UK bans Islam critic

UK has banned a blogger from visiting for saying:

it [Islam] is a religion and a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers for the purpose of establishing a societal model that is absolutely incompatible with Western society because media and general government unwillingness to face the sources of Islamic terrorism these things remain largely unknown.

One trouble with this is that it will now be hard for anyone else to tell whether this statement is true or false.

Paula Deen has been banned from the Food channel for saying something in private conversation to her husband, I am not sure what. George Zimmerman is on trial for being a creepy-ass cracka in the shooting of Trayvon Martin.

The Dilbert cartoonist writes about Snowden:

I think there's some sort of law that says I can't make a public statement in favor of jury nullification. Jury nullification is when jurors agree that the accused broke the law, but they feel the law itself is wrong, or that a conviction would be overkill, so they find the accused innocent. I predict that will happen. I don't recommend jury nullification because I'm not sure I have freedom of speech in this regard. I simply predict that nullification will happen.

No, this is a misunderstanding of jury nullification. One could easily have the opinion that Snowden did not have the necessary criminal intent, and recommend that jurors use their lawful powers to acquit. In court, juries are usually not told the full story about their powers, but there is certainly nothing wrong with a private citizen expressing an opinion about what a verdict ought to be.

Meanwhile no one complains about the movie World War Z. Zombie infections from Third World countries are destroying civilization, with the front lines being places like a Newark NJ housing project. The best way to survive is to build walls keeping the outsiders out, and to shoot the ones who get in. Or maybe inject ourselves with a terminal pathogen and hope the zombies ignore us. The movie did not make much literal sense, so I assume that the zombie invasion is a metaphor.

I am surprised at how many people say that Zimmerman deserves prison because he is a cop wannabe who should have minded his own business. They appear to have an authoritarian mindset where citizens do not have the right to defend themselves and their neighborhoods. I have confronted strangers, and I have been confronted when I was the stranger. It is a normal part of a civilized society. The authority of police in a matter like this is not much different from ordinary citizens, and that is the way is should be. Zimmerman will be acquitted.

Dope-smoking study questioned

A study last year found that dope-smoking had negative effects:

Persistent cannabis use was associated with neuropsychological decline broadly across domains of functioning, even after controlling for years of education. Informants also reported noticing more cognitive problems for persistent cannabis users. Impairment was concentrated among adolescent-onset cannabis users, with more persistent use associated with greater decline. Further, cessation of cannabis use did not fully restore neuropsychological functioning among adolescent-onset cannabis users. Findings are suggestive of a neurotoxic effect of cannabis on the adolescent brain and highlight the importance of prevention and policy efforts targeting adolescents.

This study has now been criticized by statisticians who argue that not all of the confounders were factored out. That is, maybe some personality trait led to both the dope-smoking and the cognitive decline.

Facts miss Gould's point

I have posted before about how leftist-atheist-evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould got famous on bogus IQ work. You might think that it is unfair to criticize him after he is dead, but he was thoroughly debunk while still alive. See this account:

In 1986, I mailed my results to Gould, who requested we meet after he gave a lecture in May at the University of Minnesota. Our meeting lasted perhaps five minutes. He told me that I “missed the point,” and abruptly ended the conversation, ignoring me and instead speaking to the man next to him. My recollection is that he did not say goodbye, so I simply walked away. […] After I published my paper in 1988, I sent Gould a copy but got no response. When I wrote him again, he replied that he had lost it and requested another copy, which I sent. I never heard back from him.

Gould's books are still big sellers. His point was to promote his leftist political goals by convincing the public that evolution does not apply to humans and there is no such thing as IQ.

Of course there have been lots of professors who have been guilty of sloppy, dishonest, or fraudulent work. He was on another level. He liked to denounce others for being racist, while he was a closet Marxist who faked his data in order to support his political character assassinations. And somehow he maintained the support of other liberal anti-American professors.

Update: Peter Frost says Gould distorted the work of a guy who died in 1840:

The Caucasus was the last area where one could freely buy fair-skinned women for marriage or concubinage, typically for clients in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Previously, the zone of recruitment had been larger, extending into what is now Ukraine and southern Russia. Further back in time, it had covered almost all of Europe. But this earlier page of European history was largely forgotten by Blumenbach’s time.

Blumenbach really had only one original idea. He saw a causal link between the biblical account of the Flood and the beauty of European women, particularly those from the Caucasus. But that single flash of insight would leave no lasting impression on future generations.

And that is where the term Caucasian comes from?

Evolutionists on the warpath for materialism

NY Times columnist David Brooks writes:

At the highbrow end, there are scholars and theorists that some have called the “nothing buttists.” Human beings are nothing but neurons, they assert. Once we understand the brain well enough, we will be able to understand behavior. We will see the chain of physical causations that determine actions. We will see that many behaviors like addiction are nothing more than brain diseases. We will see that people don’t really possess free will; their actions are caused by material processes emerging directly out of nature. Neuroscience will replace psychology and other fields as the way to understand action.

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne responds:

By equating free will with the absence of determinism and materialism, Brooks implicitly labels himself a dualist. And yet the program of the “nothing buttists” sounds pretty good to me: in fact, it’s the only program that is likely to make progress in understanding how and why we think. ...

You know why Brooks would be a bad scientist? It’s because he wants this dualism to be true: he wants there to be something more to the mind than the neuronal secretions of the brain. And yet his objections to the materialist program are not objections at all. Nor does he suggest an alternative. His decrying materialism suggests some kind of festering spirituality, which is odd coming from someone who wrote a book claiming that much of our modern behavior is coded in our genes. For Brooks’s brand of evolutionary psychology is nothing but materialist and reductionist.

In fact, the brain is the mind in the sense that the mind is a product of the brain, and without a brain there is no mind. The brain is in fact the meat computer that, taking in physiological and environmental inputs, produces the mind as its output. That may sound reductionistic and materialistic, but it happens to be true. Unless, that is, there’s a spiritual homunculus sitting in our heads.

Here are two sharply different views. If we are going to be scientific, then we should ask for some experiment that demonstrates one right and one wrong. But there is no experimental evidence for or against free will.

Brooks is not a scientist, but Coyne is, and I expect more from him. If he is going to lecture us about science, then he should bring some scientific evidence to bear.

Another leftist-atheist-evolutionist who is always lecturing the public about the nature of science is PZ Myers. The Dilbert cartoonist criticizes him:

Over at The Bearded Taint's blog, the citizens have lit torches, grabbed pitchforks and come after me (again). I don't think I have seen more concentrated hate in one place. It's actually quite fascinating from a mental health perspective.

I left my own comments on the Bearded Taint's blog if you want to follow along.

The interesting thing is that I'm reasonably sure my haters and I have exactly the same opinions on the topics they are getting worked up about. But once the Internet decides you are a holocaust-denying, creationist, science-hating, sexist, sock puppet, all evidence seems to support that view. And in this case, these science-loving folks are basing their views on rumors, stuff taken out of context, misinterpretations, faulty memory of stuff they once read but don't fully remember, and that sort of thing.

I'll say it again because it is so interesting: The people who are hating me because of my opinions have exactly the same opinions. They just don't realize it because of the fog of confirmation bias.

Apparently the root of PZ Myers' hatred is that Scott Adams once expressed some skepticism about a Newsweek article on fossil evidence for evolution. Myers hates religion, but Adams does not appear to be religious. Adams regularly posts skepticism about all sorts of things.

Coyne and Myers and blinded by ideology. If they really want to promote science, then they ought to attack those who deny demonstrable facts. But Brooks and Adams are not denying any facts. They are just making observations and stating opinions. Adams is also a comedian, so he also says things just because they are imaginative or funny or provocative. Apparently this is the most offensive quote:

The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.

His cartoons make fun of people much more than that. You have to read him a while to appreciate his sense of humor. He used to sometimes tag comments with BOCTAOE (But Of Course There Are Obvious Exceptions) just for the people who take him too literally.

Update: The New Yorker reviews a new book:

A backlash against pop neuroscience is now in full swing. The latest, and most cutting, critique yet is “Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience,” by Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld. The book, which slams dozens of inconclusive studies that have been spun into overblown and downright dubious fields, like neurolaw and neuromarketing, is a resounding call for skepticism of the most grandiose claims being made in the name of neuroscience. The authors describe it as “an exposé of mindless neuroscience: the oversimplification, interpretive license, and premature application of brain science in the legal, commercial, clinical, and philosophical domains." The book does a terrific job of explaining where and how savvy readers should be skeptical. ...

But the idea that the mind is separate from the brain no longer makes sense. They are simply different ways of describing the same thing. To talk about the brain is to talk about physiology, neurons, receptors, and neurotransmitters; to talk about the mind is to talk about thoughts, ideas, beliefs, emotions, and desires. As an old and elegant phrase puts it, “The mind is what the brain does.” ...

If critics are too pessimistic about what the future holds, they are right about one thing: over the past decade, neuroscience has become overprivileged as a method of examining the mind. Journalists, courts, and sometimes even scientists seem to believe that a brain scan can be more telling than a profile of an individual’s behavior. Perhaps as neuroscience progresses, it is possible for objective, physiological assessment of the brain to win out as the ultimate arbiter of truth when it comes to the mind. But that’s a long way off, if it ever will be possible at all.

That's right, one can be a materialist and still be skeptical about whether the mind will ever be understood from brain scans and similar technologies.

Google blocks my ads

Yesterday I criticized Google for undermining privacy, and today I get an email from them saying that I could no longer put Google ads on this blog because of Little or no original content.

Really? I have had this blog for 11 years, and I have 2818 posts online. There are no autogenerated content or doorway pages or any of the things they complain about. Every post I wrote myself. It is true that my blogging has been light lately, and that I quote my sources, but these habits are not much different from a lot of other legitimate and useful blogs.

Google has the legal right to retaliate against blogs for opinions expressed, but it denies that it does that. I have occasionally criticized Google in the past, such as Google keeps all data, How Google explains its rankings, and How Google punishes. I have also criticized Apple and lots of other companies.

I don't know what Google is doing here. I don't know, for example, whether a human being even looked at my site, or whether its action is part of a systematic campaign to punish certain types of blogs. It has no obligation to tell me. I am just posting the facts. If you rely heavily on Google, you might want to know about its business practices.

Losing medical privacy

Google and Facebook thrive by undermining privacy, and now the CEO says:

A day after breaking an almost year-long silence on a medical condition that had affected the way he speaks, Google co-founder Larry Page said Wednesday that people should be more open about their medical histories.

"I just disclosed yesterday my voice issues, I got so many thoughtful emails from people and advice," he said answering an audience question at the Google I/O developer event in San Francisco. Page said he had originally thought his own medical information should be very private, but the response he got from his blog post caused a rethink.

"At least in my case I feel I should have done it sooner and I'm not sure that answer isn't true for most people, so I ask why are people so focused on keeping your medical history private?"

NY Times reporter Gina Kolata reports:

But geneticists nationwide have gotten a few rude awakenings, hints that research subjects in fact could sometimes be identified by their DNA alone, or even by the way their cells were using their DNA. The latest shock came in January, when a researcher at the Whitehead Institute, which is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, managed to track down five people selected at random from a database using only their DNA, ages and the states in which they lived. And he did it in just hours. He also found relatives — a total of close to 50 people. ...

With so many questions about the privacy and security of genetic data, researchers wonder what research subjects should be told. Leaks and identification of study subjects will never be completely avoidable, said George Church, a Harvard geneticist. And as much as investigators might like to find a way to keep genetic data secure and private, he does not think there is an exclusively technical solution.

“If you believe you can just encrypt terabytes of data or anonymize them, there will always be people who hack through that,” Dr. Church said.

He believes that people who provide genetic information should be informed that a loss of privacy is likely, rather than unlikely, and agree to provide DNA with that understanding.

Advancing technology and Obamacare may make medical privacy obsolete.

I am wondering what the practical consequences would be if everyone's medical, psychiatric, and genomic info were put in a public database. I do not see how I would be personally harmed. Maybe even my insurance rates would go down, as a lot of medical privacy is just hiding data from insurance companies. If the companies can operate more efficiently, then there would be an average benefit to us.

Medical privacy is going to be very expensive. I haven't formed a definite opinion. I want to see the costs and benefits. Nobody is telling me either.

What Do Women Want?

Daniel Bergner is getting a lot of publicity for his new book, and says in an interview:

You debunk the canard of evolutionary biology that men are impelled to spread their seed widely, women to seek one resource-providing mate. Does that mean that biologically women and men are equally inclined to casual sex?

That is what science is beginning to tell us.

No the science does not tell us that. Males seek casual sex while females seek hypergamy. You see it in humans and through the animal world.

His book seems to be an expansion of his 2009 magazine article, What Do Women Want?

He seems to be confused by research showing that women do not have a clear idea of what turns them on. That is, if you ask them about images, things, or behaviors that they like, they will give very different answers from what they are observed to like. Here is an example.

Many people will say that there is a terribly unfair double standard. It takes research to affirm the obvious:

College-aged women judge promiscuous female peers -- defined by bedding 20 sexual partners by their early 20s -- more negatively than more chaste women and view them as unsuitable for friendship, finds a study by Cornell University developmental psychologists.

Notably, participants' preference for less sexually active women as friends remained even when they personally reported liberal attitudes about casual sex or a high number of lifetime lovers. ...

The findings suggest that though cultural and societal attitudes about casual sex have loosened in recent decades, women still face a double standard that shames "slutty" women and celebrates "studly" men, said lead author Zhana Vrangalova, a Cornell graduate student in the field of human development. The study, titled "Birds of a Feather? Not When it Comes to Sexual Permissiveness" and published in the early online edition of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, reports that such social isolation may place promiscuous women at greater risk for poor psychological and physical health outcomes.
"For sexually permissive women, they are ostracized for being 'easy,' whereas men with a high number of sexual partners are viewed with a sense of accomplishment," Vrangalova said. "What surprised us in this study is how unaccepting promiscuous women were of other promiscuous women when it came to friendships -- these are the very people one would think they could turn to for support." ...

"For sexually permissive women, they are ostracized for being 'easy,' whereas men with a high number of sexual partners are viewed with a sense of accomplishment," Vrangalova said. "What surprised us in this study is how unaccepting promiscuous women were of other promiscuous women when it came to friendships -- these are the very people one would think they could turn to for support."

She added that prior research shows that men often view promiscuous women as unsuitable for long-term romantic relationships, leaving these women outside of many social circles.

"The effect is that these women are really isolated," Vrangalova said. She suggested future research to determine whom they could befriend -- perhaps straight or gay men who would be accepting of their behaviors.

The big fat truth

Nature magazine reports:

The report, a meta-analysis of 97 studies including 2.88 million people, had been released on 2 January in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)1. A team led by Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Maryland, reported that people deemed 'overweight' by international standards were 6% less likely to die than were those of 'normal' weight over the same time period.

The result seemed to counter decades of advice to avoid even modest weight gain, provoking coverage in most major news outlets — and a hostile backlash from some public-health experts. “This study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it,” said Walter Willett, a leading nutrition and epidemiology researcher at the Harvard school, in a radio interview. Willett later organized the Harvard symposium — where speakers lined up to critique Flegal's study — to counteract that coverage and highlight what he and his colleagues saw as problems with the paper. “The Flegal paper was so flawed, so misleading and so confusing to so many people, we thought it really would be important to dig down more deeply,” Willett says.

But many researchers accept Flegal's results and see them as just the latest report illustrating what is known as the obesity paradox. Being overweight increases a person's risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer and many other chronic illnesses. But these studies suggest that for some people — particularly those who are middle-aged or older, or already sick — a bit of extra weight is not particularly harmful, and may even be helpful. (Being so overweight as to be classed obese, however, is almost always associated with poor health outcomes.) ...

Public-health experts, including Willett, have spent decades emphasizing the risks of carrying excess weight. Studies such as Flegal's are dangerous, Willett says, because they could confuse the public and doctors, and undermine public policies to curb rising obesity rates. “There is going to be some percentage of physicians who will not counsel an overweight patient because of this,” he says. Worse, he says, these findings can be hijacked by powerful special-interest groups, such as the soft-drink and food lobbies, to influence policy-makers.

So leading nutritionists like Willett will lie to you about food science, because they do not want to undermine their pet public policies or help the food lobby.

A lot of professional athletes have a BMI of around 26. It seems crazy for experts like Willett to argue that there is something wrong with that.

Professors required to be politically correct

Libertarian law professor Ilya Somin brags about how he has the virtue of holding unpopular views. His examples are some typical libertarian views on drugs and nudity, plus arguing that he is in favor of open immigration out of strong opposition to white and/or American nationalism.

It is true that most Americans are against open immigration, but among Jewish atheist immigrant libertarian law professors like Somin, these are among the most cowardly and conformist views that he could possibly take. As VP Joe Biden just explained, Jews have been leaders in promoting immigration of various religions, races, ethnicities, and nationalities to the USA. (Of course they just want Jews immigrating into Israel, but that's another matter.)

No one is protesting Somin's lectures. If he were to take the reverse position, and argue that the USA should cut back on immigration in order to protect its national identity, then he would face the disapproval of his leftist colleagues, and accusations that he is a bigot. I will know that he has the guts to articulate unpopular views when his lectures are protested.

Chicago biology professor Jerry Coyne complains about another professor whose Christian beliefs have apparently influenced his science teaching. There is a campaign to get the Christian fired. Apparently Christianity is an unpopular view in today's university.

If we are going to have immigration reform, then we should have an open and honest debate on the alternatives and consequences. On one side, we have people like Somin who are determined to destroy the American nationality, and to deny that America has any right to adopt policies that are good for Americans. Unfortunately liberalism does not extend to the other side being heard.

VP Biden on Jewish influence

Politico reports:

Vice President Joe Biden spoke at length Tuesday night about the influence of Judaism on the United States, dating back to the country's founding and to the present day as Jews helped shape views on gay rights.

“The truth is that Jewish heritage, Jewish culture, Jewish values are such an essential part of who we are that it’s fair to say that Jewish heritage is American heritage,” he said. “The Jewish people have contributed greatly to America. No group has had such an outsized influence per capita as all of you standing before you, and all of those who went before me and all of those who went before you.” ...

“The embrace of immigration” is part of that, as is the involvement of Jews in social justice movements. ...

“You can’t talk about the women’s movement without talking about Betty Friedan” or American advances in science and technology without mentioning Einstein and Carl Sagan, or music and Gershwin, Bob Dylan and “so, so, so many other people.”

“I believe what affects the movements in America, what affects our attitudes in America are as much the culture and the arts as anything else,” he said. That’s why he spoke out on gay marriage “apparently a little ahead of time.” ...

“Think behind of all that, I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it’s in Hollywood or social media are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry. The influence is immense, the influence is immense. And, I might add, it is all to the good,” he said.

So the Jews control Hollywood and the media, and their pervasive influence is chiefly responsible for radical feminism, uncontrolled immigration, and same-sex marriage.

This is exaggerated. Einstein contributed nothing to American advances in science and technology. After he came to America, his research was mainly in unified field theory, and was a worthless failure. He was also involved in Zionist and Communist political causes. Sagan got a lot of people excited about the possibility of life on other planets and other populist scientific issues. He also supported some leftist political causes. There are other Jewish scientists who contributed much more to American advances.

Currently immigration and same-sex marriage are two of the hottest political issues in the USA. Proposed changes threaten to transform America as we know it. I am just reporting on who Biden says is responsible.

Wanting to ban the truth about immigration

SciAm's John Horgan writes:

But another part of me wonders whether research on race and intelligence — given the persistence of racism in the U.S. and elsewhere – should simply be banned. I don’t say this lightly. For the most part, I am a hard-core defender of freedom of speech and science. But research on race and intelligence — no matter what its conclusions are — seems to me to have no redeeming value. ...

Why, given all the world’s problems and needs, would someone choose to investigate this thesis? What good could come of it? Are we really going to base policies on immigration, education and other social programs on allegedly innate racial differences? ...

I’m sympathetic toward the position spelled out by Noam Chomsky in his usual blunt fashion in his 1987 book Language and Problems of Knowledge:

“Surely people differ in their biologically determined qualities. The world would be too horrible to contemplate if they did not. But discovery of a correlation between some of these qualities is of no scientific interest and of no social significance, except to racists, sexists and the like. Those who argue that there is a correlation between race and IQ and those who deny this claim are contributing to racism and other disorders, because what they are saying is based on the assumption that the answer to the question makes a difference; it does not, except to racists, sexists and the like.”

We have an immigration policy that is rapidly changing the racial and religious composition of the USA. We are considering an immigration amnesty that will accelerate those changes. Shouldn't we get some scientific estimates of the likely effects?

Social science is all about correlations, and discussions of race are technically racist in the term refers to making racial distinctions.

Discussions of sex differences are sexist. Yes, obviously. Understanding the nature of such differences is essential to everyday life. What use is it? Better relationships, for one thing.

I mention below that this subject is one of several that are being pushed out of public discourse.

Horgan has written many worthwhile articles, and I have quoted him before, but he recently wrote: How Can We Condemn Boston Murders but Excuse U.S. Bombing of Civilians?. To answer his question, the Boston bombers were committing terrorism against innocent civilians for the purpose of carrying out a Mohammedan jihad against America and gaining martyrdom in heaven. No civilized society can tolerate such attacks. The US only bombs military targets who are at war with us, and only kills civilians by accident. If the public disagreed, then they could have voted Pres. Obama out of office last year. Horgan has a funny idea about what is too rude to discuss.

Killing mice is moral

The current AAAS Science magazine reports on new research:

Interviewee – Armin Falk
So what we do in the experiment is we show that markets have a tendency to erode moral values. The way we find this out is we contrast decisions taken in what we call a non-market condition, if you like, with decisions taken in markets. In the market and the non-market condition, subjects could trade off money and life, in our case the life of mice, so these are moral consequences. And what we show is that in markets, many more mice die for a given monetary amount compared to a non-market conditions. And we show that in a causal way, markets actually lead to the erosion of moral values. ...

It is absolutely important to stress that the mice used in the experiment were so-called surplus mice. The mice would all have been killed without the experiment.

The abstract says"

We compare individual decisions to those made in a bilateral and a multilateral market. In both markets, the willingness to kill the mouse is substantially higher than in individual decisions. Furthermore, in the multilateral market, prices for life deteriorate tremendously.

So some people play a little game in which people is paid to pretend to kill mice, and that somehow shows that economic markets degrade morals?

To most people, mice are vermin to be exterminated, and killing mice is a moral thing to do. If markets help kill mice, so much the better.

It would be nice if science could somehow tell us what is moral. But this does not, and only tells us that certain transactions are more efficient with markets, and that was known for centuries.

IQ and Immigration Policy

Here is another example of things you cannot say. Slate reports:

Four years ago, long before he’d join the Heritage Foundation, before Marco Rubio was even in the Senate, Jason Richwine armed a time bomb. A three-member panel at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government accepted Richwine’s thesis, titled “IQ and Immigration Policy.” In it, Richwine provided statistical evidence that Hispanic immigrants, even after several generations, had lower IQs than non-Hispanic whites. Immigration reformers were fools if they didn’t grapple with that.

Richwine has now been forced out of Heritage.

If Richwine said something factually incorrect, then his critics would quote it and rebut it. He would correct his error, and move on. But truth is a whole lot more offensive than fiction.

Update: The leftoid The Nation writes:

He’s probably the first person ever to lose his job because of his Harvard PhD dissertation: Jason Richwine, let go by the Heritage Foundation on Friday. The problem: he co-authored their position paper opposing immigration reform; and then somebody discovered that his PhD thesis at Harvard’s Kennedy School was dedicated to the proposition that Hispanics have lower IQs than white people. ...

The last word in this story goes a study published in 2012 the journal Psychological Science. “In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874),” the researchers wrote, “we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood.”

So hispanic immigration will make us more racist?

Things you cannot say

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson writes about John Maynard Keynes:

It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life.

He was apologizing for earlier remarks, which were criticized here and here. It concerned the quote:

The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.

Of course we expect peoples' policy preferences to be influenced by their personal lives. That is why last year's political campaign talked about the lives of the presidential candidates.

So why would anyone say something so ridiculous?

Some questions are politically untouchable, where I cannot get the truth from professors, and so I have to figure it out for myself. I am adding this issue to the list.

Gun control advocate exposed

The UK magazine Nature reports:

With his crisp blue suit and wire-framed spectacles, Garen Wintemute hardly looked frightening as he stepped to the podium last month to address a conference on paediatric emergency medicine in San Francisco, California. But his presence there made the organizers nervous.

Wintemute, an emergency-department doctor, is better known as the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California (UC), Davis. As such, he has published dozens of papers on the effects of guns in the United States, where widespread gun ownership and loose laws make it easy for criminals and potentially violent people to obtain firearms. Wintemute has pushed the bounds of research, going undercover into gun shows with a hidden camera to document how people often sidestep the law when purchasing weapons. He has also worked with California lawmakers on crafting gun policy and helped to drive a group of gun-making companies out of business.

In the accompanying interview, he says at 10:30:

Q: Do you worry that some of these groups such as the NRA perceive you as an advocate for gun control rather than a data-driven scientist?

Wintemute: I am aware of that perception, the perception is wrong.

Wrong? In both the article and the interview, he openly brags about how he has lobbied for various gun control laws. Of course he is a gun control advocate.

An emergency-room physician is not a scientist. I hope he is not doing experiments on patients in the emergency room. Apparently the NRA objects to federal tax money supporting his political lobbying.

Women conceal feeling to men

There is another spate of article on how men are somehow deficient because they lack mindreading capabilities. Here is one:

It's a cliché that men just don't understand women.

Now, new research suggests men really do struggle to read women's emotions — at least from their eyes.

The research, published Wednesday (April 10) in the journal PLOS ONE, showed that men had twice as much trouble deciphering women's emotions from images of their eyes compared with those of men. Parts of the male brain tied to emotion also didn't activate as strongly when the men looked at women's eyes.

While pop culture claims that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, both sexes are pretty similar. Yet despite the genders' psychological overlap, a few small studies in men have suggested they have trouble "mind-reading" and guessing what women are thinking and feeling. For instance, one study found that men interpret friendliness from women as sexual come-ons.

These studies touch on human nature, but fail to say the obvious. Men are much more direct than women, and are much better communicators. Women are programmed to disguise their emotions, and are therefore much harder to read.

If women were more explicit in their sexual come-ons, then life would be simpler for men. But women much prefer to disguise their feelings with ambiguous signals, such as showing friendliness when they intend a sexual come-on.

Salon magazine reports:

Do you often feel misunderstood by men? Do they fail to pick up on fairly obvious nonverbal signals, such as expressions of fear or disgust? Newly published research suggests your perception is entirely valid — but it’s not his fault.

A study from Germany finds that men do a much better job of interpreting one vital set of signals — the emotions conveyed by the eyes — when they’re communicating with another man, compared to another woman.

“The finding that men are superior in recognizing emotions/mental states of other men, as compared to women, might be surprising,” a research team led by psychiatrist Boris Schiffer reports in the journal PLOS ONE. They add, however, that it makes considerable sense in evolutionary terms. ...

Indeed, that ability to read male faces could still prove valuable in business meetings or political showdowns. Unless, of course, your negotiating partner is a woman. So, like our taste for fatty foods, this may be another example of an evolutionarily advantageous adaptation that no longer serves us well. In the words of the 16th century proverb, the eyes are the window to the soul. But for men gazing into the eyes of women, that pane of glass is fogged over.

If men and women have a difficult time communicating, it is mainly because women have a hard time articulating to men.

Since the invention of verbal communication a million years ago, there is very little need for reading faces.
The Salon article drew this comment:

we give a rats ass, we're just waiting for them to stop talking about completely irrelevant crap and get to the point.

We cannot watch football and listen to how you chose the blue socks over the red socks because of thread count.

Holy crap, no kidding. I can't count the times I've thought to myself "It's been 15 minutes of non-stop talking, and I *still* have no idea what she wants from me or what the problem is".

She: "I've got something really important to tell you"
Me: "OK"
She: "Do you remember me telling you about my cousin Gerald who lived in the city? Well it seems that one day he met this girl who had white shoes. The same type of white shoes that Jessica ordered from Eddie Bauer. Well, it seems that Eddie Bauer used to have a yearly sale on their flannel shirts; you know the ones, I use to use them for the cat bed when they got old. Anyway, Jessica's car got broken into the other day and she called me up crying. I told her to call the police, but you know how she has issue with the police due to the fact that her ex was a cop. She told me about this great place for breakfast..."

15 minutes pass

She: "... and so I told her to tell that biatch supervisor to shut the hell up and..."
Me: "What the hell is so important???"
She: "Oh. The toilet's overflowing. I think you need to fix it"

Here is a good online test for reading emotions in the eyes, on some Harvard professor's web site. I somehow got a high score, even tho I thought that I was guessing most of the time. Do you know what "aghast" eyes look like? Apparently our brains are wired for reading faces, but such mindreading is unreliable compared to verbal communication. Reading faces is somewhat useful when the facial expressions reinforce the verbal communication. But it is confusing otherwise. There are people, especially women, who have a terrible time understanding the simplest verbal communications because of faulty mindreading methods.

Trying to do science without math

Harvard professor and world famous ant expert E.O. Wilson writes in a WSJ op-ed:

For many young people who aspire to be scientists, the great bugbear is mathematics. Without advanced math, how can you do serious work in the sciences? Well, I have a professional secret to share: Many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate. ...

If your level of mathematical competence is low, plan to raise it, but meanwhile, know that you can do outstanding scientific work with what you have. Think twice, though, about specializing in fields that require a close alternation of experiment and quantitative analysis. These include most of physics and chemistry, as well as a few specialties in molecular biology.

Newton invented calculus in order to give substance to his imagination. Darwin had little or no mathematical ability, but with the masses of information he had accumulated, he was able to conceive a process to which mathematics was later applied.

I subscribe to this quote, falsely attributed to Galileo:

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.

So if you are innumerate and you want to be scientist, then either learn math or try to avoid anything that involves the quantitative analysis of experiments. Good luck with that.

Determinists behave like beasts

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne has another rant against free will:

This all reminds me of the famous (and possibly apocryphal) response of the wife of the Bishop of Worcester when her husband told her of Darwin’s theory that humans evolved from apes. “My dear, descended from the apes!” she said. “Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray it will not become generally known.”

And it all supports my notion that one motivation for promulgating “compatibilist” free will (i.e., the view that pure determinism of human actions is still compatible with some conceptions of free will) is that if people learned that their actions are predetermined, and that dualistic free will did not exist, they’d either behave like beasts or lapse into torpor and nihilism. (This is, of course, the same argument that religious creationists use against evolution.)

Some of those free will deniers do behave like beasts. See the Wikipedia article on Free will in theology, to see which religions believe in free will, and which do not. I'll give you a hint: which religions are making the world better, and which worse?

It is funny how most academic atheists reject free will, with Richard Dawkins squirming over the issue. I say that free will is a philosophical issue, not a scientific one.

Here is philosopher Sarah Conly arguing for a nanny state, because our free will is lacking:

In the old days we used to blame people for acting imprudently, and say that since their bad choices were their own fault, they deserved to suffer the consequences. Now we see that these errors aren’t a function of bad character, but of our shared cognitive inheritance. The proper reaction is not blame, but an impulse to help one another.

That’s what the government is supposed to do, help us get where we want to go. It’s not always worth it to intervene, but sometimes, where the costs are small and the benefit is large, it is. That’s why we have prescriptions for medicine. And that’s why, as irritating as it may initially feel, the soda regulation is a good idea. It’s hard to give up the idea of ourselves as completely rational. We feel as if we lose some dignity. But that’s the way it is, and there’s no dignity in clinging to an illusion.

I would rather have that large soda when I want one.

Update: Coyne post new research related to this:

In the last few years, neuroscience experiments have shown that some “conscious decisions” are actually made in the brain before the actor is conscious of them: brain-scanning techniques can predict not only when a binary decision will be made, but what it will be (with accuracy between 55-70%)—several seconds before the actor reports being conscious of having made a decision. The implications of this research are obvious: by the time we’re conscious of having made a “choice”, that choice has already been made for us—by our genes and our environments—and the consciousness is merely reporting something determined beforehand in the brain. And that, in turn, suggests (as I’ve mentioned many times here) that all of our “choices” are really determined in advance, though some choices (e.g., whether to duck when a baseball is thrown at your head) can’t be made very far in advance!

This line of experiments shows that it takes our brains a few seconds to make certain types of decisions, and we can be fooled about the timing of those decisions. The brain has many processes, and we are not consciously aware of most of them. This research says nothing about free will.

Gould not on side of angels

A new article praising the late Stephen Jay Gould gets quoted:

As Gould’s longtime friend, the anthropologist Richard Milner, told a correspondent from Discover magazine: “Whatever conclusions he reached, rightly or wrongly, he did with complete conviction and integrity. He was a tireless combatant against racism in any form, and if he was guilty of the kind of unconscious bias in science that he warned against, at least his bias was on the side of the angels.”

This is absurd. Gould is most famous for writing a book denying the reality of IQ. He faked his data, misrepresented the research in the field, made silly arguments, and refused to respond to academic critics who said that he got it wrong. I guess that this was supposed to be against racism, because it is easier to believe in egalitarianism if there is no such thing as intelligence. But to the extent that he was politically biased, it was a Marxist bias. Not angels.

High-powered automatic rifle not used

A California newspaper editorializes:

Overshadowed.

That's what could happen to the growing national consensus that gun laws need to be significantly strengthened to prevent the kind of carnage exploding around the country over the past decade, as deranged gunmen use high-powered automatic weapons with high-capacity ammunition clips to mow down innocent victims.

Since 1982, there have been at least 62 mass shootings across the U.S. -- and 25 of these have occurred since 2006. Seven took place in 2012.

No, none of these used used high-powered automatic weapons. Check the List of rampage killers. In the recent CT school shooting, Adam Lanza used a low-powered semi-automatic rifle. Maybe you could call it medium-powered, but not high-powered. It was lower powered than nearly all of the World War II rifles. And he had to pull the trigger once for each shot.

Lanza used a civilian (non-automatic) version of the M16 rifle. The M16 was designed for the USA military during the Vietnam war. Gun buffs joke that it was designed to be a lightweight rifle more suitable for the smaller Vietnamese soldier. VP Joe Biden has repeatedly recommended a 12 gauge shotgun for home defense, and that is a higher powered rifle.

Last year's killer, James Holmes, used a 100-round drum magazine (not a clip), but it jammed and he switched to another gun.

I post this because gun control laws should be based on facts. We still don't know the psychiatric histories of Lanza and others.

The paper also reports:

SAN JOSE -- Some U.S. military officials "looked the other way" rather than aggressively pursue rape charges against a sexually troubled soldier who ended up killing two Santa Cruz police officers last week, former U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said at the officers' funeral Thursday. ....

Jeremy Goulet, whose 2006 Army court martial in Hawaii for two purported rapes of military officers ended with a plea bargain in which he accepted an "other-than-honorable" discharge, shot and killed two officers investigating a new groping accusation against Goulet on Feb. 26. Had Goulet been convicted of the two rapes, he probably would have landed in a military prison for life.

No, the officials did not look the other way. The prosecuted him. Most cases are plea bargained. It is possible that he got off easy, but it is just as likely that the evidence against him was thin.

There is a movement, led by people like Fox News O'Reilly, to make all sex crimes have draconian prison terms. This trend has a lot of bad consequences, and shows a blindness to the huge variation in the severity of the sex crimes, and the sufficiency of the evidence.

Goulet did turn out to be a bad guy. He shot and killed a couple of Santa Cruz cops. Other cops hunted him down and killed him.

Was Wittgenstein Right?

NYU professor Paul Horwich writes in the NY Times:

The singular achievement of the controversial early 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was to have discerned the true nature of Western philosophy — what is special about its problems, where they come from, how they should and should not be addressed, and what can and cannot be accomplished by grappling with them. The uniquely insightful answers provided to these meta-questions are what give his treatments of specific issues within the subject — concerning language, experience, knowledge, mathematics, art and religion among them — a power of illumination that cannot be found in the work of others. ...

Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking.

Low-fat diet causes heart disease

The NY Times reports on a major new diet study:

About 30 percent of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from heart disease can be prevented in people at high risk if they switch to a Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil, nuts, beans, fish, fruits and vegetables, and even drink wine with meals, a large and rigorous new study has found.

The findings, published on The New England Journal of Medicine’s Web site on Monday, were based on the first major clinical trial to measure the diet’s effect on heart risks. The magnitude of the diet’s benefits startled experts. The study ended early, after almost five years, because the results were so clear it was considered unethical to continue.

The diet helped those following it even though they did not lose weight and most of them were already taking statins, or blood pressure or diabetes drugs to lower their heart disease risk. ...

Low-fat diets have not been shown in any rigorous way to be helpful, and they are also very hard for patients to maintain — a reality borne out in the new study, said Dr. Steven E. Nissen, chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.

“Now along comes this group and does a gigantic study in Spain that says you can eat a nicely balanced diet with fruits and vegetables and olive oil and lower heart disease by 30 percent,” he said. “And you can actually enjoy life.”

The physicians havee been telling us for 40 years that a low-fat diet is the best way to prevent heart disease. This is the latest study that shows just the opposite.

The study compared a low-fat diet to two other diets, for Spaniards at high risk for heart disease. Those on the low-fat diet did significantly worse. It appears that they really wanted to compare olive oil to nuts, but found no difference.

The NEJM paper argues:

Our results compare favorably with those of the Women's Health Initiative Dietary Modification Trial, wherein a low-fat dietary approach resulted in no cardiovascular benefit.35 Salient components of the Mediterranean diet reportedly associated with better survival include moderate consumption of ethanol (mostly from wine), low consumption of meat and meat products, and high consumption of vegetables, fruits, nuts, legumes, fish, and olive oil.36,37 Perhaps there is a synergy among the nutrient-rich foods included in the Mediterranean diet that fosters favorable changes in intermediate pathways of cardiometabolic risk, such as blood lipids, insulin sensitivity, resistance to oxidation, inflammation, and vasoreactivity.38

Perhaps there is a synergy?! In other words, this study tells us nothing about the advantages of individual aspects of the Mediterranean diet, such as olive oil and wine. It only confirms previous studies that the low-fat diet does not help.

Instilling false memory

Steven Ross Pomeroy writes in a SciAm blog:

How to implant false memories in your friends, in four steps:

In The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan argued that implanting false memories in people is not only possible, but is actually pretty easy when attempted in the proper settings with a gullible subject, ...

Once you’ve got your target singled out, the next, and possibly the most critical step, is to fabricate a memory. The false memory should have “taken place” at least a year in the past, not be unduly intricate, and not be something that might engender strong feelings of emotion.

Studies have shown that it’s easy to make people falsely recall small details about events, but as the fake memories grow in complexity and specificity, implantation grows progressively harder, though not impossible. After three interviews, researchers at Western Washington University succeeded in getting subjects to recall details about accidentally spilling a bowl of punch on the parents of the bride at a wedding reception. ...

Still, implanting a false memory in a person, and having them fully believe it, takes some doing. Even in the lab, researchers succeed less than half of the time…

Even sincere and honest people can be duped, so you cannot always believe what they say.

Race not a social construct

I pointed out below that experts regularly claim that gender is a social construct, in spite of obvious and overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Likewise with race. A NY Times blog writes:

Another two decades on, Immanuel Kant, considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the modern period, would manage to let slip what is surely the greatest non-sequitur in the history of philosophy: describing a report of something seemingly intelligent that had once been said by an African, Kant dismisses it on the grounds that “this fellow was quite black from head to toe, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.” ...

Since the mid-20th century no mainstream scientist has considered race a biologically significant category; no scientist believes any longer that “negroid,” “caucasoid” and so on represent real natural kinds or categories.

No, this shows how experts can be wrong. Immanuel Kant is considered a great genius, but most of what he said was worthless. As Steve Sailer points out, you can find the science behind racial traits in the same newspaper. The NY Times reports:

Gaining a deep insight into human evolution, researchers have identified a mutation in a critical human gene as the source of several distinctive traits that make East Asians different from other races.

The traits — thicker hair shafts, more sweat glands, characteristically identified teeth and smaller breasts — are the result of a gene mutation that occurred about 35,000 years ago, the researchers have concluded.

Yes, race is measurable in terms of genes.

Today's lame denials

Here are some lame denials in the news today. Yahoo reports:

San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon said Wednesday the fire was not set on purpose.

“We did not intentionally burn down that cabin to get Mr. Dorner out,” he said.

No, I assumed that they intentionally burned down the cabin in order to kill Dorner. If there was ever a perp that the LA cops did not want to take alive, it was Dorner. But maybe no reward:

LA’s mayor offered the hefty sum for the “capture and conviction” of Dorner. But, since he was presumably killed in Tuesday night’s fire it would be nearly impossible to convict him.

Now there is a lame technicality. The tip did lead to the cops getting their man.

The NY Times was busted wtih a fake car review:

Broder emails regarding the Musk charge that "While the vast majority of journalists are honest, some believe the facts shouldn’t get in the way of a salacious story."

We're preparing a detailed response to the factual assertions in Mr. Musk's post, but I don't think we're going to respond to these and other ad hominem attacks.

Ah hominem? Broder is the one who wrote the false and nasty review. Musk just told the facts.

A supremacist judge complains:

The governor has been criticizing what he calls “the prison lobby” that profits from lawsuits filed against the state over substandard conditions in state prisons.

The administration said in a court filing last month that special master Matthew Lopes may be requiring the state to meet more strin­gent requirements as a way to ensure that “this revenue stream will continue.”

U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence Karlton of Sacra­mento ordered the state to consider withdrawing what he called “a smear.”

“Defendants’ attack con­sists of a raw assertion of unethical conduct, with no supporting evidence nor even any hint that defen­dants actually believe the attack they make,” Karlton wrote. He added later that “the court can only be dis­mayed by the cavalier man­ner in which defendants ... level a smear against the character and reputation of the Special Master.”

He said he takes legitimate allegations of unethical con­duct seriously, but suggested the administration’s filing may violate a court rule that allows sanctions for court filings that are intended to harass or are without any evidence.

Karlton gave the admin­­istration until next week to withdraw the assertion or show why he should not strike it from the court record.

No, it is not a smear to say that the prison lobby profits from these lawsuits, and judge Karlton would recognize that if he were acting ethically. He is acting defensive because he has no good excuse for sticking his nose where it does not belong.

I knew that it was unethical for marriage counselors to seduce their clients, but I just learned that it is a crime in Texas:

A marriage counselor in Texas is on trial for allegedly using a couple’s therapy sessions to convince the husband to have sex with her. She is being charged with sexual assault.

Sheila Loven, 45, was a counselor for an Arlington couple who was having marital difficulties. After advising them to begin attending counseling sessions separately, she and the husband began having sex.

Ultimately she convinced the husband it was best to get a divorce, what with them sleeping together and all. ...

Loven’s attorney said the relationship was real and came from romance. He claims that there was no emotional coercion.

“It had all the elements of any other romantic relationship. They went out at nightclubs and dinner, and they spent almost every night together. What you will not see in this case is any evidence of manipulation,” attorney Adam Burny said.

No, it did not have all the elements. It was missing marriage, honest disclosure, unpaid dating, and the lack of home-wrecking manipulation.

New evidence for bird brains

There is new research trying to convince us that birds are capable of mindreading. AAAS Science magazine reported this a couple of weeks ago:

Are crows mind readers? Recent studies have suggested that the birds hide food because they think others will steal it -- a complex intuition that has been seen in only a select few creatures. Some critics have suggested that the birds might simply be stressed out, but new research reveals that crows may be gifted after all.

And now they report:

Well, jays are actually known as very intelligent birds. Scientists have shown previously that they can plan for the future, that they have sort of some conception of not just the current moment in time, but future moments. And so they thought this would be a good species to study to see if jays also had,maybe,this theory of mind. And the experiment they tried was actually kind of neat. It turns out that jays have pretty complicated courtship displays. And when the male jay – Eurasian jay in this case – is trying to woo a female,he actually feeds her during the courtship display. And he tries to feed her food that she likes. Well it turns out jays have a preference for certain foods. Given the choice, they prefer mealworm larvae, or wax moth larvae, but they can get sick of a food if they eat too much of it. So the scientists also knew that when the birds have been fed a lot of wax moth larvae, they tend to switch to the mealworms after a while because they just kind of get tired of the same food over and over again,kind of like we do. And so the researchers set up an experiment where the male could actually watch what the female was eating. So if the female was eating, for example, a lot of wax moth larvae, the male would start feeding her mealworm larvae,and vice versa. It was almost as if he was saying, look, I know you’re probably getting sick of that. Here’s a different kind of food.

This seems dubious to me. We don't know that the birds are getting sick of the wax moth larvae. Maybe a varied diet is healthier, and the birds sense that. Or maybe they have instincts for a varied diet.

Maybe the male jays have learned, by instinct or experience, that it is easier to get the female's attention by giving her food that is different from what she is eating.

I say:

My theory is that people like to anthropomorphize animals and concoct rich explanations when lean ones suffice. They are convinced that animals have empathy, even tho no one can prove it.

There is other evidence that crows are extremely smart animals, as they can use tools and recognize people. But this is a stretch.

Update: Matthew Cobb comments on the bird study:

Imagining that others experience the same feelings as oneself, or being able to see things from another’s perspective, is an essential part of being an adult human – it’s called having a ‘theory of mind’. Young children find it difficult, and either learn it or develop this ability as part of normal growth. Severely autistic individuals can also fail some of the simple tests that are used to measure this ability. This character, or a primitive version of it, must have been present in our primate ancestors, and there is evidence that chimps can attribute ‘intentionality’ to human behaviour, which suggests they can image what we feel/think.

Actually, the evidence that chimps or other non-human primates read human intentionality is very weak. Ordinary dogs can understand human pointing much better than chimps.

Men and women are from Earth

Apparently it is politically incorrect to find psychological differences between men and women. Even when studies find large and dramatic differences, they are reported as the opposite. Here is a current example:

If men and women were psychologically distinct from one another, then their scores on psychological measures should form large clusters at either end of a spectrum with little overlap between the two groups.

This is the case for physical characteristics such as height, shoulder breadth, arm circumference, and waist-to-hip ratio. Men tend to be tall, have broad shoulders, large arm circumference, and a small waist-to-hip ratio, while the inverse is true for women. A man is extremely unlikely to be taller than a woman, yet have narrower shoulders, for instance.

Yet the same could not be said for the myriad of psychological characteristics examined by the two researchers, including fear of success, sexual attitudes, mate selection criteria, sexual behaviors, empathy, and personality. A man could be aggressive, but verbally skilled and poor at math, for example, combining stereotypical masculine and feminine traits.

“It’s not enough that men, on average, score higher than women on a scale of masculinity,” Carothers told Raw Story. “Nearly all of the men would have to score higher than nearly all of the women on nearly every item of the scale. We did not see that level of consistency with the psychological variables we had.”

Actually women have the smaller waist-to-hip ratio, with healthy women at 0.7 and men at 0.9.

So it is not true that men score higher on all the tests than all the women. There is some overlap in the test scores, of course.

Here is the abstract:

Men and women are from Earth: Examining the latent structure of gender.
Carothers, Bobbi J.; Reis, Harry T.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 104(2), Feb 2013, 385-407. doi: 10.1037/a0030437

Taxometric methods enable determination of whether the latent structure of a construct is dimensional or taxonic (nonarbitrary categories). Although sex as a biological category is taxonic, psychological gender differences have not been examined in this way. The taxometric methods of mean above minus below a cut, maximum eigenvalue, and latent mode were used to investigate whether gender is taxonic or dimensional. Behavioral measures of stereotyped hobbies and physiological characteristics (physical strength, anthropometric measurements) were examined for validation purposes, and were taxonic by sex. Psychological indicators included sexuality and mating (sexual attitudes and behaviors, mate selectivity, sociosexual orientation), interpersonal orientation (empathy, relational-interdependent self-construal), gender-related dispositions (masculinity, femininity, care orientation, unmitigated communion, fear of success, science inclination, Big Five personality), and intimacy (intimacy prototypes and stages, social provisions, intimacy with best friend). Constructs were with few exceptions dimensional, speaking to Spence's (1993) gender identity theory. Average differences between men and women are not under dispute, but the dimensionality of gender indicates that these differences are inappropriate for diagnosing gender-typical psychological variables on the basis of sex.

Full paper here (pdf).

Congress considers Darwin Day

The NY Times reports:

Many Christians, of course, believe that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is compatible with a Christian worldview. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, is comfortable with Darwin, especially as his work relates to the evolution of bodies (souls come from God). In 1996, Pope John Paul II wrote, confirming older Catholic teaching, that “there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith.”

Ronald L. Numbers, a science historian at the University of Wisconsin, said that many evangelical Protestants were once willing to accept the theory, as long as it was applied only to animals, not to humans.

For example, the Tennessee law that gave rise to the famous Scopes trial, in 1925, “banned the teaching of human evolution, not the teaching of evolution,” Mr. Numbers said.

Okay, but it is not just the evangelical Protestants who are uncomfortable with human evolution. So are the liberal scientists who try to deny human biodiversity.

A scientist congressman introduced a Darwin Day resolution:

Whereas the advancement of science must be protected from those unconcerned with the adverse impacts of global warming and climate change;

Whereas the teaching of creationism in some public schools compromises the scientific and academic integrity of the United States education systems;

Whereas Charles Darwin is a worthy symbol of scientific advancement on which to focus and around which to build a global celebration of science and humanity intended to promote a common bond among all of Earth’s peoples; and ...

So we need Darwin Day to protect scientists from global warming skeptics and creationists?!

No, Darwin is a lousy symbol of scientific advancement. Hardly anyone uses him to draw attention to his actual scientific work. Here he is used as a symbol to make some sort of point about global warming and creationism. If they really just want to make a point about science, then they could do that more effectively with animal evolution or some less politicized subject.

Defining contra-causal free will

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne writes:

when I assert that one doesn’t have free will, I am arguing about classical dualistic free will. So when I ask whether we have free will, I am adhering to Anthony Cashmore’s definition (in bold):

I believe that free will is better defined as a belief that there is a component to biological behavior that is something more than the unavoidable consequences of the genetic and environmental history of the individual and the possible stochastic laws of nature. ...

And yes, I know you can define free will so that we have it by definition—it’s our ability to make apparent choices without having a gun to our head, or our evolved ability to consider many factors before “deciding” on a course of action, or the fact that a mammal named Jerry is seen to make decisions, and so on. Hell, I could define free will as simply “it looks to an outsider as if we’re making choices,” and then everyone has it!

To me, the important task of philosophers should not be finding some new definition of free will so that the masses can think that they have it and thus be reassured (after all, false reassurance is what theologians do), but letting people know that our decisions are behavioral outcomes of physical processes in our brain, determined by the laws of physics or indeterminate according to quantum mechanics. Either way, dualism is dead, and educating people about this is the most important thing philosophers can do vis-à-vis the free will question. ...

Sam Harris is right. We are puppets of our genes and environments, and it’s bloody well time we admitted that.

His argument is essentially to say that if you define free will to mean a conscious ability to violate scientific laws, then there is no free will because nothing can violate scientific laws. From this he wants to deny individual responsibility.

Fine. There is no contra-causal free will. There is only the kind of free will that allows us to make choices and decisions. For this to be a scientific matter, there needs to be some experiments that are strong enough to imply his conclusions. I do not see any.

The LA Times reports:

Pedophilia once was thought to stem from psychological influences early in life. Now, many experts view it as a deep-rooted predisposition that does not change.

Like many forms of sexual deviance, pedophilia once was thought to stem from psychological influences early in life. Now, many experts view it as a sexual orientation as immutable as heterosexuality or homosexuality. It is a deep-rooted predisposition — limited almost entirely to men — that becomes clear during puberty and does not change.

The best estimates are that between 1% and 5% of men are pedophiles, meaning that they have a dominant attraction to prepubescent children.

Not all pedophiles molest children. Nor are all child molesters pedophiles. Studies show that about half of all molesters are not sexually attracted to their victims. They often have personality disorders or violent streaks, and their victims are typically family members.

By contrast, pedophiles tend to think of children as romantic partners and look beyond immediate relatives. They include chronic abusers familiar from the headlines — Catholic priests, coaches and generations of Boy Scout leaders.

So do pedophiles really not have any free choice to do what they do? I do not believe it. I believe that people do have the free will to make choices, unless I see some very convincing evidence otherwise.

The UK BBC reports on a new study of mouse genes influencing behavior:

Researchers reporting in Nature crossed mouse breeds and measured the burrows the resulting mice made.

The study has behaivoural implications of many animals, including humans.

"Modular" genetic regions even relate to specific burrow parts, it suggests.

The findings bear out an idea first put forward by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, called "the extended phenotype".

It suggests that our view of genes as controlling only proteins in an individual is tremendously limited, and that genes "express" themselves in a rich variety of behaviours - or in this case, homes.

Human behavior is influenced by genes also, but this is nowhere close to denying free will.

Update: Coyne complains that no one should criticize him anonymously. Okay, I use my real name here. He banned me from his blog (that he does not like to call a blog), so I don't post there.

New vaccine study

Here is a medical news report:

The standard vaccine schedule for young children in the United States is safe and effective, a new review says.

Not exactly. The IOM report did not even consider whether the vaccines are effective. It says:

Vaccines are among the most safe and effective public health interventions to prevent serious disease and death. ...

Driven largely by concerns about potential side effects, there has been a shift in some parents’ attitudes toward the child immunization schedule. HHS asked the IOM to identify research approaches, methodologies, and study designs that could address questions about the safety of the current schedule.

This report is the most comprehensive examination of the immunization schedule to date.

The full report costs $47. The committee did not use a public process, and was controlled by vaccine industry insiders. The abstract says:

The charge to the Committee on the Assessment of Studies of Health Outcomes Related to the Recommended Childhood Immunization Schedule was to (1) review scientific findings and stakeholders concerns related to the safety of the recommended childhood immunization schedule and (2) identify potential research approaches, methodologies and study designs that could inform this question, ... However, the committee concludes that it is not ethical to implement any study requiring thatsome children receive fewer vaccines than recommended as part of the childhood immunization schedule ...

So this is really "the most comprehensive examination of the immunization schedule to date"? They assume that the vaccines are safe and effective, and conclude that it unethical to do a scientific study.

Studying vaccine safety is meaningless unless it is part of a risk-benefit analysis. No such analysis was done. I don't see why anyone is going to be convinced by an unscientific closed-door pronouncement by vaccine insiders.

Detecting cheaters

What happens when cheating is nearly impossible to detect, and has a huge payoff? The popular method seems to be to accuse people years later based on hearsay and gossip, and then punish them as severely as possible as a deterrent to others. That is what is happening to Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Lance Armstrong, and others.

It seems much better to me to have objective standards for cheating, and to apply them in a timely manner or not at all. If that does not seem fair, then change the rules until you find rules that people accept as fair.

A recent chess scandal has occurred when a 2200-level Bulgarian played a tourneyment at a 2800 level. People think that he must have cheated, but no one can figure out how. Computer chess programs are now significantly better than humans, so maybe he secretly used a computer somehow. The best chess computer in the world is Rybka, but it has been banned from computer competition because of some obscure cheating allegation.

Another form of cheating is insider trading:

Juries in Federal District Court in Manhattan have convicted all 11 insider-trading defendants who have taken their cases to trial since 2009, the year that prosecutors began bringing charges arising out its multiyear investigation into criminal activity at hedge funds.

Of the 75 people charged with insider trading crimes — a collection of traders, corporate executives, consultants and lawyers — the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan has secured 71 guilty pleas or convictions.

Some of this insider info does not really need to be secret. Maybe if the info is made public in a more open way, the opportunities for insider trading will be lessened.

If insider trading is easy and profitable, then people will do it.

Here is a game theory model of cheating:

The two-player Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game is a model for both sentient and evolutionary behaviors, especially including the emergence of cooperation. It is generally assumed that there exists no simple ultimatum strategy whereby one player can enforce a unilateral claim to an unfair share of rewards. Here, we show that such strategies unexpectedly do exist. ... Only a player with a theory of mind about his opponent can do better, in which case Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is an Ultimatum Game.

This shows that a mindreading manipulator can outdo a evolutionary best strategy.

Update: Wired magazine writes:

So here’s the thing you need to know: The USADA takedown of Armstrong matters, and it could effect everybody. Because it will enhance the power and reach of a private, non-profit business that has managed to harness the power of the federal government in what’s quickly becoming a brand new war on drugs … with all the same pitfalls brought to you by the first war on drugs.

The USADA is a private outfit. Yet it gets taxpayer money. ...

Nobody cared much about that treaty. And few care much now, really, because it was understood that anti-doping was about testing athletes, and mostly elite ones.

But the Armstrong case isn’t based on testing at all.

New book denies human nature

Razib Khan writes:

Someone named Dan Slater recently wrote a book, Love in the Time of Algorithms, and has an op-ed out titled Darwin Was Wrong About Dating
. The piece is littered with generally unpersuasive refutations of the relevance of a Darwinian framework in understanding the evolutionary origins of human behavior.

Each of Slater's arguments have fallacies. He says that the assumption that men desired more partners is contradicted by having the same average number of partners. Of course they have the same average number of partners. That is a mathematical necessity and says nothing about what men desire.

James Taranto explains the point:

It turns out you can deny evolution and still get published on the New York Times op-ed page. Dan Slater did just that, in a piece yesterday called "Darwin Was Wrong About Dating."

Slater -- who has a new book out in which he claims that online dating, of all things, is revolutionizing the sexual marketplace--sets out to debunk a subspecialty known as evolutionary psychology, which seeks to explain differences between men and women in terms of Darwin's theory of sexual selection. ...

It is crucial to understand that these are only metaphorical "strategies" and that evolutionary "interests"--the interests of one's genes--are not the same as individual interests. Evolutionary psychology posits not that men decide to be promiscuous and women hypergamous because they want to have as many or as robust children as possible, but that these sexual and emotional instincts developed because they were conducive to reproduction over many generations in the ancestral environment.

The Slater article has other flaws. It says:

In 1972, Robert L. Trivers, ... argued that women are more selective about whom they mate with because they’re biologically obliged to invest more in offspring. ...

One of the earliest critics of this kind of thinking was Stephen Jay Gould. ...

In 2009, another long-assumed gender difference in mating — that women are choosier than men — also came under siege. ...

Recently, a third pillar appeared to fall. To back up the assumption that an enormous gap exists between men’s and women’s attitudes toward casual sex, evolutionary psychologists typically cite a classic study published in 1989.

No, these pillars are not falling. Women are more selective and men more interested in casual sex for the obvious evolutionary reasons. It is remarkable to see the NY Times deny basic human nature and evolution.

Bonds and Clemens not proved guilty

There are many news stories explaining that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were not voted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame because of steroid allegations. But no one explains that both of them were acquitted in court of all charges of steroid use and lying about steroids. Bonds was only convicted of one charge of giving an evasive answer. In the words of the jury foreman, "He gave a story rather than a yes-or-no answer." An appeal is pending. If the appeals court is honest, it will rule that the question was irrelevant and that the prosecutor should have insisted on a yes-or-no answer if he wanted a a yes-or-no answer. Maybe Bonds misunderstood the question.

Masculine fields of study

Steve Sailer reports:

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a fun interactive graphic of the sexes of the authors of a couple of million academic papers going back to 1665. For the last 20 years, the most male dominated field studied is math, then operations research, then philosophy, and economics. In philosophy, the most masculine subfields include space and time and set theory, and the most feminine moral philosophy. 

In general, women researchers find living things more interesting, especially young living things.

Especially feminine subfields include sociology of gender, anthropology of dance ethnology, cognitive science of early childhood development, pollution and occupational health of cancer risk, and mycology of yeast.

The single most masculine subfield in the study is the mathematics of Riemannian manifolds.

Unsound recommendation on gun safety

The NY Times reports:

These are accidents, or worse, waiting to happen, and the pediatrics academy reiterated its earlier recommendations that pediatricians talk to parents about guns in the home and their safe storage, and follow up by distributing cable locks.

To limit unauthorized access to guns, the academy recommended the use of trigger locks, lockboxes, personalized safety mechanisms, and trigger pressures that are too high for young children.

Still, the academy emphasized, “the safest home for a child or adolescent is one without firearms.”

Here is the pediatric report:

The AAP supports efforts to reduce the destructive power of handguns and handgun ammunition via regulation of the manufacture and importation of classes of guns. ...

The AAP recommends restoration of the ban on the sale of assault weapons to the general public.

Millions of people have guns for personal protection. That includes AR-15 assault weapons, as they are widely available, customizable, and have standardized parts. Since the pediatric journal is pretending to have an expert opinion on this subject, I looked to see what the support is for the statement that “the safest home for a child or adolescent is one without firearms.” There is none.

Bans on assault weapons have been tried before, so there is empirical data on the effect of such a ban. None is mentioned in the report.

This AAP report is not a report that could be published in a real science journal. Pediatricians are not trained in either firearms safety or in scientific analysis.

The NY Times article shows that firearm deaths are a very small fraction of the accidental injury deaths.

Noncentral Fallacy

Less Wrong claims that the noncentral fallacy is the worst argument in the world:

I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member."

Call it the Noncentral Fallacy. ...

"Abortion is murder!"
"Genetic engineering to cure diseases is eugenics!"
"Evolutionary psychology is sexist!"
"Capital punishment is murder!"
"Taxation is theft!"
"Affirmative action is racist!"

He is right, but it is convenient to give an argument in 3 words.