Foreign Dispatches

The Genetic Seduction

Although I didn't mention it in my recent post on a certain A. Hitler, one of the reasons why I've been investigating the man's career is because it's long been clear to me that there is a direct line connecting the pseudoscience "justifying" Hitler's brutality and the pseudoscience being flogged in our day under the rubric of "genetics": not only can one trace the continuity of certain ideas over the decades, but often one finds that the actual institutions pushing these ideas, and even the very individuals who man them, are directly connected on an intimate level. To put it plainly, a lot of the hype being generated about genes "for" homosexuality, IQ or this, that and the other today is the handiwork of people who have been mentored or sponsored by actual honest-to-goodness Nazis, war criminals many of whom escaped justice only because they were shrewd enough to burn the evidence of their crimes when they saw the writing on the wall. The one time practitioners of "eugenics" and "racial hygiene" are the forefathers of today's "race realists" and self-styled advocates of "human biodiversity."

What Photography Means to Me

How pleasing it is to find that someone has expressed my own thoughts on the matter so eloquently.

Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

-Walker Evans

Oxymoron of the Day

"Nietzschean Humility."

Choice and Morality

As a staunch believer in a minimal state free of religious influence and as an individual with precious little tolerance for superstitious mumbo-jumbo, it's only been natural that I too have indulged in my share of schadenfreude at the unravelling of the evangelist Ted Haggard (he of the "I bought drugs I didn't use from a rent boy I didn't have sex with" school of confession), but in itself the exposure of yet another hypocritical religious rightist wouldn't have moved me to post. No, what I find questionable is a line of argument being advanced by several commenters on this issue, including Andrew Sullivan:

Is Occam's Razor Logically Justifiable?

Following up on my immediately preceding post about guessing number sequences, I'd like to link to a very worthwhile paper which touches on an issue raised in the comments section of my last post, to the effect that "simplicity" offers the best means of logically distinguishing between possible explanations: this is nothing other than the principle of Occam's razor lightly disguised, but as much as this principle is trumpeted as if it were an unassailable guideline for reasoning, the truth is that there's actually no rigorous justification for it.

Abstract. Many KDD systems incorporate an implicit or explicit preference for simpler models, but this use of “Occam’s razor” has been strongly criticized by several authors (e.g., Schaffer, 1993; Webb, 1996). This controversy arises partly because Occam’s razor has been interpreted in two quite different ways. The first interpretation (simplicity is a goal in itself) is essentially correct, but is at heart a preference for more comprehensible models. The second interpretation (simplicity leads to greater accuracy) is much more problematic. A critical review of the theoretical arguments for and against it shows that it is unfounded as a universal principle, and demonstrably false. A review of empirical evidence shows that it also fails as a practical heuristic.

What Limits to Parental Influence?

I'd personally have been satisfied to learn that the "Hetracil" site was a hoax and left it at that, but Julian Sanchez manages to utilize the spoof to raise some thought provoking questions (and in so doing, he shows why even seemingly outlandish thought-experiments aren't without their uses).

Presumably not many people would object to an adult's deciding, for whatever reason, to change his orientation. I imagine that, if it were reversible, not a few people might be interested in seeing how the other half (or the other four percent) lives for a while. But what about giving the drug to kids or adolescents?

No One is Absolutely Anti-Abortion

Via Mahalanobis comes this excellent gedankenexperiment to check the claimed beliefs of anti-abortion absolutists against their intuitions.

Let's ask ourselves what position opponents of abortion — say on the Supreme Court or elsewhere — might take if two biological facts about the world were to change. The first assumption we'll make is that for some unknown reason — a strange new virus, a hole in the ozone layer, some food additive or poison — women throughout the world suddenly become pregnant with 10 to 20 fetuses at a time. The second assumption is that advances in neonatal technology make it possible for doctors to easily save some or all of these fetuses a few months after conception, but if they don't intervene at this time all the fetuses will die.

Abortion opponents who believe that all fetuses have an absolute right to life would surely opt for some intervention. Otherwise, all the fetuses would die.

Their choice would thus be either to adhere to their absolutist position and be overwhelmed by a population explosion of overwhelming magnitude or else act to save only one or a few of the fetuses. The latter choice would be tantamount to abortion since all the fetuses are viable. It would, nevertheless, take someone very, very doctrinaire to opt to have the birth rate increase, at least initially, by a factor of 10 to 20.

[...]

The argument's point is that if certain contingent biological facts were to change, then presumably even ardent abortion opponents would change their position, suggesting that their position is itself contingent and not absolute. After this is acknowledged, the haggling over the details might proceed.

There is in fact a sense in which this argument is little more than an extension of current possibilities: how many anti-abortionists would refuse a woman who'd undergone IVF and was subsequently found to be carrying, say, 5 viable fetuses, the chance to have at least some of them terminated so that she could actually live to carry the others to term? How many "pro-life" advocates would call her a mass murderer for bearing only 2 of the 5 to term?

Reprints by Daniel Dennett

Lots of papers available over here. All those French (pseudo) intellectuals should look to guys like him (and Fodor, and Quine, and ...) for how real philosophy (as opposed to the mere striking of fashionable poses) ought to be done: one needn't be obscure to be profound.

[Via Internet Commentator.]

Breathing New Life Into Old Paradoxes

While you may think you're familiar with all the nuances of the unexpected hanging paradox, a recently revised paper by Timothy Chow shows that the issues raised by it continue to be of real interest in the here and now, and not just to puzzle addicts and antinomy-collectors.

In a similar vein, it is often assumed by students of economics that the Saint Petersburg paradox is easily settled by the adoption of the notion of diminishing marginal utility, yet not only do humans clearly and consistently violate the assumption that they operate according to such a theory, but even if they did, it still would not provide any sort of resolution of the problem, as the paradox can easily be restated to cause problems even under such a scenario: in fact, hardly any plausible assumption one could make suffices to save the day, as the preceding link makes clear.

I don't know about the rest of you lot, but personally I obtain a certain degree of satisfaction from the thought that even well-mined issues like these might still be capable of yielding up new and worthwhile insights.

Silly Editorial of the Day

"All beings that feel pain deserve human rights", insists Richard Ryder in our favorite leftie rag, but shouldn't human rights be reserved by definition for, y'know, humans?

The line of argumentation which tries to equate "speciesism" with "racism" and "sexism" only serves to disparage the importance of according equal rights to all human beings regardless of hue or sex: men and women, whether they be brown, pink or yellow, are all equals in a profound sense that non-human animals never will be, whatever their sense perceptions.