Presidential Science Debate 2012

The people of Science Debate have done some great work and have had the main candidates for US president answer some questions about their policies concerning science. There were questions about global warming, innovation, education, and vaccinations.

I noted the Romney answers were more extensive that Obama's, so it's probably a good place to get informed about the Republican challenger's positions. I also noted that Romney says here that global warming is real and due in part from human activities. While he has been flip-floppy on issues, here he has been reasonably consistent, though the rest of his party is much more strongly against the proposition that humans cause global warming and something should be done.

Nonetheless, give this a read. Sure there are plenty of platitudes (these were written by politicians and their followers, after all), but they still help us know what is going on in the potential administrations. And you definitely didn't learn it from the GOP primary debates.

As a side note, almost no one in the Congress who was asked about science questions responded; only two thus far have. And John Boehner, Speaker of the House, is flat out declined. It's probably worth while giving your representatives a call or email.

Learning with Coursera

Yesterday was the first day of classes for me, though not at the school I am working at. I recently enrolled in classes through a free, online medium called Coursera. It's a great concept: have university-level classes available to anyone interested and administer it for free. So no crazy tuition rates, no room and board in the dorms, and you can read and watch the materials on your own time frame.

Now, that last point could be a problem. Without the motivation to actually watch a lecture as you would with the normal environment because of no due dates or times when it is not possible to watch, it becomes easy to forget or just be lethargic. There is also the limitation that without some sort of feedback mechanism you don't really know if you are learning.

From what I can tell, there are features in Coursera classes that fix that. There are quizzes and homework, for example. The stats class I joined, for example, wants me to program things using the R computer language (which I haven't used before). And there is a time frame. There is also the certification that you get if you do the work assigned, so there is a goal as well. I will have to see what my experience is to discover how effective it is.

Soon I will find out if this will help me learn while I am doing my research on learning. All the more interesting to compare with the computer-based tools I am helping with as well.

If you are interested, you can still join classes that have started up. Oh, and it's still free!

The Supply-Side Lorax

I'm glad I didn't see the new movie incarnation of The Lorax and what they did to the story. It's too much a load of anti-corporationism while being filled with corporate sponsorship. But at least someone can and did have fun with the character.



Thank you, College Humor! Reminds me also of Supply-Side Jesus.

Good Book on Ancient Astronauts

In the next couple of weeks, I will be giving a talk for the local Secular Student Alliance concerning how we go about trying to find extraterrestrials. A big part of that will be looking into the claims made on the History Channel about aliens in the past which have been rather under par for good history lately (and less lately). There are numerous good books and websites on the subject that undercuts the claims of ancient astronauts, from the Skeptic's dictionary to an older book by Ronald Story, The Space Gods Revealed.

But one of the most enjoyable ones has been Jason Colavito's The Cult of Alien Gods. It wonderfully goes through the literary sources of Erich von Daniken and his successors, but its major thesis is about how the ideas originate in the fictional works of American author H.P. Lovecraft. Colavito basically proves that Lovecraft is the source behind the works (mainly French) that would try to prove there were aliens in the distant past, and those were the sources utilized by von Daniken later on.

The book isn't a debunking book, though it does take the time occasionally the eviscerate the claims of von Daniken, Graham Hancock, and others. Another joy is that it also gives the historical background to Lovecraft's work (from the poetry of Poe to the Theosophical Society) as well as the cultural matrix that made the ancient astronaut ideas take off, especially in America.

You will learn not just about a pseudo-historical idea, but also about real history and literature. It does great work all around to make its thesis work and teach you many other things.

The only gripe I have is that it tends to blame a lot of this on postmodernism, which I find to be a weak thesis. There were crazy ideas like this before Derrida (Ignatius Donnelley was big in the 19th century with his Atlantis ideas), and most people are not reading 20th century philosophers or literary critics. It's more about what people want to believe (which Colavito notes), and the philosophical rationalizations are an afterthought for most, if they ever even consider it.

Try to get a copy of this book, and you will be able to see what is going on with the ancient astronauts as well as learn to appreciate the Cthulhu Mythos all the more. Well-researched and with end notes and sources (unlike some people...).

Physics and Intuition

Nicholas Covington over at SkepticBlogs has a post that relates to the borderlands of science and philosophy, intuition and its utility. His observations are done in light of some of the blog posts by Luke Muehlhauser (who more recently went to work at the Singularity Institute and the website Less Wrong).

Philosophers have long worked with what ideas we have in our heads, the primitive notions of things such as the reliability of the senses, our reasoning abilities, that other people have minds, etc. However, there is a continuing body of growing research that shows the limitations of our intuitions and our mental faculties (some I mentioned on my appearance on the Magic Sandwich Show). Nonetheless, Nick is correct that we ought not to go all-out against intuitions having epistemic value. Though we ought to be aware of its limitations (Nick mentions the Monty Hall Problem which drives first-year statistics students and normal people nuts.) Moreover, intuitions should not be beliefs that some have called properly basic, as they can and should be subject to scrutiny. Nick concludes that we have inductive reason to take them as probably true since they seem to work rather often.

But this leaves the question of when are our intuitions untrustworthy? Should be consider evolutionary history? Richard Dawkins had commented that perhaps because we evolved at the macroscopic level we did rather than nanoscopic (extremely small) or megascopic (extremely large) we may not have the mental faculties to understand modern physics like quantum mechanics and special relativity. This implies that we would be better adapted as Newtonian thinkers, since that is the world we live in; Newton's laws and principles correctly explain most everything material in our day-to-day world, the world our ancestors would have inhabited. So this implies a potential limitation on what we can understand and what we do understand.

Unfortunately, my own research in physics education shows that college students are not Newtonian thinkers, and this has been the conclusion of PER since at least the 1980s. For example, there are the interviews done by McCloskey et al. as summarized in Scientific American back in 1983. They noted that often students seem to have something like the medieval impetus view of motion.

For example, they asked the question of you walking at constant speed in a straight line while holding a ball out and shoulder level. If you continued on an the same speed and on the same path, and you dropped the ball, would you expect to see it fall behind you, in front of you, or at your feet? Before reading the conclusion, think about what the answer is to yourself.

Don't scroll down unless you have an answer.

Have a guess now?

Really?

OK, go ahead and read on.

Well, most of the people asked said the ball would fall behind them. 49% said it would fall over the exact spot the ball was let go, and a small percentage (6%) said it would actually travel backward. Only 45% accounted for the forward velocity of the ball when it was let go. And this was asked of college students, which means students with more education than the average in the US, let alone the world.

What is going on here? Some have noted the students had a general model for how things move. One of the things most people have in their minds is that without a force things don't move. There is also the notion of a force in the direction which tends to weaken with time (like the impetus dissipating as the object traveled). More recent research argues against most people having a complete model in their minds of how things work, and Andrea diSessa's idea of p-prims tries to account for what is going on with a collection of primitive ideas about physics (physics primitive ==> p-prims). What the correct model is, I cannot say.

However, the question of where these intuitions come from is one that currently needs more research, and I am glad to be working on that currently. I shan't say too much of what I have done until publication, but what I can say I did at the AAPT meeting last month. And what I did reveal is that students claim to actually feel the sorts of forces that may account for these anomalies from reality, but those forces simply are not real. At the intuitive level, we seem to believe we are pushed around in ways that simply are not true and at variance to Newtonian (let alone modern physical ) mechanics.

This indicates that Dawkins is wrong about our adaptability to understanding the Newtonian world--we don't even get that right. Perhaps that should be no surprise since it took near 2000 years of science to come up with Newton's physics (starting with Aristotle, and then on from there). Physics teachers also have come to learn that the correct ideas are hard to get into their students, and they tend to revert to incorrect views. On the other hand, we tend not to have strong convictions about things at the extremely small level or at super-fast speeds, so perhaps the theories of special relativity and quantum mechanics are easier to learn, if not necessarily understand, since we don't experience this realm and cannot fall back onto our beliefs of what happened last time.

All this would also imply that we should be very cautious using the intuitions we build up at the level we live and project them into realms we have no experience. If our experience will betray us about moving in a circle, why think they are unquestionable with things beyond our current comprehension, such as the state of the universe before the Big Bang?

I see science as progressing by testing our intuitions and seeing that they fail, and in the process building up new intuitions via the scientific method, thus creating a coherent, tested theory. It has at least been working pretty well.

So when are intuitions trustworthy? Perhaps the best rule of thumb (which is all an intuition can be) is that intuitions are useful in situations you have had significant experience. You don't need to bring out a piece of paper and a calculator to see if a train is about to hit you based its distance and speed; you can tell you need to move, else you won't be there to analyze your intuitions!

However, this would be extremely limiting to thought experiments that philosophers use all the time. How to deal with this? That is another avenue of research that needs exploration, and I know there are people on the case. In the mean time, I have a gut feeling that this won't convince everyone to give up their gut beliefs about how the world works, from politics to morality. Oh, so much work ahead.

The Man with No Name and the Party with No Idea What It's Doing

By this point, you probably know about the "great" speech given by Clint Eastwood on the last day of the Republican National Convention. The 12 minutes of unscripted banter against an empty chair. To quote George Takei: OH, my!




And how it is beautifully deconstructed by Jon Stewart:



Oh, that was cathartic. Only thing that has been more so was the first season of The Newsroom. (5 stars!)

A Monty Python Life with Graham Chapman

I'm a pretty big Monty Python fan, though I didn't really know of it when one of its cast members, Graham Chapman, died in 1989. But it looks like he created a fake autobiography before passing, and how it will come to life.



Looks like it will come out in some theaters in late 2012 and more widely in 2013. I'll have to see if tickets will materialize in my part of the world. Otherwise, this goes straight to the Amazon Wish List.

Then again, seeing a Graham Chapman movie may feel a bit awkward. Hope it doesn't go like this: