Views from Crestmont Drive

Here’s a great statement by Neil deGrasse Tyson: What Science Is and How and Why It Works

The scientific method can be summarized in one sentence, which is all about objectivity: “Do whatever it takes to avoid fooling yourself into thinking something is true that is not, or that something is not true that is.”

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Objective truths exist outside of your perception of reality, such as: the value of pi, E=mc2, Earth’s rate of rotation, and that carbon dioxide and methane are greenhouse gases. These statements can be verified by anybody, at any time, and at any place. And they are true whether or not you believe in them. Meanwhile, personal truths are what you may hold dear, but there exists no simple way of convincing others who disagree except by heated argument, coercion, or by force. These are the foundations of most people’s opinions. Is Jesus your savior? Is Mohammad God’s last prophet on Earth? Should the government support poor people? Is Beyoncé a cultural queen? Kirk or Picard?

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Note further that in science, conformity is anathema to success. The persistent accusations that we are all trying to agree with one another is laughable to scientists attempting to advance their careers. The best way to get famous in your own lifetime is to pose an idea that is counter to prevailing research and which ultimately earns a consistency of observations and experiment. This ensures healthy disagreement at all times while working on the bleeding edge of discovery.

Worth reading in full.

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This essay summarizes my thoughts about the incoherence and hypocrisy of the pro-life movement [aside from the fundamental biological issues about how an embryo is not a human being] —

Slate: Why Do Pro-Life Activists Seem Only to Care About Unborn Lives?

If pro-life advocates genuinely saw saving unborn children as their top priority, then a significant number of them would also fight for a world in which all women and men can be confident that their children’s future will include education, food, and housing. Many would reject a political platform that cheers taxpayer funding of the military while simultaneously trying to cut health care funding—health care that might allow women to feel secure enough to bring a baby to term. And many would make contraception a central issue, instead of allowing religious prudery to take precedence over the unborn babies they are fighting for.

And yet, once children are born, conservatives have no concern for social welfare programs that might help them thrive. More fundamentally….. I think the revulsion against abortion is about the human compulsion to expand, to reproduce, to grow the tribe. Quantity over quality.

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Salon: Trump’s “proof” of voter fraud is an anecdote from a golfer who may have committed voter fraud himself

Trump watches TV, especially Fox News, and watches social media, and reacts with impulsive tweets. From a larger perspective, this is about how stories — in the worst case, mere anecdotes — shape human perception and belief; while systematic investigation, statistical studies, science, while not intuitively easy for human cognition, actually leads to objectively verifiable facts.

And reality will prevail, as Jeffrey Kluger says in Time Magazine, Why Trump Will Lose His War on Science.

Science, it’s worth remembering, doesn’t read your Tweets. It doesn’t care about the size of your Electoral College victory. When rising oceans swamp coastal communities or unvaccinated children fall to outbreaks of measles or mumps or whooping cough, you can’t pin that on a crooked media or a rigged election. It’s simply the way the fact-based world works. That’s a lesson the Trump Administration had best learn — before we all pay the price.

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Is Trump a liar or delusional, or something worse? In the past day or two, some clever person registered the domain alternativefacts.com with an automatic redirect to this piece of Psychology Today: Gaslighting: Know It and Identify It to Protect Yourself.

The idea of ‘gaslighting’, taken from the title of the 1944 film Gaslight, in which a man tries to drive his wife insane by insisting that things she hears and remembers aren’t true, has become more familiar in recent months. Are Trump’s insistence about things that are apparently not true deliberate attempts to ‘gaslight’ the public, in an Orwellian fashion? I’m not sure he’s that clever. I just think he’s a megolamaniac delusional.

But the Psych Today article lists 11 points, and Trump matches several of them, at least.

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On a similar theme, Vox, Matthew Yglesias: The best theory for why Trump tells such obvious lies.

In short, Trump doesn’t care about truth or reality, he cares about tribal loyalty. He forces others to tell lies, or support his lies, as a mean of enforcing their loyalty to him.

Any Republican who is willing to publicly echo Trump’s lies does two things. One is that he proves he is willing to incur costs to his personal reputation in order to defend Trump. The other is that having in fact borne costs to his personal reputation, he objectively ties up his success with Trump’s.

In the context of my ‘provisional conclusions’, this echoes the way religions work. Religions are only incidentally about making factual claims about cosmic reality — whether gods exist and control human destiny, etc. — but are more about creating communities [tribes] of like-minded people who, through their religious commitments, trust and support one another. The test of this commitment is about whether they support the supernatural narrative of the tribe…no matter how implausible it might be. The smart ones of the tribe understand that those supernatural claims are ridiculous, serve a social purpose without being actually true, and keep this understanding to themselves. Cultural commitment is more important. That is human nature, and that is why its hijacking by anecdote is easy and dangerous.

Conservatives, especially religious extremists, seem given over to paranoia and prophecies of doom, and they never learn.

10 Right-Wing Predictions About Obama That Never Came True

Among those implicated: Michele Bachman, Sarah Palin, Joseph Farah, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Larry Klayman, Janet Porter, Wayne LaPierre, Rafael Cruz, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones. These people never lose their audiences, no matter how repeatedly wrong they are.

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On the more cerebral topic of belief in ‘god’.

A post by Robert V.S. Redick:

And a comment by Jesse Bering to one of his own posts, yesterday:

From an atheist’s perspective informed by psychological science, it’s not simply an absence of evidence for God. There is a plethora of evidence of innate cognitive biases that generate the sort of recalcitrant illusions (misattributions of agency, intentions, continuity of mind after death, etc) underlying the commonsense belief in God and the afterlife.

Bering wrote a whole book about this — The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life — one of the best books on reasons to set religious faith aside as a kind mental illusion.

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And from Connor Wood’s “Science on Religion” blog: Trump shows why Rationalia would fail. I haven’t read this completely yet, but it seems to dovetail with a recurring theme in some of my reading, including having just finished Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, where he emphasizes the human need for “imagined orders” including religions, political systems, and money, systems of shared trust among large groups of people, without which large societies could not function. Culture based on purely rationalistic terms (Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s “Rationalia”) would never work, Wood says. Will pursue.

I keep ‘saving’ links or posts on Facebook that I don’t get around to right away, to read or post. Here are a few from the dozen I’ve saved in the past month or so.

NPR: Adopting a Sci-Fi Way of Thinking About the Future.

Posted on January 2nd, on what has apparently become National Science Fiction Day as it correponds with Isaac Asimov’s birthday. The piece quotes a key excerpt from a 1978 Asimov essay:

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be — and naturally this means that there must be an accurate perception of the world as it will be. This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our Everyman, must take on a science fictional way of thinking, whether he likes it or not or even whether he knows it or not. Only so can the deadly problems of today be solved.

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On California, perhaps a refuge from Trumplandia, on Tim Rutten’s site: The Right’s Hatred of California Is Really Fear of a Future that Already Is Working.

What’s really at work in the right-wing’s demonization of California is not really loyalty to Trumpism or traditionalist devotion to the Electoral College. It’s fear of the future. When Trump vowed to “make America great again” the right read his rhetoric as a promise to take us back in time—to the years when white men went off to work and white women stayed home with the kids and minority races were just that, minorities who kept to themselves.

California, by contrast, already is what more of America will look like in the years to come. No single race is in the majority or enjoys a lock on political or economic power. Seventeen percent of all Americans live in California and 38% of them are non-Hispanic whites, 38.8% are Latinos, 14.7% are Asians, 6.5% are African American, 1.7% are Native Americans—numerically, the country’s largest concentration of indigenous people—and 3.8% describe themselves as of mixed race. More Californians—43%–speak a language other than English in their homes, though it will confound Trump supporters to know that immigration from Mexico slowed long ago and the majority of new immigrants come from Asia, mainly China.

And despite conversative fears of how the country is changing, it hasn’t harmed California:

If the Golden State were an independent country, according to the most recent World Bank ratings, it would have the globe’s sixth largest economy.

So there.

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Via David Brin: Google Sky

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Wall Street Journal: Jonathan Haidt (one of my favorite authors, based on the one book of his I’ve read) and Ravi Iyer on How to Get Beyond Our Tribal Politics. Have not read this, but I presume in condenses the lessons of his singular book.

I’ve built a page here for reviews, books and films, that I’ve posted here since mid-2013, when the “Views from..” blog was established, succeeding the earlier Locus Online editorial blog. The link is in the header above. I’ll go through the earlier blog eventually, though I don’t think there are nearly so many substantial reviews there. Also, I occasionally post film reviews on Facebook that aren’t always copied here; I’ll track those down too.

I might also add, for anyone who cares, that I read many more books than ever get written up here. I almost always take notes as I read, and type them up into a Word file (I’ve been doing this for 20 years), but I less often go the next step and condense my notes into any sort of posted review. (At the moment, I do intend a post or two about Robert Silverberg’s short fiction through 1975, which I read late last year, and which covered many books; and James Gleick’s recent nonfiction Time Travel, which I finished last week; and Hugo Gernsback’s notorious ‘classic’ SF novel Ralph 124C 41+, which I finished yesterday.)