LJWorld.com

A friend sent me a really interesting article that looks at how people sell junk science. The article focuses on Ray Kurzweil who has proposed an idea called the Singularity at which point he claims we will be able to move from human bodies to computers. Kurzweil sees this as the natural outcome of advances in "artificial intelligence", computer power and biology. The article draws parallels between Kurzweil and a 1930's huckster, John Brinkley who tried to sell the notion that he could treat impotence by implanting goat gonads into his victims (I mean patients).

The article gives an interesting checklist about how to sell junk science. One ought to be able to use to detect junk science:

1. Tie your product to the customer's fears
2. Tie your product to popular culture
3. Have multiple products to sell
4. Use social proof rather than scientific proof (aside maybe evidence would have been a better word choice)
5. Argue from authority rather than fact
6. Spread the BS as thickly as possible
7. Treat real science as junk science
8. When all else fails trot out your family
9. Use gullible reporters to get your message out. (Hmmmm how about in the LJWorld?)

Here is the checklist from the article:

The article is at: http://blogs.bnet.com/salesmachine/?p=10552&tag=col1;post-10552

For those interested in the controversies surrounding artificial intelligence the article has a reference to an article in Skeptic magazine about the difficulties involved in developing artificial intelligence and the different approaches to this problem.

What are some sorts of junk science do you see reflected in BNet's checklist?

Here's a partial list of mine:

Creationism and intelligent design Chiropractic (or at least some versions of it) Natural supplements and herbal medicines (not all but a large number of them) The autism/vaccine controversy Scientology Some non empirically based forms of psychology So called energy work Of course "traditional medicine" is not immune to the junk science syndrome Shampoos and skin care products (Think Botanicals-what the heck is that?)

What do you think of the checklist and my list of activities? What would you add to the list? Where am I wrong?

Am I just being a curmudgeon?

The movie Avatar must really be a great movie because it has struck so many nerves on the left and the right. My favorite (and I use that word advisedly) take is from the loony right by Phil Kline Kansas's former attorney general. I am not going to dissect his whole scree which you can read on his blog:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2415427/posts?page=64

Kline predictably thinks Avatar is pro-environmental propaganda (he may be correct by the way), for he writes:

"The natives are one with their native planet, including their mother-god Eywa. Eywa is the planet, and the natives reach oneness by entwining fibers from their bodies with the fibers of the planet. This representative sexual union allows them to hear their departed ancestors and gain rhythm with the planet — a séance orgy so to speak. All life on the planet is one, with one spirit and one energy."

Notice how nicely he works in the evil SEX into his rhetoric.

Later on we get the evil bugaboo of evolution:

"Such a prayer represents atheistic Hollywood's dilemma. The only way to reconcile a godless Darwinistic worldview with a deeply spiritual American culture is to convert environmentalism into religion. For what greater purpose for man than to save mother earth, or Pandora? And thus, our purpose in a purposeless world."

And he says that that culture of the Pandorans is Pantheistic. Well that is true I suppose but if Kline would take off his blinders a bit he would see that it is really a practical pantheism. After all, on Pandora evolution (sorry Phil that is the way the world works) has led to a system where the Pandorans can little plug into each other and indeed that is necessary for their survival. So it's not some really some sort of mystical new age Pantheism, but quite practical.

Now we don't have the same explicit connections to our environment that the Pandorans have but we are interconnected much more and need the rest of the biosphere a lot more than Kline seems to care about. At simplest level we are not even a single organism but a community of roughly 100 trillion human cells and 10 times that many bacterial cells that are symbiotic with us. And I don't think that includes the mitochondria which were believed derived from free living bacteria. And examples of how we are interconnected can be multiplied repeatedly at other levels of biological organization.

So Kline and company may scream but maybe we need a good dose of practical pantheism.

OK maybe not, but a fellow in Santa Fe is suing his neighbor because she refuses to turn of her electronic devices when not in use including WiFi. He claims to be suffering from something called an electromagnetic "allergy". The whole thing reminds me of the controversy about alleged risks to human health associated with living near power lines. People who claim to have electromagnetic "allergies" exhibit a host of vague symptoms. I'm trying to keep an open mind about this but the limited information I have seen on this suggests that this sort of "allergy" is largely psychosomatic. But hey, I'm open minded here. After all other animals are sensitive to magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation so why not people? But does that sensitivity really translate into health risks?

Do electromagnetic "allergies" really exist? Do you think you have this sort of syndrome (a better term than allergy by the way)? Is my new Droid a health risk? Or can I breathe easy and use my G3 and WiFi with impunity?

See this link for details about the man's claim.

I hate year end reviews, which will probably be doubled in number this year since people have this idea that years that end in nine or zero are somehow important. For those that LIKE year end reviews the NY Times has done all the work for you with the 9th Annual Year in Ideas. This review includes semi serious stuff such as the epidemiology of zombies, and the latest in high fashion "Stiletto Claws", to sobering ideas such as the notion that evolutionary innovations in the biosphere have led to mass extinctions "Life's Greatest Hits" to "Lithium in the Water Supply".

Check it out at http://www.nytimes.com/projects/magazine/ideas/2009/

They did miss a few such as iPhones as musical instruments but nobody's perfect.

This is as close to a year end review you will get from me. I promise.

A few months ago I saw a claim that if theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking were in Britain with its socialized medicine he would have been dead by now. I blew it off as another stupid comment but apparently this comment has gotten repeated all over the web. The problem of course is the it is not true as Larry Krauss reminds us in this article in Scientific American:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=war-is-peace

So why do people repeat that sort of tripe?

Krauss asks

"What makes people so susceptible to nonsense in public discourse? Is it because we do such a miserable job in schools teaching what science is all about—that it is not a collection of facts or stories but a process for weeding out nonsense to get closer to the underlying beautiful reality of nature? Perhaps not."

My thought is that whether we are dealing with health care, global warming or various sorts of social issues, we get an emotional high from thinking we are going to win, pull the wool over our opponent's head. Or maybe repetition of simple nostrums and unexamined falsehoods provides us with a sense of security when dealing with the unknown. Maybe such behavior was at one point adaptive maintaining some sort of group cohesion.

Krauss phrases his arguments with examples from the right, but I don't think people of any ideology are immune to this. As I commented in a post to one of my readers it is if we are stuck in a strange attractor or the sort of cycling that a person's brain might get into when they are depressed and can't get out.

As Krauss so ably observes, quoting apparently from an earlier Krauss commentary:

“The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origins of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.”

So take a look at the Krauss article and let me know what you think. Only be careful. Check your falsehoods at the door.

Apparently a creationist group is passing out copies of Darwin's Origin of Species with an introduction chock full of creationist misinterpretations of evolution at the top 100 universities . They were at Washburn yesterday so let's see if KU makes the cut.

By the way here is a link from the National Center for Science Education about this creationist effort. http://www.dontdissdarwin.com/index.php

150 Years On, What’s All The Fuss About Evolution, Science Education and Church and State?

Date: Friday, November 6, 2009 Time: 7:00-9:00 p.m. Location: Johnson County Community College, 12345 College Blvd., Carlsen Center Rm. 234 Campus Map: http://tr.im/B8tg

The program is free and open to the public.

Speakers: • Josh Rosenau, “Thoughts From Kansas” blogger (http://scienceblogs.com/tfk), now on staff at the National Center for Science Education (www.ncseweb.org) “Anti-Evolution Efforts Since the Dover Decision and the Defeat of ‘Intelligent Design’”

• Paul Decelles, Professor of Biology at Johnson County Community College “Some Myths and Misconceptions About Evolution”

• David Burress, retired KU economics professor and a founding member of Kansas Citizens For Science “Fighting About Darwin: Who and Why”

Moderator: Harry McDonald, former Blue Valley biology teacher and President of Kansas Citizens For Science

Americans United for Separation of Church and State (www.au.org) is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to preserving the constitutional principle of church-state separation as the only way to ensure religious freedom for all Americans. The Greater Kansas City Chapter’s website is: www.aukc.org.

Kansas Citizens for Science (www.kcfs.org) is a not-for-profit educational organization that promotes a better understanding of what science is and does, by advocating for science education, educating the public about the nature and value of science, and serving as an information resource.

...to see just how important we are in the over all scheme of things.

heic0406a.jpg

This is an older Hubble image but always worth revisiting. The official Hubble site says of this image:

" The HUDF field contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies. In ground-based images, the patch of sky in which the galaxies reside (just one-tenth the diameter of the full Moon) is largely empty. Located in the constellation Fornax, the region is below the constellation Orion."

The LA times reports that the Chamber of Commerce has come up with a novel approach to stop proposed EPA regulation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant- hold a trial.

According to the article, Chamber officials are comparing the proposed trial to the "Scopes Trial" of evolution fame. That is unfortunate, because in the Scope's trial, the state won the technical point that Scopes was guilty of violating state law as it stood at the time, but no science was settled there.

Link to story http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-climate-trial25-2009aug25,0,901567.story

Actually the better trial comparison is with Phillip Johnson's book Darwin on Trial where Johnson attempts to poke holes in evolution using the sorts of rhetorical tricks and judicious evidence cherry picking lawyers use to cast "reasonable doubt" as to the guilt or innocence of a particular party. Of course the universe must not have been listening since evolution just keeps on happening and the intelligent Design movement he spawned has shown itself to be scientifically sterile.

So science really is not advanced by this sort of shenanigan, which after all is all about rhetoric rather than what ought to be our policy toward, say, carbon dioxide.

The whole thing is tied to another report I encountered this morning about another important issue, namely health care.

The article, Health Care Debate Based on Lack of Logic, discusses some of the issues that cloud our ability to think about complex policy issues.

What I found really interesting is the finding that often people who are less certain in their beliefs fail to look at opposing "perspectives". This sounds directly applicable to lots of other complex issues as well.

Another interesting point the article makes is that the sort of town hall format that politicians love, tends to harden people's positions rather than enabling some sort of consensus. Now granted, I think we people and organizations should, air their concerns about public issues, but are Town Hall meetings and show trials the way to do it?

The evidence suggests no, and I believe the Chamber ought to carefully rethink how it presents business's quite legitimate concerns with the proposed EPA regulations of carbon dioxide emissions. If the Chamber isn't careful, it might just end up with credibility on par with tobacco industry with respect to the health risks of smoking.

Check out this video from Science Friday.