Debunking Denialism

Defending science against the forces of irrationality.

Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Shattering Academic Philosophy

31 Comments Posted by on May 19, 2013

armchair

In their paper “What do Philosophers Believe?” (to be published in the journal Philosophical Studies), David Bourget and David J. Chalmers have surveyed the position of thousands of contemporary philosophers around the world on various questions, from the existence of a deity and a priori knowledge to physicalism and Newcomb’s problem. Their paper can be found here.

This post is going to use the data presented in that paper to argue for fairly controversial positions with regards to academic philosophy: (1) the consensus positions they found in academic philosophy only regard trivial truths, such as the existence of a priori knowledge and the ability of our senses to be accurate, that (2) there is very little progress in academic philosophy and that (3) many academic philosophers promote anti-scientific beliefs in their belief in contra-causal freedom and their rejection of mind/brain physicalism. I will also discuss why it is important to move away from a priori armchair reasoning, how to salvage relevant aspects of academic philosophy and integrate them into interdisciplinary scientific research.

Consensus positions in academic philosophy regard trivial truths

So what philosophical issues did Bourget and Chalmers find a consensus position for? Although the percentage support needed for calling something a consensus position is often quite arbitrary, I will use the same percentage that Bourget and Chalmers use (70%). Looking at the main survey results, these were: a priori knowledge (71.1%) non-skeptical realism regarding external world (81.6%), atheism (72.8%) and scientific realism (75.1%).

So after debating thousands of issues for almost 2500 years, academic philosophers have reached a consensus that mathematical and logical knowledge exists, that our senses are able to acquire correct information from the world around us, that there is no evidence for the existence of supernatural deities and that science can describe the real world.

These are at best trivial truths and no surprise to most scientists. After all, they have used mathematics and logic in their research, gained knowledge about the world using their senses enforced by the methods of science all without actively invoking a supernatural deity to explain their results.

The results also goes to show that there is almost no, or at least very little, progress in the field of academic philosophy. Read more of this post

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Fraud Psychic Sylvia Browne Proven Wrong Yet Again

2 Comments Posted by on May 9, 2013

Sylvia Browne claims to be a psychic, but she has been convicted of fraud in the past and has failed all scientific tests of her ability. In addition, she is very often wrong about her predictions. For background on Sylvia Browne, please read the the article Psychic Defective: Sylvia Browne’s History of Failure at the website for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Recently, a shocking story has been revealed in Ohio. As reported by Reuters, Ariel Castro, a school bus driver, had kidnapped three women and held them a prisoners for around a decade. He subjected them to physical abuse and rape. One of these women is Amanda Berry who went missing in 2003 (she was around 17 years old).

What is the connection between Sylvia Browne and this brutal kidnapping? She apparently used her “psychic powers”, got a “vision” and told the parents of Amanda Berry that she was dead (ABC news story). How does Browne attempt to get out of this morally abhorrent mess? She writes a Facebook status update (original link):

Pathetic rationalization

Does she treat this as a “miss”, acknowledging that she is not a psychic and that she has abused her media standing? Far from it. Instead, she makes a credulous, pathetic and morally vile post-hoc rationalization. Apparently, her vision was of Amanda being held under water, but she interpreted it as death when she should have interpreted it as Amanda being held down. It was, in her view, a “hit” all along, she just had “interpreted it to have a different meaning”. Her second excuse is that she hoped she was wrong.

Can you believe that almost 150 000 people has liked this on Facebook? Some of the comments to the post (right now close to 3000) is also mind-bogglingly irrational (I have blacked out the names and the profile pictures):

irrational supporters

Sylvia Browne is “a divine loving being of light”!? People still believe in her completely!? If psychics did not do any mistakes, there would be no crime!? It is irrelevant whether or not she is right, as long as she tries to do the right thing!?

There are hundreds of comments like this. It just goes on and on and on.

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The Failure of Mysterian Complaints about Neuroesthetics

1 Comment Posted by on March 30, 2013

mysterian

Mysterian explanation for human cognitive facilities have been around for millennia. Before the more modern discoveries of the structure and function of the human brain, mysterian explanations were very common. However, with the advent of newer technology and more accurate research programs, supernaturalist assertions about the mind has largely been discredited by the evidence. Increasingly, cognitive processes and behavior has been given a neurological basis. This can be considered a great triumph of modern science. However, there are people who dislike this approach. Two common archetypes are the religious zealot (who believes that the mind is a supernatural soul) and the secular mysterian (who while not going so far as to deny the material basis of mental events, assert that this or that cognitive feature can never be explained by science).

One such mysterian is the freelance science writer and consultant editor for Nature Philip Ball. A few days ago, he wrote a deeply flawed attack on the science of neuroesthetics entitled Neuroaesthetics is killing your soul that can be found here.

His basic assertions are the following: (1) neuroesthetics may cause an encroachment of objective standards for art or reactions to art and (2) neuroesthetics lacks operationalizations of key concepts, (3) various tangential complaints about appreciation of art not being just about beauty, (4) neuroesthetical explanations cannot differentiate the appreciation of art from being high on drugs or having sex and (5) science will never be able to fully explain human understanding and experience of art.

Let us look the credibility of these arguments, one by one. As will be clear at the end of this examination, Ball’s assertions and fears are not only unfounded but rather far-fetched. Read more of this post

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An Intellectual Re-evaluation of the “Schrödinger’s Rapist” Analogy

4 Comments Posted by on January 4, 2013

Note: while this post attempts to highlights some of the limitations I perceive with the “Schrödinger’s rapist” post, I accept most of the central claims made in the analogy (such as don’t rape, that women set their own risk tolerance, that men need to be aware of the first person cognitive evaluation made by women, respecting women and don’t harass them etc.). Therefore, this evaluation should not be understood as providing any support whatsoever for men’s rights activism (MRA) and/or those strongly opposing the “Schrödinger’s rapist” analogy. See “Summary” for a short explanation of what I think of the analogy if you don’t feel like reading through the entire post.


schrodinger

There is one special blog post that has become iconic for social justice vigilantes online. It got over a thousand comments in five days (on a relatively small blog) before the comment section was closed and has probably been linked and shared thousands and thousands of times. I am, of course, talking about the “Schrödinger’s Rapist” analogy, composed by Phaedra Starling on the now defunct blog called Shapely Prose.

Needless to say, the blog post caused a storm of both approval and praise, but also criticism and vitriolic hate. However, as the dust slowly settles, I think it is time to take a close, disinterested look at the advantages and drawbacks of the analogy. As we will see, it correctly captures something fundamental about the experience of women and the general message of the blog post is genuine and reasonable. However, it does not fully appreciate the complexity of the situation and also makes a couple of statistical and factual errors that should be acknowledged.

Strengths

I find that the strengths of the Schrödinger’s rapist analogy primarily lie in the emotional impact of the text on the reader who genuinely did not understand the inside cognitive view of being a woman in such a social context. I have separated the strengths into four different categories: common sense, conscious-raising, empathy and realism.

Common Sense: the blog post makes a lot of common sense points that every rational person should accept. These include things like don’t rape, don’t grope, don’t threaten with or use physical force, as well as the importance of social context when trying to approach women. If everyone would understand and implement these lessons in their everyday life, the world would be a much better place.

Conscious-raising: reading and understanding the innermost thoughts and feelings of someone is a very conscious-raising experience. Things that you either did not know at all, or suspected but never fully appreciated the scope of, can become abundantly clear in an instant. The “Schrödinger’s rapist” analogy is a very good conscious-raising piece for those that did not understand the specifics of the experience of women in this context.

Empathy: because the analogy portrays the cognitive inside view of how it is sometimes like to be a women and thereby taps into empathy and compassion, the central points makes a much stronger impact than if it merely was a cold reporting of facts.

Realism: the “Schrödinger’s rapist” analogy may very well realistically explain the experience of many women around the world. It does not appear to be written in an exaggerated form just to cause controversy, but to be a genuine piece with an important message. Of course, it does not necessarily represent the view of all women but judging by the support it has garnished so far among various Internet feminists, it does not appear to be a fringe view either.

Drawbacks

There are also a few weaknesses with the blog post. These are primarily statistical and factual mistakes.

Quantum quackery: the analogy uses the phase “Schrödinger’s rapist” to indicate that a given women does not know for a fact if the man is a rapist or not. She can only assign subjective probabilities (corresponding to degrees of belief) for the two competing hypotheses. While this is true, it is unfortunate that Starling alluded to quantum mechanics in naming the analogy. Had the women had complete knowledge of the situation (including the man’s intentions), there would probably not have been much doubt regarding whether or not the man would rape her or not. This is not the case for quantum-scale particles. The uncertainty principle does not exist due to imperfect measuring equipment, but is a fundamental aspect of nature. It does not involve subjective degrees of belief.

Two thoughtful counterarguments can be made to this objection: Read more of this post

Miscellaneous, Misuse of Statistics , , , , , , , , , ,

Declining Praxgirl’s Praxeology

9 Comments Posted by on October 5, 2012

praxgirl

There is a fairly new video series on Youtube making its way across the Internet. It is about an area called praxeology, and it is hosted by a women with the username Praxgirl. The show has, at the time of this writing, 23 episodes in the play list, covering a variety of topics from philosophy to economics.

As we will see in this article, the ideology of praxeology is more or less anti-empirical and consists mostly of a priori arguments. I will show why many of these falter even if we exclusively stick with a priori arguments, the problem with anti-empiricism and discuss additional limitations of Praxgirl’s positions. I do not know that much about economics as a subject, and it is not among my main interests, so I will probably not discuss some of the more specific economic arguments. I will, however, focus on areas that I think are poorly supported.

According to her blog, praxeology is

[...] the youngest and (in my opinion) the most intruiging [sic] of all sciences.

and that she and others working with her have:

[...] a passion for the science and felt that human action is often misunderstood. The current economic crisis played a part as well. We have been witnessing the so-called ‘intellegentsia’ [sic] often claiming things that are counter to basic logic for as long as we’ve understood the axiom ‘human action is purposeful behavior’. We’ve been working hard around the clock to write episodes, film them and get them online. The goal is to hopefully have a new show every week. They keep getting better as we write them and find a flow in the dissemination of the knowledge.

So Praxgirl is putting forward the claim that praxeology is a science and that her videos are dissemination knowledge. That is interesting. A core feature of science is testability. Let us see if this can be united with a strict a priori approach to reality. Read more of this post

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Naive Philosophical “Criticism” of Reductionism in Science

12 Comments Posted by on August 26, 2012

armchair

Some philosophers never get tired of falsely portraying science, its methods or the interpretation of scientific results. Too often having little or no actual experience of scientific research, they sit in their armchairs and proclaim what they believe are profound and intellectually rigorous philosophical insights. In reality, their effort is merely a non-scientific combination of ignorance with arrogance.

Topics where this often happens are evolution, genetics, neuroscience, determinism and reductionism. Stephen Pinker, an experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist at Harvard University explains (Pinker, 2002, p. 10):

As I mentioned, most Americans continue to believe in an immortal soul, made of some nonphysical substance, which can part company with the body. But even those who do not avow that belief in so many words still imagine that somehow there must be more to us than electrical and chemical activity in the brain. Choice, dignity, and responsibility are gifts that set off human beings from everything else in the universe, and seem incompatible with the idea that we are mere collections of molecules. Attempts to explain behavior in mechanistic terms are commonly denounced as “reductionist” or “determinist.” No one really knows what these words mean, but everyone knows they reduce people to something inhuman and are bad.

Richard Polt, professor of philosophy at Xavier University, fits the description of such a denouncer. He has made two contributions to the Opinionator at New York Times, called Anything but Human and Reality Is Flat. (Or Is It?). They arguments laid out in these posts readily demonstrate that the valuable skills of Prof. Polt is better spent on typewriters and translating Heidegger.

Reductionism in science

Before we investigate the arguments laid out by Prof. Polt, let us first understand reductionism in contemporary science. In science, reductionism comes in the flavor known as hierarchical reductionism (Dawkins, 1986, p. 13; Dennett, 1995, pp. 81-82) or reductive emergence (Stenger, 2009, pp. 159). Here is how Dawkins explains it: Read more of this post

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A Voice for Men on Rape Statistics: Confusing Life-Time Prevalence with Incidence

19 Comments Posted by on August 25, 2012

bars

In the online conflict between certain specific men’s rights activists (MRAs) and certain specific radical fringe feminists, no part have their intellectual integrity fully intact. Elements on both sides misunderstands statistics and basic biology and they also appeal to pseudoscience to justify their political ideology. For example, some fringe radical feminists, particularly those with postmodern inclination, may devalue biological partial explanations or subscribe to the notion of a blank slate. Similarily, some men’s rights activists propose superficially plausible evolutionary accounts of the origin of gender roles from the 1940s, but in the end, cannot provide any scientific evidence for their highly speculative accounts (making them a just-so-story).

I think that gender equality is a moral necessity, but it is terribly tedious and tiresome to read the spiraling conflict between extremists, especially when they make embarrassing rookie mistakes.

One such mistake is made by the blogger Phil in Utah over at the A Voice for Men blog in a blog post about rape statistics that confuses life-time prevalence with incidence. Phil in Utah writes:

Statistic: “1 out of every 4 women will be raped in her lifetime.”

Truth: Ah, here’s the doozy. I’m sure we’re all familiar with the source of this statistic: a study by Mary Koss that has been discredited countless times. Around three-quarters of the women she identified as having been raped did not consider themselves victims of rape, and almost half of them had sex with their supposed attackers after the event identified as a rape had occurred.

I do not really know enough about the Mary Koss study to make an informed argument, but surely, rape has to be defined as objective as possible and not solely be based on personal opinion? So the argument that some of the women did not consider it rape, therefore it should not be counted as rape, seems wrong. Obviously you can be subjected to a crime even though you are not aware that it is considered a crime. A rose by any other name…

Let us look at some rape statistics from the CDC. In their National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NIPSV), they reached the following conclusion with regards to rape prevalence among women. From the executive summary:

Nearly 1 in 5 women (18.3%) and 1 in 71 men (1.4%) in the United States have been raped at some time in their lives, including completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, or alcohol/drug facilitated completed penetration.

Now, rape prevalence will differ depending on how inclusive the definition of rape is (varies between countries), but according to the definitions used by the CDC, it is around 18% of women in the U. S. Although not exactly 1 in 4 (25%), it is fairly close. With that in mind, let’s see how Phil in Utah tackles U. S. rape prevalence: Read more of this post

Miscellaneous, Misuse of Statistics , , , , ,

PZ Myers is not an Oblate Spheroid (p < 0.05)

4 Comments Posted by on August 14, 2012

yellow p

The title, of course, is a reference to the landmark paper by Cohen (1994) in American Psychologist called The Earth is Round (p < 0.05). Technically speaking, the earth is an oblate spheroid because it is shaped like an ellipse rotated around one of its axis and flattened at the poles. Anyways, the arguments laid out in that review were not particularly new. In fact, they had existed for many decades. Still, they had, and continue to have, great intellectual merit. It outlines the major flaws and problems with traditional null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) using p-values.

Despite this, p-values continue to be used by scientists, although the use of effect sizes and confidence intervals are on the increase.

Cohen’s review is really an article that should be read by any aspiring researcher (linked in the reference section) and it highlights the following errors that are commonly performed when doing p-values:

  • The p-value is the probability of obtaining the results, or more extreme results, given that the null hypothesis is true. It does not provide us with the probability of the null hypothesis being true, given the obtain evidenced. Confusing these two conditionals probabilities is known as the fallacy of transposed conditionals or the inverse probability error.
  • NHST, by contorting deductive modus tollens into a probabilistic argument, is formally invalid.
  • The p-value is not the probability of replication. In fact, the distribution of p-values over successive replications is surprisingly large.
  • The rejection of the null hypothesis does not prove the alternative hypothesis. The classical example, although not discussed by Cohen in this particular sense, is that a correct guess of, say, 20 playing cards in a row, may be highly unlikely, but the alternative hypothesis of clairvoyance is even more unlikely.
  • p-value is a function of sample size, and given a large enough sample size, almost everything will appear statistically significant.
  • NHST leads to publication bias. Results that are deemed to be statistically significant are much more likely to be published than results that are not statistically significant.
  • Reaching the level of statistical significance does not mean that the result is of any practical (e. g. biological or psychological) significance. The data may be improbable given that the null hypothesis is true, but the difference between two groups tested may be negligible for all practical intents and purposes. In other words, NHST undervalue effect sizes.

In Live by statistics, die by statistics, the associate professor of biology PZ Myers discusses a new and highly fascinating study in experimental psychology. The general gist of the paper (Masicampo and Lalande, 2012) is that the actual distribution of p-values deviates quite a bit from the theoretical distribution near just above 0.05. This appears to suggest that some experimental psychologists fudge their data a bit as to transform results that fall just below 0.05 to end up just above 0.05 Read more of this post

Miscellaneous, Misuse of Statistics , , , ,

Obliterating The Free Speech Objection to Criticism

5 Comments Posted by on August 12, 2012

“People who cry about freedom of speech when they are criticized. Is your opinion that stupid that your only defense is that your opinion is not illegal?”

- Kawa Zolfagary, writer and consultant (source, translated from Swedish by E. K.)

censorship

You have just posted a detailed point-by-point refutation of the absurd pseudoscientific assertions made by some random crank on the Internet. You even took the time to included explanatory graphs and references to the scientific literature. How considerate. Instead of graciously accepting defeat or launching relevant counterarguments, the before-mentioned crank decided to knock over all of the pieces, shoot the football with a shotgun, and go home. Another, closely related scenario, occurs when the crank posts a lot of verbal abuse without any intellectual content on your blog or forum. Despite trying to calm the person down and promote rational discussion, the crank just goes on and on and you see no other option than to remove his or her comment privileges. Both of these scenarios typically degenerate into the crank making the free speech objection. It goes something like this: “you are just trying to silence and censor critics!!1″, as if free speech meant that cranks have a right not to be challenged or that individuals have a legal obligation to give cranks a platform for spreading their mindbogglingly stupid stuff. Read more of this post

Miscellaneous, Skepticism , ,

The Widespread Abuse of Heritability

1 Comment Posted by on August 11, 2012

stack of books

Together with evolution, heritability is perhaps one of the most misunderstood and abused concepts in biology.

Some white supremacists appeal to moderate to high estimates of heritability for phenotypic traits to justify genetic determinism, that genes explain between-group differences, the discrimination of ethnic groups or other malignant and pseudoscientific beliefs that are incompatible with science.

Some egalitarian dislikes scientific results regarding moderate to high heritability estimates because they believe that it indicate that the environment is unimportant in explaining the phenotype of individuals and latch onto single studies showing low heritability as if that meant that genes are less important.

As we shall see, both of these groups believe things that are flawed from a scientific standpoint. But before we discuss why and how this is, it might be beneficial to know something about what heritability actually is. Our definition of heritability will be unpacked and improved in several stages to facilitate understanding. Read more of this post

Miscellaneous, Race Realism and Racism, Science Explained, Skepticism , , , , ,

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