Epstein's Dollar Bill and What it Doesn't Prove About the Brain

I hate to pick on poor confused Robert Epstein again, but after thinking about it some more, I'd like to explain why an example in his foolish article doesn't justify his claims.

Here I quote his example without the accompanying illustrations:

In a classroom exercise I have conducted many times over the years, I begin by recruiting a student to draw a detailed picture of a dollar bill – ‘as detailed as possible’, I say – on the blackboard in front of the room. When the student has finished, I cover the drawing with a sheet of paper, remove a dollar bill from my wallet, tape it to the board, and ask the student to repeat the task. When he or she is done, I remove the cover from the first drawing, and the class comments on the differences.

Because you might never have seen a demonstration like this, or because you might have trouble imagining the outcome, I have asked Jinny Hyun, one of the student interns at the institute where I conduct my research, to make the two drawings. Here is her drawing ‘from memory’ (notice the metaphor):

And here is the drawing she subsequently made with a dollar bill present:

Jinny was as surprised by the outcome as you probably are, but it is typical. As you can see, the drawing made in the absence of the dollar bill is horrible compared with the drawing made from an exemplar, even though Jinny has seen a dollar bill thousands of times.

What is the problem? Don’t we have a ‘representation’ of the dollar bill ‘stored’ in a ‘memory register’ in our brains? Can’t we just ‘retrieve’ it and use it to make our drawing?

Obviously not, and a thousand years of neuroscience will never locate a representation of a dollar bill stored inside the human brain for the simple reason that it is not there to be found.

Now let me explain why Epstein's example doesn't even come close to proving what he thinks it does.

First, the average person is not very good at drawing. I am probably much, much worse than the average person in this respect. When I play "pictionary", for example, people always laugh at my stick figures. Yet, given something to look at and copy, I can do a reasonable job of copying what I see. I, like many people, have trouble converting what I see "in my mind's eye" to a piece of paper. So it is not at all surprising to me that the students Epstein asks to draw a dollar bill produce the results he displays. His silly experiment says nothing about the brain and what it "stores" at all!

Second, Epstein claims that the brain stores no representation of a dollar bill whatsoever. He is pretty unequivocal about this. So let me suggest another experiment that decisively refutes Epstein's claim: instead of asking students to draw a dollar bill (an exercise which evidently is mostly about the artistic ability of students), instead give them five different "dollar bills", four of which have been altered in some fairly obvious respect. For example, one might have a portrait of Jefferson instead of Washington, another might have the "1" in only two corners instead of all four corners, another might have the treasury seal in red instead of the typical green for a federal reserve note, etc. And one of the five is an ordinary bill. Now ask them to pick out which bills are real and which are not. To make it really precise, each student should get just one bill and not be able to see the bills of others.

Here's what I will bet: students will, with very high probability, be able to distinguish the real dollar bill from the altered ones. I know with certainty that I can do this.

Now, how could one possibly distinguish the real dollar bills from the fake ones if one has no representation of the real one stored in the brain?

And this is not pure speculation: thousands of cashiers every day are tasked with distinguishing real bills from fake ones. Somehow, even though they have no representation of the dollar bill stored in their brain, they manage to do this. Why, it's magic!

Yes, Your Brain Certainly Is a Computer

- Did you hear the news, Victoria? Over in the States those clever Yanks have invented a flying machine!

- A flying machine! Good heavens! What kind of feathers does it have?

- Feathers? It has no feathers.

- Well, then, it cannot fly. Everyone knows that things that fly have feathers. It is preposterous to claim that something can fly without them.

OK, I admit it, I made that dialogue up. But that's what springs to mind when I read yet another claim that the brain is not a computer, nor like a computer, and even that the language of computation is inappropriate when talking about the brain.

The most recent foolishness along these lines was penned by psychologist Robert Epstein. Knowing virtually nothing about Epstein, I am willing to wager that (a) Epstein has never taken a course in the theory of computation (b) could not pass the simplest undergraduate exam in that subject (c) does not know what the Church-Turing thesis is and (d) could not explain why the thesis is relevant to the question of whether the brain is a computer or not.

Here are just a few of the silly claims by Epstein, with my commentary:

"But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently."

-- Well, Epstein is wrong. We, like all living things, are certainly born with "information". To name just one obvious example, there is an awful lot of DNA in our cells. Not only is this coded information, it is even coded in base 4, whereas modern digital computers use base 2 -- the analogy is clear. We are certainly born with "rules" and "algorithms" and "programs", as Frances Crick explains in detail about the human visual system in The Astonishing Hypothesis.

"We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them."

-- We certainly do store words in some form. When we are born, we are unable to pronounce or remember the word "Epstein", but eventually, after being exposed to enough of his silly essays, suddenly we gain that capability. From where did this ability come? Something must have changed in the structure of the brain (not the arm or the foot or the stomach) that allows us to retrieve "Epstein" and pronounce it whenever something sufficiently stupid is experienced. The thing that is changed can reasonably be said to "store" the word.

As for rules, without some sort of encoding of rules somewhere, how can we produce so many syntactically correct sentences with such regularity and consistency? How can we produce sentences we've never produced before, and have them be grammatically correct?

"We don’t create representations of visual stimuli"

-- We certainly do. Read Crick.

"Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not."

-- No, organisms certainly do. They just don't do it in exactly the same way that modern digital computers do. I think this is the root of Epstein's confusion.

Anyone who understands the work of Turing realizes that computation is not the province of silicon alone. Any system that can do basic operations like storage and rewriting can do computation, whether it is a sandpile, or a membrane, or a Turing machine, or a person. Today we know (but Epstein apparently doesn't) that every such system has essentially the same computing power (in the sense of what can be ultimately computed, with no bounds on space and time).

"The faulty logic of the IP metaphor is easy enough to state. It is based on a faulty syllogism – one with two reasonable premises and a faulty conclusion. Reasonable premise #1: all computers are capable of behaving intelligently. Reasonable premise #2: all computers are information processors. Faulty conclusion: all entities that are capable of behaving intelligently are information processors."

-- This is just utter nonsense. Nobody says "all computers are capable of behaving intelligently". Take a very simple model of a computer, such as a finite automaton with two states computing the Thue-Morse sequence. I believe intelligence is a continuum, and I think we can ascribe intelligence to even simple computational models, but even I would say that this little computer doesn't exhibit much intelligence at all. Furthermore, there are good theoretical reasons why finite automata don't have enough power to "behave intelligently"; we need a more powerful model, such as the Turing machine.

The real syllogism goes something like this: humans can process information (we know this because humans can do basic tasks like addition and multiplication of integers). Humans can store information (we know this because I can remember my social security number and my birthdate). Things that both store information and process it are called (wait for it) computers.

"a thousand years of neuroscience will never locate a representation of a dollar bill stored inside the human brain for the simple reason that it is not there to be found."

-- Of course, this is utter nonsense. If there were no representation of any kind of a dollar bill in a brain, how could one produce a drawing of it, even imperfectly? I have never seen (just to pick one thing at random) a crystal of the mineral Fletcherite, nor even a picture of it. Ask me to draw it and I will be completely unable to do so because I have no representation of it stored in my brain. But ask me to draw a US dollar bill (in Canada we no longer have them!) and I can do a reasonable, but not exact job. How could I possibly do this if I have no information about a dollar bill stored in my memory anywhere? And how is that I fail for Fletcherite?

"The idea, advanced by several scientists, that specific memories are somehow stored in individual neurons is preposterous"

-- Well, it may be preposterous to Epstein, but there is at least evidence for it, at least in some cases.

"A wealth of brain studies tells us, in fact, that multiple and sometimes large areas of the brain are often involved in even the most mundane memory tasks."

-- So what? What does this have to do with anything? There is no requirement, in saying that the brain is a computer, that memories and facts and beliefs be stored in individual neurons. Storage that is partitioned in various location, "smeared" across the brain, is perfectly compatible with computation. It's as if Epstein has never heard of digital neural networks, where one can similarly say that a face is not stored in any particular location in memory, but rather distributed across many of them. These networks even exhibit some characteristics of brains, in that damaging parts of them don't entirely get rid of the stored data.

"My favourite example of the dramatic difference between the IP perspective and what some now call the ‘anti-representational’ view of human functioning involves two different ways of explaining how a baseball player manages to catch a fly ball – beautifully explicated by Michael McBeath, now at Arizona State University, and his colleagues in a 1995 paper in Science. The IP perspective requires the player to formulate an estimate of various initial conditions of the ball’s flight – the force of the impact, the angle of the trajectory, that kind of thing – then to create and analyse an internal model of the path along which the ball will likely move, then to use that model to guide and adjust motor movements continuously in time in order to intercept the ball.

"That is all well and good if we functioned as computers do, but McBeath and his colleagues gave a simpler account: to catch the ball, the player simply needs to keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery (technically, in a ‘linear optical trajectory’). This might sound complicated, but it is actually incredibly simple, and completely free of computations, representations and algorithms."

-- This is perhaps the single stupidest passage in Epstein's article. He doesn't seem to know that "keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery" is an algorithm. Tell that description to any computer scientist, and they'll say, "What an elegant algorithm!". In exactly the same way, the way raster graphics machines draw a circle is a clever technique called "Bresenham's algorithm". It succeeds in drawing a circle using linear operations only, despite not having the quadratic equation of a circle (x-a)² + (y-b)² = r² explicitly encoded in it.

But more importantly, it shows Epstein hasn't thought seriously at all about what it means to catch a fly ball. It is a very complicated affair, involving coordination of muscles and eyes. When you summarize it as "the simply needs to keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery", you hide all the amazing amount of computation and algorithms that are going on behind the scenes to coordinate movement, keep the player from falling over, and so forth. I'd like to see Epstein design a walking robot, let alone a running robot, without any algorithms at all.

"there is no reason to believe that any two of us are changed the same way by the same experience."

-- Perhaps not. But there is reason to believe that many of us are changed in approximately the same way. For example, all of us learn our natural language from parents and friends, and we somehow learn approximately the same language.

"We are organisms, not computers. Get over it."

-- No, we are both organisms and computers. Get over it!

"The IP metaphor has had a half-century run, producing few, if any, insights along the way."

-- Say what? The computational model of the brain has had enormous success. Read Crick, for example, for an example of how the computational model has had some success in modeling the human visual system. Here's an example from that book I give in my algorithms course at Waterloo: why is it that humans can find a single red R in a field of green R's almost instantly whether there are 10 or 1000 letters, or a single red R in a field of red L's almost as quickly, but has trouble finding the unique green R in a large sea of green L's and red R's and red L's? If you understand algorithms and the distinction between parallel and sequential algorithms, you can explain this. If you're Robert Epstein, I imagine you just sit there dumbfounded.

Other examples of successes include artificial neural nets, which have huge applications in things like handwriting recognition, face recognition, classification, robotics, and many other areas. They draw their inspiration from the structure of the brain, and somehow manage to function enormously well; they are used in industry all the time. If that is not great validation of the model, I don't know what is.

I don't know why people like Epstein feel the need to deny things for which the evidence is so overwhelming. He behaves like a creationist in denying evolution. And like creationists, he apparently has no training in a very relevant field (here, computer science) but still wants to pontificate on it. When intelligent people behave so stupidly, it makes me sad.

P. S. I forgot to include one of the best pieces of evidence that the brain, as a computer, is doing things roughly analogous to digital computers, and certainly no more powerful than our ordinary RAM model or multitape Turing machine. Here it is: mental calculators who can do large arithmetic calculations are known, and their feats have been catalogued: they can do things like multiply large numbers or extract square roots in their heads without pencil and paper. But in every example known, their extraordinary computational feats are restricted to things for which we know there exist polynomial-time algorithms. None of these computational savants have ever, in the histories I've read, been able to factor arbitrary large numbers in their heads (say numbers of 100 digits that are the product of two primes). They can multiply 50-digit numbers in their heads, but they can't factor. And, not surprisingly, no polynomial-time algorithm for factoring is currently known, and perhaps there isn't one.

Give Carol Wainio an Honorary Degree in Journalism

Carol Wainio catalogues once again a list of Margaret Wente's journalistic transgressions.

This is a story that Canadian media is not addressing with much intellectual honesty. Take this grotesque column by Emma Teitel, for example.

What journalism school in Canada will be brave enough and honest enough to recognize Wainio's work -- for example, by awarding her an honorary degree?

Christian god to Ted Cruz: "Drop Dead"

Poor Ted Cruz.

First, his god tells him to run for President of the US.

Then, his god humiliates him in primary after primary.

Ted wanted his Republican opponents to pray and drop out of the race.

But it didn't quite work out that way.

What a capricious puppet-master god Ted worships!

Columnist Margaret Wente Caught Plagiarizing Again

Although columnist Margaret Wente has been caught plagiarizing yet one more time by visual artist Carol Wainio, the Globe and Mail refuses to take real responsibility for it, saying only that "This work fell short of our standards, something that we apologize for. It shouldn’t have happened and the Opinion team will be working with Peggy to ensure this cannot happen again."

But it has happened again. Again and again and again and again.

Any reputable newspaper would have, in my opinion, fired Wente long ago. Inexplicably, the National Post's Terence Corcoran actually defends Wente. He can only do so by keeping his eyes firmly shut.

Trump Haiku

Craig Kaplan, my brilliant and whimsical colleague, has invented a twitterbot, trump575, that tweets haikus constructed from the opus of Donald Trump. You can follow it here.

You are Not Allowed to Laugh at the Lies and Idiocies of the Right!

Somebody sent me a link to this piece by Emmett Rensin at Vox.

The author's thesis is that liberals have stopped thinking and spend all their time being smug instead -- but this is certainly not true of conservatives. Liberals, according to Rensin, "hate their former allies". Conservatives, by contrast, are open-minded and persuadable. And, Rensin says, The Daily Show is a perfect example of this liberal smugness.

Well, Rensin goes wrong right there. "Smug" is not even close to the right word to describe Jon Stewart. Bill Maher is smug. Jon Stewart is, at times, almost painfully earnest. Does he make fun of people? Absolutely. But modern conservatism has so many targets that the jokes write themselves: Ben Carson and his pyramids that stored grain. Donald Trump and his claim that he saw "thousands and thousands" of American Muslims celebrating the 9/11 attacks. Ted Cruz and his "Trus-Ted" slogan, when his record of public dishonesty is hard to deny. Rensin apparently thinks we are not allowed to poke fun at all this idiocy and dishonesty.

Here are some examples of liberal smug ignorance, according to Rensin: "the Founding Fathers were all secular deists". Well, that's clearly not so, but some were, at least during part of their life, like Thomas Paine and Ethan Allen. But how is this mistake worse than the conservative claim that "94 percent of the [the era of the Founders'] documents were based on the Bible" (debunked here)?

Another one: "that you're actually, like, 30 times more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder". Perhaps the number "30" is wrong, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a significant health risk in owning a gun. And how is this mistake worse than the conservative insistence on "more guns mean less crime"? Pro-gun "researchers" such as Kleck and Lott are treated by conservatives as unimpeachable, when in fact their errors are extensively documented.

Rensin's thesis is essentially a denigration of the importance of knowledge and facts. Who cares, Rensin says implicitly, if watching Fox News makes you less well informed? Pointing that out is just liberal smugness. Knowledge and facts are just unimportant compared to empathy and open-mindedness, which liberals today lack (while, presumably, conservatives have it in spades). Pay no attention the fact that when President Obama cited empathy as a desirable characteristic in a Supreme Court justice, conservatives jumped all over him.

Open-mindedness is a virtue -- I'll agree with that. But open-mindedness without skepticism and facts and knowledge just becomes credulity, a willingess to believe anything if it confirms your world view.

Here are just a few of the things that conservatives "know" that just ain't so: that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet (debunked here); that Bill Clinton delayed air traffic while he was having a haircut (debunked here); that Hillary Clinton was fired from the Watergate investigation for incompetence (debunked here). Visit any conservative website, mention Al or Bill or Hillary, and you'll only have to wait a few minutes before one of these lies is dragged out yet again. I have grad-school-educated conservative friends that proudly repeat these stories, ferchrissake.

Rensin claims that all this liberal smugness has "corrupt[ed]" them, but he gives no examples of corruption. He claims the case against conservatives is "tenuous", but just dismisses evidence like that given above and his own article.

Rensin thinks it is somehow "smug" for atheists to point out the religious hypocrisy of Kim Davis. It is here that his argument (and I use the term generously) becomes the most unhinged. Is it really necessary to be a Christian to criticize Christians? Do you have to believe in the divinity of Jesus or be a professional theologian to point out that Kim Davis cannot find support for her actions in Christian theology? When Mike Huckabee opportunistically elbowed out Ted Cruz to be at Kim Davis's rally, Rensin finds Huckabee genuine and admirable, instead of the pandering opportunity it clearly was.

Rensin is rhetorically dishonest. At one point he tries to refute a claim about the Ku Klux Klan by citing statistics about Stormfront.org. But these are entirely different groups.

Rensin is upset that the Daily Show is "broadcast on national television". Has he never listened to Fox News? Or conservative radio hosts with huge audiences, like Mark Levin and Michael Savage? The vitriol and the outright lies that happen every single day in these venues make Jon Stewart look like gentle fun.

Rensin claims that only Democrats have "made a point of openly disdaining" the dispossessed. One can only make that claim by wilfully ignoring the time Donald Trump made fun of a disabled reporter, or the time a Republican congressional candidate called poor people slothful and lazy, or Mitt Romney's comment that he could never convince 47% of the American people that "they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives".

Rensin thinks liberal smugness is going to ensure a Trump victory: "Faced with the prospect of an election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the smug will reach a fever pitch: six straight months of a sure thing, an opportunity to mock and scoff and ask, How could anybody vote for this guy? until a morning in November when they ask, What the fuck happened?". Yet who is a better match for the word smug? Hillary Clinton? Bernie Sanders? Look, when even Bill Maher calls you smug, you know you've got smug issues.

Finally, I observe that there doesn't seem to be any way to leave comments on Rensin's piece. That seems pretty smug to me.

The Small Mind of the Conservative

Here is a splendid example of a certain kind of conservative mind: the kind that can't imagine how things could be any different, or why anyone would want them to be any different, from the way they are today. This kind of person always says, whenever anything novel is brought up, "But we've always done it this way!" Next, they go on to invent all sorts of silly reasons to avoid making any change.

Small-minded is what we used to call this trait, and it's particularly on display here. Mike Strobel, who despite once being Editor-in-Chief of the Toronto Sun doesn't seem to know the difference between "stationary" and "stationery", can't think of a single decent reason to turf the monarchy in Canada.

Instead, he believes keeping them around is a good idea because "the Trudeaus might declare themselves Canada’s royal family and we’d wake up one morning as subjects of King Justin". Perhaps the Queen will save Strobel someday by pushing him out of the way of an errant taxi. Those two preposterous scenarios are about equally likely.

Allan Fotheringham, a commentator that actually has connected brain cells, once said, "Grown-up nations do not need, as head of state, a woman -- however nice -- who lives across a large ocean in a castle in a foreign country." Someday Canada will grow up. Strobel, I'm not so sure about.

Under the Influence - An Amazingly Good Radio Show about Advertising

There are only a few radio shows I listen to regularly, but one of them is "Under the Influence" on CBC, an amazingly good show about advertising, hosted by Terry O'Reilly. I recommend it. O'Reilly may have a kind of whiny voice, but he seems to possess detailed knowledge about all facets of advertising, and he paints great pictures with his descriptions.

The latest show is about business-to-business advertising, and features a couple of famous commercials I had never seen before: the Jean-Claude van Damme ad for Volvo, and the "herding cats" ad for EDS.

Do you know any niche radio shows that are exceptionally good?

How to Be a Good Little Right-Wing Pundit

Right-wing pundits see bullies everywhere they look. But always on the Left, never on the Right.

Right-wing pundits see lynch mobs everywhere they look. But always on the Left, never on the Right.

A great example is Yale computer scientist David Gelernter. As I've pointed out before, when philosopher Thomas Nagel published a book about materialism, he got a lot of public criticism for his silly and uninformed views. But, according to Gelernter, all this criticism was downright unfair: he called Nagel's critics "punks, bullies, and hangers-on of the philosophical underworld" and a "lynch mob" and a "mass attack of killer hyenas".

But nobody picketed Nagel, or demanded he be fired from his academic job, or threatened to boycott journals where he published. They just criticized him.

Has Gelernter ever stood up for leftist professors who have been threatened with bodily harm or loss of their jobs for their opinions? Not that I've seen.

The latest right-wing pundit to get into hysterics is Brendan O'Neill. He calls transgenderism "intolerant". Novelist Ian McEwan was "subjected to a Twitch hunt", which is a "bloodsport". Critics of McEwan "went berserk" and engaged in "virtual tomato-throwing". It was "reminiscent" of "the Inquisition". The criticism was "attempted silencing". It was "straight out of Nineteen Eight-Four".

Yup, bullies and lynch mobs everywhere. Except that there aren't any lynch mobs. Nobody attacked McEwan physically. Nobody got in his face, or blocked his path, or threatened him. All critics did was take issue with what he said.

If you want to be a good little right-wing pundit, you have to learn this game. All criticism from the Left is "bullying". All criticism from the Right is "free speech". All criticism from the Left is just like the Inquisition. All criticism from the Right is brave disagreement with the status quo. All criticism from the Left is Orwellian. All criticism from the Right is the true spirit of democracy.

Good little right-wing pundit. Have a puppy treat.

NPR's Word Puzzle

NPR's Sunday puzzle last week was the following: find a five-letter word in which the position, in the alphabet, of the first letter is equal to the sum of the positions of the last four letters.

This week they gave the following answers: maced, table, whack, and zebra.

More generally, one could ask the same question for words of other lengths. Here are a few I found:

cab
hag
jade
leaf
leg
mage
mica
mid
need
pig
rale
real
ride
same
sand
seam
toad
toe
vial
vim
weeded
wend
who
wick
win
yet
yip
zeta
zinc

So "weeded" seems to be the longest word in English with this property. Can you find a longer one?

They also talked about words like "easy" in which the position of the last letter is equal to the sum of the positions of the preceding letters. I found the following other examples:

abbot
ally
away
babe
bail
bendy
bidet
bleat
boar
cachet
debit
dim
draw
eager
fag
feces
flew
gnu
habit
hair
hem
hoax
how
idly
jaggy
joy
kit
lam
man
neat
pact
paddy
sex
tabby
tau
wax

So the longest seems to be "cachet". Can you find a longer one?

They Offer Nothing But Lies, 6

Once again, the creationists are telling fibs about information theory. Are they dishonest, or just stupid? In the case of Denyse O'Leary, I'm inclined to suspect the latter:

The belief that randomness produces information (central to Darwinism) is obviously false. It’s never been demonstrated because it can’t be. It is assumed.

No, it's not "assumed". It's proved. It's one of the most basic results in Kolmogorov information theory, demonstrated every year in the classes I teach. With high probability, a randomly-generated list of symbols will contain a lot of information. To understand this you can use one of Dembski's own metaphors: the combination lock. Which will be harder for someone to deduce, a combination that is your birthday in the form mmdd, or the first four digits of pi, or a randomly-generated 4-digit code?

This does not seem to penetrate the skull of the rather dense Ms. O'Leary, who then tries to weasel out of her claim by saying

by "information," one means here complex, specified information, produced in vast interlocking patterns on a regular basis.

Oh, so she's not talking about "information" in the way it is used by mathematicians and computer scientists. She's talking about creationist information, that vague, incoherent, and self-contradictory mess invented by Dembski and used by basically no one except creationists.

That mess was debunked years ago.

Here's an example: take any English text T, like the first 10 lines of a Shakespearean sonnet. Now apply any decent encryption function f to it that is not known to an adversary, getting U. To the adversary, U will look like random noise and hence be "unspecified", so it will not constitute creationist information. Now I come along and apply f^-1 to U, getting T back again. Voilà! I have now magically created information deterministically, something Dembski claims is impossible.

No matter how many times you explain this, creationists offer nothing but lies in response.

Margaret Russell on Mississippi's Anti-Gay Law

Here's my old pal Margaret "Peggy" Russell, professor of law at Santa Clara, speaking on KQED about the new anti-gay law passed in Mississippi.

Mississippi is one of three US states I've never visited. I probably won't visit while this law is in effect.

Another Day, Another Right-Wing Quote Lie

It seems that pretty much every day of the week, one can find right-wing spokesmen using fake quotes to justify their beliefs.

Today's lying wingnut is Sarah Palin, who gave a sing-song speech-like thingie in Wisconsin supporting Donald Trump to barely any applause at all. Near the end (at the 20:30 mark of the video), she says, "Well, General George Patton, he said it best, he -- leading the greatest generation -- he said 'Politicians are the lowest form of life on earth', he said it, I didn't, OK? he said it. And he said, 'Liberal Democrats are the lowest form of politicians.' "

Well, no, Patton didn't. This was debunked months ago.

Sarah Palin, like most of her wingnut friends, is completely uninterested in the truth. All she cares about is having a cudgel to beat Democrats with.

These Lawyers are All ASSoLs

This is pretty funny: two donors paid off George Mason University to the tune of $30 million to change the name of their mediocre law school (rated #40 in the US by one measure) to the "Antonin Scalia School of Law".

I guess nobody noticed at the time that the acronym "ASSoL" was really, really appropriate. At least not for a while. But now they've quietly changed their public presence to the "The Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University".

That won't prevent everyone else from calling them ASSoLs, though.

Cold-FX Lawsuit May Be a Remedy for False Health Claims

Cold-FX, a drugstore remedy hawked by Canadian fashion icon Don Cherry, is the subject of a lawsuit alleging the makers "ignored their own research and misled consumers about the short-term effectiveness of the popular cold and flu remedy". Cold-FX is basically just some sort of ginseng extract, although they give it the fancy name "CVT-E002". The suit was brought by Don Harrison of Vancouver Island.

Questions about the efficacy of Cold-FX have been raised for years.

Whether or not the claims of Cold-FX are false -- nothing has been proven in court yet -- there is no question that there is a lot of fraud in the over-the-counter pharmacy market, including worthless homeopathic remedies marketed as being effective against a wide variety of illnesses.

Hopefully this lawsuit, whether it succeeds or not, will make pharmaceutical companies much more diligent about ensuring the veracity of their claims.

Et in Arcadia Ego

The Future of Recursivity

Hello, readers! I'm pleased to announce that I've joined freethoughtblogs.com, home of P. Z. Myers and other interesting bloggers.

This doesn't mean that this blog will die. I intend to cross-post things here and there. Comment wherever you like.

More info later, as I learn how to use the new system.

James Tour's First Talk: Nanotechnology and God

The dilemma of the scientist who is also a devout Christian* is clear: on the one hand, in his/her professional life the scientist must explore the natural world and rigorously apply skepticism to his/her conclusions. The scientist is always asking, "Could there be some other explanation I haven't thought of?". On the other hand, the devout Christian is required to accept an incoherent and nonsensical theology, and to renounce other reasonable explanations for the events that supposedly occurred in the New Testament. Skepticism is replaced by faith.

This is one reason, I suspect, that Christians are more common in the physical sciences and less common in fields like anthropology, psychology, and sociology. A really serious anthropologist or sociologist or psychologist who is a believer would be, I suspect, consumed by trying to understand the personality, motives, and characteristics of the Christian god, and that can only be done with some rigor through a scientific study, which the Christian is explicitly forbidden to do by Matthew 4:7, Deuteronomy 6:16, and Luke 4:12. In contrast, the chemist, geologist, or physicist is able to compartmentalize his/her beliefs more successfully. Believing in Jesus is not going to strongly impact your experiments if you are studying the properties of organic compounds or the interactions and decays of baryons.

Compartmentalization is the key word here, and it was very much in evidence in last night's Pascal lecture. To say it was a lecture is somewhat overstating the case. It started with a commercial (for James Tour's lab and its admittedly excellent work in nanotechnology) and it finished with pure Christian evangelism. Given that the title was "Nanotechnology and God", I was expecting a somewhat more polished segue between the two topics (although it was too much to hope that he might have remarked that both topics concern the vanishingly small). There was none. Prof. Tour went in one sentence from a summary of his work on nanotechnology to a story of how he became a Messianic Jew. Along the way he admonished the audience in various ways: to abjure pornography, to pray for personal success, to read the bible every day.

Here are a few of the things that Prof. Tour seems to believe, as I understand it. First, that the "fact of the Resurrection is overwhelming". (I don't think he uses the term "fact" the way I do.) Second, that he obtained his wife because he prayed for one and his god granted his wish. Third, that he was offered money to buy more software (through some supernatural intervention?) because of his virtuous refusal to break the license of software he used on other machines. Fourth, that he prays before every course lecture and scientific talk that his presentation will be wonderful. Fifth, that he prayed for the success of a disliked colleague and this resulted in the success of the colleague and his transfer to another university. Honestly, it was really hard to not laugh at all that.

I find it fascinating that such a scientist -- evidently extremely clever -- can successfully convince himself that there is a supernatural being, the creator of the universe, who is so obsessively concerned in that scientist's success and life that he (the god) arranges things so that departmental money to buy software arises (because of the scientist's virtue) and so that rival colleagues get offers to leave.

I did get a chance to ask a question. After hearing this litany of successes that Prof. Tour had achieved through prayer, I asked him what percentage of things he prays for don't come true. He was unable to provide a figure. This is compartmentalization again. A scientist would, I would think, want to know this important fact. Do certain kinds of prayers work better than others? Does the time of day affect success? Is success actually greater than chance, or does Prof. Tour simply forget about the prayers that don't come true? Does it help if the prayer is said in certain languages? Are prayers for oneself granted more often than prayers for others? What happens when two equally virtuous people pray for opposite outcomes?

Another thing that I was able to establish was that Prof. Tour, despite being a signatory to the Discovery Institute's notorious "Scientific Dissent from Darwinism", has never read a college-level textbook about evolution. In my opinion, this is irresponsible (but not surprising).

In short, although Prof. Tour is a good speaker who clearly has done excellent work, his religious beliefs seem (to me) to be childish and unwarranted. His personal version of prosperity theology is laughable. The event was largely evangelical and not intellectual in nature, and is inappropriate to be sponsored and endorsed by a public university that accepts students of all faiths. It was, in short, another embarrassment.

* I phrase it this way to avoid the ambiguous term "Christian scientist".

The Pascal Lecture, James Tour, and Shallit's Law

Well, once again it's time for that annual embarrassment at the University of Waterloo, the Pascal lecture series.

Our university actually sponsors these lectures, which are designed to "[challenge] the university to a search for truth through personal faith and intellectual inquiry which focus on Jesus Christ." I think it's completely inappropriate for a secular university to evangelize for a particular religion in this manner.

Previous lectures that I've attended and written about include Mary Poplin (also see here and here); the late Charles Rice (also see here and here); and John Lennox (also see here and here and here).

This year the speaker is James Tour, a chemist and signer of the infamous Discovery Institute dissent from Darwinism letter. You can see Tour's own rambling account of his dissatisfaction with evolution here. I hope he's a better speaker than he's a writer.

For more about Tour, see Larry Moran's take here.

I'm going to try to go, but I may be too jet-lagged to do so. In any event, I want to recall a law I have modestly named after myself: Shallit's law. Here it is:

"Whenever a distinguished scientist, physician, or engineer claims that he or she `doesn't understand' evolution, or `encourages skepticism' about evolution or that evolution `skeptics' are poorly treated, some fatuous utterance about Jeebus will soon follow."

You can evaluate the accuracy of Shallit's law by attending Tour's lectures, I suppose.

P. S. The Pascal lecture committee, as well as other dubious sites, like to cite Tour as "one of the 50 most influential scientists in the world" as stated by thebestschools.org. But thebestschools.org is a project of none other than James Barham, the ID-friendly but extremely confused philosopher who testified for the creationists in Kansas. In other words, it is not an unbiased source. In fact, I don't see much evidence that it's anything more than just James Barham sitting in a basement somewhere.