Columnist obsessed with hating the Pope

Edgar Ross writes:

In 1992, 359 years after the fact, the Catholic Church recognized that Galileo was correct in suggesting that not all heavenly bodies circle the earth. (They didn't change his status from "heretic" to "hero of faith and science" until 2008, suggesting that the Vatican would remain anything but a fast-reacting organization.)

No, Galileo was not declared a heretic, and was never punished for making any scientific suggestions. The Pope even asked Galileo to publish arguments for and against heliocentrism. See Galileo Affair. According to relativity, the choice of a frame of reference determines wheter those bodies go around the Earth.

Nevertheless, Pope Francis has now declared that the church has been excessively obsessed about abortion, birth control and homosexuality. This is really astonishing.

No, he did not say that. See the interview. And the Pope Francis is still
denouncing abortion. The basic teachings have not changed.

Jeremy Brown writes in the Wash. Post:

That theory was proposed by a Polish church official and astronomer named Nicholas Copernicus in 1543 and it suggested that the Earth was not the center of the universe, but rather only one of several planets that orbited the sun.

The Copernican model was a threat to both Jewish and church teachings of the time, because they held that the Earth was the fixed and unmoving center of the universe. This theological position was based partly on a literal understanding of some biblical verses, but mostly on the fact that Greeks had taught the geocentric model and it had been accepted for well over fifteen centuries. ...

It was not until 1835 that the Catholic Church lifted the ban on Copernicus’s book and in that century at least eighteen pro-Copernican Hebrew books were published, but opposition from a minority still remained. In 1898 for example, one rabbi in Jerusalem wrote that the earth was most certainly stationary, and that those who thought otherwise were motivated by “a desire to destroy religion.” A tiny minority of ultra-Orthodox Jews share this belief even today, but such views are fringe indeed, and are not shared by their rabbinic leadership.

The Copernicus book was not banned. It was originally published with the official endorsement of the Catholic Church. Decades later, after the book had been obsoleted by other models, the church revoked its endorsement because of nine sentences sentences. With those sentences omitted, the church had no objection.

Brown blames the Church for accepting Greek teachings, but the more accurate statement is that it was following the accepted scientific teachings of the day. Galileo's main argument for heliocentrism was based on the tides, and the Church was correct in rejecting the fallacious argument. And anyone complaining about a Copernicus ban should really explain the merits of those nine sentences, and no one ever does.

A companion op-ed says:

Bishop Fulton Sheen, the earliest and perhaps best known Catholic televangelist, once famously said, “There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church — which is, of course, quite a different thing.”

Some of this criticism is strange. No other major religion has as good a record of accepting scientific advances. Meanwhile, there is news everyday of Mohammedans killing infidels all over the world.

Academic redshirting more popular

The New Yorker mag reports:

Redshirting is the practice of holding a child back for an extra year before the start of kindergarten, named for the red jersey worn in intra-team scrimmages by college athletes kept out of competition for a year. It is increasingly prevalent among parents of would-be kindergartners. In 1968, four per cent of kindergarten students were six years old; by 1995, the number of redshirted first- and second-graders had grown to nine per cent. In 2008, it had risen to seventeen per cent. ...

On the surface, redshirting seems to make sense in the academic realm, too. ...

The data, however, belies this assumption.

There is a free book, A Nation Deceived, that details the academic advantages to acceleration.

The sports analogy does not work. If you try to accelerate a kid athletically, he sits on the bench. But academically, he learns more. You can put a kid about 6 months ahead by sending him to an expensive private school, but it is a lot cheaper and more effective to get accelerated classes in the public school, if possible.

Killer used name Mohammed Salem

Buried in the reporting on the Washington Navy Yard shooting is this story:

Friends and relatives have also said he had a preoccupation with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, felt slighted as a veteran, had money problems and was so unhappy with his life that he considered leaving the U.S.

Law enforcement officials told NBC News that Alexis created a webpage with the name "Mohammed Salem," but they said he never did anything with it. They said they had found nothing else that might indicate any interest in violent jihad or even in Islam.

So he was just a black Buddhist who heard voices in his head? Are these the same officials who denied that the Fort Hood shooting was Islamic terrorism?

Alexis did prove that so-called assault weapons are not need for this sort of mass killing. He had a plain old low-tech pump-action shotgun and 24 shells. It was just the gun that VP Joe Biden encourages everyone to buy and use for warning shots. And he did it in the area with the tightest gun control laws in the USA.

Update: Alexis was also on the antidepressant trazodone, which is associated with violence in some patients.

Paul Offit plugs his own magic

I have criticized Paul Offit on vaccination, as have others on places like drpauloffit.org but I expected to agree with much of his new book, Do You Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine. I listened to his podcast promoting the book, and it turns out that Offit favors physicians prescribing homeopathic pills in order to trick patients into getting the placebo effect!

He also defended vaccines by saying that Wakefield should never have been allowed to publish his suspicions about the MMR (measles) vaccine. He bragged about how Wakefield has been so thoroughly discredited that no one dares criticize the vaccine establishment anymore.

I am not sticking up for chiropractors, homeopathy, Dr. Oz, acupuncture, but I find that mainstream physicians like Offit have very little appreciation for scientific thinking. A real scientist would let Wafefield pushlish whatever he wants, and then do studies to disprove him. An honest physician would not lie to his patients about placebos.

He leaves me wondering whether he is pushing vaccines for their placebo effect, in part.

Promise to terrorists

I knew that Mohammedan terrorist martyrs are promised 72 Virgins in heaven, but I did not know that they are all the same age as the terrorist. No wonder we don't see 80yo terrorists!

I also didn't know that Tony Blair's sister-in-law (wife's sister) converted to Islam in 2010. He previously converted to Catholicism.

Bonds convicted for telling the truth

I defended Barry Bonds in his conviction and sentencing, and criticized the unethical prosecutors.

To my surprise, his conviction was just upheld:

Upholding the conviction of Barry Bonds on Friday, a federal appeals court found that factually true testimony, if misleading enough, can obstruct justice.

The case before the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco tested the limits of the federal criminal obstruction statute and came down to whether baseball’s home run king had made false, misleading or evasive statements to a grand jury a decade ago in connection to a steroid investigation.

Testifying before a grand jury in 2003, Mr. Bonds was asked whether his trainer, Greg Anderson, ever provided him with injectable substances.

Prosecutors argued that Mr. Bonds’ response, which led to his conviction on one count in 2011, obscured his dealings with Mr. Anderson.

The key part of his response was this:

I don’t talk about his business. You know what I mean? …. That’s what keeps our friendship. You know, I am sorry, but that – – you know, that — I was a celebrity child, not just in baseball by my own instincts. I became a celebrity child with a famous father. I just don’t get into other people’s business because of my father’s situation, you see.

The Ninth Circuit said that while factually true, the statement “served to divert the grand jury’s attention away from the relevant inquiry of the investigation.” And the court said it was also misleading because it implied that Mr. Bonds did not know whether his trainer distributed steroids, conflicting with subsequent trial testimony. ...

“Although the obstruction statute has existed for nearly two centuries, the government cannot point to a single case where a defendant has been found guilty of obstruction based on truthful testimony under oath,” Mr. Bonds’ lawyers wrote in their appellate brief.

This shows that if you are unpopular enough, the feds can convict you of just about anything. When Bonds is interviewed, he can just say, "I was only ever convicted of telling the truth."

The ruling reasoned:

We can easily think of examples of responses that are true but nevertheless obstructive. Consider a situation where a prosecutor asks a grand jury witness if the witness drove the getaway car in a robbery. The witness truthfully responds, “I do not have a driver’s license.” This response would be factually true, but it could also imply that he did not drive the getaway car. If the witness did in fact drive the getaway car, his answer, although not in itself false, would nevertheless be misleading, because it would imply that he did not drive the getaway car. It could also be deemed evasive since it did not answer the question.

There is a difference between a grand jury hearing and a police interrogation. We don't convict people based on their unwillingness to incriminate themselves. In the above situation, the prosecutor would normally repeat the question and insist on an answer. In this case, it is plausible that Bonds simply misunderstood the question or thought that his answer was acceptable.

I haven't followed the case against A-Rod, but I am dubious about that also. He faces the longest finite suspension in MLB history, even tho he has not tested positive for drugs and his penalty does not seem to follow any baseball rules. It appears that the league wanted to cut his career short before he breaks too many records, and so the Yankees don't have to pay him so much.

Human evolution continues

It is funny to see evolutionists who do not seem to believe in the theory. A UK newspaper reports:

Sir David, whose new show concentrates on the ascent of man, said he believed humans had now stopped evolving in physical terms, after developing means to keep even the weakest of the species alive.

Saying we are now able to rear up to 99 per cent of our babies, he added people were no longer subject to Darwinian theories natural selection.

Instead, he proposed, humans would continue to develop in a cultural sense; inheriting knowledge from previous generations and building upon it.

In an interview with the Radio Times this week, Sir David said: “I think that we’ve stopped evolving.

“Because if natural selection, as proposed by Darwin, is the main mechanism of evolution – there may be other things, but it does look as though that’s the case – then we’ve stopped natural selection.

On the contrary, human evolution is accelerating, as documented by Gene Ex,
Hawks, and hbd chick.

This is a sensitive issue, as Darwin said:

At some future period not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes...will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest Allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as the baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla

In fact the opposite has occurred, as the white proportion of world population has fallen ever since, and could drop to 10% in a couple of decades.

I am also amazed when someone brags about how genomic data is going to change the world for the better, but refuses to get the info himself.For example, this TED Talk:

About Richard Resnick's TEDTalk

In this talk, Richard Resnick shows how cheap and fast genome sequencing is about to turn health care (even insurance, and politics) upside down.

But he is personally scared of DNA:

RESNICK: The world has completely changed and none of you know about it.

RAZ: So how is it going to change the world?

RESNICK: In a bunch of ways. ...

RAZ: Have you sequenced your own genome?

RESNICK: No.

RAZ: Why not?

RESNICK: Because I don't want to know. I don't want to - you know. I mean, if I were sick, I would do it for a diagnostic reason, but not for a prognostic reason. And that's the advice that I would give to anybody 'cause you may find a variant that suggests that you're going to get really sick with something terrible and it may never happen.

This is like a bank president being afraid to use an ATM card, or an Apple president being afraid to use a cell phone.

Update: Note also that the genomics lobby overwhelmingly supported Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), making it illegal to use genetic info to get a discount in medical insurance fees. GINA seems entirely based on some sort of phobia about genomic info.

Bad study of ideological bias

Mother Jones cites a new study:

But in another sense, it really doesn't matter at all. These days, even relatively simple public policy issues can only be properly analyzed using statistical techniques that are beyond the understanding of virtually all of us. So the fact that ideology destroys our personal ability to do math hardly matters. In practice, nearly all of us have to rely on the word of experts when it comes to this kind of stuff, and there's never any shortage of experts to crunch the numbers and produce whatever results our respective tribes demand.

We believe what we want to believe, and neither facts nor evidence ever changes that much. Welcome to planet Earth.

The study claims:

The public’s limited knowledge is aggravated by psychological dynamics. Popular risk perceptions, it is thought, tend to originate in a rapid, heuristic-driven form of information processing — what decision scientists refer to as “System 1” reasoning (Stanovich & West 2000; Kahneman 2003). Overreliance on System 1 heuristics are the root of myriad cognitive biases. By fixing attention on emotionally gripping instances of harm, or by inducing selective attention to evidence that confirms rather than disappoints moral predispositions, System 1 information processing induces members of the public variously to overestimate some risks and underestimate others relative to the best available evidence, the proper evaluation of which requires exercise of more deliberate and reflective “System 2” forms of information processing

No, these distinctions have never been established, and the authors are the innumerate ones here. The study devises a trick question, worded in a confusing way. 59% get it wrong, and probably most of those getting it right just made a lucky guess. Then the question is modified for some political purpose.

All the study shows is that if the question is so confusing that no one understands it, then people will sometimes use their prior knowledge to make an educated guess.

Here are some confusing things about the skin cream question. The question fails to say that the two groups were randomly selected, or were otherwise similarly situated. The question suggests that a large number of patients dropped out of the study, but gives no clue how to account for that. The question asks whether "the new cream is likely to make the skin condition better or worse." In that sentence, it is not clear that the cream is to be compared to not using the cream. As a result, the question cannot be answered correctly. It is an exercise in guessing what assumptions to make. Unless the study authors understand why 59% give the supposedly incorrect answer, the whole study is worthless.

There are many academics, particular on the Left, who are always trying to concoct arguments that the public would change their political views if they only understood the facts. Maybe so, but the people who write these papers do not understand the facts.

Ranking individualism

Here are 40 great maps.

The Obama-Putin comparison is funny. Also this one.

This site compares countries according to individuality, masculinity, future time orientation, and a couple of other factors. The USA scores highest in individualism.

I am not sure if these factors are genetic, cultural, or what, but they are surely not changed by a new government or any other short-term change.

Here are also National stereotypes of business meetings. The three types are USA/UK/Germany, Latin American, and Oriental.

Not known how psychiatric drugs work

The New Yorker reports:

Yet the psychiatric-drug industry is in trouble. “We are facing a crisis,” the Cornell psychiatrist and New York Times contributor Richard Friedman warned last week. In the past few years, one pharmaceutical giant after another—GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Pfizer, Merck, Sanofi—has shrunk or shuttered its neuroscience research facilities. Clinical trials have been halted, lines of research abandoned, and the new drug pipeline has been allowed to run dry. ...

The serotonin-imbalance theory, however, has turned out to be just as inaccurate as Schildkraut’s. While S.S.R.I.s surely alter serotonin metabolism, those changes do not explain why the drugs work, nor do they explain why they have proven to be no more effective than placebos in clinical trials. Within a decade of Prozac’s approval by the F.D.A. in 1987, scientists had concluded that serotonin was only a finger pointing at one’s mood—that the causes of depression and the effects of the drugs were far more complex than the chemical-imbalance theory implied. The ensuing research has mostly yielded more evidence that the brain, which has more neurons than the Milky Way has stars and is perhaps one of the most complex objects in the universe, is an elusive target for drugs.

Despite their continued failure to understand how psychiatric drugs work, doctors continue to tell patients that their troubles are the result of chemical imbalances in their brains. As Frank Ayd pointed out, this explanation helps reassure patients even as it encourages them to take their medicine, and it fits in perfectly with our expectation that doctors will seek out and destroy the chemical villains responsible for all of our suffering, both physical and mental. The theory may not work as science, but it is a devastatingly effective myth.

It is widely believed that various mental disorders are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, but that has never been proved. For the most part, psychiatrists just try drugs randomly until the patient accepts a drug and a dose. There is no measurement of an imbalance, nor is any drug regimen chosen to quantitatively correct an imbalance.

Wikipedia factoids

I just found this in a Wikipedia article:

The following are well-known examples of factoids, and the facts which clarify or debunk them. ...

It is often reported that Toronto was named by UNESCO as the most multicultural city in the world. ...

Nonetheless, the belief in this status persisted for years, even finding its way onto UNESCO's own web site.

I am always glad to have Wikipedia correct my factoids, but why is it wrong to report what UNESCO says on its web site?

There is also a useful List of common misconceptions, but for many items, the common belief is not much different from the truth. For example:

Black holes, contrary to their common image, do not necessarily suck up all the matter in the vicinity. If, for example, the Sun were replaced by a black hole of equal mass, the orbits of the planets would be essentially unaffected, but in other situations a black hole can act like a cosmic vacuum cleaner and pull a substantial inflow of matter. ...

Mammals did not evolve from any modern group of reptiles. ... The mammals themselves, being the only survivors of the synapsid line, are the "cousins" rather than "siblings" of modern reptiles. ...

For instance, despite appearing as a word in numerous dictionaries, "irregardless" is sometimes dismissed as "not a word".

At least there are sources for most of the items.

The age of denial

Physics professor Adam Frank writes in a NY Times op-ed that we are in an age of denial:

Today, however, it is politically effective, and socially acceptable, to deny scientific fact. Narrowly defined, “creationism” was a minor current in American thinking for much of the 20th century. But in the years since I was a student, a well-funded effort has skillfully rebranded that ideology as “creation science” and pushed it into classrooms across the country. Though transparently unscientific, denying evolution has become a litmus test for some conservative politicians, even at the highest levels.

Well-funded? Hardly. Nearly all the money is in anti-creationism evolution, such as this UC Berkeley site. There is not one school district in the USA teaching creationism. There used to be a class at Ball State University that included intelligent design among many other readings, but a campaign to fire the professor has resulted in the class being canceled.

Frank would be more persuasive if he could give an example of a scientific fact being denied.

So many Oregon parents have refused vaccination that the state is revising its school entry policies. And all of this is happening in a culture that is less engaged with science and technology as intellectual pursuits than at any point I can remember.

Compliance with the recommended schedule of 20 or so vaccinations dropped to 94% in Oregon. Those who refuse are not necessarily denying any facts. Most of the vaccines are against diseases that are not present in Oregon anyway.

During my undergraduate studies I was shocked at the low opinion some of my professors had of the astronomer Carl Sagan. For me his efforts to popularize science were an inspiration, but for them such “outreach” was a diversion. That view makes no sense today.

The trouble with Sagan is that he became primarily involved in philosophical and political issues of dubious scientific merit, such as intelligent life on other planets and nuclear weapon disarmament.

Contrary to Frank, I think that respect for science is higher than ever. I don't see the public denying scientific facts. It is to the public's credit if they are skeptical about political pronouncements by scientists.

Punishment for disrespect is death

Here is a lesson in Islamic justice:

At approximately one hour and 18 minutes into the programme Mr Nazimi answered a question from a caller, who was identified as “brother Yasir Nahif” (“Mr Nahif”), who asked:

“What is the punishment for the individual who shows disrespect for Prophet Muhammad?”

In response to the question from Mr Nahif, we noted the following remarks made by Mr Nazimi:

“There is no disagreement about this [the punishment]; there is absolutely no doubt about it that the punishment for the person who shows disrespect for the Prophet is death. No one [among the Islamic scholars] disagrees about this. No one disagrees about this. The Koran, hadeeth [orally transmitted quotes of Prophet Muhammad], the actions of the companions of Prophet Muhammad, all testify to this [punishment] and there is no room for doubt in it. Whoever shows disrespect for Prophet Muhammad will be given death penalty. The procedure for carrying out the death penalty is that if there is an Islamic government operating in a country, then the Islamic government will carry out the implementation of this punishment to the one who shows disrespect for the Prophet. However, if there are no Islamic laws [implemented], if Islamic Law is not being abided by, if the Islamic Law is being shredded and is in tatters – and this environment prevails in Pakistan, then [drops the sentence].

So no one in an Islamic country knows the truth about Muhammad because there is no free speech there.

Americans are from the USA

Chris Kirk writes:

My new Colombian friend scolded me for misinterpreting “American.” Didn’t I realize, she lectured, how unfair, imperialistic, and U.S.-centric it is for U.S. people to steal the terms “America” and “American” to refer specifically to their country and themselves? ...

So let me say on behalf of all Americans to anti-“Americans” everywhere: We’re not going to stop using “America.” We should not stop. Get over it.

People from the United States of Mexico call themselves Mexicans. People from the United States of America call themselves Americans, and so does the rest of the world.

But what's with all the Chinese people suddenly calling themselves Asian? Did China get renamed as the Chinese States of Asia? Are they trying to be confused with Russians and East Indians? They used to call themselves Chinese.

Decoding brain scans to read minds

When I post about mindreading, it is usually about perceptions of what is going on in the mind based on external behavior. But there has been huge progress in brain scans understanding coarse brain activity. Neurokeptic reports:

A neat paper from Schoenmakers et al of the Dutch Donders Institute reports on Linear reconstruction of perceived images from human brain activity

It introduces a new mathematical approach for decoding (or ‘brain reading’) the image that someone is looking at, pixel-by-pixel, based on the pattern of neural activity in their visual cortex.

The paper claims to reconstruct letters from brain scans, as shown below.

Religious belief in the genes

Tim Spector writes:

I am frequently asked by journalists to recall the most surprising finding of our twin studies. The study of religion and belief in God is the one that always comes to mind, and the results are not easily accepted by many people. Most people can accept diseases or height and even weight being genetically heritable to some extent, but when it comes to our personal beliefs we tend to be more skeptical. For many, the idea that there is a genetic component to our faith -- or lack of it -- is a stretch too far and damages the concept of self-determination that we hold so dear.

Nevertheless science has shown us clearly that one level of belief in God and overall spirituality is shaped not only by a mix of family environment and upbringing -- which is not surprising -- but also by our genes. Twin studies conducted around the world in the U.S., the Netherlands and Australia as well as ours in the U.K. show a 40 to 50 percent genetic component to belief in God. ...

Skeptics among you might say that the twin studies showing similarity for belief are just reflecting some cultural or family influence that wasn't properly corrected for in the study design. However in one study of adopted twins, the researchers looked at religious belief in a number of adopted twins raised apart. They found exactly the same result -- greater similarity in identical twin pairs, even if raised apart. The conclusion is unavoidable: faith is definitely influenced by genes.

We have laws against discriminating against various immutable inborn characteristics, and laws against religious discrimination, but no one wants to believe that religion is inborn. After all, people freely join or leave religions all the time.

I am referring to Christianity and similar religions here. For Christians, religious belief is accepted as voluntary. Islam and Judaism have the concept that if you are born into the religion, then you can never leave.

Trayvon bought watermeleon juice

I followed the Shooting of Trayvon Martin pretty closely, but I always thought that Martin was out buying Skittles and iced tea. But I just learned that he actually bought watermeleon juice, not iced tea.

Okay, it is not the most important fact in this case. The case was important because President Barack Obama, MSNBC TV, and the American black community have chosen to popularize it as the most egregious example of black persecution in the nation today. There is nothing wrong with buying watermeleon juice, but there is something wrong with our leaders systematically lying to us for the purpose of provoking racial animosity.

The whole prosecution was based on the outrageous claims that George Zimmerman made an incorrect assumption, and that Mertin died thru no fault of his own. There was no testimony that any assumption was false, and a lot of testimony that Martin was viciously and criminally beating Zimmerman. Obama and the others chose a lousy poster boy for their racist cause.

Teaching feelings in class

A Science Friday broadcast last week was on emotional intelligence:

Some psychologists say teaching emotional literacy in school is key to better behavior—and better grades. Marc Brackett and Maurice Elias, two experts in social emotional learning, talk about how emotional literacy is woven into a standard curriculum, and how it can tackle problems like bullying and absenteeism.

That may sound plausible, but they lost me at this point:

We believe that all emotions are valid. We don't value any emotion over another. [at 9:50]

They go on to say that it should be normal for all the teachers and students to share their emotions and feelings with others at school.

No, this is crazy. I want the chemistry teacher to teach chemistry, and not subject the class to his personal emotional feelings.

This is another example of the feminization of the schools. See Boys Adrift, by Leonard Sax for many other examples.

Heritability of baseball and business

The latest Freakonomics podcast claims that business competence is not heritable, and gives this example:

DUBNER: So traits that are important for something like sports are pretty heritable. Consider the son of a Major League Baseball player. You want to know how much more likely it is that he’ll also play in the majors compared to the average kid? Eight hundred times more likely. Not eight times, eight hundred. ...

McGUE: Other traits are much less heritable. Most behavioral traits would be a lot less heritable than height. So personality characteristics, maybe the heritability estimate would be on the order of forty to fifty-percent. IQ might be higher. Might be fifty, sixty, some would argue seventy-percent. Do you know the story of the Vanderbilts?

The original Vanderbilt, at least the original rich one made his money in the railroad business in the 19th century. ... But after that the wealth started to really digress. To where today, if you think about it, how many leaders of industry do you know named Vanderbilt? You don’t know any. Even though that was his goal a hundred and fifty years ago, to establish this family dynasty. You don’t know of any famous Vanderbilts in the railroad business or anything.

Yes, we all do know a famous and accomplished member of the Vanderbilt family. CNN TV anchor Anderson Cooper is the son of Gloria, the one who was supposedly the proof of the family's decline. The show did not mention Cooper. (Cooper himself is gay, and not likely to have an heir.)

The show actually have several examples of heirs to successful businesses who went on to also be extremely successful, both in the USA and overseas.

I did not know that rich Japanese businessman will legally adopt a 25yo son in order to have a more competent heir, and that this is so common that the median age for adoption in Japan is about 25.

Harvard attack on science

Harvard psychology professor Steve Pinker writes:

When Harvard reformed its general education requirement in 2006 to 2007, the preliminary task force report introduced the teaching of science without any mention of its place in human knowledge: “Science and technology directly affect our students in many ways, both positive and negative: they have led to life-saving medicines, the internet, more efficient energy storage, and digital entertainment; they also have shepherded nuclear weapons, biological warfare agents, electronic eavesdropping, and damage to the environment.” This strange equivocation between the utilitarian and the nefarious was not applied to other disciplines. (Just imagine motivating the study of classical music by noting that it both generates economic activity and inspired the Nazis.) And there was no acknowledgment that we might have good reasons to prefer science and know-how over ignorance and superstition.

The Harvard quote is much worse than that. Even those supposedly negative aspects of science have helped millions of people, and hardly harmed anyone. The quote says a lot about the prejudices of Harvard professors.

The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness. And they have failed to define a progressive agenda. Several university presidents and provosts have lamented to me that when a scientist comes into their office, it’s to announce some exciting new research opportunity and demand the resources to pursue it. When a humanities scholar drops by, it’s to plead for respect for the way things have always been done.

The Harvard education is obsolete. The students would probably be better off if the humanities departments were abolished.

Upddate: Philospher Massimo Pigliucci disagrees with Pinker.

East West differences

Here is evidence that Easterners (ie Chinese) think differently from Westerners (ie Americans). The videos have tests that you can take for yourself, to see the differences.

One difference is that Americans emphasize nouns while Orientals emphasize verbs. The preference for nouns and objects means that Americans take more objective views.

Computer programmers also have such a split. Early programmers preferred the verb view, and languages were procedural. Eventually they were overtaken by object-oriented languages and programming.

Americans are also much more individualistic. These differences in world-view can be shown by asking questions about interpretations of drawings. Some of these experiments have disproved some previous ideas about the universality of human nature.

The extreme collective view is fictionalized as the Borg of Star Trek:

The goal of the Borg is assimilation. That means destroying individualism by merging everyone into a collective consciousness. Before taking over, they say, "You will be assimilated" and "Resistance is futile."

The book The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why has more detail. Here are examples:

Most toddlers who grow up in a European language environment learn new nouns at twice the rate at which they learn verbs. East Asian toddlers learn verbs at a faster rate than they learn nouns. (p. 149)

When asked to describe themselves either in particular contexts or without specifying a situation (e.g. I work very diligently on school projects, I am a loving child, or I like to cook with my friend vs. I am loving, diligent, or I like to cook ) Japanese people had difficulty describing themselves without referencing context; Americans not only preferred to describe themselves in terms of universal attributes, but many had trouble understanding the concept of describing themselves 'in context' at all. (p. 53)

I have no idea whether these differences are cultural or genetic. The book seems to assume that they are cultural, but GNXP blog writes:

Nisbett has a collection of studies that he bandies about, which reinforces stereotypes and preconceptions about "Asian thinking" vs. "Western thinking."

The West is reductionist, the East is holistic
The East is accepts contradiction, the West must be consistent
The West focuses on the object, the East observers the context

...and so forth. This is a recapitulation of tried & true generalizations. ...

As a psychologist, I assume Nisbett knows of the work of Jerome Kagan, which shows quite clearly that different races have somewhat shifted levels of extroversion from infancy. I don't know where this would fit in in with Nisbett's theories, but it seems likely that a given cultural matrix would shape individuals over generations by selecting for a certain personality type that is congenial to succeeding when certain social assumptions are ubiquitous. A good test would be Asian children adopted by white Americans and raised in The United States.

Some other differences are that America has nuclear families, while Asia has extended families. Someone who grows up in a nuclear family is much more likely to believe in individualism and personal autonomy. Another difference is that Western languages use a phonetic alphabet, while that invention seems to have never reached the Far East. Perhaps a phonetic alphabet leads to reductionist thinking.

Asian women often prefer to date white American guys, for reasons listed here, here, and here. Or read about the dysfunctional Korean dating scene. But these omit what I think is the biggest reason -- family type. When an Asian women marries and Asian man, she marries into his whole family. She will forever have in-laws telling her what to do, and she will never be good enough for them. If she marries an American man, she only has to keep her husband happy.

Update: T. Greer raises questions about the rise of the West:

Between 1760 and 1820 Europe's wealth exploded - and so did its energy use. The two trends are intimately related. ...

With this knowledge we can amend the original question. "Why did the West diverge from the rest?" is replaced with the more focused "Why did Western nations have the technical and scientific expertise to pioneer non-animate energy sources and an economic system that allowed these new methods of production to spread across the West?" ...

Rather than focus on why Europe diverged from the rest in 1800 we should be asking why the North Sea diverged from the rest in 1000.

There is no agreement about the answers. Possible causes are Christianity, nuclear families, and scientific advances.

Google scientists make unscientific attack

Google has attracted these leftist scientists:

In 2011 Google appointed 21 Google Science Communication Fellows (GSCF) – academics representing the cream of US climate-change science – and tasked them with exploring new ways of communicating the issue to the public. On Thursday, 17 of the GSCF did just that, and called out Google for its own failings in an open letter.

This public shaming of their sponsors was inspired not by Google's operational practices, they said, but by its political actions – specifically Mountain View's active support for Senator James Mountain "Jim" Inhofe (R-OK).

The letter says:

Among his most notorious statements, Senator Inhofe has outrageously claimed that climate change is "a hoax on the American people" and, in the absence of a shred of factual evidence, accused climate scientists of being "criminals."

Sen. Inhofe does like the word "hoax", but usually for catastrophic global warming. I never heard him say that climate change is a hoax, and the letter does not provide a reference.

This is pitiful. When scientists complain about someone else being anti-science, I expect them to show off their scientific thinking and document the errors. This letter does not.

But Inhofe's assault on the scientific community is not a difference in climate policy; it's a strategy designed to promote dysfunction and paralysis; to destroy the reputation of scientists and the legitimacy of their institutions; and to undermine our ability to find common ground.

Now they are doing mindreading about motives. Here is a description of Inhofe's book:

Americans are over-regulated and over-taxed. When regulation escalates, the result is an increase in regulators. In other words, bigger government is required to enforce the greater degree of regulation. Bigger government means bigger budgets and higher taxes. "More" simply doesn't mean "better." A perfect example is the entire global warming, climate-change issue, which is an effort to dramatically and hugely increase regulation of each of our lives and business, and to raise our cost of living and taxes. In The Greatest Hoax, Senator James Inhofe will reveal the reasons behind those perpetuating the Hoax of global warming, who is benefitting from the general acceptance of the Hoax and why the premise statements are blatantly and categorically false.

Again, this is sloppy language because the book says that man-made catastrophic global warming is a hoax. It seems plausibe to me that Inhofe's motives are exactly what he says, and that his strategy is not designed for any of the things alleged in the letter.

Inhofe is not a scientist, and may misstate the science for all I know. But these scientists are just making a stupid personal attack, and they should know better.

Meanwhile, the UK BBC reports on alarmist research:

Shifts in climate are strongly linked to increases in violence around the world, a study suggests.

US scientists found that even small changes in temperature or rainfall correlated with a rise in assaults, rapes and murders, as well as group conflicts and war.

The team says with the current projected levels of climate change, the world is likely to become a more violent place.

Wired is against diversity in Hollywood

Wired magazine wants to boycott s sci-fi movie because the author of the book has some Mormon opinions:

In a recent statement to Entertainment Weekly, Orson Scott Card responded to a proposed boycott of the upcoming film adaptation of his novel Ender’s Game by informing the movie-going public that it doesn’t really matter that he’s been working ceaselessly for the last decade to make sure gay people don’t get basic human rights, or that he advocated the violent overthrow of the government should same-sex marriage become legal, or that he’s used his position as a popular author as a platform from which to spew increasingly aggressive anti-equality rhetoric like his comment in a 2004 essay that gays “cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.”

This is ridiculous. Orson Scott Card has not advocated the violent overthrow of the government. He has opposed same-sex marriage, but so have Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and millions of others.

Hollywood is almost entirely pro-gay. Is anyone boycotting Hollywood? Of all the major political interest groups in the USA, I think that the gays and lesbians are the most intolerant.

Fast food burgers are most nutritious

Freakonomics considers:

It has been my gut-level (sorry, pun) feeling for a while now that the McDonald’s McDouble, at 390 Calories, 23g (half a daily serving) of protein, 7% of daily fiber, 20% of daily calcium and iron, etc., is the cheapest, most nutritious, and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history.

I said something similar back in 2007. To the best of my knowledge, no one has shown that any other food is better.

Update: NY Post columnist agrees.

Evolutionists have many ideological disagreements

Evolutionists are always telling us that it is extremely important that evolution be taught in schools, but see Jerry Coyne and Kevin Padian where they sharply disagree about the meaning of evolution, natural selection, fitness, and other essential concepts, and disagree about whether evolution is necessarily intolerant of religion.

Coyne also defends evolutionary psychology, after previously being a critic:

One gets two impressions when listening to the skeptics’ criticism of evolutionary psychology. First, they haven’t read widely in the discipline, and are criticizing either pop-culture versions of the field or a caricature (born of ignorance, possibly willful) of EP. Even I know that EP advocates don’t often publish studies that rely solely on undergraduates.

Second, it’s pretty clear that the opposition to evolutionary psychology from these quarters is ideologically rather than scientifically motivated. One gets the feeling that research on gender differences shouldn’t be done at all because it’s either designed to repress women, motivated by the desire to do that, or has the likely outcome of promoting discrimination.

I get the impression that the whole field of evolution is overrun with weird ideological battles. Coyne is frequently attacking other professors for being insufficiently hostile to religion.

No emotional appeal to grownups

David Denby writes a New Yorker review:

WORLD WAR Z

The first large-scale digital spectacle in years that’s likely to have some emotional meaning for grownups. It’s just a big zombie movie, but it stirs up fears of plague and anarchy and ...

No, there is no emotional meaning for grownups. There are a lot of action scenes centered about Brad Pitt. People turn into rabid zombies 12 seconds after a bite. The zombies spread around the world because no one bothers to check whether there are any zombies on board airplanes. Pitt is on some UN mission that makes no sense, but he never reports to his superiors anyway. He only took the job because of a promise to save his family.

While civilization collapses, none of the good guys dies or becomes a zombie. There is no significant character development or moral issues. The movie was supposedly based on a book, but the book did not have the Pitt character, so I don't see how there could be much connection beyond the title.

The low-budget amateurish 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead is vastly superior in terms of emotional appeal to grownups.

I am not sure whether the "Z" stands for Zombies or Zionism. If there is any message to the movie, it is that the Zionists have it right, and the only way to preserve civilization from the invading overpopulating barbarians is to build 100-foot walls to keep them out or to shoot them on sight. There is no mention of curing them or coexisting with them. The front lines are places like Jerusalem borders and Newark housing projects.

Man of Steel is similarly entertaining as a mindless 3-D action movie, but it is a disaster for anyone who likes the Superman character. The movie re-invents the Superman story, and abolishes "mild-mannered reporter", secret identity, vulnerability to kryptonite, and "truth, justice, and the American way". He is a coward who is unwilling to face the public or stand up for his beliefs, and who timidly surrenders to the evil General Zod. We are not sure if he even has any beliefs, as he has to collect a lot of advice before he can make a decision. Lois Lane has more guts than he does.

The movie is anti-American. Superman is even played by a dopey British actor, and his father has an Australian accent. Hollywood makes most of its money outside the USA, so maybe it thought that wrecking an American comic hero would have some global appeal. Again, there is no emotional appeal for grownups. Maybe that is a trend. It is fun to watch all the steel and destruction, as long as you do not take these movies seriously.

Google punishes me and my links

Google has blackballed my blog, and has now refused to consider this blog a legitimate blog:

Thank you for providing us with additional information about your site. However, after thoroughly reviewing blog.singularvalues.com and taking your feedback into consideration, we're unable to re-enable ad serving to your site at this time, as your site appears to still be in violation.

When making changes, please note that the URL mentioned in your policy notification may be just one example and that the same violations may exist on other pages of your website. Appropriate changes must be made across your entire website before ad serving can be enabled on your site again.

If you'd like to have your site reconsidered for participation in the AdSense program, please review our program policies and make any necessary changes to your webpages. 

Once you've fully resolved any issues with your site, please review this Help Center article to learn more about how to create a successful appeal.

We appreciate your cooperation.

Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team

I have reviewed their policies, and I comply with all of them. Google refuses to make any more specific objection. My conclusion is that Google objects to my opinions, such as occasional criticism of Google, as this info-graphic.

I was not getting any ad revenue anyway, but it is annoying to be downranked so I am much harder to find with Google searches. Furthermore, Google has a policy of negative page-rank, so a blackballed site also poisons other sites. I just got this email:

Dear blog.singularvalues.com Webmaster,

We are contacting you in regards to http://bergellaw.com which has been affected, by recent Google updates. We realize that it was requested that these links be created. It is unfortunate that Google has deemed these links to be 'bad' but as a result of these links, and the updates we are losing business and experiencing financial difficulties. We would like to request your assistance in removing the links before we are required to take further actions. Below we have provided a list of instances in which our link appears on your site. ...

In other words, this law firm's site has a lower page rank just because I link to it. Normally business like links because they add to page-rank, but not if a negative number is added.

The problem is in how Google monopolizes web ads. The Google spider is not smart enough to figure out whether my link to bergellaw.com is an editorial comment or a paid ad. Paid ads compete with the Google AdSense network that generates most of Google's income. Google says that its ads are superior because they are more contextually relevant. Google has a policy of punishing sites that do not meet its standards of contextual relevance. In my case, the links to the law firm were not ads, but Google apparently cannot tell the difference.

Admittedly, Google hosts this blog, so maybe I should not be complaining. I was still using Google Reader, until it was shut down this morning. I am just reporting on how Google makes its money. Apple and Microsoft have done worse things. Yahoo search is just as good as Google, and does not use monopolistic practices.

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.