Apathy Sketchpad

Every so often, in Internet discussion forums, national newspapers, or real life (no link for this one, sorry), I have an argument with someone who is against the Metric system. These are people who I do not suffer gladly. The worst of them are those idiotic “Metric martyrs” who point blank refused to use Metric units and then complained when they had their little shops shut down, as if insisting on only using Imperial units was somehow different to insisting on only accepting Canadian dollars and only speaking Esperanto. The fact is that nobody was, then, now, or ever, trying to stop them using whatever screwy units they please. The rules simply state that metric conversions must be printed so that everyone knows what’s what.

To help with these arguments, mostly as a resource for myself, I shall now compile as full a list as I can of flaws with the Imperial and US customary measurement systems. It won’t be a full list, because listing all of them would be like spotting errors in The Core, a task I have previously likened to counting raindrops, but here goes anyway. Feel free to add more to the comments section. Read the rest of this entry »

Before I left work yesterday afternoon, I set my computer processing some data. When it had finished, it was to turn itself off. When I got there it had done about half of the work and rebooted. Why? I cannot say.

A power cut would have simply turned it off, and a crash would have just left it sat there halfway through the work with an error message sat invisibly on the turned-off screen. The only explanation anybody can come up with is that Microsoft issued an update for Windows, and this rebooted my PC without my permission. Windows updates do that if you don’t watch them like a hawk.

I would argue that this constitutes proof that Microsoft is staffed by morons. How am I supposed to get anything done when that kind of thing keeps happening? I can’t leave a computer to compute without watching it? That’s rubbish!

But the real gripe here is that this isn’t some accidental bug that crept in. This is a bug that was deliberately introduced by some insane design. One might argue that that makes it a feature. I disagree: yesterday I wrote a script to do some processing on my PC, and I made a mistake, but that mistake made the script better. I call that a feature, and so I am forced to classify something that was introduced on purpose but makes the software worse as a bug.

Bear in mind that it’s not my opinion that the software is worse with this bug: it’s a cold hard fact. Functionality has been lost. It really is that simple. Most of these updates have no discernible effect anyway.

I don’t ask for much from software designers. Just don’t deliberately cripple your own software by actively inserting bugs. Please. Frankly I should get Linux on this thing and have done, but the rest of the office seem to think that would be over the top.

Yeah. Using good software when rubbish is available is clearly excessive. We should just stick to the worst software that can get the job done, and hang the expense of it. I see it all so clearly now.

I still get 419 scams. I don’t know why; you’d think they’d learn. But generally I can’t think of anything fun to do with them that I haven’t already done. I suppose I could re-run some “greatest hits”, sort of like after The Bunker: Crisis Command when they redid it on BBC4 with different contestants, but for now here’s one that lent itself to a novel approach. Read the rest of this entry »

Well this is interesting.

The other day, as you may have read, I removed Scott Adams’ blog from my list of links because he was acting like a moron and arguing against atheism in a rather stupid way, and then trying to justify it by saying it was amusing to watch atheists get angry at this. Today’s entry on his blog is much better. I shall quote a bit here, to save you clicking on links, since I know all internet users hate doing that:

I can’t reconcile the Richard Dawkins theory with my personal theory that I’m always right. Something has to give.

My best guess is that Richard Dawkins and I agree on all the big questions. It just seems like we don’t because my writing often triggers cognitive dissonance in readers who need to think of their world view as infallible.

…

The other possibility is that I’m a moron, since we all agree Dawkins is brilliant.

This has largely come about because Adams generally likes to assume that all current theories are wrong and come up with his own (hence while he doubts evolution he also doubts creationism). This is one reason why I like most of what he writes: it’s a good way to be interesting because you’re very likely to say something new and that promotes good discussion. It’s also what made Newton, Darwin and Wallace, and Einstein such great minds: they did very much the same kind of thing, detatching themselves from assumptions and common theory and thinking ‘afresh’, although they were rather better at it than any cartoonist. Of course, this could also be said for Mark McCutcheon and his laughably insane “final” theory — which interestingly is a theory Adams also posited in chapter 14 of The Dilbert Future. The difference is that Adams was raising it purely as an object for discussion, and so the fact that it really doesn’t work in real life isn’t massively relevant, although it does somewhat diminish his point somewhat. (The competing interpretations of quantum theory would have been a far better example, but they’d have been harder to elucidate, particularly since Adams doesn’t understand quantum theory particularly well.)

The problem with this kind of thinking is when you start to assume that your theory is correct and therefore the other theories are wrong. If you want your theory to be accepted then you have to prove it, and if you want the conventional wisdom to be forgotten then you have to debunk it. This is what McCutcheon abjectly failed to do: he wrote a book and appealed directly to a public who are mostly massively ignorant of the physics he was claiming to debunk. Had he “clearly debunked” relativity in a scientific paper instead of a book and a website then it wouldn’t have got past peer review. Instead he bypassed this and simply assumed that his theory was correct and the others were wrong, purely on the grounds that he couldn’t (or, though he presumably didn’t know this, didn’t) understand the conventional theories and he did understand his own (though again, in fact he didn’t understand it because if he had he’d have spotted the gaping holes in it).

The same mental block is evident in Adams’ recent writings (he even jokingly refers to it in the quote above, which is a little worrying now I think about it) and even more so in his blog’s comments (many of whom seem to genuinely believe Richard Dawkins is the same person as Richard Dawson, to the point where one commenter who implicitly refers to a TV show called “Dawkins’ Creek“). He said in a post some time ago that “evolution looks like a blend of science and bullshit, and have predicted for years that it would be revised in scientific terms in [his] lifetime. It’s a hunch – nothing more.” Now the second sentence of that quote is nothing more or less than a lie, albeit one predicated by ignorance rather than the intention to deceive, and quite an offensive one at that, if you happen to be one of the many scientists whose life’s work is tied up in the theory (and here I switch from the colloquial to the scientific definition of “theory”). As such I shall concentrate on the first sentence, as that appears to be the source of the ignorance that predicated the second.

The problem with this argument is that Adams has, like McCutcheon, failed to understand the theory he is attempting to debunk. I can’t claim to know how well Adams understands evolution, beyond what little I can reliably infer from his writings, but it would seem highly probable (especially since he says he hasn’t read The Selfish Gene) that the theory of evolution as he understands it in fact quite literally is “a blend of science and bullshit”. I know that my understanding of evolution could be quite reasonably described that way before I read Darwin’s Watch. It was the version of evolution I was taught in school, by teachers who thought it more important that I accept than understand the theory, and by teachers who didn’t, I presume, understand the theory any better than I did pre-Darwin’s Watch. As such the version of evolution people are taught is the basics of the science, padded out with bullshit as well-meaning and intelligent teachers answer pupils’ youthfully inquisitive and often very good questions as best they can given that they haven’t mostly read any Dawkins either, resulting in people having a simplistic and distorted view of how the universe operates.

And a major problem is that this version of evolution is quite easy to debunk. There are any number of creationist websites which will quite happily point out the flaws in it, but a better understanding of the theory can easily show that these flaws are not present in the actual theory of evolution as believed by credible scientists working in relevant fields. And just as McCutcheon debunks Special Relativity using the Twin Paradox, conveniently ignoring General Relativity which specifically exists to address exactly that point, people who don’t actually understand evolution claim to have debunked it by citing flaws in the slightly stupid version of evolution they do, and it’s very, very difficult to argue with them, because they are in one sense right: evolution as they understand it doesn’t make sense. Telling them “oh, you just haven’t understood it correctly; you’d believe it if you had” is a very difficult thing to do without seeming very arrogant. In this case, when Adams says that his “best guess is that Richard Dawkins and [himself] agree on all the big questions”, the truth is that he and Dawkins agree that the versions of evolution and of atheism that Adams sets out to debunk is bunk.

(Adams wears his ignorance on his sleeve, which sometimes makes his writing more interesting, because it makes it much less pretentious and as long as he isn’t too aggressively certain of his often-crackpot theories it makes it easier to approach them as interesting hypotheicals rather than, well, crackpot delusions to be pitied. Unfortunately, this pro-ignorance stance means that when he fails to do the proper research before attacking a subject, he does so by conscious decision. I think he should stick to proposing theories, rather than attacking them, if he doesn’t want to have to do the reading first.)

I think, therefore, that it is important that people care careful not to misrepresent evolution, as well as things like relativity — McCutcheon’s problem with it appears to stem from bad teaching: he says “The Twin Paradox Thought Experiment… famously appears in nearly all introductions to Special Relativity ever presented, as evidence for the bizarre truths of this theory, yet it is always retracted when challenged (and usually only when challenged).” And this is broadly true: I’ve heard similar scenarios presented as examples (not evidence) of the seemingly unlikely implications of relativity many, many times. But all this proves is bad teaching: Special Relativity only holds when considering inertial frames (or more accurately, frames in freefall in uniform gravitational fields), because it is a special case of the General Theory of Relativity, which applies everywhere (in theory: in reality it breaks down at a quantum level for reasons we don’t yet understand). There’s absolutely no excuse for using such a scenario to explain Special Relativity, unless you do so with sufficient layers of caveat that people couldn’t go away thinking Special Relativity was true in the general case. While it has been shown that the story usually trotted out in introductions to relativity (get two clocks, send one into orbit going really fast for a while, then land it and compare them and oh, look, the one that went fast is a few seconds behind) is true, it isn’t true simply because of Special Relativity, as the Twin Paradox shows.

Similarly, if you subscribe to a simplistic kind of “Special Evolution”, then you run into all kinds of problems, like irreducible complexity or the question of where the evolving lifeforms came from in the first place. These are valid criticisms of “Special Evolution” but they are addressed very well by the “General Evolution” theory explained in The Selfish Gene. Anyone being taught evolution must at least be made aware that the “general” theory exists and what apparent flaws in the “special” theory it addresses, even if they are only being taught the simplified “special” case.

Anything less is simply lies-to-children: very useful, but also potentially very dangerous if it isn’t made clear that that’s what you’re presenting.

Oh, so that’s what that was… I assumed someone had dropped something heavy in the next room.

If you are very observant and read blogs in a very strange way then you may have noticed I have just removed The Dilbert Blog from my links list. This I did because Scott Adams has started making a lot less sense of late than he used to. I can’t be sure of this, and I may have to re-read some older stuff to check he hasn’t always talked nonsense and my brain hasn’t just got better at spotting it, but that’s the theory I’m working on at the minute. Possibly he’s simply never talked in detail about something I already understood before. Who can say?

Anyhow, as is his way, he recently came up with something which already existed and posted it on his blog. In this case, it was the old argument from ignorance (see the highly mockable Atheist Test, question four) and Pascal’s Wager (hence my little story the other week). Naturally, everyone pointed out to him that it was Pascal’s Wager, and his response was to make a blog entry about it.

A few days after that he found that someone else had posted a blog entry about his ramblings. This, he decided, meant it was fair game for him to “stir this fellow into an even frothier foam of cognitive dissonance” by “[making] an argument on such a simple level no rational person could disagree. Then [watching] him disagree”. He abjectly failed to make such an argument, because instead of choosing a definition of “atheism” that could reasonably apply to anyone, he decided to define atheism as the 100% certainty — beyond even the level of certainty with which we say that China exists — that there is no god. Once you start by misrepresenting someone’s beliefs and from there show that those beliefs are irrational you’re really no better than your own characters. This is something Dogbert said some years ago:

Dogbert: I’m trying a little experiment tonight. I’ll attribute a stupid opinion to you, then I’ll aggressively mock you while you sit there saying nothing.
Dogbert: So, according to you, the Internet is a passing fad. YOU MORON! LOOK AROUND YOU! THE INTERNET IS EVERYWHERE! – AND THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT! NOTHING!!
Dilbert: How did that feel?
Dogbert: Quite satisfying. I needed a back-up plan in case you ever get laryngitis.

Adams’ defence for this intellectual vacuity is to claim that he’s only doing it in the name of entertainment (or infotainment, or whatever made-up portmanteau word he’s using that day) and that the value in it is not the words themselves but the “philosotainment benefit of watching the Dilbert cartoonist whip people like him into a frenzy”. So essentially, he’s deliberately trying to goad rational people to anger by deliberately being stupid at them. I moderate internet forums, so I know this is called “trolling” and is generally agreed to be the kind of thing that should be deleted on sight.

And it’s not funny for two reasons. The first is that his supposedly not-really-serious arguments are actually very common arguments used by people in all seriousness to make the same point, and so his post becomes totally indistinguishable from those — which means that he can’t really mock someone for believing it’s real. The second is that he’s being… God, you know, I’m sure there’s a word for people who put up deliberately stupid arguments and then laugh at the sane people who try to explain the flaws…

So I’m not going to carry a link to his blog anymore. I have replaced it with a link to Pharyngula, which is far more sensible because Richard Dawkins reads it.

I’d like to show you a scientific paper that someone at the Bad Science forum posted up a while ago. It’s about homeopathy, so perhaps the term “scientific paper” is an overstatement. It’s called “Journeys in The Country of The Blind: Entanglement Theory and The Effects of Blinding on Trials of Homeopathy and Homeopathic Provings”, whatever a “proving” might be, and it was written by a man called Lionel R Milgrom.

It’s also about quantum theory. I would suspect that there is not one person in the world who understands quantum theory and believes in homeopathy. This paper is published in a journal which calls itself Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine with a straight face. And it has, very generously, been released under a Creative Commons licence, which means that you can read it while I mock it!

It rambles on for about seven pages, which is quite a lot, but I shall now summarise it in a couple of sentences (which I shall spread through a few paragraphs of mockery, to make them more potent). It makes two main suggestions, as to how, if something like quantum theory (but not actually quantum theory because we already know that that wouldn’t work) could explain how homeopathy works, double-blind randomised controlled trials wouldn’t show this effect. This would be a very convenient claim, particularly since, as Milgrom observes, the same argument could be used to defend anything that didn’t show up in a controlled trial.

So here are his arguments. Both of them are based on the assumption that homeopathy works because of some undefined form of “entanglement” between the patient, the remedy, and the practitioner. For a quick lesson in quantum, you get a waveform, which describes the system, and then you run operators on it, which return different properties of the system. There’s an operator for energy (called the Hamiltonian), for example. So Milgrom defines a waveform called ψ_PPR, which he optimistically defines as the waveform of the entire entangled debacle. He states that this is equal to the waveforms of the patient, practitioner and remedy multiplied together. If that sounded complicated, then that is because Milgrom designed it to sound complicated. In reality, all he’s saying is a = bcd but using the symbol ψ for everything.

Argument 1: Argument From Ignorance Of Operational Identities

For this argument, Milgrom says that in a non-individualised homeopathy trial, the practitioner isn’t really involved. Hence, the partitioner’s waveform is set to 0 and therefore the product of that, the waveform for the patient, and that of the remedy, must also be zero. Hence ψ_PPR = 0 and hence there is zero probability of a cure.

But, if ψ_PPR = 0, then there is zero probability of anything. There’s no chance of a failure to cure. There’s no energy and the practitioner doesn’t exist.

It also serves as a delightful demonstration of how insane his hypothesis of “weak quantum theory” is. (He calls it a “theory”, which is basically a lie because he could only cite three papers on it and they were all published by complimentary medicine journals and written by people called “Milgrom”, which I’m given to understand is not what you’d call a common name.) In his theory, the remedy won’t work unless it is given to you by an “entangled” practitioner, even if the contents of the bottle are identical. And if anyone watches to make sure it’s working, it stops.

Argument 2: Appeal To The Reader’s Hopeful Ignorance Of Quantum Mechanics

The second argument he calls “more subtle” but in fact is far more brazen. It has a lot of equations again (to use the term generously) but if I’ve read this right it boils down to this: if the patients and practitioners don’t know whether the remedy is placebo or not, then the placebo becomes entangled as well and then it acts like the remedy. That’s a pretty impressive misinterpretation of quantum mechanics. Firstly it assumes that had Schrödinger put a camera in the box with his cat and broadcast the results live on E4 to millions of people, but not watched it himself, then from his point of view the cat would still be in superposition, which is of course ludicrous because there is such a thing as objective reality. But the even more impressive bit of nonsense in there is that it assumes that entanglement is a thing you can simply do to everyday things. It’s not. It’s something that can really only affect specially created particles, and can only affect things like individual electrons. So you can’t simply say “I think I’m going to entangle these two cups of water” and then boil one and watch the other magically heat up. And you can’t entangle two people and a bottle of plain water, either. And if you could, you’d achieve nothing at all by letting one of the people drink the water, because, well because the whole concept means exactly nothing.

The entire seven page article essentially boils down to this: so, you know how in that double slit experiment thing it doesn’t work if you have a detector watching which slit stuff goes through, right? Well what if homeopathy doesn’t work if you have a scientist watching whether or not it works?

The whole thing reads as if someone had a drunken conversation down the pub (possibly having bought one vodka and tonic at the start of the evening and successively topped it up with free tapwater whenever it ran low), taped it, then typed it up and paraphrased it, added a few equations and submitted it to a journal. Which may be what happened.

The most telling thing is that this paper was submitted to a journal called Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, despite the fact that it is quite obviously comprised entirely of speculation — it even describes quantum mechanics as a “metaphor” for how homeopathy works. That these people can’t tell speculation from evidence is probably all you need to know about them.

I realised the other day that while I’ve spent a lot of time criticising other people’s stupid opinions of the smoking ban, I’ve never explicitly put down in writing my own. So here they are, in the form of a response to some more of other people’s.

This blog entry is one of the better ones on what I consider the most opposing side. It makes two main arguments:

1. Hitler introduced this same policy. It is a fascist policy. It is therefore not the kind of thing an enlightened civilisation ought to be doing.
2. A bar is no more public space than your house. Anything legal in your house should be legal in a bar.

The first of these I’ve deconstructed many times before and I see no reason to do so again, so I shall merely mention in passing the Slippery Slope Fallacy and the Genetic Fallacy (and maybe Godwin’s Law) and leave it at that.

The second is more interesting, because there’s no real counterargument: it starts with assumptions that are true (smoking is legal on private property; bars are private property) and it follows valid logic and arrives at a conclusion (smoking should be legal in bars). This is a simplification, because there is at least one dubious implicit assumption which I have chosen to ignore. (Also, for the purposes of this discussion I am assuming that the bars in question have no paid employees, perhaps being operated by the owner or owners only, or operating on a very optimistic version of the honour system. Or coin-op beer pumps. Who knows what world the blogger was living in?) But you already know (presumably) that I disagree with this argument’s conclusion, and the inconsistency there is what I want to address.

The argument, you see, is not an argument for or against a ban in principle. It only opposes the idea of a ban that applies to bars but not houses. This argument says you can ban smoking everywhere or nowhere but nothing inbetween.

Personally, if I was forced to choose between those options, I would choose the former, which means that the “landlord’s rights” argument is, as far as I’m concerned, nothing more than a rally to ban smoking in private residences (which, if smokers have children, would seem only reasonable anyway). In any case, smoking is (in real terms, regardless of what this week’s tabloids may say) more dangerous than some drugs which are banned outright, and it clearly is addictive. If we accept our current drugs legislation, it’s hard to argue banning smoking outright would, at least in principle, be any kind of human rights violation. But I wouldn’t advocate such a ban for one simple reason: smokers are addicted to a legal drug. If the government complicitly allowed millions of people to become addicted to a drug, like they did with tobacco, and then banned it outright, forcing addicts to either go cold-turkey or break the law, that would be incredibly harsh. So smoking shouldn’t be banned in private residences until many years’ warning has been given (or the number of smokers has dropped to an insignificant level). But after that? Yeah, ban it outright if it seems like it’d help. What good is it anyway?

Lastly, while I’m here, let me just attack another common type of argument. I’ve seen a couple of things lately that have been pretty similar. They say things like “look how many pubs’ profits have fallen already” or “my local pub’s atmosphere has become tense already”. The latter of those was pulled from a letter in The Times. The key word there, to my eyes, is “already”. It is intended to mean “if this is what happens after a month, think how bad it will be in a year!” but the correct interpretation is “this is what happens after a month; it has no bearing on what may happen after a year and is therefore irrelevant.” Think long-term, people. This is more important than a couple of weeks’ weird looks at the bar.