Category Archives: Politics

by John S. Wilkins | February 17, 2013

Drama, journalism and science

Recently the Jonah Lehrer scandal was raised again when he was paid $20,000 to speak on his journalistic dishonesty by the Knight Foundation. I cynically noted on Twitter that being honest and as accurate as I could be netted me exactly nothing in the way of honoraria (I think I got a bottle of scotch once, for which I was very grateful). The best discussion of the Lehrer affair is this one by Christopher Chabris, professor of psychology at Union College, in which he notes

When the allegations of plagiarism and fabrication came out, the story became one of “greatest science writer of his generation makes unthinkable mistakes,” and the analysis was mostly psychoanalysis of Lehrer’s motives or of the media culture. Entirely lost was the fact that Jonah Lehrer was never a very good science writer. He seemed not to fully understand the science he was trying to explain; his explanations were inaccurate, overblown, and often just plain wrong, usually in the direction of giving his readers counterintuitive thrills and challenging their settled beliefs.

Entirely lost in such criticisms, though, is that this is not only a failure of the entire field of science reporting, whether on blogs or in published outlets (or both), but of the very field and profession of journalism itself. What you read in the successful mass media is not factual, nor complete, but a story, a narrative. And narratives have to have conflict. They need to have drama, or they will not be published, and if they are, they will not be read.

This is why the “view from nowhere” so criticised by Jay Rosen developed. If you simply report the facts, people’s attention will wander and you will not sell advertising. So if there is no drama, create some. Find an “opposing” view to report, even if it means giving equal weight to the ignorant, the foolish or the simply insane, and if you can’t find a credible enough counteridiot, interview another journalist. Every time a journalist interviews a journalist, you are being offered theatre, not reportage.

There are a few, a precious few, science journalists who rise above this dramatic license, but even they are constrained by the medium. And let us understand the nature of the medium. Mass media are not, contrary to myth, designed to pass on information. They are designed to modify attitudes. This is because they must sell advertising, or, if they are publicly funded, they must compete for audience share with the media that are not so funded, and you don’t get audience share by deliver facts. You get it by engaging the audience. Humans are narrative driven, so facts take at best second place to a story.

The media have at most about a dozen narrative frames. In the field of science, these include The Breakthrough, The Imminent Danger, The Founder, and The Fraudster. Each of these is dramatic, and engaging, and lead to fear or the release of fear (which has usually been constructed in the first instance by previous frames). But anyone who actually works in the field of science, or more generally in an academic or professional field, knows that most of what is reported, even if it is accurate, is the ephemera or epiphenomena of science. The work that scientists actually do is much less dramatic, but by the same token it is far more important than the drama. To understand it takes effort, and to understand the importance of it takes analysis and care, and avoids the view from nowhere. And it is almost never reported. It is not dramatic enough.

For this reason, when you actually study a field, there is little to no narrative. Of course the sciences themselves are not free of narrativity; every textbook tells a story (usually wrong or misleading) that purports to tell students how we got to the point the textbook relates. Historians then spend a lot of time trying to uncover the actual sequence and developments. Popular histories, though, are just another form of journalism, even if they are written by a Bill Bryson or a Dava Sobel, and they often mislead as to facts. This is unsurprising; they are there to tell you stories.

The field of science communication attempts to remedy these lacks by emphasising the need for accuracy and objectivity, but if the very domain in which science communication takes place is corrupt, and I regard it and all journalism as corrupt from its inception, this is papering over the cracks. Science communication is not the solution to the problem of the public misunderstanding of science. Education is. Scientists are not, and should not be, journalists, nor even historians (unless they turn to history of science as a profession, in which case they can often, with some training, be very good at it). They should do science, and the task of communicating their results to the lay public should be handed to those who can really get an understanding out of those willing to make the effort: teachers. Training scientists to be science communicators, as some insist we should do, merely makes them less active scientists, and they will remain unable to communicate science unless they, too, fall into the drama trap and modify attitudes. Facts are not dramatic. All the actual drama is in how people respond to facts, and that is no longer science, nor even science policy, but simple politics.

This has a number of implications. The most obvious is that we should not expect journalism nor popular publishing to do much to actually educate the lay public. The reason why textbooks and monographs are dry is that they do attempt to cover facts, and the different (actual) ideas and approaches, in order to initiate a critical analysis in the reader. You don’t do this with a breathless Dan Brown style of writing. So if we want a better informed populace, and it is vital that we have one, there is only one way to do it: teach the science to students in a non-partisan fashion, and stop making up drama, which is to say, conflict, where there is none. Evolution is not controversial in science, nor global warming, tobacco causing cancer, and the overuse of pesticides and fertilisers causing massive ecological damage. These are facts in any sense of the word, philosophical debates about factitude notwithstanding. All else is obfuscation for political drama.

Governments should therefore take all educational decisions out of the hands of politicians and pundits. That there should be a public debate is not at issue: this can go on and should do in the public sphere. But unless and until the scientific community is convinced that the objections raised in public are correct, scientifically rather than politically, no amount of noise in the media should have the slightest effect on what is taught.

Mark Twain, to whom all good bons mot not otherwise ascribed to Churchill or Wilde are ascribed, once said (it is claimed):

It seems to me that just in the ratio that our newspapers increase, our morals decay. The more newspapers the worse morals. Where we have one newspaper that does good, I think we have fifty that do harm. We ought to look upon the establishment of a newspaper of the average pattern in a virtuous village as a calamity.
- “License of the Press,” speech, 31 March 1873

I have said before that I think the greatest disaster for modern society was the invention of public relations and marketing. I include the invention of that particular PR called journalism. As Twain also rightly noted:

It has become a sarcastic proverb that a thing must be true if you saw it in a newspaper. That is the opinion intelligent people have of that lying vehicle in a nutshell. But the trouble is that the stupid people — who constitute the grand overwhelming majority of this and all other nations — do believe and are moulded and convinced by what they get out of a newspaper, and there is where the harm lies.

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Filed under Education, General Science, Journalism, Politics, Pop culture, Rant, Truisms

by John S. Wilkins | January 2, 2013

Evopsychopathy 5: Conclusion

The criticisms of evolutionary psychology and its predecessors sociobiologies 1 through 3 focus on three major points:

1. It is adaptively-biased;

2. It is gene-centric (or biological determinist, which amounts to the same thing);

3. It is culturally biased in favour of the privileged classes of the people making the claims.

I hope I have dealt with, or guarded against, each of these, but I would like to note something that any evolutionary thinking person must accept: our biological foundations for psychological and cognitive dispositions did evolve. Something like SB must be true. So what we must do is to limit the excesses (which exist in every kind of social and psychological science anyway, and must be limited in every approach), and seek to uncover what the bases of our minds are. This has to be acceptable to any naturalistic evolutionary theorist. If it is not, then one has to suspect that there is what Dennett once called “white picket fence” mentality in play: humans are more important, qualitatively different, or somehow dualistically distinct from all other living things. And to hold this view is to run contrary to all the available science. One might understand why Plantinga wants to defend this kind of qualitative dualism (for him, humans are different to all other living things; he is not a naturalist), but why Fodor? Why Gould? What is happening here?

This falls out of a larger project of what philosophers refer to as the naturalisation project. It is the view that everything can be given a natural account, at least if we were able to gather the right data and understand the natures involved. Most naturalists are physicalists, but naturalism is not necessarily about ontology; it is about explanations. So far as explanations rest on ontologies, naturalists are physicalists, but it doesn’t do to equate the two.

Those who, like Fodor, wish to privilege human (and possibly others species’) intellection and semantic reference as being irreducible to computation or to physical processes (usually relying upon a failure of denotation of terms, which is, in my view, a matter of confusing the signs for the signification par excellence; but leave that to one side for now), treat these mental events as non-physical (although they must of course exist on a physical substrate in most accounts). So EP and SB fail because they presume that the irreducibility is a failure of language not of principle, and that we are making some kind of mistake.

Others have consequentialist objections, like the apocryphal bishop’s wife who said that if evolution from monkeys is true, let us hope it does not become widely known. If we have our prized characteristics by evolution and selection, then we are lessened thereby. We might find out that we are inclined to racism, sexism, and oppression. If these things were true in virtue of an evolutionary account (rather than being what we all understand from experience anyway), perhaps we might justify them thereby. But we all know (at least if we have read our Moore) that the mere fact that something evolved doesn’t serve as justification any more than the success of the Romans (or the Americans) justified the Caesars’ (or the Kennedys’) pre-eminence.

If we did evolve with a predisposition towards rape (and I do not think this has even been shown to have a non-cultural component yet, so bear with me), surely to know this is not to justify it, but to forewarn and forearm? If males tend to rape, change the culture to guard against rape. If they do not, then you will find that there are other factors that explain, for example, the high rates of rape in India or other societies, and be able to look for these factors and modulate them. To know ourselves is a virtue not something to be feared.

As was once said by of all people a seventeenth century preacher, things are as they are, and their consequences will be what they will be. Why, then, should we seek to be deceived? Humans must be what they are via natural processes if you take the science seriously. Knowing what we are can only aid us in building a better society.

I have tried to suggest that adaptationism is not the evil demon it is sometimes painted to be, but this needs more qualification. Individual alleles or variant traits may indeed go to fixation in a population by random processes (although something like an SNP – single nucleotide polymorphism – is way below anything that would count as a psychological trait unless it happens to be akin to a single base pair defect in a psychological process~~, like Williams’ Syndrome~~†). However, I regard the overall absolute fitness of modern organisms to be very high indeed. In the light of the rigid stick and rubber band metaphor I used above, we might expect that multiple-gene traits will be maintained at a high fitness. So it resolves to a question of what the explananda are. In short, how do we atomise the biology here?

We do it the way we approach any problem domain that is not already clearly atomised. We observe, try different things out and when we find a promising and productive line of research, we follow it. When we have several such lines of research we run them in parallel and wait and see. Sociobiology is one (several, perhaps) of those lines of research, and it should be followed to the degree it is both promising and productive. And it seems to be productive, whatever the promise its proponents see in it. Massive modularity is a dead issue, in my view, but we still can identify, quite clearly, heritable traits, and seek to find out if they are heritable because they are adaptive or because they are side effects of something that is adaptive. Ruling the sociobiological approach out of hand tout court is simply dogmatism. It is the opposite of scientific reasoning.

So I have nailed my colours to the mast. I am a born again sociobiologist. I don’t like some of the tenets of other sociobiologists (such as massive modularity or group selectionism) but they aren’t definitive of the approach; merely the contingent hypotheses and methodologies of some sociobiologists. If this be heresy, then you mistakenly think science is a religion or ideology.

This series:

† Clem Stanyon, who worked on Williams Syndrome and is the source of all I know about it, corrects me here: Williams’ Syndrome consists of around 30 deletions. However, the point stands.

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Filed under Biology, Cognition, Epistemology, Ethics and Moral Philosophy, Evolution, Logic and philosophy, Philosophy, Politics, Science, Social evolution

by John S. Wilkins | November 10, 2012

The meaningless mythical mandate

Politics, as we are constantly reminded, is the art of the possible. And yet there is this equally persistent theme in political discussion about who has a mandate after an election, and for what. Policies are presented to the electorate as a bundle by political parties, not as a series of plebiscite questions, and which ones are enacted depend, as they ought, on circumstances and the greater good of the body politic. What counts as a “mandate” then?

It seems to me that the mandate can only ever be: you are elected to govern or legislate because the bundle of policies you presented were considered least offensive or the best available as a bundle by the voters. So there is neither a mandate for a singular policy nor a requirement that everything you presented must be executed as you presented it.

So does Obama, or Boehner, or in my country, Gillard’s carbon tax, etc., have a mandate? The question is entirely meaningless. As representatives, these politicians have a duty: to govern for the benefit of all. This means making the best judgement calls one can. It does not mean that they get either a free ride for their policies, or that they can do anything they like because they gained a majority in this or that race.

Political guys! Listen up! You are elected in a democracy not to represent only your people or policies. You are elected to act as the representatives of your constituencies. Stop behaving like kindergarten children and grow up. None of you have “mandates”, just political roles.

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Filed under Politics

by John S. Wilkins | August 19, 2012

Urkkkh!

If words were water, I would be paddling hard up to my ears being nibbled by piranha as an alligator came for me. So I haven’t said much here for a while. There’s this paper, this book, this contract, this report and this tendency for me to post comments elsewhere. So I recommend you all read these posts:

How I Unwittingly Infiltrated the Boy’s Club & Why It’s Time for a New Wave of Atheism

and this post

The campaign against Amy Davis Roth

on sexism in the skeptical and atheist movements. I reproduce my comment to the latter post below, but note the extensive expressions of support at the first post. Also, they asked for a new term for an inclusive atheist movement. I suggested Affirmative Atheism as I have before, but now I think the right term is

Affirmatism

This is a movement that affirms rights, equality, humanistic values, liberty, and general good taste. I hereby declare it started.

Here’s what I said at the latter post, edited slightly:

This is why one should not try to make a movement out of negative views, views that are contrary to some other views. Inevitably the movement becomes about position and status, and defending those positions and statuses against perceived threats. Skeptical movements around the world, and most certainly here in Australia, tend to have a small circle of those who run them who are concerned that newcomers don’t get too ~~strong~~ influential.

Since most such movements were set up either in societies that are male dominated (including, I am afraid to say, many scientifically oriented subcultures) they tend towards the standard male chauvinism of the eras and contexts in which they began individually. It’s not surprising that they treat skeptical women like this: they treat all women like this.

There are other sidelined and marginalised groups too; ethnic, social, and personality types are also treated like this. The result is that the movements will start well in a cultural context but then slowly denature like ~~molecules~~ DNA left in a test tube over time.

For a movement to be both a positive force and adapt to changing cultural values such as egalitarianism for different or new groups than the ones that started it, the movement must have a positive set of values. Humanisms of various stripes do, but basically we demonstrate in this the fact about religion that we cannot emulate and which explains its successes: to be really successful, you have to exploit some primate cognitive biases, and set up arbitrary totems around which to dance to establish loyalties. If you can’t do that (and from principle skeptical and atheist movements cannot consistently do that), then your target audience (the human primates) will not stay true to the aims of the movement.

IMHO

Now back to wrestling with Microsoft Word, which insists on writing my papers differently to me and then losing an hour’s work.

“Oh editors don’t let your authors use Microsoft
Don’t let ‘em peck keyboards and drive them PCs…
Let ‘em use Pages, or LaTeX for free”…

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Filed under Ethics and Moral Philosophy, Politics, Rant, Religion, Social evolution

by John S. Wilkins | May 9, 2012

Evolution quotes: Socialism

To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find much difficulty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic basis. He has already more men on his pay-roll than their population. It is conceivable that a syndicate of Fords, if we could find them, would make Belgium Ltd or Denmark Inc. pay their way. But while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge.

[J. B. S. Haldane, “On Being the Right Size” 1928]

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Filed under Evolution, Politics, Quotes

by John S. Wilkins | March 25, 2012

The decline of Australian progressivism

Australian state Queensland had an election yesterday, and the result went from a Labor government to a virtual elimination of Labor in the state parliament. This follows, and exceeds, similar defeats in New South Wales last year, and Victoria the year before. Each year, the defeats increase. Victoria went from a 13 seat majority for Labor to a 13 seat majority for the conservative coalition on a nearly 6% swing. New South Wales was, at the time, the biggest swing in Australian history, with the coalition gaining 69 seats in a landslide on a 16.48% swing, with Labor reduced from 52 to 20 seats. Last night, Queensland had seen around a 14.5% swing, and Labor is reduced from 51 to 7 seats.

The usual wisdom here is that Labor is tired, or that it has sold off public assets, or broken promises, but I think the real problem is that lately Labor in Australia has played politics for the sole purpose of holding power and giving cronies plum positions. The party is closely tied to the union movement, and most politicians in the party rose through the ranks of union representatives or functionaries. In the past when cronyism has been seen openly in politics, Australians will vote against it, as Queensland showed in the 1980s.

The trouble is that the opposite side, the conservatives, are no better, so the choice seems to be between those whose cronies are big unions, or those whose cronies are big business. The problem Australia faces is that this has been normalised, largely through the influence of the Murdoch media, so that a common refrain by pundits is that a vote for parties like the Greens are considered a “wasted vote”, which is literally false given Australia’s system of preferential voting.

There are alternatives on the political scene: the Greens are one, although I would say that there is not one but two Green parties, one that is largely progressive in its social policy, and one that seeks to paternalistically control social morés and is driven by an antipathy to any science that happens to contradict their favoured dogmas. There is the unfortunately named “Sex Party” that promotes a properly liberal, in the sense of John Stuart Mill, social agenda. I suggested to the leader that their slogan should be “governance for grownups”. Unfortunately, although it is the fourth most voted party federally, legal restrictions in New South Wales mean they cannot register as a political party there, and so they do not show up on the political reporting radar (and so they are not mentioned).

So long as the media insist Australia is a two party state, there will be strong pressure for each party to converge in behaviour and policies, and the only choice is whether one supports a corrupt labor movement or a corrupt capitalist class. Democracy is effectively stage managed and so merely the acting of free choice on a stage decorated by those with power already.

Issues like gay marriage and personal freedom from police action where no crime has been shown, and so forth are regarded as side issues by this economically obsessed media and political class. But such issues are what makes democracy worthwhile. Any society can run an oligarchy; the issue is whether social attitudes drive or are driven by oligarchs.

I urge my Australian readers to vote Anything But The Two Parties in all subsequent elections. Use your preferences to decide which of the two Oligarchy Parties is least offensive, but if enough Australians vote for a truly progressive candidate or party, things will change, and change rapidly, a rather than waiting another two generations for the current Gilded Age to subside.

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Filed under Australian stuff, Journalism, Politics, Pop culture

by John S. Wilkins | January 22, 2012

Dark days

Wikipedia dark In case you didn’t notice, just recently a number of web giants, as well as innumerable other websites, went “dark” in protest against the attempts to control the internet by the US government. But the US isn’t the first nation to attempt this. Iran, Turkey, India, China, and to the eternal shame of all Australians, my own nation, have set up, or plan to set up, controls over the internet.

Some of this is part of the encroaching copyright hegemony of Hollywood, and the music industry, or religious and moral concerns. However, the bulk of it is due to a single, simple, fact: governments and their bureaucracies like to acquire control, and once they have it, will not give it up without a fight. Over time, the once-free internet (funded by the US Department of Defence initially) has become hedged in with legal obligations for ISPs and website hoisters that no telephone company or postal service would have endured. Now, the default opinion is that if somebody may use your service to do something illegal, it is no longer the responsibility of the police and courts to find, punish and stop these crimes. It is not the responsibility of the companies and individuals who are thus exploited.

Once upon a time, punishment followed the crime, and the people who committed the criminal acts were held to account. Now, punishment not only can precede the crime, but individuals who happen to be inadvertently involved can also be punished, even if, and this seems to me to undercut the very existence of our code of law, they had no way to prevent themselves being involved in the criminal act!

So if someone happens to use my car for a crime, I can be punished by having my car confiscated, without any proof I was involved or knew of the crime ahead of time, and without any charges being laid and tested in court. This principle of pre-emptive punishment is more than draconian, it is Kafkaesque. It makes no sense, legally. The only justification for it has to be that it means statutory instruments of government can control the situation as they wish, without either having to do due diligence of investigation and evidence gathering, or testing their claims in open court.

We are living, I am afraid to say, in the dawn of the world of totalitarianism. It has been coming for a while. Recently I had occasion to re-read the opening chapter of Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, first published in 1964. He was thought by most people at the time to be a red rag communist (and he was certainly a Marxist in that philosophical manner of academics) and so he was ignored by the establishment and féted, to his bemusement, by the radical left of the late 1960s. When I read him, I was put off by the Hegelian language and the fact that he was a “leftist”, but it seems to me that while his prescriptions might be unworkable (if he actually presented any), his analysis was spot on. The opening paragraphs lay it out:

A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress. Indeed, what could be more rational than the suppression of individuality in the mechanization of socially necessary but painful performances; the concentration of individual enterprises in more effective, more productive corporations; the regulation of free competition among unequally equipped economic subjects; the curtailment of prerogatives and national sovereignties which impede the international organization of resources.

That this technological order also involves a political and intellectual coordination may be a regrettable and yet promising development. The rights and liberties which were such vital factors in the origins and earlier stages of industrial society yield to a higher stage of this society: they are losing their traditional rationale and content. Freedom of thought, speech, and conscience were – just as free enterprise, which they served to promote and protect – essentially critical ideas, designed to replace an obsolescent material and intellectual culture by a more productive and rational one. Once institutionalized, these rights and liberties shared the fate of the society of which they had become an integral part. The achievement cancels the premises.

To the degree to which freedom from want, the concrete substance of all freedom, is becoming a real possibility, the liberties which pertain to a state of lower productivity are losing their former content. Independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical function in a society which seems increasing!y capable of satisfying the needs of the individuals through the way in which it is organised. [p1]

I could quote much more, but it is clear that Marcuse, along with other critics of the post-war consumer society, recognised that freedom was only permitted so long as it served economic and political needs; when those needs evaporated, the freedoms would also evaporate. And so we see this happening now. The core function of the internet, and indeed all communications technologies today, is to serve “the economy”. Buy and sell on the internet by all means, but do not express yourself outside permitted boundaries.

The encroachment of copyright on older materials that once served to fuel cultural development is a case in point. What is gained by applying copyright protection to works from the pre-war period? Why can’t I put a Mickey Mouse image from the 1920s on my blog without paying a corporation that has way too much wealth as it stands? It is like a large part of my culture, youth and upbringing are censored already. But if the author has died, the investment to that author has been ruled off; and those who benefit are now corporate entities like companies, governments and other institutions.

The control over communication is a crucial element of a totalitarian control by governments, and even when a government is not yet, or likely to be in the future, totalitarian, it can still have unwarrantable control over the lives of people. Given the ratchet effect of gaining but never giving up control over people that governments are subjected to, we should fight hard to both prevent them getting more control, even when it seems like it is necessary, and to remove controls for which there are no good reasons apart from tradition. And in all cases, we should make sure that the claims of those with controlling powers are tested out in the open at every stage.

This means no more closed court cases, orders and laws forbidding people to even let their families and lawyers know they have been charged. It means that we must be free to communicate even when others may think it wrong or leading to a crime. Until a crime has been committed, nobody has a right to block communications. And even then, blocking them must be done out in the open.

When a totalitarian government like the Stalinism of the Soviets or the North Koreans takes hold, people share information in secret, in Samizdat. Governments hate this form of communication and will do everything they can to impede it; this is what we are seeing in the west and developing nations now. Other ways to impede communication include the time honoured technique of making certain kinds of speech defamatory and putting the onus not on those who would claim to have been defamed to prove it, but on those who speak to prove they are not. This has the effect of making free speech only available to those with the money and lawyers to pursue such actions, while it chills everybody else. Copyright and corporate protections like SOPA and PIPA have the same effect. I now can’t quote somebody in a publication for academic publishing, even in the light of “fair use” provisions, without written permission and payment of fees, as I have discovered in several cases. If you think that doesn’t chill my speech, you don’t understand how it all works.

It can only be a matter of time before the Wayback Machine at archive.org is served with copyright violations for mirroring what people put out in public. Instead of serving claims against those who first made the material public (often the very people now claiming the violation against them), it is so much easier, and serves so many corporate (that is, commercial, government and institutional) interests, to attack the host service. This has an added bonus of allowing people to control what they are seen to be doing. In the old days, you could go check a newspaper or printed pamphlet in a library; now you can’t. We can rewrite historical evidence at last…

We are in the endarkenment. Where once we thought information would lead us to truth, we now fear that in fact it might just do that, and truth is no longer what we, or our masters who tell us what we must value, desire. We instead have a comfortable unfreedom. Dark days indeed.