"In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases. 'It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,' Clifford wrote. A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, 'the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.'"
From
"The Courage to Follow the Evidence on Transgender Care" by David Brooks (NYT).
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51 comments:
"If too many people believe things without evidence, 'the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.'"
Transgender care, climate change, covid…. The list is long, and we are headed back into savagery.
In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe...
"It's not a lie if you believe it." - Basic tenant of Costanzaism
Gender (i.e. sex-correlated attributes) including sexual orientation. Transgender conversion therapy through surgical, medical, and psychiatric corruption fails unpredictably in the great majority of victims. That said, people should be free to choose their burden mitigation strategy with informed consent. The science of transgender conversion therapy, particularly mutilation and poisoning, has established that affirming care leads to a lifetime of deprivation for victims and is a profitable choice for providers.
For reasons that are not clear, the number of adolescents who have sought to medically change their sex has been skyrocketing in recent years..
the reasons seem Pretty Clear to me.. it is an infection.. one that is ENCOURAGED by the powers that be.
Of these "trans" kids.. How many are autistic?
Of these "trans" kids.. How many are gay?
AND HERE IT IS: Of these "trans" kids.. How many are children with insane mothers?
"For reasons that are not clear, the number of adolescents who have sought to medically change their sex has been skyrocketing in recent years.."
It's a fashion trend for their parents. In another year it will be exhausted and something else will take it's place.
In other news, my Althouse formatting suddenly fixed itself again. It's been stuck on desktop mode for weeks and no I didn't put it there.
I don't know why these things happen
That is a pillar of Western Civilization. Travel the world and see for yourself how shockingly absent it is in much of the rest of it, I dare you. It will stun you how many peoples and races put their ships to sea sustained by nothing but hope and the threat of violence if you dare question that hope.
You can also see this in action with a huge cohort of the human population - women. If you just believe something is true hard enough and manipulate others to believe in it hard enough and socially ostracize those who don't, it becomes true! It is the reason The Assemblywomen of Athens resonates even today, and why socialism and communism are fundamentally feminine in nature.
But, but… there’s no time to do recounts and check the election results. ��
The winds are shifting, if a weathervane like Brooks is saying things like this.
An appealing idea. If embraced it might dispose of the many noxious ideas that plague society and lead to floodtides of blood and destruction, but I would be happy if social media could be purged of "flat earth" nonsense, but nasty consequences lurk in the dark corners of ethical belief.
One of these is science, which is never settled despite what Greta Thunberg shouts at crowds. There is never sufficient evidence to hold any theory incontrovertibly true. Useful is the best an honest researcher can seek, truth being the greased pig of science. Then there's Kurt Gödel's demolition of Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. We should refute his incompleteness theorem before we start punishing people for their beliefs. Instead, let us punish people for doing actual harm, such as excising the healthy organs of children or corrupting their natural maturation. If physicians adhered to their fundamental ethic, do no harm, then many iniquitous beliefs of woke fascism would be impotent as well as false.
Polymath physicist Jacob Bronowski refers to William Clifford in his slim, little book The Common Sense of Science: {quoting…}
I learnt to think about that world from the lively account of a master of simple exposition, the geometer and philosopher William Clifford. His account was called characteristically The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences. The difference between his title and mine is not accidental. I have deliberately chosen the title The Common Sense of Science because it underlines the difference between our two centuries. We see today that in the strict sense there are no exact sciences. There is science, and there is common sense; and both must learn to assimilate into their methods and basic ideas the underlying uncertainties of all knowledge.
The best scientists of the last century did foresee this. I have spoken of Clifford, and it is fair to the memory of that great man to recall that he had some of this foresight. Indeed, Clifford had a genius for such prophetic insight. The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences contains the first hint of the idea that massive bodies give a local curvature to space, which Einstein has since worked out fully. Clifford was after all a contemporary of Galton, and when he died at thirty-five his book was edited by the founder of modern statistics, Karl Pearson. And here is what Clifford said about scientific truth, looking out of the nineteenth century forward into ours.
“Remember, then, that scientific thought is the guide of action; that the truth at which it arrives is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.”
This is an arresting thought on a number of counts. It puts pithily the view of science as action which I have underlined. And the action looks forward; it is distinguished from contemplation by looking towards the future. And arresting too here is the criterion of what is true. The realistic basis of science as I have stressed it cannot be put better than in Clifford's definition, that its truth “is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear.”
What science observes, what science predicts has all the shortcomings of fact. The facts supply the signal for the future, but the signal is necessarily uncertain and its interpretation against the background of the irrelevant will be inaccurate. The prediction which we base on the signal must be a statistical one. It does not read the future, it forecasts it; and the forecast has meaning only because we couple it with its own estimate of uncertainty. The future is as it were always a little out of focus, and everything that we foresee in it is seen embodied in a small area of uncertainty. It is the human situation and the situation of science. We do not contemplate the facts without error, but because we know what we are doing, we may act upon them without fear.
“Because we know what we are doing”: this is the crux of science. We are not merely observing and predicting facts; and that is why any philosophy which builds up science only from facts is mistaken. We know, that is we find laws, and every human action uses these laws, and at the same time tests them and feels towards new laws. It is not the form of these laws which matters.
The laws of science, like those which we use in our private behaviour, remain helpful and truthful whether they contain words like “always”, or only “more often than not.” What matters is the recognition of the law in the facts. It is the law which we verify: the pattern, the order, the structure of events. This is why science is so full of the symbolism of numbers and geometry, which are the most familiar expressions of structural relations.
{/unQuote}
____
(Jacob Bronowski, Chapter VIII: “Truth and Value,” Section (4), The Common Sense of Science, 1951)
I believe the urge some people feel to transition is real
Link from Reddit.
"In other news, my Althouse formatting suddenly fixed itself again. It's been stuck on desktop mode for weeks and no I didn't put it there."
Maybe google about how to fix that within your device. It's nothing I'm doing.
You run into Clifford algebra with Grassmann packings.
"It's not lie if you believe it." -- George Costanza
I like how these guys always come around to being reasonable. . . .only after they've shouted everyone else down.
'It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence'
I like the spirit of the claim, but this cannot be literally right. Mundane example: I believe I will enjoy this bottle of wine that received a positive review, even though as "evidence" that review is bound to be "insufficient" Important example: I, Elon Musk, believe I can create a system of low-orbit communication satellites and produce reusable rockets efficiently; before I do it, I have little "evidence" I will succeed. Of course, the trans mutilation protocols are horrible, but it cannot always be wrong to believe someone will benefit from a treatment for which, on first application, we are bound to have "insufficient evidence" as to long-term results.
'the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.'
"Lose the habit of testing things"? Perhaps we have cultivated such habits in some technical areas, such as building the grid, but in many sectors, social policy in particular, we never "test" things in any rigorous way, and even when we do, policy makers and the voting public ignore the outcomes. Example: Head Start. In other areas, inquiry is actively discouraged and testing loses out to policy-making on the basis of mere conviction. We've never escaped "savagery."
Historical references like this are why reading Brooks and George Will is not a completely useless exercise.
'Thinking about how we think about things' is crucial but doesn't get a lot of click$.
The problem with believing things in the political arena that are not true is that you are mostly insulated from the impacts of your wrong belief (for a while at least.) You can explain away the negative externalities - Often under the idea that it is your opponents that are causing the problem, or that it is a aberration or that it was not done correctly and just needs to be tweaked a bit. People on the left are stuck in the mode that they believe in the right things, things that demonstrate compassion for people and the planet. They are also bolstered by the "fact" that people who disagree with them are cynical, tribal, and hateful. People who are like that cannot possess any truth.
If people on the left had to live with the direct consequences of their beliefs, they would be less...er...left. As they say, a conservative is a liberal whose been mugged by the truth. Look at the recoil that some local governments are going through when the compassionate policies have wreaked havoc and the local population is demanding change. Sadly many places have yet to learn and there will be more pain before the correction comes.
"It's not lie if you believe it." -- George Costanza
Yes, that was a major laughline. Unfortunately for those who smugly chuckle, George was onto something semi-profound. A lie is distinct from a mistaken utterance in that a liar intends a deception whereas a person giving voice to a mistaken belief may intend no harm or dissimulation. Given these distinctions, it is possible to lie with a truth, it all depends on what the liar believes.
Pretty good summary of where we are with Trumpism: inaccurate beliefs promulgated irresponsibly, degrading followers' ability to discern truth or judge character generally.
"'It's not a lie if you believe it.' - Basic tenant of Costanzaism"
Well...that's true. If you believe what you're saying, you're not lying. This doesn't mean you may not or cannot be wrong.
R H Hardin, Ha, I saw your 1996 paper on Grassman Packings in a paper on using the idea to initialize convolutional neural nets for faster convergence.
CHS96: J. H. Conway, R. H. Hardin and N. J. A. Sloane, Packing Lines, Planes, etc., Packings in Grassmannian Spaces, Experimental Mathematics, Vol. 5 (1996).
Pretty high flying working with Conway.
Michael Mcneil: Thanks.
Remember, then, that scientific thought is the guide of action; that the truth at which it arrives is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.
That needs remembering.
Michael Mcneil: Thanks.
Remember, then, that scientific thought is the guide of action; that the truth at which it arrives is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.
That needs remembering.
Don't know what Brooks has to say about the issue. Mercifully (which is true of most things Brooks) his op ed piece is hidden behind the NYT paywall.
LOL. When you roll out the big guns, like nineteenth-century philosopher-mathematicians, I expect you to go after big game, like Christianity or communism. But a mouse like transgender care for children? Jordan Peterson or even Joe Rogan should be good enough for that.
The gun rights crowd has lived with this problem for decades. Their anti-gun opponents cannot determine in any rational, scientific, logical, rigorous way the difference between their beliefs and reality, and worse cannot perform a test to determine the truth or falsity of any idea, either ours or theirs. And I do not mean that they will not for political reasons. They cannot.
This is a similar situation, where a Through The Looking Glass process occurs where conclusions are drawn, they are declared holy writ, and any opposition or opposing reality is discounted because the conclusions are already final and proof or testing is unnecessary and in fact a demonstration of heresy. To hell with that, and to hell with those thinking that way.
Ok, could you be specific about the "inaccurate beliefs"?
Condensed into one sentence: Darwin awards are given retroactively and there's no way back from irreversible bad decisions.
Doctor-directed sex reassignments failed BADLY in the 1970s to 1980s. BADLY. BADLY. BADLY. Then, post-2010 Obamacare paid for quack mental illness treatments and the uber-quack "gender affirming care." Democratic Party medical industry donors were enriched. Unstable and insane political activists felt empowered. Many Darwin awards were won. Psychopaths were exposed.
In the words that will be Nancy Pelosi's epitaph "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uC4bXmcUvw
One's political opinions, and the factual underpinnings that undergird them, communicate one's social desirability. Many people today feel insecure. They feel the need for validation. They can see that certain beliefs (lefty beliefs) will put them in a position in which they will either be perceived as (a) virtuous intelligent people, or (b) people who, though mistaken, have their hearts in the right place. It's the 21st Century version of Pascal's Wager.
Clifford assigns culpability to people who choose wrong beliefs in order to advance themselves in the social statusphere. Unless we do that, wrong beliefs will win.
Also, citing a dead white male like Clifford as an authority figure is clearly an attempt to perpetuate the racist sexist DWM patriarchal power structure we are struggling so hard to move beyond. It has zero credibility. Now, if he could quote Harriet Tubman on the subject, he might be worth listening to.
People don’t agree on what constitutes “sufficient evidence” or “insufficient evidence” for any belief.
In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called “The Ethics of Belief.”
"To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking, and take into account self-serving biases. 'It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,' Clifford wrote."
"A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, 'the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.'"
Since the Trump years, this habit of not consulting the evidence has become the underlying crisis in so many realms. People segregate into intellectually cohesive teams, which are always dumber than intellectually diverse teams. Issues are settled by intimidation, not evidence. Our natural human tendency is to be too confident in our knowledge, and too quick to ignore contrary evidence. But in these days it has become acceptable to luxuriate in those epistemic shortcomings, not to struggle against them. See, for example, the modern Republican Party.
The reason for the increase in gender dysphoria is not a mystery. This mental illness was generally not covered, or minimally covered, by health insurance until the creation of Obamacare. So, nothing to be done. Since then, every health insurance policy must include 100% coverage for any and all transgender "medical care," regardless of efficacy.
In other words, there is effectively unlimited money in the diagnosis now, so we see an explosion of responses by the medical industry. It feeds on itself.
Well, of course, the stupid thing is pay-walled. But let me guess. David Brooks has finally dredged up, from the dregs of his rotting character, the courage to consider that perhaps it is ill-advised to cut healthy genitalia off of children, and to poison them with chemicals that ruin their lives? As long as someone else said it first, of course. Dear me. Perhaps next he will advise us on the ethical responsibilities associated with marriage.
"Remember, then, that scientific thought is the guide of action; that the truth at which it arrives is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself."
Oh, bilge. Just bilge. What rank and improvident idiocy is there, that hasn't been affirmed by people claiming to practice "scientific" thought?
The best that can be said for science is that it encourages doubt. Sometimes.
And what's with this "sink back into savagery" bullshit? We're up to our armpits in savagery. We're floating in the stuff.
Don’t we believe almost everything on insufficient evidence?
The best that can be said for science is that it encourages doubt. Sometimes.
That's old-fashioned racist oppressive white man's science. Other than curing diseases, creating the computer revolution, putting man on the moon, and allowing us to go to Europe and back in a day, what has it ever done for us?
There's no room for doubt in the new diverse Science, or should I say Scientism. Anything the talking head on TV calls Science is now received truth and mandatory to believe. We will never again have to trouble ourselves with arguments and disharmony. We may end up starting campfires with flint rocks to heat our gruel, but at least no one will have their feelings hurt by hearing a dissenting opinion.
Beliefs must not be "public possessions". That way lies ThoughtCrime.
What matters is actions, not beliefs or intentions.
Feynman (yeah, I know, just some guy)...
Science is the belief in the fallibility of experts.
Fevers either break or kill the host. Which we get with the multiple fevers of our day is to be seen.
As someone said above, if Brooks is pushing this then the winds are changing. An example might be seen in Google firing activist employees protesting on the clock and universities suddenly expelling disruptive students.
After all a Democrat is in the White House and "Recreate '68" sounds like a bad reelection slogan.
Three examples:
Columbus was WRONG about the size of the globe, and so he thought that he could sail west from Spain and reach Asia. In fact, the globe is too big for Columbus's ships to sail from Spain to Asia, and if there weren't a couple of continents in the way he and his crews would all have died of starvation, etc. But when he reached what he thought it was Asia, it was actually America, and he's a hero of history (except to native Americans).
The people who took the submersible Titan to visit the wreck of the Titanic a year ago thought that its design was sufficient to stand the pressure of the deep ocean. They were WRONG, and everyone on that vehicle died.
Many people voted for Biden over Trump in 2020 because they thought Biden would lead a moderate administration and return normalcy to American politics. They were WRONG.
Evidence doesn't guarantee certainty, particularly in the human sciences. Evidence is interpreted by particular human beings, none of whom are objective. Evidence can be dismissed, or contradicted by alternate evidence. Even in the presence of evidence, there can still be ambiguity. Progressives and conservatives both hate ambiguity.
Jupiter said...
"Remember, then, that scientific thought is the guide of action; that the truth at which it arrives is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself."
Oh, bilge. Just bilge. What rank and improvident idiocy is there, that hasn't been affirmed by people claiming to practice "scientific" thought?
**********
THREADWINNER!
Very much along the lines of Bart Simpson clapping one hand to demonstrate the idiocy of the Zen koan, "What is the sound of one hand clapping".
(Try it yourself)
A mighty wind’s a blowing
It’s kicking up the sand,
It’s blowing out a message
To every woman child and man.
A mighty wind’s a blowin,
Frost the Land and cross the sea.
A mighty wind’s ablowin,
It’s blowin you and me.
A movie foreshadows the new America.
Brooks is his usual insufferable self, taking every opportunity to bash Republicans when in fact it is mostly Democrats that engage in the abusive behavior he describes. He asserts without evidence that "brutality on the left has been matched by brutality on the right," and adds: "In 24 states Republicans have passed laws banning these therapies, sometimes threatening doctors with prison time if they prescribe the treatment they think is best for their patients." What about all the threats and actual punishments of doctors who haven't toed the party line? Like Martin Kulldorff who was fired by Harvard for his anti-lockdown views on Covid.
And this: "Our natural human tendency is to be too confident in our knowledge, too quick to ignore contrary evidence. But these days it has become acceptable to luxuriate in those epistemic shortcomings, not to struggle against them. See, for example, the modern Republican Party." Yes, it's those dastardly Republicans again. The word "Democrats" does not appear in his article, even though it's rather obvious that the left is far less tolerant of open debate and contrary opinions than the right.
Why are research hospitals using our money to mutilate children instead of improving treatment and curing real diseases? These people should be imprisoned for mutilation and financial fraud, righ up to the board of drectors and hospital researchers, department heads, and presidents.
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