The most functional English Word

Plagiarism alert:  The bulk of this post is not my original work.  I got it from a friend of mine called Jeff.  I don't think he is the original author either.  If anyone can provide me the name of the original author I will be happy to provide a credit.  Finally, this post is dedicated to my mother.  This word is one of her favorites.

The most functional English word -

Well, it's shit ... that's right, shit!
Shit may just be the most functional word in the English language.

You can smoke shit, buy shit, sell shit, lose shit, find shit, forget shit, and tell others to eat shit.

Some people know their shit, while others can't tell the difference between shit and shineola.

There are lucky shits, dumb shits, and crazy shits.  There's bull shit, horse shit, and chicken shit.
You can throw shit, sling shit, catch shit, shoot the shit, or duck when the shit hits the fan.

You can give a shit or serve shit on a shingle.

You can find yourself in deep shit or be happier than a pig in shit.

Some days are colder than shit, some days are hotter than shit, and some days are just plain shitty.

Some music sounds like shit, things can look like shit, and some days you feel like shit.

You can have too much shit, not enough shit, the right shit, the wrong shit or a lot of weird shit.

You can carry shit, have a mountain of shit, or find yourself up shit creek without a paddle.

Sometimes everything you touch turns to shit and other times you fall in a bucket of shit and come up smelling like a rose.

When you stop to consider all the facts, its the basic building block of the English language.

And remember, once you know your shit, you don't need to know anything else!!

You could pass this along, if you give a shit; or not do so if you don't give a shit!

Well, shit, its time for me to go.  Just wanted you to know that I do give a shit and hope you had a nice day, without a bunch of shit.  But if you happen to catch a load of shit from some shithead........

Well, shit happens.

SETI

SETI stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.  I have been reading Science Fiction since I was a kid.  So I am very comfortable with the idea of space aliens.  So, I am all in favor of SETI, right?  Wrong!

The first possible reason to be anti-SETI is a belief that space aliens don't exist.  I don't subscribe to that idea.  I think there's a good chance they do exist but I'm not sure.  I think that puts me in line with what most people think.  There is a line of thinking recently popularized by Steven Hawking that it might be dangerous for space aliens to discover us because they would do bad things to us (cut to innumerable horror movie plots).  I think this is a possibility.  But its not my main reason to forgo the hunt.

My main reason for being against SETI is ignorance.  I don't think we know what we are doing.  There has been a conventional wisdom going back 60 or more years about how to go about the search.  It revolves around radio.  What you do is hook up a powerful radio receiver and listen.  The first serious attempts to do this happened in the '60s.  And almost immediately we got a "hit".  The Astronomers who got the hit dubbed it LGM-1, the LGM standing for Little Green Men.  So we discovered actual aliens in the '60s?  Well, not exactly.

It turns out that what the Astronomers found is now called a Pulsar.  A Pulsar is a peculiar type of star.  For reasons I am not going to go into it puts out a very powerful radio signal that repeats itself.  The repeat period is a few seconds or less so in effect it pings at us.  At the time no one knew that such a thing as a Pulsar could exist.  Now they are a common subject of study by Astronomers and we know that there are lots of Pulsars all over the place.  It took almost no time to figure out that that early signal was not from an alien and only a few years for a basic understanding of Pulsars to emerge.  But up until that time if you had played a recording of that first signal to most people they would have said "it's definitely a space alien".

So is one "oops" enough to doom the whole enterprise?  No!  But it does provide validation for the idea that we don't know what we are doing when it comes to looking for space aliens.  The search has gotten more sophisticated since.  But it is has stuck with the "look for an intelligent radio signal" idea.  Sticking with this idea for so long demonstrates a fundamental lack of imagination.  The theory has been and continues to be that we can detect "intelligent" radio signals over longer distances than just about anything else.  But even with radio signals, it's harder to look over large distances than you would think.

During the '60s and '70s this approach seemed very sensible.  The strongest signals we humans generated were radio and TV signals, for the most part.  The modulation technique (the way you added the "signal" to the broadcast) used for these signals was very simple because the complexity of the receiver had to be very low to keep the cost of radios and TVs down.  But now, only a few decades later, we use much more complex modulation techniques.  This is because it is now cheap to put a computer into something like a cell phone.  The complex processing the receiver can do means a lot of things are now possible.  But it also means that the signal now looks a lot more like noise than those old signals did.  So the amount of effort it takes to make sense of the signal is now a lot greater.  And this makes the signal a lot harder for some alien to pick out of the background.  Another thing that is happening is that the power of the broadcast signal is going way down.  This is so that we can use the same frequency over and over.  Now imagine an advanced civilization doing just what we are doing only more so.  It may be very hard to detect them by just looking for a strong simple radio signal.

In fact, we really don't know what to look for.  So I don't think we should actively look.  Does that mean I don't think we should look at all?  Again, no.  Consider the natives that first encountered Christopher Columbus.  Let's say they wanted to search for aliens, in this case people from Europe.  What would they do?  Well, they would have limited technology.  Their best bet would be to station lookouts on mountains.  These would be able to see perhaps 15 miles out into the ocean.  This would not work very well.

But consider what happened when Christopher Columbus showed up.  Were the natives in any doubt that "aliens" had arrived?  No!  They came in a giant canoe of alien design.  They wore alien clothes, spoke an alien language, and had alien technology.  The fact that the natives had no high tech toys in no way diminished their ability to determine that they were in the presence of aliens.  And to discover, or in this case be discovered by, aliens all they had to do was to go about their normal course of business.  Once the encounter happened, they were in no doubt that they were being subjected to an alien invasion.

So I think no special search is necessary.  As in the "Columbus" case, the aliens have the better technology so they can project evidence of their existence much further than we can.  And aliens are alien.  We will not have any problem figuring out that they are alien when they make their presence known.  Given this, I am opposed to spending public money on SETI.  Although non-zero, I consider the chances of an active search producing results to be so small that the expenditure of public money solely for a SETI search is unjustified.  However, if some SETI searching can be done "on the side" and at no additional cost, I am OK with that.  Paul Allen has provided funding for the Allen Telescope Array, which is affiliated with the SETI Institute.  As a private citizen, he can spend his money as he wishes.  I am not adamantly opposed to SETI funding because SETI initiatives have provided "spin off" benefits.  So the money spent has not been a complete waste.

(Added 1/6/2011) The January 2011 Scientific American contains an article on SETI entitled "Contact:  The Day After" by Tim Folger.  It is a pretty standard piece.  Quoting:  "SETI's instruments are designed to search for steady, periodic narrowband pulses -- carrier waves powerful enough to be detectable across many light-years."  Old fashioned radio signals consists of a "carrier" wave, the central frequency of the signal.  It is surrounded by "side bands", one at a frequency range just below the carrier frequency and one other just above.  But it turns out all the signal information is embedded in either side band.  So you can suppress the carrier and one of the side bands and you are left with a "single side band" (SSB) signal.  This saves bandwidth and transmitter power.  It just requires a slightly more complicated receiver.  So if our aliens are transmitting SSB signals the SETI search won't find them.  SSB is old technology.  A popular newer technology is called "spread spectrum".  It works just like you think it does.  These are just two specific examples of how our use of radio is moving from simple, SETI detectable, signalling to signalling that looks more and more like noise.  Who knows what we will be doing a hundred years from now.  But whatever it is, it will probably be hard to detect with a simple SETI search.   

the evolution of the relationship between God and science

First, some caveats:  (1) Although "evolution" appears in the title I am not going to talk about the creationism/evolution controversy in this piece.  (2) By "God" I mean specifically the Christian conception of God.

Now let me start in the middle with Sir Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727).  Most people are only familiar with him from fable and probably think of him as a confirmed atheist.  But he was, in fact, the opposite.  During his lifetime he was an orthodox Christian and actually wrote much more on religious topics than scientific ones.  He was well respected member of the community of theologians and other religious thinkers.  One of his great works, "Optics", contains a large section at the end laying out his thoughts about the relationship between "scientific" truth and "religious" truth.  He believed both were valid and that they complimented each other.  He recommended combining them to achieve some kind of super truth that was greater than either component alone.  Newton is only the best example of the many scientists who are also noted for their deeply held religious beliefs.

Now let me move to Copernicus (1473 - 1543).  Copernicus is famous in this context for his publication "De Revolutionibus", a work on Celestial Mechanics.  What does Celestial Mechanics have to do with religion?  Good question!  And unfortunately religious people had an answer.  Before Copernicus, the prevailing system was one named after Ptolemy, who was not a Christian, by the way.  The Ptolemaic system posited that there were a series of crystal spheres surrounding the earth in the heavens, one each for the Sun, Moon, the stars, etc.  But pure spheres did not work especially in the case of reproducing the motions of the planets.  So the Ptolemaic system postulated that the main spheres had smaller spheres attached resulting in something called epicycles.  By the time of Copernicus the Ptolemaic system had gotten quite elaborate and still didn't work very well.

Why did theologians care?  Well there were two key ideas in the Ptolemaic system that they ended up invested in.  The first was that the Earth was the center of everything.  The idea was that the earth was the home of "God's people".  They were the most important thing so they must be in the center.  The second idea was that the circle, and its three dimensional extension the sphere, were the most perfect shapes.  So God would naturally put the Earth at the center of things and he would use spheres to create the heavens because God was perfect.  This logical construct eliminated any other possibility so to consider any other possibility was heretical.

As I said, the Ptolemaic system didn't work that well.  So Copernicus came up with a different system.  He posited that although some things like the moon revolved around the Earth, most things revolved around the Sun.  Switching to this system greatly simplified Celestial Mechanics calculations.  And he was careful to say "I'm not saying this is how it is.  I'm only saying this is a way to make the mathematics easier to do".

But it turns out that the Copernican system is no great shakes either.  Tycho Brahe (1546 - 1601) embarked on a series of the most accurate celestial observations done before the advent of the telescope.  These observations demonstrated that neither the Ptolemaic nor the Copernican system worked that well.  Copernicus assumed that the orbits were circular and that the origin of the circle was at the center of the larger body.  In truth, orbits are elliptical and the origin is at the center of mass, which is sometimes significantly displaced from the center of the larger body.  There was a delay of from 3 to 60 years before the reaction of the religious establishment to Copernicus' ideas became heated.  But heated it eventually became.

The next player in this Celestial Mechanics game was Galileo (1564 - 1642).  Copernicus dodged the controversy by dying about the time "De Revolutionibus" was published.  Galileo was not so lucky.  The Galileo affair is complex so I am only going to point out a few aspects.  Galileo was one of the first to build and use telescopes.  One of the uses he put his to was to observe Jupiter.  In the process he discovered the "Galilean" moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto).  This Galilean system of a celestial body, not the Earth, with things orbiting it is a perfect counterexample to the idea that everything circles the Earth.  And, to make matters worse, Galileo indicated in a 1610 letter that many of his opponents refused to even look into a telescope to see if they saw the same thing Galileo did.  They were unwilling to examine the evidence Galileo advanced to support his position.  Galileo was censured for his ideas without a fair hearing because they challenged cherished religious beliefs.

All this Celestial Mechanics business now looks comical.  Why did they care?  Celestial Mechanics now looks like a bunch of obscure mathematics that has nothing to do with theology.  But at the time it had everything to do with theology, according to the theologians of the day.  Scientists (that's what we call them now) ended up involved in theological discussions even if they didn't want to.  This is in spite of the fact that the Bible has little or nothing to say on the subject.  Most people have at least heard of the Celestial Mechanics controversy.  Now I want to move on to a couple of subjects most people are not familiar with.  The first one had a much more obvious theological connection.   And initially Scientists were in complete agreement with the religious types as to the correct approach.

Chemistry is divided into two main branches: Inorganic and Organic.  Inorganic materials like rocks had no "life force" in them.  Organic materials like kidneys were parts of organisms like cows that appeared to have a life force in them while they were alive.  And the chemistry of inorganic materials appeared to be different than the chemistry of organic materials.  There seemed to be separate rules for each.  Why even the constituent components seemed somehow different.  You could make, at least in theory, any inorganic material by doing the "beaker, retort, chem lab" thing whereas this did not seem possible with organic chemicals.  Scientists of the time were comfortable with the idea that "only God can create living things".

But that did not mean that organic chemicals could not be investigated.  The idea was that you would end up with two sets of rules, the first set for inorganic chemicals, and the second different set for organic ones.  Now there was some overlap.  It was simple to make carbon dioxide using inorganic techniques.  Yet carbon dioxide was known to be strongly associated with living creatures.  But scientists figured that with careful work they would be able to tease out the rules of these "boundary" situations.

But then a totally unexpected thing happened.  In 1828 Wohler came up with a completely inorganic method for manufacturing Urea.  Until this time Urea was firmly seen as one of those mystical organic compounds that should follow different rules.  And within a short period of time many other compounds that had historically been seen as completely organic were synthesized using strictly inorganic methods.  Now we see organic chemistry as carbon chemistry and, other than its fiendish complexity, see no difference in the rules for inorganic versus organic chemistry.

As part of this "figure out the organic rules" process there were efforts to detect and characterize life force.  There have also been efforts to weigh the soul.  Supposedly it has been determined to weigh 21 grams by Duncan McDougall in 1907.  Modern techniques can easily and accurately measure a weight change in a human that is far smaller than 21 grams but no one has reproduced McDougall's results.  They now get no weight change at death.  Despite a lot of hard looking, scientists have also not found any evidence for the existence of a life force or a soul. A successful detection of any of these would instantly result in fame and fortune for whoever pulled it off.  So there is a real incentive to do it.

Finally, I want to move on to consider something that theologians and religious people have never had any interest in.  But it resulted in a profound change in scientific thinking to the detriment of religious beliefs among scientists.  This is something called the "lumeniferous aether".  There has been a long debate among scientists as to whether light is a particle or a wave.  The modern belief is that in some situations it behaves like a particle and in other situations it behaves like a wave.  So it is neither fish nor fowl.  But let's assume for the moment that we are examining light in a situation where it behaves like a wave.

Waves in sound are oscillations.  Something oscillates (vibrates) and eventually these oscillations reach our ear and we hear the sound.  So sound waves in particular and waves in general seem inextricably bound up in the idea of something vibrating.  And that's the idea behind the lumeniferous aether.  If light is a wave it must vibrate something.  Since we don't know what it is let's give it a name and start looking for it.  And that's what scientists did in the late 1800's.  And, even if you don't know exactly what it is you should be able to determine some of its attributes.  So Scientists started out with a simple idea.  It's everywhere, kind of like air.  Now with clever experiments you can find out how fast air is moving and in what direction using only sound, just by doing the right experiment.  So that's what scientists did.  They came up with clever experiments using light that would tell them the speed and direction of the lumeniferous aether.

One such set of experiments were done by Michaelson and Morley.  The speed of light is so fast it was hard to measure using equipment available at the time.  So they set out to measure the difference in speed of two beams of light.  Using a very clever setup they were able to detect tiny differences in the speed of two beams of light.  Then they set out to measure the speed of a light beam traveling in a North-South direction versus the speed of a light beam traveling in an East-West direction.  Now the earth rotates on its axis.  And it travels through space.  And as it goes around the sun it's direction changes 90 degrees every three months.  So it didn't matter which direction the lumeniferous aether was moving, the beams should travel at different speeds at least some of the time.  In the extreme case, the speeds should be different three months from now than they are now.

Michaelson and Morley did a bunch of experiments.  They did them very carefully.  And eventually others did the same or similar experiments.  Everyone got the same result.  The two beams always went the same speed.  Now it didn't matter what "lumeniferous aether" theory you subscribed to.  Every theory predicted that for at least some of the experiments, the speed of light would be different in one direction than the other.  Scientists could not think up a set of characteristics for lumeniferous aether that resulted in this "the speed of light is always constant" result.

Why does this matter?  Because after many years they concluded that there was no such thing as the "lumeniferous aether".  And Einstein made "the speed of light is always constant" a foundational idea of his theories.  Einstein and other Scientists came to a profound conclusion as a result of the lumeniferous aether episode.  They named this conclusion the "Occam's Razor" principle.  If you have multiple theories to chose from, always pick the simplest one that accounts for all the data.  A corollary of this is "don't assume the existence of anything not necessary for the theory to work".

The Occam's Razor principle leads Steven Hawking in his recent book "The Grand Design" to say "One can't prove that God doesn't exist, but science makes God unnecessary".  Scientists have been looking carefully for hundreds of years for evidence that God exists.  They haven't found anything.  Celestial spheres, life force, and the soul are examples of other things that scientists have carefully looked hard for over a very long time without finding anything.  As Hawking says, this does not mean that none of these things exist but it does mean that science has not found them.  And without evidence of their existence, science deems them "unnecessary".

Over most of the history of science most scientists have had sincerely held religious beliefs.  But the "Occam's Razor" revolution spawned by the failure of "lumeniferous aether" caused scientists to change their way of thinking.  And looked at in this new way there is no "need" for religion.  Without this need, an examination of the tenets of religions finds them not only unnecessary but nonsense.  So most modern scientists have reluctantly become atheists.

A Scientific Perspective on Religion

If you are a religious person and your faith is weak, stop reading!  If you think that Science is some kind of evil plot to hypnotise you into giving up your religious beliefs, be afraid, be very afraid.  I don't want it said that I am the cause of people turning away from their faith.  If you keep reading, the responsibility for what happens to your faith is your fault not mine.  You have been warned.

I have always been fond of the word "epiphany".  It's just a great word.  And, of course, it refers to something that happened to St. Paul on the road to Damascus.  Here's how the Bible (King James, Acts, Chapter 9, verses 3-7 with punctuation cleaned up) describes the event:

And as he journeyed he came near Damascus and suddenly there shined around about him a light from heaven.  And he fell to the earth and heard a voice saying unto him "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?"  And he said "Who art thou lord?".  And the lord said "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.  It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks."  And he, trembling and astonished, said "Lord what will thou have me do?"  And the lord said unto him "Arise and go into the city and it shall be told thee what thou must do."  And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless hearing a voice but seeing no man.

That's the event that the word "epiphany" was coined to describe.  Now there is a bunch of more business.  And, in fact, it isn't Saul, later Paul, who gets the word, it's a guy called Ananias, but that's all detail.  The idea is that God chooses to talk directly to a mortal.  As a group these mortals are usually called prophets.  And this "epiphany to a prophet" mechanism is common to a lot of religions.

God talks to various prophets and we get the Jewish religion.  He talks to some more prophets and we get Christianity.  (I'm not sure where to slot Jesus into all this business but we're talking about a similar mechanism).  And the third "religion of the book" works the same way.  God talked directly to Mohammad and the result is Islam.  But it is not just religions of the book or ancient times.  God (through the angel Moroni) talks to Joseph Smith and we get Mormonism.  God talks to Mary Baker Eddy and we get Christian Science.  And still more recently God talks to L. Ron Hubbard and we get Scientology.

So is all this "epiphany" stuff unscientific?  Not at all.  Scientists' job is to figure out what the rules are, not create the rules themselves.  So if God created the universe, he can certainly include an "epiphany exclusion" rule.  And, since his is all powerful, he can certainly use this "epiphany exclusion" rule whenever and wherever he wants to.  And, trust me, scientists believe lots of things that are way weirder than an "epiphany exclusion" rule.  So if the "epiphany exclusion" rule is not unscientific (I know, double negative, but justified in this case), does that mean that Science has nothing to say on the subject?  No!  (Sorry for the second double negative but again justified).  Again, Scientists spend a lot of time trying to make sense of things that are a lot weirder than the "epiphany exclusion" rule.

The first thing to say from a Scientific perspective is that this happens a lot.  It is not the foundation of all religions but it is the foundation of a lot of them.  All of the above examples I have cited are what are generally called "western" religions.  But the rule is used in eastern religions too.  Buddhism is founded by the "prophet" (my characterization) Buddha.  There are probably others but I am too ignorant to be able to cite any.  Interestingly, Confucianism does not conform to the model.  Confucius did not claim any extraordinary knowledge.  He just said "we need to get back to that old time religion".  Since that old time religion already existed, he didn't need to create anything new so he did not need divine inspiration.

Getting back to the main point, there sure have been a lot of these prophets.  And they all say something different.  In fact, the general message of all prophets, with the possible exception of some of the first ones is "Those older prophets got it wrong.  Here's the real story."  This is definitely true of the 19th and 20th century prophets.  But Jesus fixed Judaism and Mohammad fixed Christianity, at least according to their adherents.  And with the modern prophets, the amount of doctrine that needs fixing becomes even greater.  The Scientology "origin story" (description of where we came from), for instance, bears no resemblance to the "origin story" of Christianity or any of the other religions of the book.  What can we make of all this?

It turns out that from a Scientific perspective, the situation is far from hopeless.  Christianity and a lot of other religions are "one God" religions.  They believe that there is one God and one world.  So let's assume that this is true for a moment.  Does it make sense that this one God, who created the one universe, would download (this is my shorthand for the whole "epiphany" process, no matter what the specific details are) different contradictory sets of facts into the minds of different prophets?

There is one hypothesis that is consistent with God doing this, that God is a liar and that the data he downloads is not all true.  Its a valid scientific hypothesis.  But if God is a liar then we can't depend on what he downloads into any particular prophet being true.  In fact, there is no prophet whose words we can depend on under this scenario.  If this scenario is correct then we need to develop outside means of verification for whatever prophets say.  And that outside verification system is Science.

Now most believers do not buy this hypothesis.  They believe that whatever God downloads is the truth.  So let's discard our earlier "God is a liar" hypothesis and adopt the alternative, namely "God tells the truth".  We still have the problem that there are a lot of prophets out there and, since they contradict each other, they can't all be telling the truth.  But, in fact, this gets us by a slightly different path to the same point.  Now it's not God who is lying but the prophets.  So we need a mechanism for determining which prophets are lying.  And again, the best mechanism is Science.  We can carefully examine the "revelations" of each prophet and see which ones are true.  And we quickly find problems with all of them.

Now there is a non-scientific approach that can be adopted.  We can "have faith".  Maybe God gave us some "faith based" mechanism that does not depend on Science to ferret out the truth.  Here I observe that no religion, hence no specific prophet, is believed in by a majority of the world's population.  So, at a minimum, we can say that the "faith based" approach is inefficient.  And if you drill down, if you ask not how many people are Christian or Muslim say, but how many people adhere to a specific strain of Christianity (say Methodist) or Islam (say Wahhabi) then the number of people that got it right shrinks to a small population, less than 1%.  And if you drill down further to the subsect level where everyone believes exactly the same thing then no religion claims the adherence of more than a tiny percentage of the population.  So God is very inefficient and he has not provided people with an effective mechanism for ferreting out the truth.  Now why am I supposed to believe in God?

None of the above depends on any specific beliefs in any specific religion.  The epiphany of St. Paul is used merely for explanatory purposes.  The argument does not depend on whether you believe in Christianity in general or in the truth of the epiphany of St. Paul in particular.  It is all the result of applying the scientific perspective to a large general class of religions.  And it does not depend on any specific scientific belief like Evolution.  The whole argument is constructed from a religious not a scientific perspective.  And that is the power of scientific thinking.  I believe that a lot of religious people understand this at a subconscious level.  And so they fear science for the very real reason that scientific thinking is a very powerful tool for undermining the belief in specific religions and religion in general.

Is Science a Religion?

The title of this piece is actually a cheat.  It was selected because it is more catchy than "Is Science Scientific?".  So, with that out of the way let me address the question.

There are two main pillars to Science:  data and mathematics.  Scientists collect data then they organize that data using mathematics and related tools into theories.  If there is a problem with data or if there is a problem with mathematics, Science is in trouble.  So let's look at each separately.

Data is, well, data.  But is it really?  How do we know that the data Scientists collect is true?  Scientists have a lot of reasons to believe their data but it is all "handwavium".  "Handwavium" is shorthand for a hand waving argument, an argument that is convincing to someone who already believes but is unconvincing to an opponent.  I won't review them.  Instead I will note that all "data" is filtered through the human nervous system.  The human nervous system modifies things in lots of ways.  Then it delivers it to the brain.  Frankly, we don't understand what happens in the brain very well.  So how do we know the result is "truth"?  We don't.  There are various properly done versions of this argument but instead I will refer you to the movie "The Matrix".  The conceit of this movie is that for reasons that don't actually make any sense a whole system has been set up to harvest energy from humans.  To make the system work computers control the nervous signals to humans and impose an artificial reality on humans.  Taken to an extreme there is really no way to prove that this is not happening to all of us in the "real world".  So that there is no Scientific way to prove that scientific data (or data of any kind) is true.

So there is a problem with data.  It turns out that there is also a problem with mathematics.  There is a long history of trying to make mathematics mathematical.  This undertaking culminated with a 1910 book called "Principia Mathematica" by Whitehead and Russell.  The title referred to the famous book with a similar name by Sir Isac Newton.  Whitehead and Russell attempted to do a proper job laying out the foundations of mathematics.  But people kept finding small problems with the work.  For some time most people were of the opinion that the problems could be fixed and eventually the endeavor would be a success.  Then in 1931 Kurt Godel published a paper that destroyed the whole thing.  What Godel showed was that for any "sufficiently complex" mathematical system there would always be propositions that could neither be proved  true nor false.  The most well known example of this is the statement "this statement is false".  If we assume the statement is false, then it is true.  If we assume the statement is true then it is false.  Thus it is neither true nor false.  So the whole project to put mathematics in a "firm mathematical foundation" is doomed to failure.  In short, mathematics can not be Scientifically proved to be true.

So we end up with the situation where the two pillars of Science are not Scientific.  So Science is not Scientific.  So all those people braying that "Science is just another type of religion" are right.  Is all lost?  In my opinion, no.  Science ultimately does depend on belief.  But there are pragmatic reasons to believe that Science is a dependable method for arriving at truth.  But, before going there let me make a digression.

I imagine a "truth" scale.  It has five regions.  At one end is the set of "things that are true and we can prove them to be true".  This is balanced by a region at the other end of the scale consisting of "things that are false and we can prove them to be false".  Back at the other end is a region more toward the center consisting of "things we believe to be true but can't prove to be true".  This is balanced at the other end of the scale by the region of "things we think are false but can't prove they are false".  And, of course, in the center we have the region of "things where don't know if they are true or false".

We would like for Science to be in the "things that are true and we can prove to be true" region.  But as I have shown above, Science is in the next region, the "things we believe to be true but can't prove" region.  It seems that at this point we haven't made any real progress but, in fact, we have.  If Science can't reliably show things to be "provably true" it turns out that Science is really good at proving things to be "provably false".  For instance, Science puts "Biblical Creationism" solidly into the "provably false" region.

So now let me get back to why it is reasonable to believe in Science even though we can't prove it is true.  Science has been demonstrated to deliver reliable truth over and over.  A simple example is cell phones, and technology in general.  Cell phones work because something called quantum mechanics works.  Quantum mechanics is really weird.  It is literally unbelievable and unnatural.  It is also extremely complicated.  But it works.  We know it works because cell phones work.  There are very few true believers who do not own and use a cell phone.  Ask them if they believe in cell phones.  They don't understand the question.  But if they did they would be forced to say "yes".  We know they would because they depend on them on a daily basis.  If you believe in cell phones you must believe in quantum mechanics.  Every time you get on an airplane you are putting yourself in a position where your life literally depends on Science being true.  The same is true for cars and many other aspects of the modern world.  Cell phones that work, airplanes, cars, the whole lot of it, is proof playing out before our eyes that there is truth to be found in Science.  

Whatever Works is Right

We like to blame politicians.  But sometimes they are not the villains of the piece.  An example of this is negative ads.  Everyone says they hate negative ads.  And the conventional wisdom is this campaign has seen an all time low, e.g. more negative ads than ever.  So who is responsible for this sorry state of affairs?  The conventional answer is that it is the politicians.  But politicians are just following the adage in the title of this piece.  Negative ads work.  They work not because of any action or inaction by politicians but because of the action of voters, namely us.

Political campaigns are actually marketing campaigns.  They follow the rules of marketing.  There is an old saw in the marketing business:  "first you sell yourself then you sell the product".  This idea is that a good salesman tries to make an emotional connection with the customer.  If nothing else, it makes it harder for the customer to say no.  So if you can make an emotional connection with the customer you can move into the "pitch".  This is the part where you extol the virtues of the product you are selling.  This is important but it is not the most important part of the sales process.

The most important part of the sales process is the "close".  The close is where the salesman moves the customer from having a positive attitude toward the product to committed to purchasing the product.  A lot of salesmen can connect with the customer and most salesmen figure out that this is important.  And a lot of salesmen are good at the pitch.  But what separates the successful salesman from the wanna be is in their ability to close the deal.

Consider car sales, for instance.  Most people do not have to make a car purchase.  Or, if they must, they don't have to buy the car from a particular dealer right now.  Moving a customer having a positive attitude toward the salesman and the car gets the salesman a long way toward closing the deal.  But the customer can always go down the street or wait a week.  It turns out fear is one of the best ways to get from "positive opinion" to "done deal".  It turns out that "I'm a good person, better than the other guy" is a much less effective argument than "I may not be all that good but the other person is really bad". And it turns out that the best time to spring the "the other guy is really bad" argument is at the last minute when there is no time for the other guy to effectively respond.  So initially negative ads were sprung at the last minute, typically in the last week or two of the campaign.

Now everyone knows this.  But our emotions take over and we go to the polls and vote against the "really bad" guy.  That's how it used to work.  But it turns out that it is really hard to counter a negative ad from the other side.  It usually turns out that the negative ad is at least partly true.  So you are countering a simple message ("he's bad") with a complicated message ("it's complicated").  Even a totally bogus negative ad turns out to be effective to an extent.  So negative ads have been showing up earlier and earlier in campaigns.  I have been making effective use of the "fast forward" feature on my TiVo to skip nearly all political ads, positive and negative, so I really don't know.  But my impression is that this campaign season has gone negative early and stayed there.

What should be done?  Negative ads are used because they work.  The obvious thing to do is say "candidate is using a negative ad against candidate y".  I am going to vote against candidate x and for candidate y solely because candidate x used a negative ad.  But few voters did this.  Early in the process when most candidates did not use negative ads and when negative ads only showed up late in the campaign this strategy would have been effective.  But that time has passed.  Now everyone uses negative ads and they use them early.  So we no longer have the option of supporting candidates who do not use negative ads because all candidates use negative ads.

The only strategy left is to ignore all ads.  And in fact a lot of people are using this strategy.  They pick their candidate early and use non-traditional methods to find candidates to support.  This actually makes a great deal of sense.  The mainstream media has essentially stopped covering politics.  The media in my area has pretty much abandoned covering government at the city, county, and state level.  So it is very hard to get a clear picture of the politicians that occupy these offices.  The national media spends a lot of time on politics.  But they cover the bomb throwers from the fringes (they are colorful and colorful = ratings) and they do horse race coverage.  I always know which party is up and which is down.  What's actually in a proposal or whatever a policy is likely to work or not, or create a good result, that kind of coverage is almost completely nonexistent.

The right abandoned the mainstream media years ago and developed alternate channels for communicating with their base.  I think the left is in the process of doing the same.  In theory this strategy should actually work fine.  But there is a lot of dumbth out there.  And far to many people have abandoned the traditional media (for the most part sensible coverage but way too little of it) for channels that have coverage that is on point but misleading, incomplete, and in far too many cases completely wrong.

Saturday John Stewart held his "rally to restore sanity".  He has the right idea.  But I am afraid he will turn out to be "a voice calling out in the desert" that will get little traction.  

dumbth on display

From today's paper:  "Climate-change skepticism a hallmark of tea partiers" by John M. Broder of the New York Times.  The story reports that "Only 14 percent of tea-party supporters said global warming is an environmental problem that is having an effect now".  My impression is that a lot of these people are huntin' and fishin' people who spend a lot of time outdoors.  I am not the huntin' and fishin' type.  But I'm also not one of those "save the (insert species here)" types.  I have no problem with hunting and fishing, if done sensibly.  Specifically, anyone who wants to blow away Canada Geese in large numbers has my complete support.  But you don't have to look far for evidence that the world is a warmer place than it used to be and that this has been bad for animals and fish and people.  The story goes on to point out that "The oil, coal, and utility industries collectively have spent $500 million since 2009 to lobby against climate-change legislation".  Tea Partiers are quick to see a conspiracy under every bush.  Why are they so blind to this actual conspiracy when they are quick to see so many made up ones.

From the Rachel Maddow Show a couple of days ago:  She talked to some supporters of Joe Miller (Tea Party Republican running for Senate in Alaska).  She asked them why they supported Miller.  Two of them mentioned gun rights.  Asked for further specifics they both characterized Eric Holder (Obama Attorney General) as being anti-gun.  But neither could list a single anti-gun thing Holder had said or done.  I know of lots of things Holder has said or done that I approve of and several things that I disapprove of but I know of nothing Holder has said or done on either side of this issue.  And Obama is pro-gun.  That's his official position.  Liberals know this because they are mad at him over it but conservatives just assume he is anti-gun because that fits their belief system.  To recap:  These people are strong enough Joe Miller supporters to be standing on a street corner in Alaska in late October because of how anti-gun Eric Holder is even though they don't know of one actual anti-gun thing Eric Holder has said or done.  Now the Tea Party knocked Lisa Murkowski out in the Republican primary in Alaska.  Is she anti-gun?  I honestly don't know.  But I'd be surprised if she had an NRA rating of less than 100%.

Recently Christine O'Donnell (Republican Tea Party candidate in Delaware) asked:  "Where in the Constitution is 'the separation of church and state'".   If you are looking for the words "separation of church and state" she's right.  But this is a code phrase for the complex relation between specific religions and our Federal Government.  And the foundation for that relationship is based on the Constitution, especially the First Amendment.  Tea Partiers claim to be ardent supporters and defenders of the Constitution.  But they sure seem to want to make a lot of changes to it.  Some of them want to repeal the 14th (anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen), 16th (Income tax), and 17th (direct election of Senators) amendments.   This last one is particularly peculiar.  The relevant text of the first amendment is "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof".  Now there are a lot of religions and a lot of religious practises.  The plain language prohibits the government from prohibiting these practises.  Now what O'Donnell and the Tea Partiers want is to "establish" a religion, namely fundamentalist Christianity, in this country.  "Establish", in this context has a specific meaning.  It refers to King Henry the VIIIth establishing the Church of England as the official religion of England.  Wars were fought about which religion was to be "established" and people were killed for supporting the wrong religion so the issue is as serious as it gets.  Establishing a religion in the U.S. is unconstitutional on the face of it.  Doing this also interferes with the constitutionally protected religious practise of others.  O'Donnell and like minded people are all in favor of interfering with religious practises they don't approve of.  I dare you to find a Tea Partier that supports the smoking of peyote, a religious practise of long standing among several Native American peoples.  So O'Donnell is in fact anti-constitutional.

Certainly the left is guilty of engaging in dumbth thinking.  But they do not engage in it in such a blatant and consistent manner.