AT&T vs. 4chan

Imagine a titanic battle. No, not T. rex vs. a killer whale, but something more alarming, like T. rex vs. a massive bacterial infection. Which side do you think will win?

Something similar is going on right now. AT&T, the T. rex of the story, is going after 4chan, the infamous nest of /b/tards and fierce crackers and hackers, an unstoppable plague of corruption. AT&T is doomed if they continue.

AT&T has been sneakily trying to silence 4chan by quietly dropping access requests to the site by users on their network. I am not a great fan of 4chan (actually, I tremble in fear at even mentioning them, so I have to respect them—I’d rather piss off the Catholic Church than 4chan), but in this case I have to be on their side without reservation. AT&T is violating net neutrality and trying to censor voices on the web…and even if they succeeded in completely silencing one site on the web, the net is fluid, and they’ll just emerge elsewhere. With a grudge and a cause.

An update direct from 4chan:

For the past three weeks, 4chan has been under a constant DDoS attack.
We were able to filter this specific type of attack in a fashion that
was more or less transparent to the end user.

Unfortunately, as an unintended consequence of the method used, some
Internet users received errant traffic from one of our network
switches. A handful happened to be AT&T customers.

In response, AT&T filtered all traffic to and from our img.4chan.org
IPs (which serve /b/ & /r9k/) for their entire network, instead of only
the affected customers. AT&T did not contact us prior to implementing
the block. Here is their statement regarding the matter.

In the end, this wasn’t a sinister act of censorship, but rather a bit
of a mistake and a poorly executed, disproportionate response on AT&T’s
part. Whoever pulled the trigger on blackholing the site probably
didn’t anticipate [nor intend] the consequences of doing so.

We’re glad to see this short-lived debacle has prompted renewed
interest and debate over net neutrality and internet censorship?two
very important issues that don’t get nearly enough attention?so
perhaps this was all just a blessing in disguise.

Aside from that, I’ll also add that there is some big news due later
this week. Keep an eye on the News page, Twitter, and global message
for updates.

Monday must be Pick On Francis Collins Day!

Sam Harris seems to have triggered some kind of reflex, because there is discussion going on all over the place.

Jerry Coyne has a long piece up that chews over that awful talk Collins gave at Berkeley. He has the full recording of the whole talk — it was titled “The Language of God: Intellectual Reflections of a Christian Geneticist”, and I’m pretty sure the fifth word slipped in there entirely by mistake — and it is a genuinely appalling load of rubbish. It’s two hours long, but I could only make it through the first half hour before having to give up. I thought I had a strong stomach from years of wading through the creationist literature, but I guess I have limits.

I ran away in exasperation at the point where he starts babbling about the fine-tuning argument, claiming that there are only two possible choices: either there is a multiverse with an infinite number of possibilities to explore, or the cosmic constants were chosen by his god. What about chance? There’s nothing impossible about the fact that our universe was the product of a chance event: after all, I am the product of a chance event, a randomized mixture of the genes of two people equally the product of chance. You can’t simply rule out the importance of chance events in the history of individuals or the universe, but Collins does. And what about necessity? It may be that a universe can only exist if it possesses an interlocked set of constants…that, in fact, all the parameters of the universe are co-contingent and co-dependent.

Anyway, I’ve read his book, but I hadn’t experienced the full force of his looniness until I’d seen that presentation. The man is a flaming idjit.

US New and World Report weighs in, too, and asks a couple of reasonable questions that I have to answer in the negative.

But isn’t it possible that Collins’s faith might be valuable for NIH beyond its PR power?

From spending some time with him, it appears that Collins’s scientific curiosity is at least partially motivated by a faith-based desire to understand what he believes is God’s universe. Isn’t that a net positive, given that it helped him lead the team that decoded the human genome?

And might not his faith lend guidance on inevitable questions he’ll face around scientific ethics? Don’t those ethics have to be rooted in some moral or religious system that transcends pure science?

Curiosity is a fine thing and I have to encourage any wellspring for it. However, the defining feature of Collins’ faith, and that part of it that makes it objectionable, is that he uses it to wall off parts of the human world from curiosity. The human genome project was a technological exercise, a sustained, disciplined effort to apply developing tools to a specific, narrow problem. It opens up new avenues for science, but in itself was not a demonstration of scientific competence. His administrative ability led the work to a conclusion, not his scientific skill set.

And what has he done with it afterwards? Declared the genome a divine artifact, decreed that certain domains, such as human behavior and morality, are exempt from scientific scrutiny, and proposed a succession of freakish Christian dogmas as substitutes for reasoned analysis. At this point, where the real science takes over, his faith only gets in the way.

And please, don’t ever equate faith with ethics. They have nothing to do with each other, except, perhaps, that faith is a commonly used escape clause to get away from the requirements of human morality. Science itself is a tool, as amoral as a hammer, and it certainly can be misused, but don’t go crawling to the priests for guidance. Let’s hear from philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and lawyers long, long before we consult with theologians—I can’t imagine a worse fate for scientific ethics than for it to fall under the sway of a dogmatic Christian.

Russell Blackford takes a pragmatic approach: we’re stuck with Collins, there isn’t much we can do to oppose his appointment, and we can’t even make the argument that he’s a crummy bureaucrat — he’ll do a competent job in the office. I agree completely. There really are no plans for the godless horde to march on Washington, there will be no effigies burnt, we aren’t going to even throw rotten tomatoes at the NIH building. We will sigh and go on.

However, we will continue to make quiet complaint, and we will be scrutinizing his actions carefully.

The situation is this: the White House has picked for high office a well-known scientist with a good track record in management who wears clown shoes. Worse, this scientist likes to stroll about with his clown shoes going squeak-squeak-squeak, pointing them out to everyone, and bragging about how red and shiny and gosh-darned big his shoes are, and tut-tutting at the apparent lack of fine fashion sense exhibited by his peers who wear rather less flamboyant footwear.

I would rather Obama had appointed someone who wore practical shoes, and didn’t make much of a fuss about them, anyway. And excuse me, but I don’t want American science to be represented by a clown.

Another review of Unscientific America

As is his habit, Jason Rosenhouse has begun a long review of Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s book. It won’t be giving too much away to say that he gives it a “Mixed, but generally negative” review. I know M&K will only present the positive side on their site (as I’m only going to emphasize the negative), but overall I think “Mixed, but generally negative” is the growing consensus about their book.

I know Mooney has the ability to put together a solid story, as he showed in The Republican War on Science and Storm World — it’s too bad he chose to go the shallow and substanceless route in this book. I hope he does better in his next.

Sam Harris on Collins’ appointment

Sam Harris has published a piece in the New York Times decrying the appointment of Francis Collins to head the NIH. It’s strong stuff; he points out that Collins isn’t just a Christian, he’s an active science-denier who has set aside whole blocks of scientific inquiry as inaccessible to study because they are a product of a divine being. As he asks at the end, “Must we really entrust the future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who sincerely believes that a scientific understanding of human nature is impossible?”

The strongest part of the essay, in my opinion, was that Harris directly quotes Collins’ own words, and they are not encouraging. Most specifically, he includes the text of slides from a talk Collins gave at UC Berkeley in 2008:

Slide 1: “Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.”

Slide 2: “God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.”

Slide 3: “After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house’ (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with an immortal soul.”

Slide 4: “We humans used our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.”

Slide 5: “If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?”

My jaw just dropped when I read that. It is breathtakingly vacuous. How does Francis Collins know any of that? Those conclusions are not anything we could draw from any scientific evidence, and there’s the head of the human genome project throwing around quaint Christian dogma as if it were reasonable and valid.

That last one really irritates, too — it’s the familiar anti-atheist canard that atheists cannot know any truly moral behavior, that the only genuine sense of morality arises out of obedience to an authority, especially an invisible but omnipotent authority. Collins is a man who does not trust the godless people in his communities because, to his mind, they are blind to good and evil.

I know evil when I see it. A priest taking advantage of his presumed moral authority to take young boys into the dark and private rooms of his church to rape them is evil, I think. Not because a god has whispered a rule into my head, but because I know that the successful relationships that build a cooperative network within the framework of my society are all formed on mutual trust, and that is a violation. We test these bonds of mutual support all the time, we rely on them, and we know from history that their loss contributes to social decay.

We also contain biological imperatives that strengthen those bonds. We know good when we see it, too: kindness, self-sacrifice, and charity move us, not because we are ordered to do so by an imaginary god, but because we can feel empathy for others, and yes, evolution has shaped individuals to respond with affirmation to actions that reinforce the community. That’s how we survive and succeed.

I have to turn Collins’ statement around against him. If god does not exist, if religion is a byproduct of the evolution of the mind, then there is no reason to obey him. It’s all an illusion. You’ve been hoodwinked. Are you devout Christians really prepared to live your lives in reality? And if you aren’t, why should we trust you in positions of power?

Home alone

I have been abandoned. My wife has left me. The kids have all moved out. I’m stuck home alone with nothing to do but work and take care of the annoying cats for a whole week, and I may just go insane.

The Trophy Wife has gone to summer camp! She’s working for a week as a camp counselor at Minnesota’s Camp Quest, the secular place for smart kids to be. I’m thinking I should probably demand, as a price for forcing me to bach it for all this time, some kind of direct report from her at the end of the week that I could post here and get everyone excited about sending their kids (or spouses) away for a while.

I’d say that I should get her to send me daily updates on the events there, but I think she’s going to be busy. As it is, all I’ve heard so far is that they have luxurious new cabins and great food. I had leftover tuna casserole for dinner last night, just sayin’.

Scientology values

Some leaked documents from the Church of Scientology reveal their priorities — these are papers they require new staffers to sign, and there is no way anyone in their right mind would sign them. The gist is that they want your promise that you are financially solvent, so that nothing can cause you to pull back from your “commitment to the church”, and then there are a whole lot of threatening agreements: you’ll have to pay a ‘penance’ to the church if you leave, you can never, ever sue or hold the church liable for anything, and the church is not under any circumstances obligated to fulfill anything they ever promise.

It’s amazing stuff, but I have to give the scientologists credit for at least being honest with their acolytes.

Solution: blame scientists, add fluff

Mooney and Kirshenbaum continue their campaign with an op-ed in the Boston Globe, which, as we all know, has rigorous standards. Their explanation for scientific illiteracy in America is simple: it’s the scientists’ fault for being so aloof and distant. Their solution is also simple: philanthropists and universities need to give more money to employ media-savvy scientists. How…nice.

I will say one good thing about their op-ed, though. It contains the full content of their entire book. Read the essay, now you don’t need to buy the book, since it covers it fully, including all the non-existent details for how to actually implement their solution.

I must offer a significant criticism, however. They start out by pointing out that most scientists accept the evidence for global warming, while only about half the general public does. Right away, the comments start coming in complaining that AGW is wrong. Don’t M&K know they aren’t supposed to feed the conflict or stir up controversy or throw out ideas the public will find disagreeable? Where’s the civility?

Those awful ads

It’s annoying. Garbage is thriving: the Discovery Channel is running ads for the Creation “Museum”, and our very own scienceblogs is intermittently running an ad for creationist literature. There are a couple of things to know about this. One is that the economy sucks, and the media, in particular are struggling. Science media especially are suffering, so everyone is scrambling to scrape up whatever revenues they can. The other thing to notice is that in a down economy, faith-based lies and wishful thinking are cheap to produce and continue to sell, so that’s what’s happening. There isn’t much we can do other than to grab every penny we can from them.

With that in mind, here’s something I’d like you all to do. Go to that obnoxious creationist ad that keeps appearing here, and take them up on their offer of a FREE booklet. Order it, I did, and it really is free — they don’t ask for a credit card number, there are no hidden shipping fees, but they probably will stick your name and address on a mailing list of the gullible (don’t worry, though, you aren’t, so you are contaminating their list).

It says it takes two to four weeks to ship. As soon as I get mine, I’ll open up a thread here with the same title as the book, and we shall all join in a gleeful public evisceration of their crappy little booklet. If you’ve got a blog, put a critical dissection of the book there and send me the link, and I’ll add it to the post. We’ll give them publicity, all right, but it will be the harshest, nastiest, meanest publicity possible — we will do everything we can to make sure that when someone googles their organization or their booklet, all that comes back is a mountain of snarling contempt.

It’ll be fun.

Hang on, some of you are getting this completely wrong. DO NOT HAVE THE BOOKLET SENT TO A FAKE ADDRESS. This is not a campaign to make creationists waste lots of money and generate lots of garbage in landfills—it is an exercise in informed analysis. You are supposed to have the booklet sent to yourself, so you can read it, and you can critique it. We’ll then have a discussion about its failures. You won’t be able to participate if you haven’t read the silly thing, now will you?

Also do not have it sent to random people you don’t like. They won’t bother to criticize it here, either.

Numbers and Nelson dislocate shoulders with strenuous back-patting

Ron Numbers is a very smart fellow, a historian of science, who has done marvelous work on the history of creationism. Paul Nelson is a Discovery Institute Fellow, a young earth creationist (but an amazingly fuzzy one), and, unfortunately, very long-winded. Bloggingheads has brought Ronald Numbers and Paul Nelson together in a dialog. I can hardly believe I listened to the whole thing — I was working away at other stuff while it was playing in the background, so it wasn’t a total waste of time — but it was incredibly boring. Both parties were so determined to be nice to each other that they spent the whole time agreeing with each other, and never wrestled with their differences. It was an epic collision of titanic marshmallows; no one was bruised or dented, but afterwards, everyone involved was sticky and gooey. It just fills one with a desire to wash one’s hands and maybe take a shot of some good scotch to get back a little sharpness and bite. Conviviality is a fine thing in an appropriate social situation, but in a discussion of matters of substance, it can be a toxic sludge that obscures differences and impedes the achievement of any real understanding.

A few interesting comments managed to untangle themselves from the treacle. Numbers made the useful point that religion achieves compatibility with science when it recedes into the background and simply accepts whatever science discovers as what the gods have been doing. That’s fine with me; he didn’t come right out and say, though, that religion lacks any method to actually determine the truth of any statement about the world.

Nelson brought up a hypothetical (a common tactic of his): if an intelligent designer created and planted the very first cell in the ocean a few billion years ago, could methodological naturalism determine that? His point was that if it had actually happened — whether a deity conjured that cell into existence, or a passing alien spacecraft flushed its space toilets as it passed by — it would be undetectable to the tools of methodological naturalism, and therefore it is a flawed procedure.

Numbers had a couple of answers to that. One was to compare it to his field of history, in which everyone knows some information is always lost over time. That does not mean that history cannot work, but simply that we always acknowledge that we cannot possibly know everything. He also made the pragmatic argument that methodological naturalism has been eminently successful, and is a tool that allows even the most evangelical Christian to be a successful scientist, and that breaking that down is an expense we should be unwilling to pay.

What he failed to mention, though, is that Intelligent Design creationism does not fill the gap in our knowledge. They have no tools in place to detect a great cosmic space poof (or flush) that occurred 3 billion years ago, either. What is their way of knowing that succeeds where science fails? Where is their evidence? The failings of ID creationism were not brought up, however, perhaps because it would breach civility on the spot.

The only point where they got spiritedly critical, but not with each other (they still agreed entirely with each other) was — and you knew it had to be this — was in damning those damned damnable atheists. A major problem here was that Jerry Coyne’s book, Why Evolution Is True, was made the target, Paul Nelson glibly mischaracterized the book, and Numbers obligingly accepted his mangling. They spent a fair amount of time flogging a dead horse filled with straw, or some such unholy metaphor.

Nelson claimed that Coyne’s book is “soaked in theology”, that it was one big theological argument from beginning to end, and compared it to a hypothetical (again!) situation in which aliens landed, asked us to explain evolution, and Coyne begins by telling them the Christian myth, and how it is all wrong.

I’ve read the book. Nelson was not describing any book I’ve read.

His example was to talk about the argument from imperfections, the fact that many of the points Coyne made as evidence of evolution were from sub-optimal adaptations, or historical relics. Nelson has made this argument many times before; he says that it is an attempt to judge what a rational god would do, finding differences from our expectations, and then using those to argue against religion…a purely theological plan and conclusion.

Numbers chimed in to agree vigorously, pointing out that imperfections are no argument against creationism, because creationists believe in a flawed world as a consequence of the Fall. I know this. It is irrelevant.

The argument from biological imperfections is not theological, no matter how vociferously Nelson asserts that it is, because no biologist is simply saying what he claims they are; the interesting part about imperfections like the recurrent laryngeal nerve or the spine of bipeds or mammalian testicles isn’t simply that they seem clumsy and broken in a way no sensible god would tolerate, but that evolution provides an explanation for why they are so. We can build a case that these structures are a product of historical antecedents, and have a positive case for them as consequences of common descent. Nelson is misrepresenting the argument, and Numbers just went along with it.

Then, of course, talking about Coyne leads into some Dawkins-bashing. Coyne and Dawkins are going beyond the conventional boundaries of science, Numbers says, and he doesn’t like theological conclusions being made from empirical work; evolutionary biology doesn’t and can’t tell us much of anything about god.

Bullshit.

When you’ve got a specific theological claim, such as that the earth is only 6,000 years old (or, in Nelson’s uselessly blurry version, is simply much younger than geology says), then science certainly can weigh in on a theological claim. It can say that that specific claim is wrong. We can whittle away at virtually every material claim that religions make, and reduce them to an empirical void — the Catholic Church, for instance, officially goes along with the scientific observations of evolution, and simply adds an untestable, immaterial claim on top of it, that there was some moment of “ensoulment” that corresponds to the literary metaphor of Adam and Eve. Science can’t disprove that, but what it means is that they are diminished to making pointless claims about invisible, unobservable entities being magically added invisibly and immaterially to people at a distant time and place that they cannot name.

It was a frustrating discussion. If either of them had been having a dialog with Dawkins or Coyne, then this would have been an interesting tack to take, because then they would be arguing over differences, and maybe some reasonable arguments would have emerged (entirely from the Dawkins/Coyne camp, of course). As it is, the two simply dodged their own deep differences to find common, non-antagonistic cause in bashing positions neither understood that were not represented by anyone in their dialog.

At the end, Numbers says one thing that really made me roll my eyes: “One thing that is not welcome in the science and religion debates is people in the middle.” It’s so true. When you are debating over straightforward questions, like “evolution vs. creation” or “god vs. no god”, the position in the middle is non-existent, and people who try to waffle about, refusing to answer the question, are definitely not welcome. They’re only there to add noise and confusion.