TV show on atheist scientists

Cosmologist Sean M. Carroll plugs an atheist TV show on the Discovery Channel this Sunday, and says:

Hawking clearly goes all-in with “God does not exist.” It’s not a message we often hear on American TV.

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Pharyngula is also excited about it. Elsewhere, Hawking denies that he is an atheist. He recently said, I am not claiming there is no God.

Meanwhile, leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne argues in USA Today:

As a biologist, I see belief in God-given morality as American's biggest impediment to accepting the fact of evolution. "Evolution," many argue, "could never have given us feelings of kindness, altruism and morality. For if we were merely evolved beasts, we would act like beasts. Surely our good behavior, and the moral sentiments that promote it, reflect impulses that God instilled in our soul." ...

So where does morality come from, if not from God? Two places: evolution and secular reasoning.

His example is that he once helped a FedEx man pick up some boxes, and that was based on a non-Biblical instinct.

Update: USA Today article on Hawking.

Advice for sexless marriage

Here is today's bad newspaper advice:

Dear Annie: My wife and I are both 30 and have been married for five years. We have a toddler.

The problem is, over the past few years, my wife has cut down sex to roughly once every couple of months. I do what I can to keep her happy and have even bargained with her to get sex by offering to take her out to eat at her favorite restaurant or giving back massages, but she won't discuss it. As soon as I bring it up, she gets angry, and it puts her in a bad mood. ...

I could understand if she had a medical problem, but she doesn't. I'm being pushed to the brink. My wife has no interest in talking to a counselor. ...

Dear Frustrated: ... Stop pressuring her for sex, either by asking or by bargaining, and get some counseling for yourself.

Their marriage is doomed. Counseling is a waste. Marriage will not survive if these attitudes are commonplace. Here is a better response (and a previous view from the Thinking Housewife. She says:

Advice columnists are shills for the feminist-dominated psychotherapy industry. No matter what a reader’s problem is they invariably recommend professional therapy.

Therapy is very destructive in a case like this.

Story on conversion therapy

NPR radio news just broadcast a story on Can Therapy Help Change Sexual Orientation?:

The debate about the value of conversion therapy, also known as reparative therapy, has been raging in psychological circles for more than a decade.

About three years ago, the American Psychological Association came out with an official position paper on it. The APA said that it was basically a bad idea, and that there was no evidence that it was possible to change sexual orientation. Therapists also shouldn't tell their clients that change was possible, the APA noted.

This morning on Morning Edition I profile the conversion therapy experiences of two men. They represent two sides of a debate that hasn't been resolved despite the APA's position.

One side feels that therapies which seek to make gay people straight are invariably harmful. The other says the therapies can help gay people who are profoundly uncomfortable with same-sex attraction.

The story is from Alix Spiegel, who told the 2002 story about how her grandfather was a closeted gay psychiatrist who changed the official definition of sexual deviance to exclude homosexuality in 1973.

The APA did not really say that there was no evidence of change. It said that there was evidence that therapy could change sexual orientation, but that it was insufficient to justify endorsing the therapy, considering that such therapy is contrary to certain political goals. See here for details.

The underlying problem here is that nearly all psychological therapies are unscientific and ineffective, and the profession is politicized and corrupt. They cannot explain why they endorse sex change therapy but not sexual orientation change therapy.

The show gave this very strange justification for refusing homosexual conversion therapy:

Clients request a lot of things based on lack of knowledge... If a girl with an eating disorder came to a therapist saying that she wanted to be thinner, the therapist couldn't ethically honor her request.

Maybe this is part of why we have so many fat women getting useless therapy.

The story is generating a lot of angry comments from leftist NPR listeners who complain that the story was too balanced. One said that there should not be balance on this subject, just as there should not be balance on the teaching of evolution. They say that they would listen to Fox News if they wanted to hear something contrary to the gay agenda.

Intelligence has remained constant

This is today's Brewster Rockit.

The current AAAS Science magazine has an issue on population, saying:

Interviewer - Stewart Wills
Well, let’s explore some of those themes in a bit more detail starting with growing population. Population obviously is expanding given the numbers that you said, but one of the things you noted in your review – and I like the way you put this – is that the demographic center of gravity is shifting from the developed to the developing world. Could you talk a bit more about that?

Interviewee - David Bloom
Sure. The U.N. classifies certain regions as less developed. And, in 1950, those regions encompassed 68% of the world’s population. Today, those regions represent 82% of the world population, and that share is going to continue to rise, because virtually all of the population growth that is projected for the next four decades is going to take place in the less developed regions of the world. And I would add here, Stewart, that that is a huge concern because developing countries tend to be the politically, the socially, the economically, and the ecologically most fragile countries in the world. ... And, as a side note here, India will overtake China as the most populous country on the planet. That crossover is projected for the year 2027, so in other words, less than two decades away.

The interviewer likes the way he puts this because he avoids saying what the comic strip says, and does not explain what a disaster this Third World population growth is. He says that the USA is unusual because it is gaining population in the developed world, but he does not explain that the gains are largely from legal and illegal Third World immigration.

Four is called irresponsible

The UK Guardian paper reports:

David and Victoria Beckham may have been overjoyed to welcome their new daughter, Harper Seven, last week but, according to a growing group of campaigners, the birth of their fourth child make the couple bad role models and environmentally irresponsible.

As the world's population is due to hit seven billion at some point in the next few days, there is an increasing call for the UK to open a public debate about how many children people have. ...

"The Beckhams, and others like London mayor Boris Johnson, are very bad role models with their large families. There's no point in people trying to reduce their carbon emissions and then increasing them 100% by having another child," he said. "England is one of the most densely populated countries in the world and the fastest-growing in population terms in Europe. In 15 years we'll have an extra 10 million people here."

The parents are both married, rich, talented, beautiful, healthy, and quite able to rear their kids. Why the gripes?

Steve Sailer comments:

Now, I realize that one part of the underlying motivation for this kind of article is driven by concern over the high population growth rates in black Africa and in the more backward parts of the Muslim, Hindu, and Latin worlds. The reasoning at The Guardian might be something like: "We need to do something to persuade people in villages in the hinterland of the Congo to have fewer children, but we can't actually mention the real problem, because we'd be roasted alive as racists, so what we'll do is pick out some rich white family and denounce them, and eventually the message will seep through to villages in the hinterland of the Congo. It's a simple, can't-fail plan!"

Public opinion is dominated by those who believe in reverse eugenics.

Science of Evil

A new book on The Science of Evil by the respected neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen starts with this:

Explaining "Evil" and Human Cruelty

When I was seven years old, my father told me the Nazis had turned Jews into lampshades. just one of those comments that you hear once, and the thought never goes away. To a child's mind (even to an adult's) these two types of things just don't belong together. He also told me the Nazis turned Jews into bars of soap. It sounds so unbelievable, yet it is actually true. I knew our family was Jewish, so this image of turning people into objects felt a bit close to home.

It is true that the Nazis were evil and killed many Jews, but they did not make lampshades out of human skin, and not soap either.

The book is a short and scholarly book, and it attempts to advance the state of the art in explaining evil. It cites research, and gives references. His main thesis is that evil people have psychological disorders that cause them to objectify people. He starts with an "unbelievable" anecdote that he says is "actually true". He has fallen for a well-known hoax. It is a wonder that anyone reads past page 1.

On page 138, he says, "We waited with baited breath while the genotyping took place". Did he have worms in his mouth? Shakespeare said bated breath. For more info on the term, see What is the origin of "bated breath"?

Norway Manifesto

The shocking Norway murders by Anders Behring Breivik are accompanied by his Andrew Berwick manifesto. It is a little like the Unabomber manifesto. It is brilliant and mad at the same time. His ideas should be taken seriously.

I am going to have to read it myself, as the descriptions in the press appear inaccurate.

Right to record cops

You would think that we would have a constitutional right to video-record cops doing their official duties. Some states disapprove of it. Two guys were tried and acquitted:

It took a Greenfield District Court jury about two hours on Tuesday to acquit a pair of New Hampshire men accused of illegally filming at the Franklin County Jail last summer.

"We can put this behind us and move on with our other projects," said defendant Pete Eyre, who along with Adam Mueller had been charged with unlawfully filming law enforcement officials at the Greenfield jail last July.

Eyre, 31, and Mueller, 28, both of Keene, are subscribers of voluntaryism, an anti-government movement that favors the concept of natural law or voluntary adherence to rules and regulations over a state-sanctioned system of laws.

The pair were arrested on July 1, 2010, after attempting to film the process of bailing out their friends, who were being held on charges at the jail.

Eyre and Mueller initially were granted permission to film the bail process, but later were forbidden by jail officials from recording the procedure. When they continued to digitally recording their encounter with jail officials, they were arrested by Greenfield police.

This is why we have a jury system.

Moslems have no choice

The UK BBC reoprts:

Malaysian 'teapot cult' woman loses Islam legal bid
Kamariah Ali waits outside a courtroom before her trial at Federal Courthouse in Kuala Lumpur, 29 November 2005. Kamariah Ali has already been tried for apostasy in the Islamic courts

Malaysia's civil court has refused a woman permission to leave Islam to avoid being jailed for apostasy.

Kamariah Ali, 60, says she should not be tried under Islamic law because she is no longer a Muslim.

She follows the Sky Kingdom sect, known as the teapot cult because it built a giant teapot to symbolise its belief in the healing purity of water.

But judges ruled that only Malaysia's Islamic courts could decide on the case because Ms Kamariah was born a Muslim.

Malaysia's Islamic courts have authority over only Muslims - the rest of the population are not bound by their rules.

Christians think of religion as something that is voluntarily chosen. Not everyone thinks of it that way.

Why economists are confusing

Andrew Gelman explains how economists give contradictory arguments:

Pop economists (or, at least, pop micro-economists) are often making one of two arguments:

1. People are rational and respond to incentives. Behavior that looks irrational is actually completely rational once you think like an economist.

2. People are irrational and they need economists, with their open minds, to show them how to be rational and efficient.

He gives this example, from a economist Emily Oster:

anthropologists, sociologists, and public-health officials . . . believe that cultural differences--differences in how entire groups of people think and act--account for broader social and regional trends. AIDS became a disaster in Africa, the thinking goes, because Africans didn't know how to deal with it.

Economists like me [Oster] don't trust that argument. We assume everyone is fundamentally alike; we believe circumstances, not culture, drive people's decisions, including decisions about sex and disease.

He nails it. Economists know all about incentives, but when they start talking about who is or is not rational, they are confusing.

Failure of shrinks

I criticized a psychologist report below, but the professions of psychiatry and psychology are really much worse than that.

According to US govt study using the generally accepted (DSM-IV) criteria, 46% of the public has a psychological disorder.

Most mental patients have concluded that talk therapy does not work, and antidepressants are now the biggest selling prescription drugs.

While people often say that psychiatric drugs like Prozac correct a chemical imbalance in the brain, there is no scientific support for that idea. Prozac does not work that way.

The drug company controlled studies, used to support FDA approval, show that antidepressants are only slightly better than placebos.

When antidepressants are compared to placebos having comparable side effects, they show no advantage at all. It is possible that the side effects trick people into thinking that the drugs work.

John Horgan has details, with links to books and articles explaining these points in greater detail.

Feds use Sarbanes-Oxley against child porn

Brian C. Hicks admitted that he visited some porn web sites, saw some child porn, and did not download any. After a federal agent contacted him, he told his story, and destroyed his disc to play it safe.

The feds prosecuted him for violating Sarbanes-Oxley. Apparently the post-Enron law against obstructing an accounting investigation is very broadly written. He was convicted by a jury, sentenced as if he really were a child pornographer, and lost on appeal.

The child porn law requires that you destroy any child porn that you accidentally download. It seems to me that the feds should have assumed that he was trying to comply with the law.

Cops take child porn seriously:

Two policemen are recovering after they were shot by fellow officers as they tried to arrest a man on child pornography charges outside a crowded move theatre.

The incident happened as undercover officers tried to apprehend the unarmed man in the parking lot as he left a screening of Harry Potter in Plainville, Connecticut.

We have draconian child porn laws. If you suspect that some child porn may have gotten on your computer, then I suggest that you destroy it immediately. After this decision, I suggest that you do not cooperate with the feds and do not tell them why you destroyed the data. If the feds don't like your answers, they can charge you with obstruction.

Attacking Bachmann

Michele Bachmann has gotten enough support that her enemies are trying to destroy her. Here are some quotes that make her look foolish.The LA Times reports:

Wall Street Journal on Monday took a look at Bachmann's oft-repeated assertion on the stump that she has worked as a tax attorney. Bachmann, the Journal reported, in fact worked as counsel for the Internal Revenue Service

But the biggest attack is on the gay issue. The NY Times reports:

All week, Mrs. Bachmann and her husband, Marcus, a therapist, had been caught in a swirl of media attention over whether the clinic practices “reparative therapy,” or so-called gay-to-straight counseling. On Friday, in an interview published in The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Dr. Bachmann finally defended himself.

“We don’t have an agenda or a philosophy of trying to change someone,” he said, adding that the clinic would offer reparative therapy only “at the client’s discretion.”

That stance puts Dr. Bachmann at odds with most mainstream medical associations; a 2007 task force put together by the American Psychological Association concluded that “efforts to change sexual orientation are unlikely to be successful and involve some risk of harm.”

The 2009 American Psychological Association report is here. The APA says that its statement is guided by this political belief:

Since 1974, the American Psychological Association (APA) has opposed stigma, prejudice, discrimination, and violence on the basis of sexual orientation and has taken a leadership role in supporting the equal rights of lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals (APA, 2005).

I looked at the report just to see what the scientific evidence is. First of all, it is about changing sexual orientation. It is not clear that Mr. Bachmann even believes in sexual orientation, so it is not clear that any of it applies to him.

The report said that reparative therapy could have both benefit and harm, according to those who have tried it. The same could be said about any other psychotherapy. The report did not say that reparative therapy was any more risky or harmful than any other therapy.

It is, of course, very difficult to get anyone to change behavior. Fat people stay fat. Smokers keep smoking. Alcoholics may stop drinking, but they rarely solve their alcohol problems. Most people getting psychotherapy get no significant benefit from it, and many are harmed by it.

Maybe the APA policy is successfully de-stigmatizing homosexuality, I don't know. It seems to me that the APA is mostly in the business of stigmatizing people, so that they will see psychologists for therapy.

Separately, Tim Pawlenty is being blamed for deferring to scientists on whether being gay is a choice. Many atheist scientists today deny that anything is a choice. They believe in a scientific determinism that says that we have no free will. Even those who do believe in free will sometimes argue that we have almost no choice in our religion, temperament, personality, and politics. So any talk about what is a choice is meaningless unless it is compared to beliefs about whether these other things are choices.

Amusing anti-Apple rant

TechEye say Apple is losing in Europe:

iOS was down pretty much across the board: its share fell from 30.6 per cent to 18.3 per cent in the UK. Apple apologists say that Jobs' Mob is not selling less, it is just not flogging as many as Android. However for a product which claims to be superior in every way, this means that there is something wrong.

For a start it says that the number of people who buy Apple gear are finite, while the numbers who buy Android are infinite. It implies that rather than being the king of technology, Apple is pandering to a fixed market who buy what ever they are told. That market of technologically illiterate, wealthy, Coldplay listening fans is large, but not statistically that important.

This might be one of the reasons why other outfits have not been able to duplicate Apple's success with keyboardless netbooks. No one really wants tablets and their use is just as limited as they were when Microsoft was trying to push them. However, Apple's large, limited, and stupid market will buy them because Steve and his tame Apple press say they are important.

Smartphones, however are different. True, Jobs did lead the way in making smartphones more accessible, but his software is now eclipsed by much cheaper and freer Android numbers.

What this means is that Apple's core base is amongst the puritan, fundamentalist Americans who tend to like their religion dictated to them by loud spitting preachers. In Europe, people are a bit more culturally sophisticated, they will look at things a little more pragmatically. Apple style Fundamentalism does not sit very well in Europe.

CIA fake vaccination

AAAS Science magazine reports:

the Guardian reported that as part of the Osama Bin Laden capture effort, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) set up a fake vaccination clinic in Abbottabad, Pakistan, to collect DNA from Bin Laden's children. ...

Vaccine program workers, who sometimes struggle to gain public trust and governmental cooperation in the first place, are furious about the deception.

"To take children who are in need of vaccines to prevent some disease that could kill them and use that as a front for something else is unconscionable," says Paul Offit, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "The end doesn't always justify the means." Although it appears that children were in fact being vaccinated, Offit says that's irrelevant. "Hiding behind a wonderful and needed program like vaccines is heinous."

Offit is the one who has abused the public trust. He sat on the govt committee setting the mandatory vaccine schedule, while he was a paid lobbyist for the vaccine companies.

Catching Bin Laden was a wonderful program. If anything is heinous, it is taking good and worthwhile vaccines and hiding them in a dubious govt mandate, as Offit has promoted in the USA. He is probably the single most visible proponent of mandatory vaccines.

No accepted medical use

The Obama administration has disappointed its core followers with:

The federal government officially declared that marijuana has no accepted medical use and should remain classified as a dangerous and addictive drug. It will remain in the same class of drugs as heroin.

The Department of Justice declared Friday: "DHHS concluded that marijuana has a high potential for abuse, has no accepted medical use in the United States, and lacks an acceptable level of safety for use even under medical supervision." (Read the rest of the ruling here.)

There are some marijuana legalization arguments, but here is an amusing rebuttal of 5 Pro-Marijuana Arguments That Aren't Helping.

Where I live in California, marijuana is mostly legal already. If you walk down a busy downtown street smoking dope right in front of a cop, he will tell you to put it away. That is about the extent of the marijuana enforcement. A ballot proposition to make it completely legal was turned down by California voters.

New pro-dope arguments show up all the time. Video gamers smoke it:

Simultaneously, you see, the gaming and marijuana communities have been debating whether pot makes video game players more at one with their controllers.

Culture magazine, for example, insists that using marijuana while gaming is not entirely unlike using steroids while smacking a baseball.

And parents give it to their autistic kids, based on internet rumors, according to this NBC TV story:

Out of desperation, she Googled cannabis and autism, and realized she wasn't the only one who made the connection.

Other parents and autism experts found success with medical marijuana as a treatment for autistic children.

There is no science behind this, of course.

Atheist complaints about demonic men

Greg Laden says that demonic men are responsible for violence and other evils, and offers a list of links on Rebeccapocalypse, where an atheist woman complained about a casual remark
in a hotel elevator. He suggests signing a "Dear Dick" letter to Richard Dawkins, because he belittled the complaint.

There are thousands of messages about what should be proper elevator etiquette at atheist conventions. Those conventions must be seriously dysfunctional. You have to read the messages to see how screwed up a bunch of supposedly-rational skeptic-atheists can be.

Scientific feuds

The 1998 book, Great Feuds in Science: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever, has nice explanations of feuds like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, age of the Earth, continental drift, and Margaret Mead. It ends with:

EPILOGUE

The feuds included in this book showed a variety of ways in which resolution can take place. One method not included that I'd like to mention is resolution by a commission, or study group. This approach can be useful in helping resolve social issues, including such questions as the desirability of nuclear power or whether the greenhouse effect is really upon us.

Resolution of such issues is particularly important, for without it, society is hard put to make reasonable and widely acceptable decisions concerning what, if anything, to do about the problems inherent in such controversies.

One such vexing problem was solved in this way. The question was whether homosexuality is a disease. For years there appeared study after study, paper after paper, angry response after angry accusation, with no resolution. Should it, for example, be included as a disease in the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual of psychiatric disorders?

Finally, it was put to a vote among members of the association. Result: Members, by a vote of about two to one, decided it isn't a disease.

No. A vote might tell us what view is popular, but it will not tell us what is correct. Votes would have given wrong answers for several disputes in the book, such as continental drift.

The story of that association vote has been recently edited out of the Wikipedia DSM-IV article:

A forced hand

Dr. Ronald Bayer, a pro-homosexual psychiatrist has described the events of 1971-3 in his book, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis. (1981)

Bayer explains that the first attack by homosexual activists against the APA began in 1970 when this organization held its convention in San Francisco. Homosexual activists decided to disrupt the conference by interrupting speakers and shouting down and ridiculing psychiatrists who viewed homosexuality as a mental disorder. In 1971, homosexual activist Frank Kameny worked with the Gay Liberation Front collective to demonstrate against the APA's convention. At the 1971 conference, Kameny grabbed the microphone and yelled, "Psychiatry is the enemy incarnate. Psychiatry has waged a relentless war of extermination against us. You may take this as a declaration of war against you."

Homosexuals forged APA credentials and gained access to exhibit areas in the conference. They threatened anyone who claimed that homosexuals needed to be cured.

Both under threat and presented with questionable new data from researchers such as the bisexual Alfred Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker, the seventh printing of the DSM-II, in 1974, no longer listed homosexuality as a category of disorder. But through the efforts of psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, who had led the DSM-II development committee, a vote by the APA trustees in 1973, and confirmed by the wider APA membership in 1974, the diagnosis was replaced with the category of "sexual orientation disturbance".[10]

Science standards are very low in psychiatry and psychology. A lot of the other so-called disorder are more political than science.

Turning in the unabomber

The Unabomber's brother keeps defending his decision to collect $1 million for turning in his brother to the FBI:

In 1996, federal agents descended on a tiny Montana cabin, arresting a brilliant but deeply disturbed recluse, Theodore J. Kaczynski, for a two-decade mail bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others. ...

Yet, in what he acknowledges as a self-inflicted paradox, David Kaczynski keeps the story out there, recounting it in classrooms and churches, to lawmakers and the families of murder victims.

"What would you have done?" he asks.

There was another reasonable course of action. The brother omits some crucial parts of the story.

The Unabomber had promised that he would end his terrorism campaign if his manifesto were published. The NY Times, Wash. Post, and others published it in full. There were no more bombings after that. Turning in the Unabomber gave him the prison sentence he deserved, but it did not save any lives.

The brother could have simply told the Unabomber that he would call the FBI if there was another attack. He brags about his ethics, but he does not explain how what he did was ethically superior to the alternatives.

Strangely, Wikipedia has censored the manifesto, with some nonsensical explanation about copyright. Weird. The manifesto is a brilliant essay, and an important historical document.

Unethical nature-nurture experiments

A SciAm blog says:

The idea: One of the oldest controversies in psychology is the nature versus nurture debate. Are innate qualities more or less important than the effects of experience on how a person thinks and behaves?

There is one morally repugnant line of thought Pinker strenuously objects to that could resolve this question. "Basically, every nature-nurture debate could be settled for good if we could raise a group of children in a closed environment of our own design, they way we do with animals," he says. ...

The problem: "There's no end to the ethical horrors that could be raised by this exercise," Pinker says.

Fortunately for science, misguided folks are unofficially doing these unethical experiments anyway. Recent examples are No "boys" and "girls" at gender-neutral preschool in Sweden, and Toronto couple defend move to keep baby's sex secret. I hope someone is recording the outcomes.

Full Dawkins argument

I posted before about a pseudo-scientific atheist Dawkins argument, so now I quote it in full so you can decide for yourself:

This chapter [4. Why there almost certainly is no God] has contained the central argument of my book, and so, at the risk of sounding repetitive, I shall summarize it as a series of six numbered points.

1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.

2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. in the case of a man made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.

3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a 'crane', not a 'skyhook', for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.

4. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that an illusion.

5. We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.

6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self evidently better than the self defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.

If the argument of this chapter is accepted, the factual premise of religion -- the God Hypothesis -- is untenable. God almost certainly does not exist. This is the main conclusion of the book so far. Various questions now follow. Even if we accept that God doesn't exist, doesn't religion still have a lot going for it? Isn't it consoling? Doesn't it motivate people to do good? If it weren't for religion, how would we know what is good? Why, in any case, be so hostile? Why, if it is false, does every culture in the world have religion? True or false, religion is ubiquitous, so where does it come from? It is to this last question that we turn next.

I would not bother with such a silly argument, except that Dawkins is the most famous scientist in the world on this subject.

Chicago evolutionist Jerry Coyne has a similar post today claiming that the multiverse eliminates need for God. He also says that, "Morality itself is not a problem for evolution" because of genetic determinism and how reasoning supports gay rights. He is writing an essay on the subject.

DSK released

I speculated before that DSK was framed, and now this news:

Former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was released without bail today after a dramatic court hearing where the sexual assault case against him appeared to shift in his favour.

Strauss-Kahn, who smiled as he walked out of court, still faces felony charges of attempted rape and sexual assault over the alleged attack on a hotel maid in New York. His lawyers said they will seek to have the charges dismissed but the judge said prosecutors were continuing to investigate.

The turnabout could upend French politics. Strauss-Kahn, 62, was a strong candidate for the 2012 French presidential election until his May 14 arrest.

It appears that the accuser was paid $100k to set DSK up. The NY Post says that she was a prostitute, and a "pathological liar and scam artist". She has made false accusations of rape in the past, and made them under oarh recently. I don't necessarily believe the self-serving story of a French Jewish Socialist banker politician, but it is outrageous to treat him as a common criminal just on the word of a lying immigrant maid with an implausible story.

While prosecutors have admitted that they have no case against DSK, they have not dropped the charges. And no one is talking about deporting the con-artist accuser, and the press is not even printing her name. The Irish Times now says her name is Nafissatou Diallo, but other papers are not saying.

Update: The Manhattan DA responsible for botching this case is Cyrus Vance, Jr.. He overruled his staff and insisted on the aggressive charges, in spite of the contrary evidence. His father was famous for resigning as Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State because he disagreed with using military force to rescue American hostages in Iran.

Dawkins' central argument

Richard Dawkins is a famous scientist, so I thought that I might agree with the scientific arguments in his recent book, The God Delusion. I did not.

Chapter 4, "Why there is almost certainly no God" ends with a summary of what it says is "the central argument of my book". Paraphrasing, the argument is:

There is an appearance of design in nature, in both biology and physics. The biology design is just an illusion because it is best explained by Darwinian evolution. The physics design has not been explained, but there is hope that it will turn out to be a consequence of the Multiverse and the Anthropic principle.

Dawkins acknowledges the multiverse is controversial, but argues that "physicists are in need of Darwinian consciousness-raising", and that "The key difference between the genuinely extravagant God hypothesis and the apparently extravagant multiverse hypothesis is one of statistical improbability".

There is no science here. The multiverse is a fantasy.

I also thought that it was odd for Dawkins to complain about "religious bigotry" later in the book. Eg, see p.287. By that he seems to me favoring one religion over another in certain circumstances. But the whole book is an attack on various religions. So his leftist politics allow him to say that all religion is bad, but do not allow others to say that particular religions are bad. Weird.

Attacking free will

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne is on the warpath against religion and free will with There’s no free will:

I’ve done quite a bit of reading about free will in the past few months, ... If “free will” is to mean anything, it must mean what Sam insists it does: the notion that we could have done or thought something other than we did. There is not the slightest evidence for that proposition, and there is plenty of evidence against it, ... There is no free will.

I disagreed with Horgan below, but Coyne attacks Horgan for believing in free will here and here.

There are two arguments against free will. One is that psychologists have done experiments showing that we have some distinctive brain activity about a second in advance of making a simple decision. The idea is that some brain process is forcing the decision on us against our conscious wishes, I guess. The second argument is that evolution proved that we are all soul-less automatons who are no better than the worms we descended from. Neither argument is convincing to me. Coyne brags about how scientific his thinking is, but it does not seem scientific to me.

Whites now a minority

The Wash. Post reports:

For the first time, more than half of the children under age 2 in the U.S. are minorities, part of a sweeping race change and a growing age divide between mostly white, older Americans and fast-growing younger ethnic populations that could reshape government policies.

Preliminary census estimates also show the share of African-American households headed by women — mostly single mothers — now exceeds African-American households with married couples, reflecting the trend of declining U.S. marriages overall. ...

Minorities comprise a majority of renters in 10 states, plus the District of Columbia — Hawaii, Texas, California, Georgia, Maryland, New Mexico, Mississippi, New Jersey, Louisiana and New York.

If whites are now under 50%, then whites are in a minority race. White births are down to about 30% in California, I think.

These changes were not accidental, or inevitable. They are the result of government policies, such as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

Determinist blight on science

I attacked S.J. Gould below and John Horgan defends him:

I used to be tough on Stephen Jay Gould, the great evolutionary biologist, who died in 2002. I found him self-righteous and pompous, in person and on the page. ...

But I admired Gould's ferocious opposition to biological determinism, which he defined as the view that "the social and economic differences between different groups—primarily races, classes and sexes—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology." I loathe biological determinism, too, and so I must defend Gould against charges that he was a fact-fudging "charlatan," ...

Commenting on Gould's claim that bias often influences science, an unsigned editorial in The New York Times snidely remarked, "Right now it looks as though he proved his point, just not as he intended." The anthropologist and blogger John Hawks claims that the "straightforward" analysis of Holloway et al. shows that Gould clearly engaged in "utter fabulation." Hawks added, "Some of Gould's mistakes are outrageous, with others it is hard for me to believe that the misstatements were not deliberate misrepresentations." ...

Maybe Gould was wrong that Morton misrepresented his data, but he was absolutely right that biological determinism was and continues to be a dangerous pseudoscientific ideology. Biological determinism is thriving today: I see it in the assertion of researchers such as the anthropologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard University that the roots of human warfare reach back all the way to our common ancestry with chimpanzees. In the claim of scientists such as Rose McDermott of Brown University that certain people are especially susceptible to violent aggression because they carry a "warrior gene." In the enthusiasm of some science journalists for the warrior gene and other flimsy linkages of genes to human traits. In the insistence of the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne and neuroscientist Sam Harris that free will is an illusion because our "choices" are actually all predetermined by neural processes taking place below the level of our awareness. ...

Biological determinism is a blight on science. It implies that the way things are is the way they must be. We have less choice in how we live our lives than we think we do. This position is wrong, both empirically and morally.

Horgan does not mention the most common such argument -- that homosexuality is biologically determined. Gould did not stand up to that either.

The nature-nurture debate is ancient, and both sides use bad science to promote their ideologies and ethnic/group identifications.

Gould's motivation appeared to be a Jewish-Marxist ideology. Kevin MacDonald accused him of fraud, as he explains here. His 1998 book said:

Gould himself would appear to be a prime example of this conflation of personal and ethnopolitical interests in the construction of science. Gould has been an ardent, highly publicized opponent of evolutionary approaches to human behavior. [p.30]

Gould had no defense against those criticisms, and depended on his network of ideological supporters to sustain his reputation. I think that it is ridiculous to suggest that Gould had good motivations. His motivations were the worst.

Things you cannot say

On the internet, comparing to Hitler is so common it is known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies.

Yahoo reports that is why Megan Fox was fired from "Transformers 2":

According to a new Michael Bay oral history in GQ, Bay says Fox was booted by the direct order of Sir Spielbergo (who helped produce the movie).

"She was in a different world, on her BlackBerry. You gotta stay focused. And you know, the Hitler thing. Steven [Spielberg] said, 'Fire her right now.'"

"The Hitler thing" was Fox saying Bay ran his movie sets "like Hitler," which probably didn't sit well with Spielberg. It's a shame: She should have just run with her Napoleon comparison, which is far more apt, save for the height issue.

What height issue? Adolf Hitler's height was 5 ft 8 in (173 cm), and Napolean was 5 ft 7 in tall. Both were about the same height as Justin Bieber and Tom Cruise.

Books on bad psychiatry

Marcia Angell on The Illusions of Psychiatry:

The books by Irving Kirsch, Robert Whitaker, and Daniel Carlat are powerful indictments of the way psychiatry is now practiced. They document the “frenzy” of diagnosis, the overuse of drugs with sometimes devastating side effects, and widespread conflicts of interest. Critics of these books might argue, as Nancy Andreasen implied in her paper on the loss of brain tissue with long-term antipsychotic treatment, that the side effects are the price that must be paid to relieve the suffering caused by mental illness. If we knew that the benefits of psychoactive drugs outweighed their harms, that would be a strong argument, since there is no doubt that many people suffer grievously from mental illness. But as Kirsch, Whitaker, and Carlat argue convincingly, that expectation may be wrong.

DC tests Singapore math

An education blog reports:

Bill Turque at The Washington Post writes about one D.C. public school's decision to adopt the Singapore Math program—and the many challenges that have come with it.

Singapore Math, Turque explains, focuses on mastery of basic computation skills and essential ideas, such as place value. "And unlike 'Everyday Mathematics,' which 'spirals' through subjects — covering them and then returning later — Singapore goes slow and deep, requiring mastery before moving on," he writes.

But in a district with a highly transient student population, Turque writes, it's tough to use a program that relies heavily on skill-building from year to year. And Singapore Math requires extensive (and costly) professional development, and "a depth of understanding most U.S. elementary teachers don't acquire in their math training," according to Turque.

That is ridiculous. The Singapore textbooks are self-contained, and an 8th-grade knowledge of math is all the teachers need.

The bigger problem is that the elementary schools only hire female teachers with no interest in math.

Studying evil with empathy

Jonathon Rosen reviews a new book:

“The Science of Evil,” by Simon Baron-Cohen, seems likely to antagonize the victims of evil, the parents of children with autism spectrum disorder, at least a few of the dozens of researchers whose work he cites — not to mention critics of his views on evolutionary psychology or of his claims about the neurobiology of the sexes. “The Science of Evil” proposes a simple but persuasive hypothesis for a new way to think about evil.

“My main goal is to understand human cruelty, replacing the unscientific term ‘evil’ with the scientific term ‘empathy,’ ” he writes at the beginning of the book, ...

Finally, zero empathy is not necessarily negative. In what he acknowledges is a controversial idea, he maintains “there is at least one way in which zero degrees can be positive.” Preparing for the howl of dissent, he adds: “It seems unthinkable, but bear with me.” People with Asperger’s syndrome also fall on the zero end of the scale, but they are Zero Positive. Zero Positive is almost always accompanied by high scores on the systemizing scale (and can lead to genius). In addition, the way “their brain processes information paradoxically leads them to be supermoral rather than immoral.”

This sounds like a dubious oversimplification. I wonder if he has any data to back up his theory. Some academics refuse to admit that there is any such thing as evil.

Sex, Lies, Arrogance

Time magazine recently had a woman-written cover story titled, Sex, Lies, Arrogance: What Makes Powerful Men Behave So Badly?. The Dilbert cartoonist calls this misandry, and writes:

A psychic is a person who can read minds. For example, a psychic can look deep into the private thoughts of a Tea Party member and know that the real reason he opposes the President's fiscal policy is racism. A psychic can look at men - millions of them at once - and know that deep down, in their private thoughts, they hate women. Psychics can also know the thoughts and intentions of the rich, using as clues the inaccurate reports of the media, and the out-of-context yammering of pundits who have financial incentives to distort. ...

Watch the news this week and see how many stories involve psychics (pundits) claiming they have the power to read the minds of others and find evil of various sorts. Then watch the media manipulate society into punishing the accused thought-criminals because doing so is good for the news business. It's the modern equivalent of witch hunts. In old Salem, you could identify a witch by a combination of coincidence and the ability to float. Today you can identify a racist and a misogynist and an immoral rich person using quotes taken out of context, guilt by association, and the accusations of psychics. We haven't come far.

Psychics aren't the only one to claim mindreading abilities. Most people do, according to conventional wisdom about the theory of mind. It is a common disease, and of course the mindreading is unreliable.

Understanding risk

It is often argued that humans have a hard time understanding probability, and the proof if is something like this:

Does all this mean that humans will perpetually remain stuck when it comes to risk and probability? Possibly not, but we have to be careful. That was the message of Gerd Gigerenzer, who helps train decision makers in how to evaluate probabilities. Gigerenzer consistently noted that language was important when it comes to dealing with probabilities.

The most compelling example he gave was one he used when working in medical education. He described the probabilities associated with a breast cancer test: one percent of women tested have the disease, and the test is 90 percent accurate, with a nine percent false positive rate. With all that information, what do you tell a woman who tests positive about the likelihood they have the disease? For a lot of people in medicine, the question leaves them stumped;

The failure here is with whoever formulated such a hopelessly ambiguous question.
The key clue here is the nine percent false positive rate is supposed to mean that 9% of all women taking the test give a positive result without having the disease. It does not mean that 9% of the positives are false.

The 90% accuracy is even more confusing. If the test were always negative, then it would be 99% accurate, the way this rate is computed. The figure is only there to confuse you.

The Mismeasure of Science

Steve Sailer writes:

Stephen Jay Gould’s vastly influential 1981 book on IQ, The Mismeasure of Man, is an odd beast since it is heavily devoted to debunking dead and often forgotten old scientists. For example, a sizable chunk denounces Samuel George Morton, who died in 1851. Gould claimed to have reanalyzed Morton’s data on skull sizes and shown that Morton distorted his results to fit his biases. A new study of Morton’s old skulls by Jason E. Lewis, Ralph L. Holloway, et al, shows that Gould was projecting.

The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias

Stephen Jay Gould, the prominent evolutionary biologist and science historian, argued that “unconscious manipulation of data may be a scientific norm” because “scientists are human beings rooted in cultural contexts, not automatons directed toward external truth” [1], a view now popular in social studies of science [2]-[4]. … Our analysis of Gould’s claims reveals that most of Gould’s criticisms are poorly supported or falsified.

The Mismeasure of Man That book made Gould's reputation as the preeminent spokesman for science in America. The book was widely praised as one of the great scientific books of the 20th century.

The book is idiotic from beginning to end. As you can see from the above Wikipedia page, it got scathing reviews from the experts, and Gould never even made any serious attempt to refute the criticism. It only convinced me that a charlatan could pass as a Harvard professor, and that the standards for scholarsphip in evolutionary biology are pathetically low.

There is more info on the Gene Expression blog.

Update: Nicholas Wade of the NY Times reports:

But now physical anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania, which owns Morton’s collection, have remeasured the skulls, and in an article that does little to burnish Dr. Gould’s reputation as a scholar, they conclude that almost every detail of his analysis is wrong. ...

But when others suggested Dr. Gould had been refuted, Philip Kitcher, a philosopher of science at Columbia University, rode to his defense. ...

As for the new finding’s bearing on Dr. Gould’s reputation, Dr. Kitcher said: “Steve doesn’t come out as a rogue but as someone who makes mistakes. If Steve were around he would probably defend himself with great ingenuity.”

No, as the article explains, Gould was refuted in his lifetime, and he refused to address the refutation. Gould was ideologically aligned with the NY Times, and Wade probably had to look hard to find someone to partially defend Gould.

Update: Evolutionist Jerry Coyne writes:

I always thought that among Steve Gould’s “real” (non-essay-collection) books, The Mismeasure of Man was the best.  Yes, it was tendentious, written to show that scientists could be as biased and racist as anyone else, but it rang true. ...

There’s little doubt that Gould screwed up big-time here, and, since he’s dead we’ll never know his reasons. ...

I think his theory of punctuated equilibrium was pretty much bunk ...

And I found him an unpleasant and arrogant man, but of course a smart and engaging one, too. He could be quite rude to those he considered his intellectual inferiors, and that was pretty much everyone.

Gould was a Harvard Marxist evolutionist. What more needs to be known about his motives? They all use bad science to promote their ideological objectives.

It amazing how Coyne can still praise Gould's book. The book is bogus from beginning to end. This just shows that academic evolutionism is more ideology than science.

Nukes are safer than cucumbers

German cucumbers are now blamed for 26 deaths, and what does Germany do? It bans nuclear power! Switzerland does the same. German cucumbers are more dangerous than German nuclear power plants.

The obvious conclusion is that these countries are not serious about global warming. They are going to output zillions of tons of CO2 to make up for that nuclear energy. And they are doing it just to make a leftist political statement.

Feds force colleges to favor accusers

Wendy McElroy writes:

On April 4 the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) instructed every college and university that accepts federal funds directly or through student loans – that is, virtually every institution of higher learning in the country – to use the “preponderance of the evidence” standard when adjudicating on-campus accusations of sexual harassment and sexual assault rather than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard used in criminal courts.

Some people still people that the accused are innocent until proven guilty. The proof should be something more than a he-said-she-said dispute.

Flipping to Grilled Cheese

NY Times gadget critic Pogue writes:

Jonathan Kaplan, founder and chief executive of Pure Digital. That’s the company that made the wildly successful Flip camcorders, the company that Cisco bought two years ago for $590 million, the company that Cisco then shut down last month, without any reasonable explanation. ...

Instead, he told us, he intends to launch a new venture, one that embraces “all the same tenets as the Flip: Simple, nostalgic, memorable, affordable.” But he left us all hanging without telling us what it was.

Yesterday, he unveiled his new company. What do you supposed the creator of the Flip camcorder does for an encore?

He founds a chain of grilled-cheese-and-soup restaurants.

John Edwards indicted

When John Edwards ran for US President in 2004 and 2008, there were lots of reporters and liberals raving about his great sincerity and empathy for the poor. I thought that he was the most transparently phony of all of the candidates.

I have had people lecture me on how I am poor judge of human character. A couple of them even used Edwards as an example, and they told me that if I cannot see that Edwards is truly sincere, then I must be mentally deficient in some way. No, I was unable to see any sincerity in the guy.

Now he has been indicted, and the $400 haircut brought him down:

The just-released indictment of John Edwards reprints the text of a note allegedly sent from the elderly billionaire heiress and Edwards supporter Bunny Mellon to Edwards’ notorious aide, Andrew Young, in May 2007:

“The timing of your phone call on Friday was ‘witchy.’ I was sitting alone in a grim mood – furious that the press attacked Senator Edwards on the price of a haircut. But it inspired me – from now on, all haircuts, etc. that are necessary and important for his campaign – please send the bills to me…. It is a way to help our friend without government restrictions.”

I am not clear on why it is illegal for him to use his rich friends to cover up the price of his haircuts.

Edwards grossed about $60M in bogus personal injury lawsuits, and raised another $30 in legal campaign contributions, largely from trial lawyers. So I guess that he can afford a $400 haircut if it helps maintain his image. I am sure he now wishes that he used his own money to clean up his personal messes.

At least everyone now understands that Edwards is unfit for public office.

Raise medical tuition

A NY Times op-ed says:

DOCTORS are among the most richly rewarded professionals in the country. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that of the 15 highest-paid professions in the United States, all but two are in medicine or dentistry.

Why, then, are we proposing to make medical school free?

Huge medical school debts — doctors now graduate owing more than $155,000 on average, and 86 percent have some debt — are why so many doctors shun primary care in favor of highly paid specialties, where there are incentives to give expensive treatments and order expensive tests, an important driver of rising health care costs.

They have cause and effect mixed up. There is a lot of money in health care for a lot of reasons. Physicians charge whatever the market will bear. They borrow money because they have high earnings potential. Free medical school will have no effect on their salaries. It would make more sense to raise tuition at medical school, since the physicians easily earn it back anyway.

Psychiatry cannot detect fakes

The Wash. Post reports:

Welner determined that Mitchell, who sang through his court proceedings and spouted pseudo-religious gibberish, was a skilled con man who was largely faking his delusions.

“Psychiatry is far less able to detect faking than it asserts,” Welner said in an interview this week. “Experience teaches me that an ounce of fact is worth a pound of expertise.”

So if psychiatry cannot detect fakes, how did he determine that Mitchell was a fake? Welner seems to be admitting that he cannot back up what the feds paid him to assert in court.

If there is surf, nothing gets done

The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports:

SANTA CRUZ -- When Ted Nicholson hitchhiked from his San Bruno naval post to Santa Cruz in 1944, he wasn't sure what to expect. ...

Kim Stoner, a founding member of the preservation society, recalled the effort to create the museum with the city's help. It took a while to get organized -- "If there is surf, nothing gets done," he said -- but when it was finished, it became the world's first surfing museum.

This is a city where the oral history comes from a man named Kim Stoner.

I recently learned that surfers contributed to the Apollo space project. The rocket scientists needed insulation, and they copied the insides of surfboards. The scientists said that the surfers were a great bunch of guys, but only available when the surf was not up.

Evolutionist wants more diabetic black lesbian poets

Pharyngula responds to one of his readers:

I am, however, rather conservative in my views. That's what troubles me with atheism lately, it seems that atheists are generally on the left side of the political spectrum. Esp. your last post about how atheists should have progressive views in terms of "racism", "gender equality" and "disability rights" made me thinking.

I feel like I agree with Conservative Chirstians on most political and social issues. For example, I think that abortion is wrong, that homosexuality is wrong and that feminism is one of the biggest threats to society. ...

However, one cannot be a rational, intelligent human being and contributing member of society and hold the conservative views you do. When you say you favor increasing individual freedom, you actually mean increasing the individual freedom of healthy white male heterosexuals who have skills that corporate interests find profitable, which, I'm sorry to say, is an extremely narrow slice of our culture, and not necessarily the best element of our society. Whatever shall we do with diabetic black lesbian poets in your world?

It seems to me that leftism, atheism, and evolutionism are separate beliefs, but to academics like PZ Myers, they are very closely related.

Testing nonperceptible Euclidian geometry

The NY Times reports:

Although many school-going youth might disagree, a new study finds that geometry is an intuitive subject that is easy to grasp even in the absence of formal training.

Researchers posed questions in Euclidean planar geometry to adults and children from the Mundurucú community, an isolated indigenous group in the Amazon. Despite having no formal education, the Mundurucú were able to quickly grasp concepts in planar geometry relating to points, lines and triangles.

The study appears in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study says:

Kant argued that Euclidean geometry is synthesized on the basis of an a priori intuition of space. This proposal inspired much behavioral research probing whether spatial navigation in humans and animals conforms to the predictions of Euclidean geometry. However, Euclidean geometry also includes concepts that transcend the perceptible, such as objects that are infinitely small or infinitely large, or statements of necessity and impossibility. We tested the hypothesis that certain aspects of nonperceptible Euclidian geometry map onto intuitions of space that are present in all humans, even in the absence of formal mathematical education. ...

For instance, on a surface described to them as perfectly planar, the Mundurucu's estimations of the internal angles of triangles added up to ~180 degrees, and when asked explicitly, they stated that there exists one single parallel line to any given line through a given point.

This did not test "nonperceptible Euclidian geometry". Angles are perceptible, and so is parallelism. If they wanted something nonperceptible, then they should have asked some abstract math questions. This study does not do what it says.

One of the coauthors is Elizabeth Spelke, a Harvard professor who claims to have done experiments showing that baby boys and girls have the same innate skills.

Girl dates a bisexual

Sunday's newspaper advice:

Dear Margo: I am a 17-year-old senior in high school. My wonderful boyfriend, "John," recently came out to me as bisexual. ... We both are headed to college next year, so that will open up new populations for us. What will happen then will happen, but, for now, we want to be together. How can I convey that to my mom? - Samantha

Dear Sam: ... Assuming you are sexually active, I suspect that your father's concern is - and your mother's will be - that the possibility of sexually transmitted diseases increases when a partner is active with both sexes.

I don't know the level of openness you have with your parents, but I would tell them that you practice safe sex - which I sincerely hope is the case. In addition, tell your mother that you and John have agreed to date others when you both go to school - which is not all that far off.

The letter did not say anything about agreeing to date others.

The message here is that as long as everyone is promiscuous and using condoms, then no parent should object to a 17-year-old daughter dating a bisexual. Weird.

Sell the Moon rocks

AP reports:

A woman who tried to sell what she said was a rare piece of moon rock for $1.7 million was detained when her would-be buyer turned out to be an undercover NASA agent, officials said Friday.

The gray rocks, which are considered national treasures and are illegal to sell, were given to each U.S. state and 136 countries by then-President Richard Nixon after U.S. moon missions and can sell for millions of dollars on the black market.

That is what is wrong with NASA. It is unamerican to prosecute someone for owning a Moon rock.

NASA should have auctioned off 10% of its Moon rocks to private collectors back in 1972. The Russians have a better attitude. Soviet and now Russian cosmonauts have carried firearms in space for decades and continue to do so.

Can America go back to its 1965 borders?

Steve Sailer writes:

The front-and-center featured article on the NYT today reports that "by the time the children of illegal immigrants reached age 2, they showed significantly lower levels of language and cognitive development than the children of legal immigrants and native-born parents." 

Illegal Immigrants' Children Suffer, Study Finds ...

Translated into Occam-speak, what the NYT is reporting is: At the earliest point at which we can test, illegal immigrants' children are less intelligent on average.

"Millions of the youngest citizens in the United States, simply by virtue of being born to a parent with a particular legal status, have less access to the learning opportunities that are the building blocks of adult productivity," he wrote. ... 

Let's reread the crucial clause: "simply by virtue of being born to a parent with a particular legal status." Uh, no.

Poor cognitive development can lead to lower school performance, which in turn can lead to higher dropout rates, an undertrained work force and lower economic productivity. 

Indeed. Therefore, the article suggests, the appropriate response to the relative stupidity of the children of illegal immigrants is granting their parents amnesty.

There's a second cognitive problem that goes unmentioned in this article, but one that might be even more threatening to America's future. A close reading of most illegal immigration-related articles in the New York Times over the last decade reveals that the topic of illegal immigration make the New York Times stupider. 

Stupid? The NY Times, and its base of readers, are ideologically committed to the ethnic divisions caused by low-IQ immigration.

One of his readers says:

If Israel is supposed to go back to its 1967 borders, can America go back to its 1965 borders? Please?

Good line. The 1965 immigration law was a racist law designed to change the long-term ethnic make-up of the USA.

Psychologist censored for beauty comments

NPR reports:

A blog posting on the website of Psychology Today asserted that black women were "objectively less physically attractive than other women" and then, as a backlash built — it vanished.

The author, Satoshi Kanazawa, has published an assortment of divisive opinions, such as liberals and atheists being more intelligent. The censored blog posting may be found here. It says:

It is very interesting to note that, even though black women are objectively less physically attractive than other women, black women (and men) subjectively consider themselves to be far more physically attractive than others.

Some are saying that the research being this is weak, but most psychology research is weak.

The current David Brooks column in the NY Times claims to report on current research in evolutionary psychology, but it is not really any more scientific, as explained here.

Update: This June 5 blog post says that the Japanese evolutionary psychologist was fired for offending people:

And now Satoshi Kanazawa's lost his blog and his profile page has been deleted from Psychology Today's website. His article and unqualified research on unattractive black women sent off a fury of protests online. 75,000 people blew up Psychology Today via email, Twitter and Facebook. Some even rang Psychology Today's telephones off the hook.

The magazine is filled with dubious research claims and generalizations, but I guess the editors are going to censor the offensive claims.

Maybe DSK was framed

One blog is suspicious:

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, IMF Managing Director and French presidential candidate, has been accused of rape. As the feminist dominated press is scared to even think that the rape accusations are false, Human-Stupidity has to speak up. The story is very strange, and dominated by clear mistakes and screwups committed by the accuser. A five-star hotel maid trespasses into a naked client’s room? Unforgivable. Five-star hotel security let a rapist check out without complaint? The maid wasn’t trained to instantly report crimes to security staff?

See also comments here.

The story is fishy. A famous French politician rapes a black African immigrant hotel maid? A 32-year-old woman cannot get away from a 62-year-old naked unarmed man? What was the maid even doing there? In my experience, maids make an immediate exit if they accidentally walk in on a naked man. Why is he being held without bail? How did he ever get to be such a big-shot politician if he was prone to spontaneously raping whomever he might accidentally encounter when he gets out of the shower?

The man is inncocent until proven guilty. The accusation does not sound plausible to me.

Update: Reports say that the accuser speaks French, is 6 feet tall, and is a Moslem.

Update: A reader asks why I mention that the accuser, Ms Nafissatou Diallo, is a tall African Moslem, and not that the accused is a short French Jewish banker. Maybe that is relevant also. I read that she lives in some sort of subsidized housing for HIV+ people. The Wikipedia story omits these facts. Ben Stein says that DSK should be presumed innocent, and lists a few reasons for skepticism.

Marital entanglement

Quantum mechanics is not known to be significant for macroscopic objects, but here is an attempt:

For the ultimate in a nondenominational wedding ceremony, consider a quantum entanglement. The ceremony, developed by conceptual artist, Jonathon Keats, is borrowed from quantum physics, where when two or more subatomic particles become entangled, they behave as one.

Keats has designed an entangling apparatus, which, when situated in a sunny window and exposed to the full spectrum of solar radiation divides pairs of entangled photons and translates them to the bodies of a nearby couple. ...

According to Keats, the couple won't know to what extent they've become entangled, because any attempt to measure a quantum system disturbs it.

"The quantum marriage will literally be broken up by skepticism about it," he said.

This is pretty wacky, but it is not too far off of what some interpretations of quantum mechanics allow.

Evidence for the unconscious

People have been trying to find evidence for the unconscious mind for centuries. Sigmund Freud got famous by promoting bogus theories about the unconscious. Julian Jaynes theorized about ancient men hearing the voices of gods in their unconscious minds.

Now psychologists claim to have new evidence:

Now, new research by four Israeli psychologists—Liad Mudrik and Dominique Lamy of Tel Aviv University, and Assaf Breska and Leon Y. Deouell of Hebrew University of Jerusalem—suggests that scientists have been underestimating the abilities of the unconscious mind. “Integration can happen even when we’re unaware of the stimulus,” says Mudrik. “Unconscious processes are much more sophisticated and deeper than was previously believed.” ...

To test this idea, the researchers put their subjects—18 men and women with normal vision—before a stereoscope, which allows stimuli to be introduced to each eye separately. ...

The incongruent scenes broke through the visual noise and came into awareness significantly faster than the congruent ones.

This seems to be nothing more than the trivial observation that it takes more time to recognize an unfamiliar scene.

Column has wacky idea of reasonable advice

Today's wacky advice:

Dear Annie: Two years ago, my wife and our 25-year-old daughter had a falling out right after our son's wedding. ...

Dear Caught: Your wife could be right about the daughter-in-law, but even so, it serves no purpose to demand an apology from someone who isn't likely to give one. Your wife also sounds like a difficult person. Has she always been like this? Some women have extreme mood swings during menopause. Please ask your wife to see her gynecologist about this possibility. ...

Dear Annie: I am a retired probation officer and would like to offer some suggestions to "Marriage on the Rocks," whose 51-year-old stepson lives rent-free in their trailer and may be using drugs.

1. Call the police and have their drug team search your property, house and trailer for drugs or paraphernalia. If the stepson has any illegal substances, he goes to jail. Police don't need a warrant if you invite them to search your property. ...

Dear Shaggy: Your suggestions are strict but reasonable.

This advice is so bad that is sounds like a joke. If the wife demands an apology, send her to get gynecological exam. If the stepson is suspected of using drugs, call the police and have him jailed.

Detecting liars

Most people are lousy at detecting liars. Even people who should be good at it, such as courtroom judges, are no better than average people in objective tests. The worst are the people who claim to be good judges of people. They are the most easily fooled.

The only ones who excel at detecting liars are FBI agents who have been trained at it. It is not a difficult skill. A good summary is How to tell when someone’s lying.

Be suspicious of 99 percent

Carl Bialik reports, for the WSJ:

Russell V. Lenth, a statistician at the University of Iowa, wrote, “I am automatically suspicious of any stated probability of 99%, 99.9%, etc. These are usually numbers people use to state that they are confident of something, without having actually calculated anything.” ...

That’s a concern in genetic testing to resolve paternity disputes. It is “possible to find two or more men (this occurs most frequently with close relatives) who each have a ‘probability of paternity’ well in excess of 99% — which, obviously, is rather silly,” wrote William C. Thompson, professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine.

There are many fishy things about the Osama bin Laden raid. The DNA and facial recognition claims sound as if they were written by White House staffer who watch too much CSI TV.

Everyone complains that Pakistan had 5 years to notice the OBL compound, and do something. But reportedly, our own CIA knew about it for 6 months, and took 6 months to figure out what to do.

The autism quacks

Reported rates of autism have been skyrocketing. Textbooks in the 1980s said that it affected less than 5 out of 10,000 kids. Today, a new report says this:

CHICAGO/SEOUL (Reuters) – One out of every 38 children in South Korea may have autism, a surprisingly high number based on a new research approach that suggests autism is a global problem that is significantly underdiagnosed, researchers said on Monday.

The estimate, which translates into 2.64 percent of children, is far higher than the estimated 1 percent rate seen in studies in the United States and Europe. ...

"The high prevalence comes from this new population we included in our study -- the kids without any previous developmental delays or mental health issues," Kim said. ...

In Asia, parents are largely ignorant about the disorder, which has no cure, and are reluctant to face it. ...

"One problem that seems to pop up frequently is that parents do not want to acknowledge that their child/children may be autistic," said the woman, who asked not to be named.

If I were a Korean parent of a kid with no developmental delays or mental health issues, and some Chicago shrink told me that my kid was born with an incurable mental disease, then I would be skeptical also.

Why is it that the only one to admit this obvious fact is a woman who refuses to be identified? I smell a rat.

There is a movement today among psychologists and other quacks to stigmatize as many kids as possible as having autism, attention deficit disorder, or some other malady. There is no science to this, other than the fact that different people have different personality characteristics.

Stop writing about geology

The NY Times reports:

Black children are most acutely affected: The study found that 17 percent of black children - nearly 1 in 5 - received a diagnosis of asthma in 2009, up from 11.4 percent, or about 1 in 9, in 2001.

No, 17 percent is 1 in 6, not 1 in 5. I always worry about the reliability of an article like this, when it has such a glaring arithmetic mistake. Worse, I did a google search for "one in five (17 percent)" shows 100s of articles! Apparently it is a common mistake.

I guess I should be glad that they bother to report statistical evidence at all. A famous writer for the New Yorker magazine (John McPhee) says that he gets hate mail when he writes about science:

Some lawyer in Boston sent me a letter —- this man, this adult, had gone to the trouble to write in great big letters: stop writing about geology. And it’s on the letterhead of a law firm in Boston.

I thought that New Yorker readers just read for literary style, and do not care what the articles are about. The magazine did publish a physics article recently:

Deutsch believes that if a quantum computer were built it would constitute near-irrefutable evidence of what is known as the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. A number of respected thinkers in physics besides Deutsch support the Many Worlds Interpretation, though they are a minority, and primarily educated in England, where the intense interest in quantum computing has at times been termed the Oxford flu. But the infection of Deutsch’s thinking has mutated and gone pandemic. Other scientists, although generally indifferent to the truth or falsehood of Many Worlds as a description of the universe, are now working to build these dreamed-up quantum computing machines.

This should sound fishy, even if you don't know anything about the subject. Researchers are trying to do an experiment that will prove the existence of Many Worlds, and yet they are indifferent to its truth or falsehood.

How can that be? Simple. The experiments will fail, and Many Worlds is an unscientific fantasy.

Why California is broke

The Si Valley paper reports:

According to reporting by Bay Area News Group, the average salary of a 30-year state employee is actually $67,000, on top of Social Security benefits that bring the annual retirement income to nearly $90,000 for many.

What is wrong here is that present-day taxpayers are on the hook for crooked political deals that were made 10 or 20 years ago. Upholding these pension contracts is incompatible with republican government.

The bored wife in her 40s

Today's Dear Annie advice column has yet another self-pitying whining letter from an age 40s woman bored with married life and lacking sexual intimacy. The advice is to find a "more understanding counselor", and to refer to the advice given to the last such letter:

You need to ask yourself that Ann Landers question: “Are you better off with or without him?” And only you can supply the answer.

My point is not to agree or disagree with this advice. I am just remarking that this is the dominant secular advice in our society today. Get a therapist who will validate your dissatisfactions, ignore your marriage vows, prepare to dump your family, and do whatever is in your personal self-interest.

Not everyone agrees with this advice. An online comment today from a Lily O. says:

I'm sorry for what you are going through, and I hope you take my words with all the Christian love intended.

I suspect the reason no one is responding to your cry of "rape" is because you were not, in fact, raped. I do not accuse you of being dishonest, only of being confused. Society has taught you that the definition of rape is broad, when it is not.

By your own words, you married a decent man, so I doubt he used physical violence against you. In fact, he merely reminded you of your marital duties. I understand that you may feel violated, as the Lord's Word on marital relations and the dynamic between a husband and wife has been lost in recent generations, but I suspect the help you seek is not on a therapists couch, but in a pastor's office. A loving, spiritually sound pastor will help you see that you have violated God's instructions to wives in this matter. Again, I am not blaming you. This is a confusing time we live in, and men and women's marital and sexual roles have been greatly confused.

Forget about calling your husband a rapist, and instead, work on making him once again the spiritual head of your household, and you will find peace within your marriage again. I wish you both luck.

This drew some enraged comments from other women:

Your comment of ‘marital duty' makes my blood boil. ... And I would not blame her for leaving him.

Marriage is defined by the dominant cultural norms, not me. I am just reporting some sharply differing opinions.

Orthorexia, the SWPL eating disorder

A Natural News site complains that others think that the health food freaks have a mental disorder:

Do you avoid foods that contain artificial colors and sweeteners, and stick to whole, unprocessed foods instead? If so, you just might have orthorexia, an imaginary "disease" created in 1997 by Dr. Steven Bratman that appears to be gaining more attention in recent days. According to a recent report in Yahoo! News, restricting one's diet to healthy, pure foods is a compulsive disorder that requires cognitive behavior therapy in order to cure.

Written about in so-called respected health journals like the Journal of the American Medical Association and Psychology Today, "orthorexia nervosa," which means "nervous about correct eating" in Latin, allegedly causes malnourishment, anxiety, and social disorders. Its creators claim it stems from a type of obsessive compulsive disorder, and that it can lead to anorexia.

Obsession with so-called natural and heathly foods is a mental disorder as much as many others in the official DSM-IV-TR. The SWPL folks who shop at Whole Foods are not any healthier than anyone else. There is no research that shows such food to be any better.

The bad science behind popular diet and nutrition advice is explained by Gary Taubes in the current Bloggingheads science show. He is right that the whole field is filled with quacks, and physicians are leading with the misinformation.

The healthiest food ever invented is the grilled cheese sandwich. Today's WSJ reports:

Over the years, his appetite and admiration grew, eventually culminating in the annual Grilled Cheese Invitational, which attracts fans eager to display novel takes on the ultimate American comfort food.

The event is a testament to the nation's grilled-cheese renaissance. That the humble gooey sandwich has gone gourmet is evidenced by trendy grilled-cheese trucks that tweet their whereabouts, the advent of top chefs divining grilled-cheese creations and the appearance of cookbooks devoted entirely to grilled-cheese recipes. The L.A. invitational has spawned regional competitions across the country.

"It's the power of cheese," says Mr. Walker, 38, unquestionably the Head Cheese at the invitational. "Cheese moves people," he said, an orange fez on his head.

The nation's grilled-cheese renaissance is the best news since the death of bin Laden.

Update: One of Taubes's more striking claims was that the data from studies show that (sodium) salt does not cause hypertension, contrary to what all the supposed experts say. This is confirmed by a new study, as reported in today's NY Times:

A new study found that low-salt diets increase the risk of death from heart attacks and strokes and do not prevent high blood pressure, but the research’s limitations mean the debate over the effects of salt in the diet is far from over.

In fact, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention felt so strongly that the study was flawed that they criticized it in an interview, something they normally do not do.

Wow, I was skeptical about Taubes on this point. I have mentioned before in 2005 that advice about salt may be wrong, but this goes beyond that.