The 31st Skeptics Circle

The 31st Skeptics Circle is hosted at Terra Sigillata.

Constitution, schmonstitution

The most recent budget which passed the House and the Senate and was signed into law by George W. Bush has a little constitutional problem. The problem is that S. 1932 differed from the House version of the bill. A small difference in text (the Senate version had a 13-month limitation on rental of medical equipment for Medicare patients; this was erroneously changed to 36 months by a Senate clerk before sending the bill to the House) led to a huge difference in effect ($2 billion more for the House version). Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert modified the House version of the bill to be identical to the Senate version without putting it to another vote, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist concurred that this was sufficient. Unfortunately, this means that the text of the bill Bush signed was never passed by the House of Representatives, as required by the Constitution.

Considering that Congress often doesn't read what they're voting on anyway, I'm not sure this is such a big deal compared to, say, the provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act which were passed without being read--but it's a bad precedent nonetheless if allowed to stand.

Public Citizen has filed a lawsuit over the issue.

CBS series pilot based on Scientology?

A CBS series called "Orpheus" sounds like it involves a fictional cult based on Scientology. In the pilot script, a group called GD or "Grand Design" is based on a popular "quasi-philosophical" book that resembles Hubbard's Dianetics. Members of the group are ranked, with a level called "Galatean" that may be equivalent to an Operating Thetan (OT) level. A CBS Paramount spokesperson said that "The cult is an amalgamation of all cults throughout history." The show stars Nicholas D'Agosto and Mena Suvari, and is being produced by Nicholas Meyer.

Let's hope Tom Cruise doesn't cause this to be killed--it is another Paramount property, like Mission Impossible 3, so the possibility is certainly there.

Britannica asks Nature for retraction on Wikipedia comparison

Back in December, I wrote about criticisms of Wikipedia in Communications of the ACM and a study published by Nature which found that Wikipedia's coverage of scientific subjects was about as accurate as that of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Now Britannica has demanded a retraction of the Nature study on the grounds that its "research [is] invalid, its study poorly carried out, and its findings [are] 'so error-laden that it was completely without merit.'" (Inside quote is from Britannica's response, outside quote from Seattle Times coverage.)

Britannica's website has a 20-page PDF (7 pages of response, 13 pages of supporting information in two appendixes) that is a response to the Nature study, titled "Fatally Flawed: Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature." This response states that "Nature's research was invalid. As we demonstrate below, almost everything about the journal's investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopedia Britannica."

The initial criticism of the response is that, while the Nature study headline claimed that "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries," the actual study showed that Wikipedia had a third more inaccuracies than Britannica.

The next criticism is that as they reviewed the alleged inaccuracies, they "discovered in Nature's work a pattern of sloppiness, indifference to basic scholarly standards, and flagrant errors so numerous they completely invalidated the results." Nature refused to supply the complete reviewer reports comparing Britannica to Wikipedia articles, so Britannica reviewed the truncated reviewer reports that had been posted to the web, along with the articles which were supplied by Nature.

Several of the Britannica articles reviewed were not from the Encyclopedia, but from editions of the Britannica Book of the Year. Britannica notes that "Yearbook authors are often given greater latitude to express personal views than writers of encyclopedia articles." In one instance, a sentence in an article on Steven Wolfram "in which point of view figured significantly" was counted as an inaccuracy. In one case, an article on ethanol, the source of the article was from the Britannica Student Encyclopedia, "a more basic work for younger readers."

A more significant flaw was that in some cases, reviewers criticized articles for omissions when they were only sent excerpts from the articles. The report notes that the reviewer of an article on lipids was sent only a 350-word introduction rather than the full 6,000-word article, which covered the items marked as omissions on the basis of the introduction alone. Similarly, what was delivered to reviewers as articles on kin selection and punctuated equilibrium were actually only sections from a longer article on the theory of evolution, and what was identified as an article on field-effect transistors was a section of the entry on integrated circuits. In another case, an article on aldol reaction was composed of selections taken from two separate Britannica articles, connected together with language apparently authored by Nature's editors.

Another flaw in the Nature study was that Nature did not require reviewers to document their assertions; where they disagreed with articles being reviewed, the reviewers were taken to be authoritative. The Britannica response supplies two examples where the reviewers were incorrect.

Finally, Nature failed to distinguish minor from major errors, treating all as equal even though Wikipedia had more significant issues, and counted as omissions cases where Britannica made editorial judgments to cover specific information in either a different way than the reviewer preferred or in other articles in the encyclopedia.

I think Britannica makes their case--the study shouldn't be relied upon as evidence that Wikipedia's coverage of science is as good as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Anybody need any oranges?

We've now completed our second weekend event attempting to get all the oranges picked from our trees--an annual struggle, as we have many (see photo, which shows most of the backyard trees). A few weeks ago, United Food Bank sent out volunteers to try to fill four large bins which each hold 1,000 pounds of oranges. We filled one and part of another one in the course of the day--the volunteers were four families and their children, who picked oranges for several hours along with us. This week, we had signs out advertising free oranges, all you care to pick, and also advertised it on Craig's List. We put out the two remaining United Food Bank bins to be filled with oranges we picked ourselves, and for any donations others cared to drop in. Unfortunately, a woman who spoke only Spanish came by while we were inside and took all of the fruit out of the bins, so when the Food Bank comes to pick them up on Tuesday they'll only get whatever Kat and I pick between now and then.

We had quite a few people come by and pick bags full of oranges, but the trees still appear to be as full as ever.

If you're in or near South Phoenix and would like to pick some oranges and take them home (or to donate to a food bank), let me know. If you're from somewhere other than Phoenix and ever plan to be here in March, April, or May, those are the months these Valencia oranges are ready for picking.

Ed Brayton on Slavery and the Bible

Over at the Secular Outpost, I've directed readers to some recent posts by Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars about slavery and the Bible (here, here, here, and here).

It's interesting to me how many members of the religious right, while usually trying to take the moral high ground and arguing positions on the basis of absolute moral values, suddenly shift to more relativistic, situational, and utilitarian positions on subjects like slavery, torture, war, executive power, and deception by national leaders.

Minds, brains, and rationality

Tom Gilson has posted some thoughts on the "self-undermining" arguments about rationality and naturalism that have been made by C.S. Lewis, Victor Reppert, J.R. Lucas, Richard Taylor, Alvin Plantinga, and others. The basic argument is that if our thoughts are the product of natural causes, then we have no reason to trust that the inferences we make are rational. There are many variations on the argument, and I think this basic line of argument goes back to ancient arguments about determinism.

I offered my thoughts in the comments on Vic Reppert's blog, and repeat them here:

The conclusion that rationality is *undermined* doesn't follow--at best the conclusion is that the connection between the physical causes and the rational inferences is at best a contingent one that is in need of explanation, which I think is a valid conclusion. But it's one that is in the process of being answered as we learn about how the brain and perceptual systems work, how language develops, and how the mind evolved.

If the fact that the brain operates in accordance with physical law undermined rationality, then the fact that computers operate in accordance with physical law would undermine their ability to perform logical inferences and computations.

The real question is *how* brains came to be able to engage in rational inferences in virtue of the way that they physically operate, not *whether* they do. Gilson (and Victor) argue that they could only have this ability by being divinely designed to do so--a thesis that doesn't seem to be particularly fruitful for scientific exploration.

Naturalists and supernaturalists agree that we do engage in rational inferences. The supernaturalists think we do so using magical non-physical properties; many of them think that our minds are completely independent of our brains, though I think this is a position that is untenable in the face of empirical evidence from neuroscience (evidence which I have yet to see a substance dualist even attempt to address). In the face of arguments about the fact that computers are physical devices which engage in computation and inference, they respond that this is not real computation and inference, but only a derived computation and inference that is fully dependent upon human computation and inference.

Naturalists, by contrast, think that our abilities to engage in rational inference and language have evolved, and that they are both dependent on natural causes and productive in generating additional natural causes of reasoning and action. They are far from perfect--we can identify systematic failures of reasoning that occur (e.g., examples of the sort in Kahneman & Tversky's classic Judgment Under Uncertainty). And our understanding of our own abilities is far from complete--but is growing rapidly.

Scientific examination of our cognitive capabilities has been extremely productive, while the supernatural thesis has been moribund.

Christian support of torture

An October 2005 Pew poll shows that American Christians (and Catholics in particular) have remarkably strong support for the use of torture, while secular Americans more strongly oppose it. This is another piece of evidence against the common claim that morality requires religion, or that religious people are more moral than nonreligious people.

More details at the Secular Outpost.

UPDATE (March 25, 2006): Steve Hays at Triablogue has chimed in with some highly critical comments on my post, mostly based on incorrect inferences about what I was arguing. (I didn't actually spell out an argument in any detail, so I'll accept some of the blame for that--but it's funny to see positions attributed to me that I don't hold.) I've posted comments in response to him on his blog, and spelled out an actual argument in the comments at the Secular Outpost:

1. Torture is prima facie wrong; it is only justifiable, if ever, in rare circumstances.

2. Those who advocate widespread, common use of torture against suspected terrorists are less moral than those who oppose most or all use of torture against suspected terrorists. (I could also insert here some premises about the use of the word "suspected" here--I believe the intent of the use of the term is to make the point that we don't know that these are terrorists and probably wouldn't have sufficient grounds to convict them in a court of law--e.g., like many of those being held in Guantanamo Bay).

3. Those who describe themselves as secular are more likely to oppose torture than those who describe themselves as Christians.

4. Those self-descriptions are mostly accurate.

5. Therefore, with respect to the subject of torture of suspected terrorists, those who are secular tend to be more moral than those who are Christian.

6. This is a point of evidence against the thesis that those who are Christian are more moral than those who are secular.

Steve's main three points of criticism on my original post were these (he has more to say at his blog):

i) Notice how he assumes, without benefit of argument, that “torture” is always wrong. That’s the nice part of being a secular rationalist. You don’t have to give reasons for your rationalism. [...]

ii) He also doesn’t bring any critical thinking skills to bear on whether we should frame the issue of interrogation in terms of torture. Surely there’s a continuum here, is there not? There are many degrees and kinds of coercion.

In addition, if we capture a high-level terrorist, and he doesn’t want to talk, should we do absolutely nothing to extract actionable information from him?

If that’s the position of secular humanism, then secular humanism is one of those useless ideologies like pacifism which is incapable of meeting the challenges of a real world situation.

iii) Then there’s his position that belief in use of “torture” under any circumstances makes you a worse person than someone who rejects the use of “torture” under any circumstances.

To which I responded in comments on the post:

Steve:

Your post is a bit heavy on the ad hominem and you have drawn inferences about my position and circumstances that aren't based on what I actually wrote. If you read the comments on my original post at the Secular Outpost, you'll see that my own answer to the survey question is "rarely" rather than "never."

So, to address your points in order, your claim in (i) that I assume without argument that torture is always wrong is mistaken. I neither said nor implied that--the most you can infer from what I wrote is that leaning in favor of widespread use of torture is less moral than opposition to most use of torture. For the record, I do think that torture is prima facie wrong, and as a public policy matter should be prohibited across the board. There are possible circumstances where the use of torture to obtain information may be the best possible course of action on utilitarian grounds, just as there are possible circumstances where murder or cannibalism may be the best possible course of action--but I don't think that calls for a revision of public policy to have anything other than an absolute prohibition on them. There is always the necessity defense in a court of law. I happen to think that the U.S. should abide by the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and UN Convention Against Torture (UNCAT) which the U.S. Senate ratified in 1994. What do you think?

In response to (ii), I agree that there are interrogation techniques that fall short of torture, which also have the added benefit of being more reliable--recipients of torture tend to say what they think their torturers want to hear. You say I don't bring my critical thinking skills to bear on a topic that I didn't even discuss.

In response to (iii), again you've fabricated a position for me to disagree with (i.e., you've engaged in the straw man fallacy). My actual position is that those who fall on the end of the spectrum of endorsing widespread use of torture are less moral than those who fall on the end of the spectrum of opposing most or all uses of torture. Likewise for murder.

and:

To bring home a more specific example--Bush administration advisor John Yoo (who, along with Alberto Gonzales, was the primary architect of the Bush administration's position on torture) has said that the president has the authority to order that the child of a terrorist be tortured, by crushing his testicles, in order to get the terrorist to talk.

Do you think that such an action could be moral? I don't, and I think it not only should be [illegal] but is illegal as well (I strongly disagree with the "unitary executive" arguments for expansive presidential powers that seem to have completely lost sight of the fact that the judiciary and legislature are supposed to have equal weight to the executive branch).

Also, you stated as a premise in your argument to the erroneous conclusion that I'm "intellectually isolated" in the sense of not having any non-like-minded friends that I have posted "many ill-informed or ill-reasoned posts." Which posts are you referring to, can you point out a few of the many, and possibly explain why you characterize them as such?

Finally, why didn't you link to the post on the Secular Outpost you are responding to? That reduced the likelihood that I (or other Secular Outpost readers) would see your comment. Fortunately, Sean Choi pointed it out, encouraging some cross-blog and cross-worldview interaction, which I welcome.

Steve made reference to some other posts he made on the topic of torture and coercive interrogation, including this one, where he debates someone named Shamgar in the comments. I think Shamgar, who has the last word, has the better argument.

Dirty Politician: John McCain

John McCain hired Terry Nelson as a senior advisor. Nelson was deeply involved in Tom DeLay's money laundering of corporate contributions scandal, but the mainstream media was lax about even asking McCain questions about this issue until after a Seattle radio show caller asked him about it:

CALLER: Thanks, I had a question for the senator. For a reformer, I'm kind of curious why he would hire a guy like Terry Nelson as a senior advisor. Here's a guy who was actually in the indictment of DeLay on his money laundering charges. When he was at the RNC, he agreed to take the corporate contributions from DeLay's PAC and then recycle them back into the Republican congressional races.

And he was also, this guy Nelson was also the supervisor of James Tobin, who was the guy convicted last year for helping jam the Democratic get-out-the-vote lines in New England a couple years ago.

So I'm curious why would you hire someone with such a shady background?

MCCAIN: None of those charges are true.

CALLER: You don't believe what was actually written in the indictment from Texas?

MCCAIN: No.

CARLSON: All right.

[nervous laughter]

MCCAIN: I will check it out. But I've never heard of such a thing. I know that he was a grassroots organizer for President Bush year 2000 and 2004, and had a very important job in the Bush campaign as late as 2004, but the other charges I will go and look and see if any of them are true, but I've never heard of them before.

If McCain had heard of this, he's a liar. If he really hadn't heard of it, he hasn't been properly backgrounding people he hires. Contrary to McCain's claim that none of the charges are true, the caller had it right (also see here).

If McCain doesn't fire Nelson, it's clear that he's a dirty politician.

Matt McIntosh on Iran

Matt McIntosh at Catallarchy has been making an interesting series of posts about Iran and the United States. In part 1, he points out that U.S. policy with respect to Iran has been completely irrational and counterproductive:

Consider: the United States military takes down two governments to the East and West of Iran, both of whom the Iranians had longstanding feuds with, leaving Iran the only regional power left standing. Rather than working with Iran from the get-go on both of these operations, which would have been the natural Machiavellian thing to do, the Bush administration chooses instead to antagonize them and continues to do so even now. The Iranians shrug and play right along, allowing al Qaeda members to stay in their “custody” and meddling in Iraq, since there’s nothing in it for them to do otherwise – and every reason for them to keep the US bogged down and busy, since Bush has already telegraphed a big fat “YOU’RE NEXT” message to them.

If you’re the Iranian Supreme Leader, what do you do in this situation? Pretty much what they’re doing now: jerk everyone around and eat the clock, all the while reaching for the Bomb as an anti-invasion insurance policy as fast as you can get it. All you have to do is get one functioning nuclear missile and you’re set, and the odds of anyone being both able and willing to stop you are slim. The Iranians are not stupid; they know full well that there’s currently no political will in the US for yet another war, and that starting one would be political death for the already beleaguered Republicans.

In Part 2, he sets out and argues for some basic assumptions about dealings with Iran:

1) Iran is not going to give up the quest for nukes voluntarily.

2) Democratic revolution is not going to happen.

3) Ahmadinejad does not matter unless people let him.

4) The Iranian regime is deterrable.

He further argues that, based on these assumptions, covert or overt U.S. support of dissident groups within Iran is likely to be counter-productive, causing those groups to be treated with more suspicion within Iran.

Now, in Part 3, he points out some things the people of Iran want and that we should find desirable for them to have--economic freedom at the top of the list. He suggests that we effectively offer a bribe--removal of sanctions and reopening of diplomatic relations in return for their cooperation in ending violence in Iraq; unfreezing billions of assets if they turn over al Qaeda leaders they supposedly have under arrest. Combined with this, he suggests that we let them continue with their nuclear program so long as they are transparent about it and understand that any nuclear explosion in a populated area will be blamed on untrustworthy nuclear nations (North Korea, Iran, Pakistan) and will result in nuclear retaliation.

I'm not particularly happy with that last suggestion--but McIntosh's suggestions seem more credible overall than current U.S. policy. On the nuclear issue, the current U.S. plan seems to be to try to get Iran to agree to stop its nuclear program completely and allow them to purchase non-military nuclear technology that is less likely to be usable for military applications, perhaps years in the future. Specifically, the U.S. is devoting resources (through the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership) to develop fast-burning reactors which can be used in developing countries, loaning them fuel and then taking spent fuel back for recycling and burning down, so that those countries have no need for enrichment or extraction technologies. If Iran could be persuaded to enter into such an arrangement, that would be far preferable to them having possession of military nuclear capability.