Stupidest op-ed piece in memory?

One of the things about travelling is that you often wind up reading newspapers that you don’t normally encounter. Thus it was that when I came down to breakfast at my hotel in Louisville, Colorado, the only newspaper available was MacPaper USA Today. I flipped to the op-ed page, and came across a spectacularly stupid piece by Peter Schweizer entitled Strategies or diversions? His thesis was that Bush’s strategy of invading Iraq rather than concentrating on al-Qaeda should be compared to Roosevelt’s decision to prioritize the defeat of Germany over that of Japan.

“With a logic that Bush would find familiar, FDR was lambasted by his critics for his WWII military strategy of defeating Germany first before focusing on Japan. They considered Germany a diversion. Wasn’t it Japan and not Germany that had attacked us at Pearl Harbor, asked Sens. Arthur Vandenberg and A.B. Chandler? One foreign minister called the idea ‘suicidal heresy’.”

The amazing thing is that he extends this argument over twelve paragraphs without once mentioning the fact that Hitler’s Germany was already engaged in bloody conflict all across Europe, and that as soon as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States. Let’s see….

  • FDR: faced with two foes, both of which have declared war, both of which are killing Americans and allies: chooses a balanced, albeit controversial, strategy to defeat both.
  • GWB: faced with an amorphous non-state opponent that has attacked the US, makes an incomplete stab at one related group (the Taleban in Afghanistan), and then invades another country (Iraq) that posed no threat to the US and had not been involved in the attack

Yup, that sounds comparable to me [sarcasm alert]. This Schweizer guy makes it sound as if Germany was peacefully minding its own business, leaving all of its neighbors alone, and when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt suddenly took it into his head to put Tojo on the back-burner and lash out at Germany. What utter bollocks! Does the Hoover Institution really pay this idiot to write?

In defense of uncommon sense

A couple of days ago I read an op-ed piece in the New York Times by John Horgan, entitled In Defense of Common Sense. Horgan is (in)famous for his announcement of “The End of Science”; now he rails against the fact that modern science is counterintuitive and violates common-sense.

“Scientists’ contempt for common sense has two unfortunate implications. One is that preposterousness, far from being a problem for a theory, is a measure of its profundity…” [Can Horgan really cite an example of this? I’ve never seen one outside the field of semiotics, which isn’t a science.] “The other, even more insidious implication is that only scientists are really qualified to judge the work of other scientists. Needless to say, I reject that position, and not only because I’m a science journalist (who majored in English). I have also found common sense — ordinary, nonspecialized knowledge and judgment — to be indispensable for judging scientists’ pronouncements, even, or especially, in the most esoteric fields.”

I found this kind of stuff offensive on several grounds. From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s nonsense – why should the set of cognitive skills that evolved in support of a hunter-gatherer existence be well adapted to the study of subatomic particles, DNA, or pulsars? From a sociological (and ultimately political) perspective, it suggests that scientific rigor and willingness to follow where the data leads should be trumped by a populist appeal to lay opinion; Lysenkoism and Kansas School Boards lie in that direction. Note his use of the word “contempt”: he clearly wants to suggest that scientists feel contempt for those who live by common-sense, i.e. non-scientists. That’s the kind of thing I’d expect from, say, Pat Buchanan.

In the latest issue of The Edge, Leonard Susskind from Stanford effectively exposes the flaws in Horgan’s piece. However rather than quoting from Susskind’s elegant essay, let me cite the whole of Daniel Gilbert‘s blunt refutation:

“Horgan’s Op-Ed piece is such a silly trifle that it doesn’t dignify serious response. The beauty of science is that it allows us to transcend our intuitions about the world, and it provides us with methods by which we can determine which of our intuitions are right and which are not. Common sense tells us that the earth is flat, that the sun moves around it, and that the people who know the least often speak the loudest. Horgan’s essay demonstrates that at least one of our common sense notions is true.”

That’s wonderful. The second sentence ought to be printed on the front page of every science textbook.

Travel, with a bonus

This evening I’m off on a rather longer trip than usual: fly to Denver, a week of meetings at our Broomfield campus, fly to San Jose next Saturday, three days of meetings in Menlo Park next week, then fly home next Thursday (out of Oakland via Denver). Apart from a brief family visit next weekend , it’s pretty much all work. One nice bonus: the BOS-DEN and DEN-SJC legs both wound up being “Fare class A – discounted first class”. All of the comfort without the expense – delightful.

Everything, everything

Over on the Al Stewart mailing list, there’s been a discussion of the forthcoming boxed set by EMI. Many of the list members already own everything in the set, including the “unreleased” and “alternate” versions, so the obvious question is, do you buy it, and if so why? My comment:

I used to be a completist – everything by Al, everything by the Legendary Pink Dots, everything by the Pet Shop Boys, everything by Faithless…. But as John Cleese put it in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “I got better.” I think what did it was the torrent of “Dick’s Picks…” live recordings of the Grateful Dead; I realized that I didn’t need eight different versions of “Franklin’s Tower”. From there it was a short step to giving up my ambition of collecting every single different remix of “West End Girls”. Subsequent recovery was uneventful.

Besides, I couldn’t bear to think of myself as the kind of anorak whose Last Will and Testament proudly bequeathes: “my entire collection of Freddie and the Dreamers records to my dearly beloved grand-nephew Cyril, knowing that he will treasure them as I have”.

(You may recognize the subject line as the title of a CD by Underworld. I own this CD; in fact I think I have everything that they’ve released. Oh, well.)

Cricket for baseball enthusiasts

Many of my American friends are mystified by cricket: not just the rules, but the very mechanics of the game. They assume that bowling is like pitching, and can’t seem to understand that in cricket one is dealing with movement in the air (as in pitching) and movement “off the pich”, generated when the spinning ball bounces. The BBC have put up a series of brief video masterclasses on various cricket techniques; the one called Learn the basics of leg-spin is particularly good. Recommended.

Ashes 2005

52306.icon.jpgIf British Airways wasn’t all screwed up… and if I could get a ticket for the match… I’d be sorely tempted to fly back to England tonight to watch tomorrow’s play in the Third Test match at Old Trafford. How often do you get to savour news like this? “Simon Jones and Ashley Giles took three wickets apiece as Australia closed in deep trouble 234 runs behind England.”

It can't be Web 2.0 – not enough people are complaining

Tim Bray and a cast of thousands are debating whether the term Web 2.0 is a useful term to describe today’s Web. He cites Tim O’Reilly’s argument that “The content is getting bigger and richer and deeper, user interfaces are getting better, and interesting new applications are showing up. His premise, basically, is that we need a name for this renaissance, and “Web 2.0 is as good as any, and it seems to be getting traction, so where’s the harm?” Nonetheless Tim Bray thinks it’s a “faux-meme” – that we’re really up to 3.0 or even 8.0. I too think it’s a bogus idea, but in the other direction. We’re still running Web 1.x.

First, it isn’t a renaissance – to have a re-birth, you must first have a birth and a loss, and this web stuff is simply too continuous and too short term (even in dot-com years). Second, we haven’t done anything to justify the leap from 1.0 to 2.0 yet. In particular, all interesting 2.0 transitions in history have involved a painful dislocation as people realize, “oh shit, we didn’t get it quite right, and we can’t achieve backward compatibility.” It’s going metric, it’s like changing from steam to diesel, or AM to FM. What might such a dislocation look like in the web? It’s hard to know until we actually run into the wall, but something like TBL‘s nirvana of semantic mark-up might do it: we can imagine that, fairly quickly, a large amount of web content would become second class, which would be painful. (There’s a related idea about evolving the web from a resource for people to a resource for autonomous agents, but I’m not quite sure how to describe that, and whether that would be 3.0.)

When I hear people complaining about the next web transition, I’ll think about changing from 1.x to 2.0. Not before.

Mighty Mouse

Yes, I did get a Mighty Mouse. I love it. The scroll ball feels absolutely natural, and the touch-sensitive shell works well. The only thing I need to work on is that, when mousing left-handed*, my ring finger sometimes brushes the left side of the shell just as I’m right-clicking. Since the logic seems to be “it’s a left-click unless it’s unambiguously something else”, I’ll have to fix this. As for the side buttons, I haven’t use them much so far. The default setting is to bring up Expose to switch windows, but I prefer to task-switch by using scroll-ball-click to bring up the application list, horizontally scrolling with the scroll ball, and selecting via left-click. Very easy, better than repeated cmd-tabs.

—
* Even though I’m right-handed, I’ve taken to mousing left-handed about 80% of the time. Good for incipient carpal issues.

Cracked

OK, this is an essential add-on for PSPs: the Akihabara News reports on “a new wallpaper for the PSP”. Sounds innocent enough…. But on further examination, there doesn’t seem to be a download link. Hopefully this will be rectified soon. I did a quick search trying to find other images of this kind – it seems like a natural theme – but I only came across one modest effort (registration required). Odd.

Science and varieties of theism

My contribution to the Priests in Lab Coats debate going on at Salon.com:

Science, including evolution, says nothing about theism in general. Given the wide variety of gods that people have believed in, this should not be surprising – it’s not clear that ANYTHING speaks to theism in general.

However it is true that science – evolution, of course, but also geology, physics, and biology – is incompatible with certain religious viewpoints, particularly those that hold inerrantist positions concerning various ancient texts. Science explores regular relationships between phenomena – gravitational (stuff falls), chemical, kinetic, and so forth. If such relationships are merely the whimsy of a capricious deity – if water can be conjured into existence to create a flood and then made to vanish – then such regularities are impossible. Evidence becomes meaningless: we may as well believe in solipsism or Last-Thursdayism (the reductio ad absurdum that the universe was created last Thursday, complete with people with memories of a longer existence).

Scientists MUST disbelieve in a world that is phenomenally capricious. If a theist believes in such a world, they cannot accept science. There is no coherent worldview that is consistent with both. But this is not an argument about theism, merely about a particular fundamentalist worldview.