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.

What I learned in 2012

Here are several things I learned this year.

Identity politics determined the election. Pres. Barack Obama was re-elected by a coalition of non-whites, non-Christians, and unmarrieds. What they had in common was a celebration of the decline of WASPs and traditional American values. Hardly any of those voters can explain what good came from ObamaCare or the Afghan war or all the bailouts or any other Obama policy.

No presumption of innocence. Jerry Sandusky was convicted based entirely on recovered memories of people who are suing Penn State for millions of dollars. There was no hard evidence or contemporaneous complaint. I never heard anyone even consider the possibility that the accusers could be lying. Likewise, George Zimmermann and Lance Armstrong have been railroaded on accusations that would never hold up in a fair court. I said I learned this in 2011, but the 2012 examples are more extreme.

Decline of marriage and family. Marriage has been declining for a long time, but three stories convinced me that it has reached a tipping point. One was the year-long attempt by San Francisco officials to bust up Sheriff Mirkarimi’s marriage, even tho there was no harm or complaint. Second was a California law to give family court judges the discretion to name three or more legal parents, based on the so-called best interest of the child. While the governor did veto the law, no one pointed out how damaging such a law is, and a couple of other states adopted similar laws without much controversy. The law will be back. Third, the courts ruled that it is unconstitutional for California voters to give same-sex couples all the privileges of marriage without calling it marriage. While the case is under US Supreme Court review, public opinion has shifted, and it is no longer a case of LGBT rights. Marriage and family as we know them must be destroyed.

Corruption of the hard sciences. The soft sciences have been corrupt for a long time, but now physics, the greatest of the hard sciences, is also. The story is too long to describe here, and I explain on the Dark Buzz blog. The big physics story of the year was the discovery of the Higgs boson, and the big non-story was the failure to find supersymmetry, strings, extra dimensions, parallel universes, entropic gravity, black hole firewalls, or any of the other wild concepts being promoted by today's theoretical physicists.

Scientists confused about free will. Neuroscientists, evolutionists, atheists, and others are frequently telling us that experiments prove that we have no free will. Furthermore, they say that their view is a consequence of their materialist world view that all scientists must have. The argument is fallacious. I agree with John Horgan who has resolved to believe in free will.

Hostility towards group evolution. The case can be made that group selection has allowed the social animals (ants, termites, bees, and humans) to conquer the Earth, as argued by E.O. Wilson. And yet mainstream evolutionists adamantly deny that there is any such thing. A big cause of this hostility is the example of Judaism being viewed as a group evolutionary strategy. On that subject I learned that Jews are vastly overrepresented at elite universities, with quotas being used against white Christians and Orientals.

Nuclear power is safe. The final reports are in on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, and it was a worst-case scenario. It had the most unsafe plants, the worst earthquake, and the worst tsunami. Many thousands were killed, but none from the nukes. Most leftist environmentalists tend to be alarmists about global warming and also strongly opposed to nuclear power. But nuclear power is the only large-scale carbon-free source of energy.

Left-right political divide. People have political differences for many reasons, but it was recently demonstrated that liberals do not understand conservatives. That is why conservatives are able to address what liberals have to say, but liberals usually completely miss the point. Also I learned about the origin of the nuclear family in NW Europe, the American nuclear family and how that shapes political opinions.

Update: There is some research saying that people who believe in free will do a better job of keeping their new year's resolutions. Eg, see here.