Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab

Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab
classy
hat tip KL Dickson

Basically some basic bacteria seem to have evolved the ability to metabolise citrate via, apparently, a series of inconsequential mutations. Evidence for evolution and all that - not that it is really needed to convince anyone other than the crazy the ignorant or the naieve.

why peopl get fooled

here is why you are not smart enough

funny comics

Haha funny comics about philosophy

the average voter

Scott Hagaman has an interesting post on the average voter - the most interesting part is a quote from Caplan

The average voter is an irrational nutjob when it comes to her political beliefs. Caplan also provides a plausible explanation for this. Having irrational political beliefs doesn't cost the average voter much. If you have irrational beliefs about how your wife treats other men in your bedroom, you stand to lose quite a bit. But holding the irrational belief that McCain is fit for public office doesn't cost people very much (unless, perhaps, all their friends are rational). As Caplan puts it:

In a sense, then, there is a method to the average voter’s madness. Even when his views are completely wrong, he gets the psychological benefit of emotionally appealing political beliefs at a bargain price. No wonder he buys in bulk.

Sadly true....

he then says
This will, for a variety of reasons, call into question Schwitzgebel's overcommon assumption - which I find absolutely absurd - that voting is a duty. But I suspect he disagrees with several of the claims I've made.

I think, not to put words in his mouth, Eric would actually agree that voters are irrational in this sense. Just for the purposes of his experiment he is willing to package being informed/uninformed/willfulness in relation to being informed and voting all together and assume that one should expect of a professor of ethics "willfully informed and voting".

And that the assumption takes the form of "at least enough that the experiment provides some indication of morality" and together with all the other experiments provides strong evidence for morality/lack of morality. Possibly these assumptions are in error but seem tolerable as long as they are stated in the conclusion of the paper or are supported by literary review.

Continued from previou posts

As a reflective agent, to truly believe something you must consider it to be epistemically superior to its negation. You must therefore hold that anyone who believes otherwise is ipso facto your epistemic inferior in this respect.

I have issues with
1) 'must'
on threat of what?*

and

2) 'superior to its negation'
does that mean if there is no theory that covers more than 50% I can't believe anything? I am thinking here of fundamental theories that underly all other ideas - such that you would have to totally revamp your world view to switch from one to another. An example might be an ethical theory on which one (as a highly rational agent) might have built 'rules for living one's life'.

*I guess a certain sort of rationality is hidden in the term "reflective agent"?

Meta Coherence

On the issue of meta coherence raised by Richard Chappell
As a reflective agent, to truly believe something you must consider it to be epistemically superior to its negation. You must therefore hold that anyone who believes otherwise is ipso facto your epistemic inferior in this respect.

clark makes the interesting comment
1. On fundamental issues I don’t think arguments are justified.
2. You say I should not believe when I don’t have sufficient justification.
3. Therefore I should not believe any of the fundamental issues in philosophy.
4. Fundamental issues in philosophy determine higher order justification.
5. Therefore I shouldn’t believe higher order beliefs. (Such as whether there is a cup in front of me)
6. Therefore your reasoning leads to pyrrhonic disbelief.
7. (6) is ludicrous therefore I call (2) into question

I have to say I'm sympathetic to Clark

the point Richard disputes is (1) and I am unsure if I agree on Clark there BUT I USED to believe it AND I am unsure if I don't think could defend it with logic which raises the circular issue of Richard's own argument arguing that I should not believe it!

I don't particularly like the idea of appeals to ludicrousness so I'd phrase it more in terms of "this view is completely impractical, and is based on a misconception of what 'belief' is.
I definitely believe some things that are not rationally justified and I see no contradiction there. It is also 'rational' for me to value something like 'having useful beliefs' such as alternatives to radical skepticism while recognizing that radical skepticism MAY be the best supported argument via evidence. that is because like with Pascal's wager - there is hardly anything to be gained by being right about radical skepticism while it is useful to be right about some other theories.

Why should we worship god?

Firstly I am thinking of a god who has the full set of "Omni"s
Omnipresent, Omnipotent, Omniscient and omni-benevolent.
Richard brown suggests the following options
1. Because God is all-powerful!!! He could destroy you in a micro-second or banish you to an eternity of pain and torture…so you had better worship Him or you’re screwed!!
which he rejects because it is not a reason because
This answer makes God out to be a petty tyrant and that is incompatible with the description of Him as all-knowing and all-loving.
2. Because God deserves it! He created this Universe just for us.
which he counters with the problem of evil in the world and by asking "why am I obligated to be grateful for a gift that I did not ask for?"
finaly he suggests
3. We should worship God because he commands us to do so!
which he counters with
‘what kind of God would command us to worship him?’ This seems sort of needy and insecure, something that I take to be at odds with the characterization of God as all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful.

My thoughts as to what would be defendable positions for why one should worship god are

1) god is ultimate good - so we should contemplate him and that the proper approach to contemplating ultimate good is worshiping, and that one who doesn't worship is less likely to be good.

still its easy to think of a person who worships and yet on the face of it is evil.

2) You should worship/thank him IF you are grateful for existing
still not clear why being ungrateful deserves punishment.

3) God has a perfect plan (which flows from being all loving and omniscient), any change you make to it no matter how well thought out will detract from that plan - part of that plan is that you worship him.

Now this might be valid - but that is partly because it is so vague.

So none of which I find compelling but all at first glance defendable.

Now considering this (regardless of whether you believe in god just assume he exists) is there a valid reason why you should be required to worship him? or why it would be valid to punish you for not worshiping him if he is omni everything?

Individualism and conservatism

Richard C argues against a point made by Bill Vallicella that individualism is inheritly related to conservatism. He counters that individualism is in fact it is the basis of his liberalism.

I have to agree with Richard here - In my experience conservatives are generally the group asking members of society to be productive members of society, and feeling frustrated when they are not. The liberals on the other hand often end up defending the anti-social people. Of course that takes a different spin when you go to the extreme like communism but on a day to day basis I don't meet many communists and I expect Bill doesn't either.

David Boaz however is attacking a more vulnerable target, although he does so with only one eye. Much as Richard might hate it it is highly likely that Obama is more into sacrifice for society and collectivism (even in a sense that could be considered abhorrent) than Richard, David or Bill, as with McCain. Why? because they are politicians. Politicians are almost always more authoritarain and collectivist than the peopel they rule becuase as decision makers they can assocaite more closely with
the state and it is their job to wondering about what a state should do, how it can fix problems via authority and how individuals prevent their idealized goals. And maybe that is how it should be, but I can see how average Joe who can't influence the state might get annoyed.

Radio

Two things that really annoy me about hte media these days.
One was an interview with a finance company I heard today, As far as I could tell the interview was entirely patsy questions, I would not be at all surprised if the company paid the radio station money to have the interview - and if they didn't then they at least got an agreement to ask only easy questions before turning up. Now maybe that finance company was a great finance company - but The interviewer could at least have asked something probing so that we could judge that.

the second was an even more common trick the radio stations pull. there was an interview regarding the English rugby sex scandal. The host cut to an 'expert' so they could ask him some questions about the scandal. This fellow then told them that he knew nothing. So we had a 5 minute or so 'story' where we learned that there was no story as yet.

Now I think this story is ridiculous (if the woman doesn't want to lay charges the police should let it go and so should the media), but maybe some people are interested. What annoys me however is that the radio station knew there were people interested and wanted to have a story - so they pretended they had new information even though they knew they didn't. To do this they used the (annoying at the best of times) trick of getting a 'expert' on to create a 'conversation'. That just feels like an insult to the public's intelligence.

Does god know Quantum mechanics

Richard asks the question "does god know about quantum mechanics?"
the argument goes like this

One of the strangest things that we have found out about it over the last thirty years or so is that if there is a way for us to know the path that the photon actually takes, and so determine which slit it actually travels through, then the interference pattern no longer manifests. What we get is ‘nothing but us particles down hir sir’. In Green’s book The Fabric of the Cosmos he details experiments he calls ‘quantuum erasures’ where they showed that what matters is whether someone could know the path taken by the photon. Tis is obviously extremely strange and anti-common sense, but it is a robust experimental finding. But now consider God. If He knows the path that the photon takes then it will not act like a wave. It will act like a particle. So from God’s point of view particle physics has to be correct. Since He is always holding the door of the refrigerator open, metaphorically speaking, the light inside will always be on. But this really reduces to the first option in claiming that God can’t have any direct knowledge of quantuum physics.

Sounds reasonable - but the problem is that that most modern physisists don't agree that this

what matters is whether someone could know the path taken by the photon.

is an accurate way to describe what is going on.

What IS going on is quite complex and its possible I don't have the writing skills to describe it in an eloquent way but...

The model proposed is an approximation as is any model I propose here - however some models are better than others. the former model is wrong in that
A) decoherence is caused not only by minds but by ANY complex system.
B) decoherence is a gradual change not something that is 'on" or "off"

First regarding A - Quantum mechanics refers to systems. So lets say a cat in a pefect box observes a light flash as a result of a photon movement - he makes that movement coherent in regard to himself but not me unless I open the box. Now I can still open the box and find the cat that observed the light flash or the one that didn't. It all depends on my perspective. This isn't all that strange, it is just some more relativity.

More scientifically - possible outcomes 'interfere' with each other if the resulting situations are similar. So if I fire a photon through a slit experiment the two possibilities have almost the minimum amount of difference and so there is a lot of interference between them. But if someone observes the evidence of the particle going through one slit as part of an experiment (prior to the photons hitting the target behind the slits) and he yells "it went through the left slit!" that creates a massive difference between the possible worlds. they cant interfere anymore because they are in a sense displaced from each other. The leading model to explain this is probably the 'multiple universe model' in this model every option is 'real' and much of what we consider magical about decoherence is related to how WE are being decohered in relation to the photons.

regarding B - decoherence is just a matter of how easily those worlds can interfere. Every 'world' interferes with every other - just some do so to an almost infinitely small degree because they are so dissimilar or because the options they represent are so unlikely.

So how does this relate to God? And under what situation would he cause decoherence in a photon?
Well first god would need to be able to be significantly different to what he is now. If that was not possible then there would be no decoherence as a result of him. That seems possible but is already at odds with theories that suggest he is by definition perfect.

Second - it needs to be possible to have a greater wave function than god - ie god plus the photon. again the sort of thin some theories might deny.

third - because decoherence relies to how different two possible worlds are he would need to be changed by the experiment. So God needs to be the sort of god that might for example be undesided whether to use Moses or Bob as his prophet, and then on observing a photon confirm that Moses is his man. Further this implies that the uncertain god is a decoherent mixture of possible gods. I don't think that matches with the usual perception of 'god' (although I'm not saying it is impossible).

Forth - god needs to be somehow locked into OUR universe for us to observe his decoherence. Just like the cat in the box unless god decoheres himself to us his decoherence of the photon doesn't matter to us. (in this case most theologists would probably suggest he IS decohered to us)

Simply - God has a number of special traits that mean I wouldn’t expect him to cause decoherence in accordance with modern quantum physics theory.

I expect the average theologist quantum physicist would go with the following

If there are multiple universes he sees them all, if there are not multiple universes that fact that there is only one possible god (in the sense of quantum physics) places God above quantum physics - so he see the world 'as it is' and doesn't observe/cause decoherence.

The Arrow of Time

I was watching this on blogging heads.

Here David Albert tackles he question of "why I can remember yesterday but not tomorow."

david separates it into
1) entropic processes - like why eggs become omlettes not the other way around.
2)epistemic asymetries - what you can know about the past, and the methods to find it out are different from what you can know about the future
3) we believe we can effect the future not past.

I think as usual the error is partly in the question.

First dealing with the big question - It is important to realize that we can't directly remember ALL of yesterday and even if I think I can I am probably very much mistaken. Memory is not a perfect tape recorder of what happened - it is an inference based on data points that we collected.
Now those data points can be used to construct an image of the future or of the past. But these images cant be equal because the latter is generally a more difficult task.

Of course even that depends on the time frame

close your eyes and imagine the room one second in the future, now do the same and imagine it twenty seconds in the past.

was the process you used very different? Which was more accurate?

Of course there remains a sense of difference between memories and inferences, at least in some cases, because my brain has evolved in the presence of entropy. Memories are (generally) stored differently than logical inferences. So if we are talking about time as something fundamental let's imagine a super computer instead of my brain.

The super computer takes information from the current state of it's memory and infers what the future and the past must be. Because the past is low entropy and the future high entropy the super computer can tell a lot more about the past - but how can you say what it knows about the past is any different in nature from what it knows about the future? (aside from it probably being more detailed).

In the light of that it is not a bad assumption (although far from a universal one) to think we can influence the indeterminate future and not the fairly well determined past.

Wishful thinking

In the previous post I refered to Richard C's argument that it seems to be illegitimate in general to accuse people of rationalizing. In the previous post I highlighted the fact that many expert psychologists believe we rampantly engage in post hoc rationalization so it is reasonable to think it is just true (although not in every case). However here I want to address the more substantive issue of if it is legitimate in an ordinary argument to accuse the other side of post hoc rationalization.*

Whar Richard C has right is that people do often use the fact that post hoc rationalization might be going on (or might be common) to argue that the idea is false - that is invalid. that I might be biased towards believing 1+1=2 isnt proof agianst it. HOWEVER it is reason for me to recheck my postion for bias. If my position is based largely on intuition I might have to say that I should reduce by certainty in my position. That also marginally helps the other persons position because he may have reduced his certainty based on the fact that I disagreed with him.

So in spite of the fact that it does not directly undermine the position - it is still a potentially important part of the debate.

as to the substantive issue, a logical argument regarding wishful thinking is a reason to "check for bias" rather than "to throw out one argument". But it remains worth highlighting.

* Note how I use post hoc rationalization and Richard uses 'wishful thinking - this isn't just switching from layman's terminology - you can post hoc rationalize things you don't wish to be true, all that matters is that you became committed to it for a non rational reason.

Post hoc rationalization

In this post Eric Schwitzgebel , the famous philosopher of mind, performs an experiment regarding WhetherEthicists and Political Philosophers Vote Less Often Than Other Philosophers.

Richard, makes an interesting post in Suspecting Wishful Thinking. Where he makes the good point
you would think the reasonable prior assumption would be to favour the experts over folk opinion in case of disagreement.

He then goes on to wonder why Eric isn't paying enough attention to his expert opinion.

However I think this applies better to his own position than Eric's. The key issue here seems to be the claim of expertise.

Eric's statement is
"I suspect that if, indeed, ethicists don't tend to consider voting a duty that may be post-hoc rationalization rather than genuine moral insight."

In the context of the experiment this is a psychological claim about ethical professors*. Now the next question is "is Richard an expert in that field? Well my assessment is that he probably is not.

Richard argues
Surely if anyone has reasons worth considering on a controversial moral question, it's going to be moral philosophers!
that would be true if this was a moral question - but it isn't. the moral question would be "is it right for philosophers to want to vote. But the question Richard is addressing from Eric's post is the completely different "is the effect suggested, if it exists, likely to be post hoc rationalization"

he then argues
It's curious how often people accuse each other of rationalizing, or holding a position "because they want to believe it" rather than because they have genuine reasons for thinking it true.

Well in this context it isn't nearly as curious. Rational psychologists, or people in related fields like Eric or myself, who have access to a literature full of millions of experiments can make that sort of decision based on that evidence. What evidence could Richard be calling to bear? obviously not an expertise in psychology.

Still he does have another option.

Richard could and probably is, claiming to be a data point - yes that is very weak evidence - but even there he runs into issues
1) Richard isn't a professor. Yes he is studying ethics, but being a professor is a relevant difference, i.e. it would be very unsurprising to find philosophy students have different voting habits to philosophy professors.
2) the very nature of post hoc rationalization is that you probably don't know your doing it under superficial analysis.

* I also read into this a statement as to what sort of thing Eric is considering 'genuine moral insight"