JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

Macbeth struggled with the milk of human kindness; current evolutionary theory is predisposed towards the mechanical survival mechanism as paramount in explaining compassion. If kindness is there, it is there for a purpose, so they say.

In this NYT article about a study of empathy in the young it is suggested that the young are hollow careerist vessels…

In a decisively everyone-for-themselves manner, [the young] are less likely to agree with statements like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.” …
Previous studies have documented an increasing narcissism among college students since the late 1980s. And Americans in general perceive decreases in other people’s kindness and helpfulness.

Given that studies like this are at the edges of what could even loosely be called science…and so might only be an expression of a general despair about the way things are going in this age…we can still speculate about the general proposition:

…these days, a transference of empathy is apparent: people love their pets with a fierce empathy. Then again, those pets might not be the real focus, but the extension of ego that the pet represents. A proxy narcissism. And pets aren’t people, which is the real target of meaningful empathy.

…there is tribal empathy: people show empathy towards and make excuses for those they see as members of their affinity group — in our time, conformist partisans are particularly prone towards enabling. But aren’t they affirming the tribe, and their group membership, not their fellow tribalists? Look at what nastiness ensues when the tribal conceptual bond is broken, even slightly. Thought police always lurk in partisan climes, always ready to ostracize and expel from the hive.

The milk of human kindness appears of no benefit in a competitive society — although the appearance of kindness can have its cynical value. But that would not be an empathic insight. Or would it?

This NYT article about the Human Genome Project says,

…after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease.

The expectation that knowledge equates to resolution is part of the contemporary mindset, where concept equals expression.

… with most diseases, the common variants have turned out to explain just a fraction of the genetic risk. It now seems more likely that each common disease is mostly caused by large numbers of rare variants, ones too rare to have been cataloged…

The problem arises in raising hopes and playing to the crowd (media), which causes scientists to overstate the potentials of their enterprise and diminish the difficulties. In some ways this diminishes science itself.

The public wants hope, the media wants a feel good sound bite, so some scientists will abide. Hollywood’s “high concept” approach to pitching films has permeated the culture.

The value of understanding, even if we are currently powerless to do much, is still of value though:

The slowly emerging explanation is that humans and other animals have much the same set of protein-coding genes, but the human set is regulated in a much more complicated way, through elaborate use of DNA’s companion molecule, RNA.

What this scientist says about genome mapping and hopes for cures could be a useful credo:

“One can prefer to be an optimist or a pessimist, but the best approach is to be an empiricist.”

Scientists at Fermilab have found suggestive evidence that might help answer an age old mystery. The scientists working at the National Accelerator Laboratory,

…found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.

The question why there is something rather than nothing sounds philosophical. But the way science has been going: more abstract, more conceptual rather than intuitive, more mathematically derived rather than observational, makes the question no longer solely a resident in the dominion of philosophy.

I doubt that the answer scientists provide to the great questions will be any more authoritative than that offered by philosophy — or even satisfying. But science is still hanging onto some credibility in a world that challenges common sense. So the discovery might be a revelation of sorts, explaining the mechanics of creation itself. And with knowledge comes hope.

Freeman Dyson’s doubts about global warming were dismissed, ridiculed, and he was attacked personally. Such is science these days — in many ways, little different than the raucous general society.

Dyson says it’s only principle that leads him to question global warming: “According to the global-warming people, I say what I say because I’m paid by the oil industry. Of course I’m not, but that’s part of their rhetoric. If you doubt it, you’re a bad person, a tool of the oil or coal industry.” Global warming, he added, “has become a party line.”

What may trouble Dyson most about climate change are the experts. Experts are, he thinks, too often crippled by the conventional wisdom they create, leading to the belief that “they know it all.” The men he most admires tend to be what he calls “amateurs,” inventive spirits of uncredentialed brilliance like Bernhard Schmidt, an eccentric one-armed alcoholic telescope-lens designer; Milton Humason, a janitor at Mount Wilson Observatory in California whose native scientific aptitude was such that he was promoted to staff astronomer; and especially Darwin, who, Dyson says, “was really an amateur and beat the professionals at their own game.”

The insights in Dyson’s statement should be the basis for all education: the development of critical intelligence. The uneducated run to and give credence to experts, but make no distinction; ultimately true believers parrot what they hear, using the expert as the unassailable proof. People forget that they are quoting people, expert or no, with all their frailties.

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I have to include this anecdote about Dyson — it has a theatrical feeling. It is almost a set piece, except it is true, and funny:

…taking problems to Dyson is something of a parlor trick. A group of scientists will be sitting around the cafeteria, and one will idly wonder if there is an integer where, if you take its last digit and move it to the front, turning, say, 112 to 211, it’s possible to exactly double the value. Dyson will immediately say, “Oh, that’s not difficult,” allow two short beats to pass and then add, “but of course the smallest such number is 18 digits long.” When this happened one day at lunch, William Press remembers, “the table fell silent; nobody had the slightest idea how Freeman could have known such a fact or, even more terrifying, could have derived it in his head in about two seconds.” The meal then ended with men who tend to be described with words like “brilliant,” “Nobel” and “MacArthur” quietly retreating to their offices to work out what Dyson just knew.

Dyson is smart, and then some, but more importantly, Dyson seeks insight.

The Large Hadron Collider, the LHC, made news:

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider managed to make two proton beams collide at high energy Tuesday, marking a “new territory” in physics, according to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

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Charlie Rose replayed some interviews about the enterprise:

Do you believe in a Theory of Everything?

I really don’t know.

It sounds funny, but I felt the scientist’s response to Charlie Rose’s question was spot on. Too much trying to prove things in the air these days, too little modesty or objectivity about it all.

Seeking supersymmetry and the Higgs Field seems a glorious realm with which to occupy yourself. A vacation from reality at the same time that it is an investigation of that self same baseline. Factoid: the LHC tube is thought to be “the coldest area in the universe. Colder than outer space.”

You have to admire the dedication of the LHC team and envy their involvement in this deep yet fundamentally playful search for reality.

The expression of psychological conflict is woven into normative behavior in a society. Even behavior that is damaging can be shuttled into its expressing itself in certain ways, based on consensus expectations.

“In some epochs, convulsions, the sudden inability to speak or terrible leg pain may loom prominently in the repertoire. In other epochs patients may draw chiefly upon such symptoms as abdominal pain, false estimates of body weight and enervating weakness as metaphors for conveying psychic stress.”

This article suggests that America is exporting its concept of mental illness to the rest of the world and that the world is the worse off for it.

Although the article itself seems mediated by its own cultural bias, the side stories are fascinating:

In Zanzibar, schizophrenics are believed to be suffering from intermittent bouts of spirit possession. …this belief affects those around them, especially family members, which affects how they treat the individual with the condition: …It turns out that interaction patterns with a person possessed by spirits are actually healthier than those of family members in the West who believe the individual has a ‘mental illness.’ In fact, with US families, the more they try to ‘care’ for the schizophrenic family member, the more they fall into an unproductive interaction pattern with the individual with the illness. The issue is not just the belief, but the emotional quality of family interaction with a suffering individual; treat them one way, and it’s not just that you believe they’re different — the individual actually becomes different.

There are fashions in approaching mental illness: In the 1960s outlier psychiatrists would sentimentalize schizophrenia. What are they telling us? They have a right to their reality…that sort of interpretive bias. It was meant as sympathy and respect. But they were ignoring the pain of the victims of these afflictions and affecting a morally superior, self-congratulatory stance.

There is probably a subset of emotional issues that are culture bound but American imperialism isn’t responsible for the interplanetary insane asylum known as Planet Earth.

According to this NYT article scientists have discovered evidence of the actual color of the plumage of the theropods — the bipedal ancestors of birds. Scientists examined the feathers, which “contain pigment-loaded sacs called melanosomes.”

It turns out they look like chickens:

Anchiornis had a crown of reddish feathers surrounding dark gray ones, and its face was mottled with reddish and black spots. Its body was dark gray, but its limbfeathers were white with black tips.

Goodbye to the sepia haze of the imagined past.

How about starting in the Himalayas and flying through The Known Universe?

My gosh. A dreamscape. Computer graphics have jaded us, but this video has the probity of fact.

Cosmology, physics, genomics and proteomics, evolution, mathematics, all give a sense of context to our little lives that merges with the awe great art inspires.

What to make of it all? Why do we feel awe and respond so deeply to beauty and mystery?

So Freeman Dyson appears to have been right. Global warming scientists were engaged in lousy science, is the way Dyson put it.

…a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit … and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet.…
When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents …this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:
Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.…
But perhaps the most damaging revelations…are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

It was never clear why putatively bright and educated people would easily recognize the foolishness of Creationist “science”, but dumb down to Al Gore’s global world wide religion of global warming with alacrity. Now it is understandable how Gore, who has investments in many Green companies and stands to benefit mightily if the government pushes some bucks in that direction, might be predisposed towards what must be a genetically derived clueless credulity — the alternative, cynical manipulation, is so unattractive I don’t even want to think about it.

But what of those who want science to remain above partisanship? Isn’t it obvious waste, dirty air, slovenly manufacturing, and poisoning of the environment are deplorable? Why juice it up with Chicken Little pronouncements when the current state of knowledge is ambiguous? Gore and friends did more damage to the idea of an honorable science than any concatenation of Creationist science could do. We really do need to pay attention to emissions and treatment of the environment.

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A sample of one email, quoted in the link above,

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

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Finally, Denis Dutton’s site has been honorably conveying the media suppressed debate about climate change for sometime now.

When Al Gore ran for president it seemed like a no-brainer. He was over qualified, and Bush wasn’t. Bush was only a little more qualified for the presidency than Obama really.

But Gore had the election stolen from him by a Supreme Court that didn’t do its job. I remember designing a tee shirt, “Re-Elect Gore in 2004″. It was enraging the way the election resolved. A lot has happened since then — Gore seems a more dubious figure now. He won the Nobel Prize — in the surreal way Obama did. Well, maybe not quite so absurdly. At least Gore had been advocating something he seems to really believe and wants to believe. He is a true-believer.

Gore was on Charlie Rose today. We had the TV sound off, with subtitles enabled, humorously suggesting what he was saying. Like Google translation, the gaffs in transcription are an entertainment in themselves. Gore, in the captions, was saying something about “gasyfaction”, which made me think of him as the Great Gasyficator.

Gore was scowling deeply when he wasn’t purring in wonderfulness. He is a man on a mission. He is going to save the world. This reminded me: before Larry David’s breakup with his wife, David said on an interview that, “she used to be a Long Island narcissist and now she is going to save the world.” David’s wife had gotten the Green Bug, and was up early each day to work for a better tomorrow. Or she just might have liked hanging out with Sheryl Crow. I guess we will never know.

According to Gore, global warming is fact and it is “birthers” and “radio talk show hosts” who disagree. Why, they are worthy of contempt, those naysayers. Gore doesn’t belong to that realm of infallible consensus science of course. He isn’t a scientist. Freeman Dyson had pointed out that if you have celebrities visiting your lab, the tendency of a scientist would be to say what the celebrity wants to hear. The ambiguous fact becomes concrete fact. “Scientists are human beings,” is the way Dyson put it.

With the TV sound off Gore was a study. He has an ego as big as all outdoors. It was manifest, he reeks of ego; Gore possesses an earnestness that is not postmodern enough for the room. Irony isn’t allowed as he grimly predicts disaster and grows misty at the technological discoveries that will save us. Gore is an extremely wealthy man and is on a book tour that has a carbon footprint bigger than the Sudan. If he could list his houses, his travels alone and with his family, his possessions, and the energy use of those he visits — the wealthy celebrity types — we would have a better idea about the man. There is a reason religious figures shed all earthly possessions.

Gore’s arguments were tendentious and general. His belief system is in technology, statistical analysis, and consensus thinking. Technology will save us, he says. There are no serious doubts, he says. All the scientists say the same thing, he says. Like plate tectonics. All the scientists said it was an absurd idea. Or the Big Bang, which all the scientists, for the first half of the 20th century, thought a joke. So much so they derided the idea as the “Big Bang” theory. But Gore rolls on, selling his book, using straw man arguments, not engaging a single concrete idea. He wants to lead. Gore just doesn’t want to be troubled by the on the ground messiness. Charlie Rose suggested in his final questions some of those doubts, but he was unprepared to counter Gore, and had no critical thinkers in a panel to question Gore skillfully about Gore’s cocksure ideas.

Meanwhile global warming has morphed to global climate change in public discussions. This Gore seems to have missed. There have been ten ice ages in our planet’s recent geological past. Interglacial periods of 10,000 years occur after each ice age. We are currently 12,500 years into the current interglacial period. That’s what Freeman Dyson says. Dyson, a former colleague of Einstein’s, has more credibility for me than Al Gore’s parsing of what he wants to hear from the scientists with whom he chooses to speak.

No doubt green technology, freeing ourselves from a dependence on oil, eliminating waste, being responsible about consumption, are all worthy and moral. You don’t need to involve scientific disputation. You don’t need a preacher to tell you. Especially, a dubious preacher.

This argument has more interest than most public arguments. The interlocutors wouldn’t call it an argument, just a discussion. All of those posting on their blogs about the controversy moderate their words so as not to seem emotional, but they feel strongly, so it comes across as insincere and poorly said rather than truly collegial. The issue itself is interesting because it involves a more evolved example of the partisanship that envelops us.

A scientist and science writer have declined appearance again on Bloggingheads.tv. They don’t want unscientific ideas, according to their lights, discussed on the site. These are all folks who would be characterized as “public intellectuals”, which means the media calls them for their quotes — they appear in the media and they have become acceptable bloviators; also, they don’t say anything that will upset sponsors.

The scientist who seems the strongest voice is Sean Carroll, who says,

Unfortunately, I won’t be appearing on Bloggingheads.tv any more. And it is unfortunate — I had some great times there, and there’s an enormous amount to like about the site…

It’s a great site, love the folks, won’t ever cross their transom again. That is, Sean is pissed and he won’t be sullied. Creationists have nutty ideas:

What I objected to about the creationists was that they were not worthy opponents with whom I disagree; they’re just crackpots.

Apparently Sean is unaware that there are sites like Not Even Wrong which say in essence that Sean is full of it; that he is, as Dirac said, so off track in his untestable string theory mental calisthenics that he is not worth taking seriously. (Actually, while creationists seem to me a sociological phenomenon and therefore are of interest, people like Carroll seem like the real crackpots to me.) As an example, Carroll was asked on a Bloggingheads discussion why there were not more people on university faculties who are skeptical of string theory. He said, why should we hire them when we think they are wrong? As though the issue was settled and anyone who questioned it was, uh, a crackpot?

The point here is the packing of universities with joiners for a particular partisan idea. For myself a somewhat silly site like BH doesn’t need to be defended against creationists. There are too many nutcases on the podcasts already. Ideas are pure only to ideologues. Like Sean Carroll.

As is often the case, curmudgeon in chief, science writer John Horgan, is closest to sensible:

My attitude was that the best way to counter this stuff is to confront it, point out where it’s wrong or misleading, make fun of it, move on. I feel this way not only about religious superstition but also about homeopathy, astrology and parapsychology-not to mention psychoanalysis, psychopharmacology, multi-universe theories, string theory and the Singularity…I’m staying [@BH], and I disagree, strongly, with their stance that some topics (with one exception, noted below) should be shunned on principle.

Although Wright often presents as the Eleanor Clift of science writers, a brittle shrieker, I have to admit his confused, inept handling of this faux intellectual comedy, has made him a more sympathetic figure.