David Berlinski! Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. He appeared on Fox News last night, with his standard air of disaffected ennui to explain science to Mark Levin. It was a series of own goals.
He has little regard for science — they’re all shallow thinkers. That’s why they’re all atheists, who regard 5,000 year old religious traditions with contempt. He explains what he knows about the academy, which isn’t much, and portrays us all as people who go around sneering at religion. Well, I do…but I’m not at all representative. If I were to interrupt a committee meeting with complaints about the pervasive religiosity of the community I live in, that would be discouraged — we’re supposed to be reality-based, so the question would be about how we can adapt to the reality of our situation, how can we get along with our neighbors, and generally getting specific about our opinions on religion while carrying on our academic business is considered a faux pas. That goes for someone promoting a religion as well as for someone promoting no religion.
Berlinski then accuses scientists, and especially atheist scientists, of being shallow thinkers. That, I think, is generally true of everyone: we work in our little niche, and sometimes some of us poke our heads out and try to explore other ideas more broadly, but we each have our domains of expertise and tend to focus on those. But Berlinski goes further, and wants to proclaim the facts of science as inadequate because they aren’t wrapped up in enough philosophical baggage. For example, he says that the hypothesis that we are nothing but cosmic accidents has been widely accepted by the scientific community
, and that is true — people have been looking for a teleological cause for centuries, and failing, while stochastic explanations for physics, chemistry, and biology have been succeeding wonderfully. In the absence of a cosmic plan, we have to accept that we are cosmic accidents.
I think that has significant social and moral and psychological explanations that ought to be explored further. Most scientists don’t worry about it; their job is to accurately describe reality, now let others figure out what it means. That’s not shallowness — science requires a great depth of knowledge — but only specialization. The thing is, if you’re going to claim scientists haven’t done a great job of fitting their answers to the greater puzzle of culture, neither have those advocates for 5,000 year old religious traditions. And the religious advocates have a more challenging job of propping up ideas that are demonstrably wrong and fly in the face of the observed facts.
Berlinski also can’t avoid elitism and lying about the science. Levin makes a mind-bogglingly stupid comment about climate change: they can’t tell us the temperature next week within ten degrees but they can tell us within a degree what it will be in a century
, which is a goofy way of confusing local weather with global climate. Berlinski has a unique way of addressing the evidence of climate change: well, the “top physicists” aren’t studying climate change. Berlinski dismisses studies of the climate with I’m talking about top physicists, to get to climate change we all have to go down that ladder all the way down to the bottom
. Then he claims that all those petty little substandard physicists who call themselves climatologists are all squabbling with one another with inconsistent results.
Then he gets to what Levin calls “Darwinianism”.
Here’s Berlinski’s arguments: he invents a series of just-so stories. Why did the giraffe develop a long neck? Because he wanted to reach leaves at the top of the trees.
(That, by the way, is no element of any modern evolutionary explanation — he seems to be reaching back to vague memories from grade school of 18th century explanations). Why aren’t women born with tails like cats? Women don’t seem to need them, even though it would make them more alluring.
He expresses every bit of biological diversity as a matter of whim and personal preference. He explains the problem: the anecdotes pile on interminably, and there’s no fundamental leading principle
. Oh, nonsense. Berlinski invents anecdotes, and then uses his ignorance of the mathematical principles underlying, for example, population genetics to claim that population geneticists are just sitting around inventing myths.
He’s an annoying and pretentious kind of fool. He needs to fly back to France and disappear again, because he’s too out of touch to be able to contribute anything to any discussion except for his cultivated air of superciliousness. Which, I will admit, he has honed to razor sharpness. Too bad there’s no substance at all behind it, and that he is such a shallow thinker.
“In the absence of a cosmic plan, we have to accept that we are cosmic accidents.”
Word.
BTW if Zod let Metuselah get a life span of 800 years, why did he not give *everyone* these epigenetic tools? If naked mole rats have a better anti-ageing tool box than humans, it really looks as if there is no cosmic plan.
“Genes might play unrecognized role in aging, intervention” https://phys.org/news/2018-04-genes-unrecognized-role-aging-intervention.html
> Why aren’t women born with tails like cats? Women don’t seem to need them, even though it would make them more alluring.
I’m concerned for his cat.
Also, boy cats have equally long tails. Unless he thinks cat = girl and dog = boy and science can’t explain that, can it?
Is Berlinski telling us he’s a furry?
“all shallow thinkers” CoughProjectioncough.
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Totally OT, but hilarious. This is the standard of logical consistency that can be expected, which is why I associate it with David Berlinski*
“Gun-lovers will be stripped of weapons when Mike Pence speaks to NRA — Parkland survivors wonder why https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/gun-lovers-will-stripped-weapons-mike-pence-speaks-nra-parkland-survivors-wonder/
*that is a suspiciously furrin-sounding name. French? During Dubya’s years, I thougt they despised everything French. Oh, I forgot…consistency.
Hey at least in the complete, unedited interview (near the end of the hour) Berlinski managed to put in a positive comment about universal health care in France (because it gave him a new aortic valve), much to the chagrin of the “free market” absolutist Levin.
“Why aren’t women born with tails like cats?”
Wait, wait, I have a better one.
Why aren’t men born with tails they can use to grip tree branches? Then those super-manly Australians could climb the eucalyptus trees to fight drop bears.
If Berlinski is into sexually harassing cats, it is time to call…the cats of Ulthar!
don’t read the youtube comments unless you want to bang your head on a hard surface.
Which religious tradition, one wonders, is he thinking of as being 5000 years old? We’re talking pre-Old Kingdom Egypt, early Sumer and the Indus Valley Civilisation here. Even Hinduism, perhaps the oldest of the religious traditions still extant, dates from the Vedic era about 1500 years after that. Does Berlinski himself have a deep appreciation of late neolithic and early Bronze Age religion? Does the cult of Horus and Osiris inform his world-view? Does he take the idols and icons of Mohenjo-Daro into account when he makes his grandiloquent pronouncements about the world?
Or does he mean that all human thought builds on prior human thought, going back to the dawn of civilisation and beyond? In which case, modern science is just as much an inheritor of that tradition as modern mysticism is.
Re. cartomancer/dawn of civilization
Black monolith?
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You guys gotta stop putting Berlinski on your shows. All he does is lie. If you don’t give him a platform, he has nowhere to lie. It’s like that old saying: If a tree falls in the woods, how do we get Berlinski under that tree?
3000 BC? If Berlinski lives in a spider hole, he may have an affinity for another arthropod-related guy, the pre-dynastic Scorpion King.
Why not? I’m not entirely sure what Berlinsky will be doing this Saturday but I know for certain what he will be doing a century from now.
I think you’re conceding too much to him, because I don’t see how this follows logically. Things may be necessary or inevitable or what have you, as opposed to contingent or accidental. Neither implies something teleological or a plan. So, if we actually found that “we are cosmic accidents,” if that were an empirically discoverable fact the sciences could tell us (which seems doubtful), then it would merely entail that we’re not cosmically necessary. What would that conclusion mean, or what’s at stake? Well, not that really much, I would think. It’s not clear why I should care all that much what the conclusion is, to begin with…. But let’s suppose you get it somehow: we’re accidental.
It’s not so hard to imagine that something must be or must happen (according to physical laws, let’s say), and nobody “planned” that it would happen. Saying it’s not accidental is more or less just saying it had to be that way, although people mean a lot of different things by simple phrases like that. It’s not like it needs to be an element of the story that a god (or somebody) thought about what it wanted to happen or had certain inclinations about what it would plan, then set about to do that (however this god can manage to do so, assuming it can do something), by contriving that the world is led in that specific direction, as opposed to some other possible direction it could have chosen.
And notice how I just put it: it’s usually assumed, the way people think about intentional choices like this, that a person (or god) making a choice could have made some other choice. (The usual remark is that otherwise it’s not much of a choice, but I’ll leave to the side.) There are other possible directions it could have gone and this god decided upon only one of those possible choices. Those are nonetheless possibilities, which seems to be saying they merely happen to be non-actual choices. They’re still possibilities, because failing to be the actual one (i.e., it wasn’t in fact chosen) doesn’t imply it fails to be a possible one. So, it wasn’t necessary that it went the way this god wanted it to go, because that god (if it exists, etc.) could have chosen differently. That’s the thinking, at least, however coherent it may be.
Or maybe a different god could have existed and made a different choice. It’s then an accident (of this god’s choice-making) that things are such that it made one choice about what the “plan” would be, instead of another. Or perhaps a whole committee of gods convened and were forced by some obscure rule in their by-laws to come up with the plan they did — it may seem to them that they didn’t have a choice in the process, that nobody in particular did. It’s still not as if we can now conclude the world must be the result of circumstances like this — it ain’t necessarily so, because it could have gone countless other possible ways without there being some silly committee like this. Somebody (or some group, etc.) failing to have multiple choices doesn’t give you things like that, because perhaps that person/group isn’t necessary in the first place, perhaps they could have had choices but by some accident they didn’t, and so forth. It’s not obvious what kind of thing you’d need for all of it to fall into place, and there’s no consolation prize for doing half the job.
Or one option, as most everyone here would say, is that there could have been no gods (and nobody else) making such choices, and it was merely something that did happen, without anybody intending it or deciding upon it or planning it or whatever. (And you don’t even have to like it, much less exercise control over it.) Given that it did, it looks we still have nothing to work with which tells us whether it’s the only thing that could have happened — maybe so, maybe not.
I don’t think we’re logically compelled to believe that this total state of affairs (no matter which one you considered, or any other you may dream up) is the only way things could be, due to a supposed fact that every other apparent option is impossible. We can certainly rule out certain specific scenarios that would be contradictory, but there’s no reason to suspect that somehow we’d be able to rule out all except one. That’s what you’d have to show, and as far as I can tell, the chances are practically zero that anybody will ever do that.
So I think where we end up here is a long way from demonstrating somehow (with science or anything else) that we’re accidental. All the same, it doesn’t seem like that would help anyway. Presumably, all it would tell us is that there’s an enormous and confusing array of logically possible ways things could have been, not only the one way the actual world is (whatever that is like; we’re still not terribly well-informed about it). It sounds right to me, intuitively, but what good would that do, if it’s correct? I don’t see why it should really matter. Maybe it’d be good for getting people like Berlinski lathered up, but other than that, I don’t think I get what the fuss is about.
Spiders are fascinating, amazing, beautiful creatures who already suffer from a PR problem. So why do you further tarnish their poor reputation by associating them with David Berlinski and Jordan Bullshitter Peterson? No poor little spidey deserves such a fate!
I certainly think the portia spider makes better use of its neural tissue than Berlinski does.
His crack about fraternity brother’s bothered me a lot, though he does finally mention women in science later on.
He likens evolution’s acceptance to that of the book of Genesis. What a terrible way to ignore the mountain of evidence supporting evolution. I was ready for him to liken acceptance of evolution to the acceptance of gravitation. That would have been a much more accurate statement.
@13: “I don’t think I get what the fuss is about”
It’s pretty simple. Teleologists like Berlinsky hate probablilism. This hate is summarized by Einstein’s “God doesn’t play dice”. Unfortunately for those haters (much less so but still somewhat for Einstein) probabilistic models in science tend to work better than causal ones (which can be reversed so that they become teleological) in many cases.
People like this demonstrate the trith that the greater the ignorance the greater the arrogance.
I know a schmuck when I see one, and Berlinski fits the bill handsomely. He doesn’t understand science or scientists but presumes to critique it and criticize them on his shallow and faulty ‘understanding’. That’s a schmuck.
While Berlinsky rejects “cosmic accidents” he also stands as an reliable object lesson that such accidents sometimes create willfully ignorant fools.
Or his imaginary deity….
That wouldn’t explain it, because it had nothing to do with probability in the first place. Possible and probable are two completely different concepts.
His views about QM are also widely misunderstood, but I’ll leave that alone for now, since it’s beside the point.
No, deterministic models wouldn’t be teleological when reversed. I guess you may assume the future is produced out of the past in some sense, as if that were what the deterministic laws did to the current state of the universe. It’s as if laws were out there (somewhere) “doing” such things to the world, rather than our descriptions of it. But it doesn’t look like a good idea to assume anything like that, for fairly obvious reasons I hope.
I’ll note that you’re the one who’s apparently starting with some idea that laws guide stuff around, are actively intervening in the world, literally taking it from one state to another, or however you’d like to put it. That sounds very suspiciously like a god reaching in, “from the outside” whatever that would mean, and fiddling around with the events that happen in the world. That’s the kind of status they supposedly have. You expressed this view, even though you think you’re committing to a “stochastic” framework which supposedly works better…. So first of all, it doesn’t seem like you have any room to complain that somebody else is doing the same thing, or at least you can’t claim that it helps people avoid that kind of thinking. But I’m not saying you need to go there either. So dispense with that nonsense first, since that’s easy enough. What are you left with in your argument then? Looks like nothing to me.
You could for example have a 4D block universe sort of concept (one Einstein might be pretty happy with): there’s just that block. It’s simply the way it is, as blocks are, and “reversing” it is not even on the table as a coherent option. Or maybe it’s a trivial operation, if you like, but that’s also nothing to worry about.
Besides, even if you’re not a fan of that sort of view (some people aren’t and I’ll admit I’m fairly sympathetic), the fact that something came earlier and something else came later (and this is fundamental, unlike in the block universe) does not suggest in any way that any of it was intended or planned, no matter which things came earlier or later.
What you’d actually need for it to be teleological is that somebody directed the way things change over time, or they directed things to be what they are even if fundamentally there’s no change. You’d be saying it was guided somehow by a supernatural agent, not merely noting that “things change” or making a similarly boring observation like that. People had good reasons for rejecting teleology, miracles, and so forth. The numerous problems they pointed out were not that, according such proposals, stuff happens or things change, that it’s predictable, deterministic, or whatever else. Most people would have no trouble accepting it, if the latter sorts of proposals turned out to be true. The trouble comes when you say we should try to guess what god’s intentions are, figure out why he wanted this or that, and when you’re able to say any arbitrary thing is “explained” because that’s what a god supposedly wants (which doesn’t help as an explanation, nor does it rule out any other arbitrary thing from happening the next moment for all you know). That’s the kind of bullshit we rightly tossed out, because it got you nowhere fast.
What’s your argument, anyway? Why should you not be able to reverse stochastic/probabilistic laws, if that’s the best you’ve got to describe the world, and be left worrying about more or less exactly the same issues (or non-issues as the case may be) that you’d have if they were deterministic laws? I don’t see how it would make a difference, because it’s not obvious and you didn’t bother to explain it.
Plus, like I tried to explain above, even which deterministic (or indeterministic) laws they happen to be is still part of the issue for these people anyway. That could be an accident too. It’s not like the Berlinskis out there should be satisfied with any old thing so long as it’s deterministic, because part of the idea is for it to be necessary that these very laws are the ones we’ve got, that everything else is impossible. Of course, they also want more than physics — that’s not really good enough for them, no matter what it looks like, because they think it helps somehow to throw a deity into the mix. It doesn’t, but that is what they think, for some odd reason.
Berlinski has been missing in inaction for a while, but it was fun to rake him over the coals a decade ago. For the curious, here’s a series of blog posts about the great-in-his-own-eyes man: http://zenoferox.blogspot.com/search?q=berlinski
…haven’t you made basically this argument before?
consciousness razor@22:
Thank you for pointing that out; yesterday afternoon I started a response to mbn0, but dinnertime intervened, I never got back to it, and everyone was spared a much longer version of your 8 words there. (If anyone cares, I can quote the sentences from Einstein’s letter to the Borns which are substantially misrepresented when mistranslated and reduced to “God doesn’t play dice.” But I promise not to get involved with Laplace!)
nomdeplume @18- The term you are looking for is egnorance, named in honor of neurosurgeon and ID creationist Michael Egnor.
leerudolph @25:
The Born Einstein letters can be read here, for those interested.
Okay.. here are some choice thoughts I have on this Berlinksi dimbulb:
– of course physicists don’t study climate change. It’s outside of their field. You may as well complain that they’re not working in immunology. Climatologists aren’t “sub-par physicists”. The climate is a very complex part of the natural world that warrants it’s own specialized field of study. Also, climate science is based off of multiple studies of the atmosphere. Not every set of weather predictions you hear on the news has that benefit.
– what’s shallow is to claim that a god magically conjuring things into existence is meaningful scientifically. All that Berlinski is doing is slapping a veneer of profundity onto simple-minded supernatural ad hoc explanations.
– that attempted refutation of evolution is so grounded in complete ignorance of how evolution works that I don’t even know where to begin.
Berlinski is a poster child for conservative anti-intellectualism. He has specialized knowledge in one particular field, and he decides that he knows all he needs to know to completely dismiss other fields of study as worthless. He’s like a theocratic Jordan Peterson.