Category Archives: View

View 716 Monday, March 05, 2012

I have just done a long essay on contraception as the answer to the first letter in the mailbag I just posted. There is a great deal more. That will have to do for today.

I will be back to work tomorrow.

James Q. Wilson, RIP.

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/james-q-wilson-co-author-of-broken-windows-policing-theory-dies-in-boston-at-age-80/2012/03/02/gIQAVVfqmR_story.html>

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Roland Dobbins

The following is probably evidence of approaching senility. I ought to delete it, but I won’t.

I first met James Q. Wilson at the 1978 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC. I was chairing some small panel or another, perhaps the one on the limits to knowledge, but my major purpose there was as Press. I was the science correspondent for the National Catholic Press, and Science Editor of Galaxy Science Fiction. Wilson was at that time known as ‘the ant man’. He had done considerable naturalist research on community insects (as had Rufus King at the University of Iowa). He had begun to apply his studies to human society and what was called sociobiology. Some of his suggestions were greatly resented by the Left, and particularly by SESPA, Scientists and Engineers for the People as I understood it, but apparently the official name was Scientists and Engineers for Political Action. In any event they were not invited to participate in Dr. Wilson’s discussion and presentation, so they decided in the usual leftist way to refute him with an intellectual argument. As Dr. Wilson began to speak, two of them ran forward and took the pitcher of water provided for the speaker and emptied it over his head, shouting “Wilson, you’re all wet!” There was much laughter.

This being February in Washington DC it could not have been a very pleasant experience, but Wilson took it with aplomb. There were several other SESPA in the room mumbling about, but when I began to get photographs of each one they left the room. Wilson present his paper on sociobiology and roles, and the thirty or so attendees applauded, and I invited Dr. Wilson for an Irish Coffee in the bar of the hotel where we were meeting. The Mayflower perhaps, or the Sheraton out on Connecticut; I don’t recall. I got a nice interview with him and a good story for the paper, and the germ of a Galaxy column. And of course one more story about the intellectual integrity of SESPA. I had previously got pictures of them storming a session conducted by Herrnstein of Harvard, Page of Connecticut, and Sidney Hook of New York. The slogan of the day was “Herrnstein, Hook, and Page. Let’s put them in a cage!” They also asserted their right to attend the session even though they were not registered for the AAAS conference and had no badges. This one took place in the Hilton in San Francisco.

I followed Wilson’s publications over the years, and was delighted when my son Richard was able to take several classes from Wilson as an undergraduate at UCLA.

Wilson was best known for his “broken window” observation: if in a deteriorating neighborhood broken windows and other signs of neglect are permitted to stand, the neighborhood will deteriorate rapidly; whilst if the appearances of order are preserved, there will be more orderly behavior there. The theory was adopted by the New York Police Department and is largely credited for the restoration of orderly civilization of much of New York. The NYPD Police Commissioner was hired to be Los Angeles Chief of Police and during his tenure here applied the principles to ‘neighborhood policing’ with a great reduction in crime rates in many neighborhoods. Those interested in community work and restoration of civilization would do well to read his On Human Nature, which looks at the influence of biology on behavior and culture.

My son was always glad to have him as a professor and took several classes with him at UCLA. Alas I never saw him teach. I should have taken the opportunity to go over the hill and have dinner with him; I am sure I could have waggled that by reminding him of the time when he was all wet. Alas I never did. RIP

And having written that I realize I am talking about two different Drs. Wilson. The Ant Man was the one I met in DC in 1978. He started sociobiology. James Q Wilson was a political scientist who came to prominence years later for his Broken Windows theories. Two minutes reflection would have shown me that these were not the same two people, but for some reason probably having to do with my head being stuffed up I managed to entwine the two in my head. The one who got the water pitcher poured over his head by SESPA was Edmund O. Wilson. Oddly enough I have books by both of them. I can only plead a temporary lapse of good sense.  I never met James Q. Wilson although I would have liked to; my son had several courses with him at UCLA.

That will teach me to write last minute addenda at midnight. Apologies. This does illustrate one of the advantages of being me: when I get something wrong, it doesn’t take long for someone to tell me I got it wrong. And boy did I get this one wrong.

View 716 Sunday, March 04, 2012

We went to the opera last night to see Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring. It’s the second time we have seen it. The first time was at the Ebell Theater before the Los Angeles Opera company was forming. We saw John Mack as Albert. After the LA Opera company was formed, back when my wife was involved with the Board of the Opera League, we used to go to a lot of opera social functions – that was back when I had best seller income – and I had a number of performer friends, John Mack among them. I never discussed Albert Herring with him, but in fact I had not liked it at all. Had nothing to do with his singing ability. I just hadn’t liked the opera, which I found pointless, no tunes, nothing memorable about the music, and only a couple of lines memorable as comic.

I didn’t expect to enjoy last night’s Albert Herring, and I was wrong, It was funny. The difference was the acting and stage direction, which made this comic opera an actual comedy. Of course the social lesson was the usual ‘progressive’ social message, about not being inhibited and not letting someone else dictate your social and sexual mores, but then that was hardly unexpected. The difference is that this production actually manages to be funny and to deliver its jokes in ways that make people laugh. One would suppose that wouldn’t be hard to do, when the subject is Victorian moral hypocrisies. But then there is C. S. Lewis, channeling the elder Tempter Screwtape in his letters to his nephew Wormwood, in Chapter XI of The Screwtape Letters. Lewis, a literary critic as well as “apostle to the skeptics”, had a keen sense of humor.

Screwtape says of the various techniques for turning mirth and joy, a gift of The Enemy, into something useful to the Infernal:

But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it,

Britten actually makes the jokes in this opera, and this time the stage director understood that this was a comedy as opposed to broad farce. All very well done.

There is some discussion of the Sandra Fluke kerfluffel, but it belongs in mail. I will put up the best of what I have received with comments when this is over.

The discussion of Climate Science continues as well, an in particular the question of whether this is “settled science”. One principal paper involved is found here

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02148/RSL-HouseOfCommons_2148505a.pdf and if you have never read it, you should. After I recommended it I got comments, which I posted with my replies at https://jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=5889 .

Today’s important paper is given here, which points to a comment by Robert Brown of the Department of Physics of Duke University, and which addresses directly the question of “settled science”. You need not follow the links in Watts’ presentation to find it; Watts presents it fairly and completely in the following link:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/02/why-cagw-theory-is-not-settled-science/

I urge you to read the paper as presented. It’s all there in the link above. I am no fan of the practice of taking a paper and interpolating remarks within it, because it breaks the thread of thought and is no more fair to a writer than constant interruptions of a speaker would be. After you have read Dr. Brown’s comments, you can come back here for my commentary on his.

I begin in the middle of Brown’s paper:

This process continues today. Astronomer’s observe the rotational properties of distant galaxies to very high precision using the red shift and blue shift of the stars as they orbit the galactic center. The results don’t seem to agree with Newton’s Law of Gravitation (or for that matter, with Einstein’s equivalent theory of general relativity that views gravitation as curvature of spacetime. Careful studies of neutrinos lead to anomalies, places where theory isn’t consistent with observation. Precise measurements of the rates at which the Universe is expanding at very large length scales (and hence very long times ago, in succession as one looks farther away and back in time at distant galaxies) don’t quite add up to what the simplest theories predict and we expect. Quantum theory and general relativity are fundamentally inconsistent, but nobody knows quite how to make a theory that is “both” in the appropriate limits.

When I read this I thought of Petr Beckmann, whose Einstein Plus Two attempts to do away with General Relativity in favor of a modified aether theory. Of course Beckmann explains why his view is consistent with the Michaelson-Morley Experiment and the other evidence generally taken as substantial proof of General Relativity. As I understand it, Beckmann’s theory may provide an explanation for the data from which we infer the existence of dark matter and dark energy. Beckmann did not address that because he died before anyone seriously proposed dark energy and there was very little scientific discussion of dark matter. Beckmann’s aether is the local gravitational field, and the explanation of the Michaelson-Morely experiment is that the local gravitational field is entangled, and rotates with the planet. Tom Bethell’s Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessay? does a reasonable job of explaining Beckmann in lay terms.

I have not the mathematical skill to present the argument, but Beckmann does it well. As to dark matter, I infer that if the aether is a local gravitational field, then that aether gets thinner and thinner between galaxies, and light travelling from far galaxies is much affected by that: moreover if it must pass through spinning galaxies on the way to Earth it will suffer a sea change. Note that my inference is pure speculation, and not due to any substantial work on my part.

The Great Climate Debate, however, is predicated from the beginning on one things. We know what the global average temperature has been like for the past N years, where N is nearly anything you like. A century. A thousand years. A hundred thousand years. A hundred million years. Four billion years.

We don’t, of course. Not even close. Thermometers have only been around in even moderately reliable form for a bit over 300 years — 250 would be a fairer number — and records of global temperatures measured with even the first, highly inaccurate devices are sparse indeed until maybe 200 years ago. Most of the records from over sixty or seventy years ago are accurate to no more than a degree or two F (a degree C), and some of them are far less accurate than that. As Anthony has explicitly demonstrated, one can confound even a digital electronic automatic recording weather station thermometer capable of at least 0.01 degree resolution by the simple act of setting it up in a stupid place, such as the southwest side of a house right above a concrete driveway where the afternoon sun turns its location into a large reflector oven. Or in the case of early sea temperatures, by virtue of measuring pails of water pulled up from over the side with crude instruments in a driving wind cooling the still wet bulb pulled out of the pail.

I have considerable experience in attempting to measure temperatures to a tenth of a degree, and I know how difficult that is; yet we are shown graphs and told to be alarmed by warming in the tenths of a degree. Attempts to question the consensus scientists on this subject have not resulted in any answer that satisfies me: that is, the data gatherers concede my point and say that they don’t really know how to get results accurate to a tenth of a degree over a wide area, and the modelers simply assume they have that data. When I point that out, I am usually given a lecture about oil company sponsorship of skeptics.

In truth, we have moderately accurate thermal records that aren’t really global, but are at least sample a lot of the globe’s surface exclusive of the bulk of the ocean for less than one century. We have accurate records — really accurate records — of the Earth’s surface temperatures on a truly global basis for less than forty years. We have accurate records that include for the first time a glimpse of the thermal profile, in depth, of the ocean, that is less than a decade old and counting, and is (as Willis is pointing out) still highly uncertain no matter what silly precision is being claimed by the early analysts of the data. Even the satellite data — precise as it is, global as it is — is far from free from controversy, as the instrumentation itself in the several satellites that are making the measurements do not agree on the measured temperatures terribly precisely.

In the end, nobody really knows the global average temperature of the Earth’s surface in 2011 within less than around 1K. If anybody claims to, they are full of shit. Perhaps — and a big perhaps it is — they know it more precisely than this relative to a scheme that is used to compute it from global data that is at least consistent and not crazy — but it isn’t even clear that we can define the global average temperature in a way that really makes sense and that different instruments will measure the same way. It is also absolutely incredibly unlikely that our current measurements would in any meaningful way correspond to what the instrumentation of the 18th and 19th century measured and that is turned into global average temperatures, not within more than a degree or two.

This complicates things, given that a degree or two (K) appears to be very close to the natural range of variation of the global average temperature when one does one’s best to compute it from proxy records. Things get more complicated still when all of the best proxy reconstructions in the world get turned over and turned out in favor of “tree ring reconstructions” based upon — if not biased by — a few species of tree from a tiny handful of sites around the world.

Precisely. Brown then goes on to his conclusion

No matter what, we will be producing far less CO_2 in 30 years than we are today. Sheer economics and the advance of physics and technology and engineering will make fossil-fuel burning electrical generators as obsolete as steam trains. Long before we reach any sort of catastrophe — assuming that CAGW is correct — the supposed proximate cause of the catastrophe will be reversing itself without anyone doing anything special to bring it about but make sensible economic choices.

In the meantime, it would be so lovely if we could lose one single phrase in the “debate”. The CAGW theory is not “settled science”. I’m not even sure there is any such thing.

I agree with his last paragraph. I am intrigued by the notion that we will be producing less CO2 in future, and I am not at all certain of it. That I need to think about more.

But I urge you to read his entire paper. It’s not that long, and it asks the right questions.

View 715 Saturday, March 03, 2012

When I was a lad, women and girls did not openly discuss their sex life, and those who attended Catholic institutions were expected to at least pretend that they believed chastity was a virtue. There was then, as there is now, opposition from within the Catholic church from those who believe the Catholic doctrine on contraception to be an error, but it was not often a matter of public discussion.

Sandra Fluke, a thirty year old women’s rights advocate and third year law student at Jesuit run Georgetown University, has a different view. She insisted on testifying at a House of Representatives hearing on the Obamacare mandate requiring all businesses to provide employee health care, and mandating what should be covered in that government mandated health care package: she wanted to talk about the mandate to provide free contraception prescriptions for everyone covered by these mandated health insurance packages. Georgetown, like all Catholic institutions, does not provide abortion as part of its health insurance package, and she wanted to speak for the Georgetown women who would now be desolated because they don’t now get free contraception. When the Congressional committee that was hearing the matter failed to call her to testify she complained bitterly, and was invited by minority Member Nancy Pelosi to be interviewed and state her case.

Before Pelosi’s intervention but after Chairman Darrell Issa (Rep,. CA) declined to invite her to testify, she gave interviews.

Fluke came to Georgetown University interested in contraceptive coverage: She researched the Jesuit college’s health plans for students before enrolling, and found that birth control was not included. “I decided I was absolutely not willing to compromise the quality of my education in exchange for my health care,” says Fluke, who has spent the past three years lobbying the administration to change its policy on the issue. The issue got the university president’s office last spring, where Georgetown declined to change its policy.

Fluke says she would have used the hearing to talk about the students at Georgetown that don’t have birth control covered, and what that’s meant for them. “I wanted to be able to share their stories,” she says. “My testimony would have been about women who have been affected by their policy, who have medical needs and have suffered dire consequences.. . .The committee did not get to hear real stories I had to share, about actual women who have been dramatically affected by this policy.” [Original source Washington Post, reprinted here.]

This caused a publicity flareup. Rush Limbaugh got involved, and pretty soon the news was about Sandra Fluke and not about the issue of publicly paid for contraception.

Fluke is essentially saying that it is her right to have free contraception, and it is the government’s responsibility to pay for it, and the Obama administration is saying that is correct, and this is something that must be covered by health insurance for everyone.

This seems odd. If getting pregnant is a danger to be avoided, humanity has known since at least the Bronze Age that there is a simple way to avoid pregnancy: virginity, or, since that word may have alternate definitions, more technically, females may avoid becoming pregnant by not having sexual intercourse with males. This is a well known sure fire method that has always worked.

Moreover, being a student at Georgetown, Sandra should have been made aware of the standard Catholic advice to young women: avoid the occasion of sin. This has been the standard Catholic lesson from about third grade on to maturity for centuries. If you don’t want to get pregnant, be careful about where you go and who you go there with. I’m sure there are still some among the Georgetown faculty who remember it.

But, Sandra would insist, that’s the kind of old fashioned gup that I am protesting. Keep your rosary off of my ovary. Or something like that. I recall protestors chanting that some years ago, I think in reaction to laws that made it difficult to obtain contraceptive pills and devices. In my day at least it was a lot easier if a bit embarrassing for young men to obtain condoms than for girls to obtain whatever contraceptive medicines and devices they trusted once they had decided to forgo virginity. But over time those restrictions and even social conventions were cast away, and while there may be some legal obstacles to young women obtaining birth control pills without the consent of their parents, the obstacles can be overcome with relative ease. Certainly by the time a young woman reaches law school she will know, or can easily find out, how to obtain contraceptives. There will be no legal barriers.

But what if she can’t afford them?

Common sense would say that the simplest solution to that problem is technical virginity.

Sandra Fluke’s solution is to demand that taxpayers pay for her contraceptive pills and devices. She can’t afford to have sex because of the risk of pregnancy, and it is up to us to provide her with the wherewithal for contraception. She hasn’t spoken about protection from STD’s but I think it safe to assume she believes we ought to pay for her insurance for treatment of those when they fail. Of course there are contraception means that are also somewhat effective against STD’s, and they are considerably cheaper than the ones Sandra Fluke demands; but apparently the choice of what we pay for is not up to us. Sandra Fluke has a right to indulge in sex when and however she wants, and to the means of contraception that she wants, and it is up to the taxpayers to pay for it.

The real question here is simple: how do you acquire the obligation to pay for Sandra Fluke’s birth control devices and pills? But in the great flap over her virtue that question seems to have been lost.

We need to go back to it. Even if insuring Sandra Fluke’s health is an obligation that the rest of us must assume, when did contraception pills become health insurance? What illness are we preventing? Must we then insure her against being eaten by sharks when she insists on swimming in shark infested waters? Can her life insurance include provisions that she will not be covered if she goes hiking on the Iranian border? Must we pay for any activity that might result in death, dismemberment, pregnancy, etc.?

Leave alone the freedom of religion issue of requiring a Jesuit college to provide contraception. Where did the government get the right to require that we the people pay for anyone’s contraception? How did we acquire that obligation and can we not find some way to be shut of it?

View 715 Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Memory Engineering

Memory Engineering

Jerry,

This is, I think, quite important – a theory of how memory works that includes techniques for modifying and/or erasing specific memories, using currently available neurochemicals, with considerable evidence that it works. There are interesting implications.

Apparently long-term memory involves destructive reads – recalling a long-term memory automatically rewrites it, modified to some extent to reflect your current mental state. (Anyone who’s looked into witness unreliability over time says, "ah-hah!")

There are therapeutic implications: Recalling a traumatic memory while in a positive mental state (however induced) can reshape the memory and reduce the trauma.

There are terrifying implications: Recalling a memory while dosed with a blocker for an essential memory (re)formation neurochemical erases that memory.

They’ve tested it on rats, so far. It requires direct injection of the blocker chemical into the brain, so far. It works quite well to erase specific rat memories, so far.

We live in interesting times. (Uh, what were we talking about?)

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/all/1

Henry

A very long time ago during the height of the child molestation witch hunts I did considerable research into the then state of the art on inducing and implanting memories, including interviews with the psychologist involved in implanting a false memory of a child having been encountered by the judge in a case then on trial – the child had never met the judge except in the courtroom nor had she ever been at the place at which the incident supposedly took place.

The incident story was deliberately kept non-traumatic since there were considerable ethical issues at stake, and of course it only proved suggestibility, not that the charge in the case (against her father; it was a divorce case) was untrue or implanted. On the other hand, at the time the general consensus of the child psychologists were that children didn’t really have false memories and weren’t all that subject to suggestion.

That of course is untrue. Any parent can induce false memories in their own children. “Remember that time when you were lost and the nice policeman gave you a lollipop?” Said to a 12 year old about in incident that supposedly took place at age 5, the first response will be “No, I don’t remember that,” but gentle reminding will often make the incident real enough that the child will remember details, such as whether the policemen was in uniform or not, or “It wasn’t a real policeman, he was a mall cop!” or some such. Again there are ethical concerns here, but it is very possible for authority figures to induce children and even grownups to “recover” childhood memories of incidents that never happened, and there is at least one record of an adult recovering a memory of being molested by a person dead at the time of the supposed incident.

Psychology consultants in divorces cases have often ‘recovered’ childhood memories of molestations or questionable events that almost certainly never happened.

I would not be at all surprised to discover that chemical and physical stimulations can be included in a program of memory engineering, since I know that it’s quite possible to change memories or implant false memories without drugs. Memory engineering is one of the dirty little secrets known to some trial lawyers and many police interrogators. It is a major reason for changing police procedures in lineups and other identification processes of eye witnesses.

We have known since Aristotle that perception consists of inputs from the real world as modified by our internal perception processes, and that memories can be false. Unfortunately that is often the best we have for law enforcement: after all, some memories can be quite true.

See also “Mad in America”

http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-are-diagnosed-as-mentally-ill/

In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by other professionals with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by (1) how many of those diagnosed are essentially anti-authoritarians, and (2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them are not.

Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not.

Some activists lament how few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the United States. One reason could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psychopathologized and medicated before they achieve political consciousness of society’s most oppressive authorities.

Of course the Soviet Union used to put those who rejected the self evident scientific proof of Marxism in madhouses. When I was a young geeky nerd there were no “ADHD” diagnoses, Mania as a diagnosis had a fairly precise symptomatic definition and in any event there were not many “mental health professionals” around, and there were no drugs to be administered by nurses. Drugging children was a big deal, and it never happened to me. I learned discipline and self control, and particularly how to at least pretend to respect authorities such as the teacher who clearly knew less about scientific subjects than I had learned from the Encyclopedia. I probably would have escaped drugging because my mother was a rugged individualist and my father was a member of the Odd Fellows Society, but one can never be sure.

I understand that there are cases in which Ritalin is useful for some children in some circumstances. I refuse to believe that it is appropriate for any great percentage of the adolescent population without considerably more evidence than I have ever encountered.

When I was in graduate school in psychology I was considered acceptable as an experimentalist and theorist, but since I questioned much of the evidence for the effectiveness of most of the techniques used in clinical psychology – I found Freud’s theories no more based on real world evidence than those of L Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, and considerably less useful in understanding the world than General Semantics – but then I wasn’t intending to start a psychology practice. That led me to a number of disagreements with the clinical teachers. Then Paul Horst taught us to doubt the mathematical competence of most experimental psychologists as well, narrowing my niche in academic psychology. Fortunately I was recommended to Boeing and hired to work in Human Factors so I never had to choose an academic career. I find Dr. Levine’s essay refreshing.

It’s lunch time, and I have to work on Black Ship Island after lunch, but I do have some other stuff for later. I am still in recovery from the bronchial distress, and it still tires me more than it should.