Ben Goldacre - Battling Bad Science

It's hard to understate the number of misleading health reports and health advice out there. First there's the problem of alternative-medicine quacks (visit the Enemies of Reason tag to learn more about them); then there are also problems with misleading journalistic reports that confuse some shallow correlation with a causal connection; then we have pharmaceutical companies who publish only results favorable to their products while keeping those that aren't as confidential under legal technicalities like trade secrets; then we have scientists who don't always conduct sufficiently rigorous studies and experiments; etc.

Thankfully, there are people like Ben Goldacre, who in this TEDTalk presentation exposes some of the ways in which industries and journalists can distort evidence and statistics to get you to buy their products, or to scare you from buying products from their competitors, or just to sell more copies of their journals and keep their ratings going, etc.

And you can't miss Ben Goldacre's awesome rant on the placebo and nocebo effects.

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Wanna Live Forever? Become a Noun

Woody Allen once quipped that while most people want to achieve immortality through their work, he'd rather achieve it through not dying. I think I'm with him on that one, but while we wait for people like Aubrey De Grey to figure out how to achieve radical life extension, your best next bet might be to do something remarkable so that your name is forever associated with your contribution.

So, try to do it right because, as Robert Krulwich and Adam Cole show in the following song, if you don't, you'll achieve infamy and no one will like you... forever!

If you want the fuller version, you'll want to listen to this:

And for a sample of people who achieved immortality by becoming nouns, check out the following photo essay

And for more info on these folks, visit Life.

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Elizabeth Warren Is Awesome

Part of my growing opposition to libertarianism and political conservatism is due to the fact that they are shallow and myopic philosophies based on the unrealistic illusion of self-sufficiency and individual isolationism, and I don't think that these approaches to political philosophy are worthy of people whose brains are fully functional.

And I don't know if the picture above is an indication that Elizabeth Warren has been reading John Rawls lately or not, but it beautifully and concisely captures part of the essence of what's wrong with the childish dreams of libertarianism and fiscal conservatism.

Anyway, if you don't know who she is, she's that rare combination of a compassionate heart that bleeds for the little people, while also armed with an acute corruption radar that's not afraid to call it as she sees it without losing her cool. Here are a few clips with Jon Stewart, who wants to make out with her :)

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Here's another interview:

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The interview continues:

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And here she is talking with Colbert:

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If you're interested in a philosophical approach that takes seriously the rights of individuals, check out a lecture on Robert Nozick, or this lecture on how Nozick and Rawls duked it out philosophically.

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Back in Black - Threats to America's Children

So, "Dr." Oz, quack-alternative-medicine peddler, started a fear mongering campaign about a week ago scaring parents all over the country with the idea that apple juice is loaded with 'lethal' amounts of arsenic. As it turns out, Oz didn't distinguish between inorganic arsenic, which really is toxic, and organic arsenic, which isn't toxic.

Now, you might think "innocent mistake, anyone could have failed to make the distinction," and that would be right. The problem, however, is that Oz was made aware of this fact by the FDA almost a whole week before he aired his show, so we're not dealing with ignorance and incompetence here (well, we are...) but also with deceitful manipulation and corruption. Lewis Black has some choice words for this and other fear-mongering assholes:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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By the way, if you ever find yourself competing in Dancing with the Stars, that's a pretty good indication that you're not a star... you're a has-been... or a never-was :)

Anyway, talking about possible threats to children's fragile psyches, guess what happened in Dancing with the Stars:

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Wow... those Fox & Friends people are uptight :)

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Slinky Physics

In the past, we've learned a few awesome things about pendulum waves and about the physics and philosophical questions raised by Foucault's pendulum, but there are plenty of other simple objects and experiments that can teach us fascinating and thought-provoking lessons about physics and physical principles, many of which can be done from the comfort of your own home.

Today we have a curious question about what would happen to the bottom of a slinky if you extended it from the top and then dropped it.

Before we move on to the answer, care to guess and explain your guess?

Care to guess again?

Now go show all your friends!

Via Bad Astronomy

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Lecture 8 - Personal Identity

Science is great when it comes to discoveries and studies about the physical world. It requires lots of work and dedication, analytic skills to test various hypotheses, and a wealth of creativity to figure out how to conduct experiments to tell the merits of one explanation from those of another. For all of that, however, and without implying any denigration, it's also somewhat easy because you have the physical world itself to check your results against. If you think dropping heavy objects will float, the universe itself will let you know you're wrong...

Philosophical research, on the other hand, is more difficult because the object of our studies is concepts, and concepts will not smack you upside the head when you're wrong. Take one simple example for comparison: in science, you might study how something changes, and you can easily imagine the set of tools you might need to do the job. In philosophy, you'd study the nature of change itself. How on earth do you do that???

And the investigation of change is one of the philosophical questions par excellence, tracing its history all the way back to Heraclitus and Parmenides. In this final lecture, Professor Millican explores the question of personal identity: assuming that you do exist, what does it mean to say that your past self and your present self are the same person? How can it be the case that something that changes is still the same thing? That sounds like a logical contradiction, and yet pre-reflectively at least, this is what we all assume to be true.

Click here to see the course slides

And more awesome stuff on this and related questions, check out the Brainspotting tag.

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West Bank Story - Challahfax vs. Halalifax

I seriously don't understand how Israel has managed to get away with human rights violations of Palestinians for as long as it has, or why everyone (other than the US) turns a blind eye to the shit they pull on a regular basis. I get, and agree, that the Jews have a right to have their own state, but by that very same token, shouldn't they be able to recognize that the same rights should be extended to the people that previously inhabited they land they now possess?

Lots of people have tried to find solutions to the bloodshed. Jon Stewart thinks that the conflict could be averted if maybe Palestine changed its name to Palestein, which is kind of brilliant, but John Oliver and Aasif Mandvi are not so optimistic...

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By the way, has anyone else noticed that Netanyahu's wife looks like Fiona from Shrek? :)

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A Few Gay Men - The Gayest Penetration

I just don't get people sometimes. Religious conservatives base their opposition to homosexuality primarily on the Old Testament, where you can easily find injunctions and orders to kill the gays. So, you would think that if gays wanted to serve in the military (and run the risk of possibly getting killed in action protecting the same country that denies them many rights most of us take for granted) conservatives would be happy to let them run that risk...

Instead, for the last two decades we've decided to discriminate against them. Fortunately, the dark history of Don't Ask, Don't Tell is finally over, and Jon Stewart has a few things to share:

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And so does Colbert:

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Inside Nature's Giants - Giant Squid

It wasn't uncommon just a few centuries ago for sailors to tell tales of gigantic sea monsters whose tentacles would crush entire ships. Jules Verne's version of this monster as it attacked Captain Nemo's Nautilus is probably a good example of the kind of thing many people used to believe. Now, while it might be possible for giant squids to really be as large as those old accounts, the largest documented case, as far as I know, puts these creatures at 18 meters in length (59 feet) with a 5 meter mantle (16.4 feet). It may not compare to the tales of old, but I'm certainly impressed.

In today's installment of the fascinating documentary series Inside Nature's Giants, our intrepid scientists get their hands on a beautiful deep-water specimen and attempt to understand its anatomy, physiology and evolutionary history. The secrets hidden inside the body of this and other related creatures are a testament to the ingenuity of the evolutionary process. Forget the aliens of science fiction... reality kicks their ass.

Check out a battle to the death between a shark and an octopus

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Religious Fundamentalists Are the Ultimate Nerds

When you think of a nerd, you probably have a very specific image in your mind of someone who wears thick glasses and lacks physical and social grace, but if you were to think about the general qualities that characterize a nerd, you'd find things like borderline-insane obsession with very narrow pursuits, a general inability to relate to folks who don't share their passions, a megalomaniacal sense of self-importance because they happen to hold what they mistakenly believe to be some ultimate and transcendent truth, virtually zero athletic prowess, a tendency to interpret fiction as facts... and probably not much in the way of pre-marital sex.

And if you think about other groups to which these features apply, you'd realize that religious fundamentalists are the ultimate nerds...

But that's not all true... Catholic priests have plenty of sex :)

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David Sloan Wilson - Religion and Other Meaning Systems

Even though I'm not as vociferous about my antagonism toward religious belief as people like Christopher Hitchens, PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne or Bill Maher, my feelings on the subject are probably not all that different from theirs. Arguing about supernatural nonsense on ethical terms is easy, and it's only in cases of forced special pleading and unjustifiable double standards that we are willing to let religiosity get away with things that we would not grant to any other kind of ideology or belief system.

But here is a possible risk that we secularists ought to be careful about: if we want to be able to explain why religions exist and thrive, we can't let our opposition to religion be the guide. It's easy to want to argue, a la Richard Dawkins, that religion is probably just a by-product of a natural instinct to want to trust parental figures because overall that tends to work out better than the alternative. It's also easy to argue, a la Daniel Dennett, that maybe religion is the cultural and memetic equivalent of a virus that seeks to further its own interests without regard for those of its host.

Such maybes are interesting, but without more than anecdotal evidence, they are fun speculation but not very scientific. Enter David Sloan Wilson, evolutionary biologist from Binghamton University, who has been working on the scientific study of the evolution of religion (among a plethora of other cultural phenomena) for at least a decade.

In the following fascinating and thought-provoking lecture, he clarifies a lot of important evolutionary concepts, such as the distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations, neatly organizes the different kinds of hypotheses offered to explain the evolution of religion (and other meaning systems), explains how they can be framed scientifically so as to be testable, and continues to discuss some of the evidence supporting a few of these hypotheses. The man doesn't know how not to be interesting :)

And just in case the youtube version disappears at some point, here's the original:

In the interests of full disclosure, I studied evolutionary theory under Dr. Wilson, who is objectively awesome, so no bias here :)

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You Are Not So Smart - PRO-CRAS-TI-NATION

One of my favorite blogs out there is You Are Not So Smart. Based on scientific developments in fields like cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, it's a fun and accessible exploration of the many ways in which our minds predictably fail us because of the many cognitive biases to which we are naturally prone and the logical fallacies we commit without even realizing it.

If you consistently manage to make the same wrong choice, for instance, the problem might have more to do with the fact that you don't understand the problem and/or yourself (and how your animal mind works) well enough to figure out what approach to take than with things like will power, self-control or even luck. One of the ways out of these mental traps is to engage in some metacognition: thinking about the process of thinking itself, but you need some background knowledge, and that's exactly what you can find in the blog, or soon, in its upcoming book.

Anyway, here's a taste of the awesomeness, explaining why we procrastinate, and how we might be able to go about avoiding this fun but ultimately self-defeating habit.

I won't be mad if anyone wants to get me a copy of the book when it comes out :)

Jonah Lehrer's "How We Decide" (previously featured here) is also a great read.

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Remembering 9/11 - Imagine No Religion

Today marks the 10th anniversary of that surreal and catastrophic day that will be forever marked in our collective and individual memories. Needless to say, my heart and thoughts are with everyone affected by that tragedy.

But I think this day also presents an opportunity to meditate and reflect on what philosophers refer to sometimes as the ethics of belief, and the question of our moral responsibility for holding the beliefs we hold.

Beliefs don't just exist in some mental vacuum separate from the physical world. They express themselves all the time in our behavior, our actions and our choices. Those planes crashed into the Towers because some people had certain ideas in their minds, and since our actions almost always have the potential to affect others, then a pretty good case could be made that we have a certain set of moral obligations for making sure that our beliefs are well justified by strong standards of evidence and reason, and NOT by whether they simply make us feel good, by whether they give us hope or comfort in our time of spiritual need, by whether they are dictated by some presumed authority figure, or by whether they conform to tradition.

And when you think about it, you may come to realize that the massacre that took place ten years ago would not have taken place if it weren't for the mental and psychological poison of religion. Whatever hope for redemption or salvation it may provide, religion offers the empty promise of an after-life at the real cost of your intellectual maturity and even at the cost of your real ethical values and your own moral compass. Steven Weinberg has often said that good people will do good things, and that evil people will do evil things, but that for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. And I would add that if it weren't for religion, 9/11 would not have happened. Think about it.

Honor all those whose lives were destroyed on 9/11 by start thinking for yourself and by taking responsibility for your own actions. Let's stop hiding behind the veil of excuses we call religion and faith.

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The Republican Debate in 45 Seconds

In case you missed the GOP debate the other night as I did, here are the highlights:

I don't think my small brain can handle the intricacy and complexity of these ideas...

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Peter Singer vs John Lennox - Is There a God?

Most public academic debates concerning the existence of God tend to feature religious apologists who propose sophisticated philosophical arguments for the existence of a supernatural or transcendent Being. Here is where we're exposed to things like the ontological argument, the argument from necessity and contingency, the kalam cosmological argument, the moral argument, Pascal's wager, the argument from design or its fine-tuning cousin, etc.

There is something disingenuous about such approaches, however, because the Gods these apologists believe in go way beyond the scope of their own philosophical arguments. Finding a necessary being (or a first uncaused cause or a fine-tuner or a transcendent, immaterial mind or whatever they want to claim) in no way tells us that therefore Mary got knocked up immaculately, that Joseph Smith wasn't just a charlatan and a fraud, that Mohammed wasn't really a pedophile, that Jesus resurrected and ascended to heaven, or that evolution is just an illusion perpetrated by the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Even if these arguments could establish the existence of some sort of supernatural transcendence (and you can be the judge of that yourself), these arguments utterly fail to tell us anything substantial about the nature of said transcendence: whether it's one being or many, whether it's personal or merely abstract, whether it's concerned with human affairs, whether it interacts with the physical universe, or whether it's interested in having a personal relationship with you.

So, it is kind of ironically refreshing in a way to see in the following debate with philosopher Peter Singer, that Oxford mathematician John Lennox tries to argue quite explicitly (and without much mental prestidigitation) for the existence of the Christian God specifically and not just the so-called philosopher's God (a perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and omnibenevolent being), as other apologists tend to do in their dishonest attempt to seem intellectually sophisticated while defending utterly primitive and irrational beliefs inherited from illiterate goat herders. Whether he succeeds, of course, is another story, but the exchange between the two thinkers is cordial and amiable, and quite interesting as well.

I'll post the debate between Lennox and Richard Dawkins in a few weeks, so stay tuned.

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Jonathan Drori - The Beautiful Tricks of Flowers

In the game of evolution, the winners are those who successfully manage to survive and reproduce, and one of the best ways to do the latter is sexually. If you simply made perfect copies of yourself, there wouldn't be enough genetic diversity in your offspring to be protected against newly evolving pressures. Sexual reproduction provides some of the shuffling necessary for the evolution of successful adaptations by providing some genetic diversity. Of course, if you're human, you kind of have the gist of how sexual reproduction takes place.

But how would you manage to have sex if you were a plant and were consigned for life to remain in the same place? Well, Jonathan Drori is here in this fascinating TEDTalk Presentation to explain and show some of the incredible adaptations that plants have evolved in order to make sure that their seeds pay their evolutionary dividends. As you'll see, many of their strategies involve getting other species (insects, birds and even humans) to unwittingly behave in ways that benefit the genetic interests of the plants.

And the plants, of course, don't care whether they achieve their ends through voluntary cooperation, bribery, force, deceit or brainwashing...

And if you want to see Darwin's moth, check it out

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Crop Circles

One of the most prevalent and insidious informal logical fallacies is the argument from personal incredulity: I personally can't explain x, therefore the explanation must be y (and y usually takes the form of God or aliens or ghosts, or some other arbitrarily chosen being). You should never take your own epistemic, cognitive and imaginative limitations as evidence of anything other than your own epistemic, cognitive and imaginative limitations...

When people can't imagine how ancient Egyptians could have built the pyramids, for instance, their minds almost immediately go to aliens. It's worth remembering, however, that monuments like Stonehenge could be built by a single person with some primitive tools and lots of ingenuity, so when you have thousands of slaves, pyramids are a piece of cake.

So, when during the 70's, crop circles started appearing in rural England (and subsequently in other parts of the world), it should come as no surprise that many people took them to be proof of extraterrestrial intelligence visiting us (because when civilizations advanced enough to travel through the vastness of time-space need to communicate important messages to us, they do in wheat while no one can see them).

Tellingly, no messages actually appeared (other than a few vague passages about world peace and nuclear disarmament). When people thought that aliens would use the language of mathematics to communicate with us, the mathematical symbols drawn never superseded any mathematical knowledge that wasn't already available to human mathematicians, and only after mathematicians made new discoveries would such discoveries 'magically' start appearing. In the following clip, Stephen Fry gets into the silliness of this phenomenon.

What people don't get is that it wasn't aliens... it was the chupacabra :)

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Richard Dawkins - So Who Was the First Person Really?

Richard Dawkins is coming out with a great new illustrated book about how scientists come to have the knowledge they do, and it'll be released here in the US on my little niece's birthday, so guess what she'll be getting from her favorite uncle? :)

The following excerpt from the audio version of the book (read, as usual, by Dawkins himself and Lalla Ward) explores the kind of question that a young inquiring mind might ask her parents: who was the first person really?

Dawkins provides a wonderfully clear explanation not only of the answer but of the thought process required to try to come to grips with the significance of such a question. The greatest accomplishment, I think, is that the very same excerpt can be understood by children and it can stimulate adults to think about some of the philosophical implications of the answer, such as the sorites problem of what a species really is if no one's parents are ever members of a different species... and yet most of our ancestors do belong to different species.

Maybe I'll have to end up getting a copy for myself too :)

Update: Here's Dawkins briefly explaining what the book is about

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Islam was created by Muhammad, for Muhammad?

Have you ever noticed that one thing most religions and cults have in common, apart from all the supernatural and unfalsifiable claims they make, is that they tend to be so coincidentally convenient for the sake and benefit of their leaders?

What are the odds?!? Some dude claims to have knowledge of things the rest of us have no direct access to (and can't therefore refute through evidence), and this knowledge just happens to tell us that we must redistribute our wealth to him, or that he gets to have multiple wives while those schmucks not in power usually don't, or that we must go plunder someone else's land... and pass a substantial percentage of the booty and the virgins to the religious leaders, or that we must not covet our 'neighbor's' property (including his women) and all because that's what God wants us to do.

Must be magic... Yep, sounds totally believable. Sign me up!

The real miracle is that people fall for these cheap tricks...

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