As was noted yesterday, psycho-social cascades can often create a locked-in, socially mutually reinforcing perception in a society at large or in a polarised sub culture, that can continue indefinitely. Regardless of true facts and duties of care to fairness. This is why the wedge document canard is particularly pernicious in and around discussions of intelligent design and the design inference. Especially, when it is joined to the further canards that ID is creationism in a cheap tuxedo, and that “intelligent design creationism” represents a right wing, antidemocratic, anti-science, anti-progress, totalitarian theocratic conspiracy. This toxic caricature often goes so far as to suggest that design theory was created as a way to evade the force of US Supreme Court rulings Read More ›

From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong blog: Today I happened to come across a really wonderful discussion there though, and wanted to draw attention to it, even though it’s from a year ago. It’s entitled A View from an Ex-String Theorist and consists of a long piece by someone who has recently left string theory, as well as some answers to questions asked by others. If you want to understand what string theory looks like these days to good theorists who are working on it, read what “No_More_Strings” has to say. The suggestion that “string theorists” should stop calling what they do “string theory” is an excellent one. … If you didn’t have to start every grant application Read More ›

At Retraction Watch: A new study suggests that much of what we think about misconduct — including the idea that it is linked to the unrelenting pressure on scientists to publish high-profile papers — is incorrect. Some factors were associated with a higher rate of misconduct, of course — a lack of research integrity policy, and cash rewards for individual publication performance, for instance. Scientists just starting their careers, and those in environments where “mutual criticism is hampered,” were also more likely to commit misconduct. More. That makes sense. To argue the opposite is like saying that the need to make a profit causes car dealers to dump rolling coffins on their customers. Given the career-ending risks, there must be Read More ›

A commenterrecently reminded meof one of the many fundamental fallacies of evolutionary thought. When I point out problems with evolution, and make arguments against evolutionary thought, it is not because I am against the idea or want it to be false. Life would be much easier if the evidence simply supported evolution, if evolutionary thought was a stellar example of intellectual progress, if—to put it simply—evolution was an undeniable scientific fact, just as evolutionists insist. But it’s not. Evolution is not any of those. Evolution is not supported by the empirical evidence, it is not a rational, intellectual movement, and it is not a scientific fact, undeniable or otherwise. I’m not grinding a personal ax here, I’m simply pointing out Read More ›

Further to “Dawkins is destroying his reputation?” (He is now generally accepted as a figure of fun, when not just bloody offensive. A threat only to his allies.) Unless, of course, you bring your charge card. No, really. Lawyer and writer John Gilmore says of Dawkins’ visit to Rochester, Minnesota: The program began with an off-putting series of short videos, essentially haranguing the audience to become a member of the Richard Dawkins Foundation, with any number of membership levels available depending upon how much one wanted to pay in support of the cause. The similarity to televangelist pitches was so palpable that I couldn’t shake it off for the balance of the evening. Of course, other analogies to religion and Read More ›

It is worth pausing to pull up more from the rich motherlode of the Kuran-Sunstein Stanford law review article on opinion and reputation cascades, to help us understand what has been going on: >> the probability assessments we make as individuals are frequently based on the ease with which we can think of relevant examples.‘ Our principal claim here is that this heuristic interacts with identifiable social mechanisms to generate availability cascades—social cascades, or simply cascades, through which expressed perceptions trigger chains of individual responses that make these perceptions appear increasingly plausible through their rising availability in public discourse. Availability cascades may be accompanied by counter-mechanisms that keep perceptions consistent with the relevant facts. Under certain circumstances, however, they generate Read More ›

His repu—WHAAAA??? He is now generally accepted as a figure of fun, when not just bloody offensive. A threat only to his allies. Wee hours coffee: From The Guardian: Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation? These days, Dawkins describes himself as “a communicator”. But depending on your point of view, he is also a hero, a heathen, or a liability. Many of his recent statements – on subjects ranging from the lack of Nobel prize-winning Muslim scientists to the “immorality” of failing to abort a foetus with Down’s syndrome – have sparked outraged responses (some of which Dawkins read aloud on a recent YouTube video, which perhaps won him back a few friends). For some, his controversial positions have started to Read More ›

Philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze on a reasonable understanding of methodological naturalism. Galileo was a methodological naturalist because he was not a methodological supernaturalist, the only other option. Galileo was interested in the natural world, specifically the movements of the planets and their moons. He studied these movements via natural methods, i.e., he observed them through a telescope. He did not use supernatural methods in his studies. What might “supernatural methods” be? He might have written his questions about the solar system on slips of paper and burned them with incense in expectations of receiving visions explaining everything. Of course that “supernatural methodology” sounds very silly. I’m not aware of any serious Christian thinker who ever used that method of Read More ›

Because they are religious fanatics. Humans need to be part of something larger than themselves.  They also need to place their lives within a context that includes an account of origins.  For post-Christian liberals, the former need is served by environmental alarmism and the latter is served by Darwinism — the origins myth of the secular elite.          

David Penny of Massey University, New Zealand, says while discussing a paper, no. Abstract: It is not really helpful to consider modern environmental epigenetics as neo-Lamarckian; and there is no evidence that Lamarck considered the idea original to himself. We must all keep learning about inheritance, but attributing modern ideas to early researchers is not helpful, and can be misleading. Open access He also notes, Thus, I should welcome this paper (Skinner 2015) – but still think that the paper is problematic -perhaps I see it as not addressing quite the right issues, or not the right questions? There has been a recent controversy in Nature over whether evolutionary biology needs to be rethought (Laland et al. 2014 argue for Read More ›

O’Leary for News’ new media blog Russia’s amazing troll farm Welcome to the Russian troll house. Now flee! Will there still be science in 2020? Is truth mechanical? Or does it point to a larger reality? The internet is like the movies except that it talks back The question isn’t, as science fiction faddists ask, can a robot do your job? How much of the Internet is teen fiction? And how damaging is that? Would teens be helped by courses in Internet studies? The Internet can create holograms but not people New media do not help reduce social inequality. They may even increase it. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Today, I must postpone my intended next FTR, but I believe we will find very useful,  the Olin Foundation paper as captioned, with abstract: >>Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation Timur Kuran* and Cass R. Sunstein** An  availability  cascade  is  a self-reinforcing process  of  collective  belief formation  by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception  increasing plausibility  through its rising availability in public discourse.  The driving mechanism involves a combination of informational and reputational  motives:  Individuals endorse  the perception partly  by  learning from  the apparent  beliefs of  others  and partly  by  distorting their public  re- sponses in the interest of maintaining social acceptance.  Availability entrepre- neurs–activists  who manipulate the content of public  discourse-strive  to trig- ger  Read More ›

From Prager University, here. From transcript of audio: Now, if all you are is a brain, an exhaustively physical system of neurons and synapses, then there’s no “you” that’s gonna be making a “choice” at all. Your thought processes are basically just a complex series of colliding electron-dominos crashing into one another. It’s just physical cause and effect, right — something that can be exhaustively understood in terms of physics and chemistry? There’s no “you” that’s an agent that’s deliberating, or choosing, or exercising free will. And that’s why, if you are just a brain, you cannot have free will. You would just be a physical machine — a very complex but programmed computer. But, if you’re something more than Read More ›

… can afford so many administrators and pump up grades? And the problem of burgeoning bureaucracy helps explain some worrying trends, foremost being a perceptible decline in academic standards over time (it’s evident in grade inflation; there are three times as many Oxford Firsts now as there were 30 years ago) and — a lesser problem — the way private donors to the university are losing the run of themselves. You don’t have to dig deep to find academics enraged at how administration flourishes while faculties are cash-strapped. That also explains why students with no sympathy for academic or intellectual freedom just want to be educrats, not indebted baristas. That’s where the action is today in academic life. Prediction: It’ll Read More ›

By any reasonable measure the Global Warming Alarmists’ predictions have been utter failures.  Their solution:  Monkey with the data. Robert Tracinski reports A lot of us having been pointing out one of the big problems with the global warming theory: a long plateau in global temperatures since about 1998. Most significantly, this leveling off was not predicted by the theory, and observed temperatures have been below the lowest end of the range predicted by all of the computerized climate models.  So what to do if your theory doesn’t fit the data? Why, change the data, of course!  Hence a blockbuster new report: a new analysis of temperature data since 1998 “adjusts” the numbers and magically finds that there was no Read More ›