Dharma

Around 1990 I went to a talk by Ram Dass and he retold a story about the nature of dharma. I suspect that I do not have all the facts right, but I know that this story is true. It was told to him by a doctor who worked on smallpox vaccinations for the World Health Organization in the 1970s. (I do not recall him saying so, but I believe it must have been Dr. Larry Brilliant.)

The WHO sought to completely eliminate smallpox from the biosphere. (They eventually succeeded.) This was one of those things where reaching 80% of people was 20% of the work and reaching the remaining 20% of people was 80% of the work. Eventually there were just a few pockets of unvaccinated people whom the WHO had mapped.

One of these was a small, remote village in India where the people refused to accept the vaccinations. The doctors had come to the village and explained about smallpox vaccination and the people were horrified by the prospect: they regarded contracting smallpox as a blessing from the goddess शीतला माता.

Being the kind of people who join a WHO project to vaccinate people around the world against smallpox, the doctors feel deeply torn about what to do. On the one hand, they know all the horrors of history which they would be evoking by violating the deep cultural and religious commitments of an isolated, pre-industrial village “for their own good”. On the other hand, eliminating 99.9999% of smallpox and eliminating 100% of smallpox are categorically different things, and enormous human suffering was at stake.

The WHO team spent a long time trying to find a way to get this community to accept the vaccinations, but nothing worked. They were at a true impasse.

The WHO team eventually landed on the side of The Needs Of The Many and went to the village to vaccinate everyone by force. They brought soldiers with them because the plan was to literally grab people and hold them down. They brought a lot of soldiers because they were determined to do this without anyone getting hurt. The process was every bit as wrenching as one would imagine. There were people running and screaming and thrashing as they were held, desperately trying to avoid the vaccination.

In time the deed was done and everything went quiet. What now? The story goes that there was a long moment in which a village elder whom the doctor had talked with at length looked him in the eye, with an emotion he could not place. Not anger. Not sadness. Something else. The old man retreated to his hut and returned with an edible gourd and a large knife. He used the knife to split the gourd. He offered the bigger half to the doctor, and said:

“It is our dharma to know that smallpox is a blessing to be sought. It is your dharma to know that smallpox is a curse to be prevented. Today all of us lived our dharma well. And there are many more of you than there are of us.

“This is what we all knew must happen.

“So now we celebrate.”

And the village held a feast at which the doctors were honored guests.

I am blessed that it was my dharma to go to the talk where Ram Dass told me that story.

Humans are scary

I wind up looking this up a few times a year, and I've never found a sufficiently legible version to satisfy me, so I'm cooking up one of my own.

It’s funny how science fiction universes so often treat humans as a boring, default everyman species or even the weakest and dumbest.

I want to see a sci fi universe where we’re actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species.

How do we know our saliva and skin oils wouldn’t be ultra-corrosive to most other sapient races? What if we actually have the strongest vocal chords and can paralyze or kill the inhabitants of other worlds just by screaming at them? What if most sentient life in the universe turns out to be vegetable-like and lives in fear of us rare “animal” races who can move so quickly and chew shit up with our teeth?

Like that old story “they’re made of meat,” only we’re scarier.

---

HOLY SHIT THEY EAT CAPSAICIN FOR FUN

YOU GUYS I HEARD A HUMAN ONCE ATE AN AIRPLANE.

A HUMAN CAN KEEP FIGHTING FOR HOURS EVEN AFTER YOU SHOOT IT

humans are a proud warrior race with a pantheon of bloody gods: Ram-Bo, Schwarzenegger, etc.

REMOVING A LIMB WILL NOT FATALLY INCAPACITATE HUMANS: ALWAYS DESTROY THE HEAD.

WARNING: HUMANS CAN DETECT YOU EVEN AT NIGHT BY TRACKING VIBRATIONS THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERE

WARNING: HUMANS CAN REPRODUCE AT A RATE OF 1 PER SPACEYEAR. DESTROY INFESTATIONS IMMEDIATELY

THE HUMAN MOUTH HAS OVER THIRTY OUTCROPS OF BONE AND POWERFUL JAW MUSCLES.

HUMAN BITES CAN BE FATALLY INFECTIOUS EVEN TO OTHER HUMANS

WARNING: HUMANS CAN AND WILL USE IMPROVISED WEAPONS. SEE CLASSIFIED DATA LABELED J. CHAN.

HUMANS CAN PROJECT BIOWEAPONS FROM ALMOST EVERY ORIFICE ON THEIR BODY. DO NOT INHALE

OH GOD THE HUMANS FIGURED OUT DOOR HANDLES OH GOD OH GOD

---

More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other animal. We often use the phrase “healthy as a horse” to connote heartiness — but compared to a human, a horse is as fragile as spun glass. There’s mounting evidence that our primitive ancestors would hunt large prey simply by following it at a walking pace, without sleep or rest, until it died of exhaustion; it’s called pursuit predation. Basically, we’re the Terminator.

(The only other animal that can sort of keep up with us? Dogs. That’s why we use them for hunting. And even then, it’s only “sort of”.)

Now extrapolate that to a galaxy in which most sapient life did not evolve from hyper-specialised pursuit predators:

• Our strength and speed is nothing to write home about, but we don’t need to overpower or outrun you. We just need to outlast you — and by any other species’ standards, we just plain don’t get tired.
• Where a simple broken leg will cause most species to go into shock and die, we can recover from virtually any injury that’s not immediately fatal. Even traumatic dismemberment isn’t necessarily a career-ending injury for a human.
• We heal from injuries with extreme rapidity, recovering in weeks from wounds that would take others months or years to heal. The results aren’t pretty — humans have hyperactive scar tissue, among our other survival-oriented traits — but they’re highly functional.
• Speaking of scarring, look at our medical science. We developed surgery centuries before developing even the most rudimentary anesthetics or life support. In extermis, humans have been known to perform surgery on themselves - and survive. Thanks to our extreme heartiness, we regard as routine medical procedures what most other species would regard as inventive forms of murder. We even perform radical surgery on ourselves for purely cosmetic reasons.

In essence, we’d be Space Orcs.

---

I do hope you realize I’m going to be picking up this stuff and running with it right?

---

Our jaws have too many TEETH in them, so we developed a way to WELD METAL TO OUR TEETH and FORCE THE BONES IN OUR JAW to restructure over the course of years to fit them back into shape, and then we continue to wear metal in out mouths to keep them in place.

We formed cohabitative relationships with tiny mammals and insects we keep at bay from bothering us by death, often using little analouge traps.

And by god, we will eat anything.

---

• We use borderline toxic peppers to season our food.
• We expose ourselves to potentially lethal solar radiation in the pursuit of darkening our skin.
• We risk hearing loss for the opportunity to see our favorite musicians live.
• We have a game where two people get into an enclosed area and hit each other until time runs out/one of them pass out
• We willingly jump out of planes with only a flimsy piece of cloth to prevent us from splattering against the ground.
• Our response to natural disasters is to just rebuild our buildings in the exact same places.
• We climb mountains and risk freezing to death for bragging rights
• We invented dogs. We took our one time predators and completely domesticated them.
• On a planet full of lions, tigers and bears, we managed to advance further and faster than any other species on the planet.

Klingons and Krogan and Orcs ain’t got shit on us

---

can we talk about how pursuit predation is fucking terrifying

it’s one thing to face down a cheetah, which will slam into you at 60 mph and break your neck

it’s another thing to run very quickly to get away from a thing, only to have it just kind of

show up

to have it be intelligent enough to figure out where you are by the fur and feather you’ve left behind, your footprints and piss and shit, and then you think you’ve lost it and you bed down for the night but THERE IT IS

WAITING

WHEN YOU WAKE UP

and you split! again! but it keeps following you. always in the corner of your eye. until you just

die

we are scary motherfuckers ok

More:

On the topic of humans being everyone’s favorite Intergalactic versions of Gonzo the Great:

Come on you guys, I’ve seen all the hilarious additions to my “humans are the friendly ones” post. We’re basically Steve Irwin meets Gonzo from the Muppets at this point. I love it.

But what if certain species of aliens have Rules for dealing with humans?

• Don’t eat their food. If human food passes your lips / beak / membrane /other way of ingesting nutrients, you will never be satisfied with your ration bars again.
• Don’t tell them your name. Humans can find you again once they know your name and this can be either life-saving or the absolute worst thing that could happen to you, depending on whether or not they favor you. Better to be on the safe side.
• Winning a human’s favor will ensure that a great deal of luck is on your side, but if you anger them, they are wholly capable of wiping out everything you ever cared about. Do not anger them.
• If you must anger them, carry a cage of X’arvizian bloodflies with you, for they resemble Earth mo-skee-toes and the human will avoid them.
• This does not always work. Have a last will and testament ready.
• Do not let them take you anywhere on your planet that you cannot fly a ship from. Beings who are spirited away to the human kingdom of Aria Fiv-Ti Won rarely return, and those that do are never quite the same.

Basically, humans are like the Fair Folk to some aliens and half of them are scared to death and the others are like alien teenagers who are like “I dare you to ask a human to take you to Earth”.

---

We knew about the planet called Earth for centuries before we made contact with its indigenous species, of course. We spent decades studying them from afar.

The first researchers had to fight for years to even get a grant, of course. They kept getting laughed out of the halls. A T-Class Death World that had not only produced sapient life, but a Stage Two civilization? It was a joke, obviously. It had to be a joke.

And then it wasn’t. And we all stopped laughing. Instead, we got very, very nervous.

We watched as the human civilizations not only survived, but grew, and thrived, and invented things that we had never even conceived of. Terrible things, weapons of war, implements of destruction as brutal and powerful as one would imagine a death world’s children to be. In the space of less than two thousand years, they had already produced implements of mass death that would have horrified the most callous dictators in the long, dark history of the galaxy.

Already, the children of Earth were the most terrifying creatures in the galaxy. They became the stuff of horror stories, nightly warnings told to children; huge, hulking, brutish things, that hacked and slashed and stabbed and shot and burned and survived, that built monstrous metal things that rumbled across the landscape and blasted buildings to ruin.

All that preserved us was their lack of space flight. In their obsession with murdering one another, the humans had locked themselves into a rigid framework of physics that thankfully omitted the equations necessary to achieve interstellar travel.

They became our bogeymen. Locked away in their prison planet, surrounded by a cordon of non-interference, prevented from ravaging the galaxy only by their own insatiable need to kill one another. Gruesome and terrible, yes - but at least we were safe.

Or so we thought.

The cities were called Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the moment of their destruction, the humans unlocked a destructive force greater than any of us could ever have believed possible. It was at that moment that those of us who studied their technology knew their escape to be inevitable, and that no force in the universe could have hoped to stand against them.

The first human spacecraft were … exactly what we should have expected them to be. There were no elegant solar wings, no sleek, silvered hulls plying the ocean of stars. They did not soar on the stellar currents. They did not even register their existence. Humanity flew in the only way it could: on all-consuming pillars of fire, pounding space itself into submission with explosion after explosion. Their ships were crude, ugly, bulky things, huge slabs of metal welded together, built to withstand the inconceivable forces necessary to propel themselves into space through violence alone.

It was almost comical. The huge, dumb brutes simply strapped an explosive to their backs and let it throw them off of the planet.

We would have laughed, if it hadn’t terrified us.

Humanity, at long last, was awake.

It was a slow process. It took them nearly a hundred years to reach their nearest planetary neighbor; a hundred more to conquer the rest of their solar system. The process of refining their explosive propulsion systems - now powered by the same force that had melted their cities into glass less than a thousand years before - was slow and haphazard. But it worked. Year by year, they inched outward, conquering and subduing world after world that we had deemed unfit for habitation. They burrowed into moons, built orbital colonies around gas giants, even crafted habitats that drifted in the hearts of blazing nebulas. They never stopped. Never slowed.

The no-contact cordon was generous, and was extended by the day. As human colonies pushed farther and farther outward, we retreated, gave them the space that they wanted in a desperate attempt at … stalling for time, perhaps. Or some sort of appeasement. Or sheer, abject terror. Debates were held daily, arguing about whether or not first contact should be initiated, and how, and by whom, and with what failsafes. No agreement was ever reached.

We were comically unprepared for the humans to initiate contact themselves.

It was almost an accident. The humans had achieved another breakthrough in propulsion physics, and took an unexpected leap of several hundred light years, coming into orbit around an inhabited world.

What ensued was the diplomatic equivalent of everyone staring awkwardly at one another for a few moments, and then turning around and walking slowly out of the room.

The human ship leapt away after some thirty minutes without initiating any sort of formal communications, but we knew that we had been discovered, and the message of our existence was being carried back to Terra.

The situation in the senate could only be described as “absolute, incoherent panic”. They had discovered us before our preparations were complete. What would they want? What demands would they make? What hope did we have against them if they chose to wage war against us and claim the galaxy for themselves? The most meager of human ships was beyond our capacity to engage militarily; even unarmed transport vessels were so thickly armored as to be functionally indestructible to our weapons.

We waited, every day, certain that we were on the brink of war. We hunkered in our homes, and stared. Across the darkness of space, humanity stared back.

There were other instances of contact. Human ships - armed, now - entering colonized space for a few scant moments, and then leaving upon finding our meager defensive batteries pointed in their direction. They never initiated communications. We were too frightened to.

A few weeks later, the humans discovered Alphari-296.

It was a border world. A new colony, on an ocean planet that was proving to be less hospitable than initially thought. Its military garrison was pitifully small to begin with. We had been trying desperately to shore it up, afraid that the humans might sense weakness and attack, but things were made complicated by the disease - the medical staff of the colonies were unable to devise a cure, or even a treatment, and what pitifully small population remained on the planet were slowly vomiting themselves to death.

When the human fleet arrived in orbit, the rest of the galaxy wrote Alphari-296 off as lost.

I was there, on the surface, when the great gray ships came screaming down from the sky. Crude, inelegant things, all jagged metal and sharp edges, barely holding together. I sat there, on the balcony of the clinic full of patients that I did not have the resources or the expertise to help, and looked up with the blank, empty, numb stare of one who is certain that they are about to die.

I remember the symbols emblazoned on the sides of each ship, glaring in the sun as the ships landed inelegantly on the spaceport landing pads that had never been designed for anything so large. It was the same symbol that was painted on the helmets of every human that strode out of the ships, carrying huge black cases, their faces obscured by dark visors. It was the first flag that humans ever carried into our worlds.

It was a crude image of a human figure, rendered in simple, straight lines, with a dot for the head. It was painted in white, over a red cross.

The first human to approach me was a female, though I did not learn this until much later - it was impossible to ascertain gender through the bulky suit and the mask. But she strode up the stairs onto the balcony, carrying that black case that was nearly the size of my entire body, and paused as I stared blankly up at her. I was vaguely aware that I was witnessing history, and quite certain that I would not live to tell of it.

Then, to my amazement, she said, in halting, uncertain words, “You are the head doctor?”

I nodded.

The visor cleared. The human bared its teeth at me. I learned later that this was a “grin”, an expression of friendship and happiness among their species.

“We are The Doctors Without Borders,” she said, speaking slowly and carefully. “We are here to help.”

Be careful which corpus you use

Twitter taught Microsoft’s AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less than a day

Manhattan-ish projects

So today I saw yet another of these stories where “Politician X calls for a new Manhattan Project to Do Some Impossible Thing”.

I don't want to pick on this particular politician right now (though I am mightily disappointed), I want to talk about learning the wrong lesson from the Manhattan Project.

Many people seem to think that the Manhattan Project shows that you can just order up any breakthrough you want and if you give enough scientists enough money, they will just cook it up for us. “Here's a trillion dollars, go invent an antigravity machine.”

That's not how it works.

FDR did not wake up one morning and say, “Hey, wouldn't it be great if we had a bomb that could blow up a whole city? Let's get our scientists working on that.”

No, it was a thing physicists thought of, not politicians or generals. Grad students had been standing at chalkboards through the late 1930s working out the cross-sections of uranium nuclei, and the difference in mass between uranium nuclei and their fission products, and saying, “Huh, it ought to be possible to make a mind-bogglingly powerful bomb”, half-joking and half-horrified. “Boy, it's a good thing that to really build something like that you'd have to deal with a bunch of weird engineering problems that would be hugely expensive to solve,” they would say, nervously.

Then after a few years of that the US was at war with Nazi Germany. American universities, as a result, were hosting an awful lot of German Jewish physicists who had emigrated because they saw the writing on the wall. Physicists got to talking. Who was the one person in the world who was best-qualified to crack the problem of making a fission bomb not at a blackboard bull session but in real life? Werner Heisenberg, obviously. And where was he? Still in Germany. What was he working on these days? Nobody knew for sure.

Other pieces were falling into place, too. Better and better understanding of chain reactions. Better and better techniques for handling uranium.

Ominous.

So some physicists got together and wrote a letter to the President of the United States explaining the potential for fission bombs. They got the most famous and respected scientist in the world, a German Jew named Albert Einstein, to sign it. And that led, ultimately, to the Manhattan Project and the Bomb.

The Bomb is so stunning and counterintuitive and such a dramatic demonstration of the power of technology to bend the Cosmos to our will — and the Manhattan Project such a dramatic example of a big, expensive, resource-intensive project bearing fruit that changes the world — that it creates the impression that anything is possible. But that is the wrong lesson.

Remember: the scientists came to the politicians with the proposal. Not the other way around. Because the Cosmos does not coöperate with what we want, and scientists are not short-order cooks.

Interventions

A long digression from a characteristically long post at Slate Star Codex, The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories, which I'd like to keep handy because it's just so great.

I’ve made this argument before and gotten a reply something like this:

“Transgender is a psychiatric disorder. When people have psychiatric disorders, certainly it’s right to sympathize and feel sorry for them and want to help them. But the way we try to help them is by treating their disorder, not by indulging them in their delusion.”

I think these people expect me to argue that transgender “isn’t really a psychiatric disorder” or something. But “psychiatric disorder” is just another category boundary dispute, and one that I’ve already written enough about elsewhere. At this point, I don’t care enough to say much more than “If it’s a psychiatric disorder, then attempts to help transgender people get covered by health insurance, and most of the ones I know seem to want that, so sure, gender dysphoria is a psychiatric disorder.”

And then I think of the Hair Dryer Incident.

The Hair Dryer Incident was probably the biggest dispute I’ve seen in the mental hospital where I work. Most of the time all the psychiatrists get along and have pretty much the same opinion about important things, but people were at each other’s throats about the Hair Dryer Incident.

Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.

It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer – and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.

So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”

And it worked.

She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.

And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car?

I, on the other hand, thought it was the best fricking story I had ever heard and the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back. If one day I open up my own psychiatric practice, I am half-seriously considering using a picture of a hair dryer as the logo, just to let everyone know where I stand on this issue.

Miyamoto Musashi is quoted as saying:

The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him.

Likewise, the primary thing in psychiatry is to help the patient, whatever the means. Someone can concern-troll that the hair dryer technique leaves something to be desired in that it might have prevented the patient from seeking a more thorough cure that would prevent her from having to bring the hair dryer with her. But compared to the alternative of “nothing else works” it seems clearly superior.

And that’s the position from which I think a psychiatrist should approach gender dysphoria, too.

Imagine if we could give depressed people a much higher quality of life merely by giving them cheap natural hormones. I don’t think there’s a psychiatrist in the world who wouldn’t celebrate that as one of the biggest mental health advances in a generation. Imagine if we could ameliorate schizophrenia with one safe simple surgery, just snip snip you’re not schizophrenic anymore. Pretty sure that would win all of the Nobel prizes. Imagine that we could make a serious dent in bipolar disorder just by calling people different pronouns. I’m pretty sure the entire mental health field would join together in bludgeoning anybody who refused to do that. We would bludgeon them over the head with big books about the side effects of lithium.

Really, are you sure you want your opposition to accepting transgender people to be “I think it’s a mental disorder”?

Anti-vax

For future reference: that comic strip explaining the spurious origins of the “research” supposedly demonstrating that the measles vaccine causes autism.

Fukushima

Dr. M at Deep Sea News is keeping an index of All The Best, Scientifically Verified, Information on Fukushima Impacts.

With all the misinformation around the internet here are links to articles that we trust. The following provide credible information about what is actually occurring and/or dispel myths about Fukushima radiation that are prevalent on the internet. I will not link to pseudoscience, misinformation, or outright lies in this post or allow them in the comments below. These posts and ideas have received far more attention and links than they deserve already. I provide the author, their credentials, a statement of the misinformation if applicable, the take home message, and my favorite quotes.

Deferring to expertise

A friend observes:

Listening to the nuclear power plant safety portion of John Hockenberry’s NPR show a few minutes ago, I suddenly had a moment of clarity about my own emotional biases. If I’m reading or listening to someone where most or all of what they think or claim has no admitted contradictions, no difficult choices, no acknowledged problems, no legitimate entry for debate or disagreement, nor confession of doubt or uncertainty, I fundamentally mistrust them at a very primal, emotional level, whether or not I know anything else about the issue at hand. The older I get and the more I know and have seen, I distrust even (perhaps especially) my own judgment in inverse proportion to how certain I feel about an issue.

And goes on to say:

Oh, there is a short road from this feeling to crippling self-doubt. It’s also a reason that academics in general are shitty communicators who over-qualify everything. This is really more a feeling than an argument — it’s a gut thing for me. In a way it makes me easy to manipulate in the other direction — all I need is someone who entertains some doubts and ambiguity and I’m foolishly reassured about what they want or think.

As someone who shares this same impulse — and thus of course sees it as a mark of sophistication — I take it as an adaptation to what Julian Sanchez calls “one way hash arguments.”

Sometimes the arguments are such that the specialists can develop and summarize them to the point that an intelligent layman can evaluate them. But often — and I feel pretty sure here — that’s just not the case. Give me a topic I know fairly intimately, and I can often make a convincing case for absolute horseshit. Convincing, at any rate, to an ordinary educated person with only passing acquaintance with the topic. A specialist would surely see through it, but in an argument between us, the lay observer wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which of us really had the better case on the basis of the arguments alone — at least not without putting in the time to become something of a specialist himself. Actually, I em a possible advantage here as a peddler of horseshit: I need only worry about what sounds plausible. If my opponent is trying to explain what’s true, he may be constrained to introduce concepts that take a while to explain and are hard to follow, trying the patience (and perhaps wounding the ego) of the audience.

Come to think of it, there’s a certain class of rhetoric I’m going to call the “one way hash” argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes. A one-way hash is a kind of “fingerprint” for messages based on the same mathematical idea: It’s really easy to run the algorithm in one direction, but much harder and more time consuming to undo. Certain bad arguments work the same way — skim online debates between biologists and earnest ID afficionados armed with talking points if you want a few examples: The talking point on one side is just complex enough that it’s both intelligible — even somewhat intuitive — to the layman and sounds as though it might qualify as some kind of insight. (If it seems too obvious, perhaps paradoxically, we’ll tend to assume everyone on the other side thought of it themselves and had some good reason to reject it.) The rebuttal, by contrast, may require explaining a whole series of preliminary concepts before it’s really possible to explain why the talking point is wrong. So the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely.”

If we don’t sometimes defer to the expert consensus, we’ll systematically tend to go wrong in the face of one-way-hash arguments, at least outside our own necessarily limited domains of knowledge. Indeed, in such cases, trying to evaluate the arguments on their merits will tend to lead to an erroneous conclusion more often than simply trying to gauge the credibility of the various disputants …

Update

Scott (whom I think is the same Scott Alexander of the excellent deeply problematic Slate Star Codex) calls his response to this epistemic learned helplessness.

I am obviously just gullible in the field of ancient history. Given a total lack of independent intellectual steering power and no desire to spend thirty years building an independent knowledge base of Near Eastern history, I choose to just accept the ideas of the prestigious people with professorships in Archaeology rather than the universally reviled crackpots who write books about Venus being a comet.

I guess you could consider this a form of epistemic learned helplessness, where I know any attempt to evaluate the arguments are just going to be a bad idea so I don't even try. If you have a good argument that the Early Bronze Age worked completely differently from the way mainstream historians believe, I just don’t want to hear about it. If you insist on telling me anyway, I will nod, say that your argument makes complete sense, and then totally refuse to change my mind or admit even the slightest possibility that you might be right.

Moon hoax

S. G. Collins offers us an entertaining and thoughtful little video about how implausibly hard it would have been to fake the Moon landings.

Benzene: the snake is a lie!

Malcolm W. Browne at the New York Times debunks one of my favorite science legends.

Of all the cases cited by psychiatrists, psychologists and historians of science to illuminate the role of symbolism in creative thought, none is more famous than August Kekule's somnolent vision of a snake biting its tail, a dream that supposedly revealed the true structure of the benzene ring to the German chemist.

But at least one historian now believes that Kekule never dreamed the snake dream, and that, in any case, the benzene ring had already been described by other chemists at the time Kekule claimed to have discovered it.

Cartoon from the amazing Rick Veitch. You should buy all of his books, especially his surreal retelling of the origin of Superman, The Maximortal.

Orrery

The information designers of Dynamic Diagrams have created a gorgeous online orrery showing the motion of the planets switchable between geocentric and heliocentric modes.

Among other benefits, it's a good work of propaganda for Copernicanism.

NASA Mission Control

Ars Technica has some amazing stuff describing the details of NASA's Mission Control Center. There's a long overview plus details of what each console is for.

Several of the consoles, though, are absolutely brimming with authentic Apollo panels. Sy's console in particular, the Electrical, Environmental, and Communications position, or “EECOM,” is one that approaches Apollo-era authenticity with its smorgasbord of buttons and lights. Being not made of stone myself, I leaned in and pressed buttons and controls as we walked, flicking back and forth the “ABORT REQUEST” toggle on the Flight Dynamics Officer's panel and toggling non-functional displays. There are no touch-screens here—the buttons are heavy and take a couple of pounds of pressure to depress, and they bottom out with solid metallic “CHUNK” sound.

As it should be.

Learning to program

So a bit ago I found this piece on Coding Horror about a fascinating paper demonstrating that the ability to program software depends upon an essential knack ... and that, stunningly, you can easily test for that knack.

It is as if there are two populations: those who can [program], and those who cannot [program], each with its own independent bell curve. Almost all research into programming teaching and learning have concentrated on teaching: change the language, change the application area, use an IDE and work on motivation. None of it works, and the double hump persists. We have a test which picks out the population that can program, before the course begins. We can pick apart the double hump. You probably don't believe this, but you will after you hear the talk.

Now via Gretchen Anderson I learn that Estonia is planning to teach programming to primary school kids starting in first grade. The big question in my mind is whether catching kids early enough will inscribe that talent into all of them. And if so, what are the implications for cognitive development?

Turtles all the way down

In case you're puzzled, that's a math thing.

Also: It turns out you can build a Turing complete computer out of Magic: The Gathering cards. Whoa.

Growing a Language

The talk “Growing a Language” by Guy Steele says a good thing that you may want to know about programming languages. Even if you do not know about programming languages, you may find it says a good thing about all languages, and says it in a smart way.

One can watch it or read it on the web.

Stick with it for a bit and all will be clear. Once you know the trick, you can skip to near the end if you do not care about programming languages. It has a good end.

Manhattan Projects

In a couple of recent conversations, I've heard folks invoke the Manhattan Project as a demonstration that given a vigorous enough government commitment, scientists can be directed to secretly invent the seemingly impossible. Unfortunately, that's just not true.

I think a lot of people imagine that one sunny day in 1942 the US government came to the scientific community and said, “we need a city-busting bomb, and we'll give you resources to do it,” and the scientists quietly whipped up the Bomb to order. But that is the reverse of the way it happened.

Physicists had been designing atom bombs on blackboards as a “thought experiment” since the 1930s. Seeing the theoretical possibility of the Bomb wasn't hard to figure out. It was the scientists who came to the government, aware of the potential to make the Bomb and horrified by the prospect that the Germans might develop it leaving the Allies at their mercy. It wasn't the conceptual difficulty of the Bomb which necessitated the mammoth effort of the Manhattan Project. Yes, having a large team of scientists did help do it more quickly, and resulted in the team delivering two different successful Bomb designs. But it was the materials problem of separating the uranium isotopes that required the magnitude of the Manhattan Project. Scientific discovery and technological invention do scale with investment, but only to a degree.

And as a secret effort, the Manhattan Project may be unique. Obviously we still have secret military research in the US, and totalitarian nations can conduct big secret projects, but it's difficult to imagine keeping something as big as the Manhattan Project under wraps again. Scientists tend to be garrulous and iconoclastic; only the uniquely galvanizing threat of Hitler with the Bomb could have kept so many of them both engaged and careful to keep the secret.

Happy Pi Day

I remember seeing this trailer and thinking, “Thank God someone made this movie, so I wouldn't have to make it in order to get to see it.”

Apollo XI

Today I find myself thinking of how as the year 2000 approached there was lots of talk of the Greatest X of the 20^th Century or the Most Important Y of the Millenium.

When talk came around to the Greatest Artwork of the 20^th Century, I certainly had to respect folks who went with Guernica or Le Sacre du Printemps or Seven Samurai. But for me, it's no contest.

For what, other than art, can you call a human being standing on the surface of the Moon? Whatever other explanations one might offer, we went to the Moon not because it was useful, but for the same reason we do all art. We felt at some deep human level that it was simply too compelling an idea not to take the effort to make it happen.

What could be more human? We are curious monkeys. We will risk our lives to know something more about the world. Then, unsatisfied, we will risk our lives again to see it for ourselves. Then, unsatisfied, we will risk our lives again to touch it.

What could be more emblematic of the 20^th Century? It would have been impossible before: the integral role of technology, that great force of the century, is obvious. And with that there is also the role of technological hubris. The 20^th Century political order gave us governments able to gather the resources ... and driven enough by rivalry to invest those resources into it. Global communications meant that half a billion people could participate in it as it happened.

And to that last point, when we talk about it, we ordinarily say that “we went to the Moon.” Not those three astronauts, not NASA, not the United States of America. We went, all of us. In part as witnesses, yes, but also truly as participants, because doing it took just about everything we had. Everything we knew about nature, and technology, and the human frame ... the wealth of the world providing the resources to build the machines, and to support and train the people who did the work ... the wit and skill of people from around the world ... and everything our ancestors did to bring us to the place where we had enough to work with. All of us, even people like me who were not yet born, as the future witnesses who would make the act immortal.

What will be the greatest artwork of the 21^st Century? It's easy to say the next step, but that seems wrong to me. I like the idea of the Clock of the Long Now. But the century is young; it's more likely something I cannot imagine. Whatever it will be, it has a tough act to follow.

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Update: @vruba at Tupperwolf has a similar thought about Apollo and the Space Shuttle.

Space exploration is art, but we have to keep this secret. We must not say in public that it’s how humanity in a technological age reaches outside itself, how we find a mirror distant enough to see to our edges, how we face the void. Shhh.So people see space exploration as part of the military-industrial complex. And it is. Kind of.

Power wants what it doesn’t have, and it can’t have art. Art needs power’s materials and protection, but fears its responsibilities. Even when they come to terms, power never owns art, only a contract, and art is never safe, only sheltered. High on the cathedrals, the stonecarvers make satirical gargoyles. Space exploration is art, but we have to keep this secret. We must not say in public that it’s how humanity in a technological age reaches outside itself, how we find a mirror distant enough to see to our edges, how we face the void. Shhh.

We have grown some of the great monumental art of our time right on the institutions of fear and violence, like a bromeliad on the saggital crest of a rogue ape. We made a lot of awful compromises to do it. But we did it.

And @vruba also has some words about Earthrise and other things which I think you really out to check out.

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Update: As one would expect, on this subject Carl Sagan brings it.

Science art

Eat Me Daily describes Kevin Van Aelst's work as “food art,” missing the very important point that it is food science art. Tasty, tasty science art!

What's more, if you visit the art page on Mr Van Aelst's website, you learn that he has science art that is non-food-oriented.

Chemistry

Via Paul Witcover I learn that the chemistry party is perhaps even cleverer than the internet party.