spoonless | Ben Stein : no intelligence allowed

So, I finally got around to watching Ben Stein's movie "Expelled : No Intelligence Allowed". I guess since my last post ended with a Ferris Bueller quote, it makes a nice seguey into this one to mention his acting career got made from his role in Ferris Bueller's Day off, as the monotonous economics teacher, teaching a class full of bored drooling high school students about the Laffer Curve, Ronald Reagan's "voodoo economics", and repeating "anyone? anyone?" after every question regardless of the fact that nobody ever answered his questions.

Before I watched the film, I couldn't help but brush up on my knowledge of Ben Stein's life on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Stein

He was the son of an economics professor, but went to school for law. Became a lawyer and at one point was a professor of law at Pepperdine University. I knew that he had been a speech writer and lawyer for President Richard Nixon, but I had no idea that he had taught as an adjunct professor for a while at UC Santa Cruz (where I went to grad school) before he became a real professor at Pepperdine. That surprised me more than anything on his resume, given UCSC has sometimes been referred to by conservatives as "the worst school in America for leftwing indoctrination", and given how insanely conservative Ben Stein is. He must have found plenty of enemies there!

The most entertaining thing I found on his Wikipedia page, though, is that apparently--even though he's not an economist, many news outlets such as Fox News regularly ask his opinion on economics as though he's some kind of expert (presumably either because his father was an economist, or because he played an economics teacher in Ferris Bueller). For example, in August 2007, he appeared on Fox News with a panel of other "experts" where he proclaimed loudly and arrogantly that subprime mortgages were a wonderful "buy opportunity", dismissing fears that they might be unsafe. Peter Schiff was also there and disagreed strongly with him, saying that subprime mortgages and perhaps even the whole mortgage market was in danger of crashing. Stein and everyone else on the panel laughed at him saying "you must be a laugh riot at parties". Talk about putting your foot in your mouth!

Regarding Richard Nixon's involvement in Watergate, he defends him by saying:

"Can anyone even remember now what Nixon did that was so terrible? He ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the POWs, ended the war in the Mideast, opened relations with China, started the first nuclear weapons reduction treaty, saved Eretz Israel's life, started the Environmental Protection Administration. Does anyone remember what he did that was bad?

Oh, now I remember. He lied. He was a politician who lied. How remarkable. He lied to protect his subordinates who were covering up a ridiculous burglary that no one to this date has any clue about its purpose. He lied so he could stay in office and keep his agenda of peace going. That was his crime. He was a peacemaker and he wanted to make a world where there was a generation of peace. And he succeeded.

That is his legacy. He was a peacemaker. He was a lying, conniving, covering up peacemaker. He was not a lying, conniving drug addict like JFK, a lying, conniving war starter like LBJ, a lying, conniving seducer like Clinton—a lying, conniving peacemaker." - Ben Stein

The film Expelled is his defense of the Intelligent Design movement, where he lays out the case for a full-blown conspiracy among scientists who believe in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. His central claim is that ID advocates within the science community are systematically identified and expelled from the rest of the community, never allowed to explore ideas that might contradict Darwin's great theory.

I have to admit--I sort of thought that I might watch this movie and get very angry. And I suppose I should be, because there are probably plenty of evangelical Christians who will watch it and think his investigative reporting is brilliant and his arguments against Darwinism are air tight. But for the most part, I just thought it was hilarious. I mean some of the antics in it were very entertaining, but so far from reality that it's hard to watch it and not think "OMG, that is so cute that he thinks that!"

The only part that made me kind of angry was the part where he visits the Nazi death camp, and has some tour guide explain to him how all of the Nazi's beliefs were based on Darwin's ideas. In scenes before that, he has drilled in to the viewer that the natural consequence of belief in evolution is to become a Nazi and engaging in forced eugenics and genocide. The theme of Nazis is woven from beginning to end of the film, but only the part where he actually visits the camp is creepy. The rest of it is more aimed at a metaphor for erecting a wall where science is on one side and religion is on the other, and if scientists ever stray over onto the religion side of the wall, they get shot. He mixes up his analogies though, because while they keep showing shots of Nazi guards on one side or another of a wall, they also keep cutting to shots of the Berlin Wall, which was erected by the Communists, not the Nazis. At the end there are a lot of shots of Reagan talking about freedom, while simulataneously Ben Stein is talking about academic freedom, and shots of the Berlin Wall falling down are interspersed. (I think the speech Reagan is giving is when the wall was coming down.) Very poetic, and interesting how he ties all 3 of those ideas of "freedom" together. But downright idiotic if you think about it in a larger context!

He has interviews with PZ Meyers, Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, and other great skeptics. If there is one thing that really impressed me about the movie, it was that he actually let them talk for a pretty long time. I was surprised at this, because at times, they appear to completely annihilate his arguments, or at least make him look foolish... and yet he doesn't cut it from the film. Those parts made me think he did a decent job at being an honest filmmaker and including what his opponents have to say--unfortunately, there are other parts where he is clearly being dishonest. The worst one, I think, is when he talks about winning the lottery of life. There's a catchy cartoon about a guy playing a slot machine. Stein claims that winning the lottery of life (creating the first few organic building blocks of life, out of inorganic materials) is like playing a slot machine and winning, and then playing 250 more slot machines and winning on every single one of them, all in a row. While I'm sure that's a powerful image for many people, it's completely dishonest because after all the scientists he interviewed about how life got started, I am sure that at least *one* of them explained to him how big the universe is, and how many galaxies there are out there. So his metaphor is completely dishonest in that it only shows one casino, not trillions of casinos all running simultaneously, where only in at least one of them this has to happen. In fact, he asks questions just like this, where I'm sure that was the answer given, but then he deliberately cuts that out of the movie and instead leaves the more emotional rants about how stupid creationists are.

In terms of Darwin's theory itself, namely that species form from previous species through natural selection, none of the ID advocates interviewed even attempt to give an alternative suggestion to that. Instead, it seems like what these people claim is just that somehow, there are some ingredients somewhere mixed in with life that supposedly can't be explained without recourse to "intelligence" designing them. None of them seem to realize that if this really were true, then there would be no more science to be done--that would be the end.

Overall, I thought it was definitely worth watching, if nothing else as a window into how really whacky conservatives like Ben Stein think about science, and how the intelligent design people in general think. And there is one big theme in the movie that I whole-heartedly agree with and enjoyed. And that theme is that people don't seem to realize just how incompatible religion is with Darwinism. He interviews scientists who explain how political correctness and the desire to win court cases has led scientists to mute what they say against mainstream religion and pretend that it is more compatible than it really is. This is absolutely true, and I think he does a great job at pointing it out. Unfortunately, his conclusion is that since they are incompatible, Darwinism must therefore be wrong. And also unfortunately, one of his main arguments, and arguably the strongest argument he has, for why it's Darwinism that must be wrong rather than religion, is that Darwinism naturally leads to genocide, while religion leads to happy happy joy joy. I say it's the "strongest" argument he has in a sort of tongue and cheek way, because while he does lay out an entirely plausible route through which Darwinism could lead a normal well-meaning intelligent person down the path to Nazism (through the intermediate step of Social Darwinism), it's not actually an argument for Darwinism being "wrong" in the sense of "not true". And he seems to ignore the obvious fact that the vast majority of people who believe in evolution are not Nazis (although he does warn several times that "I'm not saying belief in Darwinism *requires* you to believe in Nazism or that all Darwinists are Nazis"). But even the way he says that seems to suggest that he *mostly* believes that, or *almost* believes that which of course is total nonsense.

So overall, I think it has some important and true messages, but it also has some deeply dishonest and misleading messages. Oh, one more entertaining bit. Upon interviewing one scientist, who explains one plausible hypothesis for how the first organic cells may have formed--by "piggy-backing on crystals"--he stares at him with a stupid look and says "um, excuse me?? Did you say... *crystals*?" and then there's a flash to a shot of a wizard holding a crystal ball and smiling devilishly. Pure genius in the cinematography, although I really feel sorry for the person who watches it and thinks that's what the theory actually says.

Sigh. I seem to be really fascinated by conspiracy theorists lately. I may have to make another post about the Books-on-Tape I've been listening to this month, called "The Rise of the Fourth Reich : How Secret Societies Threaten to Take Over America". Totally batshit crazy guy wrote it, and ties together every conspiracy theory known to man, from 9/11-truth, to UFO's, to perpetual motion machines, to JFK, to the Illuminati, to Hilter using a body double to fake his own death, to the CIA being filled with Nazis and putting Floride (aka "Prozac" according to him) in the water to pacify everyone into obedience to Nazi control, to NASA being founded by Nazi occultists who time all of their launches meticulously according to astrological signs. Anyway, more totally nuts stuff, but for some reason it's a hard book to put down. Perhaps in some ways only slightly crazier than Ben Stein is.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

easwaran.livejournal.com

Note that even for a robot whose goal is to kill itself after 5 minutes, it still needs to be a Bayesian (or otherwise rational and reasonable) in order to achieve its goal. It needs to form some sort of relatively accurate representation of what things in the world might be able to kill it, and what things won't, and then act in ways that maximize the likelihood that it will run into something that will kill it.

If we want to describe a robot as having anything like "beliefs" or "goals" rather than just arbitrary sentences stored in memory, then it has to respond to stimuli in certain ways. If you're not appropriately responsive to evidence, then you're not even having beliefs - your internal sentence-states must be described as something else, like imaginations or suppositions or desires, or perhaps just lists. My suspicion is that once we understand this notion of "appropriately responsive", we'll see that you just don't even count as a believer unless you do something approximately Bayesian. Then, this would give us an objective ground for Bayesianism - to count as a believer at all one needs to be approximately Bayesian, and to be an ideal believer, one should be as perfectly Bayesian as possible.

We might then take a similar approach to rationality about actions. In order to count as someone who has goals or desires, one needs to respond to the world and interact with it in particular ways. If you never seek to change anything about the world, then it seems hard to describe your internal states as desires, rather than suppositions, imaginations, or whatever. In order to count as someone who acts, you have to behave approximately in accord with expected value decision theory. And therefore, to count as fully rational, you should act as perfectly in accord with this theory as possible.

Perhaps some similar ground could be drawn for morality. And this would explain why things like rocks and trees don't count as rational or irrational, moral or immoral - they don't act in ways that count as having beliefs or desires or anything of that sort, so nothing makes these norms binding on them.

Obviously, there are lots of holes in this story and I don't know how to fill them in, but I suspect that something like this is at the foundation of all normativity.

From:

spoonless.livejournal.com

I'll concede the point about the robot who's goal is to die in 5 minutes. I could try to come up with more and more absurd examples of agents without need for modeling their environment, but that gets far enough from the examples we know in real life (like people) that it's somewhat silly to base any decisions on what language to use on them.

If you're not appropriately responsive to evidence, then you're not even having beliefs
...
to count as a believer at all one needs to be approximately Bayesian, and to be an ideal believer, one should be as perfectly Bayesian as possible.

Depending on how you mean this, this actually sounds very radical. Although interesting. Given this view, what would you say to someone who claims to believe things on faith? Faith doesn't seem to be even a logical possibility in this way of thinking about it. And I'm somewhat sympathetic to that, although I think it might really piss of a lot of "people of faith" to hear that. Especially the more adament ones who argue that you're not a "true believer" unless you have faith. It sounds like you are saying exactly the opposite. You are not a true believe if you have any faith whatsoever!

From:

easwaran.livejournal.com

In response to this and the other point, one of the things that has to be part of the story is an explanation of how something can be "close enough" to count as belief, while still being wrong in some way. And this explanation has to work in a way that distinguishes among the many systems that are "good enough", which ones are better. (I claim that the Bayesian picture will turn out to be the core that defines this set, but it could well turn out to be something else, though it will be some sort of relation to evidence.)

Presumably what this ends up with is a story where if you take everything on faith, then you don't count as believing - you're just a book or a computer memory, which will story whatever inputs it gets, regardless of whether they represent anything accurately. But if some amount of things are accepted on faith, that won't be enough to destroy the whole system. Presumably, the people who believe religious things on faith still have lots of beliefs about other things that are appropriately related to evidence, about things like whether there's a table in front of them, or what color the sky is.

Anyway, because of the margin of error, it won't be a tautology that any particular belief is responsive to any particular piece of evidence, though it will be a tautology that in general beliefs will be responsive to some sort of evidence. The way you get a notion of goodness out of this will be like much of our apparently non-normative use of the word. A good knife is something that cuts smoothly and easily, though many things that don't cut smoothly and easily will count as knives to some extent because they manage to cut in some way. Similarly, a good chair will support someone sitting on it very well and comfortably, while many things will count as chairs in virtue of doing it not so well.

From:

spoonless.livejournal.com

Ok, that sounds reasonable (about being "close enough" to count as belief while allowing for some variation).

A good knife is something that cuts smoothly and easily, though many things that don't cut smoothly and easily will count as knives to some extent because they manage to cut in some way. Similarly, a good chair will support someone sitting on it very well and comfortably, while many things will count as chairs in virtue of doing it not so well.

Making analogies to good knives and good chairs initially sounds like a great starting point for some kind of objective values. But I see a lot of problems with that. I think these examples appear to work well because there is a particular function or purpose that is built into the intension of concepts like "chair" or "knife". It's not much of a simplification to say that a knife is defined as something which is intended to be used for cutting, and that a chair is defined as something which is intended to be sat in. There are a lot of different arrangements of molecules that could satisfy those requirements, making them a better or worse chair or knife. But all of this is because you have a specific purpose in mind. I think it's only ever possible to say that something is "good" if you can answer the question "good for what?" The same object might be good for sitting in but bad for cutting, or good or bad for any number of other purposes. But what is the purpose of an object? Whatever a particular sentient being, or some social group, or some society wants it to be. Whatever satisfies their needs, desires, goals, etc. So it seems that there is just as much relativism and subjectivity that creeps in as with any kind of statement about good or bad.

From:

easwaran.livejournal.com

That means that the same object can be a good chair and a bad knife. It isn't just good or bad full stop. Having a certain set of mental states might make one a good believer (because the states are responsive to the evidence in appropriate ways), but that doesn't by itself make you a good person. Similarly, a set of actions might make you a good agent. This program won't really get an answer of what makes a good person unless you have some notion of what it is to be a person (which of course could be very different from being a good human being - I take it that "human being" is a kind of biological concept, while "person" is a concept that could apply to animals, robots, or aliens just as well as to humans).

Note - none of this is about what anyone wants. It's just about the meanings of words. It might be the case that no one wants knives, but certain things will still be good or bad knives. Or as Alanis Morrisette sings, you might have 10,000 very good spoons when all you need is a fork - your desires and subjectivity don't enter into the evaluation at all, just what it is to be a spoon.

Of course, on some further level, we choose certain concepts to be interested in, but once we're interested in the concepts of belief and action, nothing about our wants or needs as individuals or a society is relevant to what makes someone a good or bad believer or agent.

From:

spoonless.livejournal.com

So--it sounds like when you say "P is a good X" you're just saying that some particular P fits our concept of X very well. Q may only approximately fit into some concept X, and therefore Q is a poor X. That makes sense, and it does explain how if you insist on certain properties being included in a definition of an agent or a believer, then you'd be able to objectively measure whether someone was a good agent or a good believer. But somehow, I'm unable to see how this would help in bridging the gap between is and ought.

Lets say Mr. Wrong likes to cheat and lie, sleeps around on his wife, and beats his kids... while Mr. Right stays faithful, is an honest guy, and is good with kids.

Then you could say that Mr. Wrong is a good liar, a good cheater, a good philanderer, and a good domestic abuser. While Mr. Right is a good father and a good husband.

But the problem is, you've just moved all of the normative parts of everything into the definitions of the concepts "liar", "cheater", "philanderer", and "abuser" all having negative normative judgements built in. And father and husband are also concepts that have certain normative expectations built in, of which you aren't a good example if you don't meet those expectations. I don't see how this helps anyone decide whether it is good or bad to lie or cheat, to beat your kids, etc. It just shows that if you have some concept of someone who is supposed to act a certain way, they can either be a good example of acting that way, or a bad example of acting that way. It doesn't seem to tell us anything about how we should actually act. Do you think it does somehow?

From:

easwaran.livejournal.com

I think the way this sort of thing would have to work is to think about the more general types of actions that these fall under. Kant pointed out that lying is a type of talking, but it's clear that it has to be a deviant type. If all (or most) talking was lying, then talking would no longer be able to serve its purpose, and lying wouldn't either. It is essential for lying to work that most other speakers are telling the truth, or at least for the audience to have the reasonable belief that this is true. Kant famously came to the conclusion that all lying is therefore always wrong, including the standard anachronistic example of lying to the Nazis about the fact that you have Anne Frank hidden in your attic. Of course, on the version of this picture that I'm talking about, goodness and badness come in degrees, so it's possible to claim that there's something wrong with lying to the Nazis in this case, but there would be far more wrong in telling the truth (if we could fill in some other norms that come from more general action types).

We can do a similar thing to say why cheating is generally wrong, and breaking promises (if that's the way to understand what a philanderer is doing). The abuse case, and responding to the Nazi objection about lying, would depend on some sort of analysis of the general notion of what it is to be a rational agent, and I don't really see how it's going to work yet. I'm more convinced in the belief case than in the action case, and so I'm more certain that we can use this sort of method to give an objective account of the norms of epistemology than the norms of ethics. But I think it might be able to work.

From:

spoonless.livejournal.com

From:

easwaran.livejournal.com

I think the way this sort of thing would have to work is to think about the more general types of actions that these fall under. It is essential for lying to work that most other speakers are telling the truth, or at least for the audience to have the reasonable belief that this is true.

I must not be seeing what you're getting at here. Are you trying to argue that right and wrong come from whether someone is behaving the way everyone else is (like, if everyone else is telling the truth and you're not you must be the wrong one)?

No, that is a misunderstanding. Lying and telling the truth aren't symmetric here. If everyone else is telling the truth and you are lying, then it's possible for your lie to have the intended effect. But if everyone else is lying and you're telling the truth, then (since everyone realizes that most people are lying) it would be impossible for your truth-telling (or lying for that matter) to have the intended effect. In order for lying to work it is necessary that most people be telling the truth. In that sense, lying is parasitic upon truth-telling. Lying is (in some very minor sense) self-undermining, whereas truth-telling is self-reinforcing.

I don't think there is anything moral built in to our notions of "rational agents". Being rational will make you better at being able to achieve your goals, and it can also help you figure out what subgoals need to be achieved in order to attain a more longterm or general goal. But it doesn't help you pick fundamental values.

A lot of metaethicists seem to think that by understanding reasons for action and practical rationality, we'll have made a lot of progress towards understanding morality. They are both systems of norms governing our actions (which makes them more similar than either is to reasons for belief and epistemic rationality), even though they are clearly different, as you point out. However, practical rationality is clearly going to play a role in deciding particular moral judgments on the basis of fundamental values, whether or not practical rationality clarifies what those fundamental values are. But Kantians (and presumably whatever group it is that I'm aligning myself with in this discussion) do think that rationality can give us the fundamental values, by seeing which sorts of actions are self-undermining in the sense I said lying was.

You might find the entry on moral realism in the Stanford Encyclopedia useful, though I don't think it gives especially strong defense of the position, and instead lays out arguments on all sides. For a defense of a very different sort of moral realism, you might see this review of a book on the topic. I don't really know what books in metaethics have been written for a more general audience though.

From:

spoonless.livejournal.com

In that sense, lying is parasitic upon truth-telling. Lying is (in some very minor sense) self-undermining, whereas truth-telling is self-reinforcing.

You seem to be assuming some kind of Kantian-like principle of universalizability here. There's nothing self undermining about a few people lying amidst a crowd of truth tellers. The only thing that would be self undermining is if everyone did it. Actually, even that isn't self undermining since, pretty much everyone *does* lie some of the time. I guess the only way for it to be undermining is if everyone lied almost all the time.

So the argument that lying is wrong here stems from the assumption that the actions which are wrong are those which, if adopted by everyone, would lead to some kind of unravelling of society. Usually when I speak of something being morally wrong I'm thinking about relative to my individual morals... in which case, I don't think universalizability should come into play at all. If on the other hand you ask me to evaluate what is wrong from a societal standpoint, as a cultural relativist, then yes... universalizability comes into play. But the fact that it matters whether you're thinking in terms of an indvidual perspective or a cultural perspective just highlights the relativism of it.

Thanks for the links, I will read them when I get a chance--I may have read the Stanford Encyclopedia entry before, I can't remember.

From:

spoonless.livejournal.com

And speaking of holes, in my explanation of how I view it, I think there may be a big hole in that I said we can know that being a Bayesian leads to more accurate predictions because you can run a Bayesian side by side a non-Bayesian in a controlled experiment and see that the Bayesian does better. But it seems like there is some circular reasoning going on there, since in order to conclude anything from that, you'd have to be a Bayesian in the first place. I think this may be the "problem of induction" rearing its ugly head. Although I'm not sure that my way of looking at norms is any more or less susceptible to that. In some ways, I think I'm a bit of a coherentist in that I know my brain works a certain way, and I have a coherent description of how it works, and everything I experience and think seems to hang together in a certain way... but whenever I try to explain what that way is, I have to start somewhere.

One of the problems I see with your description of belief, is that if the very idea of belief does really entail being a Bayesian, then I'm not sure how you can consider that a norm that is good or bad... how can linguistic tautologies be good or bad?