Here we go again: this time, Ashley Miller, Chris Rodda, JT Eberhard, and I hung out to chat about the perfidy of Christian corruption of education and government.
Some other people asked to join in midway through: these are chats among the community of bloggers here at Freethoughtblogs, so they’re a little bit exclusive…but maybe in the future with some advance warning we could think about bringing in an ‘outsider’ or two to give us a different perspective. Write to one of us and ask!
Bora has put together a history of science blogging, and there I am, one of the grizzled old pioneers, chewin’ tobaccy and slapping mules around. There’s also mention of my old Tangled Bank carnival, which isn’t totally gone — I’ve got the archive stashed on my lab computer, and someday I have to figure out how to extract and resurrect an old Expression Engine blog.
Larry Moran also talks about the crucible of talk.origins, and how a lot of the early science bloggers got their start on usenet (myself included). A lot of the feisty, confrontational style comes straight out of a history of prolonged combat with idiots.
We’re going to distract all attention from our horrible #FTBullies status by a well-tested expedient: We’re going to blame Rebecca Watson for everything. At last, all Deep Rifts are healed!
I must highlight a comment from kosk11348 that encapsulates the whole recent mess.
The best analogy I’ve heard yet for understanding this situation is a fire evacuation plan. Fires are rare, yet it makes sense to have a plan in place. Continuing that analogy, here’s my rundown of the “conversation” thus far:
FTB: “Fire evacuation plans are a good idea. We recommend that all skeptical events have one.”
DJ Grothe: “All this talk of fires scares away attendees. Plus TAM has never, ever had a fire.”
Stephanie Zvan: “Actually, there have been a few small fires at TAM. Remember that trash can that caught on fire?”
DJ Grothe: “Yes, I put that fire out myself. At no time did anyone feel unsafe.”
FTB: “Ok, but you just said…never mind. The point is, because there was no policy in place, we now have no record of the fire, no investigation into the cause of the fire, and no reason to think another fire might happen again. Are you currently training your staff to know what to do in the event of a fire?”
DJ Grothe: “We have a robust fire evacuation plan printed in our literature. It reads: ‘TAM hates fires.'”
FTB: “But that’s not really a plan…”
Russell Blackford: “Is there any evidence that things burn?”
MRAs: “Look, it’s the fire department’s job to handle fires. If you are on fire, call them.”
FTB: “Huh? You’re saying it’s the victim’s responsibility to alert the fire department? What about the responsibility of the organizers…”
MRAs: “#FTB bullies say TAM is infested with arsonists!”
FTB: “What? Nobody is saying that! Arsonists do exist, sure. But we have no reason to think TAM is any worse than the general population in that respect. Look, it’s really simple…”
Ophelia Benson: “You know, I was schedule to speak at TAM, but I just got this really weird letter explaining in great detail about what to do when I find myself in a fire at TAM. Like, seriously detailed. It described the flames singing my hair, peeling my flesh…”
Russell Blackford: “Way to overreact to a helpful warning!”
Thunderf00t: “I will continue to offer to light friends’ cigarettes for them and you can’t stop me!”
Paula Kirby: “The firestasi see fires everywhere because they love to pretend they are all victims of fire, just like the Nazis.”
FTB: “Ok, now this is just getting bizarre…”
Harriet Hall’s T-shirt: “I feel safe from fires at TAM (even though it still doesn’t have a fire evacuation plan)”
FTB: *sigh*
We’re done now.
We had another fun Google+ Hangout this morning with Esteleth, James Rook, Tommy Leung, and Yankee Cynic, building on a couple of articles I mentioned before. Basically, we talked about the attractiveness of the premises of evolutionary psychology vs. the extravagance of their conclusions, and the unreliability of brains and how we have to work hard to overcome them. It turned into a kind of discussion about psychology, of all things.
And now you can watch it all, too.
Isn’t it amazing how you can assemble a small group of people, give them the seed of an idea, and then they can go on to talk about it for an hour, easy?
We’ll probably do another one in about two weeks. Make suggestions! I’m also planning to do the next one at sometime in my local evening, so maybe we can bring in an Australian or two.
Oy, singularitarians. Chris Hallquist has a post up about the brain uploading problem — every time I see this kind of discussion, I cringe at the simple-minded naivete that’s always on display. Here’s all we have to do to upload a brain, for instance:
The version of the uploading idea: take a preserved dead brain, slice it into very thin slices, scan the slices, and build a computer simulation of the entire brain.
If this process manages to give you a sufficiently accurate simulation
It won’t. It can’t.
I read the paper he recommended: it’s by a couple of philosophers. All we have to do is slice a brain up thin and “scan” it with sufficient resolution, and then we can just build a model of the brain.
I’ve worked with tiny little zebrafish brains, things a few hundred microns long on one axis, and I’ve done lots of EM work on them. You can’t fix them into a state resembling life very accurately: even with chemical perfusion with strong aldehyedes of small tissue specimens that takes hundreds of milliseconds, you get degenerative changes. There’s a technique where you slam the specimen into a block cooled to liquid helium temperatures — even there you get variation in preservation, it still takes 0.1ms to cryofix the tissue, and what they’re interested in preserving is cell states in a single cell layer, not whole multi-layered tissues. With the most elaborate and careful procedures, they report excellent fixation within 5 microns of the surface, and disruption of the tissue by ice crystal formation within 20 microns. So even with the best techniques available now, we could possibly preserve the thinnest, outermost, single cell layer of your brain…but all the fine axons and dendrites that penetrate deeper? Forget those.
We don’t have a method to lock down the state of a 1.5kg brain. What you’re going to be recording is the dying brain, with cells spewing and collapsing and triggering apoptotic activity everywhere.
And that’s another thing: what the heck is going to be recorded? You need to measure the epigenetic state of every nucleus, the distribution of highly specific, low copy number molecules in every dendritic spine, the state of molecules in flux along transport pathways, and the precise concentration of all ions in every single compartment. Does anyone have a fixation method that preserves the chemical state of the tissue? All the ones I know of involve chemically modifying the cells and proteins and fluid environment. Does anyone have a scanning technique that records a complete chemical breakdown of every complex component present?
I think they’re grossly underestimating the magnitude of the problem. We can’t even record the complete state of a single cell; we can’t model a nematode with a grand total of 959 cells. We can’t even start on this problem, and here are philosophers and computer scientists blithely turning an immense and physically intractable problem into an assumption.
And then going on to make more ludicrous statements…
Axons carry spike signals at 75 meters per second or less (Kandel et al. 2000). That speed is a fixed consequence of our physiology. In contrast, software minds could be ported to faster hardware, and could therefore process information more rapidly
You’re just going to increase the speed of the computations — how are you going to do that without disrupting the interactions between all of the subunits? You’ve assumed you’ve got this gigantic database of every cell and synapse in the brain, and you’re going to just tweak the clock speed…how? You’ve got varying length constants in different axons, different kinds of processing, different kinds of synaptic outputs and receptor responses, and you’re just going to wave your hand and say, “Make them go faster!” Jebus. As if timing and hysteresis and fatigue and timing-based potentiation don’t play any role in brain function; as if sensory processing wasn’t dependent on timing. We’ve got cells that respond to phase differences in the activity of inputs, and oh, yeah, we just have a dial that we’ll turn up to 11 to make it go faster.
I’m not anti-AI; I think we are going to make great advances in the future, and we’re going to learn all kinds of interesting things. But reverse-engineering something that is the product of almost 4 billion years of evolution, that has been tweaked and finessed in complex and incomprehensible ways, and that is dependent on activity at a sub-cellular level, by hacking it apart and taking pictures of it? Total bollocks.
If singularitarians were 19th century engineers, they’d be the ones talking about our glorious future of transportation by proposing to hack up horses and replace their muscles with hydraulics. Yes, that’s the future: steam-powered robot horses. And if we shovel more coal into their bellies, they’ll go faster!
I grew up in Norway, by default born as a member of the Norwegian State Church; a bland form of Protestantism, blissfully ignored by the vast majority of its members for the vast majority of their lives. I expect many still hold some form of belief in god and Jesus, without letting this in any way prevent them from living exactly as they please, but the churches seem to be primarily used for the family traditions that are baptisms, confirmations, weddings and funerals. The second of these is seen by most teenagers as a fantastic money making scheme, and a few months of weekly bible classes are well worth the ridiculous amount of presents and money this ritual traditionally entails.
Alexander Aan has been thrown into prison for blasphemy, but he still has some contact with the world. He has sent a message out:
You can write back. The Atheist Alliance will forward email to him, and a little correspondence might let him know the world is watching. Also, someone imprisoned for blasphemy is probably the safest guy in the penal system to talk to, right?
Apparently, a team of teeny-tiny, insignificant people decided to band together and have a fundraising competition with me. Without telling me. Or maybe they did, and my email is just so screwed up right now that I never saw it. Anyway, they’re all feebly whiffing about my ankles right now, squeaking their defiance in their cute little piping voices — really, it’s adorable, like being mugged by little white mice — so I guess I should acknowledge their existence.
I do notice, though, that this year they haven’t described any forfeits they’ll offer up if they win. Too burned by that last effort, eh? Still have memories of that leg-waxing, JT, or that appearance in a dress, Matt? I really should wait until the little people have screwed up their courage to make it worth my while, but oh, hey, it’s a good cause. They’re raising money for Camp Quest.
They’re doing their best to stack the odds against me, but 12 to 1? Seriously? You’re going to need a bigger boat, Team Awful.
A very familiar story: a creationist is told that her views are unsupported by any legitimate science, and in reply she rattles off a list of creationist “scientists”.
Here we are told by a creationist housewife — as she describes herself — defending her belief that the Giant’s Causeway is only as old as the Bible says it is, a claim which assumes, of course, that there is a definite chronology in the Bible which can be used to date the age of the earth, and that this chronology, such as it is, supersedes all other forms of chronology, because the Bible is, after all, the inerrant word of God. In response to Richard Dawkins claim that reputable scientists all agree that the earth is billions of years old, our doughty housewife responds with: “That’s a blatant lie,” And then she lists four “scientists” who accept the creationist dating of the age of the earth (and she might well have named more, because, if you google these names, you end up on sites with many more).
The word “scientist” is simply a label, and if you ignore its meaning, you can stick it on anything. I’ve always considered a scientist as someone who follows a rational program of investigation of the real world, and that the word describes someone carrying out a particular and critical process of examination. But apparently, to people with no well-informed knowledge of its meaning, “science” and “scientist” are just tags you stick on really smart people who reach a conclusion you like, or who have done the academic dance to get a Ph.D. as a trophy to stick on the end of your name.
That’s a shame.
Let me explain the difference with an analogy.
A carpenter is a person who practices a highly skilled trade, carpentry, to create new and useful and lovely things out of wood. It is a non-trivial occupation, there’s both art and technology involved, and it’s a productive talent that contributes to people’s well-being. It makes the world a better place. And it involves wood.
A pyromaniac is a person with a destructive mental illness, in which they obsess over setting things on fire. Most pyromaniacs have no skill with carpentry, but some do; many of them have their own sets of skills outside of the focus of their illness. Pyromania is destructive and dangerous, contributes nothing to people’s well-being, and makes the world a worse place. And yes, it involves wood, which is a wonderful substance for burning.
Calling a creationist a scientist is as offensive as praising a pyromaniac for their skill at carpentry, when all they’ve shown is a talent for destroying things, and typically have a complete absence of any knowledge of wood-working. Producing charcoal and ash is not comparable to building a house or crafting furniture or, for that matter, creating anything.
You can’t call any creationist a scientist, because what they’re actively promoting is a destructive act of tearing down every beautiful scrap of knowledge the real scientists have acquired.
Nothing! It’s still going on, I’m still getting submissions (and you can send them to me still), and I’ve still got a backlog of hundreds.
It vanished for a while this week because I got a shiny new computer, and my backup restored everything but my old email messages…which is just as well, because my mail is broken and overwhelmed and messed up, and I just archived everything into a big messy tarball, and am setting it aside. I’m trying out a new procedure for handling and sorting mail on my new machine, which will eventually be less prone to grindingly slow struggles to manage a huge list whenever I open my inbox, but right now is new and incomprehensible territory, and has me hopelessly confused. I will learn it, though. Just give me time.
That means that right now email is total chaos, and I’m struggling with it. It also means that I had to go back and extract essentials, like the WIAAA stuff, from the archived mess on the old computer, and get it over to the new one, which is why there has been a little hiatus. All is well now, though, and the series will resume every day.
Meanwhile, I’ve probably got a few weeks of daily cussing at my email ahead of me.
