Category Archives: Science and Skepticism

You are not so smart

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I made a new years resolution this year to read more books. It’s pretty likely you did too, if you’re the resolution type. I’m aiming to average a book every two weeks. According to Goodreads I’m actually a little ahead of schedule, having completed seven books in the last nine weeks or so.

One of the better books I read recently is You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney. It’s about why you’re very likely wrong—or at least inconsistent—in a lot of what you think and do.

For example, if I offered to give you £50 now or £60 in a week then, besides being suspicious of my motives, you’d be pretty likely to take the £50 now. But If I offered to give you £50 in four weeks or £60 in five weeks, you’d most likely hold out the extra week for the £60. The two scenarios are logically equivalent, but our brains are configured to strongly prefer things that benefit us right now, even over things that will benefit us more in the future.

Or how about this? If you’re holding a hot cup of coffee when you first meet a person, you’re more likely to form a first impression of them as a “warm” person than if you are holding an ice coffee. Thousands of irrelevant contextual factors play into our impressions of other people, and we literally think in metaphors.

This trailer explains pretty accurately why I waited until late at night to write this blog post despite having had the entire late afternoon and evening to do it:

Chapter by chapter the book bounces through a whole host of ways in which our brains play tricks on us, confuse us, and ultimately fail us. Sometimes there are good reasons. For example our over-eagerness for seeing patterns would have been helpful for spotting predators on the savannah; and failing to see a pattern that is there—say the face of a tiger in the bushes—is potentially a lot worse than mistakenly seeing something that doesn’t really exist.

On the other hand, often our minds’ failings are just due to not being all that well put together.

Frustratingly, among everything else, there’s even a pretty good case made that I won’t succeed in my resolution to read more books.

You Are Not So Smart is based on the website of the same name which McRaney started in October 2009. He describes the website’s purpose thus:

The central theme here is that you are unaware of how unaware you are. There is branch of psychology and an old and growing body of research with findings that suggest you have little idea why you act or think the way you do. Despite this, you create narratives to explain your own feelings, thoughts and behaviors, and these narratives become the story of your life.

The book is well worth a read. Just be aware that if you put it on any kind of “to read” list with the intention of getting to it later then there’s a pretty good chance you’ll never get around to it. Because you are not so smart.

UCD offers certificate in jabbing people randomly with pins

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Via Buzz, an Irish Times opinion piece about Irish third level educational institutions offering new courses in sorcery (or its modern-day equivalent):

The Graduate Certificate in Healthcare (Acupuncture) at UCD is aimed at those with a primary degree in health care, eg medicine or physiotherapy. This is a part-time course delivered over one year. The programme “provides education in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) that will equip the healthcare professional with the necessary skills to assess and treat a broad range of acute and chronic musculoskeletal conditions”.

This reflects extremely poorly on the Graduate School of Life Sciences, which offers the course. Perhaps worse than that, it also implies that some significant number of graduates coming out of UCD’s undergraduate courses in medicine are unable to distinguish real medicine from quackery. Otherwise there would be no-one going into this new program.

Maybe if UCD had turned down the road of pseudo-science sooner I could have gone straight from my theoretical physics degree into a postgraduate diploma in intelligent falling.

Differentiating the Sexes

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My higher level maths class for Leaving Certificate (the state exam at the end of secondary school in Ireland) was entirely populated with boys. I think there were one or two girls in the class at the beginning of the year, but they found the subject too time-consuming relative to the six or seven others that students study at that age; they dropped maths to ordinary level pretty early in the year.

My Leaving Cert. physics class was similarly populated.

In my first year of theoretical physics in university, one of my thirteen peers was a lady. In second year, she was no longer around. I studied almost entirely under male lecturers, and I graduated surrounded by male classmates.

My life is one big anecdote in support of the proposition that men are better at maths and hard sciences than women are. It’s particularly important, then, for me to always be aware of that wonderful assertion that “the plural of anecdote is not data”.

In that light, putting away my anecdote and replacing it with real data, we can find out the truth about gender and maths: that poor female performance in maths is strongly correlated with societal gender disparity; that stronger male performance in maths is accompanied by a corresponding weaker male performance in maths (i.e., that us guys push out both ends of the bell curve—for every genius there’s, well, someone less successful); and that young girls are more likely than young boys to inherit the maths anxieties of their teachers, setting them off on a course towards poor maths performance in later life. In short: women underperform in maths when they spend their lives being told that they will.

I’m delighted to see real results based on real data about maths performance. We will desperately short-change ourselves if we continue to discourage half of our potential mathematicians and scientists with baseless stereotypes. Not only that, but we’ll condemn more young men to an academic life devoid of the fairer sex. I moved out of physics into computer science for the girls, which gives you some indication of the sorry state of the physical sciences.

Maybe computer engineer Barbie will help.

Is That All?

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I’m happy to live in a world where I can read a blog post about two extraordinarily large stars in orbit around each other; think, “that orbital period makes it sound like they must be pretty close to each other”; and within moments have Google presenting me with the answer that these two stars are a mere 42,000,000km apart. We truly live in the future, but what we’ve got down here is like nothing compared to what’s happening up there.

A New Hope

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Over the few days since my recent post about my hopes for 2020, I’ve come up with a few more ways in which I hope we can collectively improve our situation before this new decade is spent. Just like last time, these aren’t things that I necessarily expect to be fixed by 2020, but they are all things I am still idealistic enough to hope for.

Drug legalization

The UK Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, recently dismissed David Nutt from his position as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) because Professor Nutt had the audacity to quote scientific evidence that contradicted the government’s invented ideas about the dangers of certain illegal drugs. It spawned a movement to impress upon public officials what you would imagine to be the obvious importance of paying attention to what’s actually true when determining public policy.

I hope that governments of 2020 will be more evidence-based in their approach to drug laws. I hope they create laws that actually serve to decrease the danger from recreational use, but which also allow for the use of drugs by informed adults, especially in a medical context.

Nuclear power

Related to my hope that the Earth’s climate will continue to support human life in a comfortable manner, I hope that the public will have overcome its irrational fear of nuclear energy and will be willing to switch from dangerous, polluting, climate-altering fossil fuels to cleaner, safer, more sustainable nuclear power. Research and development in this area has been dreadfully lacking in recent decades due to an exaggerated negative public perception. Maybe one positive outcome of the climate crisis will be a public willingness to reevaluate nuclear energy.

Immigration

I’m Irish. My family is Irish. Many of my friends are Irish, and I lived most of my life in Ireland. In years past I would have lived my whole life there, and would have been unlikely to have many non-Irish acquaintances. Not so now.

Now I live in the UK, with an American girlfriend. Unsurprisingly, none of my immediate colleagues are Irish; but the majority aren’t even from the UK. I have good friends from several continents, and living all over the world. With the Internet, I read about and talk about the thoughts and ideas and lives of people as geographically disparate as people have ever been.

International travel is cheap and widely available. It’s easier now for me to get to know people half way around the world than it was for my parents to meet people in the next county over.

This change has been rapid, and laws have not caught up. Gaining the right to live and work in another country can be ridiculously difficult, even for highly qualified and intelligent young people. Australia evicts travelers after a year. Ireland erects hurdles for hopeful Americans even as it begs the USA to make the tens of thousands of illegal Irish immigrants to that country legal. The UK has backlogs of tens of thousands of applications from prospective university students.

The level of restriction on immigration between first-world democracies is incongruent with the free flow of tourism and communication. I hope that permanent or semi-permanent movement between economically similar countries becomes significantly easier by 2020. The world is now too small to bear so many walls.

Bad Astronomy

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There are two things right now that I’m quite unsure of. The first is how long I’ve been aware of the Bad Astronomy blog by Phil Plait. I know it has been at least a few years though. The second and more perplexing is why up until now I have been content to follow the occasional link to said blog without ever subscribing to it.

Well that situation has changed now. His recent post, “Anniversary of a cosmic blast“, about the December 2004 recording of the explosion of energy from a starquake on a magnetar, has finally prompted me to click that “subscribe” button:

The sheer amount energy generated is difficult to comprehend. Although the crust probably shifted by only a centimeter, the incredible density and gravity made that a violent event well beyond anything we mere humans have experienced. The quake itself would have registered as 32 on the Richter scale — mind you, the largest earthquake ever recorded was about 9 on that scale, and it’s a logarithmic scale. The blast of energy surged away from the magnetar, out into the galaxy. In just 200 milliseconds — a fifth of a second — the eruption gave off as much energy as the Sun does in a quarter of a million years.

The whole post is fascinating.

2020 Foresight

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We have reached a milestone. When counting from an arbitrary time in the past, using an arbitrary date system built on an arbitrary numeral system, we reached a day whose date, when compared to that of an average day, possesses a more pleasing roundness. That is to say there’s nothing inherently magical or mystical or important about the date of January 1, 2010 but, as always, people are excited about it. And, as always, this excitement has brewed an inevitable shared feeling of introspection, retrospection, and, perhaps above all, prospection.

If one thing is clear at the end of this first decade of the third millenium, it’s that we still have a bit of progress to make as a species. We have no hover cars or personal jet packs. We do not wear suits of shiny metal. We do not eat our food in pill form. In fact many of us have barely any food at all.

So I thought I’d write down a few of the areas in which I hope that we might improve over the next ten years. This is not an enumeration of all the world’s ills, as I don’t believe any sane person could expect all problems to be solved in a mere 3652 days (and even if they could, we’re two days down already). Nor is it a list of predictions, mostly because I don’t want people pointing out how wrong I was. It’s just hope: pure and (like its writer) simple.

Gay Rights

This is a subject that simply baffles me. Some people are straight, and some people are gay. Some straight people get married. Some gay people would also like to get married. Most straight people are allowed to. Most gay people are not. I don’t get it. It’s not just that I’m strongly in favour of gay rights—I just can’t understand why anyone, let alone a majority, could be opposed.

Yet progress is being made. Some jurisdictions have full rights for gay couples. Some have improved in recent years but don’t yet offer equal rights to straight couples. The UK has civil partnerships, but not gay marriage. Ireland will soon be in the same boat. Some states in the US are introducing full or partial gay rights, while others are revoking them.

The picture for the future is positive. As far as I can tell from what data I’ve seen, support for gay rights is heavily skewed towards younger people. The strategy then, if nothing else, is to simply wait for all the old people to die. No doubt we can do better, but that is a baseline.

My hope is that by 2020 most western democracies will have something at least as good as the UK’s civil partnership idea, if not full equal rights for gay people.

Treatment of Religious Ideas

Though I’ve done nothing but opposed it since it was first mooted, I can’t help but feel a little ashamed that Ireland’s anti-blasphemy law came into effect yesterday. It’s a huge step backwards for a country that I may well want to live in again in the future, so I have a vested interest in its being rectified.

Blasphemy is a victimless crime. To oppose or attack an idea should not be a crime, regardless of the perceived merit of either the idea itself or of the opposition. This should surely be an ethical axiom of a free society. A law against blasphemy has no place in a modern republic.

But this law is just one facet of a larger problem: the general protection of religion from criticism and the shielding of religions from the same sort of inspection that any other philosophy, or lifestyle, or organisation would expect.

The Irish constitution—the definition of the state and the document with which no law can be in disagreement—protects not only the rights of people to worship a god (a protection I wholeheartedly agree with) but the right of God to be worshipped. I’m not sure that that’s really an idea that’s compatible with the proper running of a pluralist 21st Century democracy.

My hopes for 2020 are that Ireland will have shed some or all of its constitutional references to God; that no western democracy will have any laws prohibiting or restricting the free dissemination of religious criticism; that religious organisations will be subject to the same scrutiny as secular ones when assessed for charitable status; and that western society will not only accept but expect the same honest criticism of religious ideas as it does of political or other ideological ideas.

Climate

I hope that in 2020 we still have a climate that human beings can live in.

What do you hope for in 2020?

You can believe Mary had three heads and wings

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“Our Christian tradition of 2,000 years is that Mary remains a virgin and that Jesus is the son of God, not Joseph,” she told the New Zealand Herald. “Such a poster is inappropriate and disrespectful.”

So? You can believe Mary had three heads and wings and gave birth to Jesus through her anus to preserve her hymen, for all anyone cares. Your delusions are not ours to defend, and you do not have the power to force everyone to stop laughing at you, as much as you’d like to be able to do that.

via Something else the Catholics are very touchy about : Pharyngula

It’s been years since I first experienced the delight of reading an honest and witty appraisal of religious beliefs from a non-believer. Sometimes I feel like I’ve heard it all before, and I just want to leave it all behind and let people carry on the good fight without me. But then someone comes out with a delightful skewering like this one and I feel the joy again. :)

World’s First Lab-Engineered Organ Transplant

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Woman given lab-engineered organ transplant – The Irish Times:

A woman has become the first person in the world to be given an entirely laboratory engineered organ in a landmark operation.

Claudia Castillo’s stem cells were used to create an artificial airway which replaced the bronchus to her left lung, which had collapsed after she suffered a serious tuberculosis infection.

Two things:

First, I don’t want anyone saying, “I’d give her a lab-engineered organ, if you know what I’m talking about!”

Second, I think this technique is going to re-shape how we perform not only transplant operations but also cosmetic surgery, which is about adding things as much as it is about taking things away.