Review of Alastair Reynolds’ SLOW BULLETS

Posted on Saturday 14 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Alastair Reynolds’ short novel SLOW BULLETS – the latest in a series of short novels from Tachyon Publications, following among others Nancy Kress’s Yesterday’s Kin and Daryl Gregory’s We Are All Completely Fine, both awards winners – is a spectacular far future space opera whose main defect is that it’s too short, and a bit skimpy near the end. Reynolds is one of those authors whose works I’ve admired, those I’ve read, but whom I’ve been unable to keep up on over the years, partly because most of his novels are quite long, and mainly because of my own erratic attention over the past decade. I particularly admired House of Suns (2008, Wikipedia), a spectacular saga of competing multi-generational families that hold reuinions, via clones, every circuit of the galaxy or so; he makes the drama work within the constraints of non-FTL travel in a way I’ve not seen any other hard SF author do.

SLOW BULLETS is also set in some remote, intergalactic future, as a long-term war between the Central worlds and the Peripheral worlds is winding down, has reached a truce. News of the truce is slow to spread, and so the opening of the novel involves Scur, a warrior on one side, being captured by Orwin, a sadistic warrior on the other side who hasn’t heard about the truce, who injects her with a second ‘slow bullet’, in additional to the one she already has; a memory device all warriors carry, to preserve their memories, but which application causes excruiciating pain.

Scur awakes in a ‘hibo’ capsule aboard a prisoner starship with no recollection how she got there. Aboard are hundreds of other ‘prisoners’ from both sides of the conflict, along with a few crew members who seem to have no idea of what has happened – how the ship has apparently traveled for longer than intended, and how they do not know where they are.

And so the story evokes, on a couple counts, a basic SF theme – the resetting of humanity without memory of a past, first on the starship, cut off from everything they’ve known, forced to rebuild some kind of internal society on their own terms; and second, with the gradual realization about where they’ve arrived, and what’s happened to the rest of humanity across its worlds, with an example of an SF encounter with an inexplicable alien ‘other’. The titular notion of the ‘slow bullets’ becomes crucial, as a threat to the loss of cultural knowledge, via decay of their starship, is resolved through self-sacrifice.

Reynolds writes clean clear prose, in a way that doesn’t beg appreciation for his wide-scale cosmic depictions; he lets his cosmic expanses appear matter-of-factly, to speak for themselves. Yet his prose is occasionally quite striking, as when the villain Orvin confronts our hero Scur, about her need for revenge:

Be honest with yourself, as one solder to another. We both know what hate feels like. It hasn’t gone away just because we spent a little time in hibo. It’s like a light filling you up from inside. It’s leaking through your skin.

A fine short novel, and one which invites attention to his longer works.

Posted in science fiction, Species Reset | Comments Off on Review of Alastair Reynolds’ SLOW BULLETS

The World’s Young: a review of Robert Charles Wilson’s THE AFFINITIES

Posted on Friday 13 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Robert Charles Wilson’s THE AFFINITIES is ‘social’ science fiction in the most literal sense. (I seem to recall how Isaac Asimov made the distinction between hard SF, social SF, and social satire – the latter being Huxley, Orwell, and the like – though I may be misremembering this, since I can’t find a reference to this triplet anywhere just now, either in print or online.)

The book is about a very near-future social-networking option, run by an organization called InterAlia, which conducts various tests to classify applicants into one of 22 ‘affinities’, groups of like-minded people. It’s not a dating service, and Wilson perhaps conspicuously avoids comparing these classifications to Myers-Briggs or any similar psychological testing options.

The early chapters depict Adam Fish, a Toronto graphic artist, who applies to InterAlia and is assigned to the Tau tranche. (Affinity groups are named after 22 letters of the Phoenician alphabet.) His loose social connections, his discomfort with members of his family in Schuyler NY, his chats with autistic step-brother Geddy, illustrate his need (and Geddy’s need) for some new kind of social connections. And when he attends his first meeting of fellow Taus, he feels an instant psychological resonance, an intuitive sense of common understanding and trust. And one of the people he meets gives him a job.

Part II: Seven years later, Adam is involved with affinity politics, as a movement grows to liberate the technology of the tests from the company InterAlia, as the inventor Meir Klein has quit and is subsequently murdered, and as a rival group, the Hets, seem to be challenging the Taus for political dominance, perhaps to the point of murder.

Part III: And four years after that, a political threat to the affinities is interrupted by a conflict – effectively, if obviously, foreshadowed – between Pakistan and India that brings down the internet and power infrastructure around the entire world. [I’m reminded of how the plots of so many traditional horror and thriller films would be undermined if only the characters had cellphones. This development removes cellphones from how the plot might otherwise play out.]

And the book ends with various plot resolutions and the recognition that things will keep changing.

This book resonates with my current preoccupations about big issues much more so than I had expected. It’s about humanity’s problems in the 21st century and ways they might be addressed. Wilson recognizes the issue, and the context, p26b:

We’re the most cooperative species on the planet — is there anything you own that you built entirely with your own hands, from materials you extracted from nature all by yourself? And without that network of cooperation we’re as vulnerable as three-legged antelopes in lion territory. But at the same time: what a talent we have for greed, for moral indifference, for wars of conquest on every scale from kindergarten to the U.N. Who hasn’t longed for a way out of that bind? It’s as if we were designed fro life in some storybook family, in a house where the doors are never locked never need to be. Every half-baked utopia is a dream of that house. We want it so badly we refuse to believe it doesn’t or can’t exist.

And, p140, about the issues facing humanity in the 21st century.

The problems confronting us are the obvious ones – climate change, resource competition, population stress, and all the human conflicts arising from those problems. What makes these questions especially difficult is that they cannot be dealt with comprehensively by individual action. We need to act collectively, on a global scale. But we have very limited means of doing that. We are a collaborative species, the most successful such species on the planet, but we collaborate as individuals, for mutual gain, under systems established to promote and protect such collaboration. Our global economic and social behavior is largely unconstrained. Which means that, under certain circumstances, it can run away with us. It can carry us all unwilling into the land of unforeseen consequences.

And, Rebecca on the arc of human history, and how New Socionome will succeed the affinities:

Our algorithms of connection favor non-zero-sum transactions, as the Affinities do, but they also facilitate long-term panhuman goals: prosperity, peace, fairness, sustainability. The arc of human history is long but our algorithms bend toward justice. We aren’t just falling. We’re FALLING FORWARD.

At the beginning of Part III, Adam talks with the autistic Geddy, who asks, “Is the world old or is it young?”.

It’s like, is everything all used up? Is history almost over? Or is it just getting started?

And then, movingly, a late passage, p291, Geddy answers his own question:

The Affinities were, like, the Model T of socionomic structures. We’re building better ones! Evolutionary algorithms to enhance non-zero-sum exchanges of all kinds! A way to address the big problems! … The world’s young! We’re at the beginning of something, and it’s big, and it’s scary, but in the end it might be– Beautiful!

Here is the essence of the progressive optimism of science fiction. And here is how, weirdly, this book echoes Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series: both are about attempts to analyze human psychology in order to anticipate history, avoid human calamities, and drive history toward long-term benefits.

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Reading Haidt, arcs of history, false balance, how liberal views are closer to the truth, and science fiction

Posted on Thursday 12 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Beginning to read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion today, an eloquent, insightful exploration into how the parameters of human psychology explain the range of political and religious differences. I wrote a blog post just a few days ago in which I tried to summarize my tentative take on these issues, before I read this book, and Chris Mooney’s, and others by Greene and Shermer and Kahneman. Haidt is echoing some of what I already understand, but he’s also providing some new perspective: in particular, how my ‘social arc of history’ (here) applies primarily to what he calls ‘individualistic’ societies, characteristic of post-Enlightenment societies in Europe and the US, as opposed to ‘sociocentric’ societies, such as those that dominated the ancient world (as well as some modern societies like China, it seems to me). Does the arc of history bend sociocentric societies toward the individualist? Not sure. I do note, for now, that ‘sociocentric’ tendencies seem to align with conservative politics.

But this book does not seem to be about whether any one tendency of human psychology is ‘correct’ in the sense of aligning with empirical reality (as I discussed in that earlier post). That’s another issue, but it’s a real one. (And if anything Haidt’s psychology suggests that this range of human psychology exists because it’s advantageous for survival, whether or not it’s ‘correct’ about reality; again, as I speculated about in that post.)

This recalls an issue raised in the New York Times a week or two ago. First, an op-ed by Arthur C. Brooks, president of the [right-wing] American Enterprise Institute, about how universities are dominated by liberals/progressives and why, in the name of diversity, they should strive to include more conservatives.

(This strikes me as a similar problem to that of false balance, in which the media feels obliged to present both sides of issues even where one side has obviously less credibility, e.g. is the Earth round or flat?.)

Thus, this letter responding to the Brooks op-ed captures my reaction. My bold.

Arthur C. Brooks is asking the wrong question. The question is not whether we need more conservative viewpoints in academia but why there are so few conservatives in academia. Not all ideas are of equal validity and thus deserving of equal time in college classrooms. Some ideas are empirically better than others.

The liberal version of reality predominates in academia because, quite simply, it is closer to the truth.

For example, the conservative view of biology and geology (that humans are a product of divine creation and the world is 6,000 years old) is just flat-out wrong.

And the conservative view of economics (that cutting taxes and expenditures during a recession results in greater prosperity) has been proven time and again to be false.

Another reason for the prevalence of liberal thought on college campuses was given long ago by a social scientist: It is just more humane. Liberals seek to treat all races, religions, classes, genders and so on equally compared with conservatives, who want a pre-1960 America.

And whereas all humans are created equal, the same cannot be said for all ideas.

While I’m fascinated by exploring the patterns of the human mind, how its biases and intuitions exist for evolutionary reasons, I’m actually more interested in what is real, and how we can step around those biases, through reason and science, and perceive what lies beyond common human perception. And this is where science fiction is a useful heuristic.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Evolution, MInd, Morality, Politics, Provisional Conclusions | Comments Off on Reading Haidt, arcs of history, false balance, how liberal views are closer to the truth, and science fiction

Links and Comments: Raising Kids with or without faith; Benford hosts evolution debate; the Lake Wobegon Effect

Posted on Tuesday 10 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Slate: “Why Hold a Child Hostage to My Doubts?” The confusing, complicated desire of parents with no religion to raise their kids with faith.

Why would parents with no religion think their kids need to be raised into a faith culture? (And why one particular faith culture as opposed to any other?, is my thought, not addressed, though I do understand why.)

Because religion offers easy answers to the difficult questions that children tend to ask, perhaps.

The trouble with children, of course, is that they want to know what’s real and what’s just a story. I dread the day when my daughter asks me if the stories in the Bible are true. My real answer is that some of them are and some of them sort of are and some of them aren’t and that even the ones that aren’t at all are still important because they are our stories. That should work for a 3-year-old, right?

In contrast, there are in fact books about “How to Raise Moral, Ethical and Intelligent Children, Free from Relgious Dogma”, to take one example: Dan Arel’s Parenting without God.

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Gregory Benford, in the latest issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction [Subscribe!], describes his task at UC Irvine, over the decades, of hosting various speakers to the campus. Here’s one, with Benford’s gloss on the perennial evolution/intelligent design “debate”:

In 1993 my friend, the biologist Michael Rose, and I assembled a public debate between him and the leading anti-evolutionist in America, Phillip Johnson, a professor of law at UC Berkeley and author of Darwin on Trial in 1992. Michael and I were both astonished by the rise of antiscience in our culture, and we sought a way to take on “intelligent design,” an attempt to put a patina of secularity on top of what is a fundamentally religious belief.

I opened the debate by saying I had no strong religious beliefs because I was an Episcopalian. That got the expected laugh because the crowd was quite fundamentalist. Unlike previous biologists who debated Johnson, Rose used offense, not defense, taking Johnson to task for what he thought a theory of life’s development should be. This revealed that the alternatives to evolution were laughable.

Rose wore a small, calm smile. At the half hour point John­son’s face began to twitch, eyes narrowed, ears reddened. I watched the audience, having little to do. They resembled a slow-motion crowd at a tennis match, attention swaying lazily, but now watching Johnson as Rose spoke. Rose scored points and Johnson’s face clouded, vexed.

At the end, Johnson, blocked from his favorite arguments by having to fend off Rose’s reasoned points, was visibly angry. Rose walked across the platform and shook Johnson’s hand, but Johnson refused to shake mine. I felt grand, since I made him do it in full view of the crowd. A bit more than 1500 paid $10 each to get in, with 300 UCI students getting in free. So UCI made $15,000 out of fundamentalist Chris­tians, and Johnson got blunted. Plus, it was fun.

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Last Friday’s Science Friday broadcast, with Ira Flatow, had a segment on Are ALL Minnesotans Above Average?, an allusion to Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion” in which “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” It’s a joke, but it keys off a fundamental human mental bias, about motivated reasoning and self-enhancement. Why people think they are special, a bit better than everyone else; why people think they are safer than the average driver, and so on. (It has an obvious survival advantage.) Some academics actually describe this as the “Lake Wobegone Effect”.

David McRaney’s second book, You Are Now Less Dumb, reviewed and summarized here, concludes with a long chapter about the “self-enhancement bias”, which is generally about the idea that people feel they are rather more special than everyone else. Better drivers, etc. And it occurs to me since Friday that this might explain what I’d always thought was a quandary: why people are so confidant that their religion must be the correct one, despite the evidence of so many other people in the world who adhere to different religions and are apparently just as confidant that theirs is the one true faith. How can that possibly be rationally justified? Is it just a matter of good luck, to have been born and raised in a community that happened to have identified the one true religion?? Well, no, it’s because of this perception by every person that they’re a little bit better, more special, than everyone else, and this feeling slides into a rationalization that their own religion is surely the one true religion, despite whatever all those billions of other people, who are not so special, must think.

Again, these mental biases promote survival. They are not about accurate perception of reality, which is actually not necessary for survival, but which some of us find interesting nevertheless.

Posted in Children, Evolution, MInd, Provisional Conclusions, Religion | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Raising Kids with or without faith; Benford hosts evolution debate; the Lake Wobegon Effect

Rereading Early Heinlein, part 3: If This Goes On

Posted on Monday 9 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Heinlein’s earliest serial — that is, a long story requiring a split into parts across two or more issues of a magazine — was “If This Goes On–“, published in the February and March 1940 issues of Astounding magazine. He had only published three stories before this, from August 1939 to January 1940 (“Life-Line”, “Misfit”, and “Requiem”). It was later published in the 1953 Shasta collection Revolt in 2100, the 1970s Signet paperback reprint edition of which is scanned here, with cover art by Gene Szafran.

“If This Goes On–” is set in a future in which America has become a theocracy, ruled by a Prophet Incarnate, leader of the church that rules America, and who lives in a Palace and Temple in New Jerusalem, somewhere in the eastern US. The point-of-view character is one John Lyle, a personal guardian to the Prophet, whose faith is gradually shattered by his attraction a woman in the temple, Sister Judith, who becomes “chosen” by the Prophet for what Lyle gradually realizes — he’s a bit naive — is a sexual initiation. He hears her scream.

The balance of this long story is how John Lyle is recruited into a resistance movement, the Cabal, and participates in a long revolutionary plot to overthrow the Prophet, which involves undermining the Prophet’s scheme in maintaining his image via special-effects that portrays himself as the recipient of the ultimate Prophet, Nehemiah Scudder, an image which the revolutionaries foil to reveal the subterfuge to the mass population. An invasion of the capital follows, in which Lyle takes charge to bring about success, though they discover that the Prophet has been torn apart by his own concubines.

What’s most remarkable about this story, after all these decades, is what’s implied by the title – that the US seems to be perpetually teasing with the idea of slipping into a theocracy (despite its Constitution). Writing this in November 2015, watching the Republican candidates for president, especially Carson and Cruz and (off to the side, not serious players anymore) Huckabee and Santorum, it’s easy to the seeds of such a movement, that have never gone away after all these decades. Will they ever prevail? One can hope not, but an essential factor in the history of science fiction is Heinlein’s Future History, in which he projected this idea into a future that, in consequence, the US renounced all technology progress (exploration into space) and fell back into a dark ages, from which it took a century to overcome. It’s a theme that has recurred again and again in science-fictional future histories.

Look at Cruz’s megalomaniac certainty, his comment just in the past couple days about how a president should kneel down every day in prayer, and how he attended a conference led by a right-wing radio host who advocates putting gays to death.

I’d like to think that extremists like Cruz, or Santorum, or for that matter Trump and Carson, might attract a portion of the right-wing electorate, might possibly even win the Republican nomination — but could never win the general election. In fact, I’d think it advantageous for a religious extremist to win the Republican nomination, since that would favor the Democratic nominee, bound to be someone more sensible and reality-based, in the general election.

Heinlein wrote a postscript, “Concerning Stories Never Written”, in which he discussed the reasons why he never wrote a couple stories included in his “Future History” outline, including one about the rise of the evangelist Nehemiah Scudder. I will quote liberally:

I am aware that the themes of the unwritten stories linke the second and this the third volume thus briefly stated above have not been elaborated sufficiently to lend conviction, particularly with reference to two notions; the idea that space travel, once apparently firmly established, could fall into disuse, and secondly the idea that the United States, could lapse into a dictatorship of superstition.

(Score one: space travel, once established, has fallen into disuse, if not to quite the extent that Heinlein imagined; not, to be fair, due to religious resistance.)

There is a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism in this, our culture; it is rooted in our history and it has broken out many times in the past. It is with us now; there has been a sharp rise in strongly evangelical sects in this country in recent years, some of which hold beliefs theocratic in the extreme, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, and anti-libertarian.

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. This is equally true whether the faith if Communism or Holy-Rollerism; indeed it is the bounden duty of the faithful to do so. The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue.

This was Heinlein writing in 1953. Little has changed. And this is as true as ever: “It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so…” Just listen to Santorum, and Huckabee, and Cruz.

He goes on,

I imagined Nehemiah Schudder as a backwoods evangelist who combined some of the features of John Calvin, Savonarola, Judge Rutherford and Huey Long. … No, I probably never will write the story of Nehemiah Scudder; I dislike him too thoroughly. But I hope that you will go along with me in the idea that he could happen…

And, indeed, to imagine the likes of Ted Cruz or Rick Santorum gaining the presidency, it likely would happen. (Well, not really — no matter how reactionary a president might be, he’d have to balance his goals with the votes of Congress, and the judgments of the Supreme Court. That’s the brilliance of our political system.) Why is it that American culture has not grown beyond the demands of religious fundamentalism? Something about the sense of American exceptionalism, I suspect.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Heinlein, Religion, science fiction | Comments Off on Rereading Early Heinlein, part 3: If This Goes On

Jeffrey Tayler on Ben Carson; Frank Bruni on lies about gays and transgenders and Houston; Lee McIntyre on science denialism; how Einstein, proved right again and again over the past century, was resisted on political grounds

Posted on Sunday 8 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Salon: You know Ben Carson is crazy, right? Let’s discuss the craziest things he actually believes

Jeffrey Tayler summarizes Carson’s Seventh Adventist faith — a faith built upon a failed prediction of the end of the world, back in 1843, by a group that resembles the recent Harold Camping chieftan who foresaw the end of the world in 1994, and then again in May 2011, and then again in October 2011, none of which came true, just as all the similar predictions by religious cults over the centuries have never come true. But the Seventh Adventists are apparently still anticipating the end of the world any day now. Is this someone you would elect President of the United States?..?

Jeffrey Tayler has ways with words: (my bold)

Incontrovertibly, the “real aspects” of Christianity are a ludicrous creation myth that science long ago debunked, barbaric human sacrifice (the crucifixion), and a Lord so vain he drew up the Ten Commandments so that the first three were all about Himself. I won’t go on, except to say that God so misjudged His creation that He had to send His kid down to Earth to be tortured to death to save us, which speaks volumes about the “divine wisdom” with which all Christians credit Him.

And

Carson commits semantic fraud when he then tells the reporter that “people need to understand that everybody is a person of faith. It’s just a matter of what they decide to put their faith in.” He later in the interview muses that “everybody has their own personal faith. Even atheists and secular progressives have their faith. It’s just in something different.”

No, Dr. Carson (and all who use this crass subterfuge to try and sneak religion into the Halls of Respectability), unsubstantiated belief in the supernatural has nothing to do with rationalist convictions standing upon evidence, or falling if the evidence changes. It’s very much your decision to ignore the science that gave you your profession and throw your lot in with devotees of the supernatural. It’s very much not the same sort of decision to prefer evidence-based conclusions to wishful thinking. Rationalists would accept the existence of God were there any evidence for it. There is not. Rationalists are adults.

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Today’s New York Times: Frank Bruni: Sex, Lies and Houston

And we’ll someday cringe about this, just as most Americans now cringe about the verbal garbage that was thrown at gay people, the lies that were told, the lies that were believed. I recently ran across some research that made reference to a 1970 survey in which 73.5 percent of Americans agreed that ‘homosexuals are dangerous as teachers or youth leaders because they try to get sexually involved with children’ and 71.1 supported the statement that ‘homosexuals try to play sexually with children if they cannot get an adult partner.’”

The arc of history: things do change, culturally, though there will always be isolated hold-outs.

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And this: The Price of Denialism, by Lee McIntyre, author of Respecting Truth: Willful Ignorance in the Internet Age.

A good first step would be to distinguish between skepticism and what has come to be known as denialism. In other words, we need to be able to tell when we believe or disbelieve in something based on high standards of evidence and when we are just engaging in a bit of motivated reasoning and letting our opinions take over. When we withhold belief because the evidence does not live up to the standards of science, we are skeptical. When we refuse to believe something, even in the face of what most others would take to be compelling evidence, we are engaging in denial. In most cases, we do this because at some level it upsets us to think that the theory is true.

And

In scientific reasoning, there is such a thing as warrant. Our beliefs must be justified. This means that we should believe what the evidence tells us, even while science insists that we must also try our best to show how any given theory might be wrong. Science will sometimes miss the mark, but its successful track record suggests that there is no superior competitor in discovering the facts about the empirical world. The fact that scientists sometimes make mistakes in their research or conclusions is no reason for us to prefer opinions over facts.

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And this: How Politics Shaped General Relativity.

Einstein’s theory of general realitivy was resisted on political grounds…

Sadly, events quickly proved Einstein right. Just months after Eddington’s announcement, right-wing political opportunists in war-ravaged Germany began to organize raucous anti-Einstein rallies. Only an effete Jew, they argued, could remove “force” from modern physics; those of true Aryan spirit, they went on, shared an intuitive sense of “force” from generations of working the land. Soon after the Nazis seized power in 1933, they banned the teaching of Einstein’s work within the Reich. Einstein settled in Princeton, N.J.; the German relativity community was decimated.

To this day, they are deniers, about general relativity and of course evolution and anything that would challenge religous myths: see Conservapedia. Despite the evidence, as this article concludes, (my bold)

Twenty years later, theoretical physicists briefed United States Air Force generals on a subtle complication with a new military technology, the Global Positioning System. Effects from Earth’s gravity would be stronger on the ground than in orbit, the physicists explained, and hence clocks on the ground would tick more slowly than those aboard satellites. If the clocks disagreed on time, they would also disagree on space, and that could spell trouble for this technology. If left uncorrected, the tiny differences in clock rates would snowball into enormous errors in determining distances. With GPS, the warping of time that Einstein imagined assumed operational significance. (Later, GPS was opened to the commercial market, and now billions of people rely on general relativity to find their place in the world, every single day.)

Posted in Lunacy, Physics, Psychology, Religion | Comments Off on Jeffrey Tayler on Ben Carson; Frank Bruni on lies about gays and transgenders and Houston; Lee McIntyre on science denialism; how Einstein, proved right again and again over the past century, was resisted on political grounds

Ben Carson and the range of human psychology; Michael Shermer and the perception of the real world

Posted on Saturday 7 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

This New Republic piece, The Truth About Ben Carson: Smart People Can Believe Crazy Things, addresses what I find most interesting about this Republican candidate who, though evidently a brilliant neurosurgeon, seems to have surrendered his intelligence in so many other matters to an amalgam of Bible stories, conspiracy theories, and self-enhancing fantasies about past events. (Brian Williams comes to mind.) (And, via Gawker, see this revealing photospread of Ben Carson’s house.)

The New Republic article explains how Carson is an example of how even intelligent people can believe weird things, as explored in Michael Shermer’s 1997 book Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Times (cited in the article, and which I read years ago), and summarized here:

First, great intelligence doesn’t immunize a person from indulging in magical thinking or pseudo-science. Second, even very smart and accomplished people can be fantasists.

Citing Shermer:

The smarter and better-educated you are, the more powerful you are at coming up with arguments to justify your positions. In effect, intelligence and education give you the skills at becoming entrenched in motivated reasonings. In Shermer’s words, “smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending belief they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” This explains the engineers who become 9/11 truthers, the Supreme Court justices who think the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays, the distinguished mathematicians who think HIV is not the cause of AIDS. It also explains Ben Carson.

This afternoon I was glancing through a couple books on my to-read shelf (by Chris Mooney and Jonathan Haidt) that explore the psychological issues behind the deep political divide that currently characterizes American politics, and was triggered to write the following:

The rise of the reality-challenged right-wing is partly an effect of the internet (enabling like-minded people to form virtual coalitions and insulate themselves from rival opinions and challenging facts), but to a larger degree an effect of the very change, the increasing rate of change over the past century, that has given rise to science fiction. Given the range of human personalities and characters, the groups that clings to past certainties and resisting any evidence that would affect their worldview, are increasingly, as change happens ever more swiftly, doubling down, shutting out challenging evidence.

Yet the interesting question underlying this behavior is — *why* does this range of human personalities exist in the first place? Presumably, because it must have some evolutionary advantage. Not a simple one – it must be about the overall evolutionary advantage of the particular *range* of human personality types that exist.

Beware the naturalistic fallacy -– just because something exists (for example, that something exists because it has over millennia had an evolutionary advantage) does not mean it *ought* to exist, or to put it a couple other ways, it doesn’t mean it’s *right* in the sense that human society should acknowledge and promote it, and it doesn’t mean that it’s *right* in the sense of corresponding to reality. Here’s where we circle back to a central premise: the human mind has evolved to facilitate survival – not to be an accurate perception of the real world. Which means, we can still rightly examine the evidence, using reason and evidence to overcome the biases of the human mind, and conclude that some human personality types are, in fact, more accurate perceptions of the real world than others.

Note that this is not about there being one correct psychology and perception of the world and variations which are to one degree or another incorrect. Nor is it even about a spectrum of variations, with two extremes (liberals vs conservatives, or whatever other terms might apply). It’s about a variety of psychological tendencies that are mixed and matched in any one person, and greatly affected by family, community, and culture. The entire range presumably exists because it enables psychological flexibility in the different environments and situations that have existed over the past millennia, just as a wide ‘genetic pool’ of physical characteristics within an individual species, the presence of diversity, is critical to avoiding single-point failures that might doom too specific a species that would not survive a particular kind of environmental change.

This range of psychological tendencies is about the optimization of the human mind for human survival – not, as I’ve said, about accurate perception of the real world. (This assumes there is a ‘reality’ independent of human perception and understanding, but numerous lines of evidence suggest that there is. This way lies epistemology.) But this *does not mean* that some tendencies of human psychology don’t result in more accurate perception of reality than others.

The issue is more whether that matters.

Clearly there are ways of living every day life and promoting the well-being of one’s descendants that do not depend on conscious understanding of how human biology works, or whether the earth goes around the sun or vice versa, or whether authority figures can be trusted, and so on and so on. Every person develops a sense, as they grow up especially, about how to decide what’s probably true and which things matter: generally, a heuristic for getting through life. Some people are more comfortable with certainties, with polar identification of right and wrong; others are comfortable with ambiguity, of tolerating disorder, of being open to new experiences. Any of these attitudes can work, and obviously do.

But surely there are issues where accurate perception of reality matters, especially issues of long-term threats to survival that thwarts most people’s near-term perception of danger. The current most obvious example: Is climate change real? If it is and too many people put off doing anything about it for too long, its effects will not treat humanity kindly. (My prediction: nothing will be done about climate change until it is too late. That is: within the next century, coastal cities will be flooded, and millions of people will be displaced or die. It is not in the nature of the human species to perceive and react in time to long-term threats to survival.)

Coincidentally, this theme dovetails with this Michael Shermer essay at Scientific American: Did Humans Evolve to See Things as They Really Are?. My bold.

One of the deepest problems in epistemology is how we know the nature of reality. Over the millennia philosophers have offered many theories, from solipsism (only one’s mind is known to exist) to the theory that natural selection shaped our senses to give us an accurate, or verdical, model of the world. Now a new theory by University of California, Irvine, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman is garnering attention. (Google his scholarly papers and TED talk with more than 1.4 million views.) Grounded in evolutionary psychology, it is called the interface theory of perception (ITP) and argues that percepts act as a species-specific user interface that directs behavior toward survival and reproduction, not truth.

Well, of course! This is one of my theses – provisional conclusions – and seems an obvious conclusion based on any amount of data and experience. Of course, second-hand intuitive conclusions are not the same as rigorous scientific studies, like the one Shermer describes. Shermer, oddly, seems a bit skeptical. Yes, human perception has to be accurate to a degree – but he is not acknowledging the vast scope of the universe, which exhibits qualities that humans do not perceive accurately at all. Sure, in the range of human experience, human perception is more or less accurate – but only to the degree that it enhances survival.

P.S. I have these fantasies about writing an actual book, but with worries about how I could ever write enough to fill an entire book. And then I write posts like this, (and the previous one), which once I’m done I see go on paragraph after paragraph, to such length I figure no one will ever actually read it: TL;DR. I think if I ever gather my thoughts together into a cohesive book, I will need a really good editor.

Tonight’s music: Philip Glass, The Hours

Posted in Psychology, Science | Comments Off on Ben Carson and the range of human psychology; Michael Shermer and the perception of the real world

Rereading Early Heinlein, part 2

Posted on Friday 6 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Heinlein burst upon the SF scene in 1939, the same year Asimov did, but much more forcefully. He published 28 stories, including four long enough to require serialization over multiple magazine issues, from 1939 to 1942, of which all but five were published in John W. Campbell’s Astounding and Unkown magazines (the former science fiction, the latter fantasy). Of the four serialized long stories, three were later published as individual books: Sixth Column, Methuselah’s Children, and Beyond This Horizon. The first serial, “If This Goes On–“, was published in the early ’50s collection Revolt in 2100, taking about 2/3 of the book.

Heinlein went into service in World War II, and didn’t publish again until 1947, when he cracked Saturday Evening Post, a general interest magazine that paid much higher rates for short stories than the genre magazines [a bit like how The New Yorker pays a lot more than Asimov’s, these days], and in the same year began publishing ‘juvenile’ (what we would today called young adult) novels for Scribner’s, beginning with Rocket Ship Galileo in 1947 and running one per year for over a decade up until Starship Troopers, rejected by Scribner’s and published instead by Putnam in 1959.

It’s the earlier work that I’m addressing here. In the early ’50s, a fan press, Shasta, published three hardcover books collecting many of Heinlein’s early SF stories, including a “Future History” chart that had been published by Campbell in a 1941 issue of Astounding: The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950), The Green Hills of Earth (1951), and Revolt in 2011 (1953). Many of Heinlein’s earlier works from ’39-’42 obviously fit into this framework, and the later Saturday Evening Post stories, that ended up mostly in the second book, might have been retrospective attempts to fill in gaps in that history. (I haven’t researched Heinlein sufficiently to know if he planned it that way all along, or…)

For now, I’m discussing the second and third books of that trio. I’d remembered the stories in The Green Hills of Earth as being sorta incidental, slice-of-life incidents for a general audience, in contrast to the dramatic speculations of the other stories (“The Roads Must Roll”, “Universe”, etc.). But as I reread them these past few weeks, I gained a new respect for them, for several in particular.

Heinlein’s “Future History” became a template for the timeline of mankind’s expansion into space, relatively short-term compared to the timeline of Asimov’s future history, the one that Donald A. Wollheim captured in his nonfiction book (discussed here) — compared to that one, Heinlein’s is contained in the first of those eight items.

A key feature of Heinlein’s future history, though, was that exploration of the solar system, building settlements on the moon and other planets, was rudely interrupted by a conservative/religious rebellion on Earth — in the United States — that took decades, nearly a century to overcome.

The stories in The Green Hills of Earth are roughly arranged around the settlement of space stations above Earth, establishing colonies on the Moon, and then the other planets. The first story, “Delilah and the Space-Rigger”, concerns the head of construction on a space station who is alarmed when a new radio tech assigned from Earth turns out to be — a woman! (There’s a reference to a “Fair Employment Commission”; this story was published in 1949.) The construction head goes to great lengths to marginalize and finally dismiss her, fearing that her presence will distract the men of the station, before he realizes, on the contrary, her presence has quite an opposite effect… and he changes his mind, dramatically. The story exhibits both retrograde sexual politics, and a relatively enlightened insight into how human relations actually work.

The best story in the book might be “Space Jockey” (published 1947), which follows a spaceship pilot on the Earth to Luna run, as he is summoned on an emergency call [the same way an airline pilot today might get a call to make a flight when no other pilot is available], to the disappointment of his patient wife; they were about to leave for a show. The story explains in clear technical detail the mechanics of the trip: why it takes three ships to get from Earth to Moon (one to get into Earth orbit, a second for the transit, a third for the descent to Luna — in contrast to the naive notion, fueled by Hollywood movies even in that era, that a single rocket would achieve the entire journey by taking off and landing at both ends); how the pilot navigates the ship by aligning it to three bright stars; what happens if the transit ship goes off course [an unruly kid in the cockpit hits the wrong button!] and the pilot has to recalculate their ‘groove’, with the threat of having to dump cargo in order not to miss the lunar target.

It’s very clear and matter-of-factual, in a direct, elegant way that presages the Earth-orbit to Luna scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which illustrated, without spelling anything out in dialogue, the matter of fact precision that goes into such a trip.

— And, the story also explores the internal narrative of the tension between the pilot and his wife. During his trip, the pilot imagines several letters he would write to his impatient wife, alternately defending his line of work and why she must put up with his schedule, with some deference about how maybe their differences won’t support a continued relationship. (This debate might seem a tad dated, since it assumes the wife could not possibly have any job of her own.) And then the technical arc of the story resolves as the emotional one does, once the pilot finally calls his wife when he has landed on Luna.

Other stories in the book are relatively incidental. “The Long Watch” (1949) involves an attempted coup by a Lunar officer to take control of Earth (where matters are “too important to be left in control of politicians”) with nuclear bombs stored on Luna, and a hero, later venerated, who takes it upon himself to foil his plan. “Gentlemen, Be Seated” involves a lunar quake that seals a journalist and two others in an underground tunnel with an air leak, which is patched by one of them literally pulling down his pants and using his bare butt to plug the leak, until help arrives. “The Black Pits of Luna” involves a family taking a tour on Luna, with a young kid who goes missing; this plot point echoes the unruly kid in “Space Jockey”. “Ordeal in Space” involves a crewman suffering acrophobia as a result of a repair effort outside a spinning ship (i.e., spinning for the effect of artificial gravity inside) — and frankly, the incident in which he’s on the outside of that spinning ship, in which every way is down and he struggles to hold on for hours — is as harrowing as any spaceship emergency I can recall — is resolved by his having to rescue a cat on a balcony. And “The Green Hills of Earth”, iconic for its depiction of the blind poet Rhysling (an award for SF/F poetry is named after this character) and his sacrifice to repair an irradiated ship, even as he composes his iconic song, struck me most of all for the notion that, in those heady days of space travel throughout the solar system — half the ships that went out never came back.

Three others however are striking. “It’s Great to Be Back” concerns a couple living in Luna City who decide to return to Earth, tired of the insularity of Luna, missing the sky and open air. They return to Earth and check in to a New York City hotel, and are struck by the increased gravity, how cold the outside air is, how the old friends they meet harbor so many misconceptions about life “on” the Moon (they say “in” the Moon). And it’s dirty! They settle into a country home, where the toilet clogs and can’t be fixed until spring. They want to go home! Coincidentally on my part, this story reminds me of a couple by Shirley Jackson, whom I read some of a few months ago (one described here), but especially in this case “The Summer People”, in which rifts between city folks and country folks appear. The title of this Heinlein story, of course, becomes applied twice.

“We Also Walk Dogs” is an early, 1941, story, somewhat shoe-horned into the Future History template. It concerns General Services, a high-end establishment that does anything — short of murder — for a price, and in all confidentiality. The character focal is Grace Cormet, a senior receptionist at General Services; after a couple example episodes, the story focuses on her handling of a visit from a government official whose request is to help the government host a delegation of the other intelligent races in the solar system, here on Earth. (This is the first time, in the ‘future history’, that we’ve heard about other intelligent races in the solar system.) She concludes that the task is relatively easy except for the gravity part — delegates from lower-gravity planets might not tolerate the gravity of Earth — and suggests that the government contact a brilliant physicist though uncooperative recluse, a Dr. Krathwohl, for help. His requirement for services is a rare, exquisite, Chinese bowl called the “Flower of Forgetfulness”. [A Wikipedia search on this name leads you to the entry for this story: —We Also Walk Dogs.]

The final, longest story in The Green Hills of Earth is “Logic of Empire”, the most overt political story in the book. In the opening, two friends, Sam Houston Jones and Humphrey Wingate, argue over dinner about whether the system of ‘contractual servitude’ on Venus is equivalent to slavery. (The premise here, that Venus is inhabitable and has an indigenous species, follows from the previous story.) On the second page of this story, Wingate wakes up on a ship that he gathers is headed for Venus, without remembering how he got there. Has he been ‘shanghaied’? He ends up, sold into servitude, on a plantation on Venus, where he does grudge work alongside native amphibians. He eventually escapes and makes it back to Earth, where he tries to tell his story, and finds that no one cares. Here is where Heinlein expresses political conclusions. His would-be publisher says,

I would say that you have fallen into the commonest fallacy of all in dealing with social and economic subjects – the ‘devil theory’ … You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity. Colonial slavery is nothing new; it is the inevitable result of imperial expansion…

And when he reunites with his old friend:

I’ve been wondering how long it would take you to get your eyes opened. What is your case? It’s nothing new; it happened in the Old South, it happened again in California, in Mexico, in Australia, in South Africa. Why? Because in any expanding free-enterprise economy which does not have a money system designed to fit its requirements, the use of mother-country capital to develop the colony inevitably results in subsistence-level wages at home and slave labor in the colonies. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer…

Next time: “If This Goes On.”

Posted in Heinlein, science fiction | Comments Off on Rereading Early Heinlein, part 2

Narrative vs Reality

Posted on Tuesday 3 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Another post about Republican politics — because, cf. Heinlein, this is currently the greatest threat to the advancement of American society. Trump is a buffoon; Carson a mild-mannered religious zealot; Cruz an megalomaniac, evangelical religious zealot; Christie a political clown; Fiorina an unrepentant liar; Jindal and Huckabee religious zealots. Is anyone left? Perhaps Marco Rubio? Well, no.

Slate: Rubio Is Lying About Hillary Lying.

He accuses Hillary Clinton of lying about the Benghazi attacks. But “The Republican candidate’s claims about Hillary Clinton and Benghazi fall apart under scrutiny.”

Narrative over reality:

On right-wing websites, you’ll find plenty of affirmation for this myth. National Review, Red State, Townhall.com, the Daily Caller, and other outlets agree that Clinton “blamed the ‘awful Internet video’ for the massacre,” told “the American public that the anti-Islam video was what caused the attack,” and “was the author of the lie about what caused the attack.” But when you click their links and study their evidence, the case falls apart.

And conviction over honesty, as the writer William Saletan concludes:

Clinton avoided saying what she didn’t believe to be true. She’s careful with her words. Rubio isn’t. His butchery of the Benghazi story—the intelligence, the context, the public record—betrays a disregard for evidence that doesn’t fit his agenda. He delivers his falsehoods with absolute self-assurance. What unites Rubio with Cruz, and distinguishes him from Bush, isn’t that Rubio sometimes says things that aren’t true. It’s that he does it without compunction.

My bold: What unites Rubio with Cruz, and distinguishes him from Bush, isn’t that Rubio sometimes says things that aren’t true. It’s that he does it without compunction.

Politics. Narratives. Social groups. And the realization that the history of the world, acknowledged to be written by winners, must be affected by this same kind thinking, in which powerful speakers say things that aren’t truth, but which their audiences want to believe.

Posted in Narrative, Politics | Comments Off on Narrative vs Reality

The 2015 Republican Clown Circus

Posted on Tuesday 3 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I can’t help but thinking that the entire world, or at least the rational world of the advanced countries in Europe and Asia, are rolling their eyes at the current US Republican candidates for president. Perhaps they understand that history shows that extremist Republican candidates often rank high in early polling, while relative moderates eventually win the nomination, and as often as not, lose the general election.

As a progressive liberal, I think it’s wonderful that the current Republican race is so splintered, among so many obviously non-electable candidates (can you imagine Trump negotiating with world leaders? “You’re a loser!” Or Carson? “God has provided me with the blessings to be confidant I am right”), because that just increases the likelihood that a Democrat, mostly likely Hillary Clinton, will win the presidency in 2016. (As always, this doesn’t mean I completely approve of Hillary, or any Democratic candidate — but I’ve never voted Republican in my entire life. Republicans are always on the wrong side of science, on progress of increased civil rights, on economics that actually works and is not beholden to wealthy donors.)

And so a few of many links and comments from this past week.

Salon: Put gay people to death? Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal and Mike Huckabee to speak at Iowa “religious liberty” conference led by noxious right-wing radio host

Amanda Marcotte:

The conference is called the National Religious Liberties Conference, and it’s based on the premise that Christians are somehow having their religious liberties stripped from them because they can’t impose their views on others.

In the topsy-turvy world of Christiandom, being unable to oppress others amounts to oppression of Christians.

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Alternet: 5 worst right-wing moments of the week — Ben Carson welcomes the apocalypse

Including a delusional quote from Ted Cruz, who clearly does not actually understand science. This is what happens when your brain is on religion, or conservative ideology:

“Look at the language where they call you a ‘denier,’” he said. “Denier is not the language of science. Look, I’m the child of two scientists … The essence of the scientific method is to start with a hypothesis, then look to the evidence to disprove the hypothesis; you’re not trying to prove it, you’re trying to disprove it. Any good scientist is a skeptic; if he’s not, he or she should not be a scientist. But yet the language of the global warming alarmists, ‘denier’ is the language of religion, it’s heretic, you are a blasphemer. The response from the Sierra Club, ‘We have decreed this is the answer, you must accept it.’ And so he didn’t know his facts because he just knew his religion.”

Guffaw.

And then Ben Carson’s plan to deal with global warming is… build an Ark.

The GOP presidential frontrunner, who unlike his peers is a man of science, never lets that extensive medical education stand in the way of the fantasy world he lives in. He has previously gone on record questioning the Big Bang, evolution and gravity, and compared women who get abortions to slave-owners. This week, he unveiled his plan to deal with the watery effect of climate change.

The good doctor tweeted:

“It is important to remember that amateurs built the Ark and it was the professionals that built the Titanic.”

Yeupp, arks. Arks are the solution to the coming flood. It’s right there in the Bible. Don’t worry. God will show you how to build them. Just as god has shown us the best tax system, tithing.

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Conservatives demonize the ‘media’ as being liberal, and I think there’s a bit of truth in that, as I’ve said here before — but this is because journalists (like academics) are exposed to a variety of viewpoints, and are dedicated to truth and reality, not ideology, and so identify issues and solutions that more often than not are contrary to the ideological positions on the right. But the right, curiously, ignores the capitalist motive of the media: to make money, to serve their audience. Again from Salon, The wingnut myth that refuses to die: The one simple reason why there’s no “liberal media conspiracy”.

It should be noted that the real world tends to have a liberal bias — at least what Cruz considers a liberal bias. Take climate change, for example. The fact that the climate is warming because of human activity is a completely uncontroversial notion; it is happening, and the vast majority of scientists agree that it will be catastrophic for humanity if nothing is done very soon. That the mainstream media does not contest the issue of climate change, or claim that it is some giant left-wing conspiracy, does not prove it is liberal, but that it is operating in reality. Cruz does not operate in reality, and believes climate change (i.e. science) is a “religion.” But just because Cruz believes this, or his deranged father, Rafael, believes that evolution is a communist lie, does not mean that evolutionary biologists are communists or that climate scientists are religious fanatics — it means that Rafael Cruz and his son are delusional.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on The 2015 Republican Clown Circus