Culture

Not always how we think. Forewarned is forearmed. From Emerging Technology at MIT Review: How easy is it for malicious actors to distort the public perception of science? Today we get an answer thanks to the work of James Owen Weatherall, Cailin O’Connor at the University of California, Irvine, and Justin Bruner at the Australian National University in Canberra, who have created a computer model of the way scientific consensus forms and how this influences the opinion of policy makers. The team studied how easily these views can be distorted and determined that today it is straightforward to distort the perception of science with techniques that are even more subtle than those used by the tobacco industry. … Indeed, the Read More ›

Language requires a sense of agency and purpose is for meaningful speech. And Darwinists are looking for ways to change language, for that very reason. Friend have written to offer some helpful bibliography items along those lines: – Andrew Moore Editor-in-Chief, “We need a new language for evolution… everywhere,” BioEssays, Volume 33, Issue 4, page 237, April 2011 : It is about time that we stopped such  anthropomorphic terminology and thinking, and confronted the likelihood that – far from being ‘excusable short-hand’ – it is an important contributor to a false impression of evolution among many non-scientists. I feel that much of the ‘excuse’ for using terms that evoke will, direction and strategy in evolutionary processes is a problem of Read More ›

From Ferris Jabr at Smithsonian: It’s Official: Fish Feel Pain: Moreover, the notion that fish do not have the cerebral complexity to feel pain is decidedly antiquated. Scientists agree that most, if not all, vertebrates (as well as some invertebrates) are conscious and that a cerebral cortex as swollen as our own is not a prerequisite for a subjective experience of the world. The planet contains a multitude of brains, dense and spongy, globular and elongated, as small as poppy seeds and as large as watermelons; different animal lineages have independently conjured similar mental abilities from very different neural machines. A mind does not have to be human to suffer. More. Post-March for Life, we are all thinking the same thing, Read More ›

Today is the March for life in Washington DC. Speakers include: Rep. Paul Ryan, Pam Tebow, Matt Birk and others. We have someone on the ground from the UD family and will be giving updates as we get them across the day. Remember, globally, the abortion holocaust toll rises at a million or thereabouts per week, on Guttmacher-UN figures. The total since the early 1970’s exceeds 800 millions. For shame! So, developing: U/D No 1: I found a live stream here. (I won’t even try an embed with this one.) U/D 2: US Pres Trump is to address the MFL by satellite feed, 100,000 expected. A first. U/D 3: Live address is to be at 1 pm EST, and will Read More ›

From the Babylon Bee: One Oregon man, who rejects the idea that humanity can even be sure the universe exists in any meaningful sense, was nonetheless disturbed by the idea that websites could publish completely false information, for anyone in the world to read. “It’s just absolutely wrong, in my opinion,” said the man who doesn’t believe in absolute ideals of right and wrong at all. “What if someone reads the information and gets like, deceived? That just seems totally wicked.” More. Probably, the fabled Oregonian thinks that all news of which he disapproves is—for that very reason—fake. It makes sense. He feels he should have the power to shape the world or else command that news which he disapproves Read More ›

Devolution means that a life form jettisons valuable qualities just to survive, often by becoming  parasite or “freeloader” (see below). From Nancy Pearcey at CNS: King’s vision of equal rights is no longer “self-evident” to many of America’s opinion makers in media, politics, and academia. Why not? Because they have embraced secular ideologies that sabotage King’s ideal. Listen in on some of the thinkers who are busy destroying King’s vision of inalienable rights. In a UNESCO lecture, the atheist philosopher Richard Rorty observed that throughout history, societies have excluded certain groups from the human family—those belonging to a different tribe, class, race, or religion. Historically, Rorty noted, it was Christianity that gave rise to the concept of universal rights, derived from Read More ›

From tech reporter Brian Bergstein at Technology Review: Is it possible to give machines the power to think, as John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, and other originators of AI intended 60 years ago? Doing that, Levesque explains, would require imbuing computers with common sense and the ability to flexibly make use of background knowledge about the world. Maybe it’s possible. But there’s no clear path to making it happen. That kind of work is separate enough from the machine-learning breakthroughs of recent years to go by a different name: GOFAI, short for “good old-fashioned artificial intelligence.” If you’re worried about omniscient computers, you should read Levesque on the subject of GOFAI. Computer scientists have still not answered fundamental questions that occupied Read More ›

From Daniel Engber at Slate: Ten years ago last fall, Washington Post science writer Shankar Vedantam published an alarming scoop: The truth was useless. … This supposed scientific fact jibed with an idea then in circulation. In those days of phantom Iraqi nukes, anti-vaxxer propaganda, and climate change denialism, reality itself appeared to be in danger. Stephen Colbert’s neologism, truthiness—voted word of the year in 2006—had summed up the growing sense of epistemic crisis. “Truth comes from the gut,” Colbert boasted to his audience. “Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you.” … Ten years on, the same scientific notions have now been used to explain the rise of Donald Trump. The coronation Read More ›

From sociologist Christian Smith at Chronicle Review: BS is undergraduate “core” curricula that are actually not core course systems but loose sets of distribution requirements, representing uneasy truces between turf-protecting divisions and departments intent on keeping their classes full, which students typically then come to view as impositions to “get out of the way.” BS is the grossly lopsided political ideology of the faculty of many disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences, creating a homogeneity of worldview to which those faculties are themselves oblivious, despite claiming to champion difference, diversity, and tolerance. … BS is the ascendant “culture of offense” that shuts down the open exchange of ideas and mutual accountability to reason and argument. It is university Read More ›

From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: With the publication of his exhaustingly researched and skillfully reported article, “LOL Something Matters,” science writer Daniel Engber convincingly demonstrated that the “backfire effect,” the notion that contradictory evidence only strengthens entrenched beliefs, does not hold up under rigorous scientific scrutiny. Bluntly stated, the “backfire effect” probably isn’t real. Of course the backfire effect “probably isn’t real.” It probably never could have been real. Market discipline, for example, requires people to change their minds frequently about the goods and services they use. If they did not do so, innovations would be rare instead of common. What’s really happening in many situations is that people decline to believe ideological or otherwise imposed “truths” that violate their Read More ›

From Sabine Hossenfelder at Quanta: Twenty-five particles and four forces. That description — the Standard Model of particle physics — constitutes physicists’ best current explanation for everything. It’s neat and it’s simple, but no one is entirely happy with it. What irritates physicists most is that one of the forces — gravity — sticks out like a sore thumb on a four-fingered hand. Gravity is different. Unlike the electromagnetic force and the strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity is not a quantum theory. This isn’t only aesthetically unpleasing, it’s also a mathematical headache. We know that particles have both quantum properties and gravitational fields, so the gravitational field should have quantum properties like the particles that cause it. But a Read More ›

From human evolution specialists Bernard Wood and Michael Westaway at The Conversation: The question of where we humans come from is one many people ask, and the answer is getting more complicated as new evidence is emerging all the time. … We now realise that modern humans are just one of the African great apes. Bl21So when and how did this radically changed perception come about? More. That’s nonsense and it will doom great apes. But we can be pretty sure post-moderns won’t care as long as they can blame someone else for whatever happens and their therapists give them something to make them feel better. Non-post-modern reality: Great apes are not “entering the Stone Age;” they risk extinction. IQ Read More ›

That’ll be dogma as post-modernism sinks in. Yesterday, we were discussing an extraordinary declaration of war on measurement from a dean of “engineering education”. Lawyer and impresario Edward Sisson offers some thoughts: Engineering is, of course, intelligent design grounded on accurate knowledge of the material world. First, for example, regarding the journal that published the paper, Riley states that “the Journal of Education Engineering [the Journal New Criterion said had published this] pre-emptively passed on publishing this work because it is not an empirical study.” As to the focus of her paper, “rigor,” she says “rigor in this context seems to refer to formal research questions, theoretical grounding, appropriate methodology (narrowly empirical and too often viewed as exclusively quantitative). In Read More ›

From Soul of Science co-author (with Charles Thaxton) Nancy R. Pearcey at Fox News, Silicon Valley’s drug-fueled, secret sex parties — One more reason to hate the hookup culture Before reaching campus, students are primed by high school sex education courses that typically focus on the physical: on the mechanics of sex and the avoidance of disease and pregnancy. These courses reduce the meaning of sex to a how-to manual. Many students even say the programs make them feel pressured into having sex. In one study, teens reported that they felt more pressure from their sex education classes than from their girlfriends or boyfriends. Other segments of adult culture are complicit in sexualizing children at ever-younger ages. Dolls for little Read More ›

From a study reported by political science prof Benjamin Knoll at HuffPost: – 37% reject God-guided evolution and believe in a literal Adam and Eve who were not the process of biological evolution. These Mormons have a more literalist/fundamentalist view. – 37% accept God-guided evolution as the origin of life on Earth but also believe in a literal Adam and Eve created by God and not the result of evolution. Perhaps many in this group believe Adam and Eve to be a special exception to the evolutionary process while accepting evolution as the most persuasive explanation for all other life. — 13% accept God-guided evolution and reject the idea that Adam and Eve were separately created by God outside of Read More ›