Science

The Real War on Science

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New York Times reporter and best-seller John Tierny published an excellent article with City Journal in which he argues that the Left has waged a far more damaging and effective war on science than the Right, despite narratives to the contrary. The whole article is worth reading, but among his examples include:

  1. Extensive confirmation bias (and other biases) in the social sciences that result in skewed research, particularly regarding research comparing left-wing people and right-wing people.
  2. Taboos against valid research: for example, discouraging or outright condemning research that (a) explores genetic differences between genders or races (unless the genetic differences relate to differences in sexual orientation) or (b) finds negative impacts of single-parent households, LGBT parenting, or putting children in childcare versus stay-at-home parenting.
  3. Politicizing (and thus corrupting) research on (a) genetics and animal breeding (contributing to the eugenics movement of the early 20th century),  (b) overpopulation (contributing, Tierny argues, to China’s immoral and disastrous one-child policy), (c) environmental science (contributing to many different problems, such as increased death tolls from malaria when DDT was restricted or the spread of dengue and Zika virus due to needless fears of insecticides), and (d) food science (pushing low fat diets and greatly increasing American consumption of carbohydrates).

Tierny argues that possibly one of the greatest casualties of the Left’s war on science is the reputation of scientists. As he puts it: “Bad research can be exposed and discarded, but bad reputations endure.”

The whole article is worth reading, but here is a sampling:

In a classic study of peer review, 75 psychologists were asked to referee a paper about the mental health of left-wing student activists. Some referees saw a version of the paper showing that the student activists’ mental health was above normal; others saw different data, showing it to be below normal. Sure enough, the more liberal referees were more likely to recommend publishing the paper favorable to the left-wing activists. When the conclusion went the other way, they quickly found problems with its methodology.

 

The narrative that Republicans are antiscience has been fed by well-publicized studies reporting that conservatives are more close-minded and dogmatic than liberals are. But these conclusions have been based on questions asking people how strongly they cling to traditional morality and religion—dogmas that matter a lot more to conservatives than to liberals. A few other studies—not well-publicized—have shown that liberals can be just as close-minded when their own beliefs, such as their feelings about the environment or Barack Obama, are challenged.

Social psychologists have often reported that conservatives are more prejudiced against other social groups than liberals are. But one of Haidt’s coauthors, Jarret Crawford of the College of New Jersey, recently noted a glaring problem with these studies: they typically involve attitudes toward groups that lean left, like African-Americans and communists. When Crawford (who is a liberal) did his own study involving a wider range of groups, he found that prejudice is bipartisan. Liberals display strong prejudice against religious Christians and other groups they perceive as right of center.

Conservatives have been variously pathologized as unethical, antisocial, and irrational simply because they don’t share beliefs that seem self-evident to liberals. For instance, one study explored ethical decision making by asking people whether they would formally support a female colleague’s complaint of sexual harassment. There was no way to know if the complaint was justified, but anyone who didn’t automatically side with the woman was put in the unethical category. Another study asked people whether they believed that “in the long run, hard work usually brings a better life”—and then classified a yes answer as a “rationalization of inequality.” Another study asked people if they agreed that “the Earth has plenty of natural resources if we just learn how to develop them”—a view held by many experts in resource economics, but the psychologists pathologized it as a “denial of environmental realities.”

 

For his part, Holdren [a previous advocate of forced population control in the U.S.] has served for the past eight years as the science advisor to President Obama, a position from which he laments that Americans don’t take his warnings on climate change seriously. He doesn’t seem to realize that public skepticism has a lot to do with the dismal track record of himself and his fellow environmentalists. There’s always an apocalypse requiring the expansion of state power. The visions of global famine were followed by more failed predictions, such as an “age of scarcity” due to vanishing supplies of energy and natural resources and epidemics of cancer and infertility caused by synthetic chemicals. In a 1976 book, The Genesis Strategy, the climatologist Stephen Schneider advocated a new fourth branch of the federal government (with experts like himself serving 20-year terms) to deal with the imminent crisis of global cooling. He later switched to become a leader in the global-warming debate.

 

Yet many climate researchers are passing off their political opinions as science, just as Obama does, and they’re even using that absurdly unscientific term “denier” as if they were priests guarding some eternal truth. Science advances by continually challenging and testing hypotheses, but the modern Left has become obsessed with silencing heretics. In a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch last year, 20 climate scientists urged her to use federal racketeering laws to prosecute corporations and think tanks that have “deceived the American people about the risks of climate change.” Similar assaults on free speech are endorsed in the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform, which calls for prosecution of companies that make “misleading” statements about “the scientific reality of climate change.” A group of Democratic state attorneys general coordinated an assault on climate skeptics by subpoenaing records from fossil-fuel companies and free-market think tanks, supposedly as part of investigations to prosecute corporate fraud. Such prosecutions may go nowhere in court—they’re blatant violations of the First Amendment—but that’s not their purpose. By demanding a decade’s worth of e-mail and other records, the Democratic inquisitors and their scientist allies want to harass climate dissidents and intimidate their donors.

 

Related reading:

 

2 Trillion Galaxies

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As if we didn’t feel small and insignificant already, The Guardian reports,

There are a dizzying 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, up to 20 times more than previously thought, astronomers reported on Thursday. The surprising finding, based on 3D modeling of images collected over 20 years by the Hubble Space Telescope, was published in the Astronomical Journal.

Scientists have puzzled over how many galaxies the cosmos harbors at least since US astronomer Edwin Hubble showed in 1924 that Andromeda, a neighboring galaxy, was not part of our own Milky Way. But even in the era of modern astronomy, getting an accurate tally has proven difficult.

To begin with, there is only part of the cosmos where light given off by distant objects has had time to reach Earth. The rest is effectively beyond our reach. And even within this “observable universe”, current technology only allows us to glimpse 10% of what is out there, according to the new findings.

“Using deep space images from Hubble,” the article continues, “Conselice and his team painstakingly converted them into 3D to measure the number of galaxies at different times in the history of the universe. The analysis reached back more than 13bn years – very near the time of the “Big Bang” thought to have given birth to the universe.” These findings have some astounding implications:

The results have clear implications for galaxy formation, and also helps shed light on an ancient astronomical paradox — why is the sky dark at night?

In analyzing the data, a team led by Christopher Conselice of the University of Nottingham, U.K., found that 10 times as many galaxies were packed into a given volume of space in the early universe than found today. Most of these galaxies were relatively small and faint, with masses similar to those of the satellite galaxies surrounding the Milky Way. As they merged to form larger galaxies the population density of galaxies in space dwindled. This means that galaxies are not evenly distributed throughout the universe’s history, the research team reports in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

“These results are powerful evidence that a significant galaxy evolution has taken place throughout the universe’s history, which dramatically reduced the number of galaxies through mergers between them — thus reducing their total number. This gives us a verification of the so-called top-down formation of structure in the universe,” explained Conselice.

So why is the sky so dark at night if it is populated with galaxies?:

The team came to the conclusion that indeed there actually is such an abundance of galaxies that, in principle, every patch in the sky contains part of a galaxy. However, starlight from the galaxies is invisible to the human eye and most modern telescopes due to other known factors that reduce visible and ultraviolet light in the universe. Those factors are the reddening of light due to the expansion of space, the universe’s dynamic nature, and the absorption of light by intergalactic dust and gas. All combined, this keeps the night sky dark to our vision.

The universe just gets bigger and stranger.

 

2016 NAS Report on GMOs: Safe With Relatively Minor Concerns

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The National Academy of Sciences released a comprehensive report earlier this year that “builds on previous related Academies reports published between 1987 and 2010 by undertaking a retrospective examination of the purported positive and adverse effects of GE crops and to anticipate what emerging genetic-engineering technologies hold for the future.” Here are the highlights from the press release:

  • Effects on human health: “The committee carefully searched all available research studies for persuasive evidence of adverse health effects directly attributable to consumption of foods derived from GE crops but found none. Studies with animals and research on the chemical composition of GE foods currently on the market reveal no differences that would implicate a higher risk to human health and safety than from eating their non-GE counterparts. Though long-term epidemiological studies have not directly addressed GE food consumption, available epidemiological data do not show associations between any disease or chronic conditions and the consumption of GE foods. There is some evidence that GE insect-resistant crops have had benefits to human health by reducing insecticide poisonings. In addition, several GE crops are in development that are designed to benefit human health, such as rice with increased beta-carotene content to help prevent blindness and death caused by vitamin A deficiencies in some developing nations.”
  • Effects on the environment: “The use of insect-resistant or herbicide-resistant crops did not reduce the overall diversity of plant and insect life on farms, and sometimes insect-resistant crops resulted in increased insect diversity, the report says. While gene flow – the transfer of genes from a GE crop to a wild relative species – has occurred, no examples have demonstrated an adverse environmental effect from this transfer. Overall, the committee found no conclusive evidence of cause-and-effect relationships between GE crops and environmental problems. However, the complex nature of assessing long-term environmental changes often made it difficult to reach definitive conclusions.”
  • Effects on agriculture: “The available evidence indicates that GE soybean, cotton, and maize have generally had favorable economic outcomes for producers who have adopted these crops, but outcomes have varied depending on pest abundance, farming practices, and agricultural infrastructure. Although GE crops have provided economic benefits to many small-scale farmers in the early years of adoption, enduring and widespread gains will depend on such farmers receiving institutional support, such as access to credit, affordable inputs such as fertilizer, extension services, and access to profitable local and global markets for the crops. Evidence shows that in locations where insect-resistant crops were planted but resistance-management strategies were not followed, damaging levels of resistance evolved in some target insects. If GE crops are to be used sustainably, regulations and incentives are needed so that more integrated and sustainable pest-management approaches become economically feasible. The committee also found that in many locations some weeds had evolved resistance to glyphosate, the herbicide to which most GE crops were engineered to be resistant. Resistance evolution in weeds could be delayed by the use of integrated weed-management approaches, says the report, which also recommends further research to determine better approaches for weed resistance management. Insect-resistant GE crops have decreased crop loss due to plant pests. However, the committee examined data on overall rates of increase in yields of soybean, cotton, and maize in the U.S. for the decades preceding introduction of GE crops and after their introduction, and there was no evidence that GE crops had changed the rate of increase in yields. It is feasible that emerging genetic-engineering technologies will speed the rate of increase in yield, but this is not certain, so the committee recommended funding of diverse approaches for increasing and stabilizing crop yield.”

Add this to the statements by the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science that GMOs are safe. Concerns over increased chemical use may be somewhat legitimate, though this tends to be complicated. However, fears about herbicides like glyphosate are often overblown, seeing that both the EPA and the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization and WHO declare that it is not a cancer risk. Furthermore, it is important to note that uncontrolled weeds are actually a potentially huge threat, making weedkillers all the more important. As for increased herbicide resistance, science writer Ronald Bailey explains in his book The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century,

What about “superweeds”? Again, the evolution of resistance by weeds to herbicides is nothing new and is certainly not a problem specifically related to genetically enhanced crops. As of April 2014, the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds reports that there are currently 429 uniquely evolved cases of herbicide resistant weeds globally involving 234 different species. Weeds have evolved resistance to 22 of the 25 known herbicide sites of action and to 154 different herbicides. Herbicide resistant weeds have been reported in 81 crops in sixty-five countries. A preliminary analysis by University of Wyoming weed scientist Andrew Kniss parses the data on herbicide resistance from 1986 to 2012. He finds no increase in the rate at which weeds become resistant to herbicides after biotech crops were introduced in 1996. Since Roundup (glyphosate) is the most popular herbicide used with biotech crops, have the number of weed species resistant to Roundup increased? Kniss finds that the development of Roundup resistant weeds has occurred more frequently among non biotech crops. Glyphosate resistant weeds evolved due to glyphosate use, not directly due to GM crops,” he points out. “Herbicide resistant weed development is not a GMO problem, it is a herbicide problem (pgs. 155-156).

In summary, GMOs are indeed safe with relatively minor concerns. Or, as Slate‘s William Saletan puts it,

The more you learn about herbicide resistance, the more you come to understand how complicated the truth about GMOs is. First you discover that they aren’t evil. Then you learn that they aren’t perfectly innocent. Then you realize that nothing is perfectly innocent. Pesticide vs. pesticide, technology vs. technology, risk vs. risk—it’s all relative. The best you can do is measure each practice against the alternatives. The least you can do is look past a three-letter label.

Human Violence: High for Mammals, Average for Primates, Less Than Before

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As reported in The Atlantic,

Which mammal is most likely to be murdered by its own kind? It’s certainly not humans—not even close. Nor is it a top predator like the grey wolf or lion, although those at least are #11 and #9 in the league table of murdery mammals. No, according to a study led by José María Gómez from the University of Granada, the top spot goes to… the meerkat. These endearing black-masked creatures might be famous for their cooperative ways, but they kill each other at a rate that makes man’s inhumanity to man look meek. Almost one in five meerkats, mostly youngsters, lose their lives at the paws and jaws of their peers.

Gómez’s study is the first thorough survey of violence in the mammal world, collating data on more than a thousand species. It clearly shows that we humans are not alone in our capacity to kill each other. Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, have been known to wage brutal war, but even apparently peaceful creatures take each other’s lives. When ranked according to their rates of lethal violence, ground squirrels, wild horses, gazelle, and deer all feature in the top 50. So do long-tailed chinchillas, which kill each other more frequently than tigers and bears do.

The article continues:

The point of this macabre census was to understand the origins of our own behavior. Gómez typically studies plants and insects, but he realized that the techniques he uses to study their evolution can be used to study our own. In particular, he noted that closely related species tend to show similar levels of lethal interpersonal violence. He could use those similarities to predict how violent any given mammal should be, and whether it meets, exceeds, or defies those expectations.

It turns out that humans “were six times more lethally violent than the average mammal, but about as violent as expected for a primate. But time and social organizations have sated our ancestral bloodthirst, leaving us with modern rates of lethal violence that are well below the prehistoric baseline. We are an average member of an especially violent group of mammals, and we’ve managed to curb our ancestry.”

By how much though? After “poring through statistical yearbooks, archaeological sites, and more,” the researchers were able “to work out causes of death in 600 human populations between 50,000 BC to the present day. They concluded that rates of lethal violence originally ranged from 3.4 to 3.9 percent during Paleolithic times, making us only slightly more violent than you’d expect for a primate of our evolutionary past. That rate rose to around 12 percent during the bloody Medieval period, before falling again over the last few centuries to levels even lower than our prehistoric past.”

The reason? Organization.

[O]nce we formed large states, “institutions like the rule of law reduced rates of lethal violence below what one would expect for a mammal with our ancestry and ecology, and below what has been observed in human societies in earlier periods and with simpler forms of social organization,” says Steven Pinker from Harvard University. He argued as much in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, but says that Gómez’s team have done so “with greater precision, rigor, and depth; I wish this study had been available when I wrote the book.”

Natural Gas: The Bridge to Renewable Energy

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Most people are in favor of renewable energy such as wind and solar, yet many supporters tend to look at natural gas with disdain. However, a new NBER study finds that this position is untenable. As one of the authors writes in The Washington Post,

Because of the particular nature of clean energy sources like solar and wind, you can’t simply add them to the grid in large volumes and think that’s the end of the story. Rather, because these sources of electricity generation are “intermittent” — solar fluctuates with weather and the daily cycle, wind fluctuates with the wind — there has to be some means of continuing to provide electricity even when they go dark. And the more renewables you have, the bigger this problem can be.

Now, a new study suggests that at least so far, solving that problem has ironically involved more fossil fuels — and more particularly, installing a large number of fast-ramping natural gas plants, which can fill in quickly whenever renewable generation slips.

Er…Solar!

…In the study, the researchers took a broad look at the erection of wind, solar, and other renewable energy plants (not including large hydropower or biomass projects) across 26 countries that are members of an international council known as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development over the period between the year 1990 and 2013. And they found a surprisingly tight relationship between renewables on the one hand, and gas on the other.

…“Our paper calls attention to the fact that renewables and fast-reacting fossil technologies appear as highly complementary and that they should be jointly installed to meet the goals of cutting emissions and ensuring a stable supply,” the paper adds.

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…which is where the natural gas is found.

The study seems to indicate that natural gas is “a so-called “bridge fuel” that allows for a transition into a world of more renewables, as it is both flexible and also contributes less carbon dioxide emissions than does coal, per unit of energy generated by burning the fuel.” Or, as Reason‘s science writer Ronald Bailey puts it, “Anti-fracking pro-renewable energy activists are walking contradictions.”

 

So Proud of My Humility

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A recent Aeon article highlights the importance of what Nathaniel has called “epistemic humility” and the dangers of overconfidence:

The internet and digital media have created the impression of limitless knowledge at our fingertips. But, by making us lazy, they have opened up a space that ignorance can fill. On the Edge website, the psychologist Tania Lombrozo of the University of California explained how technology enhances our illusions of wisdom. She argues that the way we access information about an issue is critical to our understanding – and the more easily we can recall an image, word or statement, the more likely we’ll think we’ve successfully learned it, and so refrain from effortful cognitive processing.

This lack of intellectual humility often leads to the trolling we see in online discussions:

Intellectually humble people don’t repress, hide or ignore their vulnerabilities, like so many trolls…People who are humble by nature tend to be more open-minded and quicker to resolve disputes, since they recognise that their own opinions might not be valid. The psychologist Carol Dweck at Stanford University in California has shown that if you believe intelligence can be developed through experience and hard work, you’re likely to make more of an effort to solve difficult problems, compared with those who think intelligence is hereditary and unchangeable.

One of the more exciting portions of the article is its discussion of the

Thrive Center for Human Development in California, which seeks to help young people turn into successful adults, is funding a series of major studies about intellectual humility. Their hypothesis is that humility, curiosity and openness are key to a fulfilling life. One of their papers proposes a scale for measuring humility by examining questions such as whether people are consistently humble or whether it depends on circumstances. Acknowledging that our opinions (and those of others) vary by circumstance is, in itself, a significant step towards reducing our exaggerated confidence that we are right.

The key takeaway, however, is the following:

Intellectual humility relies on the ability to prefer truth over social status. It is marked primarily by a commitment to seeking answers, and a willingness to accept new ideas – even if they contradict our views. In listening to others, we run the risk of discovering that they know more than we do. But humble people see personal growth as a goal in itself, rather than as a means of moving up the social ladder. We miss out on a lot of available information if we focus only on ourselves and on our place in the world (bold mine).

Most of my anxieties when it comes to research, writing, and learning are ultimately anxieties over my place in the social pecking order. I have a long way to go when it comes to learning intellectual humility.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

According to Amazon, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a best-seller. It’s not hard to see why. This deeply interesting book is also a deeply flawed book, and all of the flaws are calculated to make the book more sensationalist and provocative than the underlying research truly allows.

First of all, Harari is all-in for the hypothesis that the Agricultural Revolution was a colossal mistake. This is not a new idea. I’ve come across it several times, and when I did a quick Google search just now I found a 1987 article by Jared Diamond with the subtle title: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. Diamond’s argument then is as silly as Harari’s argument is now, and it boils down to this: life as a hunter-gatherer is easy. Farming is hard. Ergo, the Agricultural Revolution was a bad deal. If we’d all stuck around being hunter-gatherers we’d be happier.

The primary problem with this argument, philosophically, is its naked hedonism. I’m pretty sure I’d be happier if I just stayed in a perpetual, drug-induced high. And yet I don’t see Harari or Diamond (or any ostensibly sane person) standing outside of drug rehab facilities wearing a sandwich board warning heroin addicts that they’d be better off just staying high. Could it be conceivable that there’s more to life than minimizing the amount of time we spend procuring a bare minimum of resources to sustain life? The most frustrating thing about replying to this line of argument is that it’s absurd to even have to spell these things out. Isn’t the human penchant for dissatisfaction one of our noblest attributes? We’re not satisfied, and so we go out and we invent. Discover. Explore. Build. And, while we’re at it, plant and harvest.

Of course, it’s possible to take that to an extreme. Ideally, we find some way to balance the capacity to enjoy what we have–to live in the moment and to be accepting of the past–without giving up on our noble ambitions and desires to better ourselves, those around us, and the world we inhabit. The fact that this just might involve working more hours per week doesn’t automatically make it a bad idea, and the fact that I have to explain any of this to folks like Diamond or Harari is just plain silly. Their arguments are not insightful or provocative. They’re just childish.

Sadly, since this is one of the first arguments that Harari makes, he starts out by digging a deep credibility hole that he never really climbs back out of. He compounds it with other silly fad-arguments like the idea that we didn’t domesticate wheat, wheat domesticate us! Thus:

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud. Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice, and potatoes. These plants domesticated homo sapiens rather than vice versa. Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the standpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the Earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, almost 10 times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?

The biggest problem here is that the very first thing that Harari argues for in his book is the distinction between “humans” (a term that covers many species) and “homo sapiens” (a term that refers to just one particular species). He puts all kinds of emphasis on this distinction, including making it the title of his book! And yet, in the passage above, he treats “wheat” as just a plant. Yet, according to Wikipedia, wheat is a term (like human) that refers to nearly 2-dozen distinct species. Again, it’s a hit for his credibility to be so sanctimonious about a technicality in one case, and then so cavalier about it in another. More than that, however, it substantively undermines his argument. Because the reality is that in domesticating various plants and animals, humans were engaged in slow-motion genetic engineering. The result, from the various species of wheat to animals like dogs and chickens, is a species that is genetically distinct from their ancestors. This matters a lot. Because if Harari wants to define a species genetically (which he does) then the domesticated wheat species is not the same thing as the wild wheat species from which it was derived over tens of thousands of years of selective breeding.

To clarify this mistake, imagine that he tried to argue that humans were domestictaed by wolves instead of vice versa. And so now wolves live in the houses of their domesticated humans, right? Well, no. Dogs have domesticated humans, but dogs (Canis familiaris) are not the same things as wolves (Canis lupus, Canis rufus, Canis lycaon, etc). And so you can’t say “wolves domesticated humans” because man’s best friend is no longer a wolf. Similarly, the wheat that we grow for food everywhere isn’t the same creature as its wild ancestor. Once again, this isn’t just wrong, it’s silly. When you see memes on the Internet about how cats own humans, that’s funny. When you see someone trying to turn the exact same Internet joke into a serious scientific point in an ostensibly non-fiction book, it’s just sad and a little pathetic.

Harari’s book suffers a lot from this kind of sloppy sensationalism. In addition to these examples, he also spends a lot of time ironically stating that there are no objective values on the one hand and then–often within mere sentences–making sweeping claims about how modern society is better than ancient society in this or that particular respect. Better, according to which values? It’s just another example of the utter failure of ostensible relativists to actually enact the relativism they claim to believe in. If there are no objective values, then there’s no basis for making statements like that.

So, enough of the criticism. What’s good?

Well, for starters, his separation of ontological concepts into three categories: objective, subjective, and inter-subjective is actually quite useful. He is sloppy about conflating “subjective”, “myth” and “false” (these terms are not synonyms, but he think they are), but the definition of inter-subjective as distinct from mere subjectivity is really quite good:

An objective phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and human beliefs. Radioactivity, for example, is not a myth. Radioactive emissions occurred long before people discovered them, and they are dangerous even when people do not believe in them. Marie Curie, one of the discoverers of radioactivity, did not know during her long years of studying radioactive materials, that they could harm her body. While she did not believe that radioactivity could kill her, she nevertheless died of aplastic anemia, a disease caused by overexposure to radioactive materials. The subjective is something that exists depending on the consciousness and beliefs of a single individual. It disappears or changes if that particular individual changes his or her beliefs. Many a child believes in the existence of an imaginary friend who is invisible and inaudible to the rest of the world. The imaginary friend exists solely in the child’s subjective consciousness, and when the child grows up and ceases to believe in it, the imaginary friend fades away. The intersubjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals. If a single individual changes his or her beliefs or even dies, it is of little importance. However, if most individuals in the network die or change their beliefs, the intersubjective phenomenon will mutate or disappear. Intersubjective phenomena are neither malevolent frauds nor insignificant charades. They exist in a different way from physical phenomena such as radioactivity but their impact on the world may still be enormous. Many of histories most important drivers are intersubjective: law, money, gods, nations.

I also liked a lot of his later theories. As much as he made a hash of the Agricultural Revolution, his argument about the interrelationship between imperialism and science, for example, was really quite fascinating.

Scientists have provided the imperial project with practical knowledge, ideological justification, and technological gadgets. Without this contribution, it is highly questionable whether Europeans could have conquered the world. The conquerers returned the favor by providing scientists with information and protection, supporting all kinds of strange and fascinating projects, and spreading the scientific way of thinking to the far corners of the Earth. Without imperial support, it is doubtful whether modern science would have progressed very far. There are very few scientific disciplines that did not begin their lives as servants to imperial growth and that do not owe a large proportion of their discoveries, collections, buildings, and scholarships to the generous help of army officers, navy captains, and imperial governors.

This is a genuinely insightful argument, and it’s one I’d never heard before. It’s not hard to see why. Our culture–especially our intellectual culture–continues to treat science with a great deal of deference and respect. The mere existence of the term “social science”–combined with the embrace of statistical and other formal mathematical techniques in economics, psychology, etc.–all show how deeply ingrained this deference is. But imperialism? That’s practically a bad word in academic settings. Imperialism is pretty close to the Original Sin, as far as anyone residing in the Ivory Tower would believe. And so obviously it’s incredibly uncomfortable to suggest that imperialism and science are linked or even, not going quite that far, that historically science got a significant boost from imperialism. This is an embarrassment to modern Western sensibilities, and so the only kind of person who will bring it up is someone like Harari who seems intent on offending every conceivable member of his audience. The only time when mockery is really called for is in response to power, and so it is deployed appropriately in this case, and that is where the same penchant for kind of immature provocation turns from an annoyance (as with his silly theories about the Agricultural Revolution or wheat domesticating humans) into something important and serious.

Along these lines, I was also really struck with his argument about the consumerist-capitalist ethic. Here goes:

How can we square the consumerist ethic with the capitalist ethic of the business person according to which profits should not be wasted and should instead by reinvested in production. It’s simple. As in previous eras, there is today a division of labor between the elite and the masses. In medieval Europe, aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries, whereas peasants lived frugally minding every penny. Today the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments while the less well-heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don’t really need. The capitalist and consumerist epics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is “invest”. The supreme commandment of the rest of us is “buy.” The capitalist-consumerist ethic is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal: they were promised paradise, but only if they cultivate compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideas that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ. Most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha. And most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum. In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist-consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and that the masses give free reign to their cravings and passions and buy more and more. this is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How, though, do we know that we’ll really get paradise in return? We’ve seen it on television.

Given his frequent borrowing of ideas I recognize from other sources, I suspect this is not original to Harari, but it is fascinating to me.

There are several more examples of these kinds of points Harari makes that are contrarian and interesting. Some I was already familiar with (such as the nonsensical notion that primitive humans lived in harmony with their environment, something that approaches farce once you actually look at the global swathes of mass extinctions that actually followed the spread of homo sapiens around the globe) and others were either new or particularly well-reasoned (such as his explanation of corporate personhood and intersubjective reality via Peugot). For those reasons: I do recommend reading this book. Just take everything in it with a grain of salt.

The Food Industry’s Dirty Secret: DNA

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Does DNA = Frankenfood? The American public seems to think so. As reported in The Washington Post,

Last year, I wrote about an Oklahoma State University survey indicating that over 80 percent of Americans support “mandatory labels on foods containing DNA.” A new study written by economists Brandon McFadden and Jayson Lusk (who also helped author the OSU survey) similarly finds that 80% of the public support labeling of foods containing DNA (though in this case the question does not clearly indicate whether the labeling should be mandatory or not). Katherine Mangu-Ward has some additional discussion of the study here.

Obviously, such DNA labels would be absurd. Nearly all food contains DNA, and there is no good reason to warn consumers about its presence. As McFadden and Lusk and explain, the survey answers on this subject are an indication of widespread scientific ignorance, proving that many of the respondents “have little knowledge of basic genetics.” Other data from the study also support this conclusion, including the fact that 33 percent of respondents believe that non-GMO tomatoes do not contain any genes, and 32 percent think that vegetables have no DNA. Our vegetables would be blissfully free of DNA if not for the nefarious corporations who maliciously insert it into the food supply!

The authors note that the proportion of respondents who support labeling of foods containing DNA is very similar to the percentage who support mandatory labeling of GMO foods (84 percent).

The unintended consequences of DNA…

Something often missed in the debate over mandatory labels is that “”free” information is not really free at all. Labels cost money. Those costs will often be passed down to consumers. They also take up the time of consumers, and potentially divert their attention away from more valuable information. Mandatory labeling of substances that are not actually risky can also mislead people into thinking that a threat exists even where it does not.”

Given our previous posts on GMOs here at Difficult Run, you can imagine that I wasn’t too thrilled about this information.

 

Opposing GMOs is a first world luxury.

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107 Nobel Laureates just signed a letter slamming Greenpeace over GMOs

In summary:

  1. 40% of children under 5 in the developing world have vitamin A deficiency, which is a leading cause of childhiood blindness and death.
  2. We could prevent up to 2 million deaths per year if we could increase access to Vitamin A.
  3. GMO crop golden rice is genetically designed to provide vitamin A. Since rice is an inexpensive staple crop for much of the world, this has a lot of promise.
  4. And yet anti-GMO protesters, including Greanpeace, are trying to block the use of golden rice, even destroying research crops.

I guess they have a point. We wouldn’t want to feed children anything “unnatural.” Better to let them suffer natural handicaps and die natural deaths.

golden rice

Pro-Life Atheist at Reason Rally

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atheists-against-abortionLife Matters Journal has a new piece by an atheist who attended Reason Rally 2016.  It includes her reflections on attending an event where it is assumed everyone is pro-choice because, well, logic, science, and reason.  Her main takeaways  are that many people don’t know the science, those that do know the science are willing to discriminate, and there is a religious nature to pro-choice adherents.  It’s an interesting piece that you can read here.  She writes,

For some reason though many of the same people who claim to trust only hard scientific evidence are willing to deny these basic biological truths in order to continue supporting the violence of abortion.

There is no reason for the secular community to be as pro-choice as they are; in fact as lovers of logic and reason it would only make sense for more atheists to be pro-life. I fear that the reason the pro-choice side is so successful with nonreligious people is partially that pro-lifers have marketed ourselves as a fundamentally religious/Christian movement.

I’ve written about pro-life atheists before.  I think, in general, the pro-life movement hasn’t found a way to balance the fact that many pro-lifers are religious, but a  lot of the hearts and minds they need to change are not.  Thankfully atheist and agnostic voices have been getting stronger in the community, like at Secular Pro-Life.  I say thankfully because, even though I am Mormon, I’ve always been more swayed by, or felt more comfortable sharing, logical and scientific arguments.  In policy decisions  I think those arguments can reach more people.  Any movement that has science and ethics on its side should not be afraid to use those benefits.