When scientists think about morals

Backreaction: Opinions, Morals and What Science Could but Shouldn’t Tell Us

Sabine Hossenfelder has been thinking about philosophy, and now morals, in light of science.

It's both interesting and, um, a bit of a worry. 

Writing to formula

Everything you ever needed to know about screenwriting (but were afraid to ask) 

This article about what one is supposed to know about screenwriting doesn't add all that much to the world's knowledge, but I did find it interesting that "how to write a movie"books have been around for a long time:

 The rules that govern screenwriting are the fundamentals of narrative and there's a whole history of structural analysis preceeding the advent of film. What screenwriters now call Inciting Incidents (the explosion in a characters life that kick starts a story) were articulated as long ago as 1808 by AW Schlegel. The rise of film was inevitably accompanied by a rise in screenwriting gurus pedalling "how to" manuals – and Epes Winthrop Sargent has some claim to being the first. His The Technique of the Photoplay, written in 1912, is not only hugely entertaining, it has the virtue of being refreshingly honest. Much wisdom can be found in Sargent's book, but it's here that the drive to understand structure has become no longer an intellectual pursuit, but a profit-driven enterprise.

But where's your paper, Salby?

Last summer was not actually angrier than other summers | The Australian

So, renegade climate scientist Murry Salby has attacked the Climate Commission claim about the last summer being anomalously hot by referring to the satellite record.   Yet I thought I read elsewhere that the satellite average temperature did not include Tasmania, which did have an unusually hot summer.  No mention of that in Murry's article.

And more importantly, Salby became a temporary star in the Right wing denial-o-sphere in 2011 by giving a talk in the Sydney Institute which was difficult to follow, but came down to his believing that CO2 was "way down the back of the line" in driving climate change.  

I remember  John Nielsen-Gammon said he saw Salby give a summary of his theory at a conference in Melbourne, and it certainly didn't convince him nor (so the impression was given) any other scientist in the room.

Yet Salby was indicating that his theory was going to be published.

I'm sure if it had been, we would have heard about it.

Salby's talk made it clear that he was pretty much a Judith Curry figure, taking an intense personal dislike to "the Team" of mainstream climate scientists for their influence and claims.  He sounded politically motivated.  The only problem,  his claim to have found the crucial flaw has come to nothing. 

Next.

Useful eunuchs

The Modern Female Eunuch - The Atlantic

Back in 2010 I noted a story from the Science Show about how valuable eunuchs have been in history for helping run governments.

This topic gets a run again in the above article in The Atlantic.  (There's a photo of some unhappy looking palace eunuchs from China too.)  It also talks about what it is about testosterone that makes it, um, sometimes problematic:

Both historical accounts and contemporary research on how testosterone affects personality reveal that eunuchs had traits that made them different from intact males, and in some ways more like females. Their astuteness and objectivity in assessing others' strengths and weaknesses made them particularly effective as bureaucrats, diplomats and tacticians -- quite the opposite of what most people now think of when they hear the word "eunuch."  

When researchers examine how males and females differ in personality, one of the most consistently documented differences has been in agreeableness. 

Women in the maternal role, who have multiple offspring, need to be good negotiators in order to resolve conflict among their children in a way that maximizes their number of surviving descendants. It is thus not surprising that many studies show that agreeability is higher in women than men. That alone could lead natural selection to favor females to be low in testosterone. Indeed recent data from our own and our colleagues' labs on the effect of testosterone deprivation on adult males indicates that castration increases agreeableness and tends to push male behavior towards that of the female end of the spectrum.

High testosterone males are more disagreeable -- rather than only being more aggressive -- than females or low-testosterone males. In his book about testosterone and behavior, Heros, Rogues, and Lovers, James McBride Dabbs said that if there was one word that characterized an excessively high testosteronic individual, it was "obnoxious."

Gee, what Australian political/economic blog have I been saying for years obviously suffers from an excess of testosterone?   I didn't realise the research supported my hunch so strongly.   

Up in a balloon

Joseph and the Giant Balloon: The First Aeronaut of the American West - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic

The story of the first manned balloon flight in California in 1853 makes for a good read.

Rational suicide discussed

Yesterday The Age ran with the story of a relatively healthy 83 year old who committed suicide despite having no terminal illness, but felt she had lived long enough. I'm not entirely sure why this was in the paper, and it worries me a bit that such stories encourage the idea of rational suicide; on the other hand, it is the type of story that probably makes politicians more nervous about legislatively addressing euthanasia as it makes it clear that activists in the field are often sympathetic to suicide to anyone who wants it. (Philip Nietschke is so nuttily obsessed with helping anyone who wants to die achieve their goal painlessly that he has taken to driving a van with nitrogen gas for sale.)

So it is interesting to see an article by a doctor who notes the difficulties with the idea of having a legal framework to allow for assisted rational suicide.  Here are some key points:

Much of the research from the palliative care field such as this study on patients with motor neuron disease, this one on a patient with locked-in syndrome and this review of life satisfaction in tetraplegic people tend to support the view that social factors affect quality of life much more than health-related ones. Among survivors of failed suicide attempts, many are subsequently glad they made it, and would not attempt it again. Impulsive or crisis-related suicidality would have to be strenuously screened for. Do we have those tools yet? Are they reliable enough to be ethically justifiable to use in practice?

It seems reasonable to conceive that the more physically disabled a person is, the more dissatisfied they must be with their life. The problem is that the research largely doesn’t support this view, at least not in the most highly disabled groups. It seems that you can’t make generalisations about a person’s quality of life just by looking at their medical records. This is why I begin to feel uneasy when cases like Beverley Broadbent’s are discussed....


How could we reliably distinguish between a case like Beverley Broadbent, who is clearly making a long-considered decision with rational forethought free from mental illness or social coercion, and another who hasn’t been through the same emotional and mental journey, or who may be getting a nudge along? And what about younger people who have survived into their 40s and 50s with conditions like cerebral palsy and spinal cord injury? They are experiencing similar physical and social disadvantage to the elderly, but at a much earlier age. Would they be allowed to apply as well?

Much, much more research is needed about any proposal for voluntary ending of a life in the absence of terminal disease. As a humanist, I support the right to choose an early and dignified exit from intolerable circumstances. As a doctor, and a pragmatist, I have a lot of trouble thinking my way towards a legal and social framework in which this could be ethically brought about.

He ends on a point that I don't agree with, though:

We need to have a mature conversation about this. A conversation which respects shocking and awkward points of view.

 Why?

Those inclined to rational suicide have been around for ever.  Why is special accommodation for them needed now?

About that cold Northern Spring

Rabett Run has a translation of a blog post by Stefan Rahmstorf that appeared recently.  It looks at the recent papers arguing the loss of polar ice is causing air pressure and circulation changes that are leading to events like this, and makes a pretty convincing sounding case that this is indeed likely.

But the most remarkable thing was, I think, the first image, which shows that the unusual cold is almost matched  by large areas having unusual warmth:

As Rahmstorf notes, taken over the whole Northern hemisphere, it is actually close to the long term average.

You won't be reading that in The Australian anytime soon.

Easter at home

That was a bit of a bland Easter break.  We did go fishing at Raby Bay (Cleveland) on Friday morning though: only the adults caught a few small ones to release, but at least the kids got bites and some fun.  But then a cold took out the son for the next couple of days, and forecast rain for Sunday meant we were housebound, so I offered to finally get around to painting the bathroom and toilet with a can of paint bought for the purpose probably 5 or 6 years ago.  It had actually started rusting at one spot inside the can (I didn't realise this was possible) and so the paint job was enlivened by the occasional streak of brown amongst the cream colour.  It didn't happen too often, but the paint itself didn't seem great quality (it was a cheaper brand) and I have had better painting experiences.  It will soon be 10 years that we have been here - and this job means the interior repaint that started in the first year has now been finished.  (Probably just in time to start with new colours for the rest of the house.)

Going back to my son's cold, he did keep using the Samsung tablet despite my complaint that this would be the fastest way he could spread his illness, especially to the alternative person who mainly uses it (me.)  I have for a while been going to speculate here on this:  I wonder if the remarkable spread of tablet computers is going to be the main factor behind the next influenza epidemic that wipes out a large percent of the population.  Maybe after the collapse of civilisation,  Apple will be deemed to be a symbol of evil and pestilence. 

Anyway, Sunday morning featured what I guess counts as a family tradition.  The kids don't worry about eggs (in fact, my son still doesn't care for ordinary chocolate much, even though he'll eat chocolate cake and lamingtons), but they do like to eat a jelly rabbit with marshmellows for Easter breakfast:

You can tell it's a rabbit, can't you?  At least it didn't disintegrate on removal from the mould this year.  It's a real downer when that happens.  (Not really - the kids find that funny too.)

On the other up-sides, I've started reading a 1960's book I got last year by some German academic about Israelite religion (I skipped forward to the bit about human sacrifice), as well as a new (second hand from the Bookfest) Graham Greene - The End of the Affair.   It's pretty short, so that should be easy to finish quickly.  I also now have the second volume of the Norman Sherry bio of Greene.   I haven't read the first one yet, given that I am not entirely sure how interesting it is to read so much detail about such an odd character.  Well, no, I assume it is interesting; it's just that I keep giving priority to time on the internet.

I beat my daughter at cards on Saturday night, which was well deserved after she thrashed me the last two times we played.  (Spit and James Bond are the preferred games at the moment, with the occasional round of Jacks and Fives.)

I think the BBC comedy Rev., which I have been meaning to recommend, might have finished Sunday night on ABC1. (No, now that I check, it looks like it has one more episode to go, but it is also going to be coming back.)  I don't know how accurate it really is, of course, but it certainly feels like an insightful dig at the state of the Anglican church in England.  It has very good acting all around, and a title character who the writer is wise enough to let redeem himself somewhat by the end of most episodes.  I tire of shows where a jerk is a jerk throughout. 

Oh dear.  Back to work tomorrow... Or today, now.

A General Patton Easter

Lords of Karma and Military Reincarnation � Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

I've been looking at another history side about odd things, which I should add to the blogroll, and was reminded of something I think I have heard before:  George Patton's belief in reincarnation went so far as to at least speculate that he was the Roman soldier who pierced Christ's side during the crucifixion:

 Patton did write a poem  Through a Glass Darkly, which described these various lives. So Patton seems to suggest, with characteristic modesty, that he had been the soldier who had stabbed Christ on the cross: ‘Perhaps I stabbed our Savior/ In His sacred helpless side./ Yet I’ve called His name in blessing/ When in after times I died.’ The poem includes the words ‘So forever in the future/ Shall I battle as of yore,/ Dying to be born a fighter/But to die again once more’, which might go quite well to a heavy metal beat.

I wonder if that made George a bit sombre and prickly around Easter time?   And anyway, how come George seemed to believe he was always going to be a fighter?  Isn't the point of reincarnation to believe that you can change into something better/different over time, based on past experience?

It's Easter, so a bit about crucifixion

History of Good Friday execution method: When did we stop crucifying people? - Slate Magazine

This short Slate Explainer article notes that it is said that Constantine  outlawed crucifixion after his conversion, although the matter is not without doubt.  In any event, it is interesting to be reminded about the nastiness of the punishment (and to be reminded that Saudi Arabia still does it - even in this last week):

Even if Constantine did, in fact, end the practice of crucifixion, it’s not clear that he did so out of respect for Christ’s execution. Aurelius Victor, the earliest historian to claim that Constantine banned crucifixion, explained that the emperor was motivated by a sense of humanity rather than piety. Crucifixion is a pretty gruesome way to go—significantly worse than the New Testament makes it seem. Although Christ reportedly expired in a matter of hours, many crucifixion victims clung to life for days. Even in Roman times, it was considered an exceptionally cruel punishment, reserved mainly for those who challenged state authority, such as insurgents and enemy soldiers. (Joel Marcus of Duke described crucifixion as “parodic exaltation,” because it gave rebels the fame they sought, albeit in a grotesque form.) By some accounts, Constantine replaced crucifixion with hanging, a less painful execution method. Constantine’s supposed ban on crucifixion came as part of a package of reforms, further suggesting that he was merely exercising human mercy. Branding prisoners’ faces, for example, was also prohibited around the same time—a reform that had nothing to do with Christ’s execution.

Whether or not Constantine put a stop to Roman crucifixions, he definitely kicked off the Christian fascination with crucifixion and the cross. Before Constantine’s reign, it appears that images of the crucifixion were mainly used by pagans to taunt Christians. The third century Alaxamenos graffito depicts a worshipper standing next to a donkey-headed man on a crucifix. The inscription reads, “Alexamenos worships god.” Not until the fifth century did Christians widely adopt the crucifixion as their own symbol, and the faithful then sought out pieces of Christ’s cross.

A technique not tried...

Hard-boiled eggs: Why you should never actually boil them.

As l usually find myself boiling eggs about once a month (for tuna salad), I feel I should give this a try.

Hearing voices

BBC News - The people who think they tune into dead voices

For some reason, the BBC News magazine has an article about the history of EVP - Electro Voice Projection - which all started with Konstantin Raudive in the 1960's.

I wouldn't have thought the whole business could be described like this:

Nowadays, EVP is a standard tool of ghost hunters worldwide. There are hundreds of internet EVP forums and many serious and well-educated people who see it as proof positive that the dead are trying to talk to us.

For example, Anabela Cardoso, a former Portuguese career diplomat who lives in Spain and publishes the Instrumental Transcommunication Journal. She has a well-equipped recording studio and claims to have replicated the Gerrards Cross findings. 

"My voices are not little voices," she says. "They are loud and clear and totally understandable." She offered to send me a CD.

Apparently the CD contained voices in Spanish and Portuguese which "are not really very clear", but they are voices.

Raudive's recordings are not very impressive, apparently, and he went into a loony direction:

 After Breakthrough was published, Raudive progressed from voices captured on tape to voices coming from animals, in particular a budgerigar named Putzi, who spoke in the voice of a dead 14-year-old girl.

 Uhuh.

The article does note some interesting psychology:

 As Joe Banks, a sound artist, points out, a dead person speaking in studio quality wouldn't be nearly so convincing as a voice you must strain to hear. 

Banks has an ongoing project called Rorschach Audio. He suggests that the voices are the aural equivalent of inkblot tests devised by Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach. He argues that while the EVP experimenters think they are doing parapsychology, they are actually unwittingly carrying out psychology experiments. 

For example, if you take recorded speech and replace every sixth of a second with white noise, the speech is still comprehensible. But if instead of white noise you use silence, it's much harder to understand. 

We are naturally well-adapted by evolution to imaginatively reconstruct speech against a noisy background - imagine trying to whisper in a windy forest to your hunting companions. 

EVP enthusiasts, Banks thinks, aren't idiots. They are just being fooled by audio illusions that take us all in.

 Interesting.

From the world of science fiction

Brain scans predict which criminals are more likely to reoffend 

In a twist that evokes the dystopian science fiction of writer Philip K. Dick, neuroscientists have found a way to predict whether convicted felons are likely to commit crimes again from looking at their brain scans. Convicts showing low activity in a brain region associated with decision-making and action are more likely to be arrested again, and sooner.

Kent Kiehl, a neuroscientist at the non-profit Mind Research Network in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his collaborators studied a group of 96 male prisoners just before their release. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the prisoners’ brains during computer tasks in which subjects had to make quick decisions and inhibit impulsive reactions.

The scans focused on activity in a section of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a small region in the front of the brain involved in motor control and executive functioning. The researchers then followed the ex-convicts for four years to see how they fared.

Among the subjects of the study, men who had lower ACC activity during the quick-decision tasks were more likely to be arrested again after getting out of prison, even after the researchers accounted for other risk factors such as age, drug and alcohol abuse and psychopathic traits. Men who were in the lower half of the ACC activity ranking had a 2.6-fold higher rate of rearrest for all crimes and a 4.3-fold higher rate for nonviolent crimes. The results are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹.

 Pretty amazing.  

White people's fears

The Roots of Anti-Government Gun Culture in America - The Daily Beast

David Frum has a look here at an interesting sounding book about how American attitudes to gun ownership have evolved.    The paranoid basis run by the NRA (Americans need to be allowed to be armed so as to defend themselves against their own tyrannical government) has its basis, the books argues, in the Black Panther movement in the late 60's.  The big change, of course, is that it is now the white and the (relatively) rich who say they fear their own government, not the poor blacks.

Quite a weird turnaround, isn't it?

Hello all you Gillard haters out there, part 2

The days of relying on natural resources are over

Ken Davidson summarises an important recent story:

Nathan Fabian is chief executive of the Investor Group on Climate Change, which advises 65 major institutional investors who are responsible for funds with a market valuation of about $1 trillion.

Fabian told a recent business Climate Alliance conference in Melbourne: ''A positive trend in the evidence of climate change impacts, from actual recent events, is becoming clearer. This is an important development … As you would expect with these developments in the science, the notable additional scrutiny is coming not so much from civil society, but from the elite economic institutions around the world and the investment community as well.''

The science now suggests that 2 degrees of warming is no longer safe. The International Energy Agency says that the world has a 50/50 chance of keeping warming to less than 2 degrees, if only one-third of the known reserves of fossil fuels are exploited. The International Panel on Climate Change says that to reduce the risk of breaking the 2 degree barrier to one-in-five would require leaving 80 per cent of the known reserves in the ground. (More risky than Russian roulette!)

Fabian quoted a recent report by Jun Mao, chief economist for Deutsche Bank, which shows that China will switch from being a net coal importer to net exporter by 2017; that the price of seaborne coal will fall to $70 a tonne; that even at $87 a tonne, 43 million tonnes of production from Australia would be forced off line; and that new developments planned in the Galilee Basin would not be profitable and couldn't attract finance.

The respected Carbon Tracker says that companies reliant on coal revenues are in an asset bubble. This might help explain why the market price of equities of mining companies such as BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Anglo American have continued to fall, despite the recent recovery in the share market generally.

The writing is on the wall for the lucky country. Unless we can manage risk - impossible without incorporating the environmental damage of burning fossil fuel in the price - the chance of dodging the bullet of catastrophic climate change is remote.

Hello to all you Gillard haters out there...

You probably don't even understand the policy you hate the most:

Study finds widespread ignorance about carbon tax

Nine months after its introduction 54 per cent of people believed the tax, which specifically excludes motor fuel, had pushed up prices at service stations. Most people surveyed also estimated that their cost of living had risen by $20 or more a week, while 5 per cent put the increase at more than $100 a week.  The government's modelling came up with $9.90 a week.

Asked about compensation, 49 per cent said they had received nothing at all, whereas the compensation package introduced with the tax applies to 90 per cent of the population.

For all of you Julia Gillard fans out there.......(hello?)

Well, at least Harry Clarke likes her too...

Meanwhile, John Quiggin, who (despite otherwise sounding a sensible enough chap) has been a Rudd booster for a long time, has made no comment on Thursday's events.  He'll probably blame Julia for not resigning for the good of the Party. 

When Julia plays DayZ

OK, so it was a rush job...

Universal mysteries

There's a new, more detailed, map of the cosmic microwave background out.   It does not resolve some oddities:

It has also uncovered a surprise. The simplest models of inflation predict that fluctuations in the CMB should look the same all over the sky. But Planck has found asymmetries in opposite hemispheres of the sky, as well as a ‘cold spot’ that covers a large area, which were also noticed by WMAP. “It defines a preferred direction in space, which is an extremely strange result,” says Efstathiou. This rules out some models of inflation, but does not undermine the idea itself, he adds. It does, however, raise tantalizing hints that there may yet be new physics to be discovered in Planck’s data.

Today in politics

Today's spectacularly peculiar episode in the ongoing Rudd Wars just goes to show what serious damage can happen in political parties when personality based civil wars get entrenched.

Although I can't remember much of the detail now,  this all reminded me of the interminable years of the Peacock/Howard rivalry in the 1980's:  the big difference being that it all went on while their party was in Opposition, and helped keep it there.   I have trouble remembering when a party that was in government has had such a protracted internal division.

I suppose it is hard to know how active Rudd has been in encouraging the undermining of Gillard in the last month or two; it is possible that the journalistic backgrounding has been mainly initiated by his supporters off their own bat.  However, what is surely clear is that he has never got on the phone to call them off, telling them, for example, that he really did not want the job and they were only hurting the government.

Here's a suggestion for Kevin:  you are (puzzlingly) popular in Queensland.  The Labor Party here desperately needs a high profile leader in State Parliament.   Resign from Federal Parliament, take a year or two off, get some sleep, work your way into State Parliament, and you'll soon have a good crack at being a long term Queensland Premier.