Ben Stein : no intelligence allowed
Oct. 11th, 2010 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spoonlessSo, 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.
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.
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religious darwinists
Date: 2010-10-12 03:56 am (UTC)-Steve
Re: "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"
Allied Atheist Alliance FTW!
Date: 2010-10-12 08:08 am (UTC)Stein, et al... eh, I'd rather watch South Park.
Re: religious darwinists
Date: 2010-10-12 09:20 am (UTC)Do you think Darwinism is incompatible with all forms of religion, or just with the literal 7-day creation story?
I think that any Abrahamic religion, no matter how loosely interpreted, is fundamentally incompatible with Darwinism. For Eastern religions, it's more complicated, but most versions are incompatible. The one I'd say has the best chance of potentially being compatible would be Advaita Vedanta, or perhaps the atheist sects of Buddhism. The only way in which Advaita Vedanta is incompatible with science that I can think of, would be that it is idealist rather than materialist. So it may not be incompatible with evolution itself, just with science more broadly.
Then there are philosophical ideas such as pantheism and deism. I would not consider these religions, since they are not widely practiced and developed more through philosophical thought rather than through folklore and dogma. I think it might be right to say these are compatible with Darwinism, and that the reasons they are bad philosophy have more to do with internal problems than with any incompatibility with evolution.
I think if you were to poll people, they would have a very different (and very wrong) impression of the compatibility between science and religion in general, and especially between evolution and religion. So it's good to see movies clearing this point up.
Re: religious darwinists
Date: 2010-10-12 09:24 am (UTC)Most religions start from the point of view that ideas and mind and intelligence is fundamental, and matter is something that was either created by intelligence or is projected or imagined by intelligent beings. Whereas the insight that Darwin's theory has given science is that intelligence arose from matter as an emergent property, not the other way around. So it's completely backwards to picture matter arising from intelligence, rather than intelligence arising from matter.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-12 04:35 pm (UTC)You heard where he recently got busted for posing as a prof of a uni he had no affiliation with, right? Or when he got busted for claiming to have read books he couldn't name? Having followed spurts of his career I have a difficult time not thinking of him as a fraudster and opportunist... I guess we have different ideas of necessary/sufficient for "excellent skeptic"...
Why opt for the lunatic fringe? There's plenty of coherent fringe to explore...
Re: religious darwinists
Date: 2010-10-12 04:53 pm (UTC)Specifically, I have a more limited view of the kind of knowledge achievable through the scientific method. I think scientists can observe the world, document what happens, and explain what happens and how things happen so they can predict what'll happen next.
I don't think the scientific method sheds any light on morality or on "why the world is the way it is, instead of being different or not existing at all." Science is descriptive, and deals with objective truth that everyone can agree on, or agree that more data's needed. As a scientist, I don't mind saying "my experiment doesn't answer your question" or even "I can't imagine any experiment that would answer your question."
How to live our lives, what we should cherish or fear, why there's a universe: to me these are questions for philosophy, religion, politics, etc. I don't think evolution or the big bang, or any other truth found through science, provide any evidence for or against religion. That's not something science does, or can do.
Science is well-equipped to insist that a 7-day creation story, or lots of other divinely-revealed but scientifically-impossible assertions about physics or history, can't be true and can have value only as allegory and tradition. But, again, the final issue of why the world is here, why our fun times are emergent properties of atoms whizzing about, and what to hope for in your life: these are outside the purview of science.
Soemthing I've always wondered
Date: 2010-10-12 04:55 pm (UTC)How do ID people reconcile selective breeding with their beliefs? Does the movie touch on that? Breeding clearly demonstrates descent with modification, and the use of un-natural selection to guide the change. Seems like that could be a valuable path to educating ID'ers.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-12 10:53 pm (UTC)I recall you have said some nasty things about James Randi in the past (which as far as I can tell from what I've looked into, he does not deserve). Would you put him a step up or a step down from Shermer?
I had not heard either of the things you mention about Shermer--will look into it if I get a chance.
Re: religious darwinists
Date: 2010-10-12 11:08 pm (UTC)Specifically, I have a more limited view of the kind of knowledge achievable through the scientific method.
I doubt it. From the sound of it, we have roughly the same view on that. I think it may just be that you have a much higher opinion of religion than I do =)
There was a thread in
I have no problem saying "as a scientist, my experiment doesn't answer your question". However, I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that religion doesn't answer any questions... or at least, it doesn't answer any questions successfully. In the rare instances where it happens to get things right, it's no different from a broken clock being right twice a day.
Where I do agree religion can be important in people's lives is with ritual, worship, meditation, prayer, practice... etc. The one place it really sucks though is in trying to explain or predict meaningful facts about the world. That's something science does very well, and I don't see why religion constantly tries to pretend it can do a better job (or even an equal job).
Questions of how inorganic life turned into organic life, and how that eventually turned into human life are clearly in the "objective" domain. And religion makes very different predictions about these things than science. Gotta run right now, but it does seem like either our view of religion is different or our understanding of what religion tries to talk about is different. My claim is not that there is no possible religion you could invent that is consistent with evolution... moreover, just that there is no mainstream religion which is consistent with evolution, at least no Abrahamic religion.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-13 12:20 am (UTC)Shermer has credentials. He got into the business of debunking by 'accident' - i.e. media and etc began calling him to act as "debunker" for random "paranormal" event/claim and he in a way he got typecast. That aside, his research methodologies are often of questionable rigour, his data often unreliable, his claimed results often inconsistent with observed data, etc. One of the sexiest examples of this involves his involvement with Sheldrake's "dogs that know" experiments.
But the fraudulent posturing as a prof is a recent thing. Scandalous.
Re: Soemthing I've always wondered
Date: 2010-10-13 04:18 pm (UTC)How do ID people reconcile selective breeding with their beliefs? Does the movie touch on that?
Ben Stein brings up selective breeding several times during the movie, but always in the context of arguing that Darwinism naturally leads to advocation of the selective breeding of humans and eugenics. He quotes Darwin saying something about how the current way our society is set up, where we treat mental patients rather than sterilizing them or letting them die off naturally, selects for undesirable traits. Actually, I don't remember the quote exactly and he was probably taking it out of context, but it seemed to indicate that Darwin was at least hinting that it might be better if we selectively bred humans for better traits. He then goes from there to quoting what the Nazis said which was very similar.
As far as selective breeding of animals, ironically--no, I don't think that is mentioned in the movie at all. I got the impression that most of the ID advocates interviewed agreed with some parts of Darwin's theory, although they varied on which parts they questioned. One guy said something about it would have been fine if Darwin just said that members of a species could change over time through mutations... but that he didn't believe new species could begin in this way. So I guess in his view, each species was created seperately, and they all evolve separately but never cross over into each other. Very bizarre.
Re: Allied Atheist Alliance FTW!
Date: 2010-10-13 06:48 pm (UTC)Re: religious darwinists
Date: 2010-10-13 06:55 pm (UTC)Of course, answering these sorts of questions is outside the scope of the experimental method, but lots of science proceeds in other ways - just consider the methods of evolutionary biology (lots of which proceeds through observation and/or computer modeling), mathematics (which proceeds primarily through pure reasoning and logic), theoretical physics (which proceeds by modeling and considering the notions of good explanation) and so on.
And thus, I think the relevant areas of philosophy (epistemology and ethics) are in fact amenable to scientific study, though it's clearly a somewhat broader view of science than you take.
Also, while some religious claims are about "how to live our lives, what we should cherish or fear, why there's a universe", there are other religious claims about what someone did two thousand years ago, how the universe came into existence, what the relation is between desire and suffering, and what happens to consciousness after death, which I think even you can agree can be studied by standard scientific methods. (FWIW, I think "the scientific method" is a bit of a red herring - there are many methods that are scientific, and there is no one model that even all core scientific inquiry follows.)
Re: religious darwinists
Date: 2010-10-13 07:25 pm (UTC)But why can't you have a scientific study of normative questions?
I think you can have a scientific study of social norms, and get a nice model for how norms form and where they are rooted in specific properties of the brain and in specific long-existing social institutions and structures.
And I also think that you can have a scientific study of which norms lead to which consequences. For example, you could study whether releasing a certain type of gas into the air is going to increase or decrease the number of living species. But the basic values, like "let's try to preserve life" I don't think can be studied other than in the first sense. In other words, they're not questions that science can provide a convincing answer one way or another.
Where
Re: religious darwinists
Date: 2010-10-13 07:30 pm (UTC)How many kittens lives is worth one human life?
Or, perhaps more cynical, how many lives of poor people is worth the life of one rich person?
I think these are things that just come from people's basic intuitions and aesthetic sense. It's going to have a different answer in different cultures, and I'm not convinced there is one right answer that all cultures will converge to.
Re: religious darwinists
Date: 2010-10-13 07:43 pm (UTC)Maybe the questions you pose are questions that we won't be able to answer, but it might just be because they are far too complicated and rely on too much information that we don't really have. Compare - "is Lucy (the individual whose fossilized remains were found in Olduvai Gorge) the ancestor of any currently living individuals?" Also, the questions you pose presuppose that the right way to think of morality is in terms of a notion of value of lives - many ethicists argue that actions are the things that are fundamentally right or wrong, rather than deriving their status from a summation of the values of the outcomes. If they're right, then your questions would be like "what is the viscosity of the ether that the earth drags as it orbits the sun?"
Re: religious darwinists
Date: 2010-10-13 08:16 pm (UTC)Also, the questions you pose presuppose that the right way to think of morality is in terms of a notion of value of lives - many ethicists argue that actions are the things that are fundamentally right or wrong, rather than deriving their status from a summation of the values of the outcomes. If they're right, then your questions would be like "what is the viscosity of the ether that the earth drags as it orbits the sun?"
I think this part only furthers my point. These questions cannot be settled by science, that's why you have philosophers of ethics weighing in on them trying to sort things out. Not only do I not think science can answer "how many kittens is one human life worth?" but I don't think it can even answer "which is the better ethics--deontological or utilitarian?". I think there are parts of our brain involved in giving us both deontological intuitions *and* utilitarian intuitions, and we use different ones at different times. You can do countless surveys of how many people respond which way to different trolley problems phrased in different ways, and you can learn interesting things about how people think. But what you won't learn from that is which people are "right" and which people are "wrong" if any.
Your question about whether evidence should inspire belief is a repeat of an earlier thread you and I had... although it does seem to keep coming up, so I think this is probably the most important and interesting philosophical disagreement you and I have. I think you phrased it in an even more clever and insightful way this time than last. And it definitely gives me a sense for why you think the way you do about ethics. But it's not the way I think--my intuition is that you are disguising a question about "is" as a question about "ought" through clever wording... but I will have to think about how exactly to answer it. Will get back to you soon after thinking about it more.
Re: religious darwinists
Date: 2010-10-13 09:40 pm (UTC)And yes, I think that the issue about the normativity of epistemology is one of the most important ones for showing people that they really are committed to there being some objective norms, regardless of what sort of moral skepticism they might think they're committed to. Once they admit some sort of objective normativity, then moral realism isn't any more spooky (though of course, it doesn't get any direct support from realism about epistemology).
Re: the is-ought gap
Date: 2010-10-14 01:43 am (UTC)Do you intend to deny that any purely normative question has any answer beyond a descriptive one about what people of a particular culture (or perhaps, particular people) find intuitive?
Almost, but I'd prefer to rephrase it in my own way.
I deny that normative questions are objective. I think normative questions only have answers with respect to either a single subject, or a group of subjects who have some kind of shared goals, values, or intuitions about right and wrong. This group, in principle, could be as large as "the entire human species" for some questions, although I am unaware of any such question for which that's true. I'm open to the possibility that if somebody thought hard enough, they might be able to come up with one. But for most every day normative questions, they are either culturally relative or individually relative.
What about a normative question like "should the observation of ten remissions out of eleven in the treatment group, versus three remissions out of eight in the control group, make us more confident in the claim that the treatment is helpful?" That is a purely normative question.
I disagree that this a purely normative question. I think you can factor it into two parts, one of which is normative and the other of which is positive. The positive question is whether the observation makes it more likely that the treatment is helpful. And the normative part is to what extent we should react by feeling confident.
There is of course, the question of whether we are capable of choosing how we react to new evidence. But I think either way you answer that, you can still say that the question of whether it's right or wrong that we react that way is subjective, and unrelated to whether the conclusions we would draw are really more likely to be true given the premise or the evidence.
Now--just looking at the normative part of the question, I would agree that it seems like it must be a pretty universally shared intuition that to become more confident about something being true, when it is more likely to be true... is something that is almost always good. It indicates that your brain is "functioning well" and that you're doing a good job of mapping reality. And I think the universality of that comes from the fact that it is almost always easier to achieve other goals when you have a more accurate representation of reality in your head. Not to mention, some people, like presumably you and I, place some intrinsic value on learning and knowledge, and regard that as a worthy goal in and of itself, even if it doesn't help with attaining any other goals. There are other people do not share an appreciation for knowledge and learning nearly as much, and for them the utility of accurately representing the world is far less, although it still helps with a lot of their more primary goals. For them, I expect that there are more situations where it's not as important for them to react to new evidence in a purely Bayesian way. There may in fact be utility they get out of reacting in a different way... so in some cases, it could be a net negative for them if they buy the statistics.
Overall, taking the purely normative part of the question, I think it comes close to universal among agents immersed in an environment, since modeling their environment accurately is tied strongly to so many other things that the agent regards as "good"... like achieving goals and avoiding getting killed. But I think it fails to be quite universal, and there is still an element of subjectivity to it. In most other cases of ethics, I feel like there is a much greater subjectivity involved.
Re: the is-ought gap
Date: 2010-10-14 01:57 am (UTC)I think you should be careful about this factorization. It seems like a good one at first, but I think we should question what "more likely" means. As a matter of fact, the treatment either is helpful or it isn't - so if "likely" is talking about physical chance, the chance is already either 1 or 0 and it stays that way, so nothing gets more or less likely as a result of the observation. If "likely" is about frequencies, then it doesn't even enter into the question - again, either the treatment is helpful or it isn't, and the observation doesn't affect anything.
So you have to come up with some other meaning of what "likely" means here. The most natural one is some notion of "evidential probability", which is supposed to be a notion of probability given some evidence. But if that's what you're going to say, then I don't know what that might mean other than what someone's beliefs should be if they have the relevant evidence. If it's not that, then it seems that you're positing some primitive notion of evidential probability that isn't directly connected to anything else.
Of course, you could just go my way and say that "likely" here is a Bayesian probability, and that to say that an observation makes something more likely for someone is to say that that person should become more confident in that thing.
But maybe there's some other understanding of "more likely" that I'm missing, which is not normative, and also refers to something that can change as a result of evidence, in a way that chances and frequencies don't.
Re: the is-ought gap
Date: 2010-10-14 02:26 am (UTC)Of course, you could just go my way and say that "likely" here is a Bayesian probability, and that to say that an observation makes something more likely for someone is to say that that person should become more confident in that thing.
I do think of "likely" as meaning a Bayesian probability, although I would have not used the words "should become more confident" there. Those who believe in Bayes' assumptions do become more confident about something that can be inferred through Bayes' theorem.
So the normative question really boils down to the question of "should one be a Bayesian"? I don't know if he still has it there, but for a long time
But I also think there is something objectively true about Bayesianism. Namely, that if you did an experiment and put a Bayesian side by side an agent using some other epistemology, each in the same environment, the Bayesian will be able to make more accurate predictions and end up with a more accurate model of the environment at the end of the day. I think this is something testable, and positively verifiable (of course you could never test all possible environments, but you can at least get a good idea of how well Bayesians do compared to other epistemologies for a wide variety of environments).
But Bayesian epistemology is aimed at a specific goal--namely, being able to make accurate future predictions based on past observations. In principle, you could program an agent to not have this goal--it could have other goals. And perhaps for its goals, making predictions doesn't matter. Maybe its goal is simply to kill itself after running for 5 minutes, regardless of what its environment is. For that agent, that represents a good life, and is the ultimate good. Who is to say that the agent is "wrong"? That's what it was programmed to do.
Re: religious darwinists
Date: 2010-10-14 03:44 am (UTC)First, it is certainly not true that science cannot answer Why questions. Perhaps in computer science there are not as many Why questions, but I feel like most of the questions I worked on in graduate school in Physics were Why questions, not just How questions. If it were otherwise, I would not have been as interested... nor would I have chosen the path that I did, or gone to grad school in the first place.
As an example of a Why question successfully answered by science, I encourage you to read this paper, which contains the answer to what is probably the most famous Why question of all time:
Why is the Sky Blue?
Religion has never answered this question, nor has it to my knowledge, answered any why questions, ever. It has *attempted* to answer lots of questions, it just happens to get them all wrong (such as, the origins of human life).
I think there are two legitimate uses of the word "Why". One is in the above sense, where it involves the compression of a seemingly complicated, inexplicable pattern of behavior, into a nice comprehensible explanation, which makes you go "aha! I see why this is true!". This happens in math and physics all the time.
The second use is to refer to the motivation of a particular intelligent being, such as a human (although it could also be an animal, an AI, an alien, God, etc.). This is a special case of the first type of Why question, because it explains someone's strange behavior in terms of their motivations. Although it is probably the most common case of Why questions so I think it deserves special treatment.
One of the most common cognitive errors that a lot religious people (as well as some non-religious people like John Smart) make is in thinking that certain strings of words like "Why does the universe exist?" or "What is the purpose of its existence?" are meaningful questions rather strings of nonsense. Well, "why does the universe exist?" is not nonsense in the context of a multiverse theory, but if you take "universe" to mean all that exists then it is. The reason is that the point of a why question is to explain a more complicated theory (or pattern of behavior, data, etc.) in terms of a simpler theory. Once you've already got the simplest theory of everything you can get, it does not make sense to ask how it could be reduced further. Nor does it make sense to ask what the motivation of the universe is, because the universe is not a sentient being like a human. The reason why religious people make this mistake is clear--it's because they think there is actually a sentient being who watches over the universe, named God, or Allah, or whatever, and that this being has motivations just like humans do. I think the reason why non-religious people make this mistake is harder to say--although in some cases it is just as simple as they may have started out religious and were not completely successful in giving up all of the baggage associated with their religion... or they were influenced by religious thinkers from the past without realizing it. I've had this discussion with John Smart, and it's one of the main reasons I refused to review his book--there is enough in it that I strongly disagree with on philosophical grounds that my review would be too negative.
Re: Allied Atheist Alliance FTW!
Date: 2010-10-14 07:04 am (UTC)Re: religious darwinists
Date: 2010-10-14 07:08 am (UTC)Now I have to set aside some time to chew all this over!
Currently the most sophisticated input I have is that clearly the number of kittens a human life is worth is proportional to the number of times that person can masturbate; at least, according to God.
Please, think of the kittens.
Re: the is-ought gap
Date: 2010-10-14 06:22 pm (UTC)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.