Newton's flaming laser sword

Plato's been causing trouble.

It's that old Platonic ideal. Imagine an elephant. Not just some elephant you know (if you do know any), but the ideal prototypical elephant. Big, sort of gray, ears, legs, tail, trunk. An idea from which all other elephants deviate. That's your Platonic elephant. Pure elephanticity.

The Platonic elephant doesn't exist, except as an idealised abstraction in our minds. But this notion of ideal forms, of Platonism, is so pervasive that we sometimes don't even see it. Which is why, as I say, it causes trouble.

People who aren't good at understanding evolution are fond of repeating that there are no transitional forms. But in fact every species represents a transitional form. What we consider the species 'elephant' is nothing more than the set of all elephants that exist, which is different today than it was 200 years ago, which was different from 10,000 years ago. Real elephanticity keeps moving. When people think of the Platonic elephant as an immutable concept, they get tripped up.

Christian Platonism's been dicking with my head for a long time, too. That involves the belief that a perfect version of you existed before this life (if you're Mormon), or that your essential nature is spirit perfection, if you can keep it unspotted by the flesh. That Paul was horrified by flesh is one of the saddest contributions to Western thought, and goes a long way to explaining how fucked up Christianity is.

Avid comment readers will remember a recent Anonymous commenter (no, not Dieter Pingle) who made it clear that he (or perhaps she) wasn't going to accept any evidence as good enough, that all evidence was equally valid (or invalid), and that the only way to go was pure reason.

Anon groused:

You put your faith in a system that "works well enough." Mormons and other religious people do the same. You can't come up with any real evidence to support your view and you feel that they can't either.

Let's ignore the fact that, since Anon didn't accept that some evidence was better than others, I had already given her (or him) the best evidence anyone could ever provide.

What I realised from this exchange was that I had been accepting empirical evidence because it worked "well enough", while acknowledging that it was somehow inferior to, and would take second place to, 'pure reason'. And I had accepted this for as long as I could remember.

I have now come into contact with an article called "Newton's Flaming Laser Sword" (PDF) by Mike Alder of our own august UWA. It's the kind of thing everyone else probably knows already, but which I'm only now becoming aware of. (Ain't larnin' grand.) His argument is that 'pure reason' of the Platonic kind isn't actually good for anything really, and that empiricism, such as it is, is the real driving force for knowledge.

The scientist’s perception of philosophy is that all too much of it is a variation on the above theme, that a philosophical analysis is a sterile word game played in a state of mental muddle. When you ask of a scientist if we have free will, or only think we have, he would ask in turn: ‘What measurements or observations would, in your view, settle the matter?’ If your reply is ‘Thinking deeply about it’, he will smile pityingly and pass you by. He would be unwilling to join you in playing what he sees as a rather silly game.
...
So far I have presented the orthodox position of scientists: truth about how the universe works cannot generally be arrived at by pure reason. The only thing reason can do is to allow us to deduce some truth from other truths. And since we haven't got many truths to start out from, only provisional hypotheses and a necessarily finite set of observations, we cannot arrive at secure beliefs by thought alone. Most scientists are essentially Popperian positivists, they take the view that their professional life consists of finite observations, universal general hypotheses from which deductions can be made, and that it is essential to test the deductions by further observations because even though the deductions are performed by strict logic (well, mathematics usually), there is no guarantee of their correctness. The idea that one can arrive at reliable truths by pure reason is simply obsolete. Plato believed it, but Plato was wrong.

His point is that if a question can't be settled experimentally, it's not worth arguing about. Unless you like that sort of thing. I suppose I do like that sort of thing, so I'll be considering that in due time. For now, I'm still getting my head around the idea of unseating Platonic 'pure reason' from the high seat it's occupied for centuries, and putting empiricism in that place. I think I'll be reading this article a few times... very slowly.

Health care: Into the too-hard basket.

This is why you do not give power to Republicans. They've made a chart showing how confusing the new US health care system will be.

Developed by the Joint Economic Committee minority, led by U.S Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, the detailed organization chart displays a bewildering array of new government agencies, regulations and mandates.

And there's a rather complex and confusing chart. Gee, that chart has a lot of lines and shapes on it. That might take a while to read.

“For Americans, as well as Congressional Democrats who didn’t bother to read the bill, this first look at the final health care law confirms what many fear, that reform morphed into a monstrosity of new bureaucracies, mandates, taxes and rationing that will drive up health care costs, hurt seniors and force our most intimate health care choices into the hands of Washington bureaucrats,” said Brady, the committee’s senior House Republican. “If this is what passes for health care reform in America, then God help us all.”

Yes, the health care system is a complex system. The economy is also a complex system. A country is a complex system. But to them, complexity is always needless complexity. If it can't be explained in two minutes to someone with no particular expertise, it's unworkable and should be dismantled.

The Republican health care chart is much simpler.

Please do not give Republicans control over a system that they're too lazy and stupid to figure out.

Collision! Christians and Atheists! Mass panic!

The UWA Atheist and Agnostic Society is putting on an event with the UWA Christian Union: a screening of the film 'Collision' featuring Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson.

And after the film, Ben Rae of the Christian Union and I will conduct a thoughtful and good-hearted discussion of issues involving faith and disbelief. We won't even hit each other with chairs (very hard). Instead, we shall sit with our respective cups of tea and exchange views. I gotta be nice? Well, no. Like Hitchens and Wilson, we disagree on things (sometimes strongly so), but we can do so with mutual positive regard.

It's all going down on Thursday, 5 August at the UWA Tav. You can come even if you're not a UWA person. Tickets $5.

Obligatory Facebook event.

Homer, Ill makes English (and discrimination) official.

For this week's Talk the Talk, the leadership of Homer, Illinois caught my attention. They've made English their official language.

Homer Township officials acknowledge illegal Immigration hasn't been an issue in the municipality of approximately 30,000 people. And documents for the township about 35 miles southwest of Chicago have always been printed in English with no requests for other languages.

But the township's board passed a resolution without opposition Monday making English its official language.

So why did they do it?

[Steve Balich, the township's clerk and the resolution's author] said the opposition to the Arizona law has troubled him and that he believes illegal immigrants burden taxpayers through demands for public services and schools. He hoped the resolution would stimulate more nationwide discussion.

Yes, that's the Arizona law that

would make the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and give the police broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. Opponents have called it an open invitation for harassment and discrimination against Hispanics regardless of their citizenship status.

Well, you have to admire their honesty. Usually the advocates of 'English Only' claim they're trying to encourage immigrants to learn English (while cutting funds for ESL teaching), or trying to save money by not printing forms in other languages (thus blocking non-English speakers from getting legal or medical help they need). But here, they're sticking up for the right to harass minorities.

Which is the whole point of English Only in the first place.

The week in Palin

On Sarah Palin's latest: I think 'refudiate' is a perfectly good portmanteau word, like 'webinar' or 'spork'. Palin wasn't even the first to use it. But it won't help the perception that she's a Bush-style mangler of words, and I think comparing herself to Shakespeare was probably a bit over the top.

While I'm on the topic: In American pollstering: Palin's favourables are now at 76% among people who still choose to identify as Republicans -- higher than any other likely candidate. All sensible conservatives were driven out of the party long ago, or fled in horror.

Who do you write like?

I pasted a longish blog post into I Write Like, and it said:

I write like
George Orwell

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

While I appreciate the compliment, I wish it would be more specific as to how it got that assessment. I can make a few guesses.

It seems obvious that this uses some kind of nearest-neighbour search. Take a corpus of authors, break their works into good-sized chunks, and then find the closest match for whatever the user gives you.

But what constitutes a match? We could use n-grams (words, and strings of words), as we do in many computational language tasks, but just matching the words in a book doesn't mean you write like the author. Sure, Steinbeck and Faulkner wrote different words in their books just because of the topics they treated, but that's not what we mean by writing style.

My guess is that writing style is more about patterns of words, especially function words like prepositions and conjunctions. (You may have noticed I start a lot of sentences with conjunctions like 'but' and 'and'.) I'd try running all the words through a part-of-speech tagger, and see what matches that data best. Just a guess though.

I wonder if Orwell writes like Orwell. Here are three adjacent passages from Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, with the computer's assessment.

Or there was Henri, who worked in the sewers. He was a tall, melancholy man with curly hair, rather romantic-looking in his long, sewer-man’s boots. Henri’s peculiarity was that he did not speak, except for the purposes of work, literally for days together. Only a year before he had been a chauffeur in good employ and saving money. One day he fell in love, and when the girl refused him he lost his temper and kicked her. On being kicked the girl fell desperately in love with Henri, and for a fortnight they lived together and spent a thousand francs of Henri’s money. Then the girl was unfaithful; Henri planted a knife in her upper arm and was sent to prison for six months. As soon as she had been stabbed the girl fell more in love with Henri than ever, and the two made up their quarrel and agreed that when Henri came out of jail he should buy a taxi and they would marry and settle down. But a fortnight later the girl was unfaithful again, and when Henri came out she was with child, Henri did not stab her again. He drew out all his savings and went on a drinking-bout that ended in another month’s imprisonment; after that he went to work in the sewers. Nothing would induce Henri to talk. If you asked him why he worked in the sewers he never answered, but simply crossed his wrists to signify handcuffs, and jerked his head southward, towards the prison. Bad luck seemed to have turned him half-witted in a single day.

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Or there was R., an Englishman, who lived six months of the year in Putney with his parents and six months in France. During his time in France he drank four litres of wine a day, and six litres on Saturdays; he had once travelled as far as the Azores, because the wine there is cheaper than anywhere in Europe. He was a gentle, domesticated creature, never rowdy or quarrelsome, and never sober. He would lie in bed till midday, and from then till midnight he was in his comer of the bistro, quietly and methodically soaking. While he soaked he talked, in a refined, womanish voice, about antique furniture. Except myself, R. was the only Englishman in the quarter.

I write like
Charles Dickens

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

There were plenty of other people who lived lives just as eccentric as these: Monsieur Jules, the Roumanian, who had a glass eye and would not admit it, Furex the Liniousin stonemason, Roucolle the miser — he died before my time, though — old Laurent the rag-merchant, who used to copy his signature from a slip of paper he carried in his pocket. It would be fun to write some of their biographies, if one had time. I am trying to describe the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there.

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

No wonder Orwell had writer's block: schizophrenia.

UPDATE: Thanks to Kuri for that link in comments. It seems the author used

vocabulary (use of words), number of words, commas, and semicolons in sentences, number of sentences with quotation marks and dashes (direct speech).

I'd say this could be smartened up considerably. Just including some simple features would help, like the ratio of singletons (words appearing once) to other words, appearance of conjunctions, or ranking all the words by frequency and comparing lists.

This kind of makes me want to try building a better system. I won't (for lack of time), but I think I will keep in mind that if you can take interesting work in natural language processing and make a simple web implementation, people will think it is interesting. You can also have a lot of English major hotheads sniping at you because you snubbed Toni Morrison. Wouldn't that be fun!

 

Doesn't do much, does he?

Well done, Argentina. Boo, LDS leaders.

Argentina votes for marriage equality.


It's worth pointing out again that the leadership of the LDS Church, not content with interfering in the legislation of neighbouring US states, decided to broadcast its opposition in Argentina before the vote.

"The doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is absolutely clear: Marriage is between one man and woman and is ordained of God," said the July 6 letter from church President Thomas S. Monson.

A copy of the letter and its English translation began circulating over the weekend on websites for former Mormons.

Church spokeswoman Kim Farah on Monday confirmed the letter was sent to local leaders in Argentina, where the faith has more than 371,000 members, according to a 2010 church almanac. The country's population is more than 41 million.
...
The letter falls short of calling for political activism by members in Argentina, but is an echo of a 2008 letter from Monson to Latter-day Saints in California. Monson had called for Mormons to give their time and money to help pass Proposition 8, a state ballot initiative to ban gay marriage.

So, another step in the wrong direction. I've said this before: Homo-hating might have been a winning strategy back in the day, but it's only going to become less and less popular as time goes on. With such a long paper trail, the Mormon Church is really going to have a hard time walking this back eventually.

So will Catholics.

Mormon leaders, Catholic leaders -- there's less and less to distinguish them now. They are truly loathsome individuals.

Expletives may now fleet

Some taboo words are becoming more accepted, but it's rare to find a definite point in time when this occurs. One appeared this week in the USA, as a federal appeals court struck down a rule concerning 'fleeting expletives'. Before this, TV networks could be fined if, say, Bono said 'fuck' on the air during an awards show (which he did). Now, the FCC will have a harder time making it stick.

The court said that policy on so-called fleeting expletives was "unconstitutionally vague" and created a "chilling effect" on the programming that broadcasters chose to air. The court echoed complaints from network executives that the FCC's standards were nearly impossible to gauge, noting that the agency allowed the airing of the f-word and s-word in broadcasts of the World War II movie "Saving Private Ryan" but not in the PBS miniseries "The Blues."

The FCC may appeal, but it looks unlikely; FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski hasn't yet put profanity on the front burner.

So, for now, free speech: Fuck, yeah.

Revelation is not good evidence

I had an exchange with a Mormon friend a little while ago. His interesting but ultimately vacuous argument went something like this:

"You say you rely on evidence for the things you believe. But you're only relying on physical, tangible evidence. You're not relying on spiritual evidence, and so you're only getting part of the picture. I'm using the full range of evidence available to us."

My response is two-fold:

1) There is no empirical evidence for the claims of religion, including the existence of a god, the reality of an afterlife, or various details such as a Tower of Babel, gold plates, or Lamanites. The key doctrines of religious belief systems are either unsupported by evidence, or refuted by evidence. (Occasionally a religion will teach a principle that turns out to be valid -- the Mormon prohibition on smoking seems worthwhile on its face -- but these are things that could have occured to someone without requiring revelation.)

2) What my friend was calling 'spiritual evidence' is actually not good evidence at all. I think he was referring to something Mormons call 'personal revelation' -- messages that people think they're getting through prayer.

This is not a good way of finding out what's true. How you feel about a proposition has nothing to do with whether it's true or not. You can feel great about things that are completely false. Yet this method is at the very heart of the Mormon conversion experience -- and other forms of Christianity also place an emphasis on emotional reasoning.

Let's take a step back and see how this plays out in LDS missionary work.

LDS missionaries encourage investigators to 'experiment upon the word'. And the experiment that they propose is that you can pray and receive answers about the truth of their message telepathically from a god.

They rely on a scripture from the Book of Mormon, Moroni 10:4, which says to ask God, and the Holy Ghost will tell you if it's true. By doing this, the missionaries commit the fallacy of begging the question -- they claim that a god will tell you that the religion is true, but the existence of said god is the very premise under consideration.

And how does the Holy Spirit let you know?

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,

Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.

That's a pretty big list of fruits. Almost any feeling could qualify as a confirmation, especially if that's the conclusion you want to come to, and you wouldn't be asking if you didn't have at least a glimmer of hope that it was true.

It should be obvious that this is not a real scientific experiment, and not just because it falls back on supernatural explanations.

• Scientific experiments use evidence that is empirical -- involving sense data that could be observed by anyone
• Experiments try and control for bias
• Experiments are replicable -- anyone can repeat the experiment, and they should get about the same result. Ideas are verified by multiple points of view.

But so-called personal revelation doesn't follow these controls.

• Your feelings can't be directly observed by other people. That makes it impossible to evaluate someone else's religious claims, and that means that religious people have to 'agree to disagree' when they get conflicting revelations.
• There's no way to tell whether the feeling you're getting is a real live revelation from a god, something from your own mind, or (worse) a temptation from an evil spirit, if you go for that. Or Zeus, Krishna, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It's easy to distinguish between two competing natural claims, but it's impossible to distinguish between two competing supernatural claims.
• A scientific experiment attempts to control for bias, but here, the missionaries are subtlely biasing their subjects by telling them what they should expect to feel. It's sort of like when you're playing records backwards for satanic messages -- it's hard to tell what the message is until someone gives you the words.
• The goalposts for this test are defined very vaguely and can be shifted. A confirmation can be ginned up out of the most meager of subjective data -- or no data at all. Many are the members who ask for a revelation, get none, and continue in the church anyway, figuring that if they have real faith, they don't need a spiritual confirmation. It's a hit if you have good feelings, and hit if you don't.
• In a real experiment, we would try to account for both positive and negative results. But here, no attempt is made to add negative results to the sample. People who report a positive result show up in church, but people who get no result don't, and are effectively deleted from the sample. In fact, if someone doesn't get a revelation, it's assumed that they are to blame for not being 'sincere' or trying hard enough. They are encouraged to repeat the test until they get a result that the experimenter will like.
• Worse still, once someone is convinced that they've received a message from a god, Latter-day Saints then make a series of logical leaps to show that the whole church is true, from the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith to Thomas Monson and beyond. All from good feelings and not from anything solid.

Not everyone is convinced by this test, but the church doesn't need everyone to buy it -- just enough people to keep the system going. And I can tell you from personal experience that when you think you've been touched by the divine, it can be very difficult to balance that against real evidence. No good evidence is going to come out of this kind of test. This is not a valid experiment. It is a recipe for self-deception. It is just asking to be fooled.

He loves to count things, he just doesn't go overboard on it.

Fans of language might get a laugh out of today's XKCD.



Yes, there are languages where anything over 2 is just considered 'many'. You could probably save some time going through the names of colours in these languages, too. "Ready, kids? Light! Dark! That was fun!"

'Primitive cultures', though? I'm no anthropologist, but that seems a bit old school to my ears. And a hint: if they're watching Sesame Street on TV, their culture is probably not that primitive.

Missionaries or linguists?

Some linguists are saying that the documentation of every human language should be complete by 2015. That's good, right?

Erm...

Protestant translators expect to have the Bible — or at least some of it — written in every one of the world's 6,909 spoken languages.

"We're in the greatest period of acceleration in 20 centuries of Bible translation," said Morrison resident Paul Edwards, who heads up Wycliffe Bible Translators' $1 billion Last Languages Campaign.

A lot of work in linguistics has historically been done by Protestant missionaries, including the Wycliffe Bible Translators and SIL International. They take their cue from the scriptural injunction to preach Christianity to all nations.

I'm actually glad that they're documenting languages. Or rather, they're translating the Bible into various languages, and hopefully documenting more about the language along the way. It needs to be done. I don't even mind that their translation efforts are focused on the Bible. It's a good basic text, a little archaic, but not bad for expressing a good number of concepts. And as a bonus, the Bible has already been translated in many languages, and the texts are already aligned by chapter and verse. It's like the ultimate cross-lingual parallel corpus! Potentially good for machine translation.

What concerns me about these efforts is that they come into it with what amounts to a Christian agenda. Despite protestations to the contrary.

"Wycliffe missionaries don't evangelize, teach theology, hold Bible study or start churches. They give (preliterate people) a written language," Edwards said. "They teach them to read and write in their mother tongue."

The missionaries develop alphabets. They create reading primers. They translate the Bible.

Distributing bibles is evangelising. The difference between making bibles and more overt conversion efforts is a thin line. (Although in one case, the conversion backfired.)

What's more, this Bible-driven approach to language documentation misses a key point of language. A language -- its vocabulary, kinship terms, lexical categories, and even speech acts -- encodes some social ideas that are incomprehensible from outside the system. Coming in to promote a Christian worldview can only hamper the understanding of the language.

Watch the line between linguist and missionary vanish as this volunteer waxes rhapsodic about the effort.

"I am excited to put God's word in all people's heart language," Zartman said. "Until people can read the Bible in their own language, God is a foreign concept."

You mean the Christian god is a foreign concept. And it ought to stay that way. Help them by documenting their language, but leave the imported religion at home.

Talk the Talk: Artificial languages

Just had a fun interview with Arika Okrent, author of 'In the Land of Invented Languages'.

I mentioned in the interview that I had a hard time getting excited about yet another fictional language, when so many natural languages are endangered. Wouldn't it be great if the people behind Avatar had chosen a suitable sounding natural language, instead of inventing Na'vi? I suppose it does no good to complain though -- I also think that kids should be memorising stats about real animals instead of Pokémon, but it'll never happen because real animals don't shoot fire out their ass.

That said, it was interesting to hear a bit about Esperanto and Lojban. It was also fun to hear some spoken Klingon -- yes, Arika is a certified Klingon speaker.

You can check out the interview by heading to our Talk the Talk page on Facebook. Don't forget to like us!

What comfort is atheism?

A lot of people I care about have come back with some really bad god-damn diagnoses in the last few months. Mom's not well. Two friends have cancer, but they're both holding it together.

It's throwing me, frankly. I'm getting older, and I wonder if I'm due for some similar bad news. Are some of my cells even now going berserk, turning into the cancer that will kill me in five years? I look at Miss Perfect and she looks at me and we wonder how many more days we get to have together.

I know some people get comfort from their belief that after this life, a supernatural being will allow them to live in peace and happiness with loved ones forever. And there will be pie in the sky when you die. It's a nice thought. I can see why people turn to it in times of existential uncertainty.

By comparison, atheism doesn't seem to offer much comfort. We're here, we die, and there's no reason to think that any supernatural beings exist to revive us. Fine if you enjoy accepting the harsh realities, but not much in the way of comfort. Which is fine with me. I've always cared more if something's true, rather than if it's 'comforting'. You could say that drugs offer a degree of 'comfort', until they wear off and it's back to reality.

And for me this is the problem with the comfort offered by religions. It's a comfort only if it's true, otherwise, it's a cruel illusion. If atheism doesn't provide comfort, the false comfort offered by religion is even worse. It's expensive and time-consuming.

How, then, do we explain the diseases that strike those we love? If you believe in a god, you have to believe that he has the ability to heal you, but for some reason, might not. (He certainly doesn't heal amputees.) Then after he lets you go through pain, death, and uncertainty, he'll whisk you away to paradise. And what kind of heaven awaits? Christopher Hitchens (another unwelcome cancer diagnosis) opened my eyes by pointing out that the Christian version of heaven is not an eternity we should wish for:

We would be living under an unalterable celestial dictatorship that could read our thoughts while we were asleep and convict us of thoughtcrime and pursue us after we after are dead, and in the name of which priesthoods and other oligarchies and hierarchies would be set up to enforce God’s law.

But for those who look to the natural world, the explanation is different. Our bodies know how to carry out the processes we need in order to live, but they don't always do so optimally. We're engaged in an evolutionary struggle of survival with other individuals and other life forms. Evolution has seen to it that we survive pretty well most of the time, but sometimes not.

So is that it? We're just going to die, and then that's the end?

No. We're going to live, and then that's the end. And how amazing to have lived on this world! How unlikely! Some humans made a human child with a brain that could experience consciousness, and that human was me. I may not know how long I have to live my life, but I'm not going to waste any of that time in church, helping to support someone else's comforting scams. I get my comfort knowing that when it's my turn to go, as we all do, I will have lived fully, loved deeply, and kept my mind as free of delusion as best I could.

This life is full of people, love, food, knowledge, questions -- and, yes, difficulty, pain, and sorrow. Even so, I'll take it.

There's a song that keeps coming back to me: What a beautiful life. It makes me feel optimistic when I hear it. Maybe you'll like it too. It's true, you know.

Homeopathy cartoon

Beaker has alerted me to this Darryl Cunningham cartoon which is critical of homeopathy. (You may have seen his earlier cartoon about the MMR.)

He points out that homeopathy is ineffective, and dangerous when chosen in preference to real medicine, which (surprise!) is the preference that homeopaths will steer you toward. I like how he explains not only why homeopathy doesn't work, but also why people feel like it does.

He's also included a bit about Penelope Dingle. I hope this retelling of her story helps to prevent others from following her course of action.

I confess it still puzzles me why Peter Dingle seems to have no particular qualms about homeopathy. If I'd been through what he's been through, I'd be trashing it even more than I currently do. But then I'm not overly invested in quackery, so that may be where we differ.