The much-anticipated Bloggingheads.tv faceoff between George Johnson and myself is now available. We talk about string theory, religion, love, the anthropic principle, and plates. After this, any further episodes might just be superfluous.
From Mark Thoma, via Brad DeLong, comes what will henceforth be my absolutely favorite example of twisting data to fit your theories. Observe the following graph of corporate tax rates vs. revenue in units of GDP:
Pretty straightforward, really. As you raise taxes, the government collects more revenue. Norway seems to collect more than its fair share, which might be interesting to dig into, but the trend seems clear. But there’s something nagging at the back of your mind — aren’t there people out there in the world who believe that raising taxes actually decreases revenue past some certain not-very-high tax rate? “Supply-side economists,” or something like that? People who exert a wildly disproportionate influence on U.S. tax policy? What would they make of such a graph?
Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as supply-side economics, and you can find its practitioners in such out-of-the way places as the American Enterprise Institute and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Here is how such people view these data:
No, I am not being unfair. I did not draw the “Laffer Curve” on top of those data in order to embarrass the WSJ or AEI. They did it themselves; the second graph is how the plot was actually published by the Journal, while the first one was Mark Thoma’s subsequent reality-based-community version of the plot. As Kevin Drum says, it’s “like those people who find an outline of the Virgin Mary in a potato chip.”
Among other features, we note with amusement that the plotted curve implies that tax revenues hit zero at a corporate tax rate of about 33%, and become dramatically negative thereafter. As of this writing, it is unclear what advanced statistical software package was used to fit the Laffer Curve to the data; the smart money seems to be on MS Paint.
Best Curve-Fitting Ever Read More »
Today has been a good day for smackdowns! First up, Simon White in New Scientist, punching up his previous argument:
We need to apply a hard-nosed cost-benefit analysis to dark energy projects. We must recognise the cultural differences between high-energy physics and astronomy, and be willing to argue that astronomical discoveries – that the universe expands, chemical elements were built in stars, black holes exist, planets orbit other stars – are no less significant for humanity than clarifying the underlying nature of forces and particles.
Any large new astronomical project should be designed to push back frontiers in several areas of astronomy…
If we don’t do these things, we may lose both the creative brains and the instruments that our field needs to remain vibrant. Dark energy is a Pied Piper, luring astronomers away from their home territory to follow high-energy physicists down the path to professional extinction.
Next, Pope Benedict (via Atrios and Cynical-C), putting the hurt on those nefarious splitters:
The Vatican reiterated Tuesday that the Catholic Church is the one true church established by Jesus Christ and that other Christian denominations are defective, although they have elements of truth and sanctity.
In a brief document, “Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine of the Church,” the Vatican’s doctrinal office, with Pope Benedict XVI’s approval, reiterated controversial assertions made in its 2000 document, “Dominus Iesus,” that Christian denominations that do not have apostolic succession — the ability to trace their bishops back to Christ’s original apostles — can’t properly be called churches.
And finally, Senator Patrick Leahy, via Matthew Yglesias and a dozen other blogs:
A powerful elixir of sarcasm and high dudgeon mixed into a few sort sentences! Awesome.
Vote for your favorite.
Increasingly, the 2008 Presidential campaign is taking on the form of some sort of weird competitive theology stand-off. “My faith is stronger than yours!” “Yeah, well, my God can kick your God’s ass any day of the week! Except on Sunday, when He rests.” Not that you can really blame the candidates; when Americans put atheists just above child molesters in terms of electability, savvy politicians are happy to put their faith in the Big Guy on public display.
Which provides us with an excuse to fire up the Wayback Machine and revisit last May, which brought to us this delicious circumlocution by Karl Rove, of all people:
Karl Rove is not a believer, and he doesn’t shout it from the rooftops, but when asked, he answers quite honestly. I think the way he puts it is, “I’m not fortunate enough to be a person of faith.”
That’s courtesy of Christopher Hitchens (of all people).
The “I’m not fortunate enough” phraseology raises two questions. One is, “Is Karl Rove congenitally capable of telling the truth?” I’m guessing no. If he is not a person of faith, then he believes that people of faith are wrong. So he’s saying that he’s not fortunate enough to be wrong. Which is the sort of transcendently twisted conflation of condescension and disingenuousness that only a true political genius is able to achieve, and even then only when all the stars are properly aligned.
The other question is, “Should atheists feel regretful that God doesn’t exist?” To reformulate it in a more operational language, imagine that you are given the choice of a Red Pill and a Blue Pill. If you choose the Red Pill, you suddenly and with 100% certainty live in a world which is purely materialistic, governed by impersonal and ironclad laws of nature, in which we human beings are nothing other than complicated chemical reactions, and there is no realm outside the physical. If you choose the Blue Pill, you suddenly and with 100% certainty live in a world which shares the same gross features and known laws of physics as our world, but in which there exists an all-powerful supernatural deity who cares about us humans and is the origin of our lives and consciousness. Which do you choose?
Not only would I unhesitatingly choose the purely-materialist cosmos in which I actually believe, I would have guessed that almost all atheists would do so. But Ezra Klein provides at least one counterexample, so there you go.
On the face of it, the notion of a higher power that somehow cares about us can be attractive. (Also potentially attractive is the handing-down of rules from on high, helping one decide what actions are right or wrong — there’s something reassuring about being told what to do, rather than working out the rules of the game as you play.) It’s nice to have someone looking over you, in precisely the same way that it’s nice to have parents that care for you when you’re growing up. When it becomes unattractive, I think, is when you try to think seriously and consistently about what kind of deity could possibly be consistent with the world in which we live. One that is purportedly pretty darn powerful, but that allows all sorts of pain and suffering. One that, if the majority of scriptures are to be believed, not only “cares” about us, but is quite willing to punish us when we go wrong, despite handing down somewhat muddled instructions. One that, despite all that power, seems to be pretty darned parsimonious when it comes to actually intervening on our behalf. And one that, when it comes to giving moral guidance in the tangible form of the teaching of various religions, seems to hew suspiciously closely to the prejudices of the local tribes that wrote them down.
When taken to their logical conclusions, the consequences of a supernaturally powerful deity that judges us from on high are not really ones that I would prefer to live with. I know that some people would feel a sort of cosmic disappointment that they and their loved ones simply represent the workings-out of a few physical laws when applied to some particularly complicated chemical structures, but I don’t share the feeling. None of that prevents me from loving them just as fiercely, or caring just as much about justice or beauty in the world. I’m stuck in a universe where the rules of right and wrong and good and bad are for me to decide, on the basis of reason and evidence and consultation and negotiation with my fellow chemical reactions. I like it that way; give me the Red Pill any day.
Consolations of Materialist Philosophy Read More »
According to the Argus Leader, via the Science Journalism Tracker. The National Science Foundation has finally decided on a location for its Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, which has been up in the air for years now. The winner is the place that had a head start on its various competitors: the Homestake Mine in the Black Hills.
The underground lab will be the site for a diverse array of experiments, from searches for dark matter and proton decay to investigations into biology and geology under extreme conditions. The Homestake site is already famous, of course, as the home of Ray Davis’s neutrino experiment, where the solar neutrino problem was first identified. The mine itself, the deepest and (until recently) oldest operating mine in the Western Hemisphere, was operational until 2001. The NSF immediately wanted to take it over to use as a lab, but the Barrick Mining Corporation demanded that the government also assume any future liability for problems arising the mine (not a stance that fills one with confidence), and if not, they would flood it. While negotiations dragged on, others jumped into the game, and eventually a competition was launched that ended up choosing Homestake anyway. I’m not expert enough to judge whether the effort expended on the competition was all just a waste of time, or whether the ultimate scientific capabilities of the facility were really improved by the process.
South Dakota Takes Quantum Leap Read More »
This Saturday, at the invitation of science writer George Johnson, I’ll be participating in “Science Saturday” at bloggingheads.tv. If you don’t already know, the idea behind bloggingheads seems to be to bring together bloggers (or writer/pundits, more generally) for one-on-one conversations about subjects of mutual interest. Videos of the conversations are recorded using Quicktime on the participant’s MacBook Pros (or related pieces of inferior technology), and then shared with the world. Some day, of course, every room of every house will have a webcam broadcasting 24 hours a day, and we won’t need such artificial set-ups.
Most of the Science Saturdays have been discussions between George and John Horgan, and the most recent one is no exception. (I believe the redoubtable PZ is teaming up with John on the following episode.) In the closing bit, George advertises my upcoming gig and John responds by suggesting that George challenge me to a bet. John himself has a bet with Michio Kaku, detailed at Long Bets, on whether or not anyone will win a Nobel Prize by 2020 for “work on superstring theory, membrane theory, or some other unified theory describing all the forces of nature.” Horgan is voting “no,” Kaku is voting “yes.” I’m happy to bet on things, but when it comes to predictions I like to take even-money bets on propositions that I personally believe are at least 3-1 favorites. And that certainly doesn’t qualify. In fact, I suspect it’s not even money; nobody will win a Nobel for quantum-gravity type work until there is some experimental prediction that comes true, and the chances are running against that happening in the next decade or two. Beyond that, my powers of prognostication become pretty weak, at least where there’s money concerned.
Note that, earlier on, Horgan talks about inflation, segueing smoothly from “evidence for inflation is purely circumstantial” (true) to “inflation is not really a legitimate theory any more” (completely crazy). Evidence for inflation is indirect, and likely to remain so for a while even if the theory is true (which of course it might not be), but it’s still by far the dominant theoretical paradigm for thinking about the early universe. That’s what happens when your theory both solves pre-existing problems and makes predictions that come true.
I enjoy bloggingheads occasionally, even if one’s selection criteria for “good blogger” or even “good writer” aren’t necessarily the same as those for “engaging video personality.” Video has certain obvious disadvantages when compared to text — it’s much harder to skip quickly to the parts of interest, for example — but also some advantages — you can see the person’s face and peer through their eyes into the inner reaches of their soul. The highlight of the series so far, I think, was a well-publicized meltdown on the part of Ann Althouse. I doubt any such thing will happen between George and me, unless one or the other of us has at least a couple of martinis before our 10 a.m. taping. We’re both pretty laid-back guys by nature, so we need to come up with some good topics to get feisty about. Any suggestions?
John Horgan Challenges My Faith Read More »
Links people have been passing to me:
The Foundational Questions Institute Community Site now has a handy RSS feed:
If, like me, you read your blogs in a newsreader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) rather than the old-fashioned way of actually visiting every damn blog, this is a godsend. Anthony Aguirre has an interesting post, inspired in part by the Alternative-Science Respectability Checklist, on How Do We Fund Einstein Without Funding Crackpots? (To a large extent I think the present system does a pretty good job at that, actually. I would love to see much more flexibility in how researchers with a good track record get to use their funding, and much less onerous reporting requirements, but I haven’t seen any non-anecdotal evidence that the next generation of Einsteins is being denied their fair share of grants. I’d be interested in hearing otherwise.)
I’m on a new American Physical Society Committee on Informing the Public, and one of the things (the only thing, really) I was able to help them with was some suggestions on improving their website. The APS runs a public-outreach site, Physics Central, that occupies some prime internet real estate — it’s a top-ten result when you do a Google search on physics. One of the things I suggested to keep the page current and lively was a regular update on interesting articles to appear on physics blogs — and lo and behold, they now have a regular Physics Blogosphere feature. From there, for example, you might be directed to Cocktail Party Physics, to learn about speeding Priuses, cloud chambers, the Iron Science Teacher competition, Cute Child Syndrome, the Exploratorium, and some insight into Rush Limbaugh’s manifold shortcomings. (That’s just in one post, of course; there are others.) It’s sort of like Seed’s Daily Zeitgeist, but just for physics. Now if we could only get them an RSS feed…
Finally, Terri Yu points to a series of podcasts by MIT physicist Peter Fisher on Life as an Academic. A good example is this episode on imposter syndrome — the nagging feeling that you don’t belong here among all of these actually-smart people. For the most part, they don’t either, so don’t worry about it.
Use the Internets to Learn Stuff Read More »
Brynn at Shakesville points to a study by Kristine Nowak and Christian Rauh of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Connecticut. The authors investigated the impact of the appearance of digital avatars on people’s perceptions of trustworthiness. (Here’s what appears to be an earlier version of the study.) They did a blind test, with participants chatting online via various sorts of avatars. Some looked recognizably human and gender-specific, others were cats or lizards or apples. They then asked the participants to rate the credibility of the people they had been talking to.
Everyone is talking about the fact that the participants rated androgynous avatars as less trustworthy. Images that were recognizably male or female were thought of as more credible than those sneaky in-between ones.
To me, the more important finding was that the ketchup bottle finished near the very bottom of the trustworthiness scale, only beating out a menacing-looking lizard beast. Even the cat was judged more trustworthy than the ketchup bottle; if you’ve ever met a cat, you’ll understand that that’s saying something. I’m happy to see that my long-standing distrust of ketchup has been scientifically vindicated.
(Others have suggested that the study’s authors are just dumb bitches. Happily, sexism has been eradicated, so that web page must be at least fifty years old.)
I Don’t Trust Ketchup, Either Read More »
Now that I’ve been back from hunting dinosaurs with Project Exploration for a few days, I owe you all the report. I’m not going to go into all of the background, as that was covered pretty well in my blog posts about the 2004 trip, Dinosaur Report I and Dinosaur Report II. So this will just be a little photo-essay about the heavy lifting that was specific to this trip.
During the previous two trips I had been on with Project Exploration, the focus was on prospecting and the early stages of bringing fossils out of the ground. Clearing away the dirt, exposing bone, determining what we found, estimating the physical extent of the fossils. The eventual goal, of course, is to clear away everything but the bones and enough rock (called “matrix” in paleo-speak) to hold it together, wrap up the pieces snugly in wood and plaster (“jacketing”), and bring it all back home — in this case, Paul Sereno’s lab at the University of Chicago. But the process as a whole takes time, and three days of work by a crew of enthusiastic but untutored amateurs generally isn’t going to make it happen. But on this trip we were working on a site where most of the work had been done, and our task was to finish the job. In fact, we were back to the site I had gone to in 2005. In the meantime the locations of the various bones had been ascertained, many of them had been fully jacketed, and our task was primarily to finish off the biggest pieces. “Finishing off” means completing the jacketing process and transporting the jackets to Billings, Montana, where a freight company would carry them to Chicago.
The story is conveyed better by words than by pictures. Click to get hi-res versions in a new window.
Here is a view of our vans, as seen from the dig site. Each morning we’d get up bright and early to have breakfast at Dirty Annie’s (the finest dining establishment in all of Shell, Wyoming, featuring chokecherry pancakes the size of garbage-can lids). Afterwards we’d head out to the site in two rented vans, the backs of which were filled with all the paleontological necessities: burlap, plaster, water, picks, awls, hammers, GPS units, shovels, trowels, gloves, 2×4’s, buckets, tarps, brushes, kneepads, and sundry snack foods. The vans would bounce over dirt trails to the foot of the hill where the fossils were, and we would all jump out, eager to get our hands dirty. (On at least one occasion, unanticipated logistics forced the crew into drafting a theoretical physicist into van-driving duty. Thankfully, nobody was seriously injured.)
And here is the dig site, as seen from where we parked the vans. Just to the left of center there you can see the plaster around the main group of fossils — jacketing that bad boy and trucking it to Billings was our primary challenge for this trip.
For some reason (too excited by the goings-on, probably) I neglected to take a close-up photo of the main fossil group before we covered it with plaster. But to get the idea, here is a smaller group, this one a collection of vertebrae. In the field, the main goal is to roughly carve out the bone and get it back to the lab in workable condition. On the other hand, you don’t want to make it heavier than it needs to be, so you try to remove as much matrix as you can without sacrificing the structural integrity of the fossil. Once the bone is exposed, you cover it with tinfoil, then wrap it with burlap strips dipped in plaster. Delicate soul that I am, I resisted participating in the plastering at first, but ultimately I realized that everyone else was right, it really was the most fun part of the whole procedure. To make the jacket a bit stronger you can plaster pieces of wood to the whole collection, as seen in the bottom part of the picture.
Here is Paul on the first day, explaining to our intrepid crew of newcomers what we’ll be doing out here. The part of the process for which I was best suited was the delicate work with an awl and a brush, clearing away bits of matrix right up against the bone. Probably I’d be even better suited for the close-up work performed by the preparators back in the lab, who work under microscopes to remove things at the grain-of-sand level and reconstruct the bones. Actually, come to think of it, I’d be best suited to be sequestered in a room far away from any fossils, left with a pen and paper to think about the universe. So that all worked out for the best.
Paul, eager to get going, burns off nervous energy by doing push-ups. (He was the only one to employ that strategy.)
Here is the main collection of fossils, separated out from the surroundings and covered on the top with plaster. It consisted of vertebrae, ribs, and sundry other bones that I won’t pretend I could identify. Paul figured that it was a sort of Diplodocus, one of those lumbering herbivores with giant necks and tails that roamed North America during the Jurassic. But the structure of the hip bones differed from that of the ordinary Diplodocus, so Paul judged that it was a new species. By the second day he had promoted it to a new genus — apparently the rules for whether a new species is in a distinct genus or an entirely new one are a little fuzzy. In any event, our job was to hack away at the underpinnings of this rock, and eventually to bring it home.
And away we go!
…
Dinosaur Report III: The Journey Home Read More »
Typically, sentences do not commute. But sometimes they do. Consider:
Scooter is a liar.
Liar is a scooter.
Both equally true, as convicted perjurer Scooter Libby manages to zip past his required jail time, with a little help from his friends in high places.
(I find it hard to believe that I’m the first to think of this joke. Or perhaps I’m just the first to admit it in public.)
The deep, inscrutable irony here, of course, is that George W. Bush hates to pardon people or commute their sentences. Not his job to overrule a jury, he proudly proclaims. Even if we’re talking about a mentally retarded inmate sentenced to death by a jury that never had a chance to hear mitigating evidence. Those inmates could count themselves lucky if W didn’t openly mock them. But Scooter was special; the usual formalities were readily dispensed with in this case.
Or perhaps Bush has simply experienced a change of heart, and will now start freeing all sorts of unjustly convicted prisoners. He has plenty of opportunity; the U.S. has by far the world’s largest prison population, over two million, and it’s growing faster than ever. Over a third are estimated to be nonviolent drug offenders, typically punished by preposterous mandatory sentencing laws. I might point out that the impact of such laws does not seem to fall equally on members of all racial and economic groups, but that could seem shrill.
Folks who would, on ideological grounds, tend to be sympathetic towards the Republican party are struggling with the challenge presented to them by the Bush administration. It’s perfectly possible to be in favor of tax cuts, Social Security privatization, and the war in Iraq, and yet recognize that this administration represents a vortex of corruption, venality, and incompetence that the country hasn’t had to suffer through in at least the last hundred years. Bush’s fondness for signing statements that declare his intention to follow the laws passed by Congress only when he wants to would typically be grounds all by itself for honest conservatives to wash their hands of the guy. But so many people still find it hard to do. Over at the Volokh Conspiracy (where one of their co-bloggers, Randy Barnett, was actually a co-author on a brief submitted on behalf of Libby), both Orin Kerr and Eugene Volokh can only look at the President’s decision to commute Libby’s sentence and shake their heads in disgust. But their commenters, not so much. These are people who used to think that perjury was bad, but now seem to have softened their stance, characterizing (Republican) investigator Patrick Fitzgerald’s prosecution of Libby as politcal and partisan (except that it’s not).
Republicans should be thanking their lucky stars for the 22nd Amendment, and by extension FDR. Can you imagine if Bush were allowed to run for a third term? The acrimonious split between his die-hard supporters and conservatives with any sort of remaining integrity would tear the party apart, possibly for good.
An Abelian Perjurer Read More »