Month: September 2009

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Manzi's claim is incorrect. Coyne does not claim “that evolution through natural selection demonstrates that there is no divine plan for the universe”. He actually says religious people see our world as part of an unfolding and divinely scripted plan” and “these Faithful… have tweaked the theory of evolution to bring it into line with their needs”. The author says there is plenty of room within the bounds of science to ponder questions of the beginning, the end, and our purpose, and Coyne does not say otherwise. There are not any religions (at least ones that require faith) that operate within the bounds of science, and those that have twisted evolution to fit their doctrine are causing real harm to science and society. This is of course not new, but should be condemned for what it is, propaganda, and intentionally misleading people for the benefit of a corrupt institution is wrong.

Another reader:

I think both Wright and Manzi have a weird tendency to get it exactly wrong when writing about natural selection, which is manifested in the insistence on labeling it as an "Algorithm" (especially with that insidious capital A).  I think the label reflects a considerable bias, since the algorithms we all know and love (in the computer age) are all *written*, and written with a purpose. But there's simply no evidence for a writer in the genetic processes of reproduction, despite the fact that those processes happily result in evolution described by natural selection, and the "purpose" of evolution (i.e., reproductive fitness) is simply a logical consequence of its existence in the first place.  And since religions have long used the majesty of life as a primary argument for a creator, I think we have to concede, by virtue of the logical principle of parsimony, that the complete plausibility of a godless model to account for it (thanks to the concepts introduced by Darwin), along with the lack of any evidence for a god-based model, counts as a significant stroke against god's apologists.

Another reader:

You appear to assert that ultimately, randomness, like other features of nature, could have been built into the programming of nature and that therefore, it is impossible for scientists, in this case, scientists working in the the biological science of evolutionary biology, to reach a consensus on indeterminacy that is empirically testable in a scientific sense.  But the problem with your argument, which you imply, and which maybe you did not intend to imply, is that where science cannot go, religion and philosophy are free to enter.  And that religion and philosophy must be given free reign to step in and assert as true without any corresponding need for evidence various assertions of what is undeniably true, likely true, or should be belived as true; and that whatever these assertions are, whether made by religion, based on faith, a received orthodoxy, tradition, spiritual practice or meditation, or whether made by philosophy, based on argument or moral or other intuition, they should, for some inexplicable or poorly explained reason, receive credence because it is impossible to accumulate testable empirical evidence on such subject matter.  To which I reply:  "The [gentleman] doth protest too much, methinks".

Another reader:

I wonder if you've heard of epicycles. Epicycles were invented by the faithful to account for astronomical observations not in keeping with geocentrism. The inventors "knew" the Earth was the center of the Universe. But more and more observations indicated otherwise. Instead of reevaluating their basic assumption, they invented epicycles to account for inconsistencies.

You're right: there's nothing about evolutionary science that disproves it was God's plan all along for humanity to come into existence through an evolutionary process. But to embrace that notion in the face of Evolution's credence over reevaluation of your initial assumption — God exists and he willed us into existence — is just epicycling. 

A final reader:

It seems to me that you have missed the point of Coyne's argument, which is a boilerplate, although tacit, application of Occam's Razor.  It goes like this.

1. Evolution explains biology in terms of purely physical phenomena.

2. Explanations involving God posit non-physical phenomena.

3. It is rationally compelling to prefer theories that posit as few fundamental kinds of things as possible. 

Therefore, it is rationally compelling to prefer evolutionary explanations that do not posit God.

Occam's razor is essential to evolution – the removal of purpose-driven biology because it is unnecessary is exactly its point.  If one has a general scientific outlook, one that includes Occam's razor, evolutionary theory without designers or master plans is pretty compelling. One might question the assumption of Occam's razor.  But, if one did, one would have a pretty hard time explaining why they should find evolutionary theory so compelling to begin with.  

To instead drive a teched out version of a cosmological argument involving ultimate beginnings or explanations completely misses the point.  That's another argument entirely that is more usefully discussed independently of evolution. 

If your position is merely that one can logically reconcile belief in God with belief in evolutionary theory then the answer is obviously, "yes".  But to believe that God is involved in evolutionary explanations – at any level – involves serious intellectual tension. 

by Chris Bodenner

KHN's Jordan Rau reports:

Under the House proposal, people receiving government subsidies could still end up spending 20 percent or more of their annual incomes on premiums, deductibles and co-insurance, according to estimates prepared by the House Committee on Ways and Means and obtained by Kaiser Health News. That financial load could grow substantially if the proposal's financing — $1 trillion over a decade — is pared back as congressional leaders come under pressure to reduce the legislation's costs. "What we see every day is that families and individuals who have high co-payments or high out-of-pocket expenses that they have to satisfy are virtually in the same situation as people who don't have insurance. They delay or don't seek care," says Elisabeth Arenales […] "Most of the conversation" in Washington "is focusing on premium costs and not out of pocket expenses."

by Chris Bodenner

The pop-ups are a bit annoying, but Bill Withers makes up for it:

Gold dust from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

by Chris Bodenner

If you have type-O blood, that's how mosquitoes see you. Cecil Adams explains.

by Chris Bodenner

NIAC's Michelle Moghtader Masoud Shafaee explains:

Two of Iran’s most notable dissidents, Akbar Ganji, a former Revolutionary Guard member who exposed the state-sanctioned Chain Murders of the 1990s, and Shirin Ebadi, the head of a civil and human rights legal practice awarded the Noble Peace Prize, have both come out strongly against any new sanctions. They, along with many in the reform movement, argue that sanctions only harm the Iranian people while strengthening the regime.

A recent slew of airplane crashes in Iran this summer serves as a useful example. Because of U.S. sanctions, both U.S. and European airline manufacturers are prohibited from selling new planes or replacement parts to the Islamic Republic. Many within Iran consider the deaths resulting from the poor state of the country’s air fleet to be a direct consequence of the sanctions.

(Hat tip: NIAC)

by Chris Bodenner Here are some of the better photos sent in this week:

Studio City, 12.30 pm, August 29

Pasadena, 1.40 pm, August 30

Los Angeles, 5.42 pm, August 29

Sherman Oaks, 1.24 pm, August 29

by Patrick Appel

A reader responds to Manzi's post on his blog. A snippet:

I think Manzi is using his quantitative skills to pound a screw.

For one thing, Manzi brushes the entirity of "social cost of carbon" into the potential decline in world economic product (a loss of approximately 3%).  This not only excludes costs which I would deem "social" such as habitat and species loss, land degradation, and changes in local climate, but also aggregates the risk into a global pool, which is assuredly too crude a measure to make a meaningful judgment.  To take the extreme case, what if the 3% loss were entirely distributed in 6% of the world's population losing half their economic productivity?   The 3% measure looks small on paper, but in this instance 180 million people (over half the population of the US) just had their livelihoods utterly destroyed, to the point that they are now refugees.  While this extreme concentration of risk is certainly fiction, it is patently clear to both the casual reader and the sophisticated analyst that the costs of climate change will not be equally distributed.  The risks to the majority of the 160 million in Bangladesh should be enough to invalidate such crude aggregation of costs.

For another, in his association of all British driving taxes with "anthropogenic global warming (AGW)," he elides the myriad other costs of driving, including public health, land use, public land preservation, safety and enforcement, etc.  Yes, once again these costs are difficult to quantify.  This, however, does not mean they do not exist.

After dozens of paragraphs of analytical spinning, Manzi reaches the third to last, and engages in a breathtaking series of theoretical leaps.  Costs are impossible to quantify, therefore "It becomes pure power politics," and therefore is a state imposition of economic costs without quantitative justification, and is therefore akin to total state planning of the economy.  Excuse me, but WHAT?!?

To put this as simply as I can, there is a vast universe between "inability to sufficiently quantify" and "a different theoretical justification [for socialism]."  What Manzi is experiencing is not the unearthing of socialist motives, but the limits of the quantitative revolution of the 20th century. There was a time, as strict Enlightenment rationalism and to a lesser extent, positivism reached their zenith, that we supposed that all complex issues could be solved with sufficient quantitative analysis.  Difficult questions such as the costs of action or inaction on climate change demonstrate this as well as anything, but the lesson to take here is not that we have no analytical tools at all and retreat to pristine ideological tropes.  (In this, I think Manzi is unintentionally making what I might call the Bachmann move — it's impossible to quantify, and it involves government action, therefore it is the first step towards tyranny.) Rather, it should be a clarion call to dust off analytical methods tossed aside during much of the quantitative revolution, such as informal logic, deep description, dialectics, rigorous observation, ethics, and comparative studies.  (One can even retain critical rationalism, just without getting lost in numbers.)

Another reader makes a common criticism

There are usually many reasons to do something, and arguably there are more important reasons to tax carbon, and especially gasoline. Here are two off the top of my head: Decreasing our dependence on imported oil would make the Mideast a heck of a smaller powder keg. And since oil is a finite resource, it makes sense to conserve it if there are viable alternatives available. More electric cars and nuclear power plants, for example, would address these issues as well as those associated with AGW, and why not pay for it (in part) with a tax on gas?

Another reader:

Your argument has several fundamental empirical flaws and at least a few fallacies. First, your assertion that the IPCC's report provides a probability distribution that suggests at most a 3% decline in world GDP based on the most likely scenario is technically accurate, but ignores the data that has emerged since the report was written. In terms of ocean temperature increases, glacial and arctic sea ice melting, and total carbon released into the atmosphere, we've already exceeded the IPCC's most pessimistic trend forecast (remember, their trend forecasts were actually based on the belief that states would at least attempt to abide by the Kyoto Protocol). Updated modeling has placed so-called "tipping point" thresholds, which would result in substantial economic losses, to within 50 to 75 years rather than 100 to 150. In other words, the IPCC's existing probability distributions for "worst case scenarios" are already outdated.

Since the IPCC's report, new evidence has come to light of biological and climactic processes that make it even more likely that a worst-case scenario might emerge before the end of this century. This includes research on ocean acidification, the role of latent methane found in the slowly thawing subarctic tundra and deep within the ocean, and the masking effect of particulate pollution, which, once removed, will drastically increase ocean temperatures. You may be unaware of this research, but all signs seem to point to the unfortunate conclusion that the IPCC report was far too conservative.

This is all important because your argument rests on an assumption that the risk is not high enough based on the available evidence to warrant internalizing the costs of producing carbon. We now know that the risk appears to be rising, along with the potential costs if the problem is left unaddressed. Unlike congestion or noise, where costs are both well-known and hold a linear relationship with policies meant to address them. The costs of accumulating CO2 in the atmosphere are simply not well known and even the best economic models are mere guesses at the actual cost (primarily because, as you rightly point out, the problem involves so many potential counterfactuals). There's a very real possibility that the costs might be so high some time in the near future that eventually any expense will be justified, including your doomsday scenario where we all collectively turn off our cars and shutter the power plants. What we do know is that there is a substantial lag between the release of CO2 and its effect on Earth's climate, which means if we wait to see whether the cost will really materialize we will probably have waited too long to prevent costs from rising exponentially. Thus we may be facing the choice of a small investment now to slow the process versus a very large investment in the future to mitigate its effects.

Finally, by far the weakest part of your argument is the notion that a carbon tax represents anything close to"rapid, aggressive emissions abatement": A carbon tax, or a cap and trade system, will provide only a sliver of relief from CO2 emissions, especially at the weak levels being proposed in legislation before Congress. This is a very modest proposal, similar to laws put in place to limit alcohol or cigarette consumption. In America, as in another other advanced industrialized economy, we tax things that people earn and consume. It's no more fair or unfair than being taxed by the state of New York for registering my vehicle. The vehicle registration is not prohibitive. I still drive my car despite being forced to pay it. And, corporations will still produce the same goods and services, but will hopefully use energy from sources less likely to release CO2.

Your attempt to belittle the carbon tax as ineffective is a bit disingenuous since your real argument is that no effort on the part of the U.S. government justifies the cost of abating what you see as a relatively minor problem that has a very very low probability of becoming catastrophic. Thankfully, that's a position that can be proven or disproven over time as we start to see the actual effects of climate change. As for your view on taxes and socialism, I respect Hayek's argument and the potential that such a tax, implemented poorly or set too high, could lead to a loss of individual freedom, but I'm unaware of any system of government that has provided for the public welfare without a tax, and I do believe that ameliorating the effects of climate change provides a substantial benefit to public welfare, so on this we'll have to disagree.

Another:

Mr. Manzi wrote “In order to set the tax, we don’t just need to know the costs created by [anthropogenic global warming]… but rather all of the social costs and benefits created by the activity, which is far harder.”  This is just a mistake.  Unless the market is generally defective, prices should naturally incorporate these costs and benefits.  It is because there’s a sort of point defect – the market’s inability to price in carbon externalities – that we discuss carbon taxes or whatever.  It’s true that determining the actual degree of the externality is controversial and can plausibly be argued to be intractable, but correcting for an externality does not require calculating all downstream effects, and it is that asseveration in Manzi’s post that imports “socialism” into the discussion.

A final reader:

1) Manzi writes: "According to the authoritative U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), under a reasonable set of assumptions for global economic and population growth, the world should expect (Table SPM.3) to warm by about 2.8°C over the next century. Also according to the IPCC (page 17), a global increase in temperature of 4°C should cause the world to lose about 3 percent of its economic output. So if we do not take measures to ameliorate global warming, the world should expect to be about 3 percent poorer sometime in the 22nd century than it otherwise would be." – Economics is a system created by humans, and it measures only a very limited part of human life: Productivity. It's precisely a retreat into the economic that allows people to dismiss concerns over things like climate change. Since the Industrial Revolution we have been engaged in a relentless search for 'efficiency', the maximization of productivity and profits at any cost, and it's gotten us a long way. But we are now seeing its limits. How many 'units of social cost' is the existence of polar bears worth? It's not worth any percentage points of productivity on an economic scale, but polar bears (and clean, fresh air, and beautiful natural places, and all the rest of it) sure do seem important.

4) Following off the same quote I pulled, I'd like to make what I consider my most important point. It's a question, a question that I've never really seen asked properly and that I'd love to hear Manzi's answer to: How long are we trying to keep this humanity thing going? He points to the statistic that temperature will rise less than 5 degrees in the next century, and says that means something as if that were the upper boundary of life on earth. Even in terms of human civilization (forgetting geologic time) a hundred years is not very long. So say in a century the earth is 4 degrees hotter, then what? We care about our children and grandchildren, but screw THEIR children and grandchildren? Is that really the attitude that Manzi is suggesting we adopt? We may not get very far down the path towards an uninhabitable earth in the next 100 years, but we're still on that road. Isn't that automatically an emergency?

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

Yes, dioceses will charge for the annulment process.  There are expenses involved:  staff time, preparation, the members of the tribunal — the equivalent of "court costs."  In my experience, the fee covers about half of these costs.  Certainly the diocese doesn't make any money on it.

Another writes:

While the annulment process can be criticized as "bogus" (and I'll be the first to criticize the Church on several issues), it really is not fair to look at annulments as a cash cow. In the Diocese where I worked for many years (Northeast and not atypical), the "fee" consisted entirely of the actual technical costs of staffing the Tribunal – the lay secretarial folks, two psychologists with a specialty in relationship dysfunction (each part-time) and the priests who received the standard priest salary – and the PRINTING of each dossier.

In my day (10 years ago), UPON the granting of the annulment, the petitioner was THEN told (so after the annulment had been granted) what the fees in his/her case was …. Not pay first, then get annulment granted. In our Diocese, I kid you not, we were reimbursed in full only by about 10% of the people who received their annulments! Our Marriage Tribunal was one of the most heavily subsidized agencies at the Chancery! Oh yes, and folks with limited financial means were ALWAYS taken care of – from a "sliding scale" based on resources to full subsidy when necessary.

Ask anyone what a civil divorce costs!

And except for people terminally ill, for whom there was a special process so as to give them the peace of mind of having their marriage convalidated before death, there was NO special treatment tolerated. I remember an instance when the Bishop called our Officialis (the Tribunal head) to ask where a politician as prominent in our State as Kennedy was in MA, and he was told, "Oh Bishop, his case is #324." The Bishop asked, "Yes, but where does the case stand?" Monsignor – a man of scrupulous integrity replied very curtly, "Why, Bishop, that would be just after Case 323 and just before 325" (the protocol numbers were more complex, I'm just illustrating the principle).

And that psychologist who worked on annulment counseling adds:

The comment on annulment costs is absurd. Annulments are not a money-making operation for the Catholic church.  I have never encountered a case where finances were an obstacle to an annulment.  Costs range from nothing up to about $1,000 depending on the diocese where the petition is filed.  A diocese will ask petitioners who can afford the fees to pay the costs of administration, but fees are often waived for petitioners based upon financial circumstance.

by Jonah Lehrer

It's almost Labor Day, which means that many of us are about to engage in the great American ritual of sitting in traffic on the way to a large body of water. I insist on going somewhere every year, which means that every year I wonder if a crowded beach is really worth six hours on a crowded highway. 

This year, however, my journey has a scientific justification. When my wife looks at me in frustration after yet another crappy fast food meal consumed in the parking lot of a rest stop, here's what I'm going to say: vacation has important psychological benefits. This tedious drive is necessary – not for me, but for my brain.

Look, for instance, at a recent experiment led by the psychologist Lile Jia at the Indiana University at Bloomington. He randomly divided a few dozen undergrads into two groups, both of which were asked to list as many different modes of transportation as possible. (This is known as a creative generation task.) One group of students was told that the task was developed by Indiana University students studying abroad in Greece (the distant condition), while the other group was told that the task was developed by Indiana students studying in Indiana (the near condition). At first glance, it’s hard to believe that such a slight and seemingly irrelevant difference would alter the performance of the subjects. Why would it matter where the task was invented?

Nevertheless, Jia found a striking difference between the two groups: when students were told that the task was imported from Greece, they came up with significantly more transportation possibilities. Because the source of the problem was far away, the subjects felt less constrained by their local transport options; they didn’t just think about getting around in Indiana, they thought about getting around all over the world, and even in deep space.

In a second study, Jia found that people were much better at solving a series of insight puzzles when told that the puzzles came all the way from California, and not from down the hall. These subjects considered a far wider range of alternatives, which made them more likely to solve the challenging brain teasers.

The reason such travels are useful involves a quirk of cognition, in which problems that feel “close" – and the closeness can be physical, temporal or even emotional – get contemplated in a more concrete manner. (This is known as construal level theory.) As a result, when we think about things that are nearby, our thoughts are delicately constricted, bound by a more limited set of associations. While this habit can be helpful -it allows us to focus on the facts at hand – it also inhibits our imagination.

What does this have to do with travel? When we escape from the place we spend most of our time, the mind is suddenly made aware of all those errant ideas we’d previously suppressed. Furthermore, this more relaxed sort of cognition comes with practical advantages, especially when we’re trying to solve difficult problems.

The problem, of course, is that most of our problems are local – people in Indiana are worried about Indiana, not the eastern Mediterranean or California. This leaves two options: 1) find a clever way to trick ourselves into believing that our nearby dilemma is actually distant or 2) go someplace far away and then think about our troubles back home. Given the limits of self-deception – we can’t even tickle ourselves properly – travel seems like the more practical possibility.

Of course, it’s not enough to simply get on a plane or drive a few hundred miles to the beach: if we want to experience the creative benefits of vacation, then we have to rethink the raison d’etre of vacation . Most people, after all, escape to the seashore so they don't have to think about those troubles they left behind. But here’s the ironic twist: our mind is most likely to solve our most stubborn problems while getting a sunburn far away from home. So instead of napping on the beach, or reading the latest issue of US Weekly, we should be mulling over those domestic riddles we just can't solve.