Another breathless science story for the blogosphere to open a skeptical can of whup-ass on?

The BBC reports that researchers at the Tevatron particle accelerator in Illinois are claiming the possible discovery of a new high-energy particle not predicted by current formulations of the Standard Model. It's not nearly high enough energy to be the Higgs-Boson, so they are thinking it's something completely unanticipated.

Now I am not a particle physicist, but this smelled fishy to me right off the bat, even before I remembered the whole story with Tevatron. Extraordinary claims, and all that. There are surely many refinements to be made in our understanding of particle physics, and the precise energy of the expected Higgs-Boson particle is of course highly uncertain. But a completely unanticipated particle, that would be... well, highly unanticipated. These things happen, of course, but it would take a lot of convincing, and even the researchers themselves agree they have not met the required uncertainty threshold yet.

But there's more. The BBC was extremely remiss in failing to point out in the article that Tevatron is scheduled to cease operations this September, unless they somehow miraculously secure an extension of their federal funding. The reason given is that it has been "made obsolete" by the Large Hadron Collider. Oh, and lookie, the scientist they quote casting a skeptical eye on this discovery works on the LHC. Hmmmmm, are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Again, I am not a particle physicist, but it seems obvious to me that this is what's going on:

The Tevatron folks are desperate. They feel they can still do useful work (and for what it's worth I agree; see below) and yet the whole project is going to be shut down in less than six months.

Now, the folks at these particle accelerators comb through a lot of data. As a recent XKCD graphically illustrates, the more data you are going through, the higher your chances of false positives. The standard of certainty for these guys isn't p < 0.05, it's p < 0.00001 (I think I counted the right number of zeroes... 5-sigma certainty). Tony Weidberg, the guy from the LHC project, is quoted as saying, "every few years we get these three-sigma [p < 0.001] effects..." (That is the certainty level being claimed by the Tevatron researchers at present.)

So a shade over five months from Doomsday, the Tevatron data fortuitously happens to show one of these three-sigma blips. In a desperate gambit to garner public exposure for the (still very useful!) work they do, they decide to go public with it right away, with breathless claims of a possible new particle. If their plan works, there is an initial spike of popular support for the Tevatron effort, which barely diminishes when (as not reported prominently in the mainstream media) the blip turns out to be nothing. Hell, maybe they can even leverage some of the populist jingoism we are so afflicted with these days -- after all, the LHC is located on the border between France and Switzerland. We can't let those cheese-eating surrender monkeys gain the edge in particle accelerators, can we?! The hope is that they can parlay this into an extension of their funding.

And to be honest, I don't really begrudge the Tevatron researchers for this last ditch maneuver. It is true that the pace of significant discoveries from Tevatron has waned, and it's also true that the LHC is bigger and better in virtually every way. On the other hand, there is only one LHC, so having the lower-energy Tevatron operational means the world's researchers can run twice as many experiments within that energy range. The LHC could be knocked out of commission for a period, by like a catastrophic magnet failure or something -- I know it sounds far-fetched, eh? Moreover, the annual operating budget for Tevatron is $35 million. So dudes, like, take one day off from mixing it up in Iraq, and you can keep Tevatron open for eight more years. (Seriously, fucking do the math, it's that ludicrous!)

Is it ethical? Would I engage in this kind of misrepresentation in their situation? Hell, I dunno. But I sure don't blame 'em. They're getting short shrift here, and if this little PR sleight of hand buys them some more time, more power to 'em.

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Thurgood Marshall on the Founding Fathers

[T]he government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights, we hold as fundamental today.
--Thurgood Marshall

Damn, he was totally dead-on with that. Worth pondering, I think. The US Constitution, for all its successes, undeniably had some real crap in it to start with, and arguably still does. (I'm looking at you Electoral College and ambiguously-worded Second Amendment!) One can certainly admire the Founding Fathers and the document they crafted, but to insist there's some magical super awesomeness that needs protecting... that's just plain ahistorical (unless you want to scrap every single amendment past the Tenth and reinstitute slavery, I suppose...)

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Cultural relativism: Mullah-ing it over

Much has been made -- appropriately, I think -- of the fact that the shameful murders of UN workers in Afghanistan was not directly in response to Terry Jones' burning of the Koran (which initially did not make that much press this time around since it was after all just some crazy fundamentalist kook holding a dumb little ill-attended show inside his church), but rather in response to Afghani president Hamid Karzai's very public announcement and condemnation of Jones' actions, and subsequent incitement by some very angry mullahs. I immediately spotted the parallel to the Danish cartoon affair, which barely made the news outside of Denmark until a couple of imams decided to tour the Mideast a year later stirring up anti-Danish sentiment (I was not the only one to make this observation, by the way).

So in both cases we have a Western nation experiencing an otherwise rather short-lived and mostly harmless free speech controversy, in which freedom of speech ultimately triumphs despite widespread condemnation of the message (which is just great; that's how liberal democracies are supposed to work) -- which was later turned into an international incident when some mullahs deliberately tried to make an issue out of it and fan the flames of violence. To me, it seemed easy to see where the blame lies: with the mullahs, not with the dumb bigot pastor or the controversial cartoonists.

That is, until I realized that unless one rejects cultural relativism (which, thankfully, I do) that argument falls apart, or at the very least undermines some other moral statements we'd very much like to make.

Take for example the problem of child witchcraft accusations in parts of Africa. Ophelia Benson's blog is a good resource to find out about this, but in a nutshell, there is a problem in certain parts of Africa where bad events are blamed on local children practicing witchcraft, and the children are then exiled or murdered in the most brutal ways. Terrible stuff.

Of course, like the Terry Jones book-burning and the Danish cartoons, locally it is not that big news. Sadly, that's not too far out of bounds for how things are done in those regions.

Perhaps this is a poor example because, shamefully, this travesty hasn't gotten much press in the West. But if we did want to do something about this, the way to do so would be to publicize what had been only a minor local issue, get people over here angry about it and motivated to do something. In other words, do exactly what the mullahs have done in regards to perceived slights against Islam in Western nations.

Don't misread me here. I am not drawing a false equivalence. I happen to think that murdering children in the name of superstition and scapegoating is not even comparable to the questionable exercise of free speech. And I happen to think I am right about that in some objective sense, not just as a matter of cultural or personal bias.

But that's just the point I am making. Without a strong statement that, in this particular case, one culture has got it right and the other one has just plain got it wrong, we cannot blame the mullahs for inciting violence. They simply drew public attention to what, in their cultural perspective, was an unacceptable event taking place elsewhere -- an event so unacceptable that they felt, just as I feel about the child witchcraft stuff, that they could not turn a blind eye to it just because it is happening halfway across the world. From their cultural perspective, burning a Koran is as bad or worse than murdering children. And so, unless we reject cultural relativism, the mullahs were perfectly justified in what they did.

As much as a sick fuck as Terry Jones is, it's baffling and enraging to me that people want to put as much blame on him as they do on the mullahs who directly incited violence, or on the angry mobs who murdered innocent UN workers in their infantile rage. But maybe it's because of cultural relativism run amok. After all, unless we flat-out reject the idea that it's okay for another culture to be as angry about their holy book being desecrated as we Westerners might be about murdered children, then we have no leg to stand on in condemning them.

We should not make the leap from a long overdue rejection of our history of cultural imperialism and an appropriate humility about our own cultural perspective and its potential flaws, into a pure ungrounded cultural relativism. There is nothing inherently superior about Westerners that ought to make our culture always superior; and when culture does not warp people's values into a twisted caricature of morality, cultural variation is part of the rich tapestry of human experience. But none of that changes the fact that there can be issues on which another culture is just flat-out objectively wrong, no ifs ands or buts.

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Rosenau jumps on the Gnu Atheists = Teabaggers bandwagon

There was a time when Josh Rosenau was one of the more reasonable of the anti-gnu brigade. He would occasional make a point I felt was worth listening to and contemplating. But some time in the last year or so, he went completely off the deep end. His latest stunt: He has bought into the absurd comparison between New Atheism and the Tea Party. His justification? Tea Partiers (some of them) say that Obama is a secret Muslim; Jerry Coyne says that Obama is a secret atheist.

Where to begin? On a superficial level, this sounds like a convincing analogy, but just the tiniest iota of honest reflection shows it to be a completely ludicrous comparison.

Now, I need to start off by saying I disagree with Coyne on this one. I think the preponderance of evidence suggests that Obama is sincere in his Christianity (though I do think he considers the literal truth or falsity of it to be irrelevant) and in any case, we ought to respect people's self-identification unless it is clearly erroneous. Obama says he's a Christian; that makes him a Christian. If it turned out the Pope didn't believe in God, would that mean bears didn't shit in the woods?

With that out of the way, let's look at a few things here. Let's start with motivation, because that's the easiest one: Coyne is nominally attempting to discern the truth, and if we dig a little deeper we see he is probably being optimistic. He wishes Obama was an atheist, because a) he thinks an atheist president would do a better job, and possibly b) he admires Obama and so wants to view Obama as part of his tribe. Now, I'm speculating about Jerry's internal subconscious motivations here, and I could be way off -- but the point is, we see that at worst Jerry is being irrationally optimistic. There is certainly nothing nefarious in Coyne's intentions, of that we can be sure.

Contrast this with the Tea Party. It is plainly obvious they are painting Obama as a Muslim in an effort to discredit him. Do we really think there are Tea Partiers saying, "Yeah, it doesn't effect Obama's ability to do his job, but I do think he is secretly a Muslim"? Come on... On a side note, if we imagine a hypothetical devotee of Islam who speculates positively that Obama might be a secret Muslim, while that would obviously be pretty irrational, it's not the kind of attempted slander being perpetrated by the Tea Party. There's a big difference between saying, "I bet this guy is secretly on my team," vs. "Look out, that guy is secretly on the other team!"

Next let's look at what is being claimed. It is a feature of Tea Party conspiracy theories about Obama that he is not only secretly a Muslim, but that he is doing so in an attempt to covertly usher in Islamic influences to American politics -- even that he is seeking to "destroy America". In contrast, Coyne is speculating that Obama is a secret atheist who nevertheless approves of faith, and is simply concealing his unbelief in order to avert prejudice against him. Again, if we imagine our hypothetical Muslim who claimed that Obama was secretly a moderate believer in Islam, that he nonetheless approved of Christianity and other faiths, and that he simply had to hide his true faith in order to maintain electability... well, that's a little crazy maybe, but it does not merit comparison with the Tea Party.

Lastly, let's look at plausibility. Now, I am inclined to take any given politician at her word regarding her faith. But does Rosenau really think there are no closet atheists in American politics?!? That we have never had a congressperson (or even a president! It's a virtually certainly we have) who privately found religious belief to be logically untenable, but kept it to himself anyway? I think it's a safe bet that there are a number of secret atheists in Congress, and at all levels of politics. We know there are plenty of ordinary folks, people who aren't even in the public eye, who have to conceal their atheism from their employer. Why would it be remarkable if the president happened to be one of those people?

We also know that plenty of churchgoers are secretly atheists. (Fuck, thanks to Dennett and LaScola, we know that plenty of clergy are secretly atheists) Many of these people aren't even hiding their atheism out of fear or anything: They appreciate the communal and ritual aspects of their chosen church, but find true belief to be a fanciful and unlikely position. These people are all over the place.

Now, I must reiterate here that I think Obama is sincere in his faith; reading Dreams from My Father gave me the impression that while Obama was initially drawn to Christianity for the potential of black churches to organize community activism, that he soon became so enamored with the whole thing that he ceased to care about the validity of the truth claims and was willing to swallow the dogma along with the community whole hog. However, the fact that Obama goes to church is not evidence that he couldn't possibly be an atheist. Quite the contrary, it says very little -- especially for someone who has admitted that he joined initially for political reasons, and especially for someone whose employment, and possibly whose very life, would be in danger if he were to come out as a nonbeliever. While I do not believe it to be the case, it is entirely plausible that Obama might have attended Christian churches for decades and publicly professed Christian faith, while all the time being an atheist.

Is it just possible that Obama did all those things while secretly adhering to Islam? Well, I guess, but it seems far less plausible. For one, it's not hard to imagine an atheist publicly praying to Jesus and not feeling as though she is doing anything wrong. It's more difficult to imagine a devout Muslim doing the same thing and feeling like that was okay, that it was not a betrayal of his values. (And if the Muslim in question is not unflaggingly devout, why would he maintain his faith intact through decades of immersion in a different faith community?) For another, when Obama first became involved with Christian churches in Chicago, if he had really been a Muslim at the time it seems somewhat more likely that he would have sought out members of that faith community for the purpose of grassroots organizing. I suppose it's just possible that this very young and politically raw Obama had the foresight and the cold calculating nature to recognize that black Christian churches were a more fertile field for organization, and so to have hid his Muslim faith in order to mine that community... Yes, this is all possible, but it's far more of a stretch than Coyne's rather modest suggestion that he chose to embrace this community despite a disbelief in their central truth claims and dogmas.

So let's check our scorecard: The Tea Partiers' claims that Obama is a secret Muslim are malicious, conspiratorial, and implausible. Jerry Coyne's claim that Obama is a secret atheist is benign or optimistic, matter-of-fact, and (although unlikely in my opinion) at least baseline plausible. The only thing the two have in common is they probably aren't the most rational position.

Rosenau is engaging in a rather sick, twisted, and frankly obvious bit of false equivalence here. The only question is whether he is doing so intentionally and dishonestly, or if he really is that much of a fucking idiot.

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Why I eschew the use of the phrase "pyramid scheme"

"It's not a pyramid scheme, it's multi-level marketing!"

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that I've never really heard the difference articulated in a way that I understand, if proponents of MLM feel that the label "pyramid scheme" unfairly tars them, I am perfectly happy to criticize MLM on its own merits (or lack thereof). Telling someone that their MLM endeavor is nothing more than a pyramid scheme distracts from the central issue by allowing them to protest ad hominem. I prefer to avoid the terminology dispute altogether: Make "MLM" the dirty word, and leave the antiquated phrase "pyramid scheme" in the dustbin of history.

MLM induces people to take business risks they are often not fully cognizant of, it tends to turn people into annoying evangelists for their product and encourages them to exploit their friendships for the purposes of making money (even if the exploitation is not often conscious), and it almost always results in crappy products.

The reason for the last point, in my opinion, is that with MLM the business model is the primary product. Individual profit incentives focus on selling the business model, whereas the nominal product is secondary, a placeholder. I had to say "almost always" in the previous paragraph, because I am told Avon products are pretty good - but the vast majority of everything I've ever seen sold via MLM has been utter shite.

A friend recently spammed all of his Facebook friends to try and recruit them for Herbalife. Blech. I don't want to say anything (see my Three Rules for Facebook for why I believe in basically never calling someone out on Facebook) but man, that's annoying. Why do people do that crap?

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Strawman much?

I think I just encountered the most strawman-ish description of New Atheism ever in this inflammatory post from Jacques Berlinerblau:

For those not familiar with their world-view, let me help you understand their central and timeless insight: Unless you as an atheist are willing to disparage all religious people, describe them all as imbeciles and creeps, mock every text and thinker they have ever produced, then you must be some sort of deluded, self-hating, sellout, subverting the rise of the Mighty Atheist Political Juggernaut...

Emphasis in the absurd original.

I stopped reading right there, because, WOW, that's the worst description of such I have ever seen. I did skim down to the end where he admits never having debated with a New Atheist -- but of course that doesn't stop him from pronouncing himself an expert on their positions! Dumbass...

(h/t Ophelia Benson)

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Revisiting "strong" vs. "weak" accomodationism

When I set up an RSS reader for my new phone, I added Phil Plait's blog. I've been enjoying it quite a bit. Reading an article right now about the accelerating expansion of the universe -- cool stuff.

Phil Plait's got a little bit of a bad name in the gnu community at the moment, because of his infamous Don't Be a Dick speech, but I think it's unfair to lump him in with the likes of Mooney, Rosenau, and Ruse. The reason is related to a post I did a while back on the difference between "strong" and "weak" accomodationism.

In a nutshell, a "weak" accomodationist prefers an approach of reconciliation between science and religion, often asserting that faith and reason are perfectly compatible. This describes people like Eugenie Scott, who has advocated for faith/science compatibility as part of her job as executive director of the NCSE. A "strong" accomodationist not only prefers this approach, but thinks anybody who doesn't is Not Helping and should STFU. This describes your Mooneys and your Rosenaus, who constantly denigrate the gnus. The former don't bother me; the latter are annoying as all get-out. (FWIW, I think some of the gnus spend a bit too much of their time tackling the accomodationists -- Jerry Coyne's blog is one of my favorites, but he pushes it sometimes, for instance -- so it's not a problem restricted fully to the other side.)

Despite the DBAD speech, I think Plait clearly belongs in the former category. Now, the lack of specificity in that speech is problematic: I'm not actually sure whether I disagree with him or not. But let's assume for sake of argument that he meant that speech in the most anti-gnu possible interpretation. Then I would say I disagree with him, but that's okay, and since he isn't constantly writing blog posts about how stupid people like me are for disagreeing with him, I'm not all that interested in constantly writing blog posts about how stupid people like him are for disagreeing with me.

The problem with Mooney and Rosenau and Ruse is not that they have a different tactical approach. It's that they are constantly saying how destructive our approach is. I think they think the same about us, judging from comments about accomodationism being a "cardinal sin" (that was actually the 3 Quarks Daily guys, but the sentiment has been expressed by the others). Yet I think one will be hard pressed to find very many blog posts from gnus strongly condemning Genie Scott, Michael Schermer, or even Phil Plait (despite the recent noise over the aforementioned speech) -- because they have their opinion and don't seem to be bothered by the fact that other people have different opinions.

The "cardinal sin" is not asserting the compatibility of faith and science. The "cardinal sin" is asserting, even by implication, that it's not okay to proclaim their incompatibility. Because we care about open dialog -- in fact, the goal of stripping away the special deference towards religion which prevents open dialog is pretty much the defining characteristic of "New Atheism" -- assertions that seek to shut down an open dialog really piss us off. Go ahead and disagree with me about faith/science compatibility, but don't tell me I don't even have a right to my opinion or that I'm not allowed to say it in polite company.

My two cents on that.

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