3D Movies

I saw Avatar when it first came out.  I saw it in 3D.  It looked great!  James Cameron has been a pioneer in advancing the state of the art in movie effects for many years now.  He did the "transparent snake" in "The Abyss" in 1989.  He did the famous "mirror" bad guy in the second Terminator movie in 1991.  Actually the second effect was built on the first.  He just replaced "transparent" with "mirror".  This required changes but it was built on the same foundation.  Instead of bringing through background elements in the "transparent" effect he had to bring in reflections but a lot of the technology was common.

Anyhow, when Avatar came out I was willing to give it a go.  Avatar was developed from the ground up as a 3D effort.  The script was constructed to allow for many 3D elements to be used in a seamless manner.  Cameron also pioneered new 3D camera technology and came up with some enhancements to mocap (motion capture) technology.   The result was a truly "out of this world" experience.  And, although I enjoyed Avatar and thought the 3D effects were worth it, I was not sold on the idea in general.

Avatar was not by any means the first 3D movie.  Hollywood had trotted out 3D several times before.  Most notably the 1953 "House of Wax" used it extensively.  But in the '50s it was seen as a gimmick possibly suited for horror movies but not appropriate for a serious mainstream film.  Hollywood experimented with a lot of things in the '50s.  They were in reaction to the advent of television.  Instead of being the "cat's pajamas" movies were seen as just another entertainment alternative.  A run of the mill black and white movie seen in a theater was seen as being little different than a run of the mill black and white TV show.  Except that the TV show as free (once you had bought the TV).  So Hollywood went "all color" and "wide screen" (gimmicks that caught on) and experimented with 3D and "smellovision", gimmicks that did not.  The Hollywood movie seen in a theater lost some of its luster but things settled down and Hollywood theater movies ended up with a certain portion of the market and TV ended up with another.

There have since been several assaults on the theater going experience, most notably the advent of rental videos, but Hollywood has soldiered on.  3D needs to be seen in this context.  It also needs to be seen in the context of improvements in movie technology.  The "movie" was first introduced in the late 1800's.  By the 1920's it had evolved into a medium that could (barely) tell a serious story.  The fact that there was no dialog that could be heard by audiences required pretty hammy acting and simplistic plots.  Then in 1928 "The Jazz Singer" came along.  It was pretty clunky and definitely hammy.  It barely managed to permit audiences to hear the "sound" parts of the movie.  It was still a giant success.  And the technology of delivering sound accompaniment to movies advanced rapidly.  By 1933, for instance the "all singing - all dancing" musical "42nd Street" was a technical, financial, and popular success.  And people had been experimenting with color since the beginning of movies.  Initially prints were hand tinted.  But film stock improved and by 1939 two color classics, "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz" were released along with many less memorable color efforts.

It is important to keep in mind a characteristic shared by the advents of sound and color.  Sound required large changes in the way movies were created and in the equipment theaters had to have.  Color also required substantial changes on the production side of movies but no change at all in the movie theater.  And neither required any change by the customer.  You bought your ticket.  You sat in a seat.  You watched and, with the advent of sound heard, the movie.  3D is the same as sound in that it changes how movies are made and it requires changes to movie theaters.  But it is different from the advent of sound in that it requires customers to wear glasses.

3D is supposed to be like sound and color.  It is supposed to provide an enhanced experience.  The parallels with color are instructive.  By the mid '30s Hollywood was producing a very sophisticated product.  Most of Hollywood's output was "cheap entertainment".  But some movies were very sophisticated.  Hollywood was able to deliver black and white films with sophisticated scripts, first class acting and, most of all, subtle and nuanced atmospherics.  In fact, most color films were firmly in the "cheap entertainment" category in terms of their artistic aspirations.  They were substantially more expensive to produce so they had to deliver a large audience to earn back their production costs.

Since Avatar I have generally shied away from 3D films.  I have seen the 2D version of several 3D films and been quite happy.  I have also seen lots of "all 2D all the time" films and found them as satisfactory as I would have prior to my Avatar experience.  But I have recently seen two 3D films in 3D and the experience has been enlightening.

The first film is "A very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas".  This was my first Harold and Kumar experience.  Their first film got good reviews.  Their second film got bad reviews.  This film got good reviews.  And the reviewers recommended seeing it in 3D.  Why?  Because Harold and Kumar are of the opinion that 3D has already exceeded its shelf life and threw in a bunch of jokes that parodied 3D.  I liked the movie, agreed with them about 3D and enjoyed all the jokes at the expense of 3D.  I figured this might be my last 3D movie.

Then my sister recommended I see "Hugo" in 3D.  The impetus behind Hugo is Martin Scorsese.  Scorsese knows what he is about and is a keen student of the history of cinema.  So I figured "what the heck -- let's see what Marty does with it".  Hugo is a family movie.  It is told from the point of view of an orphan.  It brings in a lot of very early history of cinema in the form of Georges Milies, an early pioneer of the cinema.  Milies did most of his best work before World War I.  So that was the hook for me.  Scorsese, consummate movie pro and history buff, talking about Milies and flexing his 3D chops.  Let's see what Scorsese can come up with.

The good news is that it is a very beautiful movie.  The production design and set decoration are excellent.  The movie takes place mostly in a large French train station.  The kid lives behind the walls and is responsible for winding the many clocks to be found.  This justifies the use of a large amount of clockwork machinery which the boy climbs over, under, around, and through.  In fact, the whole movie is slightly claustrophobic.  Partly this is because the boy is living literally in the walls.  But mostly it is so that every scene can contain machinery moving in the foreground, midground, background, everywhere.  It's in 3D, see!.  Even the scenes that involve the boy in the station are claustrophobic.  He is always pushing through thick crowds or jumping flower carts, or. well, you get the idea.  Every scene is jammed full of moving stuff.

Now our eyes are used to dealing with 3D in the real world.  So we are good at figuring out that this set of gears is near the kid but is not going to hit the kid.  We automatically analyze the 3D scene and figure out that the clearances are small but adequate.  Nothing is going to all of a sudden bash into something it's not supposed to.  And all this machinery is photographed very prettily.  But it is a distraction.  It is not the classic 3D distraction of something sharp all of a sudden projecting out of the screen and into our laps.  It's not that over done.  But it is a distraction and therefore robs the film of its emotional and narrative power.

What is obvious to me in retrospect is that Cameron understands 3D much better than Scorsese.  There are all kinds of 3D elements in Avatar.  To name an obvious example there is lots of flying.  And specifically there is lots of flying close to high vertical walls.  In the Avatar case, this adds to the "action and adventure" component of the movie.  It is dangerous to fly that close to the vertical walls.  So the 3D enhances the experience Cameron is going for.  In Scorsese's case we have a lot of scenes where the kid is working on clockwork machinery.  Now the parts in real clocks actually move very slowly.  It takes, for instance, a full  minute for the second hand to rotate all the way around just once.  That's not exactly excitingly fast.  So Hugo is full of clockwork gears rotating ten or more times faster, in other words, unnaturally fast.  And there are steam jets blasting away all over the place.  All of this is done very prettily but it detracts from the overall effect rather than adding to it.

My bottom line is that Scorsese could have made a better Hugo if he had designed it to be a traditional movie rather than a 3D movie.  He could have made it every bit as pretty and he could have frankly more effectively manipulated our emotions if he and we didn't have to deal with the essentially distracting 3D components.

Color eventually became so cheap relative to black and white that it became the de facto standard.  Now one or two movies are occasionally still made in black and white.  But black and white is now seen as a distraction in most cases, an "artistic affectation" which must be justified.  I am sure that some hope that 2D will become like black and white and 3D will become the overwhelming norm.  The problem with this is that you have to deal with the damn glasses.  There has been some success with figuring out how to do 3D without glasses.  But its success is still limited.  So for the present, I am with Harold and Kumar on this one.   
 

What is Science?

In http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/11/is-science-religion.html I asked "Is Science a Religion"?  Actually, most of that post is dedicated to the question "Is Science Scientific?"  The answer I came up with was "No!  Science is not Scientific".  I then went on to do some hand waving on the title question, namely "Is Science a Religion".  Upon further reflection, answering this latter question doesn't get you anywhere.

In 1964 Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously opined "I know it when I see it" when talking about Pornography.  The question of "What is a religion" is even slipperier.  Certainly lots of people would claim to "know it when they see it" when it comes to what constitutes a religion.  And I am sure this is a firmly and sincerely held belief.  But there are a lot of things out there that someone thinks of as a religion.  And there is little or no commonality.  How many gods are there?  The most popular modern religions will answer "exactly one".  But the three civilizations that underpin modern western culture (Egypt, Greece, and Rome) all subscribed to polytheistic religions.  And Atheists gets lumped into the category of religion by many.  Atheism is the belief that "there is no god".  So there is no common answer to a simple question "how many gods are there".  Religions are also all over the map on "appropriate" marital practises.  Some believe monogamy is the only way to go.  Others are pro polygamy.  Some are even down with group marriages or prohibit marriage in any form.  And so it goes.

I have characterized the business of religion as "behavior modification", e.g. trying to convince people to do more "good" things and fewer "bad" things than they would otherwise do.  But even this idea is not universal.  Some religions are of the "chosen people" model.  If you are one of the "anointed" you are good to go.  If not, bad things are going to happen to you and there's nothing you can do about it.  Upon reflection I have been forced to conclude that saying something is a "religion" tells you nothing.  So, if you are trying to decide what Science is, knowing whether it is a religion or not doesn't help any.

So if Science is not "scientific" and deciding whether it is a religion is useless, what is it?  I have decided that Science is a popularity contest.  Now there are lots of kinds of popularity contests and the kind of popularity contest Science is is peculiar.  The popularity contest that science represents is not about people.  It is about ideas or, more specifically, the argument in favor of specific ideas.  And the scoring is odd.  More popular ideas in science are more popular because smart people and, more specifically, fair people come to support them.  It's not about the numbers.  It's about the quality.  So how does this work?  How does one construct a popular argument in the Scientific sense?  Let's first consider some approaches that don't work.  And lets consider them in a context.

I want to convince you that my idea is the best one.  What do I mean by best?  I mean "most likely to be true or, if no contender seems to be completely true, then truer than the alternatives".  I think everyone would consider that a fair objective.  So let's say I said "I'm right and you are an idiot if you don't agree".  How likely would that argument be to sway you?  It's "argument by insult".  Most people don't like to be insulted so that argument is a terrible one.  So let's improve it and go with "I'm right - trust me".  The insult is now gone and that's a good thing.  And if I am known as fair, knowledgeable, smart, and nice, it might be pretty effective.  But is it the best argument?  No!  Everybody is wrong some of the time.  And, by adding in the "fair, knowledgeable, smart, and nice" part I am really adding a component to the argument.  More generally, this enhanced argument is just a version of "Accept my argument because this important/smart/powerful person agrees with me".  Important/smart/powerful people are more likely to be right than unimportant/dumb/powerless people but this is just a "statistical" argument.  The argument is more likely to be right but there is still a good chance it is wrong.  Can we improve our odds more?  Can we get to 100% right all the time?  If we could, that would be ideal.  Before moving on, let me spend a little more time with the "powerful" version of this argument.

In practical terms as measured by the success religions have in converting people from some other religion to their own this argument is remarkably successful.  Why so?  Well, let's hear what Chief Seattle said on the subject:

Your God loves your people and hates mine, he folds his strong arms lovingly around the white man and leads him as a father leads his infant son, but he has forsaken his red children, he makes your people wax strong every day . . . while my people are ebbing away like a fast-receding tide, that will never flow again. [“Eyewitness to the Old West”, Richard Scott, ed., page 129]

If you look at successful mass conversions of peoples from one religion to another the argument that worked is the "your God is stronger than my God" argument that Chief Seattle is making. And this follows from the justification of many religions, namely that "my God is very powerful".  If he likes you he will work miracles that will help you (e.g. heal the sick) and if he doesn't he will work miracles that will hurt you (e.g. rain fire and brimstone upon you and yours).  When the whites moved into the Americas they proved more powerful than the locals.  Therefore the gods of the whites must be more powerful than the gods of the locals.  So the "powerful" argument works.  But then lots of arguments work at least some of the time.  And there are other arguments that work better.  So let's return to the mainline thesis of this post and get on to them.

For instance:  "I have done this and here's what happened".  Here I am demonstrating to you in a manner that is convincing to you how the world works.  And there is a better version of this argument.  It goes "Do this with your own hands and see what happens.  Notice that the same thing happens as if I and others do it."  Now I have eliminated the "trickery" problem.  If you and lots of other people do it then I haven't done something to trick you into believing something that I know is false.  This approach is far more convincing than any of the above arguments.

Well, not always to everyone.  We have all run into people who hold to a belief that we know to be false even after we have abundantly demonstrated that it is false.  But is other person being fair?  We all know the answer is no.  My point is that there is no way to convince all the people all the time that a specific truth is true.  So requiring all people to be convinced by an argument is an impossibly high standard.  That's why I have thrown the word "fair" in a few times now.  Since it is impossible to convince everyone, Science settles for convincing "fair" people, people that are open to being convinced by a well constructed argument.

And in fact it is usually too much to require that everyone do the demonstration themselves.  So the Scientific "standard" is repeatability.  The more people that do the demonstration and get the same result, the more convincing the demonstration is.  And Scientists are well aware that this weakens the power of their argument.  So they try to take precautions.  What is important is that the demonstration is done properly, in a way that avoids the possibility of trickery.  And "trickery" turns out to be quite a complex problem.

Consider "Clever Hans".  Clever Hans was a horse who in the early 1900's demonstrated that he could do arithmetic.  So was trickery involved?  A lot of people investigated and could find no reason to believe so.  The horse's owner was honest as the day was long.  And no one could figure out how the trickery was done or even by who, assuming trickery was involved.  Then in 1907 Oscar Pfungst made in interesting observation.  Hans did not always get the right answer.  And in each case where Hans got the wrong answer his owner got the wrong answer to the same problem.  Hans' owner was able to transmit cues to the horse completely unconsciously and in a manner that was not apparent even to supposedly trained observers.  Clever Hans and many other examples have shown over the years that even the most honest person can be fooled.  Scientists have taken this to heart in two different ways.

The most obvious way is by using "double blinds" in experiments.  In a double blind experiment neither the testee nor the observer knows whether the thing being tested for (e.g. a drug effect) is actually there or not (e.g. in the case where a placebo has been substituted). That way a subconscious cue can neither be sent nor received.  The other way Science has been affected is the substitution of observations by instruments for observations by people.

A famous and not well known example of this is the work of Edward Muybridge (a photographer by trade - not a scientist).  For years a controversy had raged within the horsey set as to whether a horse lifted all four feet off the ground at the same time while galloping.  In 1872 Leyland Stanford (Governor of California and founder of the University of the same name) decided to put up the money to find out the answer.  He hired Muybridge to find a way to settle the argument "once and for all".  Using human observation was out of the question.  Learned experts could be found in large numbers on each side of the controversy and they all supported their position by citing "personal observation".  After much experimentation Muybridge was able to take a series of photographs of a galloping horse that were closely separated in space and time so that all aspects of a gallop cycle were shown.  Next, Muybridge developed a method of flashing the pictures one after another quickly.  This short demonstration consisting of only 12 frames of film is considered the first movie.  What the movie did, when shown at speed was convince people they were seeing a horse galloping in the normal way.  But one of the frames showed all four feet off the ground at once.  This combination was utterly convincing, and a convincing demonstration was something that had been impossible until human observation was replaced by instrumental observation.

Both of these changes in how Science does things, the "proper scientific technique", are driven by the same desire, the desire to make scientific arguments more compelling.  "How can we make our arguments more compelling" is an impulse that has driven science for centuries.  Put another way, scientists continuously ask themselves "what possible flaws exist in our arguments and how do we eliminate them?"  Scientists strive to both remove flaws in specific arguments about specific items and, by improving "proper scientific technique" to remove flaws in the methods Scientists use to create scientific arguments.  So what are some of these possible flaws?

One example is the counter example.  For many years many people believed that all swans were white.  This was based on observing many swans for many years and finding that they were all white.  Then famously black swans were found in Australia in 1790.  Arguing that "all swans are white because most swans we see are white" is not convincing.  "All swans are white" is true only if ,well, there is no such thing as a swan that is not white.  So proper scientific technique requires that your argument take into account all the data.  A single counter example (e.g. an Australian black swan) is completely fatal to the truth of the argument.

In a similar but more general vein, mathematics is critically important to science.   Why?  Because mathematicians have been trying to "break" (e.g. find flaws in) mathematics for about 3,000 years.  Over these Milena mathematics have developed a very reliable sense of what works and what doesn't.  Now there are many shortcomings and limitations to various mathematical techniques (e.g. dividing a number by zero results in nonsense).  So it is important to use mathematics properly.  But mathematicians have documented these shortcomings and if you have demonstrated that you have avoided these shortcomings then your argument is on solid ground.

Another general scientific principle is "it's not who does it, it's how they do it".  A poorly done argument is not a "properly done scientific argument" even if it is done by the most preeminent person in the field.  Contrarily, if the argument is done well by an "amateur", gifted or not, it is a proper scientific argument.  (See the Muybridge discussion above).

Another general scientific principle is to base an argument on clear agreed upon statements.  Imagine you are having an argument with someone about the color of a specific fruit.  Now imagine you are talking about apples (red, yellow, green, not orange) and the other person is talking about oranges (normally orange but green if unripe).  If the two of you don't set about to come to clear agreed upon statements about what the object of the argument is then both of your arguments may be ineffective in winning over the other (fruit is red - no fruit is orange).  You may even agree inappropriately (e.g. if I am thinking of a ripe Granny Smith (green) and you are thinking of an unripe Orange (also green)).  Scientists go to a lot of trouble to make sure everyone is taking about the same thing.

Many other general scientific principles have been developed.  They all have the same objective.  If you construct an argument using those principles you will end up with a proper scientific argument.  And that proper scientific argument will be convincing to fair people.  And, as a result will become part of the scientific consensus (e.g. those arguments that are very popular - a whole lot of people agree that they are right).

So Science is a popularity contest.  And Science has evolved its general principles to result in proper scientific arguments.  And proper scientific arguments are constructed to be popular.  If this is all so then why do a large segment of the general public find Scientific pronouncements unconvincing?  Why is Science so unpopular outside the scientific community?  There are, of course, the unfair people.  Those that are unwilling to be convinced no matter what.  But there is more to it.

I think Science is a victim of its own success.  Until about 1900 most scientific arguments could be understood by the general public.  In 1704 Isaac Newton published a book called "Opticks".  It was written in Latin.  But, when translated into English, the experiments he describes and the conclusions he reaches are easily understood by anyone.  In the latter half of the 1800's many lecturers traveled the country doing scientific demonstrations.  These were very popular and people came away with a real feeling that they understood the scientific principles being demonstrated.  And they found the demonstrations convincing.  Even if they personally did not attend the demonstration they read about them in the newspaper or talked to a friend that had attended.  People felt that they were a part of the scientific world.

But by about 1900 Science started getting weirder and weirder.  Much of Science was still perfectly understandable.  But more and more of it and especially some of the parts of it that scientists considered the most important got really weird.  Maxwell's equations (actually developed in the early 1860's) that described electricity and magnetism involved an imaginary number (the square root of -1).  Michaelson and Morley did an experiment in 1887 that proved that the speed of light was a constant.  In 1900 Max Planck started talking about the "quantum hypothesis".  Then in 1905 Einstein published a series of papers postulating really weird stuff like what later became known as "Special Relativity".  General Relativity followed roughly a decade later.  Quantum Mechanics was developed in its early form in the 1920s and has since evolved over the decades into the "Standard Model" of particle physics.  It features a long list weird features.  But one of the weirdest is something called "entanglement".

So through most of the 1800s most of the latest scientific results were accessible to the average people.  They might not have understood them in detail but they got the general idea and often could understand the reasoning behind scientific thinking.  But as the 1900s have progressed the distance between cutting edge science and what the general public could understand in some detail has gotten large.  Scientists have tried to bridge the gap.  Steven Hawking famously published "A Brief History of Time" in 1988.  It became a best seller.  But talk to most anyone who has tried to read it.  People start out enthusiastic and getting it.  But at some point in the book they can no longer follow what Hawking is saying.  And Hawking completely omits all of the mathematics that underlay what he is talking about.  We have to take what he is saying, and what he is saying is pretty weird, on faith.  If he had put the mathematics in so that theoretically we wouldn't have had to take him on faith, we still would have had to take him on faith.  The mathematics behind what he is saying is beyond even people with a standard 4 year college degree in the sciences or engineering.  You have to be able to understand graduate level mathematics and graduate level physics to be able to understand what Hawking is talking about "in the raw".

Much of Science is still understandable to anyone who is willing to put a little time and effort into it.  But much of Science is not.  In many cases Science has fallen victim to the Holmsean curse.  As Sherlock Holmes opined "[o]nce you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbably, must be the truth".  The scientific version of this curse is even worse than the original Holmsean one.  Take the example of the composition of light.  In "Opticks" (see above) Newton lays out the results of a number of experiments.  The obvious conclusion from these experiments is that light consists of waves.  But Newton did not put all the experiments he had done in "Opticks".  And the results of those experiments, and for other reasons, Newton concluded that light actually consisted of particles.  For hundreds of years scientists wrestled with this wave/particle dilemma.  The problem was there was no "whatever remains".  All the possibilities had been rendered impossible.

Finally in the 20'th century the conundrum was solved.  But the solution was weird and makes no sense to ordinary people.  How can light be both a particle and a wave at the same time?  And the mathematics that describe light are beyond the capabilities of most people.  Scientists did not opt for this complex and unnatural solution to the "light problem" out of anything except complete desperation.  All the sensible and simple solutions were known to be wrong.  Unfortunately, Scientists in situation after situation have been driven, usually completely unwillingly, to the weird and the complex for the simple reason that the ordinary and simple is known to be wrong.

So with Science we have this paradox.  Science is built on simple and easily understandable principles.  Scientific arguments are constructed to meet common sense requirements.  The objective is to construct an argument that is utterly convincing.  And, for those who understand the arguments and are fair, the arguments are utterly convincing.  But Science has been too successful.  These techniques have allowed scientists to construct utterly convincing arguments about how the world works.  And in many cases these arguments can be followed by the general public.  But Science has gotten so good at this sort of thing that they have been able to successfully investigate situations and construct convincing arguments about what's going on.  But what's going on turns out to be utterly weird.  And it sometimes takes talents far beyond those possessed by average people to understand and appreciate these arguments.

This has put a lot of people off on Science.  And this gap between what average people can understand and what Science tells us about the world around us has weakened the connection between Science and ordinary people.  And unscrupulous people have taken advantage of this.

There is nothing weird about Global Warming or the Science that underlays it.  It is not difficult to understand that glaciers are shrinking around the world.  There are "before" and "after" pictures of many of these glaciers.  A casual glance at these pictures leads inescapably to the conclusion that the pictured glacier has shrunk, usually by a lot.  No arcane scientific knowledge is required.  There are many other lines of evidence for Global Warming that are as simple and direct as the glacier story.  But people take advantage of the weakened connection between Science and ordinary people that exists in areas like particle physics and apply it to things like Global Warming.  They pretend that there is some kind of great scientific controversy about whether Global Warming is real and whether part of it is man made when there is no scientific controversy.  Unfortunately, many people do not make the effort to dig into something like this for themselves and the result is they are convinced that the science is unreliable when it is not.  The same kind of situation applies about the "controversy" surrounding Evolution.  Here too the Science is easily understood by ordinary people and is extremely sound.

   

Sarbanes-Oxley

This law has been mentioned several times in the news recently.  It is not the most popular subject but it is a good illustration of what's wrong with our system.  In our modern society anything that happened more than 15 minutes ago seems to be completely forgotten.  It's not even like ancient history.  Some people know ancient history.  Sarbanes-Oxley was passed in 2002 and was a huge deal at the time.  But I would bet that if you polled 100 people over 30 easily 95 would not have a clue as to what Sarbanes-Oxley is.  That is really depressing.  So here is my attempt to remedy the situation.

To understand Sarbanes-Oxley you have to understand the Enron scandal.  But it happened in the still more ancient era of 2001.  So probably 96% of the over 30 set have already forgotten about Enron.  And it is useful in explaining Enron to go even further back.  In 1923 Edwin Lefevre published "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" (still in print), a thinly disguised account of the activities of a notorious stock manipulator named Jesse Livermore.  Along the way Lefevre documented many of the ways to cook a market so that a speculator "in the know" could make a lot of money.  It turns out that "Reminiscences" can be thought of as the bible that guided the actions of the executives at Enron.

I am going to just sample one aspect of the Enron scandal.  If you want a more complete picture of the  entire scandal read "The Smartest Guys in the Room:  The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron".  For those who are visually oriented there is a documentary (now available on DVD) called "Enron:  The Smartest Guys in the Room" that is based on the book and covers essentially the same material albeit more briefly.  So what I am going to cover is indicative of the whole scandal but only covers one aspect of it.  And my story starts in the 1930s.

In an effort to get the economy back on track during the great depression the Roosevelt Administration undertook several major capitol construction projects.  The projects I am interested in were in the form of large dams.  The principal reason for the dams was flood control/irrigation and irrigation revenues were the principle source of revenue to cover payment of the bonds used to finance the projects.  But it cost little more to add hydroelectric generation capacity to the dams.  And, since most of the cost was covered by irrigation fees, the resulting electric power was extremely cheap.  Many of these dams were built in the states of Washington and Oregon.  Neither state had enough population or industry to soak up the electric power.  California did.  So, since the additional cost was relatively modest, long haul power lines were built connecting the entire West Coast together.  This allowed load balancing between Washington/Oregon and California as the timing of their peak power needs differed.  So it became common to sell electric power up and down the West Coast.

For many years the players in this power market were electric utility executives whose chief concern was servicing their own local customer base.  So the market was operated in an informal and gentlemanly manner.  It worked well for all the participants in spite of the fact that it was essentially unregulated.  This is because the players behaved honestly and ethically with each other and did not try to take advantage of or "pull one over on" each other.  But the market did not operate using "modern (e.g. Wall Street) business practises".  Standard analysis in some political circles assumes that "gentleman's" markets are inefficient.  The theory is that converting the market to a modern business-like approach will result in lower costs and greater efficiencies.  The new players playing by the new rules will be able to wring inefficiencies out of the system and cut better deals resulting in everyone benefiting.

Executives at Enron made these kinds of arguments to politicians.  "Let Enron in and we will shake everything up and everyone will win", they said.  And "free market" oriented politicians (e.g Republicans) bought these arguments.  They let Enron into the market for trading electricity up and down the West Coast.  And they did it in an essentially unregulated manner.  "The invisible hand of the market corrects all inefficiencies and punishes all bad behavior", the argument went.  And if the Enron executives and the traders they worked for had been honest and ethical there is a small chance that the market could have operated more efficiently than it had in the past.  Unfortunately, the Enron people saw their job as making vast amounts of money for Enron and giant commissions for themselves.  I don't know if they had read "Reminiscences" but they acted as if they had.  And for the first few years they were wildly successful.  They made pots of money for Enron and for themselves.  And, since success is proof of brilliance, they styled themselves as "the smartest people in the room".  I don't think any of them ever figured out, or at least were willing to admit in public, that all they were really doing was following in the footsteps of Jesse Livermore, someone who had done it all before roughly a hundred years earlier.

What actually happened when Enron traders took control of the West Coast power market was that prices went up, way up, and the whole system became unstable.  Enron traders literally had power plants shut down to create artificial shortages so that they could jack the price up by 1000% and more.  So the West Coast, and particularly California, got the worst of both worlds, way higher prices and many more brownouts and blackouts.  So much for the "efficient market" theory.

Eventually events caught up with Enron and it failed spectacularly.  Before it crashed Enron got into a number of markets, not just West Coast power.  And not all their schemes worked out as well.  And it turned out that they were cooking the books.  So Enron left a giant mess behind when it finally crashed.  A lot of what Enron did was illegal.  But it turned out that most of what it did was completely legal.  And it turned out that the Anderson accounting firm had made a lot of money advising Enron management as to how to do what they wanted to do legally or at least in such a way that they were unlikely to get caught.  Meanwhile Anderson was Enron's "auditor of record".  The "auditor of record" is supposed to represent stockholders.  The "audited financials" are supposed to tell stockholders how well the company is doing.  But stockholders were getting conned along with everyone else.  Anderson did this because they were making a lot more money from the advising business than they were for the auditing business.

The Enron scandal, and a number of others that happened at about the same time, caused the U.S. Congress to decide it had to do something.  The result was Sarbanes-Oxley. SOX, as it is commonly referred to, was supposed to fix a number of problems that came to light as a result of Enron and the other scandals.  The first thing was to make certain practices illegal.  The second thing was closely related to this.  Many Enron executives pleaded ignorance.  They said "I did not know that illegal thing was happening.  Subordinates did it without my knowledge".  And, of course the subordinates claimed that they had kept their seniors completely informed.  SOX said it was the responsibility of senior executives to know about illegality that was happening below them.  In essence, ignorance was no longer a permitted defense.  The third thing that SOX did was make it illegal for the same company to consult and audit.  In future, the "independent" auditor would then catch the bad behavior.  That was the idea.

SOX is now generally reviled.  It is said to impose draconian requirements that are expensive to implement without actually fixing the underlying problems.  No one, including its original proponents, are currently big fans of SOX.  How did this come to be?  Here's where I point my finger at the current system.

SOX tried to do big complicated things.  Enron proved that there were big problems that needed to be fixed and most people believed that the fixes would be complicated.  Lobbyists know how the system works.  They know that sometimes there is an avalanche coming down the mountain and you just can't stop it.  But you can divert it.  So lobbyists, when confronted with an avalanche, don't try to stop it.  They try to divert it.  They know that no one gets points for working through the fine print and figuring out what it means.  So instead of trying to stop things they cause complex provisions to be added.  There is always some ostensible reason for replacing a simple provision with a complex one.  But the complexity makes it easy to insert loopholes into the bill.  The loopholes allow people in the know (the lobbyist's clients, for instance) to continue to do what they want to.  This strategy goes by the name of the "swiss cheese" strategy.  Make sure there are enough holes inside the cheese so that apparently solid cheese is actually filled with air.

This "swiss cheese" strategy always works.  It has been used successfully for decades by the National Rifle Association to make sure that Federal gun control legislation is ineffective.  Many other laws that appear tough on the outside have been hollowed out by lobbyists from all parts of the political spectrum.  Business lobbyists are perhaps better at it than others but everyone uses it.  There are literally thousands of provisions in the Federal Tax Code that benefit a single company.  No one takes the time to work through all the provisions of a thousand page bill to figure out where the loopholes are and, more importantly, who benefits from them.  This is because no one cares very much when something like this is exposed.  And removing the loophole is nearly impossible.  The beneficiary of the loophole will spend a lot of time and money defending it.  Every one else eventually decides closing the loophole is too much trouble and moves on.

It would be nice if the "reduce regulations" Republicans were serious about this.  Vast numbers of regulations are in place to benefit a single individual or company.  We'd probably all be better off if these regulations (and the single beneficiary laws they are often based on) were eliminated.  But the Republicans have never actually done this.  Instead they go after regulations like "clean air" and "clean water" that benefit citizens but make it harder for businesses to make a buck.

As I indicated, even the proponents of SOX see that it has serious problems.  In actuality it doesn't work very well due to all the swiss cheese it contains.  The obvious thing for supporters to do would be to undertake a substantial revision to SOX to make it more effective and less needlessly burdensome.  The problem is that they are afraid.  They are afraid that if they make a major effort to fix SOX the lobbyists will swoop in and create even more swiss cheese making things even worse than the bad present situation.  So they decide that their best option is to just leave things alone.  And they are right.  And the fact that they are right perfectly illustrates what is wrong with the current system.  The system needs to be changed so that the "swiss cheese" strategy stops being a strategy that always works.

Joe Paterno

Joe Paterno is a failure as a leader and a role model.  He is a failure as a human being.  So why do we care about his win/loss record?  Unfortunately, his win/loss record (impressive) turns out to be more important then his failures.  There are a lot of people that have figured out that our society has real serious problems.  But there is disagreement about what the underlying cause is.  The poster child for the underlying cause is Joe Paterno.

Big time sports are a fact of life and a powerful influence in our society.  In holding a mirror up to society and using big time sports as the mechanism people quickly dismiss professional sports.  After all they are corrupted by money.  The players are paid outrageous amounts of money to play.  But in college football the players are supposed to be "gifted amateurs".  They are in it for the glory, for the love of the game, not the money.  That's what we all pretend.  And we have been pretending this for a long time.  My father used to tell a story about a football player named Hugh McElhenny.  The story is that he took a pay cut when he transitioned from college ball to the pros.  Now he played his college ball in the late '40s and was a pro until the mid '60s, a time before the real money hit pro football.  But the point is that big time college football has been a scam for a long time.

Now "sports" is supposed to be about more than just bread and circuses.  It's about something called "sportsmanship".  It is supposed to teach players and, to a certain extant fans, the value of "good sportsmanship" and "clean living".  Grantland Rice, in a poem he wrote in 1908 called "Alumnus Football", summarized good sportsmanship as "not that you won or lost - but how you played the game".  That, at least was how the virtues of the game were seen in 1908.  How do we see it now?

Vince Lombardi, the famous coach of the Green Bay Packers pro football team is said to have opined that "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing".  Some say Lombardi was misquoted.  Wikipedia says the quote originated with Henry Russell "Red" Sanders, a UCLA college football coach of yore.  It doesn't matter.  The point is it embodies the actual belief of most people in big time college football either as players, coaches, staff, or as fans.  It is certainly guided Joe Paterno's actions.

And from Mr. Paterno's perspective, he was right.  After it was announced that he was dropped (Was he fired?  Did he retire?  We don't know and we don't care!) from his job there was literally rioting in the streets by those angered that Mr. Paterno was no longer the coach.  The rioters were, as far as I can tell, ordinary citizens: students, alumni, fans of all stripes.  They emphatically believed that "winning is the only thing".  The contrast can't be starker.  These people believed that it was more important to win football games than to prevent young boys from being raped.  There has been no rioting that I know of by people who are horrified that young boys were systematically raped over more than a decade.

And it's not just Penn State fans that believe this.  There was a successful pro basketball player from around here.  After he retired it slowly came out that he had fathered something like 10 children out of wedlock during his carrier.  This was treated as a great source of humor in the community by the press and, as far as I can tell, by most fans.  It did his reputation absolutely no harm.  It was enough that he was a winner on the basketball court.  And he's small time.  As far as I know the sex that resulted in the procreation was consentual.  There have been several scandals associated with the local big time college football program in the last few years.  Among them are the well supported allegations are of players raping women.  But the key scandal in this period, according to most fans, was the scandalously low number of games in the "win" column.

If we look across the entire country these kinds of scandals, including the rape kind, are so common they are treated as cliches.  The only question is "will the perpetrators survive the scandal".  And it is a cliche that the answer is generally determined by the win/loss record.  Mr. Paterno stands out as one of the few examples where he was bounced in spite of his success as measured by his win/loss ratio.

There is a case to be made for Mr. Paterno believing that it is not his fault.  In a larger sense the blame lies with the rioters I alluded to above.  Unfortunately they represent the common wisdom of the public at large.  And it is the thinking of the public at large not the thinking of the people working on all the big time sports programs in the country that is the root cause of our problems.  It is their thinking that moves society at large, not the Joe Paterno's of this world.  Mr. Paterno's crime is understanding how the system really works and using this understanding to his advantage.  The real rules are:

1. Win.
2. Cheat (necessary to achieve #1) but don't get caught.
3. Make sure you have an effective "cover up" program for when you do get caught.

The big time athletic departments that surround the big time sports programs like the one at Penn State all have large and sophisticated cover up operations.  You can't win unless you cheat.  Cheating delivers too great an advantage.  So all the programs cheat.  The usual methods are things like grade fixing, illegal subsidies to players provided by alums, looking the other way when players use steroids or other performance enhancing drugs.  And finally, having a "flexible" attitude when key members of the organization engage in "youthful indiscretions" like rape.  Since cheating is standard operating procedure some one is inevitably going to notice.  That's where the cover up program kicks in.  The first line of defense is to have the sports "journalists" in your pocket.  In parallel is an effort to insure that their bosses on the papers, radio, and TV stations know that the continued flow of advertising dollars depends on positive coverage of the sports program.  The second line of defense is intimidation.  Pressure of all kinds is brought to make sure that people don't speak up.  Finally, outright bribery may be tried if the first two methods do not work.

In the case of Penn State, we had a member of the coaching staff engaged in child rape involving numerous children spanning a period of over a decade.  And several of the rape incidents took place in Penn State athletic facilities.  That amount of activity does not take place in such an outrageous (and by outrageous I really mean easily noticed) manner over such a long period of time without numerous people learning of it.  We now know that several people including Mr. Paterno learned of this behavior.  None of these people stepped in to put a stop to the behavior.  None of these people brought in outside authorities.  None of these people provided any aid or assistance to the victims or their families.  In a football program the coach is the General.  He sets the tone for his own behavior and the behavior of his subordinates.  It is illuminating that this happened under Mr. Paterno's "leadership".

Mr. Paterno did not invent the system.  He was just smart enough to understand it and use it to his advantage.  That, combined with his coaching skill, led him to a lot of success over many years.  And this is not the "Penn State System".  The same system to a greater (better win/loss record) or lesser (worse win/loss record) extent is implemented in program after program across the country.  This is only possible because the fans across the country understand and support the system as it actually is.  Scandals by the dozen have erupted across the years and in every part of the country.  I can think of no case where the public has risen up in their wrath and said "we want a less successful but ethical program instead of a more successful but unethical program".  It has not happened.  The response to a cheating scandal is not "you are unethical - you are bad".  It's "you were dumb to get caught".  It's not about the bad behavior.  It's about embarrassing us by getting caught.

It is bad enough that this kind of thinking infects sports everywhere and at all levels.  But the same kind of thinking pervades many other areas of society.  We had a financial meltdown caused by bad behavior on Wall Street.  Wall Street followed the big time sports model exactly.  They won (earned lots of money) by cheating (selling garbage as AAA investments to suckers).  Firm after firm learned they couldn't make as much money as the cheaters so they joined them in the cheating.  And they covered it up by capturing the journalists and resorted to the usual intimidation and bribery tactics when it came to regulators and politicians ("you'll never do business on the street again unless you give this an AAA rating" or "we'll drop a ton of money into your opponent's campaign if you don't support our legislation" or "how would you like a nice cushy job in a couple of years that pays big bucks for little work").  Using captive "business" reporters and slick marketing campaigns they have built and maintained a "fan" base that to this day supports their practices.  But, like the Penn State scandal where the activity was just too egregious for many sports fans to stomach, the fan base for Wall Street has been shrinking, again due to egregious behavior (robosigning, giant bonuses, etc.)

And we see a lot of the same thing happening in the political arena.  To win (in this case elections not games) takes lots of money.  The best source of the most money is unpopular special interests.  Many of these special interests are unpopular because their agendas are hostile to the interests of voters.  So smart politicians cover up their connections to these special interests.  To retain the support of these interests they must do their bidding while maintaining the fiction that they are not.  This is done by writing the legal provisions in such a way that it takes a lot of work (not the strong suit of most journalists) to figure out what the provision actually does and hiding who got the provision inserted into the bill.  In many cases the provision does not directly provide the benefit the special interest wants.  Instead it makes the bill effectively unworkable by inserting many loop holes that the special interest can use to advantage.  This is one reason why we have so many thousand page bills.  In addition the speical interests run sophisticated marketing campaigns supporting their positions and candidates.

And most campaigns are no longer fought on the basis of the positions held by the candidates or, when a candidate has one, the candidate's record of actual achievement.  Instead we have mud wars:  contests where it's a matter of who can throw the most mud at the other candidate in the most effective manner.  This is aided and abetted by the media's "horse race" approach to coverage.  Instead of who is doing what, coverage consists of who is ahead in which poll.   The substance of either campaign or candidate is almost entirely ignored.  So candidates who are good at being popular win over candidates who are duller but more substantial.

There is something wrong with our society.  It is the gradual transition from our being guided by a "how you play the game" orientation to a "winning is the only thing" orientation.  I think most people subconsciously understand this.  But they rarely support the "do the right thing" people over the "win at any cost" people.  In the short run, supporting the "win at any cost" people results in more wins.  Our team wins more games and out stock portfolio does better.  But in the long term the result is more losses.  In sports other teams resort to even more outrageous tactics to win and our team's win/loss record deteriorates.  In business the losses from the Wall Street crash depress the value of our portfolio for a decade or more.  We need to support more honest and ethical people over the "win at any cost" people in spite of the short term pain this requires.  I think it will turn out that the short term losses will be smaller and the long term gains will be greater than most people think.

Tom Brokaw is a bad journalist

I'm sorry, I just can't take it any more.  I have seen two appearances by Tom Brokaw, first on the "Charlie Rose" show and then on "The Daily Show".  He is selling his new book "The Time of our Lives".  You are supposed to buy the book because he is supposed to know what he is talking about.  He is supposed to know what he is talking about because he is a "respected journalist".  I listened to him carefully and the conclusion is inescapable.  He is a bad journalist.  Why?

First, he missed the biggest political story in the last 20 years.  This story is so big it colors all political coverage today and has colored it now for many years.  Yet Mr. Brokaw missed it.  What is this story?  In about 1990 Newt Gingrich took control of the Republican party.  He did this by raising a ton of money (for those days) and distributing it around to candidates.  He also formulated an overall strategy for how the Republican party should operate.  This strategy can be summarized by the following phrases:  "take no prisoners", "slash and burn", "my way or the highway".  In general he took the party to the right, enforced crushing discipline, and adopted a "no negotiation - no compromise" approach to dealing with Democrats.  In the early days he recruited candidates to run against other Republicans if he thought the incumbent Republican was not sufficiently conservative or not sufficiently disciplined (e.g. they didn't do what Newt told them to do).  In several cases Republicans lost seats they didn't need to lose.  But with savvy political operatives and enough money Newt was able to win those seats back and more.  In 1994 the GOP took over the House of Representatives for the first time in living memory.

With leadership in hand, Newt proceeded to implement his plan dubbed "the Contract with America".  Things went down hill from there for Newt.  Newt engineered two government shutdowns and got himself involved in scandal.  So he lost his leadership position in the House and, until recently, retired from the pursuit of elected office.  But by then most elected Republicans at the Federal level had gotten comfortable with "the Newt way" so it lives on in the Republican party to this day.  The whole "no compromise" approach of the modern Republican party is just "the Newt way".

Now none of this is any kind of secret.  It's all old news.  But Mr. Brokaw hews to the "it's a DC problem" rather that the correct "it's a Republicans in DC problem" to describe the current level of gridlock at the Federal level.  And Democrats deserve some blame but not much.  For instance, Senate Republicans pioneered the aggressive use of the Filibuster and other parliamentary tactics to delay or derail legislation they didn't like.  And the Democrats have tried on occasion to adopt the same methods.  But when Senate Democrats tried to Filibuster to block Bush judicial appointments the "gang of 12", six Democrats and six Republicans, instantly appeared.  The gang succeeded in derailing the Democratic Filibuster effort and a "compromise" was reached that resulted in most Bush judicial appointments going through.  Since the Democrats have regained control the Republicans have successfully Filibustered everything and no Republicans have joined a "gang of 12" or any other kind of gang that could interfere with the Republican's ability to block legislation.

Or consider President Obama.  He is considered a wuss by Mr. Brokaw and nearly all other "journalists" in DC.  Why?  Because he has spent.nearly three years bending over backward trying to find some kind of formula to generate a compromise and break loose a few Republican votes.  A cornerstone of this strategy has been to include Republican ideas into all of his major proposals.  In spite of any number of efforts the Republicans have maintained discipline, thrown up roadblocks continuously, and voted strictly along party lines against almost all of his proposals.  Mr. Obama has been so aggressive in courting Republicans that he has alienated a large portion of his base including yours truly.  So the idea that Democrats have been effective in contributing to gridlock and made more than a token contribution to "the partisan divide" is patently ridiculous. Mr. Brokaw is ridiculous when he does not accurately describe the situation.

Then there is the biggest cultural story of the last 30 or more years.  There is a fundamental conflict going on in the country.  It is not, at least superficially, the divide between the left and the right, or between the rich and the poor, or between the coasts and the heartland, or any of the usual "divides" covered in the media.  It is the conflict between "truth" and "truthiness".  On the "truth" side you have people who work hard trying to figure out what is really going on.  There dedication to "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" sometimes forces them to believe in "inconvenient" truths.  On the "truthiness" side you have people who believe that "wanting it to be true" is enough to make it so.  And, unfortunately, the truthiness people are winning.  And, still more unfortunately, Mr. Brokaw and the vast majority of his colleges contribute to the success of the truthiness side.

Now you might think that based in the divides I have so far outlined that the only people who care about this are people who are interested in cultural issues, people like politicians and religious people.  But it turns out that business has been investing heavily in the truthiness side of the conflict.  And the reason is advertising.  What if you have a product that is inferior to the competition?  In this situation the truth is not your friend.  Now instead let's say that your product is not inferior.  It's just that you are competing in a product category where all products are essentially the same.  Well, you can go with the low price strategy.  But this leads to a spiral and pretty soon no one is making any money.  It is better to end up with only a part of the market if the price is high enough so you can make a profit.  So in this "tweedle dee tweedle dum" situation the truth is at best of only marginal use.  In both of these cases truthiness works much better.  My product makes you sexier or happier or is "new and improved".  If the formulation has been changed it is new and any change must be an improvement, right?

Rush Limbaugh listeners pride themselves on being "ditto heads".  They believe anything Rush says.  So if Rush says "buy product X" they will buy it.  This means you don't have to spend a lot of money coming up with a clever marketing campaign that may fail spectacularly.  You can just pay Rush a large fee to say nice things about your product.  Now, imagine another radio personality, someone who has the same demographics as Rush and the same sized audience but whose audience is filled with skeptics.  What do you do?  If the personality on this show says "buy product X" the skeptical audience will not just fall into line and buy the product.  You will be forced to spend money on making the product better, or coming up with a really clever marketing campaign, or maybe just settling for a smaller market share.

So businesses love ditto heads and hate skeptics.  It makes sound business sense for the tobacco industry to manufacture more ditto heads that will buy phony health claims about cigarettes.  And industries that do a lot of harm like the coal industry love truthiness people.  If they can come up with a claim that these people want to believe then they have succeeded.  And even if you are just an ordinary business that makes consumer products, if you can condition people to be more likely to be receptive to a clever marketing campaign (e.g. move them closer to the truthiness end of the scale) then you can make your business more successful.  So many businesses for sound business reasons have decided to contribute to the dumbing down of the public.

Now the news business is supposed to be biased in this conflict.  They are supposed to be pro truth and anti-truthiness.  But the modern news business in just another business.  It is supposed to make as big a profit as it can.  And that means attracting sponsors that will pay high prices for advertisements.  And that means the job of a modern "newsman" has changed.  As Robert Shaffer (Skeptical Inquirer, November/December 2011) put it: "News reporters don’t want to get the facts.  They want to get ratings".  So people like Mr. Brokaw diligently cover "both sides" of stories that have some other number of sides.  They let pass without comment idiocy as long as it is spoken by "an authoritative source".  They cover unimportant but dramatic stories (if it bleeds, it leads) and ignore dull but important stories.  And they frequently use the excuse "it's too complicated - we just couldn't find a way to present the story so the public could understand it".  Then a TV show called "The West Wing" came along.  Aaron Sorkin managed to condense numerous "too hard" political arguments into short and accurate statements that could be easily understood by  viewers.  So the real problem was that people like Mr. Brokaw were too lazy or too incompetent to do what Mr. Sorkin did in episode after episode.

Now some may say that Mr. Brokaw is "among the best at what he does".  And there may be some truth to this position.  But that just means there are a lot of "journalists" out there who are not bad.  They are awful.  News should not be graded on the curve.  It is not enough for someone to be not as bad as the other guy.  He (or she) needs to be actually good.  It is too important to settle for anything less.  Decades of bad journalism have left us where we are now.  We have a dysfunctional government that is not going to be fixed unless people actually understand what the real problems is.  (Hint:  The Republicans did it).  Now I completely agree that there is plenty of room for improvement on the Democratic side.  But that's small beer compared to the Republican contribution to the current mess.  And one of the critical factors holding us back from doing anything about the Republicans is the current state of journalism as exemplified by Mr. Brokaw.  Why do you think that a large number of people, myself included, think the best journalist working today is Jon Stewart.  Stewart is not even a professional journalist.  The fact that he is a better journalist than the so called professionals, in spite of the fact that he sees himself as a comedian, says it all.

Science versus Religion

There are two basic positions on this issue.  One position is that there is no conflict, that they address two different aspects.  Steven J. Gould characterizes the situation as "non-overlapping magisteria".  And no less an authority than Sir. Isaac Newton agreed with this position.  In his time he was more well known as a leading theologian than as a scientist.  He devotes a considerable portion of "Optics", his second most famous work after "Principia", to the relationship between Science and Religion.  He believed that Science could deliver one kind of truth while Religion could deliver another.  He believed that by properly combining these truths a super-truth could be created that was greater and more complete than either lesser truth could provide on its own.  And he believed that there was no contradiction between Scientific Truth and Religious Truth.  Francis Collins, one of today's leading scientists, also sees no conflict between his strongly held religious beliefs and his strongly held scientific beliefs.  But there are few active scientists today that have beliefs similar to Collins.

Some active scientists are in the opposite camp.  They are strong and active atheists whose position can be summarized as "all religions are bunk and hokum".  Most scientists are in a middle camp however.  In religious terms they could be called agnostics.  They just don't want to engage in the battle on either side.  Some go to church regularly.  Some don't.  But most of them just want to stay out of the fight.  They want to be left alone by the religious types to do their scientific thing.  And I think that most religious people are in a similar camp when it comes to scientists.  They want to be left alone in their religious beliefs by the scientific types.  So, since there is a great consensus (according to me), why all the hoopla?

The answer comes down to the most fundamental of questions:  Is there a conflict between Science and Religion?  I believe there is.  In my previous post (http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2011/10/scientific-method.html) I said "Science is the pursuit of truth".  In a fundamental way Religion is also about truth.  Consider for a moment what would happen if God made a great revelation to his current prophet.  But assume the revelation was full of lies.  God would still be God but would it make sense to direct our actions based on revelation?  No!  All believers believe that the word of God, the revelation, is "divine truth", that God does not lie in his revelations.  The word of God is sometimes referred to as "revealed truth" for this reason.

Now, just because God uses what some would characterize as an unusual method to communicate truth, does this necessarily mean that there is some conflict between religious truth and scientific truth?  No!  Scientists believe some truly weird stuff.  Believing that God downloaded true facts directly into the brain of Paul while he was on the road to Damascus would register as "totally normal" on the scientific "how weird is this"-o-meter.  Scientists would have no problem with the process as long as it worked.  But the real question is:  does it work?

I think that many religious people intuitively understand this.  They know that there is "religious truth" and "scientific truth".  They also believe that there is some overlap and that there are some situations where "religious facts" and "scientific facts" are in conflict.  So it is critical to discount the conflicting "scientific facts" so that there is no alternative to the "religious facts".  One technique they use is to say "religious beliefs are a matter of faith and not subject to validation".  You either believe them or you don't.  The problem, as I see it, is that religious people don't believe their own argument.  They believe that, at least in some cases, people will believe the scientific argument, and therefore the scientific "fact", and therefore doubt the religious "fact".  Religious people can disagree with me and say "faith is sufficient".  The problem is that I see a lot of religious people in a lot of places and at a lot of times acting like they doubt their "faith based" argument.

The earliest example of this that most people are familiar with is the fight between Galileo and the Catholic Church in 1616.  The fight was over whether the Earth was at the center of the universe, as the Church believed, or whether it revolved around the Sun as Copernicus had suggested.  Now most people would wonder what Celestial Mechanics has to do with religion and they would be right.  But church people at the time decided that the Bible was a source of reliable information about Celestial Mechanics and that the Bible said that the Earth was at the center of the Universe.  So "the Earth is at the center of the universe" became revealed truth.  And if one revealed truth was determined to be false then the whole edifice of belief in the Bible tumbled down.

A less drastic solution is possible.  One just decides that Celestial Mechanics is not part of revealed truth and the problem goes away.  But somehow there is always a reason why that solution is deemed not feasible by religious authorities.  The modern version of the heliocentricity conflict is the evolution conflict.  Again religious people have decided that the Bible is a good source of information about how plants and animals and people came into existence and how long ago that happened.  Scientists in the form of Evolution and related ideas say that the interpretation of this Biblical information by a number of religious authorities, namely that all plants and animals were created at roughly the same time about six to ten thousand years ago, is wrong.

Again there is a way around this.  Many religious people have long believed that the Bible is not meant to be taken literally.  Instead it should be used as a general guide.  The problem with this, the biblical literalists say, is that you can no longer draw a bright line between what is revealed truth and what is general guidance.  And they are right.  But the alternative, the literalist interpretation, means you are stuck with all the nonsense in the Bible, and there is a lot of nonsense in the Bible.  So Christians are stuck between a rock (literalism) and a hard place (fuzzy general guide with no way to draw a bright line).  Even if you go with the "general guide" school Science represents a problem.  Science keeps evolving.  Scientists keep coming up with more and more scientific truth.  No one worried about Evolution in Galileo's time.  Who knows what piece of new Science will pop up (God particle anyone?) to trouble a currently non-controversial religious belief.

So far I have characterized the issue as being one between Science and Christians.  But there are lots of religions out there.  Many of them are "prophet" based.  God speaks directly to one or more prophets (Mary Baker Eddy, L. Ron Hubbard, etc.).  The prophet then spreads "the word of God" to the flock and off we go.  As I said previously, one of the key foundations of Science is "whatever works is right" and especially it's reverse, "whatever doesn't work is wrong".  Some part of the theology of every religion I am familiar with can be subjected to scientific investigation.  There are lots of religions out there.  And I am only slightly familiar with a few of them.  But Scientists have developed a lot of tools for ferreting out what works and what doesn't.  If just one of these tools ferrets out just one falsity in one particular religion's doctrine then the whole edifice falls down for that religion.  I contend without proof (e.g. you'll just have to take me on faith) that the doctrine of every prophet based religion has a problem that can be found by applying scientific methods.  I leave it as an exercise for the reader to examine non-prophet based religions to see if they have a similar weakness.

It is only necessary for a few people in the community of a faith to be familiar with this weakness.  Over and over these people decide that Science is a threat and therefore that it must be attacked.  It doesn't really matter what most people of faith or most people of science think.  Attacks on Science by people of faith will be made because they must be made.

Science does not have this weakness.  It is normal for disagreements to arise between scientists.  There are conflict resolution mechanisms built into Science.  For those unfamiliar with them they work like this.  A Scientist makes an assertion that others disagree with.  Einstein famously said "God does not play dice with the universe", for instance.  In a faith based environment this would be the end of things.  As an authority, Einstein would be deferred to and the Einstein's statement would become accepted doctrine.  Instead scientists behave differently.  They say "Is there any way we can determine whether it is true or not?"  This actually happened.  Scientists were able to convert Einstein's general statement into testable specifics.  They then devised and executed experiments to examine the testable specifics and determined that Einstein was wrong.  The scientific version of "God does play dice with the universe" is true.  And so it goes.  It is considered normal for accepted ideas in Science to be overturned.  So proving some Scientific statement false does not overturn all of Science.  It only overturns a small part of it.  Such evolution in scientific beliefs is considered to be the normal progress of Science.  That's why most Scientific beliefs are called "Theories".  The possibility must always be entertained that a particular piece of accepted scientific wisdom will prove to be false in whole or, more likely, in part.

This is a classic case of asymmetric warfare.  Religious people must attack Science "by any means necessary" perhaps violating the very standards of morality they purport to believe in (e.g. "thou shalt not lie").  Scientists, on the other hand, do not on the whole feel a need to attack religion.  But there is an asymmetric attribute to warfare.  It is only necessary for one side to want to go to war for there to be a war.  So we have and will continue to have a war between Science and religion.

Scientific Method

The "Scientific Method" is (or at least was) presented in school in an early grade.  The standard version is something like this:

It's a 4 step cyclical process consisting of:
1.  Gather the facts (observations, results of experiments, etc.)
2.  Look for patterns and regularities in the facts.
3.  Formulate or revise theories, hypotheses, etc.
4.  Devise and execute experiments or plans for additional observations.
Go back to step 1 and repeat.

Science is done by people and is a much more chaotic process than the one listed above.  If you want to see a good and entertaining demonstration of the Scientific Method in action I strongly recommend a TV show called "Mythbusters".  The two main hosts (Jamie Hynaman and Adam Savage) have exactly NO standard scientific credentials.  They come out of the movie special effects industry.  This is handy because they have a good sense of how to put together an entertaining show.  But they also do good science.  Which leads to my first observation:  Science is a process or method and anyone who does it is a "scientist" doing "scientific work".  Science is not about who you are or what you know.  It's about how you go about doing things.  And the standard characterization of science and the scientific method obscure as much as they help.  So let's go straight to the basics:

• Science is the pursuit of truth.
• Whatever works is right.

These two observations are the core of what science is really about.  In fact, from a practical point of view, the reverse of the second observation is of more practical consequence to the pursuit of science.  Namely:  "Whatever doesn't work is wrong".  Modern science is not performed as it once was.  Why?  Because those old procedures sometimes led to things that turned out to be wrong.  So scientists went back and revised the procedure to avoid whatever problem was perceived to have led to the error.  Modern scientific technique as practised by professional scientists is far more complex and includes many more "checks and balances" steps than it used to in an effort to more reliably attain truth.

Does that mean that the simple procedures employed by the Mythbusters people will sometimes lead them astray.  Yes!  And they know it.  So, like good professional scientists, they occasionally do "revisited" shows where they look at earlier work after it has been criticized by fans of the show.  They will redo things a different way.  Sometimes the result comes out the same.  Sometimes it does not.  I think they have done the "chicken gun" test 4 times now.  Bitter experience has taught scientists the lesson that "always be prepared for your idea to be shown to be wrong" is critically important to science.

Scientists even go one farther.  A modern scientific concept is that of "falsifiability".  Is there some way, some set of data or some experimental result, that would definitely prove that your idea is wrong?  Now it may be that the experiment is very hard to do, even impossible at this time, but the concept of falsifiability is very important.  Scientists have learned to be very leery of situations where the answer is "no".  The easier it is to come up with and do an experiment where some result would falsify the theory, the happier scientists are.  So they like theories that make predictions that can be tested.  When Einstein came up with General Relativity he predicted that the Sun would bend the light from a star when light from that star came close to grazing the Sun.  Scientists came up with a situation where this prediction could be tested and went out and did the measurements, measurements that had never been done before.  The result came back the way the theory predicted and a different way than it would have come out if General Relativity was bunk.  This and other tests of General Relativity were why the theory, which is truly weird, was accepted fairly quickly in the scientific community.

And that brings me to another point.  Scientific "truth" is determined by a popularity contest.  Scientists argue about everything all the time.  For a scientific theory to become accepted wisdom that vast majority of scientists have to accept it.  There is no outside objective way to determine scientific truth.  What differentiates the scientific endeavor form others in not the "popularity contest" aspect but how the contest is scored.  So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to convince the vat majority of scientists that something is true. And what convinces scientists is that thing I noted above, namely "whatever works is right".  The emphasis here is on the word "works".  So why would you believe that something works?

The obvious and traditional answer is that "some important and respected person says it".  The obvious problem is that important and respected people often believe things that turn out to be wrong.  Say an I&RP says "the sky is green".  But one day you go outside and look up and it looks awfully blue to you.  (Actually it is possible for small portions of the sky to be green under certain circumstances, but I'm talking about the whole sky.)  Now what if you poll 50 friends, enemies, and strangers and they all agree that the sky is blue?  At that point most people would agree that I&RP got it wrong.  And that's where science began.  About 400 years ago some people got together and they decided that I&RP frequently get it wrong.  They said "we can do better".

And they did do better a lot of the time.  But they also made a lot of mistakes.  So they tried to learn from their mistakes and figure out how to avoid them in the future.  And that's where modern scientific techniques come from.  Over the years since scientists have tried a lot of things to get to "truth that works".  Most of them ended up not working very well.  The few that consistently delivered the goods evolved into modern scientific technique.  And one common component of modern scientific technique is repeatability.  Is someone does an experiment and gets a certain result is that the end of the story?  No!  Time after time in the history of science people have tried to replicate the result of an experiment and failed.  And in many cases it has turned out that the original experimenter goofed in some way.  So cornerstones of modern science are:

• Publish not only your results but the procedures necessary to reproduce your results.
• Someone else needs to use your published procedures to reproduce your results.

If your results can't be replicated then they should not be relied upon.  And this has resulted in the creation of the modern science lab that movie and TV show makers like to have fun with.  An easy way for things to go wrong is for there to be something going on that no one noticed.  Imagine you are doing a soil acid study in an open field and a dog comes along and pees on your soil when you are not looking.  It is easy to see that your results might get skewed.  But if you move your study "into the lab" you can easily make sure that no dog can pee on your experiment.  This is a silly example of what can go wrong.  But the idea is simple.  You need to control your environment to make sure nothing is going on that you don't know about.

Another issue that led to the "lab" idea is complexity.  It turns out to be really hard to figure out what is going on if you change too many things at once.  If you change 100 things at once you don't know which changes are important and which aren't.  So scientists are most happy when they can change one and only one thing at a time.  I have only scratched the surface of all the ways scientists have found to get the wrong answer over the years.  But these modern procedures are all driven by the same simple idea:  whatever works is right.

Think about it.  If you want to convince me that something is true what is more likely to work:  "It's true because I say so" or "I did all these things and I was very careful and here's what happened".  Better yet "do this then this then this yourself and see what happens.  Now do you believe me?"  The thing that makes professional scientists different from you and me is training.  It's not the training in a bunch of "scientific facts" or the training on how to operate some piece of complex lab equipment.  It is the training on procedures, what procedures work, what procedures don't work, and why various procedures work or don't.

Science can be done by anyone.  It can be done by a couple of special effects guys with no formal scientific training.  It can be done by a nine year old girl with no special training of any kind.  (The "New England Journal of Medicine", one of the most respected scientific journals in the world, published a paper whose lead author was a nine year old girl).  The important thing is not who they are, or even for the most part what training they have had.  What is important is what they do.  Do they do things in a proper scientific manner?  Where professional scientists can make a contribution is to review their work to see if they did it right.  There has been a big change in Astronomy in the last 10-20 years.  Much of the work professional Astronomers now do depends on contributions by amateurs.  Professional astronomers have learned that many amateurs do work in a proper scientific manner.  And the use of amateurs results in a lot more eyeballs looking up.  And some amateurs even have equipment that is professional or near professional in its quality.

Now the scientific ideal is to do the easily replicable experiment in the lab then have others replicate it.  But often this is not possible.  A classic example is space shots.  The one and only space shot to Pluto is on its way as I write this.  Scientists can't bring Pluto into the lab and put it under a microscope.  They won't even get a chance to send a second space shot to Pluto any time soon.  So this is a case of "you go with what you can get" even though it is not "in the lab" and its not repeatable.  Scientists have a choice between getting nothing (no data about Pluto) and a less than optimal situation.  They go with the less than optimal situation, in this case, way less than optimal.  Scientists treat these situations very carefully.  The farther away they get from the optimal situation of a repeatable situation in the lab, the more careful they try to be.  So they looked a everything on the Pluto mission eight ways from Sunday while they were designing and constructing the mission.  That's one reason space shots are so expensive.  But the alternative is to spend less money but to get junk (e.g. not reliable) data.

Even so, it doesn't always work.  The first mission to Mars looking for life found it.  At least that's what the experiments said.  So did scientists say "we found life on Mars"?  No!  They said "we got interesting results from our Mars experiments".  Why?  Because this was not the first time a scientist had gotten a strange result in a situation where scientists knew little about what to expect.  Lots of things had gone wrong in this situation in the past so scientists had learned to be very careful.  And it turned out they had not found life on Mars.  They found out that the chemistry of Martian soil was not what they expected and the differences messed up their results.

Finally, science is done by people.  People make mistakes all the time.  They believe that they are doing an experiment in the proper scientific manner when they aren't.  They think they know how an experiment will come out or they hope that an experiment will come out in a certain way.  So they see what isn't and don't see what is.  This "wishing can make it appear to be so" is why scientists like to do "double blind" experiments.  These are experiments where the scientists don't know everything (like whether the patient they are examining was given the drug or not) while they are collecting the data.  If the scientist doesn't know (until later when the data is "unblinded") then the scientist can't "accidentally" bias the result.

Scientists are trained to do things in the proper scientific manner.  So they are more likely than an untrained amateur to get it right.  But doing things in the proper scientific manner only ups your chances of getting it right.  It may be that there is some yet undiscovered flaw in the current version of proper scientific manner.  But it may also be that doing things using a flawed procedure (e.g. not proper scientific manner) gets the correct result because the flaws do not turn out to be important in this case.  Looking up in the sky one day by yourself on a clear day and noting that the sky is blue gets you the correct answer even though "your sample size is too small to be significant".  In this case the effect is so great (always blue, never green) that you don't need to go through all the scientific rigmarole to get the right answer.  So doing things the wrong way may get you the right answer and doing things the right way might give you the wrong answer.  Is this really better than the alternative.

Yes!  And for two reasons.  First, doing things in a proper scientific manner is more likely to get you the right answer.  But more importantly, science is really good at determining that a particular answer is wrong.  Doing things in the proper scientific manner has demonstrated that what was generally believed to be true is actually false.  In the General Relativity example above most people believed that Newton got it right.  Einstein came along and said "Newton got it wrong in the following ways".  Scientists then followed up by looking very carefully in the places Einstein said to look.  And they decided that Einstein was right.  And before Einstein, Newton had come along first and said "these traditional ideas of how the universe works are wrong".  He then presented his theories and the experiments that showed that the new theories were right and the old ideas were wrong.

And in both cases Newton and later Einstein won popularity contests.  There was no august body that awarded either of them a "truth" prize.  In both cases they made convincing arguments that their ideas were better than those ideas that came before them.  Essentially, that the old ideas were wrong.  Both of their new ideas sounded radical and weird to people of their time.  People were comfortable with the old ideas.  They were very popular both with every day people and with elites, in this case scientists of the time.  But both of them won their respective popularity contests, especially among scientists.  Why?  Because they provided compelling arguments.

Science has become very complex.  It frequently involves mathematics far beyond what normal people can handle.  And many modern scientific concepts are truly weird.  But the way we got here is very basic and sensible.  Scientists went about the process of looking hard for the truth.  They tried to get the best data they could lay their hands on by, for instance, continually improving their instruments and tools.  Then they tested the ideas of the day to see if they fit the data.  Frequently they did not.  So they were discarded as false.  Sometimes all of the ideas of the day were found to be defective.  This forced scientists to come up with truly weird ideas.  Why?  Because none of the non-weird ideas worked.  And "[o]nce you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth".  Am I now quoting some august scientist or philosopher?  No!  I am quoting Sherlock Holmes from "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet".  But Holmes, in spite of his fictional nature, is just speaking common sense.  If an idea is false, it's false.  If you are looking for truth it matters not if the idea is popular or "common sense" or any other thing not having to do with whether it is true or not.  Science would be a lot easier to do if only sensible ideas were true and all weird ideas were false.