In no way does Mythbusters deserve its high reputation in the skeptic community for promoting skepticism or critical thinking. It doesn’t.

Mythbusters’ strength is in its presentation of how to apply basic science to answer questions, and for that it deserves great applause. Granted, people versed in experimental design often facepalm at their lack of controls, shoddy methodology, and poorly supported conclusions, but that’s not the point. It’s necessary to cut such corners when you’re trying to make a fast, punchy show that appeals to a broad audience, and cutting them is the right choice. For teaching the basic application of science, it’s one hell of a lot better than anything else on television, and that’s a huge step forward. They teach “Test stuff,” and that’s a message that’s desperately needed in our culture.

But here is what they don’t do: Mythbusters never truly challenges their audience. The title suggests that they do, but they never go after the cherished beliefs in our society that are wrong and that enable charlatanism to be so profitable. “How much dynamite does it take to blow a raccoon out of a drainpipe” is not a popularly held belief that causes loss and harm, and that deserves to be tested and busted. It’s explosion porn.

Mythbusters is not a courageous show, and it could be.

Whenever I make this point I often get the response “Oh, what about their episode proving the moon landings actually happened?” Well, OK, that was one episode out of hundreds, and even still, it’s not really that big of a myth. Six delusional nuts out there believe the moon landings were a hoax. It’s not all that harmful of a myth, it’s just not that important to bust, and it improved the lives of very few viewers.

During one earlier episode on pyramid power (again, an easy-target fringe claim that few people actually believe), Adam asked at the end “Can we not do any more of these ‘oogie-boogie’ myths, please?” And they haven’t. As a result, anyone can enjoy Mythbusters, without fear of having their beliefs in homeopathy, psychics, and magical Power Balance bracelets challenged.

Science shows have to be sensational to survive, which is the main reason so many of them have devolved into simply promoting the paranormal or showcasing explosives. To appeal to an audience, a skeptical show has to give people something amazing to talk about, and not just take something away. To have a lasting impact and leave an important legacy, a science show must truly change the world and not simply stroke our lust for tremendous crashes and computer graphics. Can a television show do all of these things? I believe it can, if the producers are willing to work hard enough.

Credit Mythbusters for what it is, but don’t think a gaping hole in television is filled.

By now most people know that the dinosaurs (now clarified as non-avian dinosaurs), along with 85% of species alive at the time, became extinct 65.5 million years ago as a result of a massive meteor impact. This is almost certainly the impact crater at Chicxulub, which dates to the correct time. In addition, examination of fossils and geological layers centers this extinction event at Chicxulub.

This is referred to at the K-T extinction, referring to the end of the Cretaceous and beginning of the Tertiary periods. However, use of the designation “Tertiary” is being phased out, and the K-T extinction is now being referred to as the K-Pg extinction – for Cretaceous-Paleogene.

While the single impact theory is the current consensus, there are two significant if minority competing theories. One is the Deccan Traps flood basalts – a 200 thousand year long event spanning the K-Pg boundary that involved massive volcanic eruptions, which could have causes extinctions through release of dust and sulfuric aerosols into the atmosphere. While not dead, this hypothesis has not fared well under recent evidence and is supported by only a small minority of paleontologists.

Another theory is that there were multiple impacts, two or more, all around the time of the K-Pg extinction. This is based largely on the presence of other craters that date to the same time period. There is also the Boltysh impact crater in the Ukraine, the Silverpit crater in the North Sea, and the Shiva crater. The thinking is that an asteroid or comet may have broken into multiple pieces which showered the earth over a period of time.

A new study published in Geology provides evidence that suggests that the Boltysh crater occurred 2-5 thousand years before the Chicxulub impact. The study team looked at spikes in fern spores in geological layers in the Boltysh crater. Ferns recover quickly after an impact and quickly colonize the devastated area. Therefore a spike in fern spores is a marker for an impact. What they found is that there is a fern spike in the sediment layer that likely resulted from the Boltysh impact itself. And then, 2-5 thousand years later, this layer was itself devastated resulting in another fern spore spike. They believe this second devastation was due to the Chicxulub impact. (Incidentally, scientists who study pollen and spores are called palynologists.)

This is interesting, if indirect, evidence. It still leaves us with the bulk of the evidence showing that the Chicxulub impact was the major cause of the K-Pg extinction, and probably enough to explain it by itself. The complete extinction of non-avian dinosaurs appears to have occurred right at that time. But it is possible that the ecosystem was being stressed by the Deccan Traps eruptions. It is also possible that one or more smaller impacts also contributed to the extinction event.

This is an interesting refinement to the impact theory, and I am mostly interested in how paleontologists make inferences about what happened in the past. The spore spike is a cool line of evidence, one I did not know about before.

The Custom IIG Awards

On August 21st, CFI hosted the ten year anniversary of the IIG (Independent Investigation Group) with a huge bash. It was wonderful. Dedicated to the memory of Martin Gardner and with over 100 people there to celebrate, it was a non-stop brainstorming session jam packed with fun, thrills and excitement. Special guests who presented and recieved awards included our own Michael Shermer and Brian Dunning, as well as Brian Dalton (Mr. Deity), and esteemed experts such as Carol Tavris, Harriet Hall and Eugenie Scott. Good friends and fellow IIG members Wendy Hughes, Dave Richards, and Ross Blocher were honored with special awards for their hard work which has helped put the IIG at the top of its game and at a position in paranormal investigation that few groups can top. Thanks to them and many other IIGers, we are moving into an era when affiliate IIG cells are multiplying all over the country. The grassroots skeptical movement is growing steadily and these new investigative groups are spreading the word that they want to get involved like never before.

The Three Brians: Hart, Dalton & Dunning

Never without theirsharp sense of humor intact, leaders like Jim Underdown and Brian Hart are moving us all into the spotlight. We are leaping forward with growing list of projects that will unfold in the next few months including: Power Balance videos, The Odds Must Be Crazy web site, (an on-line compendium of coincidence stories with an eye to drawing in new skeptics) further efforts into the California Board of Registered Nurses reform and several new challengers for the $50K. There’s way too much to put in print here. Let’s just say we have our work cut out for us and there’s no rest for the weary. What the IIG is actively doing is what the Skeptologists should be presenting and I’m proud to a part of the group. Until something big happens, we can only step back to thank those few and far between television series that have been successful in managing to sneak the critical thinking message into the mass media.

Television shows “The Mentalist “and “Eureka” received big time awards for their indiviual efforts on behalf of science and thinking rationally about paranormal issues. Both were given an outstanding IIG SurlyRamics trophy designed by Amy Roth of Skepchick. These are really beautiful pieces of one-of- a-kind art!  As Bob Cassidy, world famous master mentalist told his audiences last week when I saw him at The Magic Castle; up until last year nobody knew what a mentalist was. The confusion that has often been a contentious issue between what is a psychic entertainer or a mentalist and what masquerades as the “real thing” in the guise of a “psychic medium” has been clarified for millions of television watchers and that’s a major boost for all of us. Now, thanks to the producers of that show, we have a little less explaining to do when we get onstage.

Pitching the Woo

To remind everyone just how powerful a “psychic” reading can be and where it can go, I did tarot readings for those who dared. What fun! Now that was an unexpected pleasure.  I don’t think many of the folks had any idea how “accurate” a reading could be. Not that I was trying to convince anybody or anything. There were some amazed faces. It just goes to show that anyone can be taken in by the methods and seductions of woo. The picture below of the wide-eyed sitter was snapped when I just happened to “hit” on one of those coincidental moments that make these mini-psycho-dramas seem all seem so real. Fortunately, those present all knew better than to believe in such rubbish…

The Skeptic Gets a Reading

Close-up magic was skillfully supplied by IIG member Dan Bowen, who held court for several hours of prestidigitation. Between the two of us, we seriously confounded a lot of people. Later on we sat around and shared tricks with those who were still sober enough to pay attention. It was great to see a fellow magician using his powers for good. I’m hoping that in the future, Dan and other people with a knowledge of deception and what it can do will choose to join up with the CFI/IIG affiliates and strive to brighten the image of magic and magicians by using truth to show illusion and illusion to show truth.

Dan Bowen Amazing the Crowd

Sharing a Few Miracles

Among these insider debates, none is more persistent than that of “tone.” Hardly a week goes by that some tone-related tempest doesn’t spill out of its teacup and across the blogosphere. And yet, these issues matter to many (including me). When people devote enormous energy to skepticism, dedicate careers to skeptical outreach, or generously commit volunteer hours or donations to skeptical projects and organizations, it’s natural that abstract internal debates about the soul of skepticism are perceived to have powerful importance.

The passions of many have been swept up in the ongoing scrap about Phil Plait’s “Don’t Be a Dick” speech at the James Randi Educational Foundation’s “Amazing Meeting 8″ conference in Las Vegas. The skeptical blogosphere began buzzing even as Plait delivered the speech, and hasn’t yet stopped. The debate has reached a new level of feverishness in recent days, after Plait posted the entire video of the speech online. (If you haven’t seen it, it’s a powerful speech which is well worth your time.)

The flood of reactions — many hundreds of lengthy comments, dozens of blog posts and a teeming ecosystem of competing tweets — seem to have broken down along two main axes of debate. One axis defends (or challenges) Plait’s factual assertion that civility tends to help skeptical communication, while incivility tends to hinder it. The other axis concerns moral values.

Talking Past Each Other

The empirical dispute about the effectiveness of civility has sometimes devolved to a clash of straw men. As PZ Myers responded,

It’s a little annoying. Everybody seems to imagine that if Granny says “Bless you!” after I sneeze, I punch her in the nose, and they’re all busy dichotomizing the skeptical community into the nice, helpful, sweet people who don’t rock the boat and the awful, horrible, bastards in hobnailed boots who stomp on small children in Sunday school.

I can relate. I’m similarly exasperated when it is suggested that “nice” skeptics are trying to enforce uniformity; or it is imagined that Phil’s speech was secretly “yet another attempt to erect a skepticism-free barrier around theistic beliefs”; or it is supposed that anyone wants to take anger and passion out of the skeptics toolbox; or, even, argued that “nice” skeptics want to “go with the flow, to pretend that a thousand issues, whether it’s homeopathy or religion or transcendental meditation or an absence of critical thinking or a lack of concern about our health, are OK because they make people happy.” Where does this stuff even come from?

All this noise conceals a non-trivial amount of consensus. In general, everyone actually agrees that passion, anger, comedy, and ridicule can be useful in the right context, when used carefully and well. Everyone agrees that face to face conversations are best conducted with kindness and respect. Everyone (PZ included) agrees that fact-based, collegial discourse is often-but-not-always the best outreach strategy. (Consider PZ’s stated position: “I think the best ideas involve a combination of willingness to listen and politely engage, and a forthright core of assertiveness and confrontation — tactical dickishness, if you want to call it that.” To me, this sounds surprisingly similar to Plait’s “Don’t Be a Dick” argument: “Anger is a very potent weapon, and we need that weapon, but we need to be excruciatingly careful how we use it.”)

In other places, the effectiveness debate has bogged down in red herrings. For example, Richard Dawkins complained that

Plait naively presumed, throughout his lecture, that the person we are ridiculing is the one we are trying to convert. …when I employ ridicule against the arguments of a young earth creationist, I am almost never trying to convert the YEC himself. … I am trying to influence all the third parties listening in, or reading my books. I am amazed at Plait’s naivety in overlooking that and treating it as obvious that our goal is to convert the target of our ridicule.

This is a serious misreading of Plait’s intent, and I think rather baffling. Phil Plait is an experienced public figure, a career science communicator. Of course he knows (as I know, and as Dawkins knows) that our largest and best opportunity for outreach is often the wider audience of third-party onlookers.

Indeed, the audience of onlookers are exactly where the empirical question matters most.

Effectiveness

How do audiences react when they see communicators speak aggressively or employ ridicule? Dawkins’ feeling about ridicule is that “I suspect that it is very effective,” but we needn’t rely on suspicion. Nor must we settle for intuitions, anecdotes (“just look at South Park”) or arguments from internal dialogue. This question has been tested.

The scientific evidence cited so far in this debate clearly favors the “don’t be a dick” argument. For example, it turns out that audiences to substantial issues debates think less of debaters who insult their opponents, engage in ad hominems, or attack the other’s competence or character.

The distinction the literature makes is between argumentativeness (the making of firm substantial points, which witnesses respect) and aggressiveness (cheap shots, basically, or ad hominems: character attacks, competence attacks, background attacks, ridicule, and so on) — which witnesses penalize. For example, the 1992 study “Initiating and Reciprocating Verbal Aggression: Effects on Credibility and Credited Verbal Arguments” found that onlookers to a debate are more impressed with arguments like these when the insults (in parentheses) are not included:

CON: [I can't believe you actually like that Canadian system! The idea's stupid!] Matt, the basic fallacy is the Canadian system puts government into the health care business. The surest way for failure is to let government do it. Haven’t we learned our lesson about central planning? Isn’t the Soviet Union having a bit of trouble with the concept?

PRO: [You Reagan conservatives sound like a broken record. You have the same objection for everything.] Government isn’t always bad, Steve. The government should be involved in some things. Would you like our national defense to be run by the private sector…

Moreover, the greater the number of verbally aggressive statements a debater makes in an exchange, the less receptive audiences are to that aggressor. Audiences find debaters who initiate verbal attacks less competent and of poorer character than their opponents — and find the attacker’s arguments less persuasive. (Audiences expect targets of verbal aggression to stand up for themselves, but nonetheless penalize targets who retaliate by matching the initiator’s level of aggressiveness.) To underline a key point: stooping to incivility has an own-goal cost despite the aggressive debater’s substantive points. Similarly, research indicates that college students find instructors less credible when they engage in insult and verbal abuse. In short, incivility makes it harder to teach people — just as Phil Plait has argued. (For an even-handed, quickie introduction to these issues, see Mike McRae’s recent “A Ridiculous Essay on Rational Outreach.”)

The finding that people don’t like bullies is perhaps unsurprising. I’ll leave it there (I am, after all, not a psychologist) and turn to an argument I’m more qualified to make: the argument from my own subjective moral values.

Morality

I have long argued that skepticism should not wade into non-empirical debates about faith, metaphysics, political ideology, or personal moral values. It is not the business of science to endorse unprovable statements of personal belief. After all, there’s a word for the attempt to attach scientific authority to whatever subjective beeswax we happen to like: pseudoscience.

And yet, it is no surprise that there is a moral dimension to debates about tone. The central question in tone debates is often said to be effectiveness, but the fierceness of the debate underlines a more visceral disagreement on a more human question: How ought people to treat each other?

Science can’t tell us the answer. Scientific skepticism can’t tell us what’s morally right — but the moral values we bring with us from outside of science can motivate us to do the hard work of science and skepticism. Trying to do what’s right is the reason I got involved in skepticism in the first place. As a humanist, as a person of conscience, I am motivated to promote rigorous scientific skepticism because nonsense hurts people. I’ve argued that

Skeptics have the privilege and burden of knowing that wrongs are going unchallenged, wrongs no one else cares about (or even recognizes). That knowledge places on us an ethical responsibility to do whatever we can.

I know I’m not alone in seeing rigorous skepticism as something that matters — as a means of helping people. Decades of skeptics have been motivated by the knowledge that people get hurt when pseudoscientific belief burns out of control. As JREF President DJ Grothe argued in his NECSS 2010 keynote address “Skepticism is a Humanism,” skepticism is “more than just a club for our little cognitive minority…to get together and congratulate each other on how smart we are.” When skeptics come together for mutual bellyaching, or self-identify as part of a movement, or take action, or speak out against false beliefs,

We’re responding to an ethical imperative that most of us feel. It’s something we express when we rage against a huckster or a charlatan. … It’s obvious that skepticism is not just about what’s true and what’s false, but what’s right and what’s wrong. … When we get riled up because a huckster is peddling quack medicine, it’s because quack medicine harms people, and we know that it’s wrong to harm people.

The Moral Argument for Not Being a Dick

I could almost save myself a couple thousand words in this essay by just writing “mean people suck” — or (as one person quoted to me on Twitter) “be excellent to each other.” I find myself astonished that it’s necessary to make this case at all.

Nonetheless, it is argued on humanist principle that “Every person needs to be accorded a modicum of respect and dignity” — even online. If I may side with the quaint schoolmarmish view, I agree: it is a moral wrong to intentionally elect to treat people badly.

There’s really no way around this: it may sometimes be necessary to say things people don’t want to hear, but, in itself, cruelty is morally bad. This is such a fundamental, self-evident moral truth that I’m really lost as soon as anyone disputes it.

Phil wisely left his argument general, inviting us to confront our own conscience. But he is right that it is trivially easy to find examples — not only of self-described skeptics being unkind, but also those who argue that it is good to be mean. For example, one blogger followed up her criticism of Plait’s speech (“Pissed me off something hardcore having to sit through him lecturing me about being too mean to people”) with the forthright assertion,

I like vitriol and venom. I like it, I enjoy it, I think it’s fun and I enjoy reading it and listening to it. A witty verbal riposte is like sex to me. … I like hate, I think it’s fucking sweet, particularly when applied by someone with great acumen and a large vocabulary.

I don’t really have a reply for that.

Some accept the basic moral argument for kindness and respect, but counter that they carry a moral obligation to aggressively speak the truth — even when doing so requires fierce confrontation. I’m sympathetic to that sentiment (I’m in the business of exposing nonsense, after all), and indeed, so is Phil Plait.

Luckily, we rarely need to choose between passion and kindness, or between honesty and respect. Here we come again to the distinction the scientific literature makes on this topic, between argumentativeness (presenting the actual case) and aggressiveness (personal attack in addition to— or instead of — valid argument).

It has been complained that the “don’t be a dick” position offers no program or solutions. I think it does. It’s an obvious solution, and the science backs it up:

Skeptics should passionately argue the merits of their case, and we should leave the ad hominems and snarling and hyperbole to the bad guys.

Ethics

Even if you don’t buy the moral argument, the ethics of scientific discourse imply that ad hominem attacks are inappropriate. I submit that science-minded people should either care about ethical conduct or give up on the conceit that we are science-minded.

The ethical norms of the scientific enterprise ask us to be honest, to assume good faith, to give heterodox ideas a chance, engage in collegial exchanges of opposing opinion, publish under our own names, make data available to our critics, and so on. None of that is based upon moral goodness, but on the pragmatic recognition that science functions best when the greatest number of practitioners adopt a shared code of conduct (and a shared rejection of scientific misconduct). Most skeptics are not scientists, but we are well-advised to think of science as an ethos that fosters truth-seeking. (Similar norms apply to journalism, and presumably to those bloggers who take on a journalistic role.)

And so, I will close with two questions. Weren’t we the ones who said we were after the actual truth? And — weren’t we the good guys?

Ray Bradbury 3 Days before 90

The man who helped put the fiction into science fiction and (among other things) envisioned flat-screen wall-to-wall television way back in 1951 turned 90 this week. Obsessed from an early age with death, old age and a longing to retain the eternal child in all of us, his works manage to encapsulate themes of the unknown that playfully bounce back and forth between fantasy and science with the greatest of ease. Ray has been a friend and mentor to me for many years and I can say with that in mind that there are few writers who have humanized the world of science more than him. He’s a national treasure and in this blog I will share a few of the magical moments and thoughts he has shared with me.

The Book That Got Me To Read

Ray has the rare distinction of being the first author I ever read in high school whose works I read because I wanted to read it rather than having to read it for a grade point. Back then when I was forced to read “Catcher in the Rye” by other teachers, through a creative writing teacher I will forever be thankful for, I discovered Ray’s “Dandelion Wine” and the rest is history. Once to be titled “The Child’s Garden of Terrors,” I not only became a fan of his visual style of writing, but his sentiments ran in the same current as mine when it came to magic and the paranormal. He was just right for that time in my life.

As I found out later after meeting him through my dear friend the late great Curtis Harrington; as a child Ray helped Harry Blackstone Sr. vanish a horse on stage and after that became a lifelong fan of magic in all its forms. I have had the privilege to hear in person how both magic and science converged in Ray’s prolific mind to give us hundreds of short stories and such wonderful novels as “The Illustrated Man,” “Fahrenheit 451,” and “The Martian Chronicles.”There are few of us that haven’t read or are not familiar with his works. I could go on for pages and pages of relating personal anecdotes, but I will try to confine myself to the moments in Ray’s presence that really knocked me out. He has been a most gracious person: always there if I needed to talk to him and never one to show any irritating ego affectations so common here in Hollywood that can lead to cold shoulders and arrogance. Not Ray. He still answers his own phone! He’s a genuine caring human being – so rare in any circumstance, it’s hard to imagine such an icon of Americana can exist. If you want to get a good picture of this man’s honor and dedication, please spend a few minutes watching “The Big Read – A Conversation with Ray Bradbury by Lawrence Bridges ” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF3uZf4G3Lo&feature=youtube_gdata_player There you can watch him speak from the same room and chair I have listened to him speak from in the past. It’s also the same point of view that Susan Gerbic and I sat in last Saturday when we visited Ray to show him a video that was created by Rachel Bloom, “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury.” More on that later.

The Electric Lady (Collen Gray) from Nightmare Alley (1947)

Ray shared with me his first magic trick: The Ball and Vase. When he was eight years old, he went to the circus and saw his first side-show. During that pivotal moment, he watched a performer called “Mr. Electrico.” This was the old “Electric Chair” illusion where a pretty girl sits in a chair and has electricity passed through her (she is grounded so she doesn’t get zapped; see photo) and she is able to hold different kinds of light bulbs which light up in her hands without harm. At one point Mr. Electrico took his own “light sword” and tapped Ray on the nose, telling him he would live forever.  Ray was transfixed. He wasn’t afraid since he now thought he would live forever and with this notion in mind he waited until the show was over to ask Mr. Electrico how he did his magic. Mr. Electrico gave him a red wooden Ball and Vase, which Ray still has today. He ran home and tried to figure out how to do the trick and went back the next day to get a private session with Mr. Electrico, where he learned the real secrets behind this minor miracle. This adventure started out as  a short story he wrote in “Dark Carnival” which later became the title of Ray’s first published book and on to “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” Such are the many real life experiences that were magically transformed in Ray’s mind that have become classics of fantasy and science fiction. He’s done everything imaginable including lampooning himself in a futuristic commercial for pitted prunes: “Brave New Prune.” Stan Freberg anyone? http://laughingsquid.com/ray-bradbury-sunsweet-prunes-commercial/ Ray has a devilish sense of humor and he has never been afraid to speak his mind.

Susan in Ray's Sitting Room

Ray’s house is a museum. It is cluttered from floor to ceiling with history. One can only hope that when the time comes, it will be put together in a safe place just as it is: with every shelf and corner just the way he has it now; like some wandering wizard’s toyshop of fantastic curios. You could spend hours walking through hallways and hidden nooks housing collections of bizarre paintings and ephemera that include everything from models of the Nautilus submarine from “20000 Leagues Under the Sea” to a saved brick from Poe’s original birth place. Years and years of magical thinking surround every wall. This is not woo, this is the modern outcome of investigating centuries of mind, myth and magic.

A Corner of Ray's Dining Room Circa 2010

We spoke with Ray for a few choice minutes. He’s incredibly fragile and not in good health, with both vision and hearing problems that make conversing with him a challenge. But he’s still as sharp as a tack. When he speaks, it is always something profound. He doesn’t mince words and when you are in his presence, you better pay attention. We ran the video that we had downloaded on a laptop. Considering the title and content of this video, it was a tense few minutes. Still, we both soon saw that wise old knowing gleam in his eyes and heard a few soft chuckles. This is a man who has been around the block a few times and we could see that he was charmed by the whole thing. And who wouldn’t be? How many authors of his stature get to see young women frolicking in a girl’s school singing that tune? Not appropriate for the workplace, you can watch what we watched at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1IxOS4VzKM

Ray Watching YouTube Video Tribute

Susan Gerbic, Ray Bradbury and The Ball and Vase

As a finale for Ray’s afternoon, as if anything could possibly top the Youtube video performance, I managed to coerce Susan to treat Ray to one of her own inimitable performances of The Ball and Vase. I gave her one as a holiday gift and she has been keeping people in stitches ever since. If you haven’t watched Susan doing her version of this classic of magic and want to have a few laughs (and watch Randi double up in laughter too) you can find that gem at:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or90XDpmztM

All in all it was a short but memorable visit. Like Ray’s own dandelion wine, it’s best to drink in such  heady experiences in small sips. When we got up to leave I asked Ray if there was anything we could do for him, he replied, “… Just keep visiting me.” What a sweetheart. Ray is at this moment getting set to observe an entire week devoted to his birthday here in Los Angeles. Tagged as the “Live Forever” week, although I remain skeptical, I have no doubt he will live forever, one way or another. Thanks Ray for teaching me how to read – for real. FYI:Ray Bradbury is about to publish a new book of 22 new short stories!

AND THIS JUST IN: Lots of reaction to this video (and Susan’s picture!) at P.Z. Meyer’s blog:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/how_to_make_a_famous_sffantasy.php

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

(Most people forget that there are actually five freedoms protected in the First Amendment: religion, speech, press, assembly, petition.)

Laura Schlessinger says that she is quitting her job as the biggest female radio show host in the galaxy because, she told Larry King: “I want to regain my First Amendment rights. I want to be able to say what is on my mind.” Sarah Palin chimed in on Twitter that Schlessinger’s First Amendment rights “ceased 2exist thx 2activists trying 2silence her.”

Wrong. The First Amendment applies only to what the government can and cannot do. No government agency is demanding that Dr. Laura step down. No laws are being passed to silence radio talk show hosts (at least not yet—recall last year’s cultural scuffle over whether liberals should be given equal time on all radio shows, including conservative talk radio). This is not a First Amendment issue in the least. Dr. Laura is free to exercise her First Amendment rights to say what is on her mind, including her stupefyingly ignorant opinion that blacks are being hypersensitive when called the N-word by whites. In turn, blacks, whites, and anyone else not from another planet are free to remind Dr. Laura what has transpired over the past half century here on Earth since she’s been away on Mars.

The Ground Zero Mosque issue is equally clearly not a First Amendment issue because, near as I can figure, it is not being built on government land, it is not being funded by tax-payers dollars, and it is not a public building. To that extent, it’s none of the government’s business what the owners and financers of the building want to do with their private property, so they are free to build a mosque near Ground Zero (it’s two blocks away, by the way, not “at” Ground Zero), and by the 4th right of the First Amendment, people are free to peacefully assemble to remind said private land holders and building builders what happened in that neighborhood a scant nine years ago next month.

The government is not—and never should be—in the business of regulating stupidity or making laws respecting the free exercise thereof.

Futurism

You can read the exchange for all the details. I want to focus on just a couple of points – predicting our efforts to reverse engineer the brain, and the question of how complex the brain is.  Kurzweil has predicted in the past that we will reverse engineer the brain – model it’s function in a computer, basically – by 2030. It was reported that in his talk he said 2020, but Kurzweil has clarified that this is not correct, he said 2030, sticking to his earlier predictions.

That’s a minor (but interesting) point, and Myers points out that it was not the focus of his original criticism. I agree with Kurzweil on some basic principles. First, we do have an active research program that is using computer modeling to reverse engineer the brain. These efforts are progressing nicely, and I do think that eventually it will succeed. I also agree that some technologies progress at an exponential rate, and they surprise those who were making predictions based upon a linear progression. Kurzweil gives an excellent example of this – the genome project. This project started out very slow, and many though it was lagging behind predictions, but as technology improved the effort to decode the human genome accelerated geometrically and actually finished years ahead of schedule. Now we can decode the genome of other species in a fraction of the time, and the pace continues to accelerate.

So Kurzweil has a legitimate point here – information-based technologies are accelerating, and if you account for that acceleration you get a better handle on predicting its future course. I do think, however, that Kurzweil is cherry-picking a bit also, for some information-based technologies have fallen short of prediction, such as speech recognition (an area of his particular expertise). Recognizing human speech works, but the technology has seen diminishing, rather than accelerating, returns in terms of accuracy, and this has delayed it adoption – which is not nearly as much as Kurzweil predicted in the past.

I think the example of speech recognition represents a factor that Kurzweil, in my opinion, seems to underappreciate. While our information tools may get better at an accelerating rate, some problems become exponentially more difficult as you try to eek out incremental gains. In other words, it seems that for some technologies (to use symbolic figures) each 1% improvement is 10 times more difficult than the previous incremental improvement. This offsets our exponential progress. The complexity of the genome project was linear – decoding that last 10% was as difficult as the first 10%, so it was the perfect example for Kurzweil. But other problems, like understanding how the brain works, are not linear in complexity. As our knowledge of the brain deepens, we are getting to greater and greater levels of complexity.

Further, while I think Kurzweil’s charicterization of technological progress is generally correct when you consider the broad brushstrokes of advancement, it is very difficult to apply them to any individual technology. There are hurdles, roadblocks, and breakthroughs with any individual technology or scientific problem that are impossible to predict.

On the point of predicting the future I am somewhat between Myers and Kurzweil. Kurzweil has some legitimate points to make, but I think he over applies them and cherry picks favorable examples. Myers also has some legitimate criticisms – Kurzweil does not quantify some problems (like how much of the brain we currently understand), and does not account for the fact that we do not know how much we do not know. There may be hidden layers of complexity of brain function we haven’t tapped into yet. But I think that Myers overall is a bit harsh on Kurzweil and does not give partial credit where it is due.

Will we reverse engineer the brain by 2030? I guess we will have to wait and see. Kurzweil gives himself a bit of an out by saying that we will reverse engineer the “basic functions” of the brain – this is vague enough that you can declare victory at any point along the way. You might argue we understand the brain’s basic functions now. I think we will succeed eventually, even to the point of being able to make an artificial brain, but I would not hazard a guess as to when.

Brain Complexity

The more interesting point of contention, and a real teaching point, is the question of how much we can infer about the complexity of the brain by looking at the genome? A separate question is whether or not you can reverse engineer the brain by examining the genome. Here both Myers and Kurzweil agree – you cannot. But Kurzweil says he never made that claim – it was misreported or misinterpreted. So we can put that aside – no one is arguing that the design of the brain is in the genome. You have to examine the brain to reverse engineer the brain.

But Kurzweil is still claiming that we can infer something about how much complexity is in the brain from the genome. He writes:

The amount of information in the genome (after lossless compression, which is feasible because of the massive redundancy in the genome) is about 50 million bytes (down from 800 million bytes in the uncompressed genome). It is true that the information in the genome goes through a complex route to create a brain, but the information in the genome constrains the amount of information in the brain prior to the brain’s interaction with its environment.

This is profoundly problematic, and reflects the fact that Kurzweil truly does not understand the process by which the brain develops. From a developmental point of view – there is no such thing as the brain prior to its interaction with the environment. First – is Kurzweil talking about a newborn infant’s brain? Does he understand the significant differences between that brain and a fully developed adult brain?

I think, to be generous, Kurzweil is trying to differentiate the design of the brain from the information contained within it (our memories, etc,). This could be analogous to a computer vs the software, or reverse engineer a generic human brain vs duplicating PZ Myers’ brain.

But that was never the point at all – the point Myers was making (which I also discussed this week on the SGU) is that the design of the brain is dependent upon interaction with the environment. Myers focused on brain proteins interacting with each other in a complex way, while I focused on the neurological functions of the brain.  The genome provides a set of processes by which brain design unfolds – but that program is dependent upon input from the brain’s environment, which includes the body of which it is part. The basic systems within the brain develop and organize themselves in response to sensory input or use. Our visual cortex requires visual stimulation, binary vision requires seeing with both eyes, our motor system requires use against gravity, our language cortex requires exposure to language, etc.

The process of brain design being a combination of genetic rules laying out neurons and connections in a pattern that is dependent upon feedback from some kind of input adds complexity and information to the brain. So again – what is Kurzweil talking about when he refers to a brain prior to interaction with the environment? He seems not to understand the process of brain development, and therefore he overestimates the degree to which information in the genome constrains information in the brain – or he underestimates the increase in information that derives from this interactive development process. Therefore his basic premise – the brain is not so complex because the genome does not contain that much information – is flawed and invalid (which was Myers original criticism).

Kurzweil adds another line of reasoning to his argument, writing:

For example, the cerebellum (which has been modeled, simulated and tested) — the region responsible for part of our skill formation, like catching a fly ball — contains a module of four types of neurons. That module is repeated about ten billion times. The cortex, a region that only mammals have and that is responsible for our ability to think symbolically and in hierarchies of ideas, also has massive redundancy. It has a basic pattern-recognition module that is considerably more complex than the repeated module in the cerebellum, but that cortex module is repeated about a billion times. There is also information in the interconnections, but there is massive redundancy in the connection pattern as well.

Here again, Kurzweil is grossly underestimating the complexity of the brain based upon some faulty assumptions. I agree with his point that there are modules or patterns in the brain that are repeated billions of times. But they are not simply repeated. You cannot describe this aspect of brain design by simply describing one module then say – repeat 1 billion times. With each repetition there is a novel and meaningful pattern of interconnectedness to other brain regions and to the body. Kurzweil seems to recognize this when he says: “There is also information in the interconnections, but there is massive redundancy in the connection pattern as well.” But he seems to be brushing it off too easily. We cannot assume that the pattern of interconnectedness is a simply redundant pattern.

We also have to consider that the added levels of complexity from the pattern of interconnectedness likely varies from brain region to region. Kurzweil might have a point if you are talking only about the primary visual cortex, for example – where there is a literal grid of neurons that correspond to the visual fields. Here the patterns are somewhat simple and repeated, and it is therefore not surprising that our efforts to reverse engineer these brain regions have progressed the most. But this is the lowest hanging fruit, and should not be considered representative of other brain regions and functions.

If we move to brain regions that subsume our most complex abstract thought and planning, there is no simple somatotopic pattern of neurons whose function we can easily infer. We have no idea, for example, how a pattern of neuronal connections equals a specific word, and connects to our knowledge of how to say the word, how to spell it, what the word means in all it’s complexity, memories of the word’s use, and its relation to other words and parts of words. But most importantly – we really don’t know yet how complex this problem even is, and so predicting how long it will take to solve the problem strikes me as utter folly.

Conclusion

I find the entire discussion between Myers and Kurzweil to be a fascinating topic, and an opportunity to explore various aspects of neurology in the context of a specific and interesting application – reverse engineering the brain. This amounts to an elaborate thought experiment, but those are a fun way to challenge our understanding of a topic.

Ultimately I come down closer to Myers’ position – Kurzweil does not seem to understand the brain or brain development, at least in certain key aspects, and this dooms his arguments to failure. He would do well to take the criticisms going his way seriously, and also to check his ideas with some actual neuroscientists. Myers, on the other hand, came off too harsh, but that seems to be his style. Kurzweil is an interesting mix of provocative ideas, some interesting insights, but also some serious flaws that border on crankery. This makes him a very intriguing character that I would not casually dismiss, but also I would take everything he says with a skeptical grain of salt.

Knebworth House: My Kind of Joint

It had to happen and I’m surprised it took this long. The UK has finally given up the ghost and supplied us with a haunted home that really deserves it’s share of attention – and tourists. The ancestral home since 1490 of politician, poet, playwright and prolific writer of early occult and science fiction themes, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803- 1873) is now officially haunted! At least that’s what his great great grandson 73 year old Lord David Cobbold is telling the press.

Knebworth Hall was home to a writer of rare genius. His best known novel was “Last Days of Pompeii” (1839) and memories of one of the first truly frightening ghost stories I read when first introduced to supernatural fiction, “The Haunted and the Haunters or The House and The Brain (1859),” riveted me to his spectral way of thinking and remains a classic I return to over and over again. It is included in Isaac Asimov’s recommended anthology, “Tales of the Occult” (1989) It also appears in The Wordsworth Book of Horror Stories.

His ghost stories are some of the earliest and finest ever written. John Sutherland, Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature, University College had this to say:

‘Think of a great moment in the evolution of Victorian fiction and Lytton was there. He can plausibly claim to be the father of the English detective novel, science fiction, the fantasy novel, the thriller and the domestic realistic novel.”

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Bulwer-Lyton penned many other works, including “The Coming Race or Vril: The Power of the Coming Race” (1871), which drew heavily on his interest in the occult and contributed to the birth of the science fiction genre. Its story of a subterranean race waiting to reclaim the surface of the Earth is an early science fiction theme. The book may have popularised the Hollow Earth theory and may have inspired Nazi mysticism. There’s no doubt this man had an effect on Victorian thinking and was certainly ahead of his time. Jules Verne (1878-1905) and H.G. Welles (1866-1946) both came after him and probably read Lytton’s work.  

In case you are not familiar with Bulwer’s works, most of us have likely used phrases of his without even knowing it. One might even say history is haunted by his words. Bulwer-Lytton’s most famous quotation, “the pen is mightier than the sword”, is from his play Richelieu where it appears in the line. “beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword.” In addition, he gave the world the memorable phrase “pursuit of the almighty dollar” from his novel The Coming Race. He is also credited with “the great unwashed”. He used this rather disparaging term in his 1830 novel “Paul Clifford.

Lord Cobbold at The Gates of Knebworth Hall

“I hear them and feel their presence but my wife sees them,” Lord Cobbold  says. He told UK’s Welwyn Hatfield Times reporter Chris Richards how he hears the whispers of his ancestor and others on the estate. “I have the feeling that Bulwer-Lytton is still there.” Lord Cobbold, who established Knebworth’s tradition of hosting rock concerts back in the 1970s, added: “It’s the spirit of the house. “You just feel that this is a rather special place to be.”

Knebworth Hall in Far Background

I’ll predict someone is planning a big budget re-make of Bulwer’s spook story chock full of CGI and the ghosts of, …well, I’m guessing this time around –  dead rock stars.Watch for it. Maybe Cobbold would like to book my Keith Moon Seance?

...And Now Ghosties Too!

In The Meantime:  If you love a good ghost story like I do, get ahold of “The Haunted and the Haunters or The Huanted Brain” on line and read it. If you can read it with the lights off, even better. Or search for a low-budget British quickie originally titled “The Ghost of Rashmon Hall” (1947) now making the rounds as “The Night Comes Too Soon.” In this obscure less-than-an-hour film, the Bulwer tale is told in bizarre B&W documentary style.  This is a film that has been completely overlooked by most critics and few people have ever seen this rare gem of supernatural cinema. It ranks as one of my all-time favorites containing genuinely creepy moments, startling and unexpected visuals and an overwhelming air of menace, all achieved by simple lighting and low budget in-camera effects. Without glaring gore or distracting special effects, “Rashmon Hall” manages to achieve a truly supernatural ambiance. Much of this film was made inside a genuine semi-derelict mansion, and that touch gives it a much more authentic atmosphere. It is a remarkable period piece full of voices, mannerisms, and behavioural patterns from a lost era and is another one of those amazing social documents for which old movies can be so useful. It suggests horror and unease instead of hitting you in the face with it. Not exactly “razor-edge” as the poster says, but an unnerving unsettling 55 minutes just the same. Back when I was training myself as a Magic Castle Medium, I watched it many times to capture the timing and mood it evokes. The lead character is played by the extraordinary actor Valentine Dyall. He’s a very tall, droll, mysterious fellow and just the type of characterization that ”suggests” a classic medium.

Val Dyall from "Rashomn Hall"

The mystery lights as they appear on the horizon

I’ll admit it was a pretty long time ago, like a year and a half, but a while ago I did a blog post about some mystery lights that often appear off the coast here in southern Orange County. From my house, they can be seen on many clear nights, ranging from about 180 to 190 degrees south, magnetic. They swap around a bit, and if you leave and come back ten minutes later, you may find the lights have moved one way or the other.

Closeup of the light on the right

Each object has about a half dozen very bright lights, tending toward the orange. They look like a ship only superficially. Cruise ships have many more lights, much dimmer; and cargo ships run dark with hardly any lights visible at all. So really they don’t look like a ship. They do look quite similar to oil platforms though, which tend to have bright floodlights. They are out there quite often, though I couldn’t tell you exactly how often. Not every night, but some nights, on no apparent schedule.

Having sailed these waters most of my life and being familiar with them, I know that there are no offshore oil platforms in southern California south of Long Beach. This is easy for anyone to confirm with Google Earth or other online reference sites; and anyway, oil platforms don’t move around back and forth along the horizon. But nevertheless, when I posted the blog, more commenters suggested oil platforms than anything else. I could get up on my ear and assert that it’s perfectly obvious to determine that there are no oil platforms there, but still people insisted that’s what the lights had to be. OK, whatever.

Triangulating on the lights

The reveal can now be made. The lights are indeed ships, but not commercial. They are military. They come out of San Diego, and hover off the coast of Camp Pendleton (the huge Marine Corps base that dominates the coast of northern San Diego county). From what I’ve been able to determine, the ships stay on station within a rectangular area, and guys go back and forth from the shore by helicopter, hovercraft, what have you, and practice — well, going back and forth between a ship and the shore. Readers who are in the military and helped me out explained that the few bright spotlights on the ship are characteristic of these exercises.

Before posting this, I wanted to be able to give specific information about which ships these are, and of exactly what type, and precisely what vehicles are going out to them. However, I was thwarted. My military readers gave me a good start, telling me who to call and what to ask for, but alas, I finally conceded defeat. The experience was dominated by disconnected phone numbers, wrong phone numbers, unanswered messages, surly operators, and public affairs officers who didn’t know anything and didn’t want me to either. The Navy doesn’t know what the Marines do, and the Marines don’t know what the Navy does. But obviously they manage to work it out between themselves on the water.

Also, my repeated requests to go out for a joyride on a Mark V Special Operations Craft probably did not help my cause.

I was hoping to get the coordinates of the box station where they go, but I never got close to that. I can give you the three sightings that I made, however. They are illustrated in the accompanying graphic. If I were a professional researcher of paranormal claims and was trying to take this case seriously, I would (should) be run out of town for such a slipshod explanation with no real details. But hey, here at SkepticBlog, you get what you pay for. They’re military ships. Probably pretty cool ones, but I don’t know.

Employing modern political terms such as “liberal” and “conservative” to someone who live 2,000 years ago is an absurd game to play because those terms as they are used today do not even apply to people who lived a scant few centuries ago. The original meaning of “liberal,” for example, was what we would today call a “classical liberal,” or someone who believes in laissez faire capitalism and small government. Followers of Adam Smith were liberals, but today are called classical liberals, or conservatives, because they want to conserve the political and economic principles of classical Enlightenment thought. Those who are vehemently opposed to these conservative principles are sometimes today called progressives, who want to progress beyond—instead of conserving—classical liberalism, and their type specimen is Franklin D. Roosevelt, who originally had the support of pro-laissez faire capitalists until he launched the New Deal. One of FDR’s ideological descendents was Bill Clinton, who turned out to be one of the strongest Democratic proponents of free markets in history, which makes him, what? A conservatively classical progressive liberal? You can see how odious such label making becomes even for modern figures.

Jesus was, for the most part, apolitical. There were a number of political factions in his time, yet there is no evidence that he joined or even endorsed any of them. He emphasized the “Kingdom of God” over the kingdom of man, and heaven over earth, and his central message was to love God and to love one another. When Jesus was asked, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” he replied, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:34–40). In the next chapter in Matthew (23:9–12) Jesus punctuated the point by comparing earthly fathers to the heavenly father: “And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ. The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”

Lacking clear political leanings we have to examine the moral teachings of Jesus to see if they more closely fit the moral principles of liberals or conservatives. As I read the record, Jesus sounds like a liberal when he admonishes us to turn the other cheek and practice forgiveness, not to judge lest ye be judged, to show great compassion for the poor, and especially when he admonishes the money changers and tells his followers to give up their belongings, abandon their families, and follow his religious movement. Remember, it was Jesus who said, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

And let’s not forget the Beatitudes from the sermon on the mount (Matthew 5: 3-9), which do more closely echo the sentiments of liberals instead of conservatives:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”

Matthew 7: 1–5 is the classic statement of liberal tolerance:

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

Indeed, would any red-blooded, gun-totting, Hummer-driving, hard-drinking, Bible-totting conservative today saying anything like this? (Matthes 5:43-44): “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you….”

Even on the current hot-button issue driving the Tea Party train—taxes—when asked if it was proper to pay taxes, Jesus famously said (Matthew 22:21): “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”

Of course, I’m cherry picking passages myself here, but I found the process much more conducive to fitting Jesus into left-leaning politics than into the right. I suppose the following passage from the Messiah (Matthew 5:27-30) might be construed as Jesus’s expression of conservative values, but I’m not sure anyone in their right mind would endorse such a moral principle:

You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.

Speaking of the 7th commandment, I found one webpage dedicated to this matter of the Messiah’s politics in which the author wrote:

At times, Jesus blended His Liberal and Conservative sides in perfect balance. One example was when He asked the woman accused of adultery, “Where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?”, and the woman answered, “No one, Lord.” Jesus told her, “Neither do I condemn you; from now on, sin no more.” The Liberal Jesus did not condemn the woman, but the Conservative Jesus called her behavior “sin”, which she needed to stop.

So … are we to infer from this interpretation that liberals would not call adultery a sin that should be avoided, and if committed need not be stopped? All married liberals reading this column raise your hands if you think an act of adultery on the part of your spouse is acceptable. That’s what I thought. In point of fact, adultery is a sin because it deeply injures a loved one, it breaks the bonds of trust so essential to the deepest of all human relations, and it leads to the breakdown of families. And you don’t need the Bible to understand this simple fact. Adultery as a sin is an evolved characteristic of our species.

We evolved as pair-bonded primates for whom monogamy, or at least serial monogamy (a sequence of monogamous marriages), is the norm. Adultery is a violation of a monogamous relationship and there is copious scientific data (and loads of anecdotal examples) showing how destructive adulterous behavior is to a monogamous relationship. In fact, one of the reasons that serial monogamy (and not just monogamy) best describes the mating behavior of our species is that adultery typically destroys a relationship, forcing couples to split up and start over with someone new. Thus, adultery is immoral because of its destructive consequences no matter what God or the patriarchs said about it. And evolutionary theory provides a deeper reason for adultery’s immoral nature that is transcendent because it belongs to the species. If there is a God, and if He does condemn adultery as an immoral act, it is because evolution made it immoral.

This post originally appeared at TRUE/SLANT.