Francis Collins on Facts (!)

Posted on Tuesday 24 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Francis Collins on how facts don’t care how you feel;
  • Short pieces on Trump and golf; how brain damage is linked to religious fundamentalism; how Carlson and Vance are smart guys who play dumb; about Trump’s Truth Social posts; how Vance attacks the media for exposing his lies; how Trump’s rhetoric really does compare to Hitler’s; and how attacks against Harris’s Arizona office again reveal which side is prone to violence.

The main item today is remarkable because it’s a defense of facts by a scientist who famously converted to Christianity on the basis of seeing a waterfall that split into three parts. (See Wikipedia.) On those grounds alone, I would hesitate to trust anything he has to say about facts and feelings. (At the same time, a significant minority of scientists claim religious faith; they’re examples of how humans deal with cognitive dissonance.) Let’s give the piece a look.

NY Times, guest essay by Francis Collins, 20 Sep 24: Take It From a Scientist. Facts Matter, and They Don’t Care How You Feel. [gift link]

I am a physician and a scientist. Over 12 years, I had the privilege of serving Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden as the director of the National Institutes of Health. Before that, I led the U.S. component of the Human Genome Project.

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Utopias, Dystopias, and Tribalism

Posted on Monday 23 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Follow-up to yesterday’s topic about utopias and dystopias, and Star Trek;
  • How Trump and Vance have no idea about the reasons for Obamacare;
  • Robert Reich on how Trump appeals to base hatefulness;
  • Charles M. Blow on Trump’s bigger agenda;
  • And David Lay Williams appeals to Rousseau to explain Trump.

A follow-on to yesterday’s topic. About those dreams of utopias. At the risk yet again of oversimplifying a vast literature on no doubt complex and subtle themes, very roughly one might align utopias with democracies, egalitarianism, justice, and being ‘woke’; and dystopias with tribal values and demonization of other ‘tribes’ and being ‘anti-woke’. It all boils down to different psychological takes on how the world should be. That range will likely never change. (And in ways we can only dimly imagine, such diversity could well be beneficial for the long-term survival of the species.)

Star Trek, at its beginning, was a kind of utopia. Gene Roddenberry, the show’s creator, explicitly laid out a premise in which the ancient conflicts of the past (meaning the 20th century) had been overcome, and peace and understanding (this was the ’60s) ruled over all, even among some of the alien civilizations the Enterprise encountered. From the beginning writers complained that lack of conflict between characters made stories difficult to write. And over the decades, as the movies were made and subsequent TV series were produced, Roddenberry’s vision got pretty watered down. Even today, you see references to this or that episode in one of the series as one that “Gene Roddenberry would have hated.” Well, that’s narrative drift for you. The same thing happens in every franchise. Thus the sympathetic creature created by Dr. Frankenstein became a rote monster in virtually all the movies and sequels. And so on. Another topic.

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Now to cover a batch of the past few days’ media links.

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Posted in Conservative Resistance, Economics, Star Trek | Comments Off on Utopias, Dystopias, and Tribalism

Today’s New Insight

Posted on Sunday 22 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • What ‘woke’ means, to different people;
  • How the ancients overcame biases in understanding the world, in order to discover and navigate the world;
  • How moderns have tried to overcome cognitive biases through constitutions and “political correctness” and being “woke,” and have been bitterly opposed by conservatives, who prefer tribal morality, to this day;
  • And so the insight: the ancients overcame human psychological biases about the shape of the world, because they had economic incentives for doing so; yet despite their success, millennia later there are still flat-earthers. While attempts to overcome tribalist human nature has led to grand movements like the US Constitution, yet most people to this day prefer tribalist mindsets: see conservatives.
  • And so: human nature is inescapable. The dreams of utopias are likely only dreams.

This item on Jerry Coyne’s site today — combined with following the implications of thought in yesterday’s blog post — suggested to me a new fundamental insight.

Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, Are we past peak woke in America?

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Admitted Liars; Presumptions of the Ancients

Posted on Saturday 21 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Republicans repeatedly are admitting they lie;
  • How Republicans voters trust Trump as a source of election information;
  • Reading Timothy Ferris, revisiting the ancient astronomers and their presumptions about the universe — not unlike the modern discovery of psychology biases.

Increasingly, they’re saying it aloud, admitting that they’re lying because they can get away with it, and their goals justify it (a rationale I’ve long noticed).

AlterNet, David Badah, 19 Sep 2024: Yes, Republicans are lying — and they’re not going to stop: ‘Enjoy it’

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Alarmism About Culture

Posted on Thursday 19 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • A disgruntled French intellectual on “deculturation” sounds a lot like MAGA;
  • Shorter items about how a mother died due to Georgia’s abortion ban; how conservatives see everything they don’t like is a judgement from their God; how Trump supporters are subject to motivated reasoning and confirmation bias; Paul Krugman on how Trumponomics is even worse than “trickle-down” economics; about Trump’s superlatives and hyperbole; how Trump believes his own hype; and how Trump brags about reactions from an audience that wasn’t there.

NY Times, Joshua Rothman, 17 Sep 2024: Is Culture Dying?, subtitled “The French sociologist Olivier Roy believes that “deculturation” is sweeping the world, with troubling consequences.”

Heh. Haven’t read this yet, but it’s easy to imagine what he might claim. The solution would be about scope, and understanding inevitable change.

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Stories Are Not Evidence

Posted on Wednesday 18 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How the right “creates stories” to support their worldview (i.e. they’re all about motivated reasoning);
  • Paul Krugman on Trump, tariffs, Stalin, and Lysenko;
  • Items about DeSantis cheating and which party is the party of violence;
  • Items about a brain fever brought on by voting for Democrats; Satanic interdimensional invasions; and how Republicans think anyone unlike them is suspect, perhaps subhuman.
  • Trying to recall Bright Eyes, or Conor Oberst

Media Matters, Matt Gertz, 16 Sep 2024: MAGA runs wild with random poster’s “ABC whistleblower” claims, subtitled “How the right works to “create stories'”

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Passages from Brian Greene and Richard Dawkins

Posted on Tuesday 17 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

How unusual is this? An esteemed scientist, Brian Greene, with an Opinion piece in a major paper. (I just reviewed his book UNTIL THE END OF TIME ending here.)

Washington Post, Brian Greene, 16 Sep 2024: Opinion | Decades later, string theory continues its march toward Einstein’s dream, subtitled “Why we must keep investigating physics’ most tantalizing theory — even without experimental results.”

The gist about string theory is whether it “explains” anything except mathematically, though without generating predictions that might be experimentally tested. It goes to the very nature of what science is.

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Posted in Cosmology, Evolution | Comments Off on Passages from Brian Greene and Richard Dawkins

Education vs. Conservatives

Posted on Monday 16 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Why should a ‘diverse’ campus include conservatives who are essentially against education?
  • Paul Krugman on the eternal demonization of immigrants by conservatives;
  • Short items about Vance’s fantasies, his aim simply to get media attention, and Trump’s clueless accusations about harsh language.

Here’s a venerable issue that has an obvious answer.

NY Times, Jennifer Schuessler, 14 Sep 2024: Should a ‘Diverse’ Campus Mean More Conservatives?, subtitled “Republicans are demanding colleges embrace ‘viewpoint diversity.’ They aren’t the only ones who are concerned.”

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Posted in Conservative Resistance, Education, Politics | Comments Off on Education vs. Conservatives

Distrust of Science and of Public Schools

Posted on Sunday 15 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Thomas B. Edsall on the roots of MAGA’s distrust of science;
  • Hemant Mehta on evangelicals and public schools.

NY Times, guest essay by Thomas B. Edsall, 11 Sep 2024: MAGA vs. Science Is No Contest [Gift Link]

I’ve mentioned before that Edsall’s occasional columns are rather like my blog posts, in that they link and quote from a variety of different sources to illuminate a particular theme from various angles. This column is about conservative, in particular MAGA, antipathy toward science. Well, we know what. Can we extract any general principles? Rather that quote his quotes I’ll just bullet point the key ideas that jump out at me.

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Posted in Conservative Resistance, Education, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Distrust of Science and of Public Schools

Regression Toward the Tribal

Posted on Saturday 14 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Let’s see now. Here we are in the 21st century. In the past 500 years humankind has shown remarkable progress on two parallel fronts. Along governance: no longer was the divine right of kings (or tribal leaders) recognized; rather, principles of self-governance were developed, notably in the United States Constitution in which, supposedly, all men were “equal” at least before the law and as voting citizens. Along matters of science and understanding reality: no longer was authority on such matters granted to holy books and their spokesmen; rather consensus on reality was granted to the evidence of the world around us, along with a healthy system of self-criticism, so that errors in understanding would eventually be recognized and corrected.

Why is that “progress”? Because these systems enabled the human population of the world, as it expanded so that no one tribe (city/nation) could exist apart from all the others, to get along with one another, and agree upon a consensus reality.

And yet now, in parts of the US at least, they have apparently stopped working, and we’re beginning to see the consequences. In the US, a large portion of the population rejects democracy, and rejects science. Where will this lead us?

This week’s issue about Haitian immigrants in Springfield Ohio supposedly eating pet cats and dogs is utterly absurd and trivial, on its surface, and yet the more it endures in the daily news cycle, the more it represents the breakdown of the consensus reality that has enabled the United States, and the modern world in both the West and elsewhere, to endure and become powerful. I’ve wondered before if it’s possible for society and its technology to depend on a minority who do understand science and technology, even as most of the rest of the population disbelieves in it while nevertheless depending on it.

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The story about Haitians eating pets derived from a single Facebook post based on third- and fourth-hand reports. This is a classic lesson in understanding why not to believe anything based on secondary reports.

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Posted in Conservative Resistance, Epistemology, History, Human Progress, Politics, Science | Comments Off on Regression Toward the Tribal