Science

Are We Becoming Morally Smarter?

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Science writer Michael Shermer argues that we are in the March 2015 issue of Reason, based on his new book The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom. He writes,

Since the Enlightenment, humans have demonstrated dramatic moral progress. Almost everyone in the Western world today enjoys rights to life, liberty, property, marriage, reproduction, voting, speech, worship, assembly, protest, autonomy, and the pursuit of happiness. Liberal democracies are now the dominant form of governance, systematically replacing the autocracies and theocracies of centuries past. Slavery and torture are outlawed everywhere in the world (even if occasionally still practiced). The death penalty is on death row and will likely go extinct sometime in the 2020s. Violence and crime are at historic lows, and we have expanded the moral sphere to include more people as members of the human community deserving of rights and respect. Even some animals are now being considered as sentient beings worthy of moral consideration. Abstract reasoning and scientific thinking are the crucial cognitive skills at the foundation of all morality.

His evidence?:

  • “Numerous studies from the 1980s onward, for example, find that intelligence and education are negatively correlated with violent crime. As intelligence and education increase, violence decreases, even when controlled for socioeconomic class, age, sex, and race.”
  • “[N]ewer evidence that shows a positive correlation between literacy and moral reasoning, most particularly between reading fiction and being able to take the perspective of others.”
  • Negative correlation between high cognition and low demands for punitive punishment.
  • Positive correlation between high intelligence and classical liberal views.
  • “Positive correlation between the IQ of British children at the age of 10 and their endorsement of anti-racist, socially liberal, and pro-working women attitudes at the age of 30, holding the usual potentially intervening variables constant.”

And more. Check it out.

You Must See these Stunning Posters from NASA’s Exoplanet Travel Bureau

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Did you know that NASA had an Exoplanet Travel Bureau? I did not. Of course, they don’t, not really. But they do have these really incredible images about some real-world exoplanets that have been recently discovered. I applaud both the art and the science. Here are the images, along with the NASA text that accompanies each one, but you should definitely head over to the site to get super high resolution versions suitable for printing your own posters.

992 - Kepler-186f

Kepler-186f is the first Earth-size planet discovered in the potentially ‘habitable zone’ around another star, where liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface. Its star is much cooler and redder than our Sun. If plant life does exist on a planet like Kepler-186f, its photosynthesis could have been influenced by the star’s red-wavelength photons, making for a color palette that’s very different than the greens on Earth. This discovery was made by Kepler, NASA’s planet hunting telescope.

Experience the Gravity of a Super Earth

Twice as big in volume as the Earth, HD 40307g straddles the line between “Super-Earth” and “mini-Neptune” and scientists aren’t sure if it has a rocky surface or one that’s buried beneath thick layers of gas and ice. One thing is certain though: at eight time the Earth’s mass, its gravitational pull is much, much stronger.

990 - Kepler_16b

Like Luke Skywalker’s planet “Tatooine” in Star Wars, Kepler-16b orbits a pair of stars. Depicted here as a terrestrial planet, Kepler-16b might also be a gas giant like Saturn.

Some Articles about the Coming Demographic Winter

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995 - demwinterchild

A friend gave some very high praise to The History of Fertility Transitions and the New Memeplex, and so it has been sitting amongst my Chrome browser tabs for a month or more. Last week, I read it, and it really is a very important, big-picture article. The basic idea is that memes compete via cultural transmission in much the same way that genes compete via biological transmission.[ref]This isn’t unique to the article. It’s memetics, which comes from Richard Dawkin’s famous book The Selfish Gene.[/ref] Historically, memes have been transmitted primarily through intergenerational transfer, which has given a strong advantage to cultures with high fertility. If you have more kids, and if the main way to pass on memes is to kids, than successful cultures are those that have lots of kids.

The advent of the printing press and other technological advancements turbocharged an alternative method of meme reproduction however: cultural diffusion. Now memes didn’t have to depend on having lots of children to carry them on. They could also be transmitted laterally in books.[ref]Lateral transmission was always possible but was not as powerful.[/ref] This resulted in a break between biological and cultural evolution, and it allowed cultures with low fertility to compete successfully by “infecting” other cultures with the meme for lower fertility.

Accordingly, there was a massive cultural transition that started in the 18th century with the American and French Revolutions and has since engulfed the entire world: all countries and regions in the world either already practice controlled fertility or are transitioning from uncontrolled / natural fertility to controlled fertility. At an individual level, this makes sense because it allows families to invest more resources per child, especially in education. And education is the key to maintaining and increasing social status. So the first consequence is a drastic reduction in the fertility rate. In many developed nations, the fertility rate[ref]excluding immigration[/ref] is already far below replacement. The second consequence is that the eugenic effects of natural fertility (in which couples with high intelligence and self-control have more children) have been replaced by dysgenic effects (in which couples with high intelligence and self-control have fewer children.) As the article puts it:

The benefits of the new pattern are increased material wealth per person, a reduction in disease, starvation, and genocide, and upward social mobility. The main drawback is the onset of a dysgenic phase that may end civilization as we know it.

The article is most impressive for the exhaustive, meticulously researched evidence that the transition has, in fact, occurred.[ref]Seriously, just scan to the bottom and check out the number of references![/ref] It doesn’t do as good a job at talking about the consequences of this transition, however. The dysgenic effect is not the only problem, and may not even be the most acute one. I happen to have recently watched a YouTube documentary about the demographic winter being created by declining fertility rates. It’s a demographic winter because, as fertility rates fall rapidly, the average age of a population rises dramatically. You still have all the old folks (from prior decades when fertility was higher), but there are far fewer children to replace them. As a result, children become relatively scarce.

This isn’t just sad. It’s very, very dangerous. Some of the most obvious problems have to do with entitlements for the elderly. When you have a huge population of old, retired folks and a much, much smaller population of active workers, this is bad. It gets much worse when you factor in immigration, since the racial characteristics of the two groups may be significantly different as well. In the United States, for example, you’ll have a lot of young Hispanics paying taxes to support retired whites. You’ll get a similar problem in Europe, with African and Middle Eastern immigrants taking the place of Hispanics.

Another point made by the documentary, and a plausible one, is that the economy tracks population with about a 48-year lag. The idea is that what really determines the stock market and overall economic performance is consumption, and people hit their peak consumption at about age 48. So when you have a very large cohort hit age 48, you get an economic boom. If the successive generations are much smaller, you will get economic contractions.[ref]In the video, you will see that the 2009 decline fits this trend almost perfectly, as the Baby Boom generation passes it’s peak spending in 2008.[/ref]

This might seem counterintutive. Aren’t more people a drain on resources? No, not necessarily. As this fascinating Wall Street Journal article outlines:

An odd thing about people, compared with other animals, is that the more of us there are, the more we thrive. World population has doubled in my lifetime, but the world’s income has octupled. The richest places on Earth are among the most densely populated.

Economic growth depends on the creative energy that comes from lots of people trading ideas in densely populated clusters. If population density declines, so too will economic and scientific progress.

Of course, the biggest argument in favor of limited population is environmental. Don’t more people take up more resources? But there’s a major problem with this criticism as well, which is that the unit of interest is not really individuals but rather households. In other words, if you have a situation where you’ve got 10,000 households and each has 4 people (for a total population of 40,000) and another situation where you’ve got 20,000 household and each has 2 people (for a total population of 40,000), then it’s pretty obvious that the population with more households is going to use up a lot more resources. Of course there is still a maximum aggregate population that the Earth can sustain, but the point is that the resource savings from low fertility are going to be much, much less than you  might initially think.

Looking ahead, I think the best case scenario is that we manage to survive the coming demographic contraction without some kind of horrific World War III followed by Mad Max scenario. But, ultimately, the aggregate fertility rate really needs to remain at replacement rate levels. Otherwise, we’re looking at the possibility of species suicide. Frankly, however, I would prefer that we see the return of positive population growth in the future coupled with some serious attempts at extra-planetary colonization. It is the nature of life to grow. I don’t believe stagnation is a long-run solution.

Sitting is the New Smoking

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A friend sent me this article, which I found fascinating. I figure the article is also a nice break from the generally political, socioeconomic, and philosophical bent of Difficult Run.

But wait, you’re a runner. You needn’t worry about the harms of sedentary living because you’re active, right? Well, not so fast. A growing body of research shows that people who spend many hours of the day glued to a seat die at an earlier age than those who sit less—even if those sitters exercise.

“Up until very recently, if you exercised for 60 minutes or more a day, you were considered physically active, case closed,” says Travis Saunders, a Ph.D. student and certified exercise physiologist at the Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group at Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario. “Now a consistent body of emerging research suggests it is entirely possible to meet current physical activity guidelines while still being incredibly sedentary, and that sitting increases your risk of death and disease, even if you are getting plenty of physical activity. It’s a bit like smoking. Smoking is bad for you even if you get lots of exercise. So is sitting too much.”

So inserting exercise chunks into an otherwise sedentary lifestyle might help control calories and weight but not the big issues like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, depression, etc. What I want to figure out next, then, is how can we help people who are essentially trapped by their job sitting for 8-10 hours a day? Will standing desks make a difference? Would trying to avoid sitting everywhere outside the office make a big enough difference? How attainable is a non-sedentary lifestyle for the population at large? The costs of poor health are real, making this research extremely worthwhile and also proving that not a single Difficult Run article can pass without tying back to economics or politics somehow.

About deGrasse Tyson’s Christmas Tweets

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2014 12 30 deGrasse Trolling

On the one hand, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Christmas day tweets are the kind of obnoxious trolling that tends to give atheists such a bad name, so I could see if they annoyed people. On the other hand, as obnoxious trolling goes, these are pretty tame. I didn’t think he was being mean-spirited. I just thought he wasn’t being as clever as he thought he was being. Besides, I wrote about his bigger problems back in September, so I was going to just let these go by without comment. But then Ro sent me this article highlighting three unintentional ironies behind Tyson’s quote, and I thought it was definitely worth sharing: Neil deGrasse Tyson’s (Unwittingly) Ironic Trolling.

The main points are:

  1. Isaac Newton Shows how Religion and Science aren’t Opposed.
  2. Newton’s Birthday Reminds us of the Church’s Role in Promoting Science.
  3. Tyson Gets Basic Historical Facts Wrong.

Check out the article for full explanations.

Relieving Existential Anxiety

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Psychologists hypothesize Tylenol may relieve existential anxiety as well as physical pain.

New research shows Tylenol may have the unseen psychological side-effect of easing existential dread. The findings suggest anxiety about finding meaning in life and feeling physical pain may be rooted in the same part of the brain.

“When people feel overwhelmed with uncertainty in life or distressed by a lack of purpose, what they’re feeling may actually be painful distress,” said study researcher Daniel Randles, a doctoral student in psychology the University of British Columbia.

“We think that Tylenol is blocking existential unease in the same way it prevents pain, because a similar neurological process is responsible for both types of distress,” Randles wrote in an email to LiveScience.

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Previous studies have shown that acetaminophen may also ease the blow of social snubs, and some researchers have argued that both physical pain and feelings of rejection are caused by activation in the brain’s dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.

“We’ve suspected that this brain region also is central in managing violations of expectations and errors, and as such predicted Tylenol would have the same effect on manipulations of uncertainty or existential unease that it has on headaches or ostracism,” Randles said in an email.

Admittedly the sample sizes are small, consist of pre-existing groups (such as college students), and the methodologies are… odd, but this research raises some interesting implications. My immediate thoughts, as per usual, go to the book Brave New World, which features the omnipresent drug Soma:

In the book, soma is a hallucinogen that takes users on enjoyable, hangover-free “holidays”. It was developed by the World State to provide these inner-directed personal experiences within a socially managed context of State-run “religious” organisations; social clubs. The hypnopaedically inculcated affinity for the State-produced drug, as a self-medicating comfort mechanism in the face of stress or discomfort, thereby eliminates the need for religion or other personal allegiances outside or beyond the World State; the book describes it as having “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol, none of their defects.”

Now this is the point in my post where I flail my arms and yell “We’ve arrived in the Brave New World, just as predicted!!!”

But seriously, I think this research, if true, reveals one more aspect of the trend in society where, instead of facing problems, we ignore them in the hopes that they’ll go away. We distract, we medicate, we divert, we do anything but actually build the emotional maturity necessary to face life’s difficulties because that would require experiencing unpleasant feelings and situations. And now we have one more tool to realize that goal, at least as far as the emotional implications of our actions and beliefs.

Or maybe I’m just old and grumpy.

The Science of a Meaningful Life

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greater goodThe website for the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley is one I check on a regular basis. Positive psychology is a major interest of mine and overlaps fairly well with management and organizational theory (many management professors are actually psychologists by education). The site recently posted “The Top 10 Insights from the “Science of a Meaningful Life” in 2014,” which should be of interest to anyone seeking to understand and increase one’s well-being. Without further ado, the top 10 insights are:

1. Mindfulness can reduce racial prejudice–and possibly its effects on victims.

2. Gratitude makes us smarter in how we spend our money.

3. It’s possible to teach gratitude to young children, with lasting effects.

4. Having more variety in our emotions–positive or negative–can make us happier and healthier.

5. Natural selection favors happy people, which is why there are so many of them.

6. Activities from positive psychology don’t just make happy people happier–they can also help alleviate suffering.

7. People with a “growth mindset” are more likely to overcome barriers to empathy.

8. To get people to take action against climate change, talk to them about birds.

9. Feelings of well-being might spur extraordinary acts of altruism.

10. Extreme altruism is motivated by intuition–our compassionate instincts.

Check out the link for further details and the actual studies.

Scientific Skepticism

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Turns out Bill Nye isn’t entirely fond of GMOs:

I stand by my assertions that although you can know what happens to any individual species that you modify, you cannot be certain what will happen to the ecosystem.

Also, we have a strange situation where we have malnourished fat people. It’s not that we need more food. It’s that we need to manage our food system better.

So when corporations seek government funding for genetic modification of food sources, I stroke my chin.

Yet even though I’m in favor of GMOs, I think he’s perfectly fine signalling caution about the difficulty of studying cause/effect within whole ecosystems and potential political/corporate interests in science. As scientists and engineers, we should always be questioning how our theories and models can be inaccurate or inadequate, and as human beings, we should always be wary of outside influences on science. Yet by Bill Nye’s own standards, he’s a denier. There are no studies to indicate environmental problems with GMOs, and if the amount of corporate and political influence in GMOs worries Bill Nye, he should be equally suspicious about climate change.

As a practicing engineer, this is what drives me bonkers about many supposed science advocates who brook no dissent on their chosen topics. You either find out that they have little known reservations about other topics where the science is “clear” (like Bill Nye), or they have zero reservations or skepticism about anything scientific consensus says, in which case they are professing the most anti-scientific belief possible (like Neil DeGrasse Tyson). The heart of science is realizing that all theories are provisional, that at best our theories can be well attested, never absolutely proven true. Karl Popper, the famous philosopher of science, believed that:

Scientific theories…are not inductively inferred from experience, nor is scientific experimentation carried out with a view to verifying or finally establishing the truth of theories; rather, all knowledge is provisional, conjectural, hypothetical—we can never finally prove our scientific theories, we can merely (provisionally) confirm or (conclusively) refute them; hence at any given time we have to choose between the potentially infinite number of theories which will explain the set of phenomena under investigation. Faced with this choice, we can only eliminate those theories which are demonstrably false, and rationally choose between the remaining, unfalsified theories. Hence Popper’s emphasis on the importance of the critical spirit to science—for him critical thinking is the very essence of rationality. For it is only by critical thought that we can eliminate false theories, and determine which of the remaining theories is the best available one, in the sense of possessing the highest level of explanatory force and predictive power.

I suppose people will now want to know what I believe about climate change, or conversely, if I say nothing people will probably start assuming. I know the earth is warming up. That’s not very hard to measure. I know that humans contribute to that warming. Again, not very hard to measure nor controversial. I do not know, though, to what extent humans contribute to the warming, nor to what extent reducing our greenhouse gas output a reasonable amount would actually slow this warming. That’s where the science of the matter gets difficult, because now we’re dealing with a whole ecosystem (like with GMOs), and sussing out cause and effect in a whole ecosystem is tricky. So currently, I have no strong opinion one way or the other. We could be contributing greatly to warming. Or our input could be modest. Modeling these effects and predicting warming rates is finicky to say the least.

Then when we get to the politics and economics of global warming, the situation is even messier. Will carbon taxes actually reduce greenhouse gas output in any significant amount worth the economic costs? Can we even reduce our greenhouse gas output any appreciable amount that won’t send the American public into shock? This is where global warming gets beyond my expertise.

So generally I just support measures that benefit us anyways with the side effect of combating greenhouse gas output. I support monitoring and regulating pollution output. I support continuing research into alternative energy sources, which isn’t just solar and wind for the record. We have geothermal, hydroelectric, wave energy, biomass, and more. I realize many of these methods are limited in their production capacity, location, and reliability, but they are capable of producing power amounts that aren’t insignificant.

More importantly, I support nuclear power, which has none of the above limitations. Now this is where all the talk about supporting science gets really odd. Nuclear power plants have a very good safety record (despite what the news says), and engineers are constantly working to make them better. On top of that, add the context of nuclear safety versus other sources of power. On top of that, add some perspective on radiation amounts (yes I cited XKCD). On top of that, add the oft cited dire effects of global warming. In that context, how can opposing nuclear power be anything short of anti-scientific and ridiculous, using the vocabulary abundant in discussion of global warming? And yet, people do it. Many climate scientists are jumping on board the nuclear train, but there’s still plenty of opposition. People proclaim the inviolability of scientific consensus in one context and then turn around to challenge it in a different context.

So, what general principles can we derive from this long-winded analysis? I would say people need to be able to simultaneously hold two seemingly contradictory concepts in their mind: Science is a quest for understanding the natural world, and science can never finally prove anything. With that knowledge, we should respect the explanatory power of science but also realize that science relies fundamentally on a critical spirit. We cannot crush dissent, nor should set ourselves up as arbiters of what constitutes “valid” dissent, which is really just crushing dissent by a different name. Rather, we must continually attempt to falsify our own theories, and if they survive the continuing ordeals, we can begin to call them well attested. But even then we must not close our minds, even as we defend theories we believe to be well attested. Newtonian physics reigned 300 years before general relativity showed up.

How do these principles look practically? I would say they manifest themselves in simultaneously laying down what we know while maintaining a spirit of humility. For example, I have defended evolution numerous times contra creationism. I don’t resort to telling people they’re scientifically illiterate (even though people who try to tell a chemical engineer how the 2nd law of thermodynamics “actually” works might qualify). I don’t demand they accept the consensus of science over their doubts (which would be horrifically anti-scientific). Rather, I just tell them what I know and demonstrate the explanatory power of evolution. You’d be surprised how well that works. Even if people don’t change their minds right then and there, it gets their minds thinking, and it allays their fears that I have an ulterior motive for defending evolution.

I believe these principles would serve science advocacy well. There is no contradiction between lacking absolute certainty and seeking scientific knowledge. In fact, the two work together. By realizing our own limitations, we can continually revise our understanding to better reflect what we see and what we know of the natural world. To say that we have finally and definitively figured out the answers ends the scientific quest and permanently extinguishes the scientific spirit.

On Plane-Boarding-Efficiency and Self-Promotion

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2014-11-26 Boarding Planes

I got about half way through this article about the fastest way to board airplanes when I read this line:

The same optimization routine that can solve the traveling salesman problem can be applied to airplane boarding. Drawing from its results, I’ve proposed an optimum boarding method. In this approach, often called the Steffen method…

My first thought when I read this was, “The author of this article better not be named Steffen.” He is. My second thought was to point out the passage to my wife, and say, “Please never do that when you’ve got your PhD.” She just groaned and rolled her eyes. Trying to get people to accept a theory or a method based on your own name is the academic equivalent of trying to give yourself a nickname. Not only will it not help matters, it’s just not done. If the method or the theory is awesome, it will be named after you. Maybe. That will actually depend on whether or not you have cadres of extremely loyal grad students and/or other ardent supporters not yourself who will go promulgate the name on your behalf. Most importantly, however, if the method or theory isn’t awesome, it’s not going to be named after you or anyone else. And this theory isn’t that awesome.

In field tests, this method has outperformed all others. In a test with 72 passengers it was nearly twice as fast as boarding back-to-front or in rotating blocks of rows, methods commonly used in the industry. It was 20 to 30 percent faster than more-optimized boarding methods such as random boarding, when people get on without regard to where their assigned seats are. It also beat boarding windows-middle-aisle. My method even outperformed the industry gold standard of open seating, used by Southwest airlines. That’s when passengers don’t have assigned seats at all.

Steffen's Method, Illustrated by Steffen.
Steffen’s Method, Illustrated by Steffen.

First, if Steffen says his method outperformed Southwest’s method (no assigned seats) but doesn’t provide a number, I’d guess it was by less than 20%.[ref]I can’t be sure, because the article he cites costs $40 to read. Which sort of negates the purpose of a citation in a popular media article. I found a free version, but it’s older and doesn’t include a comparison with Southwest.[/ref] So you get an improvement of 20% (or less) in exchange for a boarding pattern that looks like the image to the right. The thing to notice there is that the first person who is seated (bottom right, which corresponds to the rear right of the airplane) boards 24 spaces ahead of the person they are sitting next to.

Think about the way people travel. When it’s in pairs or groups, they like to sit together. In order for this to work, you would have to line up with 24 people (or more, depending on the size of the plane) between you and the person you’re traveling with. If it’s your spouse and you want to be together, that’s a mild annoyance. If it’s a child or someone who needs even a little bit of help, that’s a pretty serious issue. And even if it’s another adult, there are still going to be all kinds of problems with who-carries-what. Not to mention people will game the system so that the person who goes first is going to be the one who carries all the carry-ons to get them stowed.

All methods have drawbacks, and I’m sure Steffen’s method probably isn’t worse, in aggregate, than other methods. But, in my humble opinion, that inconvenience of breaking up parties of travelers (in addition to the headache of keeping your passengers in exact order) probably outweigh the 20%-or-less time benefits.

 

New Brookings Essay Series

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The Brookings Institution has an essay series on character and opportunity. As the site describes it,

This essay collection contains contributions from leading scholars in the fields of economics, psychology, social science, and philosophy. It provides a kaleidoscope of views on the issues raised by a policy focus on the formation of character, and its relationship to questions of opportunity. Can ‘performance’ character be separated from ‘moral’ character? Should we seek to promote character strengths? If so, how?

Definitely worth checking out.