"Every Absurdity Now Has A Champion" (problem w/po

[Battlehymn Republic]

I found this very interesting post from the blog Bouphonia regarding the current type of mass-appeal science books in vogue.

"Every Absurdity Now Has A Champion"

I've read a fair amount of pop science in my day, which means that I've been regularly entertained with tall tales that would make Baron Munchausen blush. Theoretical physicists are the worst offenders, but anyone with the proper scientific capital can publish a pop science book on virtually any absurdity he or she can dream up, and there are plenty of people who'll swallow it whole.

Douglas Hofstadter babbles about putting everything that was in Einstein's head into a book, in order to converse with him. Freeman Dyson says that genetic engineering will soon become a wonderful hobby for the masses. Other folks dazzle us with anthropic principles, self-organization, the physics of immortality, the "God particle" and the "God gene."

Then there's the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which not only sheathes Occam's Razor, but throws it on the ground, smashes it with a sledgehammer, and pisses all over the fragments. And there's the ineffably silly Ray Kurzweil, who's so anxious about the ethical issues raised by the advent of "Spiritual Machines" (Cheer up, Ray...it may never happen!). And there are philosophers who fancy they've proved that consciousness is an illusion, but that the information consciousness offers and receives is more than substantial enough to be worth a book deal or a TV appearance.

All of these notions can't be right, though there's no reason why they couldn't all be wrong. But people swoon over them to an amazing extent. I've had perfectly intelligent people tell me, in all earnestness, that their computers are conscious, or that it's impossible that any scientific question could go unanswered forever, or that there's something called a "God gene," or that many worlds are, at this moment, diverging from this dimension at the rate of trillions per nanosecond.

Many years ago, someone I used to know read a book on quantum mechanics, and proclaimed to me that there were only two possibilities: Either everything is superposed between being and not-being, happening and not-happening, until it's observed; or each possible occurrence, down to the subatomic level, causes a new universe to form. I tried to say, politely, that he was laboring under a couple of simple misconceptions, but he wouldn't hear of it. "Those are the scientifically acceptable choices," he said. "It's one or the other."

At Pharyngula the other day, a commenter tried to refute a garden-variety creationist troll by (among other things) invoking Kurzweil's belief that we will soon download human personalities, like computer software, into new bodies. Now, we can argue about whether that's possible; I happen to think it's absurd techno-triumphalist claptrap and that Kurzweil's an utter schmuck. Nonetheless, I accept that someone could disagree with me as to the theoretical possibility without being crazy or stupid. But when such downloadable personalities are treated for all intents and purposes as fact, and are produced triumphantly in argument as a rebuke to the illiterati, I lose all patience.

Not that I have much patience to begin with, given the sort of gobbledlygook that regularly gets a free pass by virtue of being "scientific." For instance, here's Freeman Dyson on what he calls our Post-Darwinian Future:

We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species will no longer exist, and the evolution of life will again be communal. In the post-Darwinian era, biotechnology will be domesticated....Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of the general public, will give us an explosion of biodiversity. Designing genomes will be a new art form, as creative as painting or sculpture. Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but all will bring joy to their creators and diversity to our fauna and flora.

Every one of Dyson's statements seems to me to be perfectly insane; the whole concept is not only ghastly beyond belief, but logically unjustifiable. Nonetheless, it's been received rather rapturously in a couple of "scientific" forums I've visited, and by any number of science-minded bloggers. What's missing from it - besides the merest fragment of evidence or common sense - is any comprehension of how people are, and why they can't necessarily be trusted to use technology wisely. It lacks any grasp whatsoever of the wholesome and bracing truth that "man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward," and it proves yet again that scientists are not necessarily ethicists, nor even reasonable people.

Dr. Michio Kaku is one of the worst offenders in the field; his new book, Parallel Worlds, is a typical hodge-podge of ultra-fashionable theoretical physics, cavalier assumptions, and pure fantasy. It's one of the most perfectly useless books I've ever read...useless in the sense that it fails as science that it fails as science and as metaphysics. It simultaneously lacks the tutelary virtues of religion and myth, and the scientific virtues of cold hard materialism, and is therefore an essentially sterile work of the imagination and the last thing on earth anyone should take seriously.

And yet, retail shelves are groaning under the weight of books like Parallel Worlds...books that brew all the "wild" ideas of physics and evolutionary psychology and cognitive science into an unwholesome potion that seems to have no other purpose than to afflict the general public with slack-jawed, uncritical, quasi-religious awe.

Why is this? Because, for whatever reason suits your prejudices, human beings seem to enjoy the feeling of slack-jawed, uncritical, quasi-religious awe.

Beyond this, people like to feel that they're conversant with great mysteries; they very much like to feel that they understand life, and can explain it to other people. Speaking of which, over at Eschaton the other night, I found myself in an argument with one of those wonderfully polite racialists who tries to justify his unpleasant theories via recourse to Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate. That's par for the course towards the end of a long thread. But imagine my chagrin the next morning, when I was listening - with my usual edgy disapproval - to Air America's tiresome Marc Maron, and heard him tell a caller to "read The Blank Slate and start figuring out what's actually behind all the stuff people do" (or words to that effect).

His smugness was palpable, needless to say. He'd figured things out, thanks to Science, and was all set to rid the world of Error.

Unfortunately for him, error happens to be science's primary export. As Arthur Fine points out in The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum Theory:

Overwhelmingly, the results of the conscientious pursuit of scientific inquiry are failures: failed theories, failed hypotheses, failed conjectures, inaccurate measurements, incorrect estimations of parameters, fallacious causal inferences, and so forth.

As a simple statistical matter, a given hypothesis - and most pop science books are either hypotheses or descriptions of hypotheses - has a far better chance of being wrong than right. (Particularly when it's founded on shoddy research, like Pinker's.)

In Science of Science and Reflexivity, Pierre Bourdieu notes that science, like all fields, has a "price of entry" that makes it more (or less) autonomous by regulating its accessibility to new entrants. A firm grasp of higher mathematics is a typical entrance fee; there are others. Ideally, in Bourdieu's view, such restrictions must strike a balance between elitism and demagogy. As regards the latter option, he devastatingly describes consumers of pop science as people who have:

[A] self-interested propensity to hide from themselves the limits of their own capacities of appropriation - following the model of self-deception that is expressed so well by readers of popularizing journals when they assert that "this is a high-level scientific journal that anyone can understand."

But popularizing journals make a great deal of money, of course, and this is alluring not just to publishers, but to scientists who are willing to trade autonomy for fame and money by catering to a sensation-starved public.

At which point, all is vanity. We end up with a situation where people like Marc Maron can cheaply assert their status as rational intellectuals by pledging allegiance to "Science," by way of whatever pop-science potboiler is blowing minds at the moment. In my opinion, these books are a bad influence on public debate, and are not all that different from Medieval wonder-books that amazed readers with the marvels of the Great Chain of Being (except that their use of language isn't as graceful, of course). As a counterbalance to the forces of "irrationality and superstition," they leave a lot to be desired.

That's what I think, anyway.

Now, I like Kaku, but I think the blogger's got a point. Magazines like Popular Science and Scientific American, the sort of avenues for the average man to attempt to find out about the current state of science from, are chock-full of wide-eyed futuristic flying cars and the sort of thing they apparently never grew out of from the 1950s. A lot of pop science is, well, not much more than pop, instead of science. I don't think this really affects the actual science (good scientists will remain good scientists), but it really is indicative of the attitudes mass culture has for science. Even if you strip out the religion, you still have the "everything is unknowable" pseudo-Gnostic view that started with confused ideas of quantum mechanics or the golly gee "AI by 2050!"/"biological immortality in a century!" view of the post/transhumanist wankers.

[Lord Zentei]

Can't be arsed to read through all that, but:

Douglas Hofstadter babbles about putting everything that was in Einstein's head into a book, in order to converse with him.

Couldn't say, since I have not read Hofstadter, but is he not discussing the issue of AI, and of the Chinese Box concept? If we cannot distinguish the automata from the person, has the automata not become the equivalent of te person?

Then there's the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which not only sheathes Occam's Razor, but throws it on the ground, smashes it with a sledgehammer, and pisses all over the fragments.

No, it does not - at least not neccesarily. Occam's Razor implies that we have to invoke the smallest number of unknowns to explain the observed data. But what is more parsimonious - many words or many worlds? His rantings about parallell worlds in no way demonstrate that these ideas are false: he just goes on to rave that he feels that the ideas are ridiculous, as if his personal feelings on the matter carried any weight.

Unfortunately for him, error happens to be science's primary export. As Arthur Fine points out in The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum Theory:

Overwhelmingly, the results of the conscientious pursuit of scientific inquiry are failures: failed theories, failed hypotheses, failed conjectures, inaccurate measurements, incorrect estimations of parameters, fallacious causal inferences, and so forth.

As a simple statistical matter, a given hypothesis - and most pop science books are either hypotheses or descriptions of hypotheses - has a far better chance of being wrong than right. (Particularly when it's founded on shoddy research, like Pinker's.)

And, of course, this means that ideas should be dismissed because they are scientific hypotheses? He does have a point on the quasi religious aspect of much of pop science, though. Simply swallowing a hypothesis as gospel as opposed to an educated guess is not good mojo.

Now, I like Kaku, but I think the blogger's got a point. Magazines like Popular Science and Scientific American, the sort of avenues for the average man to attempt to find out about the current state of science from, are chock-full of wide-eyed futuristic flying cars and the sort of thing they apparently never grew out of from the 1950s. A lot of pop science is, well, not much more than pop, instead of science.

That may be true, though a number of the items he singles out are, quite frankly, attacked undeservedly.

I don't think this really affects the actual science (good scientists will remain good scientists), but it really is indicative of the attitudes mass culture has for science.

That may be true, also.

Even if you strip out the religion, you still have the "everything is unknowable" pseudo-Gnostic view that started with confused ideas of quantum mechanics or the golly gee "AI by 2050!"/"biological immortality in a century!" view of the post/transhumanist wankers.

AI by 2050 is not implausible, neither is life extention. Simply pointing out that the public has a distorted view of science and that pop science is unrealistic does not mean that the ideas presented there have no merit.

[CaptJodan]

pseudo-Gnostic view that started with confused ideas of quantum mechanics or the golly gee "AI by 2050!"/"biological immortality in a century!" view of the post/transhumanist wankers.

On the flipside you see the "dooms day" nutters who believe that science is within striking distance of taking over the world and literally destroying all of humanity. I recently had to read a HORRIBLE article (kicking and screaming, it was for a class) on how nanotechnology is about to be able to self-replicate within 30 years or so, biotechnology will cause us all to go hungry when pests adapt to the modifications being made to plants, and robots will be able to build themselves and we will become useless as a species.

The article is far too long to quote here. Read at your own risk, I don't think anyone wants to. (www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html)

It's a lot of "pop" stuff which, of course, causes problems because so many people will buy into it.

[Covenant]

pseudo-Gnostic view that started with confused ideas of quantum mechanics or the golly gee "AI by 2050!"/"biological immortality in a century!" view of the post/transhumanist wankers.

On the flipside you see the "dooms day" nutters who believe that science is within striking distance of taking over the world and literally destroying all of humanity. I recently had to read a HORRIBLE article (kicking and screaming, it was for a class) on how nanotechnology is about to be able to self-replicate within 30 years or so, biotechnology will cause us all to go hungry when pests adapt to the modifications being made to plants, and robots will be able to build themselves and we will become useless as a species.

The article is far too long to quote here. Read at your own risk, I don't think anyone wants to. (www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html)

It's a lot of "pop" stuff which, of course, causes problems because so many people will buy into it.

But do you welcome your new grey goo masters?

Also, c'mon, God Particle was about the Higgs Boson. Lederman himself mentioned that he chose the title in part because it's catchy. You can't fault people for wanting to publish pop science, and you can't fault them for wanting to have it actually purchased by someone. I'm not sure if a society that considers science dry and uninteresting, and are not informed is all that much worse than one that finds it interesting and is misinformed, but I'm much happier to see pop science books all over the place than to see other garbage books that have absolutely zero content, instead of just a negligable one. It's a gateway book, to the harder, harsher, seedier underbelly of science. Eventually they'll be looking for their next buzz and searching for technical books, hard sci-fi and research materials.

You can always look at this two ways. One as a horrible thing that damages the integrity of science, or two as just another swing in the other direction of the long battles between rationalism and mysticism. People always believe in some degree of bullshit, it seems, since they are morally incapable of seeing what's right and what's wrong, and the intellectual capability that they require to do such is underdeveloped. So they find things to grip onto based on their subjective feelgood moralities that conform to things--like the idea that the Universe is made of wiggling strings, which it might be, or that there's a billion dimensions and every possibility is a quantum bubble out there, which it also might be, or that the mind can alter space and time through will alone, which also might be but shares the same shakey footing as the other two.

What the difference between pop science and good science is, of course, is the credibility and the truth that comes with all that ugly, unexciting math and research. You'll also notice that pop science is way behind the curve. I'd find this in poor form if these were marketed to children, like Star Trek's garbage science is, but these books are generally new age books written by new age people for the perusal of other new age people. Science can stand on it's own two feet though, and it'll survive the popularization of it just fine. I think people waste too much time being angry that people undeserving of fame and popularity end up famous and popular.

The same could be said of Stephen Hawking, who despite his wide appeal and high public profile is not one of the most influential physcists in the modern years by a longshot. For every person who reads these books though there's one who buys them and reads them and thinks they're too candy coated. The author seems smart. He should write a book, and get things straight. The road goes both ways, and nothing's stopping someone from writing a showstopper book about real science.

[Nate_A]

--like the idea that the Universe is made of wiggling strings, which it might be, or that there's a billion dimensions and every possibility is a quantum bubble out there, which it also might be, or that the mind can alter space and time through will alone, which also might be but shares the same shakey footing as the other two.

How the hell can you compare string theory to the pseudoscience of super-human mind powers? Just so we're clear, string theory - along with, to a lesser extent, multiple realities - is hard science. The idea that the human mind can manipulate things without the help of the body is as ridiculous as the god hypothesis.

[Covenant]

Just so we're clear, I can easily compare string theory to vulcan mindmelds because neither are verifiable yet through experimentation. Hard science? It's hard theory. I like M theory just fine, I think it's pretty super spiffy cool and I have a few books on it on my shelf, gifted to me, that have proven enjoyable and not bogged down in mysticism. But as yet it's theory untethered to hard experimental data. Paraphrasing a physicist who is not in love with string theory, "Is that physics or philosophy?"

But you can't call it hard science until you can test it. Extravagant claims about a hidden, strange nature of the Universe are popular. Look at the co-opting of Quantum Theory into bizarre forms of new age spiritualism! And that's what the article was about. Popular theories getting extended book tours with very little substance to back up their gut. In any case, it wasn't a critique of string theory, it was to say that there's a wide range of bullshit out there, and some of it's less bullshit than others. The title of the thread is "Every Absurdity Now Has A Champion," and I was challenging the idea that it's so wrong to throw these ideas out into the popular arena and see which of them endures deadly gladiatorial combat. That's also why I said, for those people concerned about pop science and the next new thing (like some are about String Theory, though not I), they should write a peppy book about the things we are much more sure of and give people more than theory to read. People want to expand their minds, and they'll fill it with tripe if tripe is all that's on the menu. If we didn't have out String Theory books at all, the only absurdities with champions are the ones we know to be absurd.

Clearly, you mistake me for some sort of raving lunatic if you think I'm supporting mind powarz with the same credibility as string theory. The fact that my title is not village idiot should have given you some evidence to the contrary.

[Darth Wong]

In a society full of rational people, pop-science books would be great. They would produce popular enthusiasm about science but people would not be so goddamned arrogant and stupid that they think the pop-science book actually gives them university-level comprehension of the subject material.

Unfortunately, we do not live in such a society. In the hands of arrogant morons who learned so little science that they don't know how little they know, pop-science books allow them to puff out their chests with the delusion of intellectual adequacy.

[Covenant]

Is there really anything that those kinds of people can't grip onto and think that it entitles to them a Ph.D? Whenever you write a science book for the masses it feels like you're putting matches into children's hands. I think it's something of merit, and I enjoy my pop-sci books, but it certainly doesn't seem to be an ideal situation. I think that the level of readership required to actually digest some of the books actually about science is high enough that you're not going to have as many problems as if it was turned into a TV show that everyone could get misinformed by, but it's mostly a question of picking your poison. I'd still say that idiots speaking science lingo are less dangerous than ones speaking whatever else is out there--if they really like the science aspect to it, they should be happy to join the fold once we publish a book with better science in it. I don't like turning facts into religion though.

[Nate_A]

Just so we're clear, I can easily compare string theory to vulcan mindmelds because neither are verifiable yet through experimentation.

That's because we have never encountered vulcans; but tests on human psychic powers reliably show them to be nonexistent. So, I don't see how you can put them on the same footing as string theory.

Hard science? It's hard theory. I like M theory just fine, I think it's pretty super spiffy cool and I have a few books on it on my shelf, gifted to me, that have proven enjoyable and not bogged down in mysticism. But as yet it's theory untethered to hard experimental data. Paraphrasing a physicist who is not in love with string theory, "Is that physics or philosophy?"

But you can't call it hard science until you can test it.

The validity of a theory is determined by how well it explains observations. So, a theory is tested by comparing its predictions to observations. In this sense, people have been testing and improving string theory for some time.

Extravagant claims about a hidden, strange nature of the Universe are popular. Look at the co-opting of Quantum Theory into bizarre forms of new age spiritualism! And that's what the article was about. Popular theories getting extended book tours with very little substance to back up their gut. In any case, it wasn't a critique of string theory, it was to say that there's a wide range of bullshit out there, and some of it's less bullshit than others.

Then would you please clarify what you meant by:

or that the mind can alter space and time through will alone, which also might be but shares the same shakey footing as the other two.

[Emphasis mine]

Don't you think that your wording could incourage the intermingling of science and superstition?

The title of the thread is "Every Absurdity Now Has A Champion," and I was challenging the idea that it's so wrong to throw these ideas out into the popular arena and see which of them endures deadly gladiatorial combat. That's also why I said, for those people concerned about pop science and the next new thing (like some are about String Theory, though not I), they should write a peppy book about the things we are much more sure of and give people more than theory to read. People want to expand their minds, and they'll fill it with tripe if tripe is all that's on the menu. If we didn't have out String Theory books at all, the only absurdities with champions are the ones we know to be absurd.

Agreed.

Clearly, you mistake me for some sort of raving lunatic if you think I'm supporting mind powarz with the same credibility as string theory. The fact that my title is not village idiot should have given you some evidence to the contrary.

I don't jump to assumptions - that's why I asked a question. But surely you can see how what you said could be misunderstood.

[Covenant]

These people do intermingle science and superstition, that's the problem. As Darth Wong said, if these were a rational, educated populace... if they were that, then we could publish any materials, and there'd be a good chance people wouldn't need hand-holding to figure out what's worth getting militant about.

I will grant that by attempting to draw a stark paralell I may have made too sweeping a set of examples, so I can see how the wording was poorly made. Re-reading it now, it seems like I could have done a lot better. I'll cede you the point, since you seem intelligent, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

As to clarify for you, just since you asked, they share the same footing as books about something that you can't back up with evidence. Cosmic Theory is great, but these 'String Theory 4 Dummies' books usually end up being so weak in the science that they bridge on being non-science, as do most. They encourage paralells to religion and invite people to misinform themselves by taking an idea and believing it to be fact, or believing that scientists themselves settle for nebulous "We don't understand our wacky universe" answers to reality. I was responding to the OP's quoted text that had a lot of these quasi-metaphysic theory books that include a lot of wierdness to make things understandable but also confuse the science illiterate as to the real reasons for things. We should care less that people know something about string theory and care more that they know a lot of it wrong. The masses of the world have no impact on the advancement of science, so a watered down book on cosmic physics is not helpful to science persay, but they do have an impact on legislation and culture, so it behooves us not to arm them with junk science. They really need to learn a lot more elementary science than quantum physics right now, and that was another thing the OP, and others, mentioned.

[General Brock]

Given the way this site explains how Star Trek post-TOS made a hash of science and people's perceptions of science, he has a point, but science from the very beginning has had to sort through charlatans, quacks, and hacks from the good scientists and legitimate visionaries.

As long as the peer review process remains uncorrupted and society demands the tangible results of good science, there shouldn't be a problem. Irrationality and superstition can't develop and sustain a technological culture with working amenities and advanced essential services.

An elitist attempt to censure scientific imagination by the masses would be more damaging to science in the long run, than letting them dream on. The mechanisms for censure could impede socially inconvenient scientific advances. There are, for example, practicing scientists against stem-cell research. Sometimes a controversial field in its infancy began as only speculation, the implications of its results seeming more sensational than sensible.

The lesson of Galileo should not be lost. Science should be left to stand on its own, and good science outlasts the fraudulent because it works much better.

[B5B7]

I think a too broad brush is being applied here. For instance, I also think that the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics is nonsense, or at least implausible, and yet it is accepted by a substantial percentage of the physics community - something funny is going on here, much more disturbing than perceived erroneous popular science books.

[Battlehymn Republic]

I recently had to read a HORRIBLE article (kicking and screaming, it was for a class) on how nanotechnology is about to be able to self-replicate within 30 years or so, biotechnology will cause us all to go hungry when pests adapt to the modifications being made to plants, and robots will be able to build themselves and we will become useless as a species.

The article is far too long to quote here. Read at your own risk, I don't think anyone wants to. (www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html)

Yeah, it's actually kind of old, but still famous article. It was written by no less than Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, someone who made his career and legacy out of technology, but is in reality a Luddite on these matters. It's all very ironic.

I think another problem (though it may be unrelated) is that occasionally you get all these famous mainstream figures of science and technology saying things that capture the public's imagination and messes with their perception of science. Dyson piping up about biotech and global warming (he's a skeptic), for one. Penrose and his work with parapsychology is another. Hawking's forays into popular culture. It confuses the masses, though it's not always for the worse.

[Nate_A]

These people do intermingle science and superstition, that's the problem. As Darth Wong said, if these were a rational, educated populace... if they were that, then we could publish any materials, and there'd be a good chance people wouldn't need hand-holding to figure out what's worth getting militant about.

I will grant that by attempting to draw a stark paralell I may have made too sweeping a set of examples, so I can see how the wording was poorly made. Re-reading it now, it seems like I could have done a lot better. I'll cede you the point, since you seem intelligent, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

Thank you. All I wanted was to make sure that no erroneous perceptions were propagated here. Perhaps I should have simply ignored your poor word choice as I would a grammatical error.

As to clarify for you, just since you asked, they share the same footing as books about something that you can't back up with evidence. Cosmic Theory is great, but these 'String Theory 4 Dummies' books usually end up being so weak in the science that they bridge on being non-science, as do most. They encourage paralells to religion and invite people to misinform themselves by taking an idea and believing it to be fact, or believing that scientists themselves settle for nebulous "We don't understand our wacky universe" answers to reality. I was responding to the OP's quoted text that had a lot of these quasi-metaphysic theory books that include a lot of wierdness to make things understandable but also confuse the science illiterate as to the real reasons for things. We should care less that people know something about string theory and care more that they know a lot of it wrong. The masses of the world have no impact on the advancement of science, so a watered down book on cosmic physics is not helpful to science persay, but they do have an impact on legislation and culture, so it behooves us not to arm them with junk science. They really need to learn a lot more elementary science than quantum physics right now, and that was another thing the OP, and others, mentioned.

Thank you for clarifying; and well said!