A Tale of Two Universes

On July 16, 2020 By Swarn GillIn Commentary, Philosophy, Politics33 Comments

When you go over to the “other side”, meaning Trump supporter central it’s eerie. I look at the conversations and it looks like a mirror image of the type of discussions I have. It isn’t full of anger or racist messages, but simply full of the same style of criticism, and sarcasm that one would see on my side. People are civil and casual as they discuss what they consider liberal/democratic points of view. I am not saying that I agree with what they are saying just that it’s like looking in on another world that’s just like ours, but more like the universe in the classic Star Trek episode Mirror, Mirror.

I find this alarming because it means we almost can’t be further apart if you watch the conversation happening on social media. I hope that social media isn’t a good representation, but if it is, I do understand why many worry about the breakdown in conversation in our society. Even more concerning is the fact that it is very much like looking into a world that is built on fictions. Once the fictions are accepted as true, the rest appears rational and logical. In this way it’s very much like religion in which the unknown premise, that there is a God, is accepted as true a priori and the rest follows.

As much as I pride myself on my analytical skills, knowledge of the scientific method, and ability to think logically, when you see millions of people operating on a totally different set of assumptions it does make you question your sanity. Because it is possible that me and my friends are the ones living in the delusion. So, who has the better grip on reality? Are there elements of truth in both worlds and that we really need to look at a composite of those worlds? Who is qualified to be an arbiter of this? Is there anybody we can trust or believe to look at both sides objectively and determine what is real?

I base much of my morality on the simple idea of cooperation. We are a social species; we bond with others through reciprocal altruism (i.e. the golden rule) and we survive better because we work together. Which side violates this more? The problem is a bit of a numbers game. We can easily see how in an 8-person rowing team, one person acting in discord is noticeable. We can that person is certainly not coordinating efforts with others. In a tribe of a few hundred, discord will also stand out likely from a survival standpoint. However, we are millions of people. We are in discord and this impacts how we function as a nation, but not as a species. A million racists can all work together to solve problems, grow food, and propagate the species just as well as a million people who oppose racism. And what about building bridges to the other side of the political aisle? Is there one side of the aisle who is better at doing that? Right now, I would argue that there isn’t. If kindness is what connects us to people, then we need a lot more kindness that what it seems like what is currently out there, from both sides of the political spectrum. Thus, at an evolutionary level we can determine truth, because the truth is both sides can survive. Perhaps one side is happier than the other, but survival doesn’t have to be happy.

In the end I must look at bigger concepts like empathy, compassion, and humility. None of these things necessarily make one universe more real than another, but they matter if we are going to someday be a unified human race working to improve the well-being of all life on this planet. If the other universe is the real one, it is one that separates people into groups, it is based in non-existent fears, categorizing and stereotyping groups, and limiting their rights. It seems to me that they are far too often making the mistake of believing their rights being limited when most of the time it’s just privileges being lost to those people who were previously oppressed and exploited. If I’m wrong and my reality is illusory, I feel like I’ve at least tried to:

see women as equals
see race as a social construct
appreciate science and how the best tool we have for knowing works
try and be mindful of the words we use and the jokes we make because being considerate of feelings are important
that learning and growing is important
to have a society where we take care of each other better

These values seem good to me. I can’t shake it. In my understanding of liberalism, that’s the philosophy I see shaping my political values. Conservatism, at least represented by society today does not demonstrate these values. While I do think it’s important to be cautious and measured in moving forward the very idea that things are great the way they are and never change is ludicrous to me. Change is inevitable. As a species we continue to learn to try to ensure the safety and health of more and more of our people. We’ve fought and died for it. With time I do believe we’ve done a better job of giving more people a chance to flourish and having more people live that would have died a 100 years ago or more. Our story is one of change.

Perhaps it is human nature for those who fear change to battle those who welcome it. I like to frame that struggle as the battle between comfort and risk. Both have their merits and perhaps arguing about it is the only way to reach a compromise, to find a way to move us forward where everybody gets to come along. It seems once again a numbers game. If we were our hunter-gatherer selves, we would all know each other and how many shades of difference in worldview could we have from one another. However, when you’re talking about billions of people the perspectives vary greatly. And even if some of those perspectives are based on fundamentally unsound principles, when it’s all you’ve known it’s hard to even know that the boundaries that shaped your life can be broken at all. But there is some element of truth in everybody’s story and we’ve really got to do a better job of preserving the essence of someone’s lived life that can instruct, that can be beautiful, and/or weep at the tragedy that unfolded on them.

In the end we live in a time of vast inequality with numbers of people living in abject poverty that we can’t even fathom. But every time we get a glimpse into that well of inequality we all know that there are some on this planet who have more wealth than they can possible spend, while children literally die of starvation. I’ve heard from economists who pay attention to history that capitalism helped raise people out of poverty. I’m not going to dispute that. However, at the risk of sounding cynical, I worry that even though less people (as a percentage of global population) live in abject poverty than in the past, our drive to give people the barest of wealth to get by is not because capitalism cares about people, but because capitalism realized that more people means more labor and more consumers. Capitalism was never an ethical system, it is an engine to generate wealth and nothing more. We better come up with answer to what all this wealth is for, because capitalism is moving on without human labor. Automation is coming. More wealth will be generated by corporations and the need for labor decreases. Eventually the system has to collapse in on itself because if people have nothing to do they will not have any money to buy things. The narcissism of greed is our real enemy. I think there are people on both sides of the aisle who feel they don’t have value and what they do has no value. The people with the money want you to believe that some other group is to blame. Some group who’s just trying to live their life and hope that things stay secure enough so they can raise a family and have a little fun along the way.

I’m trying to be my optimistic self during these times, but it’s a great challenge. I don’t know the answer to how we can come together, but I do know if we don’t start being a lot kinder to each other it’s never going to happen.

The Value of I Don’t Know

On May 5, 2020 By Swarn GillIn Philosophy, Psychology, Science13 Comments

I don’t know. These 3 words are important.

One thing that is fairly obvious among humans is that we don’t like uncertainty. To say that we don’t know something is to highlight ignorance. It’s the highest level of uncertainty we can reveal. Even us ego driven academics are often chided for weighing in on every issue, and it’s a stereotype that is not unfounded. But as every good teacher will tell you there is a lot of value of telling your students that you don’t know. Now maybe some students idolize your intellect and saying you don’t know might shatter the pedestal they put you on, but if they truly care about the pursuit of knowledge they should be lauding you for having the humility and honesty for saying “I don’t know”. No one can know everything, even in their own field. And it’s a moment to teach your students about how one goes about finding the answer to a particular question, and that you never really stop learning or being a student.

But how is it that we know things? We can know things through experience and through investigation. Some claim instinct or intuition is also a type of knowing. But is it, or just a reaction to a particular situation? Instincts can be certainly be wrong even if they are embedded into who we are as humans. But instinct or intuition can also be honed through experience. For instance, a doctor might have a hunch or intuition about what might be wrong with a patient. This isn’t some inborn knowledge. The doctor, as a 16-year-old, certainly wouldn’t be able to make the same guess than they might have after years of experience. Most things that we chalk up to instinct or intuition are based on experiences we have had, or perhaps read about. If, as a woman, you have intuition about a guy that he’s creepy or dangerous, it could be that you’re spot on. Given the litany of examples of violence and abuse of men towards women this wouldn’t be a surprising thing to fear. But whatever that feeling is, does it represent true facts about the universe? Not necessarily, because you could be wrong, but it’s part of our survival to play it safe, instead of taking chances, going against our intuition can be costly. Regardless of what you believe about instinct or intuition all ways of knowing are subject to our cognitive biases and thus investigative methods that attempt to remove biases have a higher probability of being right.

The one thing that I think religion and science have in common is that they are both representative of our desire to know things and our uncomfortability with uncertainty. There are always things we don’t know. Sometimes big things like why is there a universe at all? Or, how did life begin? Many of the questions we’ve had over the years have been explained by the supernatural, only to have that debunked through scientific investigation. Refusing to leave things unexplained we have, in human history, always had those who claimed magic is real and that supernatural forces act with intent. But can we call supernatural explanations an explanations? It answers what, and sometimes who and when, but rarely how and why. It also seems to me that such explanations never really factor into things we are closer to understanding. For instance, we still have questions about lightning, but this is something that we also understand a lot about. We don’t say, “Alright we don’t know exactly how charge separation happens in a cloud, so therefore God.” We have enough of a physical understanding of the situation to know there are some details we haven’t worked out, but that it’s an explainable, natural phenomena. In ancient China, well before we understood anything about lightning, people believed that lightning was caused by supernatural forces and it would strike down people who were disrespectful to their parents. It’s as good an “explanation” as anything when you know nothing perhaps, but that’s a big problem. Such explanations are a dime a dozen, you could say “No! Lightning strikes people who are dishonest with their spouses”, “It’s pixies in the clouds, angry at humans for taking their home to make their village”, “It’s punishment for an entire civilization for their sinful nature”, “It’s an electric elk called Simon”. Things that promote magic as real render the investigation of scientific laws and principles useless. What value would understanding these things if such rules are ignored by the supernatural and the whim of a believer? People often want answers so badly they don’t care about the process.

This is where science differs from religion. Science seeks to explain and is much more about the process of investigation than the answer. Obviously that is the endpoint of a particular question, but how you arrive at that destination is at least as important, if not more important than the destination itself. Science seeks to explain through premises that are verifiable and analyzing available data before arriving at a conclusion. This conclusion then must be reliable as a starting point for new questions to be answered successfully, and this conclusion must be reachable by others independently. And because we don’t always have or know what relevant data is to answer a particular question, we can’t guarantee that any conclusion is 100% right. We can only determine the most correct answer given a certain set of information.

People say that history is also a way to know what’s true, but such people who say that don’t truly understand what good historical scholarship involves, or the reliability of such conclusions. Historians know that any one source of historical knowledge can be biased, so the more data (sources) about a historical event the more sure the conclusion. But even then there still may be cultural bias, or differences in the way historical events were recorded at different times in our history. The lexicon of a particular language was less complex than now and thus we can sometimes only guess at the true meaning of a particular text. We can also support historical claims with archaeological evidence. Apologists that I’ve debated with love to cite the truth of a historical event in the Bible, but saying a historical event happened doesn’t mean the rest of a particular text is reliable. We can’t say that because City A existed as described in the Bible, thus the resurrection happened. This would be like saying well Mel Gibson’s movie Apocalypto must be all factual history because there was a tribe called the Incas. The Bible is a mixture of ordinary and extraordinary claims, and given that it was written by people who were aware of history and the norms of their time it would foolish to expect all of it to be fiction. Unless we have some unaltered video footage we still can’t know anything for sure. Video footage of Kennedy’s assassination tells us that he was assassinated and where the assassination took place. It doesn’t tell us who did it, or why? That had to be investigated and evidence collected. And despite the many conspiracy theories out there, the one thing that nobody says is that God sent down a bullet to kill Kennedy. The laws of physics were obeyed. Somebody fired a gun and that bullet traveled as it should towards its target.

The most important value perhaps of admitting “I don’t know” is that this means that it elicits curiosity and investigation. Having an answer, even if it cannot be tested, can often close off an avenue of investigation that might have otherwise been taken. If you ask me a question about the atmosphere and I give you an answer, you may simply believe me, based on my authority as an atmospheric science professor. If I’m right the fact that you don’t investigate for yourself costs you nothing. Yet if I think I know, or am afraid to look dumb and pretend to know my answer can prevent you from finding the actual answer, and now you may act on false information in the future. The reality is that there is too little time in our lives to investigate everything. Some things we do have to just believe. Having an answer is comforting. Believing in the supernatural can be comforting. That which is comforting doesn’t necessarily equate to truth, it is aesthetics. Aesthetics are important, but we shouldn’t expect everyone to share our aesthetic preferences.

Finally it is often the case that apologists will also use uncertainty as a means of positing that all answers are thus equally valid in the absence of evidence. Sometimes this is true, but certainly there are some explanations that have a higher probability of being true than others. If a tornado doesn’t hit your house one answer to why, could be that God spared your house. But this is highly improbable given how much the dynamics and the thermodynamics of the atmosphere influence storm motion. Provided we could get sufficient measurements of the atmosphere, we would have a better explanation as to why the storm took one path and not the other.

In cases where all answers might be equally valid, for which we have no evidence to support a particular assertion, there is an extremely large number of possibilities. For those who purports the logically flawed prime mover argument, even if it was a sound argument it says nothing about what might be the prime mover. Is it:

One God
More than one
Nice God
Bad God
Indifferent God
Computer programmer of a simulation
Flying Spaghetti Monster
God who is just really smart, but not omniscient
God who is powerful but not all powerful
God who is not timeless. Created the universe but then expired about 2 billion years ago.
A group of people from a parallel or previous universe who could do magic by writing things down. The act of writing on a page made it come true.

This list is possibly endless as we try to prescribe a nature to the supernatural. In fact the less evidence there is for an assertion the more possible answers we can provide. Not surprisingly we’ve had over 10,000 Gods in human history. My believing in one of these answers and writing it down in a book does not make an answer more true. Yet we are asked to simply accept specific extraordinary claims and reject others regularly by theist apologists.

Uncertainty is a sign of humility, and humility is just the ... — Charlie Sheen? The actor? This is pretty good actually.

The better, and more honest answer is, “I don’t know.” The more comfortable we can become with uncertainty, both individually and as a people, the more likely we are to grow. Not only is humility a virtue, but a methodological assessment of that which we have evidence for and what we don’t, can help us search for possible explanations that we might not have searched for because we believed we knew the answer.

Salvation Army sneaks Creationist Literature to Children at Science Fair

On September 15, 2019September 15, 2019 By Swarn GillIn Commentary, Parenting, Science40 Comments

Yesterday I took my son to a science fair here in our small city of Washington, PA called STEMfest. It was the first time that such an event has occurred in the city, and after talking with one of the organizers I was pretty excited that this was something I could take my 5 year old. It was your typical science fair for the most part with local tech companies, universities and private high schools doing science demos and activities for kids. For some reason the Salvation Army was there, but they seemed to be just there out of the goodness of their hearts. They had little plastic cups where they helped the kids make slime. Kids love making slime and then put it in a little ziploc bag. I noticed that they also had slightly bigger Salvation Army plastic bags which I thought was just an extra safeguard in case the slime leaked out and didn’t get the other take home stuff from the event wet with slime. However, something else was lurking in the bag.

Fast forward to this morning and my son is taking out stickers in this:

Notice the cover indicates is meant to lure kids into believing this contains scientific information. A bible resides on the science lab desk and somehow a cross appears in the atom symbol.

The pages inside don’t get any better by making their religious nonsense appear to be part of things for which we have scientific evidence.

At least they are promoting women in science right? You can see the attempt to legitimize bible verses and religious rhetoric as scientific. They have the gall to call this a Time Traveler Guide, but Day 1-5 is Creation, Old Testament, Visitation, Preparation, and Celebration. Inside is also a plastic transparency like thing where you are supposed to use a flashlight to find various scientific items, bible verses and symbols in a science lab. A page of stickers, and then finally this exercise which asks the kid to “Complete the timeline with correct daily drawing sticker”

My son was playing with stickers in the book before I saw what this was. Fortunately he can’t read yet and constructed this according to his own logic, which I think you’ll like. He says to me that “fire creates trees and then new leaves, leaves cause clouds and then rain, rain causes evil kings, and evil kinds lead to death.” We watch a lot of nature shows so he know forest fires lead to new growth and he knows trees give off a lot of moisture and creates clouds and rain in rain forests. The evil king thing though remains a mystery. 🙂 Anyway, I told his explanation makes more sense than what this is actually trying to tell you. This booklet is made by “Answers in Genesis”. Which, as many know, is a particular dishonest Christian fundamentalist organization trying to push the Bible as being literally true (except for the parts that make no sense).

I am definitely going to complain to the organizers. Despite this being a conservative county, I don’t expect they knew this was going on. Given the one organizer I had talked to prior to the event, I don’t think the organizers intended for any booth to hand out religious literature. The fact that such anti-science creationist nonsense was being snuck to kids, I’m sure (I hope) will come as a surprise.

My dad always had a soft spot for the Salvation Army as when my parents were starting out life together and didn’t have much money. Salvation Army was helpful to them and was willing to marry them, as many other Christian pastors wouldn’t as they rejected a mixed marriage. As a result I will still thrown in some money when they are asking for donations around Christmas time. No longer. The disturbing part here is how deviously the Salvation Army hid what they were handed out while sucking kids in with a fun activity, and how the booklet itself misrepresents religious claims as scientific with images meant to trick and indoctrinate children. It’s simply appalling. So be aware parents when taking your kids to a science event, you may find a wolf in a scientist’s clothing.

Ask an Expert

On January 10, 2018January 10, 2018 By Swarn GillIn Commentary, Politics, Science37 Comments

Currently I am in Austin, TX attending the national American Meteorological Society meeting. The conference continues to grow in size as the field becomes more interdisciplinary and attracts professionals from both the private and government sectors. You meet researchers, educators, broadcasters. Of course one of the big topics here remains climate change. You won’t see many speakers spending time proving that it’s happening. There are a few, but a bulk of the people will be talking about how to we get more people on board to take action? How do we get government to listen? How do we communicate more effectively to the public? What are the kinds of policies we need to mollify people who are worried about jobs and livelihood as we switch to more and more renewable energy? But climate change itself isn’t what I wanted to talk about although it is part of the inspiration for this post. That and a podcast I listened to with Tom Nichols who wrote a book called The Death of Expertise.

As someone who writes a blog, uses social media, and is a professor, I am fairly outspoken about climate change and have had my expertise challenged many times. I consider myself an expert of sorts, but as I sit here surrounded by greats in our field and even lesser known ones, I also know that I am a light expert when it comes to climate change. And I know a lot. But there are people who know more. There are people who have a great depth of expertise. I spent 11 years in university becoming what I am. There are people who have spent the same amount of time and then on top of that spend year after year researching problems and testing hypotheses and collecting and analyzing data. Why do they do such things? We live in a time where much information is available instantly. Have people like myself and others here simply wasted all our time and just should have waited for the internet to be in its current state so that we could gain the same level of expertise through a few days (hours?) of googling?

I have tried different methods of engaging people on the subject of climate change publicly (some I’ll admit I knew weren’t helpful to anybody but myself), but nothing really seems to make much of a difference. In the end, someone who might be a line chef at a restaurant will adamantly disagree with you. And of course I have had far more educated people disagree with me as well, but they have not been educated in meteorology or a related field. And it shows. I’ll be honest if you want to be critical of climate change with me, I can tell the moment you start speaking, how much you actually know about the science. Now that’s not to say that you couldn’t have a lively debate should you talk about policy, law, or the pros and cons of renewable energy. These are all things I am not an expert at, and don’t pretend to be. So why do so many people pretend they can be an expert on the topic of climate change?

You might say that skepticism is healthy, and this is true. But that skepticism needs to also come from other experts. Within the scientific community disagreement and skepticism are everywhere, and scientists within a discipline are constantly challenging each other to do better. Yes there are times when science fails, but more often than not the expertise of people makes a positive difference. It seems that it’s our penchant for noticing the failures that perhaps skews our perceptions. But the amount of expertise it takes just for a plane to successfully take off and land is immense, and there are over 100,000 commercial flights per day. Many people of course falsely see planes as unsafe modes of travel, but most of us know there is no safer way to travel. Assuming people in aviation don’t know what they are doing because of the rare plane crash would be an obviously false perception. For people who deny the validity of climate science I often ask them why the scientific findings are inherently different than the science that was used to make the computer they are using to argue with me? One of the more intelligent people (non-expert however) I’ve argued with about climate change plainly stated that he trusted a prediction 2 years out of an asteroid collision with Earth, but still maintained that any climate model that tried to predict climate was no better than flipping a coin.

It’s clear that climate science is much more about politics than the science, but since the truth of the results lies outside of the purview of political leanings, the science gets attacked, weakly but loudly. What other choice is there for such people? With instant access to information, the perception that one can be knowledgeable enough over a number of hours to speak authoritatively on issues gives them the confidence to do so. This simply isn’t true. This post might seem boastful to some or elitist. In some ways I suppose the latter is true. I do feel that I represent a very small portion of the population that understands the atmosphere well. But as I’ve said I’m also smart enough to know how much more there is to know. And while I am generally smart enough to slog my way through scholarly articles in most field, never would I assume that this makes me an expert. Put me in the presence of an expert and you’ll find me asking more questions than being argumentative. And there is expertise to be found in many walks of life. I don’t go in telling mechanics what their job is about, or spend a lot of time second guessing how accountants do their job, or tell a carpenter he’s hammering a nail all wrong. I feel I am humble enough about the things for which I know little, but appropriately confident about the things in which I have expertise. Too often that expertise is challenged by people with none and too often I feel like I should almost apologize for knowing a lot about something. Personally, I am glad there are experts out there. I am glad there are people who devote their lives to the understanding something well, to perform tasks everyday knowledgeably and skillfully. And I am also glad that there are enough experts to challenge other people with similar expertise, who are there to spot mistakes and make improvements over each other’s works.

It seems that we have drifted in this country away from the appreciation of expertise. And I don’t think one side of the political spectrum is immune to it. As I watch the numerous cheers for Oprah Winfrey to be our next president, I get deeply concern that the value we place on expertise has waned to dangerous levels. It is a great age, because there are so many places where we need people with expertise. Everybody has the ability to be an expert in something. But this takes time, study, and experience, and this fact should never be forgotten. Take some time to think about how your day is made better by the experts in your world.

A Re-framing of Faith

On August 7, 2017 By Swarn GillIn Philosophy, Science65 Comments

After my previous post about faith, which led to a fruitful discussion, I’ve been thinking more about the importance of faith to humans and how it might be framed in a more useful way. A couple summers ago I presented a series of posts about 8 virtues or qualities that make a good human, and faith was the last one I discussed. I think that if I were to do that series again today I might change the word faith to “prediction”.

In the discussion we had on my most recent post about faith, we talked about the difference between religious faith, and the sort of everyday way we might use the word faith. One of the things that I talked about as a difference between how a scientist might use faith, and what a religious person might call faith are two different things. The most important difference being that a scientist would be willing to change what he has faith in, based on evidence. I have always argue that while faith is important we should be willing to change what we have faith as we learn. The other thing that I argued was that faith is built on evidence and there is a very big difference in having faith that the sun will rise tomorrow, and faith that there is a supernatural divine being. The difference there being the weight of evidence, and the quality of evidence used in building those two types of“faith”.

But I started to think about it at a deeper level and it seems to me that at the heart of faith is really something else when I started to ask, “Why do we have faith at all?” Faith is a representation of our desire to predict an uncertain future. When I had my son, I wrote a post called Love and the Future, about how when we love we start painting pictures of the future in our mind. It happens in romantic relationships too. According to a friend of mine who is a counselor, one of the hardest parts of counseling someone after a difficult breakup is for them to let go of those “future plans”. I have also written a post before about “expectations”. In the post, I talked about the benefits of expectations in that we rise to meet them. By having a future goal in mind, we make better progress than none at all. Of course, there are many who would say you shouldn’t have expectations, because they will only lead to disappointment, but I am not sure it’s possible to live a life without any expectations. It’s natural that we’d have some, but I think that it’s true we might have limits into how many failed expectations we can shoulder. Either way it seems to me that expectations are also a type of “faith”. A desire to place some certainty in the future based on our desires and wants. It is something we expect to come true, even if it doesn’t.

For the past few months I have been practicing mindfulness meditation, and it has been an enjoyable experience. I’ve been using an app called Headspace. It avoids a lot of the new age type stuff and really focuses on the philosophy of meditation and I highly recommend it to anybody who is interested in getting into it. The goal is to be more focused on the present, to be mindful of what we are doing in the moment. A thought struck me yesterday when I was practicing it, as that one of the things they tell you in the guided meditation is that you want to think about “what are your goals with the meditation” and after it’s over they suggest you think about what is going to the very next thing you do. So even in something that is supposed to be about the present, we cannot help but look forward at least a little bit in our thinking.

I have come to the conclusion that it is natural in humans to be forward thinkers. I have had the thought before that one of the things that makes humans more intelligent is our ability to project further into the future than other species. Now one could argue that we are also still pretty awful at it, but the fact that we try is actually impressive. We look for patterns in the universe and we try to project those patterns into the future so that we can be less uncertain and fearful about it. While Farmer’s almanacs would like us to believe that squirrels can predict months in advance about the severity of the winter, it is clear in an evolutionary sense life on average are poor forward thinkers. If they were good at it, I’m not sure extinctions would happen as often as they do. For instance, an animal can only assume a winter will lie between certain climatic norms. Some portion of the population will develop mutations better equipped for let’s say surviving a larger range of conditions, but when change becomes to extreme large proportions of a population if not all, cannot adapt and die out. Humans are better at it, unfortunately we are also deeply conceited and that leads to problems. So given this human propensity to want to predict, the best thing we can do is to build value systems that allow us to be successful more often.

When we say we have faith in our partner, our ourselves, we are making a statement that there is an expectation that based on existing evidence that we will continue to handle some future situation in the same way we have before. Making a statement like, “I have faith I will do well on my exams”. Presumably you have taken enough exams to presume a similar outcome. More than that, to make sure it isn’t blind faith, you have examined the patterns to your success through various study methods, getting a certain amount sleep, etc to make sure your faith is not misplaced. Your faith is a type of prediction. A value system that aids in this faith is your ability to be introspective and also perhaps learn from others as to how they study and learn what are good and bad practices.

So where does religious faith fit into all of this? Hopefully by now it is pretty clear, but let’s look a little closer. I have read several atheist and agnostic scholars speak about religion as a type of model. This is how religion has always made the most sense to me. What is the purpose of models? In science models are things that model scientific processes that give us more predictive capabilities. The better we understand a process, on average, the more predictive we will be. This is why a scientist’s ‘faith’ might be quite different than a religious person’s faith because the success of a scientific theory is its predictive capability. The poorer it is at prediction the less certain we are about our understanding. In my field of meteorology one of the main reasons we try to model atmospheric processes is to become better at prediction. It is helpful to be more aware of what weather and climatic patterns are coming in the future.

Religious faith, at its root, is a kind model. One constructed a long time ago, built largely on false patternicity errors, but given how little we understood about the universe its weak predictive capabilities (in line with empirical evidence) is hardly surprising. Nevertheless it is an attempt to know the future. It’s full of prophet predictions, it speaks of what happens to you when you die, how the world will end, what consequences your actions might have. People pray or plead for diving intervention for their future endeavors. ‘Please get me this job, please make it rain so our crops come in, please don’t let my mother die of cancer.’ These are all attempts to give us certainty in an ever changing universe in which are predictive capabilities, especially at an individual level, are extremely limited. The statement “God has a plan for you” is a prime example of how religion has the course of your life worked out already. There is no need to worry about it. Just have faith. People find it soothing to pray, people find it peaceful to know the purpose of the universe, to know what will happen to them when they die. In fact, on the whole, religion gives far more certainty than science, which is why I expect it is much more popular. Science rarely claims 100% predictive capability, but religion does, and to this end religion can be easily used to exploit people. It is a panacea to all the uncertainty in the world. Religion pushes people to have more and more faith in times of doubt and confusion. What they are really saying is “Be more and more certain that (religious claim x) is the truth.” And if you’re successful, not surprisingly, you feel better. With mental effort we can convince ourselves to be more certain of things whose outcome is uncertain. Human history is rife with such examples. There is no doubt in my mind that we have better models for how humans can live their lives now. Nevertheless, we have maintained these old models, trying to ignore the worst bits of them, and developed an entire field of apologetics whose main purpose is to try to convince people that these old models still not only have value, but that they are actually superior to other models out there.

Now just because prediction is something humans do, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a virtue. I guess I see it as a raw instinct that needs to be tamed, which is how I have approached all beneficial human qualities. I think it’s clear that while much happiness can be found in getting lost in the moment, we need some sort of value system that gives us a direction. We might get there and find we have to go somewhere else, but it seems beneficial to always have some sort of idea of where we might go next. In my life it seems that the people I have admired most are the ones who can take pleasure in the moment, but also keep their eyes ahead of them as well. It’s dangerous to get lost in times that have not occurred, just as it is unhealthy to dwell in the past. So if I were to choose this 8^th value that makes a good human, perhaps the word “prediction” doesn’t quite do it justice, but until I come up with a better word it will have to do. There is, however, no question in my mind that a defining quality for our species is our ability think about the future. It encapsulates our dreams for a better future and if there is any escape from the fate of extinction that most life on this planet has faced, it will be through our ability to predict, if we can remember to be humble enough to remember we aren’t perfect.

Additional reading:

Is It All A Matter of Faith?

On July 13, 2017July 13, 2017 By Swarn GillIn Philosophy, Science74 Comments

Recently in a debate with Scientific Christian over on Nan’s blog he presented a clip that I don’t know was supposed to represent game, set, and match about something, but I’m not sure what yet. It seems that he was claiming that we all use faith and so any form of faith is just as valuable as the next. In the clip, you see Dawkins debating with Dr. John Lennox. Lennox is big into using this argument against people he debates with so let’s investigate this a bit more carefully.

I have argued before that I think faith is an important part of who we are as humans, and an important one at that. I have not changed my view as faith being a fundamental human quality. But so is curiosity and so is reason. If faith alone were the only way determine reality it simply would be insufficient.

First things first, let’s assume that Lennox’s argument is a good one. Even if that were true, and he caught Dawkins, it still isn’t proof of God. It is only proof that faith sometimes works or that we all utilize faith to some degree. It certainly doesn’t always work.

Now Dr. Lennox himself warns against the dangers of blind faith. He would argue that no Christian (and I am sure follower of any religion) would say that they don’t have blind faith in their religion. There is at least some evidence. But if we, just for arguments sake, take blind faith as the extreme at one end (and I would say people who think God is just going to heal their child and they don’t give them medicine is close to that end) and that something like having faith that the sun will come up tomorrow is being at the other extreme, we can easily see that there is a world of difference between those two extremes. So, at the outset, it is intellectually dishonest for anybody to make claims that just because you use faith and I use faith makes what we have faith in as equally valid. As Dawkins points out in the clip and addresses in more detail in the full debate, is that the key is in the evidence.

So why do the two points of view not work out to be equivalent? As I have argued before (here and here) and will not go into detail here, it’s because of what we consider valid evidence. If parents who let their children die on the hopes that prayer would save them were using the same evidence as Dawkins’ uses in having faith that his wife still loves him, then both would have equal predictive capability. And this is an important point that Dawkins tries to make is that even if we are all using faith to some extent the degree to which the work model we have of how any phenomena works must be predictive. Given our model of the solar system, each time the sun does come up it is further reassurance that are model, which would predict the sun would come up (really the sun doesn’t come up of course we rotate on our axis), is in fact verified. So while one could argue that it is a matter of faith that I think the sun would come up tomorrow, the evidence to which I have built that faith, is far different than those who would use faith that God will intervene on their behalf through prayer.

Of course, one might ask, “Why do people think prayer works at all?” If that evidence is so untenable why build any faith on such things? The answer to that questions requires a greater delving into human cognitive biases but largely it is due to our propensity to make Type I errors (false patternicity) and our cognitive bias to remember ‘hits’ and disregard misses. And this speaks to why the scientific method is so important because it requires careful methodology, it requires replication, it requires that we be able to build off of older principles to new ones reliably.

One then often argues, well clearly you have faith in the scientific method. And I do, but this again is because the scientific method works. If were to use the scientific method to uncover some knowledge of the world and at every turn I was not getting reliable results, then this would be cause for me to question the very way I was trying to discover how things work. We’ve seen the scientific method be effective so many times, that we can therefore have faith that it will be reliable again. Once again we see how being predictive plays a role in how faith in the scientific method is different than a faith in a personal God.

Finally for as important as I think faith is to our lives, we also must be willing to change the things we have faith about. If I do have faith that my wife loves me based on a certain set of evidence. Even if I’m convinced that evidence is good, should that evidence change, or it’s pointed out to me that I’m not using reliable markers of one person showing love to me, then there is no reason for me to continue to have faith along that avenue. What we have faith in, is not set in stone. What an unsuccessful species we would be if that were the case.

It’s the Thought That Counts

On May 30, 2017 By Swarn GillIn Commentary, Musings, Philosophy, Psychology, Science21 Comments

It has been discussed by many that our brains are wired on an evolutionary scale, and that the rapid change of society through technological advances has outpaced us, leaving us with many disconnects between what we see every day and what we can actually handle. In many ways, we might be happier if we lived in small tribes and were closely surrounded by wilderness, instead of surrounded by brick and cement, drive vehicles and get visual stimuli from computer or television screens. One aspect of this disconnect, that I find quite intriguing, and I think is central to our ability to understand the world we find ourselves in, is what I call and order of magnitude problem.

Think about early man in those hunter gatherer days. Counting is a base cognitive skill, important for our survival. But what is that we might count? You might count the amount of fruit gathered on any particular day, the number of children, or people. Such numbers might get you into the 100s. You might count seasonal cycles. If you were lucky maybe you had 80 of those to count. You might count lunar cycles. Getting you to about 1040. Even this would require some note making, because this is counting over time, and surely you would not sit there and count something that high. Such cycles of time were the only things worth keeping track of. We had no need to measure time beyond that. No need for small units of time such as a second. It might make sense to come up with some unit of measurement for distance. Something comparable to arm lengths or hand widths…something we might use to size an animal, measure height of people or spears. When it came to traveling, you might then simply use something like phases of the moon, or number of diurnal cycles. Once again such counting would leave numbers small. Occasionally you might find yourself thinking about numbers in terms of fractions. Maybe something like half a day, or a quarter of an armlength. For things very small, you probably would no longer use armlength as your standard, but perhaps finger width. Such techniques are ones that we still use today.

The reality is that if you think about numbers, you probably won’t get very far. Now do a little exercise for me. If you think of the number 1000. How do you think about it, to picture a 1000 of something? You might think what a $1000 can buy, but money is a fiction that represents a quantity of stuff you can buy which varies depending on what stuff your buying. If you wanted to actually count, what would you think about. Maybe 1000 people in a room. You might have a sense for how big a group that is. Chances are you won’t get it exactly. Go down to a 100 and your chances of picturing 100 things gets better. Now do 10 of something. Pretty easy. Now do 1. Even easier. Let’s go down another order of magnitude. Try to think of something that is 0.1. Here as we move down an order of magnitude we can no longer count whole things. So think of 1/10^th of a person probably gets a bit graphic, so what are you thinking of to imagine 0.1? For that you now have to think of some standard. Maybe a mile, an inch, a meter? Depending on what you choose, you can do okay. Now try 1/100^th. Again with the right starting point you might do okay, but even dividing by 100 can be hard for someone without a formal education and once we get to 1/1000^th our ability to guess at the meaning of that fraction is severely reduced regardless of our starting point. So if you are keeping track this puts the human mind, on a good day our brains are capable of somewhat accurately sorting out 5 orders of magnitude (10^-2 – 10³). However, if we look at the scale of the universe in size we span 52 orders of magnitude from the plank length to the size of the observable universe (please see this very cool interactive graphic that allows you to explore the different spatial scales of the universe). In terms of time, our quantum clocks can measure up to 1 ten billionth of a second (10^-10) . Meanwhile we know the universe has been around for about 14 billion years (10¹⁵ seconds). If you don’t have trouble digesting such numbers you are a super genius, because everybody should. Those are just the extremes, but unless you are within that 5 orders of magnitude range I discussed earlier, it makes little difference. And this is also important because it means that a million miles, might as well be a billion miles in our head. However, the difference between those two numbers is meaningful. In science, to consider two numbers like that the same would be to make a grievous error on the order of 100,000%.

Scientists, through years of working with the numbers that shape our world are often better at dealing with these things, but even scientists tend to use conventions to make numbers easier to manage. There is a reason why you don’t measure the distance from New York City to Boston in inches. We have developed different units of measurement for distance. In the old English system we have inches, feet, yards and miles. In metric, we have prefixes that span numerous orders of magnitude so that we don’t have to always report distance in meters. For objects in space in our solar system we might use astronomical units to keep those distances in more manageable numbers. For things outside our solar system, light years.

Whatever we measure in science can change over large ranges and change at massively different rates. Change is rarely linear, but very often exponential. As a result, we might find ourselves dealing with quantities which very over several orders of magnitude. In my field a good example for this is radar reflectivity. You may not be familiar with it, but you’ve certainly seen radar images if you’ve paid attention to the weather. Higher reflectivities indicate bigger drops and faster rain rates. Lower reflectivities represent light rain or drizzle. The difference in size between a drizzle drop and a basic rain drops is no more than a factor of 10, but the reflectivities span over 10- 1,000,000. Thus, meteorologists convert those reflectivity values using decibels. The decibel system was initially used for sound given the large range of frequency for sound waves, but now is a common tool for expressing values that vary over several orders of magnitude by taking the logarithm (base 10) of the value. This reduces the number to its order of magnitude. For example, instead of 10⁶ if I take the logarithm with base 10 of that number I get 6. And 6 is much easier to wrap our heads around than 1,000,000. I know I’ve gotten kind of technical here with this example, but the point is that nature, as we’re discovering, does not conform to the numbers our brains had to deal with when we evolved. And most scientists, while they might have some understanding of the microscopic or macroscopic numbers and the wide ranges of values science employs, to objectively analyze and come to some meaningful conclusions we very often have to be able to visually see those numbers between about 0.01 and 1000.

You might say that such numbers make little difference to most of us unless we are in science, but let’s talk about where our everyday lives might be impacted. First let’s start with the population of the world. There are 7 billion people. Try to wrap your head around that number. Is your soul mate really just one in a billion? Could such a large group of people create an environmental disaster? How many bodies could certain countries throw at you in a war? About 700 million, globally, live in abject poverty. Do the numbers seem so voluminous that it’s easier to ignore human suffering, or make you feel defeated before you try?

What about some of the more important educational and scientific controversies that still exist today? Evolution has been happening for several billion years, but many would like to believe that we’ve been around for only 6000 years. Religious dogma aside, isn’t it possible that part of the reason that some people resist what science clearly demonstrates is because we are talking about a length of time that few can relate to? The vastness of time threatens to humble us all as blips in a universe far older than we can fathom. And its size and origin similarly attacks our human conceit at being the grandest and cleverest design in a creator’s eye.

Vast amounts of people also create vast sums of money. Billionaires have almost unimaginable wealth that people still commonly believe that can obtain too. Politicians and media constantly throw large dollar values in our faces to intimidate us. When one wants to high light wasteful spending we can put point to something costing 100’s of millions of dollars and we shudder at such an amount being wasted. Forgetting that with 100 million taxpayers, something in the 100’s of millions is costing us a handful of dollars a year. I have seen the tactic used frequently. Once again we might on some level realizes that a 100 million, 10 billion, and a trillion dollars are different, but they are all unimaginably large sums of money that in the battle for what’s important and what’s not, they can all be seen as being on equal footing. The idea that public television and radio need to be cut for austerity is quite simply a joke when compared to a 10% increase in defense spending if anybody thinks that’s going to balance the budget.

One might argue that the microscopic matters very little (no pun intended), but I do think an appreciation for that scale is valuable, if for no other reason helping us appreciation the vast variation of scales that make up our known universe. Scientists often take very small numbers that might exist for pollutants or toxicity in foods or water, and change the unites of those numbers so that they are bigger. I understand why, because of course we don’t want to underwhelm in those situations, but maybe it’s also a problem that we continue to cater to this limited range of numbers that our minds most easily manage. It’s probably best to start incrementally, and perhaps a good example of how we can begin is with time. John Zande over at his blog, The Superstitious Naked Ape, offers up a good first step towards our lack of comfortability with numbers outside of our “sweet spot”. The start of our counting of years begins with the birth of Christ, but this is a religious and faith based reason to start the counting of the years. Why not use Thai’s bone which is our earliest evidence of careful astronomical observations of the sun and moon over a 3 ½ year period. Instead of the year 2017, it would instead be 15,017.

It might seem like an arbitrary difference, but I think it would give us a better feel for the vastness of time, and a better appreciation for the numbers that shape the universe we’ve come to know. Since there seems to be little stopping the advance of science in technology, perhaps we better find more ways to help these brains, made for a different time, catch up.

I, Science

On April 21, 2017April 21, 2017 By Swarn GillIn Commentary, Education, Philosophy, Science18 Comments

Around the nation tomorrow, there will be marches for science. Why should that be so? We might understand marches for women, or marches for a minority group, but why should scientists march? We make only 5% of the population, it’s clearly a small proportion of the workforce. I am sure I could build a compelling scholarly argument for the importance of science, but rather than go about it mechanically, I’ve decided to talk more about my relationship with science and why it’s so important to me.

Like many children I enjoyed books with different animals and learning about their characteristics. I remember watching many an episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. I had a book on whales that I love to read a lot, and one on dinosaurs. I remember learning about the different planets. I found the colors of the planets, the sun, so stunning. Different atmospheric compositions led to vastly different looks. I marveled at the thought of looking up at the red sky of Mars. I used to capture a variety of insects in jars. And while I would certainly not encourage such behavior from my child without proper care and the hopes of setting it free, I marveled at the structure and behavior of such creatures. When I look back on these memories, I have hard time imagining every child not being like this. Maybe it was a precursor to what I would eventually become, but there seems nothing so natural as wanting to observe the world around us and learn about it and wonder how it works. How can one not marvel at the array of colors that nature provides? How can we not wonder at the flight of some creature and the scurrying of others? How can we not be fascinated by the massive size of the blue whale, to the little aphid that seems but a speck in your hand? I am certainly not an expert in child behavior, but I have watched enough children to know what observers they are. And while they may not understand all they see, they are constantly looking. It seems to me the essence of science lies in the very heart of who we are as humans.

From at least my early elementary age, I remember being fascinated by thunderstorms. Seeing the lightning streak across the sky was nature’s fireworks and I loved every minute of it. Often peeking out the window at night, and occasionally sneak out at night so it under the ledge of our house to watch the thunderstorms. My very first introduction to meteorology was in grade 6 when we learned about different cloud types and how different cloud types could often be predictors to the type of weather that was coming your way. For some reason I found that fascinating, but I know there was also an aesthetic quality to clouds that I found beautiful. Their variety of shapes and colors depending on the position of the sun. To this day I still look up at them and they seem almost beautifully magical floating there. My first real act as an atmospheric scientist at around adolescent to early teens. I say this because my observations were recorded mentally over probably a couple of years. Thunderstorms in the prairie of Alberta are seen a long way off and I noticed that when a line of bubbling cumulonimbus clouds was on the horizon the wind was always blowing towards the clouds, yet the clouds kept getting closer. After enough observation I saw this as simply a fact, and knew when to tell my family to prepare for thunderstorms. Often adults would question me, saying “you’re wrong kid, the wind is blowing the other way”. Of course I wouldn’t learn why this was the case until university, but it gave me some pride to recognize patterns in such a way.

My mother was always good at supporting me asking questions, and even better at showing me how to find those answers. In those days it was the library. How easily today I could have looked up the answer as to why wind blows towards the thunderstorms before they come to you. Kids today really have it so much easier, but they also have to deal with a lot more misinformation than I had to deal with in a library. She taught me a lot about research and to look for answers in multiple places to make sure there was some consensus. Though she didn’t have an advanced degree, she was always one to have questions herself and research the answers before forming an opinion. Although she never said so explicitly, I think it was important more to see that our own senses are not enough to really understand how things work, and having information from other sources can help us answer our questions and make better sense about what we see.

When I look back, the ingredients it took for me to become a scientist seem rather organic. Parents who encouraged questions and were curious themselves, made science feel like it was no extra effort. School was effort at times, and I didn’t understand everything easily, but it never stopped me from finding it all quite interesting. My favorite subject in high school was actually biology. I loved learning especially about organ systems. The way the body works and maintains itself still amazes me to this day. So while there may be some combination of genetics that works in my favor, I find it hard to understand how we aren’t all scientists. Not by profession, but just by nature. I think, that regardless of my job, science would be a part of my life. It has already helped me immensely in understanding so much and answering so many questions, and knowing that there is always more to learn is rejuvenating because it means that maybe I will learn something and it will change my whole outlook. It means that what I do today, because of what I have learned, might be something that I never saw myself doing before. I used to think that it was sad that I could not learn everything there was to know. Beyond the impossibility of that task, I think life would go stale quickly if there wasn’t newness. Science may not bring certainty, but it does bring to the fore previously unknown possibilities and who can say that does not make life more fulfilling?

Some people think that science removes mystery from the world and thus makes it less exciting. It was in the 8th grade that I decided to become a meteorologist. I can tell you that a thunderstorm today excites me to less than it did when I was a child. In fact now, when I look at a thunderstorms I see equations and physical laws floating around like code from the Matrix. I see into the cloud and in my head see interactions between droplets and crystals that I never saw when I was a child. I understand the magnitude of the forces that meet to produce this wonder of nature, and I feel the weight and power of it, in a way I never could have as a child. It is like the difference between falling in love with someone, and the deep intimacy and friendship that you develop after you’ve known that someone for many years. It is love with depth, it brings a lasting feeling of happiness and well being.

Somewhere a child has nowhere to turn for answers to the questions they have. Somewhere a child is told not to ask questions, or is simply told what their parents say is the truth of things, and that questions are dangerous. Somewhere parents have decided that their girl shouldn’t be educated, or that science is not for girls. Somewhere a teacher doesn’t understand science themselves and thus kills the joy of curiosity and learning in their students. Somewhere a group of politicians have decided that memorization-based exams are the important metrics to determine funding. Somewhere a television show is making scientists seem irrelevant and worthy of ridicule for finding excitement in discovery. Somewhere a journalist is completely misrepresenting a scientist’s findings. Somewhere a government is denying the findings of scientists to help rich people make more money.

These things make me sad. I see no reasons why we can’t be a society that is constantly asking questions. We have a tool for answering those questions that we know is reliable. It is so pervasive now that we don’t even recognize all the ways it shapes our lives. If we supported that scientist in all of us, the one who first makes their appearance at the earliest of ages, the power and value of this tool would be immense. It helps us ethically and morally. It helps us fight oppression and inequality. Science is the only thing that has no politics, no religion, no race or culture. It truly is for everyone, and in everyone.

I see the March for Science as not just a political statement. It is about showing the value for curiosity, for education, for discovery, and for wonder that we seem to be losing. Our government has become one which seems to think it has nothing to learn. One where opinion is as valid as fact. One where there is no consequence for lying. I don’t blame Trump for this alone, he may be the penultimate in this dangerous attitude, but it has been bleeding into our society for some time. The March for Science is a march for progress. A march that shows we care about our fellow human, and that we value science as a means to reduce suffering in the world.

I say all this, not because I am a scientist and I worry about my job. I say this because it is my lived experience. I say this because we all intrinsically know that change is the only truth in this universe, and that time makes a fool of the arrogant who think they have nothing more to learn. I say this because history is full of the darkness that follows when we rest our futures on superstition and falsehoods. Finally, I say this because I do think there is significant evidence that human-induced climate change is the scientific issue of our time, and threatens our very existence. It challenges us like no other issue, because it cannot be solved by one nation. It cannot be “felt” on a day to day basis. It is the essence of science because it takes us beyond the narrow field of view that we each individually possess and asks to widen the lens and reach out into space and time, and think big. If we cannot do that, the story of humanity becomes a tragedy. I, for one, refuse to let it be, because I know we can do better.

Reason

On November 11, 2016November 11, 2016 By Swarn GillIn Philosophy, Prose and Poetry17 Comments

I know that darkness won’t endure,
But sometimes it’s hard to see in the dark,
But I will not lose my reason,
My desire to understand the seasons,
Turning leaves reveal the truth,
Known to every pimpled youth,
There is no escaping that things change,
And so you can hold on
And squeeze the moment,
But it will eventually slip like sand,
And with time abrading your open fingers,
To make sure you learn lessons well,
To remind you, you’re avoiding the inevitable.

You can wallow in the quagmire of your beliefs,
You can even inspire with a clever tongue,
You can wipe clean all that science has found,
And it will come back and haunt you,
But humanity is no ghost,
It is curious and is happiest when it discovers,
Even though it risks its happiness,
Because somewhere in the maze of consciousness,
We know that without the risk there is no joy,
No success, no growth
We are not content to look through a pinhole,
While one eye looks at the dark, and the rest
Of our senses atrophy into putrid decay.

Each time that you hate and dehumanize,
You become less than you think you are,
Your victims more than you think they are.
And I will oppose you with heart, with teeth,
And you will fight on the battleground of reason,
Or risk endless cycles violence,
Ripping parents from children,
Casting yourself into an oblivion,
That you believe to be paradise,
All because you never knew,
How great a human you could become,
How so many pieces of existence,
Were waiting for you to know them.

And you will pay dearly for unwise choices,
And you will be forgiven,
Because the world has loss and pain,
But nobody really wants to destroy you but time,
And none of us have any say over that,
Make your meaning out of the indifferent universe,
And treat existence like a gift.
Because it is.

Shepherding the Earth: Fallacies That May Destroy Us All

On May 4, 2016 By Swarn GillIn Philosophy, Psychology, Science22 Comments

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts called The Hidden Brain on NPR and they were talking about the climate change situation in a great episode called Losing Alaska. Basically they were saying that scientific arguments have little merit anymore in talking about climate change. I would have to say that I agree. As someone who holds a Ph.D. in the Atmospheric Sciences I can most certainly say that few people that I have debated with on the subject truly understand the problem scientifically and I don’t claim to be the smartest person in the world, this is simply the truth. My field is applied math and physics. Not only that, the climate system is complex.it Involves interdisciplinary knowledge as well in chemistry, oceanography and geology. To change someone’s mind from a scientific point of view, it would take a lot of study and learning. Now you may be saying, wait I accept man-made climate change, and it it’s pretty obvious. Well I would argue that you don’t really understand it, but it’s easier for you to accept because it already fits in with your ideology. And I don’t say that to be demeaning, especially I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad ideology to have. Specifically the one in which we recognize that something is very complex and we don’t have years to study it on our own so maybe I should listen to what experts are saying. Much like we tend to believe our doctor when they tell us we have cancer as opposed to learning the requisite knowledge we need in order to test ourselves.

*Instead of a Heavenly Father, maybe a Mother Earth isn’t a bad person to start worshiping.*

But more to the point it really does come down to our personal ideology whether we accept the science, because let’s face it the science is telling us some pretty harsh things. Not only is the Earth in a lot of trouble, but we actually might be responsible for it all. And in order to combat the problem we are causing we are going to have to give up a great deal. Transitioning away from a fuel source we heavily depend on will require large shifts in business and industry affecting the jobs of many. And of course such a transition cannot be made overnight, but even at a moderate pace will require a cultural change at a rate faster than many of us would have a hard time adjusting too. That of course does not make it any less compulsory. Interestingly this podcast made the argument that we all are capable of great sacrifices at times of war or crises, and that dealing with man-made climate change requires an approach that is used by religion rather than one that is used by science. I find myself having a hard time disagreeing. While I would love to live in a society where science had a much more powerful influence on changing minds ultimately it does seem that we need to change minds at an emotional level over an intellectual one (which is to me what the podcast suggested by saying a “religious approach”).

In that vein, I wanted to address some of the main arguments I see used by climate change deniers, which tend to be more ideologically based instead of arguments that attack the scientific data on the subject. They are more dangerous to me, because they seem reasonable. They seem irrefutable. This is not the case.

Science had been wrong before, why should we trust scientists?

This is quite true. Scientists have been wrong before. In fact progress is actually built on that very premise. But notice the word “progress”. It always strikes me as strange that people overlook this aspect of science. Much like we learn from our own mistakes and grow and get better as people, this is how science works as well. So we do get things wrong, but we also get a lot of things right. Your daily lives in this modern world are a living result of that. From the car you drive to the device in which you are punching out your arguments. Now you could be right that someday we will discover that we were all wrong about this, but if we do, it will not because we were willfully trying to mislead people, but rather a new discovery has allowed us to view the world in a different way thus disproving our theory. So unless you’ve got that said discovery I can guarantee you that our assessment about the state of the climate system is based on the best available knowledge we have about how it works. And personally I see no shame in acting in the best interest of all on this planet based on what we know of it.

Finally, just because you don’t trust science or want to focus on the things it got wrong makes it your problem, and not science’s problem. To refute climate change science on those grounds is to commit the genetic fallacy. Directly address the assertions being made by those advocating the position in terms of their conclusions analysis of their data. That is really your only option. To explain it more simply “Al Gore is a democrat, and I hate democrats. Al Gore gives evidence for why man-made climate change is happening, but since he is a democrat, he must be wrong.” That’s not how it works. Sorry.

Scientists are just doing it for the money. IPCC is corrupt. Liberal media…

This argument is the same as the genetic fallacy because it is again an attempt to discredit to the reliability of the source to simply argue away what the source has to say. I’ll admit that in such instances I will use the same fallacious argument back, because, quite honestly two can play that game, and I can play it better. Let’s say all of us scientists are ego driven money-grubbing bastards. My options are renewable energy companies and liberal governments, or oil companies. Hmmm…I wonder who has more money. Not only that with all the other scientists clearly in the wrong camp, all that sweet oil money could be mine (as it was for Wei-Hock Soon) as there are even less people to share it with.

In terms of fame, the fallacious argument made by deniers fall even shorter. If I had definitive proof that all the other scientists were wrong. I would be the one who was famous. I’d be on all the news programs, giving talks around the world on a sweet oil company payroll, and even the liberal media would have me on their shows even to abuse me while I valiantly stuck to my guns with the full conviction that I was doing my science right. I would be the hero of deniers everywhere.

Sometimes even fallacious arguments are hardly worth the effort.

The climate has changed before when humans weren’t around. It’s natural.

This is the first part of an argument constantly used. It’s also known in logic as a type of naturalistic fallacy. Just because something can happen naturally, doesn’t mean it can’t happen unnaturally. Do floods happen naturally? Sure. Can floods also happen because of human activities? Absolutely. Natural selection happens in evolution. But you know what also happens? “Unnatural selection”. The fruits and vegetables we eat, the dogs and cats we have as pets, and the horses we ride are all examples of this. The same thing can happen with or without intention.

We cannot have an impact on something as big as the Earth.

*The ecosystem formerly known as rain forest.*

This argument is made without any substantiation at all. It is often also used by people who are trying not to be religious but would rather take the James Inhofe argument that God controls the climate! Of course examples of how we have changed climate locally can be found all over through the building of structures like dams on rivers, cutting down forests and poor farming practices. In terms of the climate change issue specifically this person does a pretty nice break down of looking at how the amount of carbon we produce can quite easily explain the increase in carbon since pre-industrial levels. There is no reason to believe that we couldn’t have such a global impact. In fact that argument always seems to me a way of insulting or discrediting scientists again because it’s a pretty important question to answer before we would even start putting out evidence about climate change. I mean if the amount of carbon we produce paled in comparison to the amount of increase we’ve seen then I am not sure how the scientific consensus could be developed in the first place. It’s like when people say, the warming is being caused by the sun, and I think to myself “Oh my…we scientists all forgot to take into account the sun. I better make a few calls. Can’t believe we missed that one!”.

The Earth will survive. We’ve had major disasters before and life persists. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen.

This is the most insidious arguments, because it’s not fallacious at all in a logical sense. However it is apathetic and immoral. A lot of times people will say things like…”we’re just another species. Whatever we do is natural, and whatever happens will happens.”

Let’s say you are an emergency manager who works at a national park in a mountainous area. The weather is starting to warm and there has been heavy rains in the mountains and typically when such rains occur, especially in combination with some ice jams in the water flash flooding occurs. It’s not a guarantee, but likely. A town at the foot of the mountain in which the river runs through is going to get flooded, people could easily die if they are not warned. This is a natural event, it was going to happen whether humans are around are not do you warn them?

I think most people would answer that they would. To me arguing that doing nothing is the only option we have because the Earth is just going to do is thing is tantamount to doing nothing in this example, and simply letting people die. Many people who accept the fact that the climate is changing but don’t think man is responsible still must accept the consequences to this warming. Some of the one’s we are more sure of are:

Rising sea levels drowning coastal populations and increased damages and deaths from coastal hazards such as tropical storms and tsunamis
Increased heat waves and droughts
Increases in extreme weather events as climate patterns shift
Increased severity of extreme weather events.

What’s more is that these types of things will adversely impact the most vulnerable of the worlds population. People who are in poverty. People who depend on subsistence farming. When local hazards happen communities do make sacrifices, and do look for solutions, through re-zoning laws, construction improvements, and other engineering solutions to try and make the world safer and have less loss of life. So even if man has nothing do with the problem it doesn’t mean that we don’t have a responsibility to act to come up with a solution.

One can be logically sound but be ethically and morally irresponsible. Ignoring what experts are saying, making sweeping and unsubstantiated statements that there is nothing we can do, that it’s just nature, and the Earth will be fine is really the same as having the power to do something to save lives and not doing it. And this is why I agree that the conversation about climate change has to shift away from science and facts and be more about compassion, about love for our fellow human beings, valuing equality so that we all have the same chance to adapt and survive the changing climate, and about taking responsibility for the home that sustains us all. These are important values regardless of what is causing the climate to change and these are things we can address and even already have some solutions for. Of course I know that is even overly idealistic to think that such a solution of addressing people on an emotional level might work. Hell it’s difficult to find a religion that unanimously agrees poverty is something we should do something about. I feel pretty bleak in general about us actually doing something about climate change. It requires people to move beyond nationalism, beyond their own religious beliefs and worldview, which tend to not be very worldly at all. Maybe we can’t win against the forces of nature, but it sure would nice if we could overcome the forces that divide us as a species. We can try. Maybe in the end it really is easier to move mountains.

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Cloak Unfurled

Tag: Science