Stephen Wolfram Wants To Solve Programming

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Super-smart guy Stephen Wolfram is proposing to create a new general purpose programming language that is powerful and easy to use, called Wolfram Language.

I’m skeptical. He doesn’t propose to be doing anything particularly innovative or ground-breaking:

“There are plenty of existing general-purpose computer languages. But their vision is very different—and in a sense much more modest—than the Wolfram Language. They concentrate on managing the structure of programs, keeping the language itself small in scope, and relying on a web of external libraries for additional functionality. In the Wolfram Language my concept from the very beginning has been to create a single tightly integrated system in which as much as possible is included right in the language itself.”

This isn’t a new idea. The problem with such an approach is that it forces users of the language to pack a lot of code into their programs that they aren’t using. In this era of high-capacity hard drives this isn’t such a huge deal for, for example, general-purpose machines like desktop PCs, but it does have repercussions for the language’s usability in embedded systems and the like.

It’s also tough to discern exactly what he’s talking about. Programming languages are meant to be tools, or better yet, provide a source of tools, like a toolbelt. Java, for example, comes with a lot of useful functionality out of the box, without any “external libraries,” but the functionality provided by those built-in libraries is akin to the tools in your toolbelt–they aren’t particularly useful in the context of a finished project but they are integral to the construction and proper functioning of that project.

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Wolfram appears to want to include what amount to finished projects in his new programming language. The usefulness of this is limited because the strength of programming languages isn’t really in their final products, but in what their basic tools allow you to accomplish.

He says:

“And so in the Wolfram Language, built right into the language, are capabilities for laying out graphs or doing image processing or creating user interfaces or whatever.”

All modern programming languages have these functionalities, either natively or as part of external libraries. All Wolfram is doing is forcing users of his language to pack them along. The primary appeal I see of this approach is consistency and (hopefully) guaranteed compatibility, which, don’t mistake, is a wonderful goal, but to try and accurately predict what programmers need ahead of time, particularly years down the road, is asking for trouble.

Instead of creating a general purpose programming language as he claims, Wolfram appears to be creating a programming language specially suited toward using this giant set of pre-built functions. Unless by “general purpose,” Wolfram thinks he has enclosed the majority of useful computation under the umbrella of his own libraries, but that’s quite a claim to make. As a programmer continually dissatisfied with the state of programming languages, I wish him luck, but I’m not overly hopeful.

Amazon, your newest car dealership. Okay, not really.

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Not actually selling, but acting as a portal. Maybe a gussied up advertisement. I’m not sure what it means, or if it will catch on, but selling cars outright on Amazon is inevitable, isn’t it? Amazon certainly isn’t the first online front to feature cars, but it’s certainly the most popular and well-known. While I’m not particularly impressed with… whatever this is, I wonder, how long until they are actually selling the cars themselves instead of just pointing you to your nearest dealership? And will people be willing to spend money on a car they haven’t actually touched and driven? (I say if the price is right, yes, they will).

If you can’t beat ’em…

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A few years ago a consortium of tech giants bought several thousand patents from a failing telecom with, it appears, the express purpose of using them to hurt their biggest competitor. Counting amongst its members Apple, Sony and Microsoft, this coalition of corporations has allied together to use standard patent troll tactics in a bid to use these Nortel patents against Google and Google’s wildly popular Android mobile operating system, as well as several companies that build Android-based devices. At the time the patents went up for auction in 2011, Google saw what was going to happen and tried to purchase the patents itself, but was unable to pony up more dough than were the collective resources of some of the largest and richest companies in the history of the world.

So, now, instead of attempting to simply compete directly with Google, these companies, under a “plausible-deniability” shell company called Rockstar, are going to try to use the government to put the brakes on one of the biggest tech success stories of the modern age. In using purchased-patent warfare and filing their suit in the patent-friendly Eastern District of Texas, these tech giants, through Rockstar, are essentially conceding that they cannot best Google in the eyes of the consumer and must instead appeal to the failed and broken US patent system using the bogus framework of software patents to continue to pour more money into the pockets of their executives and shareholders.

It’s ridiculous, and it enrages me. The patent system exists ostensibly for the purposes of disclosure of invention. It is, at least theoretically, about information, and its dissemination into society. There is an agreement between the patent applicant and the patent office that the applicant will disclose the details of his or her invention (which encourages further innovation from other parties) and the patent office will grant certain rights to claim exclusivity (which is the incentive to invent and disclose). This pushes people to do work in fields that has not yet been done rather than “reinvent the wheel,” forcing them to license what has already been done if they want to utilize it in their own developments. In practice it is being used by attorneys and corporations to shake down anyone within reach, particularly the “little guy” without the resources to fight a protracted legal battle, and to outlaw and siphon money from their competitors’ products. This directly contracts the number of useful inventions and promotes the proliferation of useless inventions which exist only for purposes of litigation. As soon as a legal or social institution becomes the means to do the exact opposite of what it was meant to accomplish, it’s due an overhaul, if not demolition and reboot.

There are a few rays of hope, though. New Zealand, hopefully serving as an example of rationality in the world of patent insanity, recently outlawed software patents, with the European Union continuously debating similar action. I wouldn’t be surprised if we started to see more and more startups moving to software-friendly (ie, anti-software patent) nations in hopes of protecting themselves against the trolls looking for a government-mandated tribute.

In the past couple years we have seen increasing and heartening efforts from Congress and even Obama himself, most recently in the form of a bipartisan bill which looks to make a serious dent in the economic damage wrought by patent trolls every year. While that bill may not affect the impending Google vs. Rockstar war, it’s good to see our government is finally acknowledging there is a problem, and finding ways to do something about it.

The next step? Follow New Zealand.

More info here.

Is California doing something right?

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This Buzzfeed article starts out a little shaky, seemingly giving credit to a Democratic government for everything that’s going right in California, but then it mentions the reasons that current government exists is, at least in part, because of two election reform measures former Republican governor Schwarzenegger helped to get passed before he left office, one which enforces nonpartisan redistricting, and another which allows voters to vote in any party primary, no matter their party affiliation. Whether or not Schwarzenegger intended for a solidly Democratic government to be installed into the state House and Governor’s office, that’s what happened. The result, if not the idea itself, is not to give more power directly to the people, but indirectly to better choose their leaders. This could result in a “more effective” government that can simply more easily pass bad legislation, or it could result in a government that actually knows what needs to be done and how to do it.

I’m absolutely in favor of election reform, whatever the consequences, if it means more transparency and accountability in government. It seems California may be on the right track. This year, the state even is closing in on something near to a balanced budget, which could be another byproduct of these reforms. I’m very interested to see further results from such political experiments in California and elsewhere, and I’d be interested to see them spread around the country–particularly to Washington.

Krugman Blames Republicans For Everything, Part 947

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Paul Krugman has taken to his soapbox again to lambast Republicans for engaging in “crisis driven” fiscal policy, citing a report which says such policy has cost the nation $700 billion and over a million jobs.

Krugman then openly admits the report he cites relies on shaky research, so he dumps it quickly (I’m sure the “shaky research” claim comes because it states very clearly that government spending is out of control), but states that, unreliable or not, we can still use it to blame the GOP, which he explains has done plenty of unnecessary damage to the US economy in its quest to… destroy America? I don’t know. To back the damages claim, since he only needed the report to set the table before pulling out the knives, he mentions a few things Republicans have done or had a hand in:

1. Discretionary government spending has fallen, which any good Keynesian knows harms economic growth and employment.

2. Allowing payroll taxes to rise.

3. Reducing aid to the unemployed.

Let’s examine these each in turn.

First: I can’t comment much on this because it’s a matter of economic theory, which I don’t know enough about. I do know, however, that Krugman slyly mentions the reduction in discretionary spending in the context of blaming Republicans and quoting the year “2010” as the start of the fall of that spending, allowing his readers to draw the implied conclusion without actually backing it up. Clever.

Second: Ever the paragon of intellectual dishonesty, Krugman frames the declination of Congress to extend Social Security payroll tax cuts as a part of the previous fiscal cliff dealings as a tax hike. In reality, both sides of the aisle agreed on letting the tax cut expire, though at the time Democrats did a decent job of blaming Republicans for “raising taxes on the middle class” because Democrats’ counteroffer was to raise taxes on the rich, which, unfortunately, it seems wouldn’t have made up for the shortfall produced by the payroll tax cuts in the first place (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/10/07/obama-s-stealthy-payroll-tax-plan-raise-rich-people-s-taxes.html). This was a thinly veiled attempt by the left to engineer a policy of tax-driven wealth redistribution from rich to poor, entrenching sizeable tax cuts for the middle and lower classes and significantly and raising them for the rest. Republicans, naturally, refused to go along with it. Whether or not you agree that the largest weight of the tax burden should further shift permanently toward the wealthy, and whether or not you believe the income gap is a problem, and whether or not you think such policy is the best way to reduce it, you have to agree that the Republicans were only doing what they’ve been asked to do.

Third: I may actually agree with Krugman on this one, to a degree. While I don’t know enough about the efficiency and effect of unemployment insurance to make an informed judgment, it does seem reasonable to me that in a time of high unemployment and recession, extra help in keeping the unemployed out of the mire of poverty is a good thing–so long as it’s been done right. That said, from the source Krugman gives, the reduction in aid put an additional 1 million people below the poverty line–a figure which, I’m not entirely convinced, given that some of those people would have gone there with or without help, and that it counts wage-earners as well as non-wage-earners, would make a major impact on the economy.

Are Republicans to blame, at least in part, for the sluggish recovery? Undoubtedly. Have their political ploys and obstructionism cost the economy money? I’m sure they have. But if we’re going to pass out blame, let’s at least be willing to find the actual problems, uncover their sources and address them no matter which side they fall on.

Lesson: Krugman is as partisan as they come and he’s willing to muddy the water to make the other side look bad. Don’t take his statements at face value.

The Natural Monopoly

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Not being an economist (see: Nathaniel) or anything like it, and despite my personal interest, I consider myself to be pretty ignorant of the inner workings of economies, and I fairly regularly rock back and forth between stances on economics–policy, theory, etc. I am often made, by people far more knowledgeable than myself, to see the wisdom in government tinkering in the national economy, how without the government keeping tabs on business and unions fighting the good fight, we’d still be working 16 hour days for 65 cents an hour and no holidays. The problem I’ve started to uncover, however, is how the specter of commercial abuse of labor and consumer has become, as a matter of course, a blanket justification for any kind of legislative intervention, even the kind that evidences no discernible benefit whatsoever to the public. Today it seems to be a forgone conclusion that permitting government to redress bad business behavior is the same reason we should also permit government to take preventive measures, which, it seems, is an abstract solution to a problem not fully defined.

You start to see the cracks in the rationale when you allow yourself to question the seemingly-unavoidable consequences of a free-market economy that every kid learns in US History when he’s twelve years old. Many of us are told in no uncertain terms that without a government in place to regulate business and industry, natural monopolies will arise to stamp competition out of existence and force everybody to pay exorbitant prices to access services, be they basic or luxury. This seems reasonable, especially in industries with high fixed costs and high barriers of entry. Without government helping keep the big dogs from getting too powerful and helping the little guys gain a foothold, established entities can easily shut out competition, the very opposite of the goal of a free-market economy. Yes?

Well, not so fast. It appears that there may be good evidence to support the idea that without the contaminating influence of government, the inevitability of destructive natural monopolies is little more than a myth, a fiction perpetuated by the indeed-inevitable collusion of business and government as a means of entrenching influence and power in the rule of law. As it turns out, the meddling, well-intentioned or not, of public power brokers may be the catalyst for the very ill such outcome they purport to protect us from. This idea is accessibly explained in Thomas DiLorenzo’s illuminating essay The Myth of the Natural Monopoly (http://mises.org/daily/5266) published in 1996. If we put aside DiLorenzo’s cadre of questionable positions on Lincoln, the Civil War, and the Great Depression, and focus purely on the facts as presented in the essay, we find a strong case for what we could call a certain brand of libertarian economic thought with an emphasis on economic non-interventionism with respect to “monopolistic behavior” as the default position, outside of, at least, banking (per Hayek). We are prompted to ask the question of what evidence we have of natural monopolies arising without government intervention in modern economies. The answer? Less than you might think. Even the textbook historical cases of natural monopolies, e.g., AT&T, that we learn about in school are perhaps not as simple as they were taught to us:

Despite AT&T’s rapid rise to market dominance, independent competitors began springing up shortly after the original patents expired in 1893 and 1894. These competitors grew by servicing areas not served by the Bell System, but then quickly began invading AT&T’s turf, especially areas where Bell service was poor. According to industry historian Gerald W. Brock, by the end of 1894 over 80 new independent competitors had already grabbed 5 percent of total market share. The number of independent firms continued to rise dramatically such that just after the turn of the century, over 3,000 competitors existed. Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, and Ohio each had over 200 telephone companies competing within their borders. By 1907, non-Bell firms continued to develop and were operating 51 percent of the telephone businesses in local markets. Prices were driven down as many urban subscribers were able to choose among competing providers. AT&T’s profits and prices during this period began to shrink due to increased competition. Whereas AT&T had earned an average return on investment of 46 percent in the late 1800s, by 1906 their return had dropped to 8 percent. As Brock noted, this competitive period brought gains unimaginable just a few years earlier. Industry historians Leonard S. Flyman, Richard C. Toole, and Rosemary M. Avellis summarize the overall effect of this period by saying, “It seems competition helped to expand the market, bring down costs, and lower prices to consumers.”

Adam Thierer, Unnatural Monopoly: Critical Moments in the Development of the Bell System Monopoly (http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-journal/1994/11/cj14n2-6.pdf), 270

Thierer goes on to explain that it was through the legerdemain of AT&T president Theodore Newton Vail in eliminating competitors by weaponizing policymakers in his favor that AT&T managed to concentrate its power. During this period of intense competition, AT&T began buying up some of its competitors, which swiftly brought the government’s antitrust guns to bear. Under this pressure, AT&T agreed to a program engineered to both mollify the federal government and undermine competition with the installment of a clever system of non-compete agreements with other telephone operators in agreed-upon geographical areas, creating unnatural local monopolies, as well as convincing the government that allowing independent operators to use AT&T’s system would be in the best interests of the market’s health, but instead simply incentivized those operators to abstain from establishing their own systems and ensuring AT&T’s primacy in the provision of technological infrastructure. In time, Vail opportunistically latched onto growing legislative sentiment against duplication of service by competition and embraced government regulation over a “public good” as a condition for firmly establishing a monopoly over telephony. Almost immediately afterwards, AT&T began using its newfound influence in federal governance to convince state governments to hike rates across the board. Vail had gone into the lair of the beast and emerged victorious, his enemy subdued and bound by the golden leash of money and influence.

Lest we think AT&T is an isolated example, if we closely examine other modern examples of so-called “natural” monopolies, we find a similarly muddled picture:

Standard Oil — Standard Oil is the very best example I can find of a natural monopoly. Unfortunately for critics, Standard Oil lowered prices and streamlined the oil product production pipeline and the trust was broken up not out of any evidence that they were harming the consumer or unfairly forcing competitors out of business, but simply out of fear of their power. Standard Oil provided a better product, at a better price, and was rewarded with dissolution by mama government. We shouldn’t neglect to mention that competition in the industry, despite paranoia that no one could compete with the Standard Oil colossus, had reduced Standard Oil’s market share from 88% in the 1890s to 70% when the antitrust suit was filed in 1906 and then 64% by the time the company was broken up in 1911. It’s not unreasonable to believe that the “dangerous” Standard Oil trust was well on its way back to earth without any help from lawmakers screeching on behalf of jealous competitors.

De Beers — De Beers is the next best example I can find of a natural monopoly, but to call it such is a stretch at best. De Beers was able to operate a successful monopoly in a non-essential, worldwide industry for about a century. One of the ways in which this monopoly got its start was by using government policies in South Africa to their advantage (http://mises.org/econsense/ch91.asp). Most interesting to note is how De Beers’ stranglehold on the world market is finally being broken not by government intervention, but instead by their competitors (http://www.economist.com/node/2921462).

Microsoft — Despite what Judge Thomas Jackson thinks, branding Microsoft a monopoly, natural or otherwise, at any point in its history is a dubious proposition. By the very definition of the word, Microsoft would have had to find a way to raise the barriers of entry to the software industry to qualify as a true monopoly by preventing new entrants into the market and ensuring they had no effective competitors. They did no such thing. They were, at best, a non-coercive monopoly. Microsoft’s efforts to dominate the operating system market were one of major reasons prices for personal computers dropped so precipitously in the 1980s and 1990s. The price of Microsoft’s own products never even kept pace with inflation over that time, going lower and lower as the PC industry grew ever larger. This is not to mention the fact that, indeed, for the average user Microsoft actually provided a better product than the rest of the industry. Unix and Linux were, simply put, not for the average user. Mac OS purposely cornered themselves into their own restricted ecosystem. Other offerings in the operating system environment and elsewhere were, in some respects, better than what Microsoft offered and it is true that Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive practices, leveraging their market dominance fairly gained by selling a product the market wanted, to squeeze out competitors (think Office vs. Wordperfect and Internet Explorer vs. Netscape), but a company needn’t be a monopoly to engage in anti-competitive business practices.

Comcast — Comcast, and Verizon, CenturyLink and Time Warner and others have, for years now, benefited greatly from laws that prevent local municipalities from governing their own infrastructure and, as a result of intense lobbying, give telecoms exclusive rights to provide phone, cable and/or internet service to their areas (http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2011/11/telecom-lobby-killing-municipal-broadband/420).

For more examples, please read DiLorenzo’s essay.

I find the example of AT&T is especially enlightening as it shows the inherent difficulty the government has in properly regulating industry while simultaneously supporting the principles of free-market competition, how in putting pressure on AT&T to stop its allegedly monopolistic behavior, the government succeeded in not only helping AT&T to reach its expressed “one system” goal, but in encoding into law the means by which AT&T achieved its aims, and ensuring that the only force powerful enough to destroy the titan government had created was government itself, a palimpsest we find today in the alarming notion of “too big to fail.” It’s a sobering lesson, one which we have obstinately refused to use in applying the fuel of elected officials to the flame of industry, forcing us to now look down the barrel of economic insolvency, particularly today as we prepare to permit our government to make unprecedentedly deep inroads into the massive health care industry, the consequences of which will surely signal us concerning the financial future of our nation.

As for the larger problem of corporatism, there’s plenty of blame to go around, and politicians are happy to play that game as it keeps us from asking the questions that threaten the institutions that give them strength. But we should know better. The questions we should be asking are: what, if anything, can be done about it and what does the future hold if we do nothing?


Part 2 of this post will continue soon.

The Limits of Satire

I remember the first Grand Theft Auto game. It was a little shareware title that came out about fifteen years ago with a hilarious premise, a simple idea and great execution. There were no complex philosophical questions. I don’t remember any satire. I don’t remember any story. I just remember the thrill of sitting at my prized Pentium desktop computer with my brother next to me, getting in fast cars and crashing them into everything on the screen, mostly other cars. And people.

Of course, the people weren’t real. It was top down, so all you really saw was shoulders and heads. Apart from the context it might as well have been Pac-Man eating dots. To us, as kids, it was great fun because running over fake computer people is really, really funny. You get to do something that is completely unacceptable in real life and nobody gets hurt. The entire appeal of it is the fact that it’s unacceptable, or undesirable to do such a thing in real life. If you could drive around hitting cars and people with impunity in real life, why would anyone want to play a game based around the same activity? The other side of that coin is the question: if it’s fun to do it in a game, would it be even more fun in real life?

But this isn’t the question I’m interested in. I’m interested in understanding what it is, if anything, Grand Theft Auto V’s developer, Rockstar, is trying to say to us–not necessarily just about violence, but about American culture.

In the modern GTA games, the entire world is a send-up. The major landmarks of modernity are all to be found, but darkly twisted. Fox News is Weazel News, the NASDAQ is BAWSAQ, the FBI is represented by the unrepentantly corrupt FIB, and the in-car radios in every car are rife with advertisements that take every social trend to ridiculous extremes. The jokes are many, and there’s little to no subtlety in their delivery or punchlines. There is a fictional superhero in this universe called Impotent Rage, who is every stereotype of all liberal privileged-white-guilt hypocrisy. In Impotent Rage’s TV show (yes, you can sit down and watch TV in the game), he manages to lampoon both liberals and conservatives in a sequence where he destroys a group of environmentalists who are protesting an oil corporation for “fracking,” misunderstanding them to be protesting against homosexuality.

It’s clever, about as clever as Rockstar ever gets, and amusing, but it’s never particularly satisfying. I’m having trouble putting my finger on why, but I think it has something to do with the pervasive nature of the satire.

Thinking about it took me back to an article I read some years ago by Douglas Haddow that discussed hipsters as heralding the “end of western civilization.” Hyperbolic, to be sure, and written back when it was still interesting to speak derisively about hipster culture, but the point it made–that there’s a fine line to be walked by counter-culture commentary, and that by overdoing it we run the risk of subversion crashing into nihilistic narcissism–is relevant to my struggle to find some meaning behind the satire of Rockstar’s opus. I want to quote from the article, and note that “hipsterdom” could easily be replaced with “GTA V”:

“With nothing to defend, uphold or even embrace, the idea of ‘hipsterdom’ is left wide open for attack. And yet, it is this ironic lack of authenticity that has allowed hipsterdom to grow into a global phenomenon that is set to consume the very core of Western counterculture.”

Haddow is making the argument that the appropriation of art or aesthetic by a culture which cannot appreciate the heritage of its spoils strips them of their meaning. Star Trek brilliantly exposes the horror of such cultural annihilation via the Borg, a collective intelligence made up of drones bent solely upon consuming all biological life. In the Star Trek universe, being assimilated by the Borg is a fate worse than death–not only are the essential parts of your personality subsumed by the collective intelligence, but your body then serves as a tool to force others into the same state. The Borg and hipsters alike are the average of all civilizations and people they assimilate, which is another way of saying they are nothing, they are meaningless, they exist simply for their own sake, their own mechanistic preening, and you are just another item to be added to their collection.

Satire, to me, is reductio ad absurdum, shining a critical light on reasoning or circumstance by stripping away the bits that hide the true character of our pretenses. But what happens when we apply the brush of satirical absurdity to everything in sight? As Haddow ably pointed out, this type of cultural consumption rapidly loses any meaning. We stop caring about what it’s saying. Once we’ve cut everything down to its most ridiculous aspects, the only thing left to do is satirize the critical process itself, and then we’re forced to wonder about the entire point of the exercise. Ironic detachment is the tool of choice when we want to comment on something without actually saying anything, but it’s the surest way to cry wolf and find yourself ignored and irrelevant.

Coming back around to the violence of the experience in a game like GTA V, it’s obvious that for many, including myself, the appeal of such violence is not in the rehearsal of despicable acts against thinking and feeling human beings, but in the novelty and thrill of simulated activities we’d never want to actually engage in in real life. When asking questions about the effect of video game violence on human behavior, we often fail to recognize that the attraction comes not from the similarity of such stylized violence to real-life violence, but in the safety and insulation of the vast gulf of abstraction that actually separates the two. Gamers, by and large, when confronted by too-real depictions of violence in their games, recoil with horror. For evidence of this, look no further than reactions to titles like last year’s Spec Ops: The Line or even the graphic and impactful torture sequence in GTA V itself. There is meaning to be found behind the bloody façade of GTA V. Rockstar recognizes this, and makes it sharply manifest by the harrowing emptiness and dysfunction of the story’s main characters that results from a lifetime of sociopathic feloniousness. Sadly, the heft of the violence doesn’t carry over to the game’s ubiquitous social commentary, which rarely rises above the level of “yeah, that’s pretty silly, isn’t it?”

The friction between fiction and reality that we find so satisfying in the action of the game isn’t as readily found in the catch-all net cast by Rockstar’s farcical take on Los Angeles and American culture in general. This seems to be what happens when you refuse to take sides and are satisfied with simply taking haphazard aim, shooting, and moving to the next target. After a while we stop nodding our heads and just shrug, thinking, “And?”

What is “unscientific”?

I recently had a discussion with an individual about the supposed incompatibility of religion and science. This individual was convinced that most of the central claims of any religion can be labeled as unscientific. I disagreed, but not simply because of my own convictions about the nature of God, but also because of my intuition about the limitations of science and why any questions or claims that lay beyond those limitations are not automatically “unscientific.”

Zachełmie_quarry,_stromatolites

I’d like to start by making reference to a related argument. In the very public, recent intelligent design vs science court case Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, celebrated intelligent design proponent Dr. Michael Behe was forced to admit that his argument–that can be effectively summarized as follows:

the input of an intelligent designer is the only currently-known method for producing the strong appearance of design (theoretical arguments of evolutionists notwithstanding) that we find in complex biological organisms, and therefore the inference of a designer is rationally justified

is an inductive argument that can never be ruled out (is unfalsifiable). This “marginalization by unfalsifiability” was how Behe’s arguments were painted as “unscientific” and therefore unworthy of serious consideration. Falsifiability is how Karl Popper famously gave science an escape from Hume’s problem of induction. Falsifiability allows us to say that since it’s so difficult, if not impossible, to prove a claim absolutely true, we instead seek to prove it false, which is a far easier task. If your predictions cannot be shown to be false, they are generally considered to be unscientific. This is, of course, a rough and somewhat naive explanation of how science is done as scientists are more concerned with supporting or contradicting evidence surrounding a claim, but falsifiability is nonetheless a fairly reliable gauge of whether or not a specific claim can ever be considered “scientific.”

If these are the grounds on which we may rule out certain inductive arguments in terms of their “scientificity,” then I would like to suggest that, from a philosophical standpoint, we can similarly dismiss many more supposedly scientific arguments. As an illustration, let’s consider the varying and even competing hypotheses of abiogenesis–the natural process by which life arises from simple organic compounds, implicitly without the need of any intelligent input. That this process occurred at some point in earth’s history is, of course, the default position of most scientists. Any claims to the contrary simply remove the origins of life elsewhere in the universe without actually answering the central question. Scientists believe that either life can create itself from naturally occurring materials, or we lose all explanatory power about the origins of life since the input of an intelligent creator would necessitate an explanation of how that creator itself came to be.

Let’s examine both possibilities a bit more closely. How could we test that life arises from naturally occurring, simple compounds? We could formulate an experiment or series of experiments in which we mix such compounds under simulated pre-life earth conditions and see if such a process can produce a self-replicating molecule. If our experiments produce such a molecule, we have indeed confirmed that life can arise spontaneously from naturally occurring, simple organic compounds. Does this prove that life arose on earth in a like manner?

Well, no. It can, at best, only strengthen the claim that life arose on its own on earth. And in fact, since we can’t know the exact conditions under which life arose on earth, our test itself required the input of an intelligence to both create the test and then fine-tune its parameters. This forces us to explain the success of our experiment, which strengthens the claim we’ve made about the natural origin of life on earth, in terms of the actions of that life. What then to make of the explanatory power of abiogenesis?

What about our other theory–that life arose on earth with help? Attributing the origin of life on earth to a creator intelligence could require the exact same test–and in fact the same experiment we used to verify our predictions about the capabilities of natural abiogenesis could be used equally well to strengthen the claim of intelligent biogenesis. Where does that leave us?

Are any of the specific claims that follow from or precede our experiments falsifiable? Probably not, at least not without a time machine. Are they then unscientific? No. One of the biggest problems I have with reductionism is the ironically religious-like a priori rejection of claims without considering their merit and without serious introspection and a healthy sense of skepticism toward one’s own convictions.

The universe is a strange place, and I believe we will find it to be far stranger the more we learn about it. If a claim must fit our personal worldview, let’s at least allow others, especially those with whom we disagree, the same consideration. We might learn something.

Don’t mess with us

The Guardian reports that the UK government is using anti-terrorism laws to intimidate citizens with no evidence that they are in any way connected to terrorism. Officers at Heathrow recently stopped an individual, David Miranda, whose domestic partner happens to be Glenn Greenwald, the man who interviewed whistleblower Edward Snowden and published articles about the NSA’s spying programs. The officers held Miranda for nine hours (the maximum allowable time period) and confiscated thousands of dollars of his personal affects. “Suspects” detained under this provision of the UK’s Terrorism Act (called “Schedule 7”) are compelled to cooperate with questioning or risk being arrested for “obstruction.”

Make no mistake, this is not diplomacy. This particular law has been on the books in the UK since 2000. It’s been suggested, with good reason, that most of its victims are racially profiled–that they “look” like terrorists. The detention of David Miranda was not naive racism by ignorant cops who should know better, it was intimidation, pure and simple. It was abuse of power for the purposes of cowing those who might dare threaten the very power being abused. We have every reason to be gravely concerned.

Independent Insiders

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Arstechnica writes about the Obama Administration’s so-called commitment to “independent review” of government surveillance programs. The rumored review panel, as reported by ABC News, appears to consist of at least four people with overt government connections and whose backgrounds would make it hard for those four people to convince even their own spouses of “independence” in any meaningful sense of the word. The argument that (former) government insiders are needed because they can brandish leverage is insufficient by the definitions of the words “independent” and “outside.”

There is simply no pretense at objectivity being made here by the Obama Administration. As they have done time and time again, they make good on promises in letter only, simply to have a reference (“See? We did what we said we would do!”) in order to more effectively dismiss criticisms. Leaving such a review in the hands of this particular group of experts is a bit like hiring David Novak to do an “independent study” on the health benefits of fast food. Sure, you’ll get your study, but who’ll buy it?

Oh. Right. We will.