August 2009

Congratulations to Lotty!

Another summer, another young scientist is elevated from the ranks of Humble Seeker to Wizened Oracle. Or, in more familiar terms, someone successfully gets their Ph.D. The latest elevatee is Lotty Ackerman, my first student here at Caltech. Lotty’s work is well-known to CV readers; she and I collaborated with Mark Wise on the question of a preferred direction in inflation, which was featured in the series of Anatomy of a Paper posts. She also worked with Matt Buckley, Marc Kamionkowski and me on the Dark Photon idea. And she worked with other people on other things, including cosmological density perturbations from reheating and the more experimentally-oriented question of asymmetric beams in the WMAP satellite.

Today Lotty successfully defended her thesis, and we’ll be sad to see her go. But California’s loss is Texas’s gain, as she’ll be taking up a postdoc at the new Texas Cosmology Center in Austin. Best of luck!

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Inherent Vice

I wasn’t going to mention Thomas Pynchon’s latest book, a noir detective novel set in 1970 LA called Inherent Vice. Not because of any suspected problems with the book — it sounds great, and I’m looking forward to reading it. Only because we previously enthused back on this very blog when Pynchon’s last book, Against the Day, came out — and I still haven’t gotten around to actually reading it. Bad blogger.

But this is too cool not to mention (via Andrew Jaffe) — the good folks at Penguin Books have come out with a “trailer” for Pynchon’s new book.

In case you’re wondering — yes, that’s Pynchon reading the voice-over. The man doesn’t like having his picture taken, which is perfectly understandable, but there’s no reason not to lend some authorial authority (as well as the actual text) to a video attached to one’s work.

I notice that Tom Levenson also did a trailer for Newton & the Counterfeiter. Wave of the future, I suppose.

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White People Have Trouble Accepting Pangaea

White Americans, anyway. That seems to be the result from this poll at Daily Kos (via Tom Levenson’s Twitter feed).

Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 7/27-30. Likely voters. MoE 2% (No trend lines)

Do you believe that America and Africa were once part of the same continent?

         Yes    No  Not Sure

All       42    26    32

Dem       51    16    33
Rep       24    47    29
Ind       44    23    33

Northeast 50    18    32
South     32    37    31
Midwest   46    22    32
West      43    24    33

White     35    30    35
Black     63    13    24
Latino    55    19    26
Other     56    19    25

Probably readers of this blog are not a representative sample of Americans, and most or you — even the white people! — know that Pangaea was the supercontinent that existed about 250 million years ago, before plate tectonics worked its magic and broke it apart.

Now, some of my best friends are white folks, so I don’t want to make any grand generalizations about their intelligence or education. But this is a good illustration of a point made by Jerry Coyne — the problem of scientific illiteracy is not a simple one, and in particular it’s not just a matter of better outreach and more Carl Sagans. Which is not to say that more and better outreach and science journalism isn’t important or useful — it clearly is, and I’m in favor of making structural changes to provide much better incentives for making sure that it happens. But there are also factors at work for which outreach isn’t the answer — political and social forces that push people away from science. Those have to be confronted if we want to really address the problem.

(I don’t know who was the mischievous person who thought of asking this poll question in the first place, but it was an inspired idea.)

Update: Aaron Golas in comments points to a post by Devilstower laying out that the question was worded in an intentionally provocative way, to illustrate how bad questions can fail to correctly gauge scientific understanding. Which is completely true, and a point worth making. But I argue that the poll does reveal something, namely the extent to which underlying cultural attitudes can influence one’s stance toward purportedly scientific questions. Thus, “White People Have Trouble Accepting Pangaea,” not “White People Don’t Know About Pangaea.” As a measure of what percentage of Americans truly understand continental drift, the poll is pretty useless; as an indication of how culture affects that understanding, it’s very illuminating.

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The Grid of Disputation

A few days ago the world witnessed a rare and precious event: a dispute on the Internet. In this case, it was brought about by a Bloggingheads episode of Science Saturday featuring historian of science Ronald Numbers and philosopher Paul Nelson. The controversy stemmed from the fact that Nelson is a Young-Earth Creationist — someone who believes that the Earth was created by God a few thousand years ago. You can read opinions about the dialogue from PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne, or for a different point of view Nelson himself.

I was one of the people who found the dialogue extremely inappropriate (especially for “Science Saturday”), and as someone who is a fan of Bloggingheads I sent a few emails back and forth with the powers that be, who are generally very reasonable people. I think they understand why scientists would not be happy with such a dialogue, and I suspect it’s not going to happen again.

But it’s worth laying out the precise source of my own unhappiness — I’ll let other scientists speak for themselves. One potential source of discomfort is the natural reluctance to give credibility to creationists, and I think that’s a legitimate concern. There is a long-running conversation within the scientific community about whether it’s better to publicly debate people who are skeptical about evolution and crush them with superior logic and evidence, or to try to cut off their oxygen by refusing to meet them on neutral ground. I don’t have strong opinions about which is the better strategy, although I suspect the answer depends on the precise circumstances being contemplated.

Rather, my concern was not for the credibility of Paul Nelson, but for the credibility of Bloggingheads TV. I’m fairly sure that no one within the BH.tv hierarchy is a secret creationist, trying to score some public respect for one of their own. The idea, instead, was to engage in a dialogue with someone who held radically non-mainstream views, in order to get a better understanding of how they think.

That sounds like a noble goal, but I think that in this case it’s misguided. Engaging with radically different views is, all else being equal, a good thing. But sometimes all else isn’t equal. In particular, I think it’s important to distinguish between different views that are somehow respectable, and different views that are simply crazy. My problem with the BH.tv dialogue was not that they were lending their credibility to someone who didn’t deserve it; it was that they were damaging their own credibility by featuring a discussant who nobody should be taking seriously. There is plenty of room for debate between basically sensible people who can argue in good faith, yet hold extremely different views on contentious subjects. There is no need to pollute the waters by engaging with people who simply shouldn’t be taken seriously at all. Paul Nelson may be a very nice person, but his views about evolution and cosmology are simply crackpot, and don’t belong in any Science Saturday discussion.

This thought has led me to introduce what I hope is a helpful graphical device, which I call the Grid of Disputation. It’s just a reminder that, when it comes to other people’s views on controversial issues, they should be classified within a two-dimensional parameter space, not just on a single line of “agree/disagree.” The other dimension is the all-important “sensible/crazy” axis.

The Grid of Disputation

There’s no question that there is a place for mockery in the world of discourse; sometimes we want to engage with crackpots just to make fun of them, or to boggle at their wrongness. But for me, that should be a small component of one’s overall rhetorical portfolio. If you want to play a constructive role in an ongoing cultural conversation, the sizable majority of your disputational effort should be spent engaging with the best people out there with whom you disagree — confronting the strongest possible arguments against your own view, and doing so with a respectful and sincere attitude.

This strategy is not universally accepted. One of the least pleasant aspects of the atheist/skeptical community is the widespread delight in picking out the very stupidest examples of what they disagree with, holding them up for sustained ridicule, and then patting themselves on the back for how rational they all are. It’s not the only thing that happens, but it happens an awful lot, and the joy that people get out of it can become a bit tiresome.

So I disagree a bit with Richard Dawkins, when he makes this suggestion:

I have from time to time expressed sympathy for the accommodationist tendency so ably criticized here by Jerry Coyne. I have occasionally worried that – just maybe – Eugenie Scott and the appeasers might have a point, a purely political point but one, nevertheless, that we should carefully consider. I have lately found myself moving away from that sympathy.

I suspect that most of our regular readers here would agree that ridicule, of a humorous nature, is likely to be more effective than the sort of snuggling-up and head-patting that Jerry is attacking. I lately started to think that we need to go further: go beyond humorous ridicule, sharpen our barbs to a point where they really hurt.

Michael Shermer, Michael Ruse, Eugenie Scott and others are probably right that contemptuous ridicule is not an expedient way to change the minds of those who are deeply religious. But I think we should probably abandon the irremediably religious precisely because that is what they are – irremediable. I am more interested in the fence-sitters who haven’t really considered the question very long or very carefully. And I think that they are likely to be swayed by a display of naked contempt. Nobody likes to be laughed at. Nobody wants to be the butt of contempt…

I emphatically don’t mean we should use foul-mouthed rants. Nor should we raise our voices and shout at them: let’s have no D’Souzereignty here. Instead, what we need is sarcastic, cutting wit. A good model might be Peter Medawar, who would never dream of shouting, but instead quietly wielded the rapier. …

Maybe I’m wrong. I’m only thinking aloud, among friends. Is it gloves off time? Or should we continue to go along with the appeasers and be all nice and cuddly, like Eugenie and the National Academy?

Let me first note how … reasonable Dawkins is being here. He’s saying “well, I’ve been thinking about it, and maybe we should do X rather than Y — what do you folks think?” Not quite consistent with the militant fire-breathing one might expect from hearing other people talk about Dawkins, rather than listening to Dawkins himself.

Nevertheless, I don’t agree with the suggestion. There is an empirical question, of course: if the goal is actually to change people’s minds, is that accomplished more effectively by sweetly reasoning with them, or by ridiculing their incorrect beliefs? I don’t think the answer is especially clear, but very few people actually offer empirical evidence one way or the other. Instead, they loudly proclaim that the mode to which they are personally temperamentally suited — calm discussion vs. derisive mockery — is the one that is clearly the best. So I will just go along with that fine tradition.

My own goal is not really changing people’s minds; it’s understanding the world, getting things right, and having productive conversations. My real concern in the engagement/mockery debate is that people who should be academic/scholarly/intellectual are letting themselves be seduced by the cheap thrills of making fun of people. Sure, there is a place for well-placed barbs and lampooning of fatuousness — but there are also people who are good at that. I’d rather leave the majority of that work to George Carlin and Ricky Gervais and Penn & Teller, and have the people with Ph.D.’s concentrate on honest debate with the very best that the other side has to offer. I want to be disagreeing with Ken Miller or Garry Wills and St. Augustine, not with Paul Nelson and Ann Coulter and Hugh Ross.

Dawkins and friends have done the world an enormous service — they’ve made atheism part of the accepted cultural landscape, as a reasonable perspective whose supporters must be acknowledged. Now it’s time to take a step beyond “We’re here, we’re godless, get used to it” and start making the positive case for atheists as sensible, friendly, happy people. And that case isn’t made most effectively by zooming in on the lower left corner of the Grid of Disputation; it’s made by engaging with the lower right corner, and having the better arguments.

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Romantic Science

The Romantic period (roughly 1770-1830) was better represented by poetry than by science. On the poetic side, you had Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Goethe, Schiller, Pushkin, and more. On the science side, you had Michael Faraday, William Herschel, Humphry Davy, Erasmus Darwin; no slouches, to be sure, but you wouldn’t pick out this period as one of the golden ages of science.

But the interesting thing about this era, according to Richard Holmes’s new book The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, is that the scientists and the poets were deeply interested in each others’ work. That’s what I gather, anyway — not having read the book yet myself — from Freeman Dyson’s review in the New York Review of Books. It’s a provocative look into the cultural mindset of another time, when the power of science to discover new things about the world wasn’t yet quite taken for granted. Dyson quotes a stanza from Byron’s Don Juan:

This is the patent age of new inventions
      For killing bodies, and for saving souls,
All propagated with the best intentions;
      Sir Humphry Davy’s lantern, by which coals
Are safely mined for in the mode he mentions,
      Tombuctoo travels, voyages to the Poles,
Are ways to benefit mankind, as true,
Perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo.

Scientists and poets don’t talk to each other as much any more (although there are exceptions). I tend to lament the fact that science doesn’t mingle more comfortably with other kinds of cultural currents of our time. Maybe it’s just not possible — we’ve become too specialized, leaving no room for a writer like Coleridge to proclaim “I shall attack Chemistry like a Shark.” But the more we scientists take seriously to share our ideas with the wider world, the more those ideas will take root.

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When Do We Get Donuts?

Gödel’s Lost Letter writes an interesting post suggesting that complexity classes — categories of computational problems related by the resources necessary to solve them — play a similar role in complexity theory as elementary particles in high-energy physics. (Via Chad.) All very fascinating stuff, no doubt. But along the way a much more important issue is raised: when there is a seminar, should we have donuts before, or after?

Back then, Yale computer science used the post-talk-food normal form. That is after the talk donuts were served to the audience and the speaker. Most places then and now use pre-talk-food normal form, but Yale was different. I always wondered why we were different, but it was Yale.

I have to say that Yale is right on this one, and yet almost everyone does it backwards. Some sort of refreshments — coffee, tea, stale cookies, donuts if you’re lucky — are generally served before a colloquium or seminar, to attract an audience and presumably put people in a good mood. The problem is: we haven’t heard the talk yet, so we can’t chat about that, and if the audience is big enough we might not even know which person is the speaker.

Whereas, if donuts or whatever are served after the talk, not only do you make it more awkward for grad students to scarf some food without sitting through the seminar, but you have offered a very natural topic of conversation — the substance of the actual talk everyone has just heard. And the resulting conversation will usually be better than the desultory Q&A that follows a typical talk. For one thing, it’s just more natural to stand around and chat while sipping coffee or munching a donut than while one person stands at the front of a room and everyone else sits in the crowd (many of whom are restless and ready to scat). For another, students who might be intimidated out of asking a question in front of the whole audience can screw up their courage in a more informal setting. And most importantly, the chances that the actual speaker will get something intellectually useful out of the whole experience are enormously larger if they get to interact with a bunch of people who have just heard their talk. (Not even to mention the abomination of the usual “lunch talk,” where the undernourished speaker seminars away in front of a collection of people happily chewing away at their meals.)

I’m sure a lot of influential people read this blog. Let’s put that power to good use. What do we have to do to change the traditions and make it standard that coffee is served after the talk instead of before?

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