The questionable utility of "born this way"

A bit of an interesting take on the matter of sexuality and being "born this way" in this research:

Patrick Grzanka and Joe Miles, both UT assistant professors of psychology, recently published a study in the Journal of Counseling Psychology challenging the notion that the belief that people are born with their sexual orientation—a belief that has proliferated in the past 20 to 30 years, particularly among social and biological scientists—is the key to improving attitudes toward lesbian, gay and bisexual people....

For the study, Grzanka, Miles and co-author Katharine Zeiders of the University of Missouri surveyed two groups of college students. They used their previously developed sexual orientation beliefs scale, which attempts to capture a wide variety of beliefs such as the idea that sexual minorities are fundamentally different from straight people or that sexuality is based in biology. Most respondents believed sexual orientation is inborn and unchangeable, but it's what else they believed about sexual orientation that distinguishes them.

For example, the researchers looked more closely at respondents who had negative attitudes about gay men. Even among those who believed gay men are "born that way," those who also believed gay men are "all the same and act the same way" were more likely to hold prejudicial attitudes toward gay men, Grzanka said.

"We suggest that this demonstrates the limited capacity of 'born this way' arguments to reduce homophobia," he said.

Kind of makes sense.  And, perhaps counterintuitively in that "born this way and this is who I am" has helped in some legal fights, suggests that not insisting that their sexual orientation defines them as a person could be helpful in its own way.

Important science news of 2015

I have to thank Jason Soon for the link to this long, long list of (mostly) famous scientists and commentators talking at Edge about the big science stories of 2015.

Unfortunately, the format makes reading it a bit of a slog, so I'll just link to the ones that I think are particularly interesting:

1.   Frank Tipler:   I haven't read anything from him for a good few years, I reckon.  I had assumed he had retired, and perhaps he has; but here he is, still holding out in his somewhat peculiar reasoning style on the matter of what problems associated with black holes would be solved if the universe will stop expanding and head back into a Big Crunch (an essential part of his long standing "Omega Point" theory, which few people pay attention to anymore ever since it appeared the expansion of the universe is accelerating.)    Frank has always had trouble convincing other physicists he was onto something; probably because he always seems to be working backwards from the end result he wants, rather than the more routine way of dealing with evidence.   But it is true, some physicists have argued that the poorly understood dark energy might do a switch around in future.  (I'm sure I've posted to some arxiv papers along those lines, years ago, for those who can search this blog successfully.)   It's hard to know who's right until the nature of dark energy is understood, I guess....

2.  Jim Holt:  a good science writer whose books I have always intended to buy but keep forgetting to.   Here's he's writing about the somewhat amusing matter of a Japanese mathematician who thinks he has come up with a profound proof of something important, but hardly any other mathematician in the world can work out whether he really has, or not.  Lectures on the topic apparently mystify most of the mathematician audiences.  (I posted about this before, but it's such an odd and amusing story it's worth noting again.)

3.  Richard Muller:   the grandstanding physicist who said he was skeptical about global warming, but then did his own BEST re-analysis of temperature records and decided climate scientists were right after all, is here again hedging a bit by not saying that the risk of AGW is the reason why coal burning has to stop, but rather arguing that the millions of Chinese and Indians already dying from air pollution gives an immediate incentive to move to gas or nuclear.   I think he sounds unduly "down" on renewables, but the figures he cites for the health effects of current pollution are startling, if accurate.

4.  Joel Gold:  never heard of this psychiatrist before, but he talks here about how Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (which I knew was considered good for mood disorders and depression) actually works rather well for psychosis too.   That's a counterintuitive idea, and the first I have heard of it, but very interesting.

5.  Michael McCullough:  again, someone I haven't heard of, and talking of social research I haven't much heard of.  Apparently, religion is mostly "below the belt".   I'm not entirely convinced, but its worth more reading, I guess.

In other articles, lots of things I have written about over recent years get a mention:  fecal transplants (yay), gut microbiome (poo related again); but yes, the single weirdest entry in the post is the one by a South Korean guy fancifully suggesting an economy based on powdered poo.

Perhaps he trips out after eating kimchi?

Not abominable at all

Watched via Stan last night the one off Sherlock special episode The Abominable Bride, and, as much as I intensely dislike Steven Moffat's work on Doctor Who, I have to say I thought it was pretty terrific.

The episode is copping much criticism, and I don't really understand why.  Even a significant proportion of commenters at The Guardian (home for all Moffat fanboys and girls) had trouble with it, yet I think part of the problem may be that some did not think hard enough about what the episode was doing.   (Which is a little odd, because some of the criticism is along the lines that it was being "too clever by half".)   Maybe it is just attracting  too much over-analysis:  can't people simply enjoy it for its fast and witty dialogue, effective spooky scenes, and fine direction?  Or - another theory - it rated very highly in England (unlike the badly declining Dr Who ratings) and some might have been viewing the show for the first time, in which case, yes, it would make little sense.

But if you are going to go the "analyse it to bits" route, I think one person at The Guardian probably had it right.  I'll link to his or her post once I can find it again!

First post

And a Happy New Year to all.  Except anyone in ISIS.  Speaking of which, does anyone really have a good idea what the final outcome of the current diplomatic spat between Iran and Saudi Arabia will be?  From the point of view of the West, I suppose that any intensification of the centuries old dispute between branches of Islam that involves keeping it within the boundaries of a few countries in the Middle East is not entirely a bad thing, working on the principle that while they're busy killing each other over there, they're not plotting new ways to kill the innocent in our countries.  But it is, of course, even better if no one is killing anyone anywhere, especially over religion.

I've been on another beach holiday to our favourite seaside area.  More about that later. 

In the meantime, I didn't mind this article about the idea that all stories are the same.   (Even if you have heard this discussed before, and you probably have, you should read it for the somewhat startling quote by director Guillermo Del Toro.)

Lately I've been feeling mildly interested in trying to be creative again.  This is usually prompted by the fact that I can't find science fiction that interests me much anymore, or when I feel that movies are stuck in a bit of a creative rut, even while I enjoy them.   (By the way, Christopher Orr   notes that some critics - including him - have been revising their initial enthusiasm for Force Awakens.)

But, as always, whenever I start vaguely thinking of stories I would like to attempt to write up, my mind drifts back to what other books or movies they resemble.   As the article about stories says, there are a million books out there explaining how to write a novel (or script), but I am not sure that there is any that can stop this defeatist feeling before I even properly start getting ideas down.  Dreams often feel novel, but it is rare that one makes a compelling idea for a lengthy story.

Anyway, sadly, it's off to work...

Happy Christmas, reader(s)

The problem (partially) explained

Will the Republican Party Survive the 2016 Election? - The Atlantic

I think this long essay by David Frum on the problems of the Republican Party is pretty good.  But it still feels inadequate in not completely addressing the culture war the Right perceives itself as being engaged in.

Only took 50 years..

SpaceX rocket in historic upright landing - BBC News

These vertically landing rockets put me in mind of the one in You Only Live Twice.   As the post title says, I only had to wait 50 years to see it become reality (kind of).

Force awakened

Just saw the new Star Wars - which is a more literal way of putting it than you might think, if you haven't been reading the reviews.

On the down side, I did have to suppress a scream due to a key plot feature which I warned the world would disappoint me.   But on the upside, the film is in most respects more Empire that Wars, in that the key action and drama is more one-on-one, human-centric, than on the "X Wings versus yet another gigantic space ball weapon" scale.

Yes, Christopher Orr was right:  the movie is pretty much a "mashup masterpiece"; and so was the more cynical  Anthony Lane (who pretty obviously enjoyed it anyway) when he writes that the movie "feels young" and "as an act of pure storytelling, streams by with fluency and zip."  (It really does seem to take only about 3/4 of its actual length, and the pacing always feels just right.)

Yeah, I have to give JJ Abrams his due:  this is pretty well directed. And well scripted - there's an air of mature credibility to much of the dialogue that is so refreshing after the terrible lines in the prequels.

So while I did enjoy it for what it is, the best thing is perhaps that this is all the mashup-ery that is really possible in the series, so that the next movie must surely have to tread some new ground.  They can't just recycle Empire, can they?  It's my new hope that they can't.  (Heh...)

[And on a "meta" observation:  this has been a huge, huge year for movie franchises that have revisited their past.  Certainly, there was a large element of it in Spectre; and with Mission Impossible, it was once again a case of Hunt having to defy the authorities and work in some sort of unauthorised ghost-like mode.   Jurassic World was in many respects rather like the first, but with hundreds of victims in a cooler looking mega park.   The trouble is, as much as I would like a bit more originality, I enjoyed all of them a great deal, and they all were pretty huge hits.  I guess we only have ourselves to blame if we don't get more plot novelty.]

A cheering alcohol story for the holidays

Drink to Your Health (in Moderation), the Science Says - The New York Times

An unusual movie recommendation

You don't need children to watch Shaun the Sheep Movie, and it did much to redeem Aardman studio in my mind, after some dud material of late.  (Well,  The Pirates is from 2012 I see - seems longer ago than that -  and it was not good, in my opinion.)

Lucky residents of Hobart

Powerful aurora australis puts on spectacular display of Christmas lights in Tasmania - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

And some people go travelling all the way to Norway to get a glimpse of them...

A touch of the Don Quixote's about him

I generally avoid Spiked, largely because I can't bear the whiny, hectoring voice of Brendan O'Neill complaining every column about the whiny, hectoring voices of the Left.

But this Spiked Review interview with Roger Scruton is interesting.   He has a new (or updated) book out, complaining about the rise and (in his mind) continuing influence of the style of Left wing intellectualism that got going in the 1960's.  I think these are the key paragraphs summarising Scruton's view:

In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton attacks the left idea of thought for a cause, ‘politics with a GOAL’. By contrast, he tells me, ‘Conservatives are by their nature people who are trying to defend and maintain existence without a cause’. Simply to keep things as they are? ‘We obviously all want to change things, but recognising that human life is an end in itself and not a means to replace itself with something else. And defending institutions and compromises is a very difficult and unexciting thing. But nevertheless it’s the truth.’

For Scruton, the left intellectuals’ apparent attachment to a higher cause only disguises what they really stand for: ‘Nothing.’ He writes that ‘when, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had “capitalism” as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice’. More recently, ‘the windbaggery of Zizek and the nonsemes of Badiou’ exist only ‘to espouse a single and absolute cause’, which ‘admits of no compromise’ and ‘offers redemption to all who espouse it’. The name of that cause? ‘The answer is there on every page of these fatuous writings: Nothing.’

But the interviewer makes an obvious point, and one which is similar to what I've been saying from time to time about the "culture wars" as it is playing out in Australian right wing politics:

The slightly pained look on his face suggests that I am not the first to ask Scruton why he has devoted a book to taking on a collection of largely declining or deceased intellectuals and a culture that he concedes ‘now survives largely in its academic redoubts’. ‘They may seem like obscure intellectuals to the man in the street but actually they are still dominant on the humanities curriculum’, he explains. ‘If you study English or French, even musicology or whatever, you have to swallow a whole load of Lacan and Deleuze. Take Deleuze’s book, A Thousand Plateaus – the English translation has only been out a few years, but it’s already gone through 11 printings. A huge, totally unreadable tome by somebody who can’t write French.’

‘Yet this is core curriculum throughout the humanities in American and English universities. Why? The one sole reason is it’s on the left. There is nothing that anybody can translate into lucid prose, but for that very reason, it seems like a suit of armour around the age-old prejudices against power and authority, the old unshaped and unshapeable agenda.’

 Hmmm.   Many of the comments following the article are very good, and some go straight to the point that he's attacking a bit of a straw man:

He is a populist conservative who creates a grotesque caricature of the left, focusing on the nuttiest currents of academic leftism, then lumps all liberal thought in the same category and presents conservatism as a healthy and rational alternative. By and large this is how the new conservatism works. Part of it is the martyrdom fallacy, that is, presenting conservatism as the silenced victim who has "uncomfortable truths" to tell. The supposed outrage of the left at hearing these "truths" is presented as evidence that something true really was said. Needless to say, ad hominem attacks like these are never evidence.

For a more sympathetic, but still critical, take, try this one: 

I have a lot of time for Scruton. As a young person in the 80's all the arguments seemed to be coming either from the social liberal, "progressive" left, or from the Thatcherite neo-liberal right, both of which I found wanting, for various reasons. I'd alway been attracted to ideas, but had a conservative outlook for more instictive reasons, and so reading Scruton a lot later gave an intellectual justification for what was an essentially non-intellectual poitical disposition an I thank him for that.

I do get the impression these days though, that in railing against the post modern intellectual left, he is still fighting yesterdays's battles, as very few people take them seriously any more, and their influence really is on the wane. Another failing, is that he seems to fail to realize that neo-liberal, globalizing capitalism is as much as a threat to conservative values as left-wing socialism. He occasionally acknowledges this, but fails to eleborate on it, as if this woufd be "letting the side down" or something.Still, all in all, he's one of the good guys. Thumbs up Rog!

(I'm guessing that was typed on an iPad, by the way.)

All rather interesting.  

An example of the low standards of the Republican field

Ted Cruz has lied about immigration.

Les Miserables revisited

As I wrote in my lengthy post about the musical (and book) Les Miserables in 2013*,  I had never seen a stage production of it at the time I saw the movie.

This was rectified yesterday, when my wife and I sat in the balcony at QPAC to watch it, wishing we had opera glasses.   (Actually, if you sit right at the front of the balcony, which we moved close to after intermission, it's not too bad.  But the cheaper seats up the back - very far away indeed.)

Anyway, it is a very good production, and the favourable reviews it has received are well deserved.   Perhaps it was due to more familiarity with the score from seeing the movie, but I found it more moving in parts than the movie.  (My general line is that it is easier to be moved by the realism of a movie than the artifice of a stage show.)  

Certainly, I have certain earworms stuck in my head today that are showing no signs of leaving.

I noticed as we left that Cats is returning next year:  a show I have zero interest in seeing, although I suppose that any show with good singers will have bits that are good.   My wife and daughter went to see Wicked by themselves earlier this year, and liked it well enough.   The other musical viewed recently was Anything Goes, which got it's own explanatory post too.  

My point in noting this is to observe that the creation of  really successful narrative musicals seems to take place at an incredibly slow rate.   When they are big successes,  they just keep returning, decade after decade.   But perhaps this is just from an outside of Broadway perspective:  I see that someone in Variety was noting in 2013 that maybe there were too many new musicals at that time for them to all be successful. 

*  you should read it - it's the style of post I like doing in particular, and enjoy re-reading when I have forgotten half of it.

Wrong and wrong again

Before he gave up his "I'm for small government" principles for a government job with fantastic travel allowances, Freedom Boy Tim Wilson used to specialise in mouthing off on behalf of the IPA on behalf of Big Tobacco against tobacco plain packaging.

Here he is, warning that the Australian government may have to pay billions to his then benefactors:

"Bad anti-intellectual property laws by State and Federal Parliaments could require taxpayers to gift up to $3.4 billion per year in compensation to film companies and big tobacco for the loss of their trademarks", Director of the IP and Free Trade Unit at the Institute of Public Affairs, Tim Wilson, said today.

 Here he is in 2011:

The IPA raised concerns that stripping trademarks from packaging could lead to the acquisition of property rights under the Constitution and lead to compensation on "just terms".

It's a good thing he left that job, I suppose, given his prediction rate is looking very poor indeed.

First, the High Court didn't agree that the Commonwealth had stolen property rights, and now a completely bogus trade arbitration claim in Singapore has failed too.

What's the IPA to do now?:  I guess the only think is to continue with Sinclair Davidson's sad exercises in complaining that, because smoking rates were dropping before plain packaging, and plain packaging came with increased tobacco taxes, his mortal enemy Simon Chapman can never really claim that plain packaging "works".   So there. 

It's all a bit pathetic:  but nothing compared to the coming IPA crisis as its climate change denying group of aging non experts continue to fade into complete irrelevancy.  

But back to Wilson:  I saw a tweet yesterday that claims he's interested in running for selection for a Liberal  Senate seat.   Just what the Liberals need - a shallow intellectual lightweight proven wrong on previous prognostications who's primarily interested in self promotion - and selfies.

Daly counters Sloan

Australian government spending as a percentage of GDP

That's quite a graph Daly has got there.  I hope it's right.  

Meanwhile, in one of the most ridiculous nations on the planet

Teacher suspended after playing violin for young women | GulfNews.com

A university in Saudi Arabia has suspended a foreign teacher after he played the violin in front of a class of young women.
Dr Eisa Al Ansari, the rector of Prince Mohammed University (PMU), one of the largest private universities in Saudi Arabia, said that an investigation had been launched into the incident.

The rector said that the teacher was new at the university and that he was recruited two months ago.

The incident was a personal behaviour by the teacher and violated the formal policy of the university aligned with the systems and regulations of the Ministry of Education that are endorsed and applied by all universities in Saudi Arabia, he added, Saudi news site Sabq reported on Thursday.

Good grief.   Was he doing it nude?  (No.)   Is it meant to be seductive?  (Ha.)   Does a bow carry some sort of phallic symbolism?  Who knows?

In other news from that country where the heat seems to addle minds:

A huge family dispute erupted in Saudi Arabia after a man’s wife kissed a camel.

The man’s mother accused her daughter-in-law of breaking religious and social traditions and pressured her son to divorce his wife.

The wife insisted that the kiss was innocent and spontaneous.

She also accused her mother-in-law of using the kiss as an excuse to attack her because she had not yet given birth to a baby.

Mind you, this story is not sourced, and sounds the equivalent of tabloid gossip, but still...

My new found respect for the sea monkey

BBC - Earth - The animal that lives for 10,000 years

Perhaps that should be "lives" (in inverted commas) because what they are talking about is the larva cysts, which can dry out yet appear to be viable for 10,000 years.  (They know this because they got some to hatch from old salt layers of that age.)

Still, that is very impressive.  It sounds as if it won't be cockroaches that inherit the earth, after all.

What about the Pelagians??

Would you believe it? A selection of ancient faiths ripe for revival � The Spectator

As far as heresies go, the Pelagian one seemed pretty inoffensive, and, indeed, somewhat more attuned to modern thinking.

A topical slur

Steve to young monty, looking over at Catallaxy Files:

"You will never find a more wretched hive of dumb and villainy."