Showing posts with label Skepticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Skepticism. Show all posts

Thursday, 20 August 2020

What I've Been Reading, July 2020

Links

Above the Fold

Miscellaneous

At the Doomstead Diner

Over the last while I've gotten together on Skype with RE at the Doomstead Diner and made a few videos. Here are links to what we've done so far. There is more to come.

Defund the Police

Coronavirus

Capitalism, Communism, Anarchy

The New Fascism, and Antifa

I hear a lot of well educated people saying that the people some of us are calling fascists don't meet all the criteria for being "real" fascists. Others have even accused us of calling anyone we disagree with a fascist. I predict that a few decades from now those same people will be saying they wish they hadn't been quite so fussy with their definitions, and had acted sooner to oppose these "new fascists", even if they weren't identical to the fascists of the twentieth century.

Economic Contraction and Growing Inequality

  • The Ides of Autumn--Seeds, Stagflation and Crash Risk , by Tim Morgan, Surplus Energy Economics
    "For anyone involved in economic interpretation, these are hectic times. They’re frustrating times, too, for those of us who understand that the economy is an energy system, but have to watch from the sidelines as huge mistakes are made on the false premise that economics is ‘the study of money’, and that energy is ‘just another input’."

Recipes and Cooking

  • Bouillon Brodo Caldo Dashi, Medium-Anthology of Cooking
    "The broths of several cultures, their preparation and use"
    I find broths freeze quite well. I also tend to cook them quite a bit longer than this piece suggests, like overnight. Very few tings benefit by being turned in a race.

Genetic Engineering

Before jumping to the erroneous conclusion that this section was paid for by Monsanto, stop for a moment and understand that organic agriculture/food is a multi-billion dollar per year industry that relies on fear to get people to buy its product. Millions of dollars are spent to convince you that non-organic food is dangerous. In fact both conventionally grown and organic foods are equally safe. Sadly neither method of agriculture is even remotely substainable.

  • Panic-free GMOs, A Grist Special Series by Nathanael Johnson
    "It’s easy to get information about genetically modified food. There are the dubious anti-GM horror stories that recirculate through social networks. On the other side, there’s the dismissive sighing, eye-rolling, and hand patting of pro-GM partisans. But if you just want a level-headed assessment of the evidence in plain English, that’s in pretty short supply. Fortunately, you’ve found the trove."
    A series of articles that does a pretty good job of presenting the facts about GMOs. I plan to include one article from this series here each month.
  • Genetically modified literature (in which I read books so you don’t have to), by Nathanael Johnson, Grist

Practical Skills

American Politics

  • What Could Happen If Donald Trump Rejects Electoral Defeat?, by Jabin Botsford, The New Yorker
    "A new book conjures three scenarios in which President Trump could lose the election but not step down."
  • Are you a conservative? It’s a trick question., by Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
    This article makes some good points, but I'd say that conservatism is a force for evil, and still a powerful one.
  • Biden’s Big-Tent Strategy Seems to Be Working, by John Cassidy, The New Yorker
    "None of this means that Biden is a lock for the Oval Office. Between now and November 3rd, something could conceivably shift the momentum against him, such as a Vice-Presidential pick that backfires, a major slipup in the debates, or a surprising economic upturn. Right now, though, the challenger’s strategy of keeping the focus on the incumbent and pitching a broad tent that accommodates anyone who wants to see the back of Trump is working well."

Canadian Politics

Debunking Resources

These are of such importance that I've decide to leave them here on an ongoing basis.

Science Based Medicine

"Science is properly reductionist for a reason. In order to understand the world, and to have reliable empirical knowledge, you have to build your theories from the bottom up, but also confirm them from the top down. This means that we correlate ultimate effects with basic knowledge about mechanisms. Scientific knowledge does not have to flow in any particular direction. At times we discover something fundamental about the world, and then look for implications and applications. At other times we observe effects in the world, and then reverse engineer their cause. In either case real scientific phenomena become increasingly embedded in this network of knowledge. When a claim remains persistently isolated at one level, and neither leads to further applications or to more basic discoveries about the nature of reality, that is suspect." Steven Novella

There is No God, and Thou Shall Have No Other Gods

I don't think I've made any secret of the fact that I am an atheist, but I may not have made it clear that I think any sort of worship is a bad thing and that believing in things is to be avoided whenever possible. Indeed, I do not believe in belief itself. That's what the "Thou shall have no other gods" is about—it's not enough to quit believing in whatever God or Gods you were raised to believe in, but also we must avoid other gods, including material wealth, power and fame.

Further, many people today (including most atheists) follow the religion of "progress", which is based on the belief that mankind is destined to follow a road that leads from the caves ever upward to the stars, and that however bad things seem today, they are bound to be better tomorrow due to technological advancement and economic growth. This is very convenient for those who benefit most from economic growth, but it is hardly based on any sort of science and leads to a great many confused and incorrect ideas.

Poverty, Homeless People, Minimum Wage, UBI, Health Care, Affordable Housing

Artificial Intelligence

  • If You Think GPT-3 Makes Coders Obsolete, You Probably Do Not Write Code, by Chris I., Medium--Data Science
    "In rebuttal of data scientists and developers going obsolete"

    • Books

    Fiction

    Non-Fiction

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    Sunday, 5 March 2017

    Evaluating Existential Threats

    In a recent post, I talked about how most people are loath to discuss collapse, some even believing that talking about it makes it more likely to happen. After all, Business As Usual is working just fine and everything is going to be alright. Right?

    In contrast to this sort of head-in-the-sand optimism there are people (admittedly a much smaller number of us) who like to focus on existential threats—things that promise, at the very least, to wipe out a large chunk of our human population and, at the worst, to bring an end to life on earth. When you start looking into this you'll find that there are quite a variety of such threats. In my next two posts, I'll take a look at a selection of them. I'll explain why I think that the kind of collapse that I've been talking about is the threat most worthy of most of our attention. And in the process we'll get a clearer picture of what kind of collapse that is.

    This post, though, is about the virtues of worrying and how to evaluate existential threats.

    What "virtues of worrying", you ask? Worry certainly isn't in fashion these days. On social media one frequently sees this little flowchart about when to worry. All paths seem to leads to the same conclusion—"don't worry".

    Now, I admit to being somewhat of a worry wart. Perhaps because of that I can see several things wrong with this flowchart. First, when you don't know, you need to find out. While you are finding out, worry serves as an incentive. And at the bottom of the chart the possibility that there is a problem, and that you can do something about it, is very much under emphasized. Worry serves as an incentive to find out what you can do, make a plan and then execute it. When you've set that in motion, I guess maybe you could quit worrying, but instead I would swing back around to the top left of the chart and see if there is anything else to worry about.

    On the other hand, it is true that you can waste a great deal of time and mental anguish worrying about things over which you have no real influence. You have to identify problems that you can actually do something about and concentrate your efforts there. Of course, different people will reach different conclusions—it's a big world and there is lots of room for disagreement. We can't really determine what the right thing to do is without a lot of trial and error, so a diversity of response is a good thing in that it makes it more likely that some of those responses will be more or less successful.

    I'll borrow a "new word" from John Michael Greer—"dissensus". The opposite of consensus, dissensus means agreeing to disagree and wishing the other guy all the best even if you think his ideas are outright crazy or stupid. Provided, of course, that he extends a similar courtesy to you. I've noticed that when people are willing to do this, and then find themselves faced with a serious threat, it often turns out that on important points like "what the heck do we do next" there is a remarkable degree of agreement. Ideological differences can be set aside when we are dealing with more immediate problems.

    What I am expressing here on this blog is my own point of view, which you are free to disagree with. I do wish you all the best in pursuing your own point of view. And if we find ourselves coming up with similar plans, it may be that we can help each other to put them into action.

    What is my point of view? Well, I have a great deal of faith in the scientific consensus—we really don't have any better way than science of finding out about the world around us, and in the last few hundred years science has built up a pretty useful picture of that world.

    Some will no doubt ask, "How can you question BAU and expect it to collapse and yet still be in favour of the scientific consensus?"

    It is a common error to conflate the scientific consensus with the "official stories" that are the basic myths of Business As Usual. You can hardly blame anyone for jumping to the conclusion that BAU and science are on the same side, since every effort is made to use science to legitimize the ideas of BAU. Those myths are pushed by politicians, economists and business. They are dressed up in the kind of pseudoscientific costumes that make them hard to distinguish from reality. The "Biggest Lie" that I talked about recently, the idea that our population and consumption can go on growing forever on a finite planet, is at the heart of this false worldview.

    There are lots of people who don't completely buy into BAU. And there are multi-billion dollar per year businesses (organic farming, health food, and alternative medicine to name just a few) who take advantage of that, spending a great deal on propaganda and doing a good job of positioning themselves as being in opposition to Business as Usual. There is money to be made in that business, but the pseudoscience they are selling is just as bad as the myths from regular BAU. The people pushing both of these ideologies are very adept at finding the parts of science that happen to agree with their positions and flogging them for all they are worth to further their cause.

    The idea of these two conflicting ideologies, both of which are wrong, is central to what I am talking about on this blog and you'll find it coming up again and again. Last year I wrote a series of posts on the subject:

    If anybody can suggest a better term than "Crunchy", something less pejorative and more mellifluous, I'd sure be happy to use it. Setting aside all the pseudoscience for a moment, Crunchiness, in its opposition to BAU, is on the right track.

    Anyway, if you actually take the time and make the effort to understand how science works and what the current scientific consensus is, you'll realize that it does not particularly support either of these ideologies. But for a great many people, who don't have any real background in science, the combination of conflicting ideologies and pseudoscience is extremely misleading.

    One unfortunate side effect of this is that a great deal of worry and effort is wasted on problems that nothing need be done about (because the risk is vanishingly small), or that nothing can be done about (because solutions are beyond our reach). Risk assessment is the key to avoiding this sort of thing.

    Ask yourself four things when considering any particular problem or threat:

    1. Risk: what is the likelihood of this happening?
    2. Severity: what are the consequences if this does happen?
    3. Difficulty: how hard will it be to do something about this?
    4. Timescale: how soon will this happen?

    If you study up on any existential threat, you'll find reliable experts who have already considered the problem and have a lot of wisdom to offer.

    Based on the answers you find to each of those questions, you will decide to worry or not:

     
    • If risk is small, there isn't much to worry about and little need to plan a response.
    • If the severity is small, same conclusion.
    • If it would be easy to do something about the threat, you may want to take some action even if the risk and/or severity are small. If response is difficult then it will require detailed planning and the mobilization of forces beyond yourself. And you will need time to mount a response.
    • Sometimes it is simply not possible to stop a threat from happening, so the action we can realistically take consists of preparing to cope its effects.
    • If the timescale is short, you'll want to plan and act immediately. Preferably to draw on resources you already have in place.
    • If the timescale is long then you may use that time to plan and mobilize your response, or, you may decide to just watch and wait until it is more clear what's going to happen and when. Of course, ignoring threats that are on a long timeline is a tempting but dangerous approach. Eventually that timeline will get a lot shorter.

    You'll plan a response based on the nature of the threat and follow up with action, or go and look for something else to worry about. After the first few times you run through your list of threats, you will already have made plans and started to implement them, so the time for worry is over. Of course, you'll always want to keep a "weather eye" out for trouble that you haven't anticipated, or established threats that have changed and now require a different response.

    There are a few challenges involved with this approach that we should consider here.

    How to identify a reliable expert is certainly one of those challenges. Unfortunately the letters "Dr." in front of a name is no guarantee that someone is either an expert or reliable. I can recommend only skepticism, critical thinking and learning to identifying the many types of bias and the sort of dirty tricks used by those producing pseudoscience. After a while you will develop at sort of "BS" detector that goes off when you are confronted with pseudoscience. A big part of that is knowing what the current scientific consensus says and being skeptical about claims that contradict that consensus. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And it is reassuring to find many researchers turning up the same findings, and interpreting them in similar ways.

    Some will be eager to point out that scientists working for business concerns are certainly not reliable and their work just can't be trusted, as it will be biased to the advantage of the company. Sometimes this is true, but just as often it is not true. Your evaluation of that work must be based on the evidence, not on ideology—theirs, or yours.

    Evaluating risk can also be quite challenging. In my experience there are a couple of particular pitfalls that people encounter. There are probably more, but these are the ones I know personally.

    People often look at risk as being "monotonic". That is, if something is dangerous in large quantities, it must also be dangerous in small quantities—it may take longer for the harm to become evident, but there is still harm. This certainly sounds reasonable, but in most cases it is simply not true. Take radiation as an example. There is no doubt that ionizing radiation can kill in large quantities. This makes it frightening and since it can't be seen and is poorly understood, many people don't want to have anything to do with it, assuming that any release of radiation will affect them negatively.

    But life on earth has been dealing with small quantities of radiation since day one and has evolved mechanisms for coping with the "background radiation". Most releases of radiation result in a barely detectable increase in the background and are not a serious concern. Of course, if you work in the nuclear industry, where there is the chance of exposure to significant amounts of radiation, you should take safety procedures seriously. And that brings me to my second risk evaluation pitfall.

    The majority of the people I worked with during my career in the electrical transmission and distribution industry were quite brave. We often worked in close proximity to serious hazards and while a healthy respect was vital, outright fear would have been crippling. So far, so good. But some of the hazards we encountered were less straightforward. If there is a one in ten chance of serious injury, essentially everyone will take the appropriate precautions. But at some level of decreasing risk, many people will decide to just accept the risk, rather than do much about it. Especially if the precautions they are expected to take (procedures and protective equipment) are rather onerous.

    At what level of risk is that a reasonable response? One in a million? Probably. But what about one chance in a thousand? My experience is that there is a range of risk that is significant, but many people find hard to take seriously. The trouble is, if a large population is exposed to the risk on a regular basis, the odds good are that someone is going to get hurt fairly soon. That's why the safety rules are written and why supervisors (me at one point) have to enforce them, even if they didn't take them so serious when they were workers. Something to keep in mind when evaluating risks.

    One final thing I should point out—it seems to me that mankind as a whole is at or just past the peak of our ability to respond to large existential threats. From here on in, as collapse proceeds, it's all a bumpy downhill ride. The best we will be able to do, in a great many cases, is to mitigate the effects of what is coming. And since it appears that governments aren't interested in, and increasing don't have the resources to organize such a response, this will have to be done on an individual, family, or at most, community level.

    So, what are some of these threats? I've divided them into two groups: non-anthropogenic (not manmade) and anthropogenic (manmade), and I'll be covering them in my next two posts.

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    Thursday, 12 May 2016

    Business as Usual, Crunchiness and Woo, Part 1

    I do mean something by that rather oddball title, something quite specific. Which I will explain, eventually. And be aware that the conclusion I reach at the end is not what it's going to seem like I am leading up to, so hang in there. This started out as a single post of over 6000 words, enough to try the patience of even my most loyal readers, so I've divided it into 6 parts, which will appear over the next few weeks.

    Much of what I have been talking about on this blog for the last four years has been the damage being caused by our growth and consumer based industrial society (Business as Usual, BAU) and what can be done to cope with it and oppose it. The people who are working on that opposition are what I would call "Crunchy". I intend to cast a wide net when I speak of "Crunchies". Some people when asked to define "Crunchy" will say, "ah, they're just dirty hippies." While I do mean to include hippies (washed and unwashed) in my definition, I mean to include a whole lot of other people as well.

    So it would seem that BAU and Crunchiness are two opposing ideologies. Of course, whenever you see binary thinking like this, framing a situation in terms of two opposing sides, you can bet that someone is benefitting from the conflict and is doing everything he can to keep it going. Examples from the industrial workplace, where I spent most of my life, would be management encouraging disputes among factions within the workforce to distract the workers from whatever management is up to, or during contract negotiations when both management negotiators and union negotiators emphasize differences between workers and management, making it more difficult to come to an agreement. In both cases, this is to the detriment of both workers and stock holders, but to benefit of management and the negotiators.

    In the case of BAU versus Crunchiness, many of the leaders on both sides benefit from maintaining the conflict, in that it keeps our attention focused away from what might be done to actually change human society into something more sustainable and render that leadership redundant. And almost no one involved, at any level, really wants to make any of the major changes in lifestyle that would be necessary. We have been convinced that such changes would make life "no longer worth living".

    That's nonsense, of course, but it is typical of the kind of nonsense that supports such binary thinking. Along with it comes quite a bit of "woo" (magical thinking and pseudoscience), as well as considerable doubt and confusion and some outright lies, all necessary to paper over the holes in the two positions, to avoid admitting there might be some common ground between the two, or a third approach that might work even better.

    There is usually a lot to be gained by abandoning the binary thinking and looking past the woo to see what's really behind it all and that is what I hope to do in this series of posts. Originally, I was going to call this post "Save us from the flakes" and talk mainly about the unfortunate flakiness of Crunchy people. But then I was reminded that Business as Usual people are pretty flaky too, just sneakier about it. And of course, as always when one strays into binary thinking, it is important to remember there are many different types of BAU people and many different types of Crunchies. And all of these people are a mixture of various quantities of sound thinking and flakiness. Sorry if this seems complex, but that's the world I live in—nothing here is simple.

    I'm using the word "flake" here in the sense of someone who is so fixated on his ideology (his side of the argument) that he will embrace any sort of magical thinking or pseudoscience that seems to support it, regardless of how irrational that may be. Such people end up believing in some very strange stuff. Of course, we are living in a very strange world where much of this stuff is widely accepted.

    The Urban Dictionary defines "flake" as someone who is an unreliable person; someone who agrees to do something, but never follows through. That is not the sense that I am using here, but it has been my experience that many who are flakey in the ideological sense are so far out of touch with reality that they are pretty unreliable as well.

    I like to think of myself as "Crunchy without the Woo." Many of you will ask, "Is there anything left when you take out the woo?" Others will be concerned that I not come down too hard on their favourite brand of woo. Some (the honest ones) will do both. Anyway, I do think it is not just possible, but necessary, to be Crunchy but without the woo.

    Fence sitting is part of my nature—I seem to be pretty good at seeing the pros and cons of both sides of a thing, and I always suspect that there are only two sides to a thing because someone wants it to be seen that way. If anyone who worked for me at Hydro One is reading this they will be chuckling at the moment. I got this way by spending time on both sides of a number of situations, becoming unsatisfied with first one side and then the other, and finally looking for other ways of seeing the situation. There are usually many other ways, and some of them are more accurate and more useful.

    I've been lied to on occasion and frequently led astray by genuinely deluded people. As a result of this, I began to question how anyone knows anything for sure. Accepting what the supposed authorities tell you certainly doesn't work. I finally concluded that the scientific method is the best tool we have at present for finding out the facts about the material world.

    Here are some links to several good introductions to the scientific method:

    What makes this method unique is that it calls for actually testing the ideas we have about the material world, to see if they are supported by the evidence or not, and changing those ideas if the evidence doesn't support them Then it calls for sharing your ideas and the evidence for them with others who will criticize your reasoning, the tests you did and your interpretation of the results and then try to duplicate your tests and see if they can get the same results. Over time this eliminates the sort of bias and fallacies that seem to be built into human thinking, and leads to a body of knowledge that might be called scientific facts, and a set of theories explaining those facts.

    I am not suggesting that we should all become scientists, but rather that when a question is raised, we should make ourselves aware of what science sees as the facts in that field of endeavour and base our opinions on this scientific consensus. Here is some links on what the scientific consensus is and why we can trust it:

    Of course, scientific knowledge is always provisional in nature, subject to revision as more evidence, and better understandings of it, become available. And we may find that science, especially out at the edges, doesn't have definite answers for us as yet. But the bottom line about science is that it works and you can rely on it. There is a lot of controversy going around these days on subjects where the science is already quite clear. Don't be fooled by this, by people who push pseudoscience to support their ideologies. Have a look at these links and see what I mean:

    Many people say they are looking for absolute truth and can't believe in something like science that may change or be proven wrong. For me that is the great advantage of science—being able to adapt as we learn more, which we always do. Anyway, it's not about "belief". For me belief is a last resort to turn to when the currently known facts and the best available explanations of them don't yet answer your questions. And the best thing to do in those situations is not to pick a position and just believe in it, but simply to admit that you don't know, and then keep looking for real answers.

    Some people object that science only applies to the material world and can only decide upon testable or falsifiable points. What about things outside the material world? Or that are not testable? Well, I've tried religion (more than once) and my eventual conclusion was that the material world is all there is, propositions that aren't testable are just nonsense and anyone making absolute, final statements about anything is not to be trusted. My statements here are not intended to be absolute— they are subject to modification should evidence to the contrary be found.

    Here's a quote from the notable skeptic Michael Shermer that nicely sums up my thinking on the natural versus supernatural worlds: "If one were to argue that God exists outside of our world (or outside of the universe, or outside of nature), and that God’s forces are non-natural (or supernatural) and they can still affect the world but in a non-measurable way (because our scientific nets only catch natural fish), then what’s the difference between an invisible God and a nonexistent God?"

    "Thus, it seems to me that once we have carefully defined our terms, it is clear that there really is only the material world, methodological naturalism is the only means to understand it, and science is the only form of reliable knowledge that we have."

    Along with the scientific method, a few additional tools are helpful. Although the argument could be made that they are really integral parts of the scientific method....

    Literacy is probably the first to consider. There is all kinds of good information out there in books and on the internet, and there is no point in reinventing the wheel. But of course there is also a great deal of nonsense, "woo" if you will, out there as well and you have to learn to sort it out from the good stuff. Because science has a well deserved reputation as a reliable source of knowledge, those who are pushing woo try to make their case sound as scientific as possible. Thus the term "pseudoscience".

    Fortunately, there is also a good deal of information, written at a level suitable for the layman, which will help you sort out the science from the woo.

    Numeracy is the next tool I would recommend. Math education is so bad in North American schools that people end up asking why they even bother to learn something they will never use. If you learn it badly (or not at all), then of course you won't use it. But a good grasp of high school level math (and even a bit of calculus), along with a good solid gut feeling for how numbers work in the real world is, in my experience, an important life skill—something you will use on a daily basis and which will give you a leg up on those around you, to whom numbers are probably a bit of a mystery. Numeracy is a great help in detecting woo, because the purveyors of woo tend to have a very weak grasp of numbers. This becomes obvious when they try to use numbers to pull the wool over the eyes of the defenseless public, and end up spouting numerical nonsense. It helps, of course, to be able to recognize numerical nonsense when you see it.

    One of the reasons that science has done so well in the last few centuries is its use of numbers and the invention of tools which enable us to measure the world around us and express our knowledge about it in numerical terms.

    Critical thinking is the next logical step after numeracy. Basically this means becoming familiar with the many biases and logical fallacies that human beings fall prey to, so that you can you can recognize when others are doing so and, perhaps more importantly, prevent yourself from doing so.

    Which brings us to skepticism, which is characterized by a questioning attitude towards opinions or beliefs that others state as facts. Simply put, it is based on the idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Being familiar with the scientific consensus will help you recognize when someone is making an extraordinary claim. Of course a good skeptic has the scientific method, literacy, numeracy and critical thinking skills in his tool box. For more information check out these links:

    I strive to be a good skeptic, but occasionally I stumble and I'm always questioning myself, concerned that I have been taken in by some sort of woo.

    This may all seem rather academic. But what I think we should be aiming for here is a good practical understanding of how the natural world works, and where we fit into it. So many of us today live in cities and have very little exposure to anything but a human built environment. This leads to some inaccurate impressions about man's place in the world, and also about the workings of real world (nature) itself.

    These ideas run along a spectrum. At one end are those who feel that nature is something to be mastered, conquered and risen above. Part of this is a fear of nature and a conceit that we can render ourselves independent of it. At the other end are those who personify nature, seeing "her" as a benevolent mother, and equating her with all that is good, trusting that by doing things the "natural way", we can live in harmony and prosperity.

    Neither of these extremes is a very realistic. We are definitely part of the natural world and completely dependent on it for our survival. We are no different than any other species in that we are not exempt from the rules of ecology and population dynamics (or any other natural law). Nature can be as harsh or gentle as the realities of the situation dictates, but to personify nature, to say that it is either hostile or loving to mankind is to have missed the whole point—which is that nature is not an entity with feelings. As far as the "natural way" of doing things, for humans there hasn't been such a thing since we started taming fire and using tools, 2 to 3 million years ago.

    As it happens, those two extreme ways of looking at nature line up rather well with BAU and Crunchiness in its more flakey incarnations. In my next two posts I'll be taking a closer look at both those positions, and using the thinking tools I've been talking about, I'll try to sort the good sense out from the woo.

    This the first post in a series of six:
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