Midnight on the Forecastle

Faces of Politics

Scientific American, January 2008:

How we react to faces could be linked to our political affiliations. Psychologist Jacob M. Vigil of the University of North Florida had 740 college students look at 12 photographs of faces digitally blurred to not display any clear emotion. The volunteers were then asked if these faces expressed sadness, joy, disgust, surprise, fear or anger. The students who identified themselves as Republicans were more likely than those who identified themselves as Democrats to interpret these vague faces as more threatening, as measured by anger or disgust, and less submissive, as conveyed by fear or surprise. These findings, which appeared online October 21 in Nature Precedings, are consistent with research linking conservative political views on military spending and capital punishment and heightened reactions to disturbing images and sounds. Vigil conjectures that the political ideologies we advocate could be linked with the way that we respond to ambiguous details.

ADDENDUM: An Abstract of The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report (via HuffPo):

This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert's political ideology. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism. Finally, a post hoc analysis revealed that perceptions of Colbert's political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion.

LHC Presentation

Additionally, here's an interesting interview.

Anti-Intellectualism, Bears & Stupidity

The good people at Cosmic Variance have a post up about how McCain hates bears. Near the end is a quote from Lee Harris defending the merits of stupidity:

…stupidity has been and will always remain the best defense mechanism against the ordinary conman and the intellectual dreamer, just as Odysseus found that stuffing cotton in his ears was his best defense against beguiling but fatal song of the sirens.

Get that? The best defense. Oy.

Immunize Your Mind

U.S. health agencies stand behind safety of vaccines. Duh. I don't know a whole lot about chemistry or medicine, but I know a thing or two about history. Vaccine scares are recurring, persistent, and dangerous phenomena. Of course vaccines are not invulnerable to error and/or criticism, but the issue behind the most flagrantly idiotic panics usually has something to do with public misinterpretation (or outright ignorance) of the statistical data surrounding the effectiveness and/or risks of specific vaccines. Fortunately, electoral politics affords us a wonderful opportunity to use the various candidates as proxies for a larger discussion about the role of science in the life of our nation. For me, the call to arms was sounded by Mike Huckabee:

I am not planning on writing the curriculum for an eighth grade science book — I am asking for the opportunity to be President of the United States.

Is it acceptable for a U.S. president to have a knowledge of foundational scientific principles that has not progressed beyond what is (presumably) being taught in the seventh grade? The Republican establishment has responded with a resounding "you betcha!" John McCain, as is widely known, has staked out a rather moronic position on vaccines – not a political position, but a medical one (source: bad astronomy via C&L):

McCain needs to replace his medical and scientific advisors forthwith and find some who understand science and clinical trials. I suppose I should have seen it coming when he agreed to give the keynote address for the Discovery Institute last year. Credulity towards one form of pseudoscience is, sadly, often accompanied by credulity towards other forms of pseudoscience. This is worse, though, than pandering to creationists. Presidents don't have much power to determine how evolution is taught at the local school [level], but he does have enormous power over the public health apparatus of the nation in the form of the CDC, FDA, and NIH. Encouraging antivaccinationists can lead to a public health disaster in the form of the resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases.

From the link embedded in that last quote:

It is of the utmost importance that a president, or future president, have rational thinking and reasoning skills as well as a firm grasp over what constitutes scientific evidence in the formulation of theories. A president makes crucial decisions every day which impact the lives of millions of people. The election of a person who demonstrates an inability to assimilate facts and observations in a way that makes sense, but rather defaults to an emotional mythology, would be a grave mistake. Therefore, not only is it beyond reproach for the "intelligent liberal community" to impose a requirement of rationality on a future president, it would be ludicrous to do otherwise. Yes, I believe that influential people who cannot use their power in a coherent, scientifically-supportable way merits contempt.

That sounds about right to me.

UPDATE: And on an on and on it goes…

Beyond Belief 2007

This is mainly a post devoted to dumping a link that, hopefully, will be clicked on and pursued by wayward souls who might drop by in pursuit of something interesting. Here it is: TSN's Beyond Belief. The second annual conference ("Enlightenment 2.0") was held about 4 months ago and has been available for viewing for awhile now. I viewed them while working, so it took me a few days of steady concentration to get through 'em… but I finally did.

On the whole I found last year's conference slightly more provocative and certainly more entertaining. Enlightenment 2.0, however, is nonetheless worth viewing. If you only have time for a few, I highly recommend the presentations of Scott Atran and David Sloan Wilson. Seriously. Treat yourself.

It was explained to me once that scientists generally refrain from engaging in debate with flat-earth types, creationists, and other purveyors of pseudoscience for the following reason: argument is anathema to scientific discourse. A legitimate scientist is usually inclined to let his or her work stand on its own merit and speak for itself. Charles Darwin, for example, famously allowed Thomas Huxley to fight his battles for him – in no small measure because he feared that if he too closely associated his own personality with his work on evolution, it [the work] would be rejected on an ad hominem basis. Today's scientists – if the Beyond Belief seminar is any indication – seem conflicted between affection for the modern "bulldogs" of their cause (i.e., Harris, Dawkins, Dennett) and adherence to strict vocational standards of objectivity and critical analysis. It would be a mistake to underestimate how entertaining it is to watch them attempt to reconcile these qualities.

Creationism and Global Warming

There’s a terrific essay by J. Michael Plavcan titled “The Invisible Bible: The Logic of Creation Science,” in the book Scientists Confront Creationism: Intelligent Design and Beyond.  Specifically, Plavcan does a wonderful service by describing the ideational paradigms that support the idea of “creation science.”  As I was reading it, I was struck by the similarities between the way creationists view science with respect to evolution (and isotopic dating) and the way conservatives view science with respect to global warming.  They both seem nearly identical in the that they both do the following:

• contribute no new data to the discussion but confine themselves to attacking existing scientific postulates;
• consistently use old scientific data which has since been corrected, updated or discarded by those within the scientific field – or has otherwise been exposed to the self-correcting rigors of the broader scientific community - to make their case;
• regard evidence as “not ‘scientific’ but rather [as] an interpretive construct that arises from a faith”;
• point to technical debates within isolated scientific disciplines as evidence that fundamental questions of fact are “in dispute”; and
• take a universalistic approach to reasoning that dictates that if one piece of data is incorrect, all data so gathered must be incorrect as well.

Most revealing, however, is the way in which the ‘cognitive dissonance’ model is useful in understanding the anti-science mindset of many conservatives with respect to global warming.  To be sure, dogmatic positions from across the political spectrum are often accused of being associated with cognitive dissonance; usually without a great deal of merit because political convictions “do not offer … clear, absolutely falsifiable, prediction[s]” and are therefore not, strictly speaking, memes of cognitive dissonance.  However, like creationists, environmental conservatives have a great deal invested in their view of the world; i.e. that market behavior, strong protections for property, and ‘enlightened self-interest’ are better suited to maintain long-term prosperity than regulation and collective responsibility.  Faced with overwhelming data which supports the idea that we are collectively responsible for hastening the destruction of the biosphere, conservatives are rightly concerned that admitting as much would be a repudiation (of sorts) of their most closely held beliefs.  Like the creationists, the anti-global warming conservatives have effectively been reduced to a small but vocal cadre of hard-liners that appear immune to reality-based efforts of suasion.  It is the last bastion of the faithful; and there is no evidence that the light of reason will ever breach it. 

UPDATE: Think Progress on Fox News and "Global Cooling".

UPDATE 2: David Keith at TED on Climate Change.

Matchstick Men

Well, it turns out that that humanity is on the very brink of a very major event. A cancer researcher has made a discovery: Radio Frequencies Help Burn Salt Water.

…radio frequencies act to weaken the bonds between the elements that make up salt water, releasing the hydrogen. […] Once ignited, the hydrogen will burn as long as it is exposed to the frequencies.

Roughly 70% of the surface-area of Earth is water; 97.14% of this is saltwater. I think we're confronting a very serious apocalyptic vision of the future. If Rush Limbaugh happens upon the magic frequency in one of his retarded monologues, our delicate little planet will literally become engulfed in flames. Even if there's a 1% chance that his can happen, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.  It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.