robert Axelrod seem to indicate that a stance of "Be nice to everyone, but if someone hits you, hit back" is a very good bet. (When The Matrix came out, one reviewer, I think it was Stuart Klawans in The Nation, described...

or at least in very strong like, or something - it's a bit beyond respect and admiration. In this post, I mentioned the incredible reasoning and rhetorical skills of Milton Friedman in an old video clip. I love the internet. I found the transcript. Turns out it's from 1975, not the '60s. It's wonderful. Read it. The post title was Milton on Fire and was a follow up to Milton Friedman Doesn't Beat His Wife. I've long been an admirer of Uncle Milty too, so I pretty much had to read it. Roberts selected this exchange to pull out of the transcript. HEFFNER: Yes, but it interests me that you just said that mankind is selfish and greedy. And that has always been the battle cry of those who have said; therefore, we must impose controls upon them. FRIEDMAN: Therefore, we have to put power into the hands of other selfish and greedy men. Now I want to apologize...

This, I have learned, is what Orwell called it. This bon mot is one of many in James Piereson's review of Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain by Stefan Collini. Pierson contrasts this work with The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969) by John Gross. The “man of letters,” as Gross understands him, is one who lives by writing and makes a living by doing so—that is, a professional writer, albeit one with literary interests. . . The disintegration of the literary culture of the nineteenth century was accompanied by the gradual disappearance after 1900 of the man of letters himself. Within a short time, the man of letters began to appear as a dilettante, a dabbler, a dying species, even as a crank. The term itself came to be used as an instrument of abuse to signify an aged and somewhat eccentric bookman. In short order, modern life began to evolve its own substitutes for the...

It seems that I point to Pielke in half my posts, but he's been on a roll. Read this one immediately. The almost daily use of current weather and climate events to argue for action on greenhouse gases by the media and political advocates is among the most egregious misuses of science in the climate debate. Not only does it redirect attention away from those actions most likely to have an effect on the impacts of weather and climate, but it creates disincentives for action on the longer-term problem of human-caused climate change. . . The hard reality is that the only justifiable use of current weather and climate events as a tool of promotion for action on climate change is in support of improving adaptive responses and reducing vulnerability. He supports those assertions by referencing work in cognitive heuristics. The research by John Sterman of MIT and Linda Booth Sweeny at Harvard on MIT graduate students - presumably...