User:Armondikov/Now/Jul12

Thought of the Now

...half-baked ideas from the mind of someone who is almost certainly dumber than they think they are.

Archive

26th July 2012[edit]

Logic Consider the following:

Some men are doctors.
Some doctors are tall.
Therefore, are some men tall?

Instinctively, you answer "yes", because that's what reality shows. The only way some men wouldn't be tall is if no men became doctors, because there are some tall doctors. But... this is wrong. Purely from the logical syllogism given above, this is the wrong answer. The diagram below should show it up. The top is what the logical syllogism suggests. The lower one reflects reality, but is an inference beyond just what the logic above states.

Okay, so this is really Logic 101, but I think it nicely displays the trouble we have in separating the logical structure of an argument from its content. I admit that I had trouble figuring it out until I looked at the visualisation, but it's easily pointed out by replacing "some doctors are tall" with something else, like "some doctors have vaginas" - therefore do some men have vaginas? (sex vs gender can shut up for a moment) Changing the content flags up the fallacy for what it is far more readily, because we don't leap to an inference about how reality is structured, even though the underlying logical structure remains unchanged. It's possibly why logical fallacies are so badly misused by many, and the informal and the formal are so difficult to get right. It's hard to detach and really examine only what we have available, and not let other prejudices inform judgement too much.

21st July 2012[edit]

I'm an idiot...

In a lab, I wouldn't dream of handling propanol or acetone without gloves. And those are, let's face it, reasonably harmless. The former is alcohol, and only partially more toxic than ethanol (which we drink, although I'd argue that this is the reason that EtOH is less toxic, simply evolution and natural selection building a slight resistance to it) and the latter is nail varnish remover, which people obviously have put all over their bare hands anyway. Anything more dangerous than that and it's lab coat, bigger gloves, specs and a well-ventilated fume hood to work with.

So why the hell is it that I come home and happily spray oven cleaner (concentrated NaOH), acid based cleaning products and worse without any form of protection at all? I suppose I can handle some chemical burns. Just only in places where I don't have to fill in some paperwork afterwards.

20th July 2012[edit]

50 Shades of Consent

I've discussed this subject elsewhere, but haven't really put anything down in a length opinion piece yet. Finally, I've cracked and decided to put this here. One of the major criticisms of 50 Shades of Grey is its treatment of consent, or the lack of it, in the book. It's a recurring theme in almost every sex-positive blog on the subject.

However, I don't take issues with the treatment of consent in 50 Shades at all. It is, after all, ~~smut~~ erotica. It might have a lot of other things wrong with it, and I won't bother to repeat them as they've already been said elsewhere and very extensively, but it's still erotica and the entire genre plays fast-and-loose with many aspects of reality - consent is just one more of those things that falls into a little black hole along with condoms and average sized penises. In one of those imaginatively titled lists of "50 things wrong with 50 Shades..." that's been making the rounds recently, the first dozen or so can be aimed at the genre as a whole because they're to do with consent.

A lack of consent - at least, explicit consent - is a recurring theme in D/s fiction. I'm not too proud to say that I've read and have even written stuff that throws it out the window entirely, or even focuses on the complete lack of consent. Not just because prior negotiations make for writing that's as compelling as the genealogical lists in the Bible (as evidenced by the tedious email exchanges in 50 Shades) but because you're selling a fantasy. No one is really going to believe your shagerrific bodice-ripper about a sex slave in ancient Rome where the protagonists sit down and have a chat about limits and safewords for half an hour beforehand. That would be like taking some hot, steamy action and throwing a bucket of ice water on it.

Of course, this is in no way an endorsement of a lack of IRL consent on behalf of author or reader. Black Lace books, for example, are all preceded by disclaimers with the general gist of "this is fantasy, now don't be an idiot in real life". It's all set in a world where STIs don't exist, you can't get pregnant, at all, and even less realistically semen tastes of strawberries and cream and it's possible to having 15 orgasms in a row without the associated hypersensitivity causing crippling pain. Even within IRL D/s relationships the consent takes place only on a meta level - if you're beating the crap out of your slave, you're beating the crap out of your slave, not a consenting partner. Fantasy novels simply take the meta-level consent and simply pretend it doesn't exist, as if reality was the fantasy rather than the fantasy being embedded within a reality where consent exists. Indeed, within an IRL fantasy, the "consent" doesn't really exist, it's only when we pop back out to that meta level (now this is starting to sound like Hofstader writing smut...) does it actually matter. In fantasy, this meta level doesn't explicitly exist.

In short, the ones moaning about consent in 50 Shades need to get out and read more smut to get a feel for how it works. When you're talking of consent, there is far "worse" out there. Really, it's analogous to criticising Lord of the Rings for having far too much dubious and unrealistic magic in it.

That all said, I suppose there's an argument to be had in the fact that 50 Shades tries to sort out "consent" by portraying the lead characters as being in a realistic TPE relationship... but then fucks it up royally, making it fair game to attack on those grounds. It tries to portray it as it would occur in reality, where the consent-containing meta level explicitly exists. The accuracy of this attempted portrayal is questionable, but a lack of consent really isn't the issue.

16th July 2012[edit]

I like...

First, I un-subscribed to Rebecca Watson because live-blogging what her cat was doing and her constant White Whining was driving me nuts.

Then, Being Liberal went the way of the "never show me this shit again" because it was seriously drawing the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists out of the woodwork and the amount of unverified material in desperate need of a fact check was mind-bloggling.

Finally, I Fucking Love Science bit thee dust because, as much as I love godawful science jokes, few of the people posting comments seemed to have a clue what they were talking about.

So, in short, the race to find the most tedious Facebook page I subscribe to is back on. Don't say anything stupid.

12th July 2012[edit]

Fucktard extraordinare.

Casey Luskin presents the Top 10 things wrong with Darwinian evolution!

Lack of a viable mechanism for producing high levels of complex and specified information.

Possibly due to the lack of a viable mechanism to make "complex specified information" actually mean anything.

The failure of the fossil record to provide support for Darwinian evolution.

This is just wrong. We have fossils showing progression. They happen to be in order in the geological strata. This can only be supportive evidence for evolution. Yet, creationists deny it. Sigh.

The failure of molecular biology to provide evidence for a grand "tree of life."

Wait, last I checked molecular biology didn't just provide evidence for a "tree of life" it helped significantly improve its accuracy and the relationships between organisms.

Natural selection is an extremely inefficient method of spreading traits in populations unless a trait has an extremely high selection coefficient.

And technically speaking, nuclear energy is an extremely inefficient method of extracting energy from mass, yet France still derives 90% of its power from it. Inefficiency like this can, in fact, be good thing as it helps stabilise populations and prevent bottlenecks. You can check this on any evolutionary algorithm.

The problem that convergent evolution appears rampant -- at both the genetic and morphological levels, even though under Darwinian theory this is highly unlikely.

I'm not aware of how this works out. Natural selection causes organisms to become suited to their environment, how the hell does that not form a perfect recipe for convergence?

The failure of chemistry to explain the origin of the genetic code.

This old chestnut... dear fuck Luskin come up with something original. The origins of the genetic code are irrelevant to how it acts once it's formed. Chemistry has some good ideas, and they can be tested. Certainly this is better than the alternative proposed by ID advocates.

The failure of developmental biology to explain why vertebrate embryos diverge from the beginning of development.

Wait, I thought this was about evolution?

The failure of neo-Darwinian evolution to explain the biogeographical distribution of many species.

How is this actually relevant to the neo-Darwinian synthesis apart from it being a massive science was wrong before gambit?

A long history of inaccurate predictions inspired by neo-Darwinism regarding vestigial organs or so-called "junk" DNA.

Ah, so this is the science was wrong before gambit!

Humans show many behavioral and cognitive traits and abilities that offer no apparent survival advantage.

Or, to translate this into snark-skeptic speak: "I don't have any imagination, therefore goddidit."

9th July 2012[edit]

Practice drill

Taken from the RW Facebook page. So, let's practice some refutation of some crazy:

If all you intellectual wanna be assholes get off your asses, put some clothes on and out of your parents basement you might see and learn something.

Nice argumentum ad cellarium. Incidental, I'm fully dressed, never owned a basement (in fact, the only time I've ever been in a basement is for this psytrance party that I accidentally wandered into) and haven't live with my parents for 8 years (well, 11 years for parents, plural). Okay, nice, solid, rhetorical opening gambit anyway.

What have you people accomplished by denying god and religion (whatever it might be) all these years?

As always, I dislike responding to questions with more questions so "what have people accomplished by believing in God?" isn't the best answer. We could, however, phrase it differently by noting what a belief in God requires us to do, and whether that's an efficient use of our time. By being atheistic and explicitly atheistic, we can avoid a lot of problems such as worrying if we're going to go to hell, wasting time praying when it's been empirically shown not to work, and, not least, avoiding stamping on the progress towards equal rights for all because of what our ancient texts say.

When I read some of the garbage from some people in here it makes me think that abortion should've been legal for most of you, As much as I disagree with it. Done.

Again, nice solid rhetorical insults there. I don't believe them to be ad hom, however. But on the point regarding "some of the garbage", it's a claim that's difficult to assess without more specific information.

A little further down...

<<There will never be any proof that either god exist or not>> My point exactly.

Well, this point was never explicitly made in any of this individual's posts. However, we can address the notion of "never any proof" simply; if there is never going to be any proof that God is real, then you preclude God ever interacting with the world. By saying this you shift your notions of God into a category that is synonymous with "non-existent" - or at least, if I was being nice, synonymous with "completely irrelevant" but I don't see too much of a difference there.

If few of you funny people trying to insult/ belittle a person by making remarks/ jokes about nationality, God, religion instead of the main issue, well, I just prove how irrational and immature some you are. BTW, I don't believe in any religion nor God. I believe in right and wrong so you morons can't offend me as for where I live, well I am right there next to you. Right over you head. in your head. Having fun with wannabes. One against many and I still smoked y'all. Hehehehehehe

This is just getting delusional, now, and not even worth my procrastination time.

6th July 2012[edit]

To be, or not to be...

Who are you?

I'm Armondikov...

No, I said "who are you?" not "what is your RW username?"

Okay, my name is...

No, I didn't ask your name. I asked "who are you?"

Well, then... I'm a human.

That's your species, not who you are.

Okay, I'm male, I have a vague interest in science, and I'm studying...

No! It's a simple question, who are you?

I'm... oh shut up.

5th July 2012[edit]

Why falsifiability?

I seem to change my opinion on falsifiability almost on a daily basis. Sometimes, I find it far too simplistic for the demarcation problem. It excludes otherwise perfectly coherent and legitimate work and would label any thought or suggestion as "pseudoscience" until someone can post a hard, falsifiable opinion. On the other hand, the only way we can really improve upon our knowledge is through testing, and "testing" in this context is really about subjecting ideas to situations where it might be shown to be wrong. If we restrict our testing to things that can only confirm what we know (aka confirmation bias) then we doom ourselves to wander with this same idea, forever and unchanging.

But that last part is only a tirade against confirmation bias, right? True, but you can't overcome confirmation bias without using falsification as a starting point. Yet, when you're in a lab doing real work you just need to gather data. "Data data data! I cannot make bricks without clay!" - in reality, strict falsification is usually far from your mind. Evidence is evidence, and sitting down to gather data is always going to be the priority when it comes to defining "science". Plenty of pseudoscientific ideas are falsifiable; the question is whether the proponents accept the falsification if presented and whether they bother to try it themselves. Plenty of scientific ideas aren't falsifiable, or at least not yet - the interpretations of quantum theory, for example. The quantum theory example is particularly mind-bending as Karl Popper is credited with championing falsification, yet he was less impressed with the idea of instrumentalism (the "shut up and calculate" school of thought) - even though this is the only philosophical option to take if you really want to adhere to strict falsification of quantum theory. I'm not as enamoured with Karl Popper as some people are.

4th July 2012[edit]

Direct or indirect

The old creationist canard of How do you know? Were you there? continues to amuse and fascinate me. Of course it's silly, but I think it flags up a far more general fallacy that people throw at science; you haven't really seen it, so it remains just a theory. So, let's take a quick look at what "seeing" actually involves.

If you start reading a sheet of paper with writing on it, then, presumably, you'd call that "direct" observation. Yet it's far more complicated than that. Photons, generated by a nearby light source (or the sun) fire out at the speed of light and hit the paper. There they absorb, scatter and reflect depending on the material they hit. It's not just a surface interaction, many penetrate down deeply before scattering - this is why human skin is notoriously hard for computer graphics to simulate. Dark ink absorbs photons (releasing the energy as barely perceptible heat) while the white paper is more likely to reflect them back out. Out of all the light striking the object, only a fraction manages to make it as far as the human pupil.

Really, we're not seeing the paper and ink. We're actually seeing the photons it once reflected, a couple of nanoseconds (light travels about 1 ft, or 30 cm, in 1 nanosecond) earlier.

But that isn't the whole story. The light entering a pupil into the eye then strikes the retina. It then induces reactions in the rod and cone cells within the eye, reacting with a range of light sensitive pigment molecules. The rods with their highly sensitive nature detect intensity while the three types of cone cell react differently to different wavelengths of light - thanks to quantisation of energy that comes from quantum mechanics. It's the combination of how these three cone cells react to light that gives us colour.

So we're not really seeing photons either. We're actually seeing the results of photochemical reactions confined within the eye.

Yet again, there's another step to consider. Those chemical reactions have to turn into electrochemical reactions to be sent to the brain along the optic nerve. For this to work, charged potassium, sodium and chloride ions are shifted back-and-forth across the membrane of a nerve cell, creating a potential difference of positive and negative charge that then cascades along the nerve, at around 15 metres per second or so, until the brain picks it up. Nerve fibres are what transmit all of our senses to the brain, which doesn't see, hear, feel, taste or touch anything directly at all.

It's not the paper, the photons or the chemical reactions that we see. We're actually seeing the nerve impulses that the brain receives from the optic nerve.

And once more, that isn't the whole story. Sight in biological organisms is almost entirely unlike video and still-frame cameras as it is possible to get. The human eye rapidly, and without anyone really noticing, darts back and forward to sample its data. The part of human vision that the eye can pick up at any one time is often said to be approximately the size of a person's thumbnail when held out at arms length. The eye does a lot of pre-processing itself while the brain assembles the data based on prior knowledge and expectation as much as it relies on the new data from the eye. In fact, colour is mostly an illusion caused by the brain reassembling the cone cell data, a range of three data points used to reconstruct wavelengths of light being seen. But colour gets even better for this: purple is not a monochromatic wavelength of light but is the result of stimulating two opposite ends of the visible spectrum. We really don't see any of that colour at all, and "purple" doesn't really exist!

What we're actually seeing is something that we're not "seeing" at all; it's all in our heads. And the same above can be repeated for almost every sense we can think of.

So, the point is that regardless how you swing it, this "direct observation" is far from direct itself. In fact, it's remarkably convoluted with many steps in between. Given this, adding a few extra steps before the photons enter the eyes is relatively inconsequential. The point is that we can still connect the dots, and join every step with some sort of experience by the brain. When you start unhooking ideas from this, then you have a problem.

In short, whenever someone tells you that "we've never really seen atoms, they're only a theory", slap them in the face and tell them "you never really felt that slap on the face, that's just a theory too".

3rd July 2012[edit]

Moral conundrum

I'm sure questions very similar like this have been asked before, but I find this is an interesting one, although the dichotomy is extremely contrived. I dare say that the major problem people have with moral thought experiments is in overcomplicating it to get around how contrived they are - "what if this?" and "it depends whether..." and "what if that?" pop up a lot. Fair enough, if you're evaluating a real situation, that's what you ought to be doing, but it defies the point of evaluating a model system in a thought experiment. Thought experiments take place in worlds where we can avoid awkward questions of motive or extra problems to really look at the crux of situations without added confounding factors. Anyway, I digress...

Assume you're the manager of a massive construction firm. Through either inaction, ineptitude, laziness or profiteering (yes, the motive is one of those contrived things that we should ignore) you fail to implement a certain safety procedure and end up causing one extra death in a statistical sense. This is something you know in advance of the action, inaction, etc. and is something you actually have a choice in. It's not the same as killing someone, and you certainly can't pin-point which one of the many accidents that happen every year was "extra", but still the ultimate (although not proximal) cause of this one extra death rests on you. If you ran the year again taking the other route, there'd be one less death. Nothing you can be personally convicted for, but that's really just a quirk of the law more than the moral framework underlying this.

So, the question is; is this action or inaction leading, knowingly, to a statistical death more or less moral than simply picking someone and shooting them in the head? If you're going to do one, why not just go ahead and do the other instead?

From a utilitarian perspective someone is still dead at the end of each scenario - although you could draw a distinction in "how much suffering was caused in each death?" (see, another confounding factor!) but assume that suffering is equal for now. Such an analysis avoids any differences between such "direct" killing and "indirect" killing, or that one was selected and one was statistical. The method and chain of causes are irrelevant in this. It sort of reminds me of a quote from Blackadder Goes Forth, when Blackadder describes the war as something "which would be a damn sight simpler if we just stayed in England and shot fifty thousand of our men a week". The most pressing result is the same, why bother with the window dressing around it?

Now, friends of mine who graduated in political philosophy (IMHO, the most boring kind of philosophy) and who can talk about Kant until peoples' ears bleed, will immediately point out that inaction is always more moral than action when it comes to equal outcomes. This is actually backed up by experiments looking at how people do actually behave; so, it's easy to let one person die to save three when you don't have to pull the lever, but far more difficult to kill one and save three when you have to pull the lever to get that result. Though unfortunately this often gets interpreted as "sit on your arse and you can do no wrong". Yet to me, inaction is still a form of action. It's the action of "sitting by and watching it happen". Just as a "direct" cause is really an "indirect" cause with a couple of the steps hidden from view - you may think the hitman was the direct cause of someone's death, but really, it was the physics and biology involved when a speeding bullet meets skull, that's substantially more direct and so the hitman is as indirect as the jilted wife who paid for him, as indirect as the lover she caught him with and so on until "because of the Big Bang".

So, what does this mean for the hypothetical boss for whom we're asking "if you're going to let someone die, why not just shoot them anyway?". Traditional moral philosophy would say the latter is unacceptable, but the former is sort-of fine. But to me, in the context of how this really works, I find the latter to be at least a far more honest interpretation of the utilitarian facts. Just as with the Blackadder quote; why bother fighting a war with human wave attacks when mowing down your own people in the comfort of your own country is so much more efficient? Well, "efficiency" isn't really the word, more like honesty. If you're going to kill someone, kill them. Don't dick about, just do it.

Knowingly causing death through indirect causes and inaction is a very sly way of doing things. You diffuse responsibility that way. You make the victim random. You fob the guilt to the proximal cause, even when you are, as far as it makes sense to draw the line somewhere, the ultimate cause. It's like killing but denying the fact - standing over a corpse with a bloody knife and pleading innocent. Those in the power to do this sort of thing can be happy to sleep at night despite their position as an ultimate cause of death and suffering, precisely because they've contrived to distance themselves from it. Nobody recognises the guilt here, and when you don't recognise a problem, it becomes far more of a problem. It's not just limited to those failing to put safety procedures in place; politicians signing death warrants and declarations of war from the comfort of their offices do the same. They shift guilt and responsibility away from them even though the outcome, death, is the same. By contrast, serial killers who get up close and personal with each of their victims implement the act of killing in a far more direct, honourable, and honest, manner. Those wielding the weapons don't deny guilt, those who chose to be proximal as well as ultimate causes see what they're doing as what it is, and not as some by-product

He who passes the sentence must swing the sword, and all that.

2nd July 2012[edit]

Racism or xenophobia?

Hatred and bigotry are, let's face it, easy to spot and is morally reprehensible in all forms. Arguing the finer points of what that consists of might seem a little pointless given this, but I believe identifying as much detail is what will help solve conflicts and guide little wayward souls back onto the path of enlightenment. You cannot change someone's mind if you don't already know a great deal about the state of their mind. Hence I don't believe in calling some people raving misogynists for some non-wilfully ignorant comments (Others, though, have at it) as you'd be addressing the wrong motive and, at best, you simply alienate your opponent and make them think worse of you - souring any chance you'll do the "guiding to the path of enlightenment" you seek to choose.

Anyway, so the crux of this point is thus: does Britain have a racism problem? We seem to be in the grip of it. A YouTube video went viral after someone on the tube made a racist tirade against a fellow passenger, and hardly a day goes by without some new row in football. A racism problem? I don't think so. I think it's far more accurate to describe it as a xenophobia problem. Are these just two sides of the same coin? Yes, I'd agree, but in the same way that shameless raving misogyny and non-wilful ignorance of women's issues are two sides of the same. The treatment, however, is different. If you insist on labelling someone a racist, you'll probably only get back "but I'm not a racist" - and we have articles on various tropes that this manifests as. Keep pounding the "racist" accusation and you'll get nowhere, even if you believe in your heart-of-hearts that it's true.

Why do I not think it's a racism problem? Simply put, in the UK the word "race" is not on everyone's lips. It simply isn't when you step away from the media hype and you talk to real people. You don't hear about "the black man" in the same way you hear about it the US. There are no calls to ban mixed-race marriages. "Interracial" is never used to describe couples. Race, if it is anything, seems to be a background "thing" of little importance.

Yet, prejudices do still exist, but mostly along nationalistic lines. One only needs to turn on an episode of Top Gear to see a barrage of stereotypes and insults about the French, Germans and Italians. Open the Daily Mail and it's not "black" people but immigrants that are the problem - and in this case the British Left have been far too quick to dismiss this as a code word, but this is a failure to really get into the mindset of the opposition here. "Immigrants" is not used as a code word, or a dog whistle, it genuinely is used to refer to "foreigners" - eastern European, Middle-Eastern, Asian... the list goes on and isn't separated along ethnic grounds but along national ones. It's a distrust of the outside world, the one outside of England's green and pleasant land that's full of people who want to eat you. Even in UKIP and the BNP, their most "racist" policies are most accurately described as xenophobic policies. They don't want people coming into the country, they like tracing ancestry back hundreds of years, they're hyper-nationalistic. If you were to call the BNP racist you might well be justified, yet they could come back and deny that they're racist, accuse you of generating a straw man and they'd kinda be right about it.

Obviously, this goes back - as all things do - to the Empire. It's simply an over-simplification to say that racist attitudes came because the Empire believed it was superior to dark-skinned people, it simply believed it was better than all people. The popular image seems to be of British soldiers fighting dark-skinned tribes (a la Zulu) but the Boer war was fought against mostly white farmers of Dutch descent, and of course the Crimean against the Russians, the American War of Independence. Hardly the actions of an Empire that exclusively hated "black" people - they simply despised non-English people, and racism is merely a side-effect of that distrust continuing.

So, racism and xenophobia; pretty much the same bollocks all round, but there's a certain nuance and subtlety between them that we need to pay attention to.