Books about the FBI

There are a couple of new books about the FBI, and here is what I learned. J. Edgar Hoover's secret surveillance programs were explicitly ordered or approved by the President, including FDR and Kennedy. Hoover was a homosexual or cross-dresser. The FBI spied on M. L. King because because his top Jewish advisor was a Communist. Hoover cut off Sen. Joe McCarthy from info because Pres. Eisenhower regarded McCarthy as a political threat. The Watergate scandal was largely the result of the deputy FBI director vindictively sabotaging Pres. Nixon by illegal leaking slanted info from investigations.

Commies and commie sympathizers have always hated Hoover's FBI. If he really had presidential authorization for all of his investigations, then any blame should be on FDR, Kennedy, and the other presidents, not Hoover.

Scientists against free speech

Cosmologist Sean Carroll writes:

Everyone who has been paying attention knows that there is a strong anti-science movement in this country — driven partly by populist anti-intellectualism, but increasingly by corporate interests that just don’t like what science has to say.

As Motl explains, it is silly to complain about $10,000 when billions are spent to promote anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Likewise, 99+% of the evolution money promotes evolutionism, and yet there are complaints about the five or so scientists who promote a contrary view. Carroll also complains about Citizens United having free speech rights to put out a political film, even tho most of the money favors incumbents.

It is amazing to see scientists against the dissemination of minority viewpoints, but they are not immune to human weaknesses. Nobody likes criticism. Scientific processes need critics, so that the ideas are always being tested. Whenever you hear of someone trying to squelch dissent, you can be sure that he is clinging to some untenable ideas.

Peter H. Gleick received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2003. He stole and leaked some documents, and says:

My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected

How could there be well-funded effort to prevent climate science debate? This is just a euphemism for Gleick wanting to silence AGW dissent.

Coyne attacks Tyson

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist and Chicago professor Jerry Coyne is dissatisfied with scientists who promote science on its own merits, and who tolerate religious views that do not interfere with science. He particular hates atheist scientists who are not sufficiently hostile to religion. Eg, see his attack on Lawrence Krauss, and his apology.

His latest target is Neil deGrasse Tyson. Coyne writes:

Tyson posits that religion doesn’t have an issue with science because most American’s “fully embrace science.” He says there’s been a “happy coexistence [between science and religion] for centuries.” ...

First, of all, I don’t agree that most Americans “fully embrace science.” That’s certainly not true as far as my own field, evolution, is concerned. Only 16% of Americans embrace the scientific view of evolution as a mindless, materialistic process, one that takes place without divine guidance.

Coyne conflates science with atheist beliefs. Americans do fully embrace scientific facts that can be demonstrated with observation and experiment. He is just unhappy that they have not fully adopted his "view".

Coyne goes on to complain that Tyson is not fully on board with his strategy for extirminating religion:

if we’re going to expunge creationism from schools, going after it as cases of teachers pushing “bad science” would involve a painful, step-by-step review of each teacher’s behavior, and then the onerous process of correcting or firing that teacher. But going after creationism as an incursion of religion into the public sphere — a perfectly proper and justified thing to do — eliminates the problem in one swipe. No creationism can be taught, anywhere.

By “problem”, I mean, of course, the legality of teaching creationist views (including intelligent design) in schools. The bigger problem remains: religion, the source of creationism. So even if you don’t care about the other inimical (and more serious) side effects of religion, ignoring it as the source of creationism is a blinkered view.

This is yet another example of where evolutionists pretend to be just promoting science, but they are really much more interested in pushing an anti-religion agenda. I think that controversies over evolution are almost entirely driven by bad scientists who trying to use science to push their personal belief systems.

Update: Tyson responds. He is simply promoting science, without getting sucked into unnecessary and unscientific disputes about religion. Not everyone wants to evangelize for the atheist cause the way Coyne does.

Proof of infinitely many primes

A new paper was posted on Euclid's theorem on the infinitude of primes: a historical survey of its proofs (300 B.C.--2012) and another new proof. Euclid's theorem is also proved on The Prime Pages and MathWorld.

This great theorem is both brilliant and trivial, but unfortunately explanations of it tend to get sidetracked into subtleties about infinity, contradiction, and non-constructive proofs. Euclid himself did not understand the concept of infinity. The simplest proof is to turn it into a finitary constructive statement.

Theorem. Let N be the product of a set of primes. If there are no other primes less than N, then N+1 is prime.

Proof. The only possible prime factors of N+1 are in the original set of primes, but those all leave a remainder of 1 when divided into N+1.

Corollary. There are infinitely many primes.

Proof. Given any finite set of primes that purports to be all primes, the theorem contructs another one.

This is essentially the same as Euclid's proof, but if you don't say it right, then N+1 is not necessarily a prime. For example, 2*3*5*7*11*13 + 1 = 59*509. So most proofs need extra explanations to address this point. However, the above proof avoids the issue.

This presentation also exemplifies the difference between hard and soft analysis. The distinction is similar to that of hard and soft science, but for math it is more subtle. The authority on the analysis distinction is Terry Tao, who explained it here in 2007 and here in 2011. On his blog, he often tries to turn a soft theorem into a hard theorem.

The above theorem is hard, while the corollary is soft. The theorem is hard because it is finitary. Given some set of primes, it tells you how to find another one. The operation can be carried out in some finite and predictable number of computations.

The corollary is soft because it says nothing about how those primes are distributed, or how to find them, or how big they are, or anything beyond there being infinitely many. Yes, you can get all the primes by counting the natural numbers and testing each one for primality. But the corollary gives no clue about how much work you will have to do to find each prime. While everyone agrees that the corollary is a true and meaningful statement, the theorem is saying something more precise that might be more useful in some situations.

This presentation is also a good example of how a difficult theorem (that there are infinitely many primes) is made easy by merely formulating the right lemma. Once the above theorem about N+1 being prime is formulated, it is easy to prove it, and to prove Euclid's theorem.

Note also that the hard-soft distinction is not the same as the difficult-easy distinction. Hard analysis is hard because of its rigidity, not its difficulty.

American nuclear family

The hbd chick tries to correlate family type with ideology, based on the 7 family types. The discussion is mostly about Europe. To simplify, there are 2 main types:

American nuclear family - autonomous unit consisting of dad, mom, and kids; dad is head of household; Christian ideals.

Old world family - arranged and cousin marriages; rigid inheritance rules; household authority includes extended family; tribal culture.

The past 50 years have seen systematic attempts to undermine the American nuclear family. There are many factors, including financial incentives for single motherhood, massive immigration by old world families that refuse to assimilate, and leftist-feminist opposition to Americanism.

I think that they are on to something. Family types explain a lot. A big advance in European civilization occurred when Christianity abolished cousin marriages about a millennium ago. Islam has not. Families are very important in China and India, but they are not like the American nuclear family. The American nuclear family made American great, and now no one is defending it against the forces that are out to destroy it.

Ambiguity intolerance disorder

I have been fascinated by the question of why the vast majority of people so frequently jump to conclusions that are not justified by the available info. They usually persist, even when their error is pointed out. It is as if they all have some sort of mental defect.

My current hypothesis is that they are lacking in two areas, Theory of mind and Ambiguity tolerance.

Animal studies have shown that people have mirror neurons that make it very difficult for people to distinguish between their perceptions and experiences. As a result, people have a very hard time avoid coming to faulty conclusions about the motives of others, as they confuse their own mental processes with those of others.

I have noted below about how most people so easily jump to a guilty conclusion. Jurors are told to withhold judgment until they see all of the evidence, but they just cannot do it. Likewise, most people cannot undo their first impressions. I now believe that the problem is rooted in a low tolerance for ambiguity.

I would call these two under-studied psychological disorders, except that most people are afflicted. Maybe there are studies on this, but psychologists have these problems themselves, so I am not sure I trust them.

It seems to me that these disorders might correlate with political beliefs. Liberals have the mindreading disorder and conservatives have the ambiguity intolerance. They both jump to faulty conclusions, but maybe for different reasons.

A recent study claimed a correlation between certain disorders and college majors:

Our results suggest that shared genetic (and perhaps environmental) factors may both predispose for heritable neuropsychiatric disorders and influence the development of intellectual interests.

For example, relatives of bipolar depressed drug addicts were more likely to major in humanities than science. This is not exactly the sort of study I am looking for, but it is similar.

Pathologizing normal behavior

Pyschologists are increasingly pathologizing normal behavior. The DSM-5 will soon say that grief following the death of a loved one will be considered to be a symptom of depression. But there is some pushback from some folks.

The NY Times reports:

The latest findings on dyslexia are leading to a new way of looking at the condition: not just as an impediment, but as an advantage, especially in certain artistic and scientific fields.

A Time magazine cover story is on The Upside Of Being An Introvert (And Why Extroverts Are Overrated).

Only a theory

Here is typical evolutionist explanation of whether evolution is only a theory:

A theory, as the word is used in science, doesn’t mean an unsupported speculation or hypothesis (the popular use of the word). A theory is, instead, a big idea that encompasses other ideas and hypotheses and weaves them into a coherent fabric. It is a mature, interconnected body of statements, based on reasoning and evidence, that explains a wide variety of observations. It is, in one of the definitions offered by the Oxford English Dictionary, “a scheme or system of ideas and statements held as an explanation of account of a group of ideas or phenomena; . . .a statement of what are known to be the general laws of something known or observed.” Thus atomic theory, quantum theory, and plate tectonic theory are not mere speculations or opinions, but strongly supported ideas that explain a great variety of phenomena. There are few theories in biology, and among them evolution is surely the most important.

So is evolution a fact or a theory? In light of these definitions, evolution is a scientific fact. That is, the descent of all species, with modification from common ancestors is a hypothesis that in the last 150 years or so has been supported by so much evidence, and has so successfully resisted all challenges, that it has become a fact. But this history of evolutionary change is explained by evolutionary theory, the body of statements (about mutaitons, selection, genetic drift, developmental constraints, and so forth) that together account for the various changes that organisms have undergone.

This says that evolution is a theory, but then says that it is a fact instead. But note that he wants to say that a theory must be a "strongly supported idea", even tho his dictionary definition does not say that at all. As a comment says:

It’s worth emphasising that calling something a theory says absolutely nothing about its truth. Theories range from the theory of conic sections (a branch of geometry, and as certain as anything can be), through Newton’s theory of gravity (true up to a point), and ideal gas theory (true of a non-existent gas, to which real gases approximate), to the Steady State theory of the Universe (wrong).

I would add String theory and many-worlds interpretation. These are pure fantasy, as there is no way to determine whether they are true or false.

Today, leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne moves on to complaining that this 1873 Darwin quote is out of context:

“The impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God.”

The context is that Darwin is not persuaded by the argument. Coyne hates the suggestion that a great scientist might not have been an atheist. But Darwin's point is that evolution directly attacks the chief reason for believing in God, and modern evolutionists like Coyne say the same thing, as noted below. I don't really agree with them, but I do think that this attitude of evolutionists explains why evolution is so controversial.

New attack on California marriage law

The LA Times just reported:

A federal appeals court Tuesday struck down California's ban on same-sex marriage, clearing the way for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on gay marriage as early as next year.

The 2-1 decision by a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that limited marriage to one man and one woman, violated the U.S. Constitution. ...

“Proposition 8 served no purpose, and had no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California,” the court said.

It is crazy to say that California marriage law violates a Civil War amendment because there is no reason for it. The rational basis for marriage has been described in court papers many times.

There are many other legitimate reasons as well. Maybe voters wanted to correct a bad court decision. Maybe voters wanted to clarify the law. Maybe voters wanted to conform to federal law and law in other states. Maybe voters were concerned that activist judges would use same-sex marriage as an excuse to push social policies, as has happened in California and elsewhere. Maybe voters wanted to make a statement about religious freedom. The supreme courts in several states have mandated same-sex civil unions and not same-sex marriage, which is the California law that the 9C now says is irrational.

Pres. Barack Obama says that he is against same-sex marriage, but he appoints leftist judges who try to change social policy with decisions like this.

This is a question of whether California is ruled by the people, or by a leftist elite that considers 60% of the voters to be irrational.

The global warming debate

I enjoy a good scientific debate. The WSJ published No Need to Panic About Global Warming:

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about "global warming." Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

It drew a lot of attention and a heated response, Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate:

Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition? In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field and on published, peer-reviewed work. If you need surgery, you want a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations. ... For example, there is a retrovirus expert who does not accept that HIV causes AIDS. And it is instructive to recall that a few scientists continued to state that smoking did not cause cancer, long after that was settled science.

The rebuttal is disappointing because the climate scientists do not actually refute the first article. Nor does it stick to its own advice about sticking to the opinions of experts in the field. It ends up concluding:

In addition, there is very clear evidence that investing in the transition to a low-carbon economy will not only allow the world to avoid the worst risks of climate change, but could also drive decades of economic growth. Just what the doctor ordered.

Huhh? They are climate scientists, not economists. Artificially restricting the use of carbon will make us poorer in the short run, not wealthier. I am wary of people who brag about their expertise, tell me to accept their opinions as authoritative, lecture me on what science says, and then claims some unspecified "very clear evidence" for some political purpose outside their expertise.

Why Americans reject evolution

Leftist-evolutionist-atheist writes:

the gist of Sewell’s article is that evolutionists themselves are to blame for America’s rejection of evolution.

That’s palpable nonsense. Every statistic shows that evolution-denial is born of religion. Religious people accept evolution far less than do secularists, and Biblical literalists far less than those who see the Bible as divinely inspired but not literally true. Church attendance is strongly and negatively correlated with acceptance of evolution. Countries that are less religious accept evolution far more readily. And, of course, creationism has repeatedly been thrown out of America’s public schools by the courts because creationism is a belief based on religion, not fact.

I do think that evolutionists are to blame. As Sewell explains:

Evolution began as a neat explanation of variation within species and a plausible hypothesis for the origin of species. But today it is held out as a sufficient explanation of the origin of all life, a general explanatory theory of the development of everything – including culture – a grand narrative to end all grand narratives. Evolution is presented by Daniel Dennett as a “universal acid” that dissolves all ethical and moral systems, and by Richard Dawkins as a compelling argument against the existence of God and a slam-dunk case for abandoning any search for meaning, purpose or direction in human affairs.

Does anyone seriously expect the American public to buy into all that?

He is right. The American public does not reject science. It rejects the nihilistic philosophy that evolutionists try to force on us in the name of science.

Schools need less emphasis on empathy

Mary Grabar writes in an Atlanta paper op-ed:

Consider what an “official” of the curriculum company told an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter: “It’s important for kids to have some empathy for other people in the world.”

Really? When did schools get into the empathy business?

But this official’s admission illustrates how prevalent this belief is among educators. Educators have swung sharply from what most citizens believe schools should be doing, and that is imparting knowledge objectively and teaching students how to present written and oral arguments using logic and evidence.

Instead, students are asked to adopt attitudes and present opinions on adult issues. ...

But there are other means by which educators exploit students emotionally: Writing assignments that ask for feelings and opinions. ... Group work. ... Community service. ... The emphasis on everyday people, instead of leaders and heroes. ... Anti-bullying efforts. ...

But when schools emphasize feelings over knowledge and give students a false sense of accomplishment, they’re not helping.

Real knowledge and a strong work ethic come from such things as memorization, rewards for correct answers, intellectually challenging reading, and standard-based math and writing, not from “brainstorming” in groups, or getting praise for unsupported opinions, impressionistic scribbling in journals or token acts of do-good-ism.

This is the femininization of the schools. They are now more concern with indoctrination than learning.

Junk food does not cause obesity

The NY Times reports:

In the fight against childhood obesity, communities all over the country are banning the sale of sweets and salty snacks in public schools. But a new study suggests that the strategy may be ineffective.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University ... compared children’s weight in schools where junk food was sold and in schools where it was banned. The scientists also evaluated eighth graders who moved into schools that sold junk food with those who did not, and children who never attended a school that sold snacks with those who did. And they compared children who always attended schools with snacks with those who moved out of such schools.

No matter how the researchers looked at the data, they could find no correlation at all between obesity and attending a school where sweets and salty snacks were available.

Nearly everyone has an opinion about what foods are healthy, and nearly all of them are contrary to scientific research. Do-gooders pass laws and policies favoring what they think are common-sense ideas about beneficial diets, but they are almost certainly doing more harm than good.

Denying sex differences

Anthropologist Agustín Fuente attacks the study in SciAm:

Recent publication in PLoS ONE by psychologist Del Giudici and colleagues [i] has reignited the debate about just how “naturally” different men and women are. Del Giudici et al. state that their findings of a “pattern of global sex differences…may help elucidate the meaning and generality of the broad dimension of individual differences known as “masculinity-femininity”.”

The study doesn't actually say anything about the sexes being “naturally” different. It merely reports personality differences.

There are three major problems with the conclusions being drawn from study: a) “gender” and “sex” are used interchangeably, b) evolved differences in men and women are not being measured, and c) relevant biological and anthropological datasets are ignored. ...

“Sex” and “Gender” are not the same thing. Sex is a biological state that is measure via chromosomal content and a variety of physiological and developmental measures. Gender is the roles, expectations and perceptions that a given society has for the sexes. Most societies have two genders on a masculinity-femininity continuum, some have more. The two are interconnected, but not the same thing. We are born with a sex, but acquire gender and there is great inter-individual diversity within societies and sexes in regards to how sex and gender play out in behavior and personality.

Gender is a grammar term that is sometimes used as a polite term for sex. The above comment might be applicable to a study of transsexuals, but this study concerned those who are unambiguously male or female.

There are no consistent brain differences between the sexes [iii], there is incredible overlap in our physiological function [iv], we engage in sexual activity in more or less the same patterns [v], and we overlap extensively in most other behavior as well. There are some interesting re-occurring differences, particularly in patterns of aggression and certain physiological correlates of reproduction, muscle density, and body size.

This is nonsense. Another denier says:

They argue that males and females are as different in personality as the distance between the planets Mars and Venus. Instead, the overwhelming evidence, across multiple psychological domains, is that men and women are more similar than different; the distance between them is more like the distance between North Dakota and South Dakota.

More gibberish. The same reasoning says that humans and monkeys are more similar than different. I don't even get the point of the Dakota analogy -- North Dakota and South Dakota have no overlap at all. Here is a recent example of parents trying to be sex-neutral, and a funny video of the Norway gender equality paradox. Yes, there are plenty of academics who deny the obvious.

Why Jews Vote Democrat

Ilya Somin tries to explain why Jews vote Democrat. He disagrees with other Jewish explanations, such as Norman Podhoretz's and Irving Kristol's.

These opinions confirm that American Jews have been voting overwhelmingly Democrat for a century, but their theories are filled with contradictions. Jews hate the Religious Right, but that could only explain the last 30 years or so, at most. The cause does not seem to be any religious teaching, because the Orthodox Jews are not so Democrat. Jews are not necessarily opposed to conservatism, as they heavily supported Margaret Thatcher. Explanations based on income, education, urban living, etc. are unconvincing. Nor is it based on support for Israel, as Republicans usually support Israel more than Democrats. Other theories involve Jews foolishly voting against their self-interest. Kristol calls it "cognitive dissonance".

Explanations by non-Jews are always denounced as anti-semitic.

Jews are only about 2% of the USA, but the Democrat Party would be dead without them. Marxist and other more radical leftist movements would not exist without Jews.

Whatever the reason, it seems clear that Jews will vote for Barack Obama in 2012. So will the blacks, single moms, and food stamp recipients.

Grads defend liberal bias

Princeton University has a token conservative on the faculty (Robert P. George), drawing this alumnus praise:

Especially in light of the heavy liberal bias that exists on the current Princeton administration and faculty, it is refreshing to learn that “it’s not unusual to find Professor Robert George engaged in a dialogue about constitutional issues,” and that “it’s a major focus of his classes.”

But a brainwashed recent alumna complained about it:

The basic premise of science is that change is inevitable and in many ways, if understood, beneficial and revolutionary. We may consider “liberal bias” to be revolutionary in terms of the citizenship rights and alumni donations that allowed me to attend the University. ...

The liberal perspective toward change is intrinsic to higher education in the United States and for this, thank goodness. What are education, science, and governance if not the acceptance of the basic premise that change will happen and that we can have an impact on its direction? I rue the day when my alma mater or any other loses this bias. In its absence is the reproduction of the status quo, which while admirable as an ideal, requires us to ignore the watches on our wrists.

So she thinks that conservatives are folks who refuse to accept the time on their own wristwatches? She probably did not have a conservative professor. Who even wears a wristwatch anymore?

She probably did take a class at Princeton that taught her that science was all about revolutionary change, in a leftist Marxist sense. I did when I was a student there.

Another alumnus wants that professor to be re-educated:

he might benefit greatly from sitting in on an introductory economics course, and perhaps one on the history of the 1930s.

This is another incoherent letter. Is he blaming conservatives for the Great Depression?

You would think that if a liberal Princeton graduate is showing off how stupid George is, then he or she could actually address some opinion of his.

Into the mind of a Neanderthal

Now that Neanderthal DNA has been sequenced, scientists are getting bolder with their analysis. NewScientist reports:

But while Neanderthals would have had a variety of personality types, just as we do, their way of life would have selected for an average profile quite different from ours. Jo or Joe Neanderthal would have been pragmatic, capable of leaving group members behind if necessary, and stoical, to deal with frequent injuries and lengthy convalescence. He or she had to be risk tolerant for hunting large beasts close up; they needed sympathy and empathy in their care of the injured and dead; and yet were neophobic, dogmatic and xenophobic.

So we could have recognised and interacted with Neanderthals, but we would have noticed these significant cognitive differences. They would have been better at well-learned, expert cognition than modern humans, but not as good at the development of novel solutions. They were adept at intimate, small-scale social cognition, but lacked the cognitive tools to interact with acquaintances and strangers, including the extensive use of symbols.

In other words, the European Neanderthals were conservatives, while the out-of-Africa hominids were liberals. Plus Neanderthals were ugly. Or so they imagine.

Update: The NY Times reports that the out-of-Africa theory has been superseded:

The new view is fast supplanting the traditional idea that modern humans triumphantly marched out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, replacing all other types that had gone before.

Instead, the genetic analysis shows, modern humans encountered and bred with at least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent times: the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia, dying out roughly 30,000 years ago, and a mysterious group known as the Denisovans, who lived in Asia and most likely vanished around the same time.

Not dark today

Wikipedia and a lot of other web sites have gone dark today to protest SOPA, a proposal to limit lookups to pirate web sites.

Google uses a rare ad on its home page to recruit people to its political cause. What Google does not say is that it makes billions of dollars from indexing pirate web sites, and that limiting piracy is a threat to its business model.

SOPA may have been a bad idea, but it was already dead, and it was not going to destroy the internet or anything like that. The internet has a long history of chicken littles claiming that some law or technology will end the internet, and they have all been wrong. SOPA might make it a little harder to find pirate web sites, and slightly harder for Google to facilitate piracy, but that is about all. If Google wanted to be constructive, it could suggest other ways of dealing with pirate web sites.

So this blog is not going dark today.

Update: After the blackout, the feds seized the overseas file sharing site megaupload.com. I thought that the they needed SOPA to have this power. It appears that the feds wanted to make a statement that they will bust pirate sites regardless of the web protests or congressional action. And I didn't see Google sticking up for the free speech rights of megaupload users.

Romney attacked for being white

Lee Siegel writes for the NY Times blog:

There has yet to be any discussion over the one quality that has subtly driven Mitt Romney’s candidacy: his race. ...

Contrast that with Mr. Romney’s meticulously cultivated whiteness. He is nearly always in immaculate white shirt sleeves. He is implacably polite, tossing off phrases like “oh gosh” with Stepford bonhomie. He has mastered Benjamin Franklin’s honesty as the “best policy”: a practiced insincerity, an instant sunniness that, though evidently inauthentic, provides a bland bass note that keeps everyone calm. This is the bygone world of Babbitt, of small-town Rotarians. ...

Mitt Romney ... knows that he offers to these people the white solution to the problem of a black president. I am sure that Mr. Romney is not a racist. But I am also sure that, for the many Americans who find the thought of a black president unbearable, he is an ideal candidate. For these sudden outsiders, Mitt Romney is the conventional man with the outsider faith — an apocalyptic pragmatist — who will wrest the country back from the unconventional man with the intolerable outsider color.

Siegel is Jewish, which allowed him to once criticize Joe Lieberman for matching the "anti-Semitic caricature" by being "greedy, arrogant, venal, and vindictive."

This election is not about race or religion. Barack Obama's race turned out to be a big advantage in the last election. He only became unpopular with people like David Brooks after his policies failed. And it is funny to see Romney accused of representing Christians when he is a Mormon.

To liberals at the NY Times, race and religion are proxies for the American Dream. They hate American culture and values, and they promote racial animosity whenever they can, in the hopes of undermining Americanism. The NY Times had its harshest attack on Romney for wanting limits on immigration. They want to flood America with Third World immigrants, and scream racism at anyone who wants to preserve American greatness.

Autistic boy aces college

Last night CBS TV 60 Minutes reported:

Jake Barnett is one in 10 million. The Indianapolis 13-year-old has been acing college math and science courses since he was eight years old. Now Jake is a college sophomore taking honors classes in math and physics, while also doing scientific research and tutoring fellow students. No one could have predicted that Jake would even make it to college. At age two, Jake began to regress - he stopped speaking and making eye contact. The diagnosis: autism. Jake is proud of his autism. "That, I believe, is the reason why I am in college and I am so successful," he tells Morley Safer. ...

No one could have predicted that Jake would even make it to college. Just before his second birthday he began to regress, stopped speaking and making eye contact. After consulting with several doctors the diagnosis was autism.

Michael Barnett: We went through speech therapy, physical therapy, developmental therapy, occupational therapy. Therapists came to the home.

Kristine Barnett: He was going further and further from our world into a world of his own. And I really was just baffled at how we were going to get him back out of that world.

Safer: And how did you get him, back out of that world?

Kristine Barnett: We realized that Jacob was not happy unless he was doing something he loved.

Which even as a three-year-old was math and science. His parents say the more he focused on the subjects he loved the more he began to communicate.

The psychiatrists are redefining autism as autism spectrum, and broadening the concept so that it can be diagnosed based on stereotyped behaviors, as well as mental retardation. Many states have now passed laws requiring insurance coverage, even tho there is no known effective treatment.

On TV, Jake seems like just an unusually smart boy with no obvious disorders. He just has what the shrinks derisively call stereotyped behaviors.

The psychiatrists are doing something sinister here by pathologizing harmless behaviors, particularly male behaviors. Millions of dollars are being drained from our medical system to fund useless therapies. They conflate smart kids with retarded kids. I think that their pseudo-scientific opinions about autism will ultimately be considered more offensive and wrong than their previous stances on homosexuals.

Cannot consider musician for his accomplishments

Criminal defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz writes

Gilad Atzmon was invited to attend a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Friends Meeting House happening late this week...

I cannot overemphasize how serious this matter is. ...

I cannot imagine an overtly homophobic, sexist or racist musician being invited “solely for his musical accomplishments.”

Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School, is author of “The Trials of Zion.”

Really? Musicians cannot be considered for their musical accomplishments anymore, and must also be judged for the political correctness of their views? And the serious of those judgments cannot be overemphasized?

Many famous musicians have endorsed Che Guevara in various ways. Companies sometimes get blamed for it, such as the recent Mercedes-Benz Apologizes for Using Che Guevara Image. I think Mercedes-Benz was only trying to make a harmless joke. But musicians seem to get a free pass. Surely endorsing Che is more offensive than any opinions that Atzmon has expressed. Dershowitz is the bigot here.

Google wants copyright opt-out

Google copyright lawyer Bill Patry claims to tell how to fix copyright, part 3 and part 2. I would respond in the comments on that blog, but my comments were deleted.

He does not explain it, but a large part of Google's empire is based on the difference between opt-in and opt-out. Copyright law protects an author's exclusive right, and no other system can use his works unless he opts-in to the system. Google wants the law to be opt-out, so that Google can copy whatever it pleases until the author opts-out by formally objecting. Google finds that few authors opt-out, becaues of Google's market power and other reasons.

For example, the rapid success of YouTube was almost entirely because it was the biggest and most reliable source of pirated videos on the web. Now Google responds to takedown notices from those who want to opt-out, but the market power of YouTube is so great that most copyright owners settle for some ad royalties instead.

The Google Book lawsuit was supposedly a class action representing authors who did not want their books copied unless they decided to opt-in. But Google's proposed settlement was an opt-out system.

Patry's only proposal is to shorten copyrights, but he says, “None of those suggestions would weaken copyright, whatever that means. None of the proposals have anything to do with my employer.”

Yes, they do weaken copyright, and they are designed to help Google, his employer. A weakened copyright would be a good thing, but Google ought to be honest about its interests here.

Red wine health is bogus

NPR reports:

The already shaky case for the anti-aging powers of resveratrol, a substance in red wine, is looking a little shakier.

After a three-year investigation, the University of Connecticut Health Center has told 11 scientific journals that studies they published by resveratrol researcher Dipak K. Das may not be trustworthy.

In 2008, the university got a tip about irregularities in Das' work. The subsequent investigation identified "145 counts of fabrication and falsification of data," according to a UConn statement.

Of course, these studies being bogus does not say anything about whether red wine is healthy or unhealthy, just as a vaccine study being bogus does not say anything about whether the vaccine is safe. But this does show that a lot of people are easily duped by research claims that reinforce what they would like to believe.

Meanwhile, it is claimed that a soda tax will save thousands of lives.

Marxist retirement is tragic and unnecessary

I will know that California is low on funds when I stop reading about 6-figure pensions. The Santa Cruz newspaper reports:

SANTA CRUZ - Mike Rotkin, who has spent nearly two-thirds of his life at the City on a Hill, has finally and officially retired.

The five-time former mayor, who holds the record for City Council service, retired from UC Santa Cruz at the end of December, nearly 43 years after arriving as a graduate student in 1969.

After working as a teacher's assistant for several years, Rotkin served a combined 38 years as a lecturer and field study coordinator for Community Studies, a program being phased out by UCSC amid ongoing state funding cuts.

"I do feel that I'm not harmed by this as much as the students and the university by closing the program," Rotkin, 66, said. "It's tragic and unnecessary." ...

And even now, he's not really leaving. He will teach "Introduction to Marxism" as a summer session course and continue as member of the University Council of American Federation of Teachers' negotiating team.

"I didn't retire because I was tired of teaching," he said. "I retired because they threw me out."

There was a financial calculation, too.

Rotkin, who earned $88,461 from UCSC in the 2009-2010 academic year, figured out he would take home more each year if he started drawing on his pension. As a 26-year veteran of the City Council, he also gets a small pension from the city.

So he was being paid $90k to teach Marxism, and even more not to teach Marxism? The governor is planning on a tax increase to be approved by a ballot measure. There should be a ballot measure to abolish unfunded pensions and stop teaching Marxism.

Disqualifying the chess champion

Computer chess has gotten too good. In 1996, a computer beat the human world chess champ. In 2005, a state-of-the-art chess program was released as GPL open source, and the field got a lot more competitive. Now the good computers are far better than the best humans.

One program wins every year:

On December 4, 2005 a free, downloadable chess program named Rybka 1.0 Beta was initially released and took a sizable lead on all then-existing chess program strength ranking lists, surpassing all commercial programs. Rybka then proceeded to rapidly widen its lead with subsequent versions. Rybka went on to become a commercial engine in 2006. Working with Grandmaster Larry Kaufman, one of the world’s leading position evaluation specialists, Rajlich issued the seminal Rybka 3 in 2008. Rybka 3 was over 100 Elo points stronger than Rybka 2, an enormous improvement in what was already the leading commercial program. The latest public edition of Rybka (Rybka 4.1) is more than 300 Elo points stronger than the top competitors that existed in late 2005 on comparable hardware.

But in A Gross Miscarriage of Justice in Computer Chess, Rybka has been banned from tournament play.

It is a little hard to see how Rybka could have been plagiarized when it is some much better than it has won every tourneyment it has entered. The Wash. Times wrote:

Yet another world champion has been brought low for suspected use of a banned performance-enhancing substance.

Rybka, the chess-playing computer program that won the past four World Computer Chess Championship titles, was summarily stripped of its silicon crown this week amid charges its programmer plagiarized the software of two rival programs. ...

As for Rybka, it will now be remembered as just another champion that didn’t respect the rules of the game.

No, Rybka may be remembered for advancing the state-of-the-art more than any other chess program. Here is the rule that it is accused of violating:

Each program must be the original work of the entering developers. Programming teams whose code is derived from or including game-playing code written by others must name all other authors, or the source of such code, in their submission details. Programs which are discovered to be close derivatives of others (e.g., by playing nearly all moves the same), may be declared invalid by the Tournament Director after seeking expert advice. For this purpose a listing of all game-related code running on the system must be available on demand to the Tournament Director.

There is some evidence that early versions of Rybka had components similar to what is in the open-source programs. Rajlich admits that he studied them. But I don't see how Rybka could be called a close derivative when it plays so much better. There don't seem to be any standards for how much one program can use the ideas of another.

It appears to me that the real problem is that Rybka got so good that no one else had any chance of winning the tournaments. The losers had to gang up to disqualify the champ so that the others would have a chance at winning.

I think that the real problem with Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Lance Armstrong, etc. is that they were so good at what they did. Others are jealous, and will do anything to bring down the champ.

The Distance Between Mars and Venus

A new psychology paper says:

The idea that the sexes are quite similar in personality – as well as most other psychological attributes – has been expressed most forcefully in Hyde's “gender similarities hypothesis” [9]. The gender similarities hypothesis holds that “males and females are similar on most, but not all, psychological variables. That is, men and women, as well as boys and girls, are more alike than they are different.” Hyde's paper has been remarkably influential; between 2005 and 2010, it has accumulated 247 citations in the Web of Knowledge database and 498 citations in Google Scholar (retrieved May 19th, 2011).

While the gender similarities hypothesis does not make specific predictions about personality, sex differences in personality were found to be “small” in Hyde's meta-analytic review.

The paper goes on to argue that while the 16 Personality Factors do not individually show much difference between men and women, the factors can be combined so that the distributions of men and women only overlap by 10%.

As explained here, the situation is somewhat analogous to race and genes. People used to say that human races were all the same because they have essentially the same genes. They also said that we have 99% the same genes as chimps. It turns out that you have to look at many genes at once to see dramatic differences.

The paper says:

The idea that there are only minor differences between the personality profiles of males and females should be rejected as based on inadequate methodology. ...

In conclusion, we believe we made it clear that the true extent of sex differences in human personality has been consistently underestimated.

It is surprising that this paper is so controversial. I thought that it was obvious that men and women have different personalities, and I had assumed that psychometric testing had established this decades ago. The original Turing test involved fooling someone about a male or female personality.

In other psychology news, SciAm Mind reports:

Two Big Myths about Grief
People are not always devastated by a death and should be allowed to recover in their own ways

It says that grief counseling usually does no good at all.

Psychology research is in a sorry state. They have trouble with the obvious.

UN attacks freedom of religion

Harvard law prof and Jewish identity political activist Alan M. Dershowitz writes:

The Brian Leiters of the world are an important part of the reason why anti-Semitic tropes are creeping back to legitimacy in academia. His knee-jerk defense of an admitted Jew hater — who, according to Leiter is not a despicable anti-Semite but an acceptable "cosmopolitan" — contributes to the legitimization of anti-Semitism.

The same can be said of Ron Paul, who everyone has heard of. Paul has, according to The New York Times, refused to "disavow" the "support" of "white supremacists, survivalists and anti-Zionists who have rallied behind his candidacy." ...

It has been said that "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Leiter and Paul may or may not be good men, but they are guilty of more than merely doing nothing. They are, by their actions, helping to legitimate the oldest of bigotries. Shame on them!

This is apparently a large part of what Jewish identity politics is all about -- going around calling people anti-Semites and bigots and invoking silly Nazi analogies. He even calls Jews and other Semites anti-Semites if they do not support Israel.

Leiter and Paul have all sorts of goofy views. It is reasonable to assume that 2% of their goofy views involve Jews, since Jews are about 2% of the USA population.

Deshowitz is the worst sort of bigot. He doesn't even believe in the religious aspects of Judaism. He just promotes Jewish identity politics and Zionism, and recklessly calls people Nazis if they do not share his political views. He claims to support free speech, but he wants organized ostracism of anyone who even associates with people he dislikes.

A different view comes from leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne. He is of Jewish descent but he says that all religion is poisonous. He says:

We need the right to freely and publicly criticize politicians, religious people and their beliefs, and historians — indeed, even those historians who affirm the Holocaust. I’ve learned a lot listening to Holocaust deniers, including ways that they resemble other conspiracy theorists, the methods that Nazis used to suppress information about the gas chambers, and the paucity of direct written links between Hitler himself and the extirpation of the Jews. It should not be a crime to promulgate such denialism, odious though those viewpoints may seem.

That is a crime in much of Europe, and Holocaust historical work is unreliable as a result. Another religion wants the UN to give it special protection from criticism:

It’s Islam, and at issue is Resolution 16/18 of the United Nations Human Rights Council (have a look at it.) It ostensibly protects all religions, but the people pushing it are, of course, Muslims. ... But now the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (a consortium of Islamic Nations) has tweaked the language to make it palatable to America, and they’ve succeded: Obama and Secretary of State Clinton are supporting the resolution, and the U.S. may sign on.

This is what the resolution says ...

3. Condemns any advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence, whether it involves the use of print, audio-visual or electronic media or any other means; ...

What’s happening here is that Islam is seeking special protections not afforded to other faiths. We should not let ourselves be bullied by this stance, or by this resolution. Resolution 16/18 is an offense to the American tradition of free speech, and it’s odious that both Obama and Hillary Clinton are supporting it.

Yes, it is odious. Some religions really are better than others. Nearly everyone agrees to that, altho they differ about what the better religions are. Speaking in support of one religion implicitly devalues the competing religions, and incites discrimination against those other religious views. That is a good thing, not a bad thing, even if it is upsetting to Dershowitz and the Islamic nations. They are textbook examples of bigoted religious intolerance. There is no true freedom of religion in any Islamic nation.

Human appendix not useless

I pointed out here that evolutionists like to cite the human appendix as bad design, even tho there is a good theory that it is useful. Now there is clinical evidence as well. Those with an appendix recover from certain intestinal infections better.

Jumping to a guilty conclusion

I am making a list of things that I learned in 2011. One is that no one believes in innocence until proven guilty. Between people I know, people on TV, etc, I have yet to meet a single person who believes it. Every single one of them jumps to conclusions that people are guilty based on the flimsiest of evidence.

Herman Cain. I had an otherwise sensible woman tell me that Cain must be guilty of sexual harassment because she was once sexually harassed. She insisted that I listen to her story, even tho it had nothing to do with Cain's story. I have heard other women make a similar argument many times. If sexual harassment stories are common, then it is easy for a woman to make a false accusation.

Jerry Sandusky. Many people said that they decided that he was guilty based on the weakness of his denial in a TV interview. But criminal defendants have a 5A right not to testify at trial, and one of the reasons for that right is people think that they can judge guilt or innocence by watching a denial, but they cannot.

Penn State officials. They have been fired and ostracized, and yet the case against them rest entirely on one accuser who has told an implausible story and who has changed his story a couple of times. Of course there will soon be lawyers filing million dollar lawsuits, and you can be sure that new witnesses come forward with mysteriously recovered memories.

Rod Blagojevich. He was convicted of selling Barack Obama's senate seat, but no one ever showed that he ever took a bribe, asked for a bribe, or had any suspicious money squirreled away.

Barry Bonds. People argue that he is guilty of something based on the size of his head and other strange notions. He was convicted and sentenced, but hardly anyone knows what he was convicted of. And the prosecutor sure did not present evidence of his head size.

Michael Jackson. The accusations were implausible, and from people suing for millions. He was acquitted.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The accusations were extremely implausible, and the charges were eventually dropped.

Of course there are many people in the criminal justice system who are unfairly prosecuted, but that is not my point. My concern is about how people jump to conclusions of guilt even tho the accusation is bizarre and improbable, the evidence is flimsy, and sometimes even the crime itself is undefined.

I should have learned this lesson during the 1974 Watergate hearings. Yes, some crimes were committed, but hardly anyone can tell you what Richard Nixon did that was criminal. Somehow they all decided that he was guilty without even knowing the charge or how the evidence relates to that charge. I think that this is a common brain defect that people come to such conclusions.

Obvious studies of the year

After posting some retracted science stories, here are some true ones. SciAm reports:

Nonetheless, some studies really take the cake in the "duh" department, discovering things that were already obvious. Here are findings from this year that should come as little surprise.

1. Unsafe sex is more likely after drinking
2. Men appear confident by suppressing fear, pain and empathy
3. Smoking pot and driving isn't safe
4. Pigs love mud
5. Fashion magazines glorify youth
6. People with generous partners have happy marriages
7. Parents don't think their kids are doing drugs
8. People aren't doing anything in particular on the Internet
9. Restricting driver's licenses decreases teen fatalities
10. Most shoppers ignore nutrition labels

A reader adds:

You missed the article that said, The first humans out of Africa engaged in interbreeding for tens of thousands of years. That article was just plain stupid.

Maybe obvious, but it is still a minority view. The mainstream idea has been that humans came out of Africa, and have not evolved since then.

Retracted science stories

2011 had several big stories of previous science stories being wrong. Lists are at NPR and MSNBC. For more, see Retraction Watch. Some fields are more vulnerable than others. Most big medical studies are not replicated. Many psychology studies are bogus. Even physics may soon be retracting the story about neutrinos going faster than light.

Disparities in school discipline

The Wash. Post reports:

Across the Washington area, black students are suspended and expelled two to five times as often as white students, creating disparities in discipline that experts say reflect a growing national problem. ...

Experts say disparities appear to have complex causes. A disproportionate number of black students live below the poverty line or with a single parent, factors that affect disciplinary patterns. But experts say those factors do not fully explain racial differences in suspensions. Other contributing factors could include unintended bias, unequal access to highly effective teachers and differences in school leadership styles.

Are those really the only explanations that the experts can imagine? They ought to at least consider IQ, future time orientation, ADD, and drug use. And whether the students are discipline problems in other settings.

Why psychoanalysis never existed

NewScientist reports:

THE name Sigmund Freud is inextricable from psychoanalysis. And vice versa. But why? And how did the two wind up in the same cultural basket as Copernicus and Darwin?

In The Freud Files, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani have a tangled tale to tell but their mission is clear: "We should hurry to study psychoanalysis whilst we can," they write, "for we will soon no longer be able to discern its features - and for good reason: because it never was." The pair argue that without the Freud legend the "identity and radical difference [of psychoanalysis] from other forms of psychotherapy collapse".

Attempts to debunk the legend in the 1970s and 80s failed. But a current assault, helped by a wealth of "declassified" material, correspondence and critical studies, looks more likely to dismantle the monomyth. The Freud Archives, a collection of letters and papers, were deposited at the US Library of Congress by Freud's daughter, Anna, to put them out of reach of unofficial biographers. This move also locked away Freud's patients' versions of their own problems.

But now, as primary material is made public, parts of the archive are declassified and his letters re-edited without censorship, the legend is "fraying from all sides".

The book costs $95. I will pass. If the field had any integrity, Freud would have been disavowed as a kook a century ago.

Govt-funded evolution site gives religious opinions

I criticized a Cal Berkeley evolution web site in 2004:

I guess these evolutionists think that it is okay to use religion to promote evolution, but unconstitutional to allow religious criticism of evolution.

Now leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne attacks the same web site:

Now I’m sure that when the NSF gave money to the Cal Museum of Paleontology, it had no idea that taxpayers’ money would go to fund theology — for that’s exactly what this kind of accommodationism is — but we need to be aware of what message taxpayer–funded institutions are putting out to the public. (Berkeley is a state university) My position has always been that scientific organizations, particularly ones funded by the taxpayers, should say nothing about the compatibility of science and faith.

He personally believes that evolution disproves religion, but I guess that he does not advocate forcing that view on others.

The evolutionists seem to be split into two camps -- the new atheists who believe that evolution disproves religion and that religion is evil anyway, and the accommodationists who insist on telling us which religions are acceptable and which are not.

Either way, evolutionists are on the warpath against religion in a way that other scientists are not. It is no wonder that religious folks are offended. Their tax money is used to put down their religious views. I think that we would all be better off if the evolutionary scientists would stick to the science. But they do not. Almost all of them try to use their evolutionary views to justify unscientific opinions about religion and politics.

Genes Play Major Role in Behavior

Liberals like to deny that people have any innate differences, but the NY Times reports:

Social behavior among primates — including humans — has a substantial genetic basis, a team of scientists has concluded from a new survey of social structure across the primate family tree.

The scientists, at the University of Oxford in England, looked at the evolutionary family tree of 217 primate species whose social organization is known. Their findings, published in the journal Nature, challenge some of the leading theories of social behavior,

This might be exaggerated, because they did not find any actual genes. It has been known for millennia that behavior is a complex combination of nature and nurture, and modern research has not changed that. But they do apply it to human nature:

The Oxford survey confirms that the structure of human society, too, is likely to have a genetic basis, since humans are in the primate family, said Bernard Chapais, an expert on human social evolution at the University of Montreal. ...

Human multifamily groups may have arisen from the gorilla-type harem structure, with many harems merging together, or from stable breeding bonds replacing sexual promiscuity in a chimpanzee-type society, Dr. Chapais said.

I am waiting for the follow-up editorial on why this shows that we should not expect Mexican, Arab, and Chinese immigrants to assimilate into American culture.

Free will and the unconscious

Here is research claiming that we have an unconscious mind, and no free will.
Scientific American Mind says:

Sigmund Freud popularized the idea of the unconscious, a sector of the mind that harbors thoughts and memories actively removed from conscious deliberation. Because this aspect of mind is, by definition, not accessible to introspection, it has proved difficult to investigate. Today the domain of the unconscious — described more generally in the realm of cognitive neuroscience as any processing that does not give rise to conscious awareness — is routinely studied in hundreds of laboratories using objective psychophysical techniques amenable to statistical analysis.

A Berkeley leftist cognitive scientist explains in this video:

Prof. George Lakoff - Reason is 98% Subconscious

The London Telegraph reports:

For a man who thinks he's a robot, Professor Patrick Haggard is remarkably cheerful about it. "We certainly don't have free will," says the leading British neuroscientist. "Not in the sense we think." It's quite a way to start an interview.

We're in the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, in Queen Square in London, the nerve centre – if you will – of British brain research. Prof Haggard is demonstrating "transcranial magnetic stimulation", a technique that uses magnetic coils to affect one's brain, and then to control the body. One of his research assistants, Christina Fuentes, is holding a loop-shaped paddle next to his head, moving it fractionally. "If we get it right, it might cause something." She presses a switch, and the coil activates with a click. Prof Haggard's hand twitches. "It's not me doing that," he assures me, "it's her."

This stuff is interesting, but I don't think that it is persuasive about free will or the unconscious.

Freakonomics: What went wrong?

Statistician Andrew Gelman documents what's wrong with Freakonomics:

The nonfiction publishing phenomenon known as Freakonomics has passed its sixth anniversary. The original book, which used ideas from statistics and economics to explore real-world problems, was an instant bestseller. By 2011, it had sold more than four million copies worldwide, and it has sprouted a franchise, which includes a bestselling sequel, SuperFreakonomics; an occasional column in the New York Times Magazine; a popular blog; and a documentary film. The word “freakonomics” has come to stand for a light-hearted and contrarian, yet rigorous and quantitative, way of looking at the world.

Steve Levitt was a big hero to the Left when he was giving bogus arguments in favor of abortion. He fell out of favor when he gave arguments against global warming. Now he has been shown to be completely wrong on many subjects.

Steve Sailer says:

It’s unfair to denigrate Levitt and Dubner without comparing the reliability of the Freakonomics brand to that of their chief rival, the Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker Brand. My view is that Levitt and Dubner are more trustworthy than Gladwell by a comfortable margin.

Yes, Levitt has the virtue of being sometimes correct. The New Yorker is read for its literary style, and not for the correctness of its essays. It is famous for fact-checking the details, and getting the big picture wrong.

It is funny how someone can get away with being a public intellectual and giving bogus arguments, as long as he stays politically correct. As soon as he steps on the wrong political toes, then he gets criticized.

Statute of limitations for sex crimes

A CNN columnist writes:

There are various reasons why we have statutes of limitations for crimes, other than the worst felonies, and for torts. Memories fade. Witnesses die. Evidence goes bad. We want to encourage plaintiffs to bring suit as quickly after the alleged injury as possible. Potential defendants should be able to get on with their lives without worrying about getting charged or sued for acts alleged from long ago. If anyone could sue anyone at anytime it would further clog an already congested legal system. In most cases, this all makes sense.

Not so for child sexual abuse. The very nature of the crime is predicated on secrecy and shame and manipulation. It often takes years, decades even, for victims to grasp what has happened: that an adult, often a trusted authority figure or a family member, did horribly wrong by them. ...

Over the objections of numerous groups -- insurance lobbies, teachers unions, Roman Catholic clergymen -- some states have decided to suspend the statute of limitations for these crimes, a tacit recognition of the unique dynamics of child sex crimes. Delaware recently suspended the statute of limitations for two years, creating a window for those previously time-barred to come forward. More than 100 alleged victims emerged.

In California, a similar suspension spurred more than 300 lawsuits, some dating back to episodes from the 1950s. "It's clear that it can take a long, long time before victims are ready to confront abuse and everything that can come with it," says Marci Hamilton, a law professor at Cardozo Law School and a lawyer for one of the accusers in the Sandusky case. "It's just wrong to have [policy] that favors the predator."

This is backwards. The more horrible and harmful the crime, the more we need the statute of limitations.

Yes, of course suspending the statute of limitations will encourage lawsuits. When people find out that the Catholic Church had hundreds of millions of dollars to pay out against claims, then they have a recovered memory about some allegation from decades ago.

When I hear a sex crime allegation, I ask myself: Is the charge plausible? Was there a contemporaneous complaint? Is there physical evidence? Does the accuser have an ulterior motive to make a false accusation?

I never believed the accusations in the McMartin preschool trial or Duke lacrosse case or Michael Jackson trial or DSK case for just those reasons. Implausible stories. No hard evidence. Non-credible accusers. And I am dubious about the Penn State sex abuse scandal for just those same reasons.

Yes, sex abuse is bad. If it happens, report it to the police and get the physical evidence. Sex abuse is universally considered abominable, and no police cover up these crimes. The perps are always prosecuted and convicted. But when someone says that it is so bad that the usual rules of justice have to be suspended, I get worried.

The Pann State accusers all have this in common: They did not make a prompt complaint. They have no witnesses. They have no physical evidence. The allegations are about events many years ago. And they are suing for millions of dollars. The only exception is McQueary, but he is not credible for other reasons. He has changed his story. His grand jury story is implausible. He traded his testimony for immunity. And he is a morally damaged man himself.

It is possible that jurors will ultimately find McQueary persuasive, but his story hinges on details of conversations from 2002. Most people are unable to remember a 9-year-old conversation, and our justice system has no way of resolving a discrepancy between two different accounts of a 9-year-old conversation.

We laugh at medieval prosecutors who convicted witches, but we have our own witch-hunts.

Barry Bonds sentenced

Baseball hero Barry Bonds was sentenced today:

The Barry Bonds case is over. Bonds, as we speak, is being sentenced. The penalty: 30 days of house arrest, two years of probation and 250 hours of community service. This, by the way, is what the probation office recommended. Prosecutors were seeking a 15 month jail term.

In handing out her sentence, the judge observed that she agreed with the jury that Bonds tried to obstruct justice. Just that he failed. She noted that he did not threaten witnesses, for example. When I first read his grand jury testimony three and a half years ago I observed the same thing. You can tell Barry wanted to perjure himself. He just was pretty damn bad at it.

The judge also noted that the sentence took into account that Bonds has a strong record of philanthropy, much of which is unpublicized. Weighing against that, I presume, is that he is a lousy stinkin’ cheater who robbed some sportswriters of their childhood memories.

Prosecutors spent 10 years and millions of dollars on this base. Bonds was not convicted of perjury or of using steroids. I defy anyone to explain to me what he did wrong. He did not obstruct anyone being prosecuted. At worst, he gave an incomplete answer to a question. If anyone was at fault, it was the prosecutor for not asking a followup question at the grand jury hearing.

A lot of people hate Bonds, and today they will be cheering that Bonds is disgraced. I am glad that he "robbed some sportswriters of their childhood memories." He was a great baseball player. I hope that he convinces the appeals court that it was not a crime for him to have given an incomplete answer to the grand jury.

Moderate Islam is not moderate

The leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne writes:

I keep looking for the “moderate” form of Islam in the Middle East, but have trouble finding it. I guess its main home is elsewhere. But I’ve recently come across four items that bear witness to the hatred of Muslims for Jews (I’m not claiming it’s not reciprocal), and to the fact that religion poisons everything. ...

Here’s a twelfth-grade textbook from Saudi Arabia: ... The struggle with the Jews is not political but religious. ... The Jews spread corruption and fitna [chaos and internecine rancor]. ... The Qur’an describes the corruption of the Jews. ... Jihad will force the Jews out of Palestine. ...

If this stuff is drilled into you at age twelve, what are you going to believe? And it further shows, as I’ve argued before, that a huge element of radical Islam is based not on politics, disaffection, or dispossesion, but simple religion-based emnity. Do we deny that these people believe what they say? ...

Finally, to round things out, and show that Islamic viciousness is not limited to the Middle East, ...

Is there anyone who doubts that, considering all major religions, Islam is the most pernicious. Of course Catholicism gives it a run for its money.

I was with him until that last sentence. Catholicism does not teach anything like those things. Coyne is mainly on the warpath against evangelical Christians who do not accept the macro-evolution of men descending from lower animals, but Catholics accept evolution. Coyne does argue that the Pope doesn’t understand evolution and that the Adam and Eve story cannot be reconciled with modern genetics. Okay, fine, I am sure Coyne understands evolutionary science better than the Pope. Coyne's main complaint is the Pope said evolution being a product of random mutation without mentioning natural selection. But the Catholic Church does not encourage or condone suicide bombers.

A recent study said:

80% of U.S. mosques provide their worshippers with jihad-style literature promoting the use of violence against non-believers and that the imams in those mosques expressly promote that literature.

No Catholic churches promote violence against non-believers.

Since Coyne is of Jewish descent, I will round this out with a couple of things I recently learned about Judaism. The Bible (Old Testament) says:

"When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you may nations...then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy." Deuteronomy 7:1-2, NIV.

"...do not leave alive anything that breaths. Completely destroy them...as the Lord your God has commanded you..." Deuteronomy 20:16, NIV.

One of the weirder anti-Jewish stories is that Jews cannot be trusted because once a year, they all get together and say a prayer that all their promises to non-Jews will be broken. That is not quite right. Here is what Wikipedia says about the Day of Atonement prayer, known as Kol Nidre:

"All personal vows we are likely to make, all personal oaths and pledges we are likely to take between this Yom Kippur and the next Yom Kippur, we publicly renounce. Let them all be relinquished and abandoned, null and void, neither firm nor established. Let our personal vows, pledges and oaths be considered neither vows nor pledges nor oaths."

The leader and the congregation then say together three times "May all the people of Israel be forgiven, including all the strangers who live in their midst, for all the people are in fault." The Torah scrolls are then replaced, and the customary evening service begins.

I do not wish to imply some sort of equivalence between Islam and Judaism. The overwhelming majority of the Jews do want to peacefully coexist with the Arabs, and Jewish textbooks do not teach violence and hatred like the Mohammedan textbooks. The book of Deuteronomy is in the Christian Bible also, but Christians (and Jews) are not taught to destroy their enemies.

Some religions are better than others. Everybody believes that, even if they think that it is rude to point out the differences.

Bogus atheist distrust study

A study on distrust of atheists was widely reported in many newspapers, including USA Today:

Psychologists at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon say that their study demonstrates that anti-atheist prejudice stems from moral distrust, not dislike, of nonbelievers.

"It's pretty remarkable," said Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the study, which appears in the current issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The study, conducted among 350 Americans adults and 420 Canadian college students, asked participants to decide if a fictional driver damaged a parked car and left the scene, then found a wallet and took the money, was the driver more likely to be a teacher, an atheist teacher, or a rapist teacher?

The participants, who were from religious and nonreligious backgrounds, most often chose the atheist teacher.

Andrew Gelman points out that the researchers were fooled by the base rate fallacy. The study does not imply that atheists are distrusted at all, and only shows the low standards of one of the leading social science journals, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The current Amazon no. 11 top seller is currently Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I just mentioned that Pinker's book is selling well, but Kahneman's book is selling much better, and tops all the science-related books.

Kahneman is known for prospect theory, which is about the psychology of how people understand risk. If you read his book, you would probably understand what is wrong with the above atheist study. According to an Amazon review:

Here is one final example from Kahneman's work of some of the concepts the reader will encounter in this book. Suppose that Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. In college, she majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with the issues of discrimination and social justice, and she also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable?

1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

According to Kahneman, about 85% - 90% of undergraduates at several major universities chose the second option, that Linda was a bank teller and active in the feminist movement. However, this is an example of the "conjunction fallacy," since the probability of two events occurring together (in conjunction) must necessarily be less than the probability of either event occurring alone. Put simpler, the probability that Linda is a bank teller must be greater than the probability that she is a bank teller and active in feminist causes.

So the fictional driver is more likely to be a teacher than an atheist teacher, and more likely to be an atheist teacher than a rapist teacher.

These are really just trick questions that are especially contrived to trip people up. I only mention them because some major social science conclusions are manipulated from the ambiguity of the questions.

Better angel analysis is weak

Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature is one of the better-selling science-related books of the year. As noted below, it claims that violence has declined over history in spite of Christianity.

Pinker's quantitative analysis seems to based on the assumption that violence should be expected to scale linearly with population size. So he compares the Mongol invasion to recent wars by counting deaths, as a proportion of the population at the time. His trick has the effect of making the Mongol invasion seem much more deadly than it was.

This assumption seems dubious. If we have a population of N people, and we assume that each pair of people has a 1% chance of being enemies, then we expect about 0.01N² pairs of enemies. If violence occurs between enemies, then we might expect violence to grow quadratically in N.

However civilization would be impossible if violence grew that rapidly. Maybe it makes more sense to assume that potential friendships grow quadratically in N. Then maybe societies can use those friendships to self-organize into peaceful communities, and violence would grow sublinearly in N. Maybe violence only grows like the square root of N, or even the logarithm of N.

Pop psychologist John Gray reviews Pinker:

While Pinker makes a great show of relying on evidence — the 700-odd pages of this bulky treatise are stuffed with impressive-looking graphs and statistics — his argument that violence is on the way out does not, in the end, rest on scientific investigation. He cites numerous reasons for the change, including increasing wealth and the spread of democracy. For him, none is as important as the adoption of a particular view of the world: “The reason so many violent institutions succumbed within so short a span of time was that the arguments that slew them belong to a coherent philosophy that emerged during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. The ideas of thinkers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Mary Astell, Kant, Beccaria, Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and John Stuart Mill coalesced into a worldview that we can call Enlightenment humanism.”

This is an odd list of thinkers to credit. Baruch Spinoza was big hero to Jewish atheists. Hardly anyone else has even heard of him. He was a Dutch Jew who believed that God was the universe, and that intuition was the highest kind of knowledge. Immanuel Kant was an unreadable German philosopher whose biggest achievement was to find a non-Christian rationale for the Golden Rule. Thomas Hobbes and David Hume were religious skeptics who were accused of being atheists. Cesare Beccaria wrote a book arguing that crimes should only be punished to the extent necessary, and that people should have access to guns to prevent crime. Thomas Jefferson is revered by Americans for writing the declaration that justified armed revolution against the British. So why does Pinker make him non-violence leader? My guess is that Pinker likes the Jefferson Bible, which was an attempt to remove the religion from the Gospels. (It removed God and miracles, and left the moral teachings.)

What do these have in common? It seems to me that Pinker has cherry-picked some intellectuals in a vain attempt to support his anti-Christian thesis. The Age of Enlightenment was very important, but it happened entirely within Christian Europe. The political leaders, peasants, and intellectuals were nearly all Christians. Christianity taught a message of peace. There were Jews and other groups, but their numbers and influence were far too small to have a significant effect on the violent crime rate or the war-making policy. If violent wars and crimes were declining, it seems crazy to argue that Christianity was not the major reason for the decline.

There are many Christian historians who know this subject much better than Pinker or me. I would like to see a serious rebuttal, as Pinker's book seems like anti-Christian propaganda to me.