Category Archives: Science & Tech

ID’ers Are Kooks

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The other day, the Spectator gave a platform to Stephen Meyer, the intelligent Design guru, so he could make his case. They gave John Derbyshire the chance to reply. Most people shrug off the intelligent design people, assuming they are just the creationists with a different line of attack. Therefore only believers bother to read the arguments put forth by people like Meyer. If you read what this guy has to say, it is not hard to come away thinking these people are worse than creationists.

When writing in scientific journals, leading biologists candidly discuss the many scientific difficulties facing contemporary versions of Darwin’s theory. Yet when scientists take up the public defense of Darwinism—in educational policy statements, textbooks, or public television documentaries—that candor often disappears behind a rhetorical curtain. “There’s a feeling in biology that scientists should keep their dirty laundry hidden,” says theoretical biologist Danny Hillis, adding that “there’s a strong school of thought in biology that one should never question Darwin in public.”

The reticence that Darwin’s present day defenders feel about criticizing evolutionary theory would have likely made Charles Darwin uncomfortable. In the Origin of Species, Darwin openly acknowledged important weaknesses in his theory and professed his own doubts about key aspects of it.

In the Origin, Darwin expressed a key doubt about the ability of his theory to explain one particular event in the history of life, an event known as the Cambrian explosion. I’ve recently written a book, Darwin’s Doubt, about this in which I argue that the problem Darwin identified not only remains to this day, but that it has grown up to illustrate a more fundamental conceptual difficulty than he could have understood—a problem for all of evolutionary biology that points to the need for an entirely different understanding of the origin of animal life on Earth.

An interesting thing about the intelligent design people is they have an authoritarian mindset that is revealed in their habit of relying on appeals to authority. On the one hand, they rely on the Bible as their ultimate source of authority. That makes sense, as they are believers. They assume, however, that evolutionary biologists also rely on an authority as their god. The ID’er turn Darwin into a shaman or prophet, who they seek to discredit, assuming that will discredit the theory for which is best known.

The trouble is evolutionary biologists do not worship Darwin and are more than willing to point out his shortcomings. It is how science works. It is what makes Darwin a scientist and not a philosopher. He readily acknowledged his own shortcomings and gaps in knowledge. Attacking Darwin to discredit evolution is like attacking Blaise Pascal to disprove probability theory. A whole lot of work and a whole lot of people have built on and modified what Darwin started. Darwin’s shortcomings, real or imagined, are irrelevant.

The real problem with the ID’er is this. Let’s say they are correct and evolutionary biology is a dead end and self-refuting at that dead end. Let’s say the math of genetic mutation is so improbable that it cannot possibly explain the diversity of life. How does that validate Intelligent Design? One has nothing to do with the other. Intelligent design is built on a collection of logical fallacies. To argue that natural selection is invalid proves intelligent design is correct is a version of the fallacy of the undistributed middle.

Of course, the motivation is the argument from adverse consequences. Their particular brand of Christianity requires a more literal interpretation of creation. God created the heavens and earth just as we see it today. Natural selection says the current natural world is the result of random selection, along with other things like sexual selection. Therefore, if natural selection is true that invalidates their religious beliefs. Since they are not abandoning those beliefs, they can never accept evolution.

That’s really the irritating thing about these people. They are not honest. John is correct to call them liars. On the one hand, they swear they are not starting from a religious angle and are scientists like everyone else. Unlike real scientists, however, they make no attempt to prove their claims or even offer up a shred of data in support of their claim. Instead it is a non-stop assault on “Darwinism” as they imagine it. It really is the opposite of science when you think of it. It’s also fundamentally dishonest.

Bad Science

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Alex Tabarrok has a piece in Slate arguing that more guns in a society results in more suicides, at least in some places under certain conditions. For reasons no one can explain, this effect is not observed in East Asian counties or among Asians anywhere in the world. A similar phenomenon has been observed about gun ownership and crime, where increased access to guns only increases black crime, while increased gun ownership among whites seems to reduce crime. Another mystery.

In fairness to the writer, the math is not defective and the observation is sound. A gun is a much more effective tool for killing yourself than a knife or a brick. Give the ways you can use a gun to kill yourself, the odds of surviving are very small. Other forms of suicide, like pills and the idling car in the garage routine are slower and increase the chance of discovery and therefore survival. They concede that point in the Slate article.

Are the people not killing themselves with guns simply committing suicide by other means? Some are—but not all. While reduced household gun ownership did lead to more suicides by other means, suicides went down overall. That’s because contrary to the “folk wisdom” that people who want to commit suicide will always find a way to get the job done, suicides are not inevitable. Suicides are often impulsive decisions, and guns require less forethought than other means of suicide—and they’re also deadlier.

Suicides are often impulsive decisions. If we assume the well thought out suicides are a constant and just focus on the impulsive ones, it is easy to see how this number would correlate to the availability of effective killing tools. If every household had strong poison that tasted like candy, we would see the same effect. That’s hardly a surprise. The availability of guns certainly results in more accidental shootings and impulsive shootings that stem from disputes. Take away all the knives and we get fewer knife accidents.

Of course, if we were talking about poison or knives, Slate would not bother publishing it and Tabarrok would not bother writing about it. The Left hates gun ownership, as it is a proxy for white males. Therefore, there is no money to be made in studying the use of guns in preventing crime. There’s money to be made peddling a study of the obvious, as long as it confirms some shibboleth of the Left. That’s what you see here.

The folks at Slate expect their readers to come away with the impression that science says guns cause suicide. It is a revealing bit about how the Left operates. The real focus of their propaganda is not the unbelievers, but in fact their own believers. In fact all of their agitating for gun grabbing is aimed at their own people, in an effort to stoke their enthusiasm for the cause in general. Gun grabbing is just the red cape to get the bulls of the Left excited. You see it in this sort of rhetoric.

Our research had to overcome the fact that no one knows with great precision how many guns there are in America, how many households own a gun, how gun ownership varies demographically and geographically, what types of guns there are, or how guns are used. In part that’s because in 1996, Congress banned the CDC from funding any research to “advocate or promote gun control.” That’s not a ban on gun research, technically, but after Congress extended the wording and expanded the ban to other agencies, it had enough of a chilling effect to reduce CDC funding for gun violence research from $2.5 million per year in the early 1990s to just $100,000 in recent years.

In other words, the gun bogeyman is made scarier because he cannot be quantified, so there could be a gun in your town, ready to cause you to commit suicide. That’s another aspect to the gun grabbing cult. They have imbued guns with magical qualities, which is why they are so willing to believe guns cause blacks to murder one another and suburban whites to kill themselves. The gun is a material projection of white privilege and white supremacy. It’s mere presence acts as if a white man is there to oppress you.

Of course, the reason Congress banned the CDC from gun studies is they were churning out the sort of junk science we see in this Slate article. Alex is a bright guy and he clearly knows his work is going to be used by the gun grabbers. Those gun grabbers will not mention any of the caveats. They will simply scream, “See? See? Science says guns cause more suicides!” Tabarrok knows this, yet he has been pimping this paper and the supporting research for a month. Libertarianism is just another grift.

Again, the issue here is not methodology. It is the misappropriation of authority, in this case social science, to promote falsehoods. If you make poison for a living you have a responsibility to take precautions. That means not selling it to children or people you suspect are evil. If you do social science research, you have an obligation to guard against your work being used for nefarious ends. Tabarrok is willingly adding the authority of his name to something he has to know is misleading, at best.

Criminally Stupid

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Most people have no idea what goes on in their local government office, because they don’t work for the government. You can have some idea how the department of motor vehicles operates, but you don’t know what really goes on inside those offices. You just see the part that faces the public. The people inside know about the computer systems, the people who do nothing but take up space and the the ridiculous managers and supervisors who fill their days with busy work and pointless meetings.

The revers is true as well. The people working in government offices have no idea what happens in the dreaded private sector. Most government workers and just about all managers have never worked in the private sector, outside of college jobs. They don’t know about the drive for efficiency, cost cutting, and profit margins. They don’t know what it is like to keep the computer software up to date so the company can maintain its competitive edge and continue to reduce costs, by reducing labor.

The reason this matters is when the government decides they are going to increase the the number of interfaces between the government and the dreaded private sector, it means increased opportunities for a clash of cultures and technologies. The culture within the government office, for example, is never going to blend well with the culture inside a private business. Similarly, the technology and process are never going to interface smoothly with those in the private sector. There’s going to be problems.

This is what is happening with the ObamaCare exchanges. In government, IT projects are as mostly about rewarding favored companies in specific districts. They eventually get done and generally work, but they are never intended to reduce costs or lower the number of people in the government office. In the private sector, technology is a tool to cut people and costs, but often a tool to defend against mischief. Trying to bring government IT systems into the retail space, is like putting government workers in the private sector.

Now, the reason all of our government systems have not been compromised is they are not exposed to the world. Most people are unaware of the alternative “internet” used by security forces, but it exists and it used by national security, diplomats and parts of government. Secure communication channels are essential. More often, government systems are simply so old, they can’t be accessed over the internet.  There are plenty of government systems running COBOL applications to this day.

This initiative to upgrade these government systems so they can interface with the private sector systems sounds good in theory, but that’s where the culture problem comes into the mix. Since none of these legacy systems were written by people contemplating the Internet, they have nothing more than old school password security. By exposing them to the internet, bad actors can now quickly crack the security and get into the back-end systems where the sensitive data is stored. The whole system is now exposed.

Lesson From The Market: Software

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I go to an upscale grocery store that is like Whole Foods, but without the preachy liberal nonsense. They sell all the fashionable stuff and they make sure to create an atmosphere that flatters their clientele. It has a coffee shop and bakery, so shoppers can have a latte and a muffin while they browse the organic food items. Of course, everyone uses the silly canvas sacks that are supposed to be good for the earth. It’s all pretentious and silly, but unlike Whole Foods, the prices are great so i tolerate the other stuff.

Anyway, I was at the checkout and I noticed they still use a character based computer software. Judging from the interface, I’m going to say it is written in COBOL. You can sort of tell by the blue screen with red highlights. It could be some form of business basic or maybe even Clipper/Foxpro. Regardless, it is old stuff, probably written for them two decades ago. They have scanners and scales, but that’s not revolutionary. Integration to these items was done long before the graphical user interface.

Checkout is fast and efficient. The clerks never struggle to price an item or look up some obscure code for a weird item. For the grocery chain owners, the point-of-sale system is perfectly adequate and they obviously see no reason to “modernize it.” From their perspective, this tools does the job that needs doing, so there is no reason to replace with a new tool. In the grocery business, margins are small, so anywhere they can reduce costs, they will, even if it means using a twenty year old software system.

I know of at least a dozen goodly sized companies that use legacy system for their business. In one case, they use a system written by a firm long defunct in a language long abandoned. The other use systems that are a decade or more out of date and no longer supported by the developer. I know of a large importer using character based software written in the 80’s. Most banks in this country rely on software written in the 1970’s, patched up over the last few decades. There’s lots of old code out there.

The point here is that good enough is good enough. As much as we think technology is a constant driver of innovation and change, it does run its course. The lesson from the market is that we may have picked all of the low hanging fruit from the computer revolution. While automation will continue, it will be much slower than the futurist would like us to believe. That growing pile of legacy code that is out there in the world will only make the process slower. We are quickly reaching the point of diminishing returns.

Dropping Facebook

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I am not a young person, but I am not old yet either. That means I am less inclined to adopt new technology than a 20-something, but I will if it is practical. The older you get, the definition of “practical” tends to narrow. A teenager views a smart phone as a necessity, while a senior views it as a novelty. I have a smart phone and rely on it a great deal, but I also know I could get along without it, because I remember a time when these things did not exist. The dark ages get a bad rap. It was not so dark.

Facebook was sort of the reverse. In my youth I was an early adopter of mobile phones so I moved up with the technology. Facebook sis not exist in my youth, so I was a late adopter. Anyway, one of my friends badgered me into signing onto Facebook a few years back. I setup a page and did nothing with it. I added friends for the first month or so then I stopped. I would log in daily to see what was posted and maybe comment on occasion, but mostly it was a daily peak into on the lives of friends and some strangers.

The fact is, I never really used it much. I like my friends, but I have no need or desire to communicate with them daily. E-mail is better anyway. The friends of friends who come into view from time to time are not very interesting. It seems that the more prolific users are crazy. They are like drug fiends who will do anything to get attention on-line. They quickly run out of good ways to get attention, so they lurch into the unlimited supply of bad ways to get attention. You learn a lot about people a a result. None of it good.

My liberal friends have some real wackos in their circle. If you are logging onto a website of a politician to tell them and the world how much you love them, you need a psychiatrist, not a platform. Otherwise, the daily fare on Facebook is boring scraps of information about the collection of average people in my life. God bless them, but they are just not that interesting. Neither am I. I read a lot and know a lot of things that most people don’t know, but I am no more interesting than the next guy.

So, I deactivated my account. It seems that may be the one thing I have in common with young people. Facebook is now losing its cool factor with the young. I’ve always said it was a fad, but I started to wonder if I was mistaken. It turns out I was right. We know that a very large number of the accounts on Facebook are fake. We also know many are dormant. More important, we know that most of us are not that interesting. Facebook is like reality TV, without the parts created by writers to make it interesting.

The whole rationale for the company, however, is they get young people hook ed on the site, so they can sell them stuff or have the ad makers sell them stuff. If it turns out that they do not get young people, then you have to wonder if Facebook is a viable business, at least in the long run. The myth of marketing is that you have to sell young people in order to sell older people. Maybe that’s false, but if they are not selling young people, what are they selling to old people? That’s never been very clear with Facebook

Putting that aside, I wonder if social media has the legs experts claim. For all of human history, we lacked social media. Humans socialized in person. We have evolved to be good at it. We have never been good at communicating through writing or pictures. Almost all human knowledge is passed along in-person. A good way to look at it, consider the telephone. People will call one another to arrange a get together. No one meets with someone to arrange a telephone call. That would be absurd.

Telephone technology is a decent alternative to in-person communication, but not the preferred one. Social media like Facebook is closer to phone tag than anything else. It is people leaving message for one another on the refrigerator. Again, it works to a point, but it is never replacing normal human in-person interaction. Then there is the openness of these platforms. Despite the madness for an open society by the usual suspects, the truth is white people like their privacy. Facebook is anti-privacy.

The Problem With Women

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Steve Sailer has a post up about the trials and tribulations of girls in science. His post is commentary on this very long article by a woman calling herself Eileen Pollack. The general thrust of that piece that girls don’t go into STEM field in great numbers, because there is some invisible force filed that repels them. This invisible force field cannot be seen, because it is invisible, but it can be described by women with the right credentials from the women’s studies department. They call this force field “male privilege.’

Of course, as Sailer points out, Mx. Pollack started out in life as an undergrad in physics, but lost interest and moved onto creative writing. It turns out that women are not as good at math, on average, as boys, but they are also less interested in it. That means the number of girls in the STEM fields is going to much lower than expected, just using test scores for mathematical aptitude. Feminism, ironically, can not tolerate women choosing to be women, so they insist women are being tricked in some way.

Feminism stopped being a serious topic long before anyone reading this was alive and now it is quite silly. A century ago, changing the law to better serve women in the industrial age was a worthy topic. In the agrarian age, divorce, for example, was not an issue for most people. Property rights and legal rights were also far less important. As cities grew and social relationships changed, the law needed to change to address the needs of both men and women, so feminism made some sense.

Today it is just the stereotypical “feminists” grousing about men. In college, feminism is where the low self-esteem gals go when they don’t want to become lesbians. Some thing that has been true for a long time is the easiest women to get are the ones hanging around the women’s studies department. Despite all the man-hating and sisterhood talk, they will jump in the sack with the first guy showing interest. All their talk about independence and not needing a man is just an act.

Now, it is worth mentioning that the scrambling of the sex roles has made sorting these things more difficult. Men are far less manly, especially at elite universities where feminism is rampant. They are also far less worldly. From the female perspective, being out-competed in these cognitive fields by wimps and socially awkward losers could very well look like a conspiracy. The girls are atop the status system on campus and more aggressive than these males, but they can’t compete.

Even so, the main driver of the gender equity delusions is a studied and rampant ignorance of biological reality. The starting point is always the assumption that some mysterious force or perhaps a hidden conspiracy is preventing the egalitarian paradise from emerging. The default is the dream, rather than observable reality. Even the basic relationship  between the sexes is excluded. The fact that boys like pretty girls and girls like high status males is not a mystery.

The new study goes a long way toward providing hard evidence of a continuing bias against women in the sciences. Only one-fifth of physics Ph.D.’s in this country are awarded to women, and only about half of those women are American; of all the physics professors in the United States, only 14 percent are women. The numbers of black and Hispanic scientists are even lower; in a typical year, 13 African-Americans and 20 Latinos of either sex receive Ph.D.’s in physics. The reasons for those shortages are hardly mysterious — many minority students attend secondary schools that leave them too far behind to catch up in science, and the effects of prejudice at every stage of their education are well documented. But what could still be keeping women out of the STEM fields (“STEM” being the current shorthand for “science, technology, engineering and mathematics”), which offer so much in the way of job prospects, prestige, intellectual stimulation and income?

Imagine if someone said, “Our study goes a long way toward providing hard evidence of a continuing bias against whites in the National Basketball Association…” Everyone gets that blacks are, on average, better equipped by nature to excel at some sports. No one thinks this is odd, but in the cognitive fields, it is blasphemy to suggest there are differences between the sexes and races. It suggests the problem of gender equity is really just  a problem with women accepting reality.

Living Past 115

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This is an interesting post that touches on two interesting things. One is the fact we may be reaching the limit of human longevity. Once you eliminate the problems that come from scarcity and then address the basics of medicine, human life spans start to grow. People also get healthier over their lifetime. Humans are far healthier late in life than at any other time. We are probably within reach of solving some of the big killers like cancer, heart failure and dementia. While some may never be “cured” they will be manageable.

For things related to aging, the eeffects will continue to be postponed. Within living memory, a healthy a vigorous 70-year old was something like a miracle. Today it is common. We will certainly be seeing more and more vigorous octogenarians, especially as medicine gets a grip on using things like HGH and SARM’s. Of course, we are already seeing drugs that allow humans to extend their sexual activity into old age and the demand for this stuff will spike as Boomer head into their final chapter of life.

This need to extend life and the quality of life is not without some spooky stuff. Here’s a bit from the linked post.

“The only way to get a person past the “Calment limit” of (say) 125 will be some sort of genetic engineering. This might prove to be, if not easy, at least fairly routine — in technical terms. Fiddling with just a few genes in worms, fruit flies and mice has enabled scientists to extend their lifespan, sometimes up to sevenfold. One recent study in Lausanne found a 50 per cent reduction in the activity of just three genes on Chromosome 2 increased mouse lifespan by about 250 days, and kept them healthy longer.”

Once you start talking about genetic engineering people, the mind quickly moves from the spooky to the sinister. As soon as it becomes possible to alter one’s aging with gene therapy, drugs will be created to give the same effect. If reducing a certain protein extends youthfulness, a clever company will bottle it and sell it. Human nature being what it is, there will come a time when this is not just possible, but considered essential.

Strangely, the naive assumption that people will be ethically constrained in this area is why we will see the genie get loose as soon as it can be uncorked. Matt Riddley, the writer of the linked post, thinks it is hard to imagine any scientists willing to do what is necessary to bring such technology forward, with regards to humans. After all, it will require human trials and that means experimenting on embryos, which will be brought to term. That’s a nice way of saying it will require experimenting on kids.

The fact that China would have zero hangups about doing this is alien to most western ethicists. Amazingly, China remains an inscrutable place for the West. The Russians would probably have no trouble with the ethics either. Even if they were not willing to experiment on their own people, they would happily team up with India or maybe the Iranians to conduct the research on their people. Making fewer better people is probably the next phase of the arms race between peoples.

Riddle asks an interesting question, which suggests something about the Western cognitive elite. “Plus, ethics aside, it is not easy to see where the demand for such a drastic and expensive step would come from. Who would actually want their next child to live past 125, let alone badly enough to go through with it?” There’s that fatigue with living that turns up in the elites, that animates the current culture. The thing is, not everyone is looking to call it quits. That’s the Western disease.