Skeptic's Play

Asexuals are not X-men

2012-02-02T10:06:00.000-08:00

There was another thing that really bothered me about the House episode featuring an asexual couple, which was something the writer said afterwards.

Originally, part of my dialog included thoughts about whether as a species we've grown past sex. Any time we tackle a subject, we risk the possibility of not doing it justice. I apologize that you feel I did you a disservice. It was not my intent.
...
Asexuality is a new topic for me and definitely one I find fascinating. It is a subject I would like to continue to explore here or ..on future shows I write for. I think it speaks to where humans are now and where we are going. I will do my best in the future to do it justice. Thank you for feedback and please share any and all thoughts.
[emphasis mine]

Of all the things you could possibly say about asexuality, this one really gets me. It offends me as an asexual and as a skeptic. If there's one way to make House's portrayal of asexuality even worse, this is it.

I'm not really sure where people get this idea, that asexuality is the future. It's comparable to Creationism in how wrong it is on evolution. It's a magical worldview, where cultural saturation of sex will somehow spawn asexuals as a spiritual counterweight. It's a false equation between "evolution" and "progress". It's a mythical view of the pure, superhuman asexual. It just doesn't make any sense no matter how I look at it.

Nonetheless, this is not the first time I've heard it. In fact, I hear it from several different quarters.

1. People who think they're helping.

Sometimes I get this response from non-asexuals who are trying to affirm asexuality. How else to affirm it, but by saying what you think is great about it? Maybe you think chastity is christ-like, or that society is so oversexed that it's desensitizing itself. Asexuals sure sound chaste, and maybe they're part of the coming Great Desensitization!

Ugh! If asexuals are chaste, it's not usually because they hold it up as a virtue. It's because they would rather be chaste, regardless of whether or not they happen to think it is a virtue. I certainly do not regard chastity as a virtue; furthermore, like many other asexuals, I am not chaste. I find it really offensive to stuff these "values" into my mouth and pretend that's what I asked for.

If you talk about how extraordinarily great asexuals are, that's missing the point. Asexuals are ordinary people. Sexuals are ordinary people. Neither is a choice, and both can result in functional human beings, so why is it suddenly a moral thing? And what induces a person to say that they themselves are in the immoral, lesser group, I'll never understand.

2. People who think that's what I say.

Observe that the religious right is always stuffing their values of "purity" into your face. Asexuals sure sound pure. They think they're better than us! They're be hijacking the discourse of sexual identity in order to advance the "family values" agenda!

If I really were advocating everyone be more abstinent, and if I really were using my identity as a way to protect my politics from criticism, then my critics would be absolutely justified. This is what I am afraid would happen in House. An asexual character, written by a clueless non-asexual, says something clueless. And then viewers (especially my friends in skepticism) would call out the BS, and they would be right to do so.

Meanwhile, in the real world, asexuality actually made me even more liberal on sexual issues. Before I knew I was asexual, the only way I could make sense of the world was by assuming people were almost like me, but exaggerating their sexuality. Now I know better. Now I recognize that there is wide variation in sexuality, and what seems unthinkable to one person is the reality of the next person. I've heard so many times the idea that more sexuality is better, and that's wrong. But if I simply reversed it, saying less sexuality is better, that would also be wrong as well as hypocritical.

3. Asexuals who say it, putting me down.

A corollary of "asexuals are ordinary people" is that some asexuals will also believe some wacky things. They're put in a senseless position in life, and they have to make sense of it. And why not make sense of it in a self-flattering way? I'm not weird, I'm above it all. I'm the next step. Sex has been cheapened and no one takes it seriously anymore.

The trouble, besides the blatant misunderstanding of evolution, is that other asexuals don't "fit" into this picture. As a gray-A, I definitely don't fit into the picture. To them I'm not a "real" asexual, I'm just a sexual trying to be like them. As if I would try to be like anything. I have one foot on each side, and I didn't get to be this way by thinking one side is "better" than the other. What am I to them, a pervert, half a pervert? I don't know what they think of me; I suspect they don't think of me at all.

Because this view is fundamentally harmful to the community, I usually only see it coming from a few newbies. Presumably, they're either soon disabused of the notion, or they stop participating in the community.

tl;dr: The idea that asexuality is the next stage of humanity is just wrong and offensive from all angles. I just lost all confidence in the writer for House, and would really rather she never "explore" asexuality again.

House did not do the research

2012-01-31T19:04:00.000-08:00

Written Jan. 24:
House recently aired an episode called "Better Half", which features an asexual couple. Here's a sneak peek and full episode on Hulu. Reportedly, its portrayal was very negative. So it's time for another case of "Let's watch TV and judge its sensitivity to marginalized groups". Order! Order! But before I watch the show and write the second half of this post, I have some preliminary comments:

1. I am a fan of House. It is literally the only TV show I watch. Therefore, I'm inclined to be forgiving of the show, and might not agree with the negative reports.

2. Sometimes people assume that Dr. House is always in the right. Sort of the whole point is that House is a diagnostic genius, and sees through a lot of BS in society, but he can also be blind to his own BS. Typically, none of the characters in the show are completely right, they just represent different perspectives.

So for example, I found a complaint about an episode where House gets it wrong on Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. But it's unclear to me the degree of wrongness, because the complaint focuses mostly on House's behavior. Is it bad because of poor research, or is it bad because no other characters offer more positive opinions, or is it bad because viewers are likely to agree with House regardless?

3. Sometimes people expect characters of their minority group to be perfect angels. But that doesn't work in a story. In fact, it would stand out in a show where "everybody lies". Therefore, I will be tolerant of some degree of lying/drama/character development on behalf of the asexual characters. But if the asexual characters are wrong, they should be wrong in a non-stereotypical, unpredictable way. For example, instead of, "After trying sex, I decided I was really a nymphomaniac with repression issues", it would be better if it were, "I was wrong to be so defensive about my hormones, because it turns out I have high testosterone, unrelated to my orientation."

------------------
Written Jan. 31, after watching show:

Conclusion (no spoilers):
Yeah, there's really no way for me to see this story in a positive light. It's not just Dr. House being the person he is, but the factual events in the show not reflecting the reality of asexuality. Instead, the factual events played into a few common myths about asexuality, meaning that the writers failed to understand just how insensitive the narratives were. Lastly, while different characters offered different perspectives on the asexual couple, the "positive" perspective from Dr. Wilson was patronizing, and effectively a strawman.

Otherwise, the episode was okay, as far as House goes.

Spoilers below

In this episode's side story Dr. Wilson has a married patient who claims to be asexual. Upon mentioning this to Dr. House, House bets that he can find a medical cause. So far, nothing wrong, since that's just what House would do. The problem is that, in this fictional universe, House turns out to be right. The wife had been lying to her husband for the last ten years, I guess because she believed this was necessary to make the marriage work. The husband has a brain tumor which lowers his libido and causes erectile dysfunction.

The biggest factual error here is equating asexuality with low libido and erectile dysfunction. Your typical asexual has typical libido, typical sex drive, and does not have erectile dysfunction. To spell this out, imagine someone who has fully functioning sexual arousal, but gets aroused at random intervals rather than when seeing someone attractive or even being with someone they love. Or imagine someone who gets physically aroused but doesn't connect this experience with interpersonal intimacy. If an asexual has low libido or erectile dysfunction, that would be unrelated.

In the real world, the asexual guy would have pointed out to House that his asexuality was unrelated to his libido (or better yet, point out that he already had a functioning libido). But I guess the characters in the show can't have any more of a clue than the writers do. Too bad, the extra twist would have made the story more compelling.

The worst part about it is that the factual inaccuracies play into myths about asexuals which people are already inclined to believe. Asexuals are either lying, deluded, or sick. Something must be wrong with their brain or their dick. The show referenced other narratives, such as hormonal problems or childhood abuse, which I took to signify that the writers did some minimal research. But apparently not enough.

However, I must reluctantly give points for wife's non-stereotypical motivations for lying. As far as I know, asexuals are not commonly accused of lying about their sexuality in order to maintain a relationship with an asexual partner. I mean, that just comes out of the left field, and wasn't explained very well. And for ten years too. It's a "delightful" inversion of the myth that asexuals are hiding themselves to trick sexuals into bad relationships. Only it makes even less sense.

One of the things I like about House is that each character will offer a different perspective on any given issue. It's fun to watch the perspectives interact and collide, while simultaneously developing the characters. Since it was only a side story, only a few characters commented. Probably the most positive was Dr. Jessica Adams, who went so far as to suggest House could be wrong. And then she casually gave up that line of thought because of a one-liner from House?

The other perspective came from Dr. Wilson. Wilson just didn't want House messing with his patients' marriage, and thought it might be better to leave them happy as they are. He says it's destroying a person's identity, like proving to a gay man that he's straight. He thinks they were happy, even if it was based on lies. I think this is completely patronizing. I don't want people going around trying to disprove my asexuality, but this isn't because I'm afraid of the truth. It's because people are generally ignorant and think they can disprove it when they can't.

Wilson's perspective on this issue is in character for him. But the way it's written, the conflict is, "Should we let them live a lie, or tell them the truth?" when the conflict should be "Are we really disproving a person's orientation, or are we just biased by our prejudices?" The very framing of the conflict is all wrong. I'm not convinced the writers know what a positive perspective on asexuality even looks like.

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Other perspectives on this episode.
There is also an ongoing petition.

The relatively prime graph

2012-01-28T13:49:00.000-08:00

Wow, it's been some time since I've posted a puzzle! Here's a simple pure math puzzle off the top of my head.

Back in middle/high school, I would kill time in classes drawing graph of all the points (n,m) such that n and m are relatively prime. Relatively prime means that there is no integer greater than 1 which divides both n and m. The graphs would look something like this:

The black squares represent (n,m) where n and m are relatively prime, while the white squares represent (n,m) where n and m are not relatively prime.

The question is, can you find a 3x3 white square somewhere in this graph? In other words, find N and M such that (N,M) are not relatively prime, nor are the eight surrounding pairs, (N-1,M-1), (N,M-1), (N+1,M-1), (N-1,M), etc.

It's not a particularly elegant problem, but think of it as open-ended. There are many solutions, and many methods will work to find them. Can you find one?

Superconductors: a picture of progress

2012-01-26T09:55:00.000-08:00

In any introduction to superconductors, you can find a brief explanation of the history. The first superconductor ever discovered was Mercury, which only superconducts below 4.2 K.* As more superconductors were discovered, this temperature slowly increased, but theory predicted it would never grow beyond 30 K. And then in 1986, there was a breakthrough and high temperature superconductors were discovered!

*K is a unit of temperature relative to absolute zero. Room temperature is 290 K.

My favorite part is always the timeline, which shows the critical temperature (Tc) of superconductors vs time of discovery. It sort of looks like you could fit it with an exponential curve:

But the exponential fit is highly misleading! If it were really following the exponential curve, we'd have discovered superconductors that work even at oven temperatures. The real progress looks more like this:

If anything, this looks more like a logistic function. But if it's a logistic function, that implies that we're hitting a limit on high temperature superconductivity. I'm not sure about that... we could have another breakthrough around the corner.

It sort of looks like the field of superconductivity has had large periods of stagnation. But this is not true! It appears like there's hardly any progress from 1941 to 1968, but in fact 1957 was when BCS theory was proposed as the explanation for superconductivity. That's a huge step of progress!

The lack of progress after 1986 is also illusory. A lot of progress was made in characterizing high temperature superconductors, as well as finding technological applications. And in 2008, a whole new class of iron-based superconductors was discovered, but isn't shown because it has a lower Tc than the copper-based superconductors.

I feel like this is a little lesson in predicting scientific progress. It is true that there is always progress, but if you look at any particular aspect, say the highest temperature superconductor, it does not progress the way you expect! Sometimes progress comes in jumps and spurts. And sometimes progress comes in the form of understanding the obstacles to moving forward. The question isn't necessarily, "How can we overcome these obstacles?" but instead could be, "Is it even possible to overcome these obstacles?"

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A note on the graphs: I gathered the data points from various sources (mainly Wikipedia). However, I may have missed a few superconducting materials, and not all sources even agree on the dates and temperatures. Therefore, I will not vouch for the accuracy of every detail, and I don't care to list the materials, dates, or temperatures.

Science vs Acne: followup

2012-01-23T20:55:00.000-08:00

Some time last year, I talked about doing "an affectionate parody of science" by half-assing an experiment with acne treatments.

On one side of my back, I tried using hot pads. On the other side I used some acne medication.

So it turns out that hot pads might be effective, but they're too much work! I'd have to heat up some water, then pour it on the pad, and hold it against my back for the small window of time when the pad was neither too hot, nor too cold. This window was shorter than three minutes, so I'd have to repeat a few times. And then I'd have to do it again for each pad-sized unit of area on my back. In practice this meant that I gave up on hot pads entirely after a few weeks.

The acne medication, on the other hand, appears moderately more effective than hot pads (or no treatment). The medication I was using was tea tree oil. That sounded really dubious to me, so I didn't expect it to work, but it did. Apparently, it's a legitimate acne medication, shown to be about as effective as benzoyl peroxide.

As I said before, I drank some "skin detox" tea so that I could later find some excuse to credit the tea instead of crediting the actual acne treatment. It seems hard to believe that drinking this tea could continue to have an effect for two months, (but only on the side of my back with the tea tree oil, and not during the winter break when I stopped using tea tree oil). But the facts speak for themselves! A single empirical observation trumps all the theoretical arguments in the world. It's herbal tea, man. Goodness is real nature, or so the tea told me.

More seriously, I drink a lot of herbal tea, but not because I think it's healthy. Technically speaking, herbal tea is just tea that's not made from the herb Camellia sinensis. It's made from other plants, such as chamomile or chrysanthemum. Chrysanthemum tea is great. In an alternate universe, we would call chrysanthemum tea tea, and all other teas herbal teas.

Math-ive attack

2012-01-20T10:32:00.000-08:00

Warning: this post is part of my quest to find increasingly ridiculous excuses to talk about math. But first, some music.

When listening to Massive Attack's song "Future Proof", the part that stands out to me are those beeping sounds that continue through the entire song. Most of the time, the beeps cycle quasi-randomly between three pitches in some kind of inscrutable arpeggio.

So the question is, does the sequence of pitches actually come from a random number generator, or does it just sound random because it goes by so quickly?

I wouldn't put it past artists to use randomness in their music. I swear, some of the other bands I listen to must compose lyrics by pulling words out of a hat. And if Wikipedia is to be believed, there is a long history of using chance in musical compositions, and the practice is known as aleatoric music.

On the other hand, humans are terrible at generating and recognizing randomness. Maybe the composer wrote a sequence of pitches that seemed random to them, but which does not resemble a typical randomly generated sequence. Or maybe it's not even meant to sound random, but sounds random anyway because humans are so terrible at recognizing it.

Perhaps this can be cleared up if I transcribe a small segment of the music. The following represents the sequence of pitches starting at 3:35, until the chord change at 3:41:

3223 2132 1232 1132 1232 1323 2123 2132

(Note: If a note is of double length, I'm transcribing it as a repeated note. I can't guarantee that my transcription is free of errors.)

Now that we have a transcription, it's an open-and-shut case. This sequence was probably not created by a random number generator. If it were randomly generated, you would expect about a third of the numbers (give or take a few) would be followed by a duplicate. In other words, there should be a lot more double-length notes, and probably even some triple-length notes. Here is a randomly generated sequence for comparison:

1131 2131 3133 3121 3133 1112 3311 1213

Observe that there are three doubles and three triples. Massive Attack's sequence, on the other hand, only has two doubles.

You might also observe that the randomly generated sequence has sixteen 3s, four 2s, and twelve 1s. This may seem strange, since you would expect each digit to appear about ten or eleven times. But that's just the way randomness goes sometimes. But if we accept that randomness sometimes produces outliers, shouldn't we also accept the possibility that randomness produced Massive Attack's sequence even though it includes only two doubles?

The answer is that we are using trickier reasoning here than it may first appear. A true random number generator is equally likely to produce any sequence of 32 digits. A random number generator is no more likely to produce the sequence I showed than it is to produce Massive Attack's sequence. Our reasoning really has to do with what sequences are most likely to be produced by a human.

And the thing is, we don't really know the probability that a human will generate any given sequence. There are 3^32 sequences, and it's just not possible to collect that many statistics. So the first thing we do is we classify those sequences by some simple property.* For example, I chose to classify the sequences by the number of doubles and triples. The idea is that instead of 3^32 different sequences, we just keep track of the set of sequences with one double, the set of sequences with two doubles, and so forth. It's (somewhat) well-known that when humans try to imitate random number generators, they tend to underestimate the typical frequency of doubles and triples. So if a sequence has relatively few doubles and triples, that tends to support the hypothesis that it was a human imitating randomness.

*This is much like the way we group microstates together into macrostates in order to define entropy. [/physics]

Note that we can come up with more hypotheses to explain the sequence. For example, perhaps they used a random number generator, but ignored most repeats. Or they could have used a random number generator in some other way. This would be difficult to disprove. However, I believe in a fourth hypothesis, which is that it's meant to sound wandering and mysterious, but is not meant to imitate randomness. I observe that the transcribed sequence has three copies of the sequence 3212321, which is the kind of pattern that seems very unlikely to be produced by a random number generator, but much less unlikely to appear in deliberately composed music.

Reflections on grad school

2012-01-17T17:24:00.000-08:00

I am in my second year of a graduate physics program. Students typically earn their PhD after five or more years. In a few years, I will be at a completely different stage of research, and have a completely different perspective. But right now, grad school is still somewhat "new".

My point of comparison is undergraduate university. I thought undergraduate physics was really easy. Obviously, I had many classmates who disagreed, which goes to show that my perspective is not necessarily representative. But that was me. I do very well in a class environment. I never had to study for tests because I already understood the material from the time it was mentioned in lecture.

Grad school is not a class environment. Or at least, not most of it. I've been taking a few classes every semester, but they are not very important, and the grades don't really matter. Soon I won't have any more classes to take. At that point, I'll divert all my attention to research, which is the real centerpiece of physics graduate school.

My impression is that research uses a different set of skills from those used in classes. It's hard to say exactly what that skill set is, but it includes self motivation, good communication skills, and good paper-reading skill. For me, this is somewhat of a disappointment, because I may be great in the classroom, but I am only decent at research skills. 'Twas to be expected, since life isn't a series of lectures, but still. I am most annoyed by all these papers. There is something to be said for the compact and efficient way that physics papers present information. But one thing I would not say for papers is that they are welcoming to people who are new to a topic. I would have a much easier time of it if they were in lecture format.

I came into grad school wanting to do theoretical physics, but now I am doing experimental physics. That's the way a lot of people do it, actually. For whatever reason, incoming students' interests skew towards theoretical, even though there is more room in experimental. An obvious possible cause is that theoretical physics is glamorous. String theory and cosmology are also glamorous, and thus also overrepresented among incoming students' interests. I've also heard it suggested that incoming students want to do theoretical physics because most undergraduate work is essentially theoretical. Students want to do more of the same, and think theoretical research will fit.

Myself, I just liked the idea of solving mathematical puzzles. I've been a puzzle enthusiast for a long time, as you know. But I was open to the idea of doing experimental physics. So I tried it. And now I see there are a lot of advantages to experimental work. And the thing is, I still get to solve puzzles! Last semester, I spent a lot of time trying to explain a feature in our data. I talked to a theorist about it, and he suggested a direction, but I still had to work out the rest. It was quite satisfying. This made me realize, experimentalists will always have an abundant supply of their own problems to solve, and theorists can't solve all of them.

I'm not sure what theoretical physics is like, but I suspect that it is not really much like undergraduate study after all. They probably have to read lots of theoretical papers, which are like ten times harder to read than experimental papers. And they probably do most calculations by computer modeling rather than pencil and paper like undergrads do. And I bet it's more stressful because it's more competitive too. Or so I imagine.

So yeah, I like where I am. My advisor fits the "perpetually absent" archetype, which suits me fine. I've met her several times, and she gives a great pep talk. Most of the time I just refer to the other grad students and postdocs for help, and they are very helpful. I have no complaints so far. Let's see if that changes in a few years!

I'm an organ donor

2012-01-12T12:10:00.000-08:00

Everyone should be an organ donor. You won't need organs when you're dead! And among the living, there's always a short supply of organ transplants.

I don't really know anything about organ donation that you can't learn on the internets. But I'm enthusiastic about it.

For some reason, organ donation isn't an issue that skeptics talk about much, but it well could be. Many people don't become organ donors because they believe in myths that aren't true. My favorite one, because I used to think it was plausible myself, is the idea that doctors won't try as hard to prevent your death if they know you're an organ donor. But now I realize that it doesn't pass the smell test. Even if we thought doctors were completely irrational, it's not even the same set of doctors who check organ donor status.

Oh, and just to make things interesting, there's a strange relationship between religion and organ donation. It turns out that most major religions* allow, or even encourage, organ donation. And there are lots and lots of educational materials out there which say so. Because people need to be informed about their own religious beliefs, or they might get them all wrong!

*The only notable exception is Shintoism.

But seriously, according to a study, 8% of non-donors in the US cite religion as their reason for not being organ donors.* But it's not so straightforward as religiosity discouraging organ donation, because we're ignoring people who become donors because of their religious views. Another study** found that stronger religious views were correlated with more positive attitudes towards organ donation. I also found a paper which discussed multiple factors which may affect people's decisions, including a sense of spiritual connection with recipients, and a sense of spiritual concern for body integrity. The paper finds that the former is correlated with organ donation among women, and the latter is anticorrelated with organ donation among men.

*Most people cite at least one of the myths about organ donation.
**Unfortunately, I don't have access this this paper, so I can't say much about it. But it's based on 190 undergraduates at a small midwestern University.

So that's about all the statistics I found. Draw your own conclusions from them.

Sexism, transphobia, and uncertainty

2012-01-09T11:07:00.000-08:00

As you likely know, there is an ongoing discussion about how women can be made to feel uncomfortable in the atheist and skeptical communities. A post on Friendly Atheist explains how the problem is not with single incidents of men flirting with the women:

Being propositioned ... or flirted with at a conference will not make most women feel devalued. Being propositioned several times, or feeling like most men only approach you for the purpose of getting in your pants, can.

This reminds me of an anecdote, which may seem only tangentially related. I have a friend who one time told me about her experiences looking for women. She said that she had been rejected many times because she is trans. This is not too surprising, because plenty of lesbians and bisexuals are transphobic. And even among people who are not openly transphobic, many of them still feel uncomfortable actually dating transgender people.

And I, ever the skeptical thinker, commented that in any particular case (excluding cases where people were being openly transphobic), there was no way of knowing that people were rejecting her because she was trans. People could just be disinterested for whatever reason, and it doesn't even necessarily reflect on her.

But she explained to me, individual cases may be uncertain, but if you look at the whole series of rejections, it's reasonable to claim that some of them were caused by transphobia, though we may not know which ones.

I had been thinking of it superficially, looking at an individual case, weighing the evidence for and against transphobia, and I concluded it was uncertain. But I should have thought about the deeper implications. What do you actually do with this uncertainty? Will you just sit back and take it? Hope that everyone involved has good intentions, rather than concealing bad ones?

The uncertainty just makes it worse. When every case is uncertain, you have no one in particular to blame. You can't complain about any particular case without people dismissing the case as uncertain. You can't complain about rejection, because by itself there is absolutely nothing wrong with rejecting a trans person. The problem is in the pattern.

Similarly, by itself there is absolutely nothing wrong with hitting on a woman. There are more or less awkward ways to hit on people, but if it were just a one-time thing, I think most women could tolerate being hit on in even the most awkward situation. The problem is in the pattern.

And yet, every time the internet blows up over sexism, the focus is on a single case study. What's up with that?

A new favorite blog

2012-01-06T00:18:00.000-08:00

Queereka is a blog specifically about the intersection of skepticism and queerness. I have been looking for a blog like this for years, and it's finally appeared as a new sister site to Skepchick.

(If you're wondering if it includes asexuality, the answer is that it has not been mentioned yet.)

Making fun of sexualities: godless edition

2012-01-04T10:46:00.000-08:00

As I've said before, lots of people who are supposedly sex-positive aren't very good at it. Sometimes, they say stupid things which damage sexual freedom, because they just never really thought about it.

I think it is important to show specific examples of this, so I collected a few. These are not meant to be especially disgraceful examples or anything, just little examples that came to mind. All these examples come from the atheist community, not because atheists are the worst or only offenders, but to make it more relevant to all my atheist readers.

Christopher Hitchens, in his book God is Not Great, repeated the myth that Orthodox Jews are religiously required to have sex through a hole in a sheet. I looked this up, and Hitchens has since recognized that it is an urban legend, and removed it from newer editions. Good for him, my respect for Hitchens just went up a notch.

But even if we believed the legend were true, why is that relevant? So what if a group of people has sex through a hole in a sheet? And if you're attacking, or even just joking about the "hole-in-a-sheet" practice, it will make kinky people feel unwelcome.

It sounds an awful lot like making fun of people for what you view as sexual deviancy. In fact, that's exactly what it is. The urban legend primarily comes from the non-Orthodox Jewish community as a joke at the expense of Orthodox Jews. It's an old story: Group A dislikes group B, and then makes up rumors about the deviant sexual practices of group B. If Hitchens had played his cards right, this would have been a great example of how religious affiliation poisons everything.

Here's another example, one that happened to me personally. Friendly Atheist posted the results of OkCupid statistics, which showed how many people claim to have never masturbated, binned by religious affiliation. Then he asked people to come up with amusing theories for the results. This prompted many jokes along the lines of:

This chart can be more effectively broken down into two categories: Those who masturbate, and those who lie about masturbating!

Because anyone who claims to not masturbate is just being silly, and we should point and laugh at them. I get that people lie about masturbating (and that this likely accounts for most of the poll results), but this is just incredibly poor taste. People who do not masturbate usually grow up feeling ignored and erased. And then when anyone finally acknowledges the possibility, they make a joke about it, and then a dozen more people jump in and make more jokes about it. It is not a single joke which is the problem, it's the entire behavior pattern which is the problem.

When I reacted negatively, people offered helpful comments like this one:

Miller sounds a bit... backed up. There's surely something that could help that.

I said that I personally know people in the asexual community who do not masturbate. This is a red herring, since asexuals aren't significantly less likely to masturbate (though perhaps they are more likely to admit not masturbating). But for whatever reason, people are more hesitant to make jokes when they realize they're making fun of an actual sexual orientation, something that people actually live through. This is kind of stupid... what did they think they were doing?

My last example is when atheists (primarily liberals, really) attack Ann Coulter by insinuating that she is transsexual. For an example, see virtually any liberal discussion about Coulter; it's about as likely as references to Hitler. This one really pisses me off, and my mind drifts to the fact that people literally get murdered for being transgender. Other people on the internet said it better.

Humorlessness is tough to sell, but making fun of sexualities is heartless, harmful, stupid, and I can't laugh at it anymore.

A jaded look at agnosticism

2012-01-02T09:05:00.000-08:00

When I first identified as an atheist, I took interest in arguments over the definition of atheism and agnosticism. But over time, I have come to hate these arguments.

I freely admit that not all of my hate is for good reasons. For example, I hate the sheer number of cliched arguments involved. I hate analogies about baldness, collecting stamps, and fairies. I hate distinctions between lack of belief and belief of lack. I hate arguments over negation and certainty, even if they happen to be good arguments. As for this diagram...

I have seen so many variants on this diagram. (Source)

...I think it needs two more dimensions.

The horizontal line in the middle represents people who think that there is no way to tell whether the diagram is or is not BS. ...with apologies to the creator of the original.

These are silly pet peeves of mine, but I think there are also some good reasons to dislike arguments over atheism/agnosticism. I believe that the arguments are mostly made of relative opinions. That is to say, identifying as agnostic or atheist mostly has to do with how you see yourself relative to others. Are you constantly bothered by those atheists, or are you sick of those agnostics? It's all about who you want to use as a foil to yourself.

And since the arguments are primarily about your personal experiences and impressions of the other side, it all ends in stereotyping.

Supposedly, agnostics are accomodationists and atheists are more confrontationalist, and this stereotype is the basis of much defense and criticism of agnosticism. But the stereotype simply isn't reflected in my personal experience. Many agnostics I know are aggressive critics of religion. I suspect this may be most true in the atheist community, where the agnostics are usually outspoken contrarians. I do not think my experience reflects any general characteristic of agnostics, but it makes me think the stereotypes are unfounded.

Often, these stereotypes are encoded in the definitions. For example, agnostics sometimes define agnosticism as lacking certainty about God. The implication being that atheists are 100% certain and dogmatic, or they're too stupid to realize that they're actually agnostics. Atheists sometimes use a broad definition of atheism, with the intention of arguing that agnostics are either religion-apologists, or too stupid to realize that they're actually atheists.

There's supposedly a substantive issue underlying atheism/agnosticism arguments. That is, is the existence of god discernible? Agnostics say no (unless you're talking about the silly sky-daddy kind of god). Atheists say yes (unless you're talking about the useless deist kind of god). This supposedly substantive disagreement, when properly understood, boils down to what kind of definition of god you think is most relevant. That is to say, the disagreement is not all that substantive. I'm not convinced that the substantive gap between an atheist and an agnostic is any larger than the substantive gap between two agnostics.

And I can't say I really care about this hair-splitting. Virtually every other issue which people argue over, they don't worry about degrees of certainty. For instance, why don't people argue over whether they're certain about the success/failure of the free market? It's just this issue, and you hold one position or another, or you don't argue either way.

I identify as atheist because I wish to take a position against religious beliefs. I don't identify as agnostic because that is a game I refuse to play. When I find that other people identify as agnostic, atheist, or agnostic atheist, I don't ask why, because I'm sick of hearing about it.

I used to think Santa was a myth

2011-12-21T08:32:00.000-08:00

'Tis the season for anecdotes...

I didn't ever take Santa very seriously when I was younger. Or at least, not as far as I can recall. And I thought that no one else took Santa seriously either.

I mean, kids believing in Santa, that's just something that happens in the movies, right? There are countless movies depicting little kids who believe in Santa Claus. They'll write letters to Santa. They'll wait excitedly at the stairs for Santa to come, deliver presents, and eat the cookies and milk. Kids believe in all these elaborate legends and rituals, sometimes even in the face of disbelief from their parents or older kids.

Of course, in these movies, Santa also happens to be real. But Santa isn't real. So why should belief in Santa be real? For me, belief in Santa was all part of the mythos, along with the elves, reindeer, and red suit.

But some time ago, my dad told me that he and my mother made a conscious decision not to emphasize Santa Claus. (They also made a decision not to emphasize heaven and hell, but that's another story.) The reason? Apparently, one of my uncles had a very negative experience with Santa. One year, he found out Santa wasn't real, and he broke down crying. He had a huge tantrum, and IIRC, also questioned the existence of God.

And then the next year, he forgot that Santa wasn't real. And then he found out again and had another tantrum.

So it turns out that my childhood experience was not identical to other people's childhood experiences. And plenty of kids really do believe in Santa, as well as the Tooth Fairy. In a study I found, about 70% of 3-year-olds believe in Santa, as opposed to 78% who believe in the garbage man. 83% of 5-year-olds believe in Santa, and a third of 9-year-olds believe in Santa.

This just boggles my mind. Next you'll tell me that kids actually write letters to Santa (what does the post office even do with them?), actually leave out cookies and milk on Christmas Eve (don't they go bad?), and parents actually dress up as Santa to fool their children. This entails a much greater societal investment into the legend than I previously thought.

And what a bizarre legend it is. Often, it's about the conflict between the believing children and disbelieving adults. And as the narrative goes, it's the children who are in the right for believing. Why?? Why is belief for its own sake a value? It's one thing to claim that it has some value for child psychological development, but I hardly think that the legend has caught the public imagination because of psychological research.

I used to believe we lived in a world where children only believed in Santa in the stories. That world made much more sense, but now I know that is not the world we live in. I guess I learned a valuable lesson in critical thinking.

Interlude: God is infinite

2011-12-19T08:11:00.000-08:00

This is a continuation of "A few things wrong about the cosmological argument," an ongoing series. This will be a lighter post.

In William Lane Craig's formulation of the Kalam Cosmological argument, he argues that infinities cannot exist, therefore the universe began, therefore God exists.

But... surely God is infinite? You know... actually infinite.

This seems like such a jarring inconsistency in the argument. I give William Lane Craig more credit than that, and I'm sure he has a functional response somewhere. Let's just pretend that I've put in the effort to find his response, and that I've been suitably convinced that of all the problems with the cosmological argument, this is not one of them. *wink*

As many of you know I went to a Catholic high school. It wasn't so bad. Actually a really good high school, run by Jesuits. But yes, it was a religious education. Morning prayers. Religiously infused mission statement. Monthly services. Retreats. A few teachers who were Jesuits. I was Catholic at the time, so I didn't mind. Except for the monthly services. Mass is boring!

I also took some religious classes, learning about the Bible, social justice, and apologetics. They didn't call it apologetics, but that's what it was. The teacher for that class was pretty good. He had a flair for the dramatic and comedic. He used lots of creative teaching techniques, and frequently showed videos. From a high schooler's perspective, showing videos in class was like the best thing ever.

I think he was a fan of William Lane Craig. When I later encountered Lane Craig's arguments, they seemed utterly familiar to me. I consider them to be classic apologetic arguments, though this is perhaps only my perception. "Classic" is just whatever I learned about in high school.

Along the same lines, I also believe that one of the "classic" understandings of God is The Infinite. God isn't merely infinite, God is The Infinite. You can't possibly comprehend God with your finite mind! That would be like trying to comprehend the integers, or quantum field theory! (Silly physicists...)

I took all this stuff with just a grain of salt, but he said one thing that really bothered me. Paraphrased from memory fragments:

God is defined as The Infinite. Suppose there were two gods. Then there would be two infinites. But there can only be one infinity, because all infinities are overlapping and identical. Therefore, there can only be one God.

Arrrgh! I mean, I don't mind arguing for a single God. Whatever. But man, that is some bad math! The set of even numbers and the set of odd numbers are both infinite but they don't overlap! Also, neither odd nor even numbers are identical to God. This got me to thinking along other lines, like what is God's cardinality? Does God's power set have greater cardinality than God?

This series on the cosmological argument is in about the same spirit. I don't particularly care if people argue for the existence of God. I definitely don't care if people argue about whether God is single or multiple. At least, I don't care in the abstract. But sometimes I see these arguments, and wow! Bad math, bad physics, bad argumental form. If someone argues that we're justified in believing an invisible conscious being that can only touch us in our "hearts", that's okay on some level. (Well, no, it's ridiculous.) But when you start talking bad math? Blasphemy!

A few people have accused me of hiding behind lots of complicated logic, math, and physics. It's all an attempt to dazzle people in to agreeing with me. But that's not the point. The point is to trick you all into reading about logic, math, and physics, when you just wanted a refutation of the cosmological argument. Ha! Ha ha ha!

...
Tune in next time for more of...

"A few things wrong about the cosmological argument"
1. Actual and potential infinities
2. Actual infinities in physics
3. What is real?
4. The "absurdity" of Hilbert's Hotel
5. God is infinite

The "absurdity" of Hilbert's Hotel

2011-12-14T15:47:00.000-08:00

This is a continuation of "A few things wrong about the cosmological argument," an ongoing series. Today we will discuss William Lane Craig's treatment of Hilbert's Hotel. I will assume you are familiar with Hilbert's Infinite Hotel; if not, you can read William Lane Craig, me, or any other source on the internet.

William Lane Craig (WLC) thinks Hilbert's Infinite Hotel is absurd. If Hilbert's Hotel is full, then you can add or remove people and it will still have the same number of guests. Absurd!

Can anyone sincerely believe that such a hotel could exist in reality? These sorts of absurdities illustrate the impossibility of the existence of an actually infinite number of things.

This is an argument from absurdity, which has the following form:

A implies B.
Both me and my opponents agree that B is obviously false.
Therefore we should agree that A is false.

There is nothing wrong with an argument from absurdity if it is done correctly. But it is not done correctly. I can agree that Hilbert's Hotel is absurd. But not all infinities are necessarily absurd. We can have infinities without specifically having an infinite hotel. Hilbert's Hotel is absurd because we will never have the resources, the manpower to create such a hotel. We don't have the people to fill it, the means to maintain it.

Of course, WLC thinks there is a more abstract property of Hilbert's Hotel which is absurd. Specifically, he claims it is absurd that you can add or remove things, and still have the same number of things. I do not think this is absurd. The argument from absurdity relies on my agreement at this point, but I do not agree.

(An aside: WLC makes a technical error here. We do not say that there is the "same number" of things, we say that the two sets of things have the "same cardinality". Neither set has a well-defined "number" of things, since both sets are infinite. There is a reason we use technical terms like "cardinality", and it is to avoid making mistakes by accidentally applying intuition where it does not apply. WLC may have simply wanted to avoid technical jargon...)

WLC cites a couple people who objected, like me, that infinities are not absurd. His basic response is, "It looks pretty absurd to me." "Nuh uh." "Yeah too." We seem to be at an impasse. If you're keeping track, that means WLC lost, since he is the one presenting the argument, and he has failed to convince. But let's stop keeping track, and focus on resolving the impasse.

An anecdote: I first learned about infinite sets in high school. This was back in the day, when the internet was still a novelty to me, and I wasn't smart enough to use a pseudonym. I used to exchange puzzles with people and argue about mathematics. In one of these arguments, someone told me to read about infinite set theory. It was crazy! Infinite sets blew my mind. But by the time I got to college, they became intuitive and familiar, like a favorite old joke. Non-math people think that when math people get together, they make jokes about pi and squares. In my experience, they make jokes about infinite sets. And yet, the set of untold jokes about infinite sets remains as big as ever.

I contend that infinities are not "absurd" in the sense of "obviously false". Rather, infinities are only counter-intuitive (and only at first). Infinite set theory is well-established in mathematics. Due to some complications*, it is impossible for me to simply prove that set theory is consistent. But we think that set theory is consistent for the same reason we think arithmetic is consistent, and I don't see WLC waving his arms incredulously at arithmetic.

*See Godel's second incompleteness theorem.

This is a point that clearly needs a response, so WLC has already responded to it.

Hence, one could grant that in the conceptual realm of mathematics one can, given certain conventions and axioms, speak consistently about infinite sets of numbers, but this in no way implies that an actually infinite number of things is really possible.

WLC distinguishes between "logical" possibility and "real or factual" possibility. Unfortunately, this places infinite sets in a very odd place. What kind of absurdity is this, that is too absurd for the real world, but not absurd enough for mathematics? And for what kind of "real" is it too absurd for? Lastly, if there are different degrees of absurdity, how do we know which degree it is?

There is no way to answer these questions, because "absurdity" is an intuitive idea. Either we think something sounds absurd or it doesn't. Intuition doesn't whisper in our ear, "It is absurd in reality, but not mathematics. Also, 'reality' is a category that includes past events, but not future events, and it excludes inconvenient counterexamples." Anyways, my intuition never says anything like that to me.

Put it this way. If WLC didn't know anything about what mathematicians said, he would have guessed infinite sets were bad math. And then when he finds out that it's good math, what is the appropriate response? WLC's response is to say that infinite sets are still absurd, just not in mathematics. I think the proper response is to revise what we previously thought was absurd.

I must say one last thing, as a physicist. WLC thinks absurdity is a good argument against a physical theory? Even when said absurdity is mathematically consistent? I question his knowledge of modern physics.

"A few things wrong about the cosmological argument"
1. Actual and potential infinities
2. Actual infinities in physics
3. What is real?
4. The "absurdity" of Hilbert's Hotel
5. Interlude: God is infinite

Electrons, gaps, and pseudogaps

2011-12-12T23:46:00.000-08:00

I want to give you a bit of flavor of what I've been researching this semester. Problem 1: It is confidential information (there are scientific competitors). Problem 2: It is incomprehensible.

So I'm not going to talk about my research. I'm going to talk about a few of the broad ideas in cutting edge research into high temperature superconductors. The point is not really to teach you about high temperature superconductors (which is hardly useful information if you're not studying superconductors), but so you get the idea of what it looks like.

So. Superconductors. Below a certain temperature "Tc", superconductors conduct electricity perfectly, with no resistance. This property has obvious practical value, but unfortunately all known superconductors have a very low Tc. Even the so-called "high Tc superconductors" discovered in 1986 still have a Tc of about -140 Celsius.

We understand how low Tc superconductors work. The problem was solved in 1957, and the solution is called BCS theory. BCS theory provides a way for electrons to attract each other (despite being opposite charge), and the electron pairs form a Bose-Einstein condensate. The condensate of electron pairs is what makes a superconductor. High Tc superconductors also have condensed electron pairs, but BCS theory doesn't work, and no one knows why the electrons attract each other.

There are two major classes of high Tc superconductors, the cuprates and the iron-based superconductors.* Iron-based superconductors are currently a hot topic because they were just discovered in 2008. But I study cuprates. In particular, I spend most of my time on a material called Bi-2212, which is one of the most highly studied superconductors. I am not sure why it gets so much study, but I would guess that it is because it is cheap, easy to study, and (somewhat self-referentially) has been studied enough that it allows for an ever higher tower of knowledge.

*There are other high Tc superconductors, but I will not speak of them.

I study Bi-2212 using a technique called ARPES. In concept, ARPES is simple: shine light on the material, and look at the ejected electrons. In particular, we look at the direction that the ejected electrons go, and the energy. If we graph the energy of the electrons (vertical axis) vs the angle (horizontal axes), we get something like this:

From Ronning et al, Science 1998. Figure cropped for clarity. I marked the Fermi Surface in blue. Don't worry about what a quasiparticle is.

Experimental physics being what it is, we don't really see that whole picture there. We see tiny slices of it at a time. If I showed you some real data, it would be unrecognizable.

The way the electrons work, there are a bunch of quantum states for them to fill. The quantum states act like slots, and only one electron fits in each slot. The electrons only fill slots up to a certain energy, but there are more empty slots above that energy. The most interesting physics happens where the filled slots meet the empty slots, what's called the Fermi Surface. In fact, this is where the electron pairs live.

Long story short, when we look at the Fermi Surface of a superconductor, there is a small energy gap between the filled and empty slots. This gap in energy represents the energy required to pull the attractive electrons pairs apart. The fascinating thing about cuprate superconductors, is that the gap is not the same size everywhere on the Fermi Surface.

Also from Ronning et al. The size of the gap has been greatly exaggerated.

Yes, in fact, there are even points on the Fermi Surface where there is no gap at all! These points are called nodes. It would seem that at these nodes, there is no superconductivity happening. This is very different from conventional superconductors, which have gaps everywhere on the Fermi Surface.

And what about iron-based superconductors? Iron-based superconductors also have gaps everywhere, just like conventional superconductors. But it's not quite the same! We have reason to think that there are nodes in iron-based superconductors, but they cannot be seen directly because they are between Fermi Surfaces, rather than on the Fermi Surfaces. Of course, this is not a settled matter...

When you raise the temperature of a superconductor, the superconductivity disappears, and so does the gap. But the cuprates do something funny. The gap remains even at high temperatures, when the material is not a superconductor. Or at least, part of the gap does.

From Lee et al, Nature 2007. Figure cropped for clarity. The horizontal axis is the position in the Fermi Surface; the vertical axis is the size of the gap. The blue and green lines are at superconducting temperatures; the red line is above superconducting temperature.

The gap that remains when the material is no longer superconducting is called the "pseudogap". It's a silly name, since the gap is real. But is the gap there because of incipient superconductivity? Or is it an unrelated property of the material?

Check out the date of that paper. 2007. Scientists are still arguing over the pseudogap. I've seen several talks about it, talks which disagree with each other.

So, that's what superconductivity research looks like. Or at least, that's one very small part of it.

Same-sex PDA: reactions

2011-12-07T22:01:00.000-08:00

My boyfriend and I are sorta into PDA. What can I say, I like hugging and kissing and holding hands, and I don't mind doing it in public. I think he likes showing me off too.

As you would expect, PDA between two men often gets weird reactions. This is true even in San Francisco. I started collecting a few of these reactions, but I stopped after the novelty wore off. Here they are.

Woman on train: How old are you?
Me: I'm 22.
Woman: You look 16. I was going to tell you that you shouldn't hold your son that way.
Woman leaves train.

That one offended my boyfriend.

Man on street: Let go.
Man: Let go.
Man: Let go.
Some minutes pass as he repeats himself.
Man: Stop doing that. Come on!
etc.

I thought this guy was especially weird because he was walking half a block in front of us, and trying to talk to us.

Female reveler at street fair: Oh, they're so cute!
She hugs us as her friend takes a picture.

It's funny that she treated us as a novelty, but I guess if we didn't secretly enjoy this sort of thing, we wouldn't be doing PDA.

We're locked out of my BF's apartment, waiting for the landlady.
Man walks up to us: Father, son?
BF: No.
Me: *ignore*
Man pesters us for a while, talking nonsense. I get the impression that he's trying to proposition us, but it's unclear. My BF thought he was trying to sell us drugs.
Man: You're not open-minded enough to try black. (The man is black.) Look, he's open-minded enough. (He gestures at me.)
Me: *roll eyes*
Eventually he leaves and the landlady arrives.

This guy helped me appreciate how awkward women feel when being propositioned in elevators.

Guy on the bus, just as he exits: Faggots... Out in public.

I wanna look at this ironically and laugh about it, but having the real experience is just disturbing.

Relativism and the gelato guy

2011-12-06T16:35:00.000-08:00

Remember the Gelato guy? A few weeks ago at Skepticon 4, the owner of a gelateria posted a sign that said, "Skepticon is NOT welcomed to my Christian Business”. The owner took it down fairly quickly, and posted an apology. In most of the atheist blogs that I pay attention to, people responded very positively to the apology.

That’s exactly the type of response we want from people who may not agree with us. I don’t know what more we could ask from a Christian. I forgive him. Hell, next time I’m in Springfield, I might even buy some gelato from him.
--Hemant Mehta

The notable exception was PZ Myers, who made a big deal about rejecting the apology:

GelatoGuy lives in one of the most religious countries on earth, in a particularly intensely religious part of that country, and in a moment of smug self-righteousness, felt he could openly discriminate against people who do not respect his beliefs. And now he thinks he can walk away, forgiven, and return to his blithe happy Christian pocket universe, just by saying a few words.

Someone asked PZ, "Just out of curiosity, what would the guy have to do to be forgiven?" PZ responds, "Nothing. Make an example of him; don't give bigots an out."

I basically don't care about Gelato guy, and I forget which state he's in. But I point this out as a recent example of judging people based on their context, as I discussed in my previous post on cultural relativism.

On an objective measure, I don't think Gelato guy's actions are "positive". I would prefer that businesses don't discriminate in the first place, rather than discriminating and then apologizing for it afterwards.

On the other hand, we intuitively judge people based on what they can be reasonably expected to do. We feel the need to give a person an "out". If we simply condemn people no matter what they do, our condemnations will fail to encourage better behavior. Gelato guy is just going to throw up his hands, because there is no way he can earn PZ's forgiveness.

On the other other hand, who is the audience for our condemnation? Is it the Gelato guy, or is it blog-reading atheists? If the audience is blog-reading atheists, condemnation is useful after all, because atheists can be expected to behave better. As I understand it, this is PZ Myers' goal, to make a statement to atheists, not to Gelato guy. His statement is that atheists should have higher standards, and I sympathize a lot with this message.

On the other other hand, I basically don't care about Gelato guy.

On cultural relativism

2011-12-05T18:31:00.000-08:00

Here's a good example of what you might derogatorily call cultural relativism. Coming from Biblical scholars, no less.

In a chapter of The Bible Now, Friedman and Dolansky argue that the Bible's seeming unambiguous condemnations of homosexuality can be ignored, even if you accept the Bible's moral authority. According to a review by Adam Kirsch, this is one of the arguments they make:

Turning from ancient Israel to Assyria, Egypt, and Greece, Friedman and Dolansky observe that these other Near Eastern societies generally had nothing against homosexual acts as such. They reserved their odium for the passive partner in anal sex, the man who was penetrated.
...
Why, then, does Leviticus, uniquely among ancient Near Eastern law codes, prescribe death for both partners in homosexual acts? Friedman and Dolansky argue, quoting another Bible scholar, that it is because Leviticus “emphasizes the equality of all. It does not have the class distinctions that are in the other cultures’ laws.”

This is a remarkable performance. Before you know it, a law that unambiguously prescribes death for gay men has been turned into an example of latent egalitarianism.

It's not altogether clear to me that killing both men is better than killing just one of them, but let's put that aside. I wish to discuss the question of whether the surrounding culture can make the authors of Leviticus more morally praiseworthy.

As I understand it, cultural relativism is not so much a distinct philosophy, as a term that you use to denigrate philosophies you don't like. But of course, we all know the stereotype of cultural relativism. "Cultures all have different moral guidelines, and we should judge people from the perspective of the culture they come from." Well, what if this culture thinks it is morally correct to apply its own moral guidelines to other cultures, huh?

However, I think there is a grain of wisdom in even the strawiest of cultural relativist strawmen. Allow me illustrate it with faux mathematical graphs.

Suppose that there are a variety of actions we can make, and some are morally preferred to others. Let's invent a number "x" which says how strongly a particular action is preferred. A higher value of x corresponds to a greater moral good.

But even though we may prefer x=3 to x=2 to x=1 to x=0, it is hard to express different gradations of moral approval. For the most part, we either express praise, or condemnation, or indifference. So when express judgement, we have to translate this potentially continuous variable x to a discrete value. Here are a few ways to do the translation, though there are many more:

I was too lazy to bust out Mathematica for this one

But depending on what culture a person is from, they may have a different range of actions available to them. Either people from that culture believe that a certain range of actions is "reasonable", or the culture punishes people who go outside that range. For example, the authors of the Leviticus could have chosen to express more or less condemnation of homosexuality, but it would be extremely unlikely for them to express anything approaching an enlightened view.

In other words, the authors of Leviticus had various values of x available to them, but all of these available values are very low in my view.

If I were to express praise and condemnation according to method 2, this wouldn't be very effective. No matter what action the ancient people take, I condemn them, so they have no incentive to do better. But if I express praise and condemnation according to method 1, praise is within reach for them! Perhaps this will cause them to change their actions.

And that's why we may want to look at the surrounding culture before issuing judgments about the people in it.

But there's a problem here. The authors of Leviticus aren't listening to my moral praise. They're dead! The only people listening to my moral judgments are people in my culture. Therefore, I'm sticking to method 2. That means universal condemnation of the authors of Leviticus and their surrounding culture.

(via Evolutionblog)

Science vs Acne

2011-12-01T15:25:00.000-08:00

I have pretty bad back acne. No, I will not show you photos. This is not that kind of blog.

I don't really care about my acne. I've shown it scientifically! In the past when I've tried acne medication, my conclusion was that I don't have the motivation to apply the medication on a regular basis, and that medication applied on an irregular basis is ineffective.

But I have new motivation. I have what I'm worried is another abscess. After how painful it was last time, I'm taking someone's suggestion that I apply hot packs to kill the bacteria before it grows big. As long as I'm boiling this water, I might as well kill some acne!

Of course, I'm not actually going to do any science. I am participating in what has been called the "coffeeshop fallacy" (via The Thinker). I like the idea of doing science, but I'm not actually willing to put in the effort. I'm a PhD student, and I have real science to occupy my time! So what I'm actually going to do here is an affectionate parody of science, whatever amuses me.

The hot pack idea comes from Brian Dunning. He cites a study which says you can treat acne by applying 120 farenheit for three minutes twice a day. There's no way I will use such stringent protocols. Brian suggested using a laptop power adapter, but I'm going to use a rag with a bit of boiling water poured on it. I can use the extra boiling water for tea!

The other day I had some Yogi tea called "skin detox". On the label, it said:

Goodness should become human nature because it is real nature

This so that I can credit the tea later if I get rid of the acne.

I'm taking another idea from XKCD:

On one side of my back, I'll apply the hot pack. On the other side, I may just try some acne medication. Then I will ask my boyfriend to say which side looks better, without telling him which is which. Actually, I will probably use really shoddy blinding, and he'll find out which side is which. But he will appreciate the excuse for me to be topless.

And my excuse for writing about the experiment before it's done is to avoid reporting bias. As you know, scientists are less likely to report negative results than positive ones, which can lead to systematic errors. Therefore, if I never write about this again, you may assume that the results were negative, or that I lost all motivation.

Harry Potter meets rationality

2011-11-30T07:17:00.000-08:00

I'm still reading Gravity's Rainbow, which is taking forever. It doesn't help that somewhere in the middle, I decided to take a break, and then the library lost the copy I returned! During my break, I took up a variety of much lighter reading, including Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

This well-known fanfiction takes place in an alternate Potter universe where Harry Potter has been brought up by a scientist. When Harry Potter first discovers the world of magic, he does what any reasonable eleven-year-old would do, and applies the scientific method to it. Harry Potter first tests the existence of magic using pre-agreed protocols. He immediately sees that the wizarding economy is inefficient, and plans to exploit it later. He gets Draco to apply the scientific method to his belief that muggle blood is diluting magic. He tries to use the time-turner to solve NP problems.

Exciting right? I thought it was hilarious. It's also great because it doesn't have as much straw vulcan in it as you might expect. The ideas are mostly taken from the website Less Wrong. Harry Potter isn't right all the time, but that's because he is prey to cognitive bias like anyone else, not because he is "too rational".

But it's not merely about delivering lessons about rationality. Nor is it just about parodying the sillier things the Harry Potter universe. It starts out that way, but soon develops its own story, distinct from the original Harry Potter. It has its share of mysteries, dramas, and dynamic characters. The story discusses many themes that even rational people may disagree on. For example, Professor Quirrell's character has been replaced by a very different character, one who becomes Harry Potter's morally ambiguous mentor.

But since I'm giving this a review, I must also express a few complaints. Though I loved many of the things in the later chapters (eg Hermione calls out Dumbledore for his clear bias towards male heroes), I sort of liked the earlier chapters which were funnier and less serious. I felt the "Humanism" chapters were obnoxious. Harry Potter finds some sappy secular-humanistic way to deal with Dementors. This is pretentious and cliched, and my tastes are too ironic for that sort of thing.

Also, it is much longer than it needs to be. It's not even complete yet, and it's over a thousand pages. I felt way too much time was spent on these wizarding battles that Quirrell uses to teach the kids how to fight. It's a lot like Ender's Game where it goes in great depth about the weightless battles in Ender's military school. I don't particularly care for Ender's Game, or for that part of the book. Quidditch may be an objectively terrible game, but at least it only took up a small part of the books!

But on the whole I enjoyed the work, and I would continue reading it once it gets updated. I highly recommend reading the first few chapters, which are fun even if you don't want to really get into it.

Fillomino #2

2011-11-22T21:06:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, I submitted a fillomino (aka polyominous) puzzle to a puzzle design competition on A Cleverly Titled Logic Puzzle Blog. I think this is the second one I've ever designed (here's the first).

Rules of fillomino:
1. Divide the grid into polyominoes, which are connected shapes made from the little squares. For example, tetris pieces are polyominoes made of four squares.
2. Fill each square with a number, representing the number of little squares in that polyomino.
3. No two polyominoes with the same numbers may share an edge.
4. Some of the numbers are given, but some polyominoes may be implied and have no given numbers.

Solvers voted on the puzzles they liked best. Mine got second, which might reflect on the kind of people who voted. Seriously, they clearly had a taste for rather difficult puzzles.

You may email solutions to skepticsplay at gmail dot com. Enjoy your Thanksgiving!

New theorem: Quantum states are real

2011-11-19T21:07:00.000-08:00

There's a new paper on arxiv called "The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically". It has a theorem which proves that, given a few basic assumptions, the quantum state (ie the wavefunction) must be real, rather than a merely statistical object. Nature has an article which mostly just harps on how "seismic" the paper is.

Nature (correction: the article's author, not Nature itself) compares its importance to Bell's Theorem, which is a very important result indeed from 1964. Bell's theorem proved that if there were "hidden variables" underneath the quantum state, then entangled particles must be communicating with each other faster than light. I've explained Bell's theorem in the past.

I felt the news coverage left a lot of unanswered questions. What do they even mean by the "statistical interpretation" of quantum mechanics? Roughly how is it proven? What is the difference between this and Bell's theorem? I found the answers in the arxiv print, and will attempt to summarize them.

What does the "statistical interpretation" mean?

Let's say that we have two ways of flipping a coin. The first method leads to a 50% chance of heads, and a 50% chance of tails. The second method rigs it so the coin always comes up heads. Let's say that I flipped a coin by one of these two methods, and showed you the result. If the coin was heads, then you would not know which method I used.

Now say that I have two ways of preparing an electron. And suppose that you measured the vertical spin component of the electron. If I use the first method, there is a 50% chance the electron is spin up, and 50% chance spin down. If I use the second method, the electron will always be spin up. If I prepared the electron by one of these two methods, and you found that the electron is spin up, you would not know which method I used.

But electron spin is a little trickier than coin flips, because you can measure the spin component in any direction. Suppose you had tried to measure the horizontal spin component, would you always be able to tell which method I used then? The answer is no. But perhaps there is yet another way to measure it?

The authors equate the "statistical interpretation" with the following: Given any two distinct ways to prepare a quantum state, there is a nonzero probability that the result is consistent with either method of preparation. In other words, no matter what kind of measurement we make, there is a chance that we'll get an outcome that doesn't tell us anything.

What's the difference between this theorem and Bell's Theorem?

Bell's theorem requires that you take many measurements and compile statistics of these measurements. Once you are confident enough in your statistics, you can show that the probabilities are incompatible with the "hidden variable" view of quantum mechanics.

This new theorem requires only one measurement. One measurement, and you're done. (Of course, if you have a noisy experiment, you may need to repeat it to build confidence in your result.)

Of course, the new theorem and Bell's theorem also have a slightly different set of assumptions, and slightly different conclusions. But I think the primary difference is that the new theorem requires one measurement, while Bell's theorem requires compiling statistics.

Roughly how is it proven?

As an example, let's take the two methods of preparing an electron that I described above. It turns out that no matter what measurement I make, there is a chance an outcome that is consistent with either method A or method B.

But we can be tricky. Let's duplicate the machine that prepares the electrons, and assume that these machines are independent of each other. Now there are four methods of preparation:

A and A (ie both machines use method A)
A and B
B and A
B and B

Suppose that there is a chance that the first machine will produce an electron that is consistent with either method A or method B. There is also a chance that the second machine will produce an electron that is consistent with either method A or method B. Therefore, there is a chance that both machines produce electrons which are consistent with any of the four methods.

But it turns out that there is a measurement we can make with four possible outcomes. And each outcome is inconsistent with one of the methods.

Outcome 1: inconsistent with method 1
Outcome 2: inconsistent with method 2
Outcome 3: inconsistent with method 3
Outcome 4: inconsistent with method 4

What is this special measurement? It's not straightforward. In quantum mechanics, we can measure things like position, momentum, and spin. But we can also measure things like helicity, which tells you whether the spin and momentum are in the same direction, without telling you what direction that is. Similarly, we can measure whether the electrons have spin in the same direction or opposite directions. The measurement described in the paper is sort of like that, but more complicated.

The same theorem can be generalized to any two methods of preparing a quantum state. Suppose that one method always produces a spin up electron, and the other produces a spin up electron 99% of the time. All you have to do is have N duplicates of the electron-producing machine (in this case, N=15 suffices), and take a special measurement. No matter the outcome of this measurement is, it is inconsistent with one of the 2^N possible methods of preparation.

The conclusion is that any two distinct quantum states are not just "probably" different, but always different. You just need a tricky measurement to show it.

Is this paper as groundbreaking as Nature claims?

I don't know.

Question First vs Answer First

2011-11-18T21:29:00.000-08:00

Among the interests represented on my blog, puzzles are the oldest. Writing puzzles used to be a hobby of mine back in high school, when I'd write and submit puzzles to a website. Naturally, the website was full of expert puzzle solvers, so that explains why I am unable to write a puzzle of reasonable difficulty.

In high school, I had a half-baked philosophy of puzzle-writing. There are essentially two ways to write a puzzle: Question First, or Answer First.

In the Answer First method, first you think up a clever idea. And then you try to design a puzzle such that the clever idea is the answer. For example, a folk remedy for hiccups is to scare someone. So there's a classic riddle based on this idea:

A man walks into a bar and asks for a glass of water. The bartender pulls out a gun, and the man thanks her. What happened?

I've also written Answer First puzzles of my own. "Fast Clock, Slow Clock" is an unambiguous example, as is "Guess the Meaning". You can usually recognize Answer First puzzles by their clever "Aha!" solutions. All riddles are Answer First puzzles.

In the Question First method, first you think of an interesting problem. And then you check to see if there's an interesting solution to it. For example, a recent puzzle, "Tower of Hanoi Variant" is clearly a Question First puzzle. I was inspired by a problem posed in the game of Freecell; I only tried to find a solution after the fact.

The Answer First method requires quite a bit of creative insight to use, but the Question First method has its own difficulties. When you find an interesting question, there is no guarantee that there is a solution, or that the solution is interesting. And a lot of times, you don't want to just think up one interesting question, you want to think up a whole set of interesting questions. And then you have to look at all of those questions, and see which one has the most interesting answer.

For example, in "Ten Rows of Three", I asked solvers to arrange nine dots into ten rows of three. But I could just as easily ask solvers to arrange X dots into Y rows of Z. What values of X, Y, and Z lead to the most interesting puzzle?

So not only do I need to find a solution without any hints, or even a guarantee that a solution exists, as a puzzle-writer I also have to solve a much larger set of puzzles than the puzzle-solver. This is my secret to being good at puzzle-solving. Write lots of puzzles and then you will become very good at solving them.

But I am not sure that the Question First vs Answer First dichotomy applies to all puzzles (that's why I say the philosophy is half-baked). For example, where does Fillomino fit in? Designing one of these puzzles involves filling more and more clues in, while trying to see what deductions you can make from those clues. But often, the clues we fill in are decided by something that the designer wants in the solution. Depending on the puzzle-designer, it could be more Question First or more Answer First.

My inner skeptic wanted to write a comparison between the Question/Answer First methods of puzzle-writing and the experimental/theoretical methods of science. But my inner skeptic's inner skeptic said that this is ridiculous.

Stats on Catholic dissent

2011-11-16T12:02:00.000-08:00

Hemant Mehta posted some statistics on Catholic attitudes and beliefs in America. The one-sentence summary is that Catholics don't really fall in line with official Catholic Church teachings.* For example, only 21% of Catholics believe that having celibate male-only clergy is an important aspect of Catholicism, and 60% say you can be a good Catholic without adhering to church teachings on birth control.

*Not news

What struck me, were the statistics on transubstantiation.

In case you didn't catch it, 50% are aware that the Catholic Church teaches that transubstantiation is real rather than symbolic.¹ But a higher percentage, 63%, believe it is real. The 17% "unknowing believers" are Catholics who don't know the Catholic Church's teachings, but believe them anyway.

The source of the statistics, the National Catholic Reporter offers this explanation:

Perhaps this is just a classic case of source amnesia -- people believe many things that they have learned even though they are unable to recall the source of that belief.

Somehow, I feel insulted on behalf of reality. It's like, people aren't even believing these things on the basis of some authority, they just believe them on the basis of... well, they forgot.

1. From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

1374 ... In the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist "the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained." "This presence is called 'real' - by which is not intended to exclude the other types of presence as if they could not be 'real' too, but because it is presence in the fullest sense: that is to say, it is a substantial presence by which Christ, God and man, makes himself wholly and entirely present."

1381 "That in this sacrament are the true Body of Christ and his true Blood is something that 'cannot be apprehended by the senses,' says St. Thomas, 'but only by faith, which relies on divine authority.' ...

Attraction is like wine

2011-11-14T19:36:00.000-08:00

This essay was written for this month's Carnival of Aces.

I don't drink wine because wine gives me worse Asian glow than any other form of alcohol. But of course I've seen wine. They often have these colorful descriptions on the back. For example...

A firm, full textured almost focused Cabernet. Spews bing-cherry, unripe apple and lingering tomato.

Wholly obtuse and yellowed Dessert wine. A mouthful of smoked ham, sassy french onion soup and a modicum of Baby Ruth bar.

Actually, I took these from a Silly Tasting Note Generator, and I'm sure that if you actually drink wine, they look awfully silly. Not that I can tell. Wikipedia helpfully offers a dictionary of wine tasting descriptors, but I think wine tasting is one of those rare things that you can't learn from the internet.

The asexual community is a bit like a wine tasting community, except that they taste different kinds of attraction. While the dictionary of attraction is not as large as the one for wines, I could come up with a dozen just off the top of my head.* And people still struggle to find words to describe their experiences, often resorting to long stories to do so.

*Ahem. Sexual attraction, romantic attraction, sex drive, sexual fantasies, sexual desire, primary attraction, secondary attraction, aesthetic attraction, sensual attraction, limerence, platonic attraction, platonic crushes, and that's not even half of it.

I'm not sure why asexuals are such connoisseurs, but it at least makes sense. Imagine you're in a society that drinks wine, but doesn't care about, and hardly seems to recognize the existence of different kinds of wine. And then you have this group of people who can't stand white wine, but some of them enjoy red wine. Since we know there's at least a distinction between red and white wine, maybe there are distinctions between different types of red wine. Wow, let's go investigate!

And then the red-wine-drinkers tell the rest of society, "Look at all these different flavors of red wine we found. I bet there are lots of flavors of white wine too!" The rest of society shrugs unenthusiastically. Sure, wine is complicated, but do we really need to create so many words to describe it? Wine is wine!

I feel sympathy for both sides, the connoisseurs and the "wine is wine" folks. I don't see why they can't coexist peacefully.

Different flavors of attraction are pretty important to me. Aesthetic attraction and limerence are particularly important to me, because that's what I'm most notably missing. Basically, I don't have a sense of "hotness", or "cuteness", or what have you. And I don't get crushes. Thus it seems obvious to me that we must separate out aesthetic attraction and limerence.

But on the other hand, I can't really tell the difference between sexual and romantic attraction. And I don't really know what platonic attraction is. From the perspective of the asexual community, this is a big blind spot! It's like being unable to distinguish between red and white wine, or not knowing what tannin is.*

*I do not know what tannin is.

Why can't I understand the distinction between romantic and sexual attraction? Maybe I just haven't experienced enough, or I haven't done enough introspection. Maybe I have a genetic insensitivity to a particular flavor. Or maybe the words are poorly defined. Maybe they don't describe single flavors but collections of flavors. Or maybe I'm having trouble connecting the words to their meanings. Nobody can hand me a glass-full and tell me that this is what romantic attraction tastes like. Or maybe everyone else is having the same problem connecting words to meanings, so that the words to really mean different things to different people.

Some people complain to me that asexuals make everything too complicated. All I can do is shrug. Some of those concepts are really important to me, because they hit on a key aspect of my experience. Some words are just meaningless to me, and I only keep track of them as words that are meaningful to other people. Surely, if sexuality is complicated, people are allowed to discuss what exactly is complicated about it for them.

Why atheists focus on certain religions

2011-11-10T15:30:00.000-08:00

Why do atheists always focus on Christianity? Why not focus on a much more harmful religion, like Islam?
or...
Why do atheists always focus on fundamentalist Christianity? Why not focus on more reasonable forms of religion, like mine?

These are some of those questions people ask vocal atheists (in the US). But to any vocal atheist, a handful of answers are immediately obvious. Here are a few...

The atheist movement prioritizes social change over academic debate. The calm and methodical search for truth is a worthy goal, but one also has to admit the importance of actually getting things done. Religion is not just some academic hypothesis, it's something that actually causes people to kick out their children, oppose LGBT rights, and make poor medical decisions. If that is something we want to change, we do not criticize the most compassionate and reasonable religions, we criticize the least reasonable, most harmful, and most popular religions.

Atheists are focused on here and now. This is not simply due to the desire to create change where it will most benefit ourselves. It is also because we have more power to change the here and now. Islam is pretty bad, but has the most impact far away. Local attitudes are easier to change.

It is likely that you are viewing atheists through a filter. Atheists actually do criticize Islam, liberal Christianity, eastern religions, new age religions, as well as non-religion things like alternative medicine. But the criticism that actually gets widely propagated is the stuff that's most relevant to people, or most exciting. For example, I think atheist criticism of Jainism would be vaguely interesting, but not that interesting, because, honestly, I've never met a Jainist in my life. And I think there is popular appeal in seeing the most extreme atheists and fundamentalist Christians just duke it out. If people want it, then people get it.

Atheists write what they know. That means they'll talk about what's in the news they read. It also means they'll talk about their personal experiences. Even when atheists talk about abstract arguments, they're often inspired by some real argument they had with someone, or an article they read. The same is true about most things people write on any subject.

I'm sure readers can come up with other reasons as well.

My advice to people who think atheists are just focusing on straw men: Relax! If a particular criticism of religious beliefs doesn't apply to your beliefs, then it doesn't apply to your beliefs.

Solution to Tower of Hanoi variant

2011-11-08T19:11:00.000-08:00

See the original puzzle

Hint: The number of disks you can move increases exponentially as you add more rods.

Still give up?

It's relatively easy to simply show the steps when there are only five rods, but I want to generalize. This requires some recursive algorithms. Advanced puzzle solving ahead!

First, let's define a function G(N), which is the tallest tower we can move if there are N empty rods. In the puzzle, I asked for the tallest tower we can move when there are five rods. Four of those rods are empty, so I basically asked for the value of G(4). I'll give it away right now, G(4) = 15.

But what happens if we have a tower with sixteen disks? We can't simply move the top fifteen disks, and ignore the bottom one. The bottom disk gets in the way, and can't be treated like an empty rod. Therefore, I need to define another function F(N), which is the largest stack of disks we can move from an infinitely tall tower to an empty rod when there are N available empty rods.

Procedure 1: Moving F(N) disks from a big tower to an empty rod, when there are N available empty rods
If N=1, simply move one disk and you're done!
Otherwise...
1. Use Procedure 1 to move F(N-1) disks from the big tower to the first empty rod.
2. Use Procedure 1 to move F(N-2) disks from the big tower to the next empty rod.
3. Continue as above until we get to F(1)
4. Move one disk to the last empty rod.
5. Use Procedure 1 in reverse order to move F(1) disks from the second to last rod onto the last rod.
6. Use Procedure 1 in reverse order to move F(2) disks from the third to last rod onto the last rod.
7. Continue as above until we get to F(N-1).

This procedure allows you to move F(N) = 1 + F(1) + F(2) + ... F(N-1) disks. F(N) is given by this recursive function, but we can also figure out an explicit formula. F(N) = 2^(N-1).

Procedure 2: Moving a tower with G(N) disks to another rod, when there are N available empty rods.
1. Use Procedure 1 to move F(N) disks from the big tower to the first empty rod.
2. Use Procedure 1 to move F(N-1) disks from the big tower to the first empty rod.
3. Continue as above until we get to F(1). By now we should have depleted the big tower of disks.
4. Reverse steps 1 through 3, only now we build the tower on the last rod instead of where it was before.

This procedure allows you to move G(N) = F(1) + F(2) + ... F(N) disks. So G(N) = (2^N) - 1.

G(4) = 15
G(5) = 31
G(6) = 63
etc.

I am sure that this is the best you can do, but I will not provide a proof.

The size of the observable universe

2011-11-04T10:40:00.000-07:00

Previously, I analogized the expansion of the universe to a stretching of a rubber band. Light that travels across the universe is like an ant crawling on that rubber band. Whether the ant ever reaches the other side of the rubber band depends on how fast the rubber band is stretching.

Here, I will introduce something called the scale factor. The scale factor is similar in concept to the total length of the rubber band. The tricky part is that there is no "total length" of the universe, because the universe (as far as we know) is infinitely long. But even if the rubber band were infinitely long, we can still imagine it stretching.

Even without referring to the "ends" of the rubber band, we can still see that the ants are getting further apart. Similarly, even though the universe has no "ends", we can still observe galaxies getting farther apart. There are some complications (like if the ants are crawling around while the rubber band is stretching), but let's assume that clever physicists have found a way to correct for this. The scale factor is proportional to the distance between these two ants/galaxies.

I say "proportional" because it doesn't really matter what the distance is exactly; we just care about how that distance changes over time. Is the scale factor increasing as a constant rate? Or is it slowing down? Or is it accelerating? The answer ultimately depends on the theory of General Relativity, which is outside the scope of this post. There are, at least, some results of General Relativity which make intuitive sense (and others that do not make intuitive sense).

If the universe had no energy, we'd expect the scale factor to increase (or decrease) at a constant rate. "Inertia" is the intuitive explanation. As I explained in my previous post, a constant stretching rate implies that light from any galaxy will eventually reach us.

But since the universe has energy in it, that mass pulls itself together with gravity. So we'd expect the scale factor to slow down. But the rate at which the scale factor slows down depends on what kind of energy it is. If that energy comes from matter, the scale factor slows down at a certain rate. If that energy comes from massless particles like light, the scale factor slows down even at a greater rate.* The difference between matter and light is that they dilute at different rates as the universe stretches.

Now, if the energy comes from something that doesn't dilute at all, then the scale factor actually accelerates over time. I realize this is quite counterintuitive, but I'm postponing the explanation indefinitely until I understand it myself! In any case, that's what dark energy is. Dark energy is a transparent form of energy which doesn't get more dilute as the universe grows.

In summary,
Universe without energy: Scale factor increases at constant rate
Universe dominated by radiation: Scale factor slows down over time
Universe dominated by matter: Scale factor slows down (but not by quite as much)
Universe dominated by dark energy: Scale factor accelerates

Of course, the universe has a mix of the different kinds of energies. The early universe was dominated by radiation. But the radiation diluted away as the universe expanded, so the later universe was dominated by matter. But now the matter has diluted away, leaving a universe dominated by dark energy. So at first the scale factor slows down, but it eventually speeds up again.

You want more details, with graphs? There was this great paper called "Expanding Confusion: Common Misconceptions of Cosmological Horizons and the Superluminal Expansion of the Universe" with exactly that.

Click to enlarge. This is based on the ΛCDM (Lambda Cold Dark Matter) model, assuming that the energy of the universe is currently 70% dark energy and 30% matter.

Some definitions to understand the graphs:

The comoving distance is simply the distance divided by the scale factor.

The dotted lines represent the paths of objects, provided they are not "crawling around", but just following the expansion of space.

The particle horizon is the answer to the question: how far can we see? Some 380,000 years after the big bang, the universe became transparent. From that point on, light traveled from far away objects, and eventually it reached us. Simultaneously, those objects were getting further from us. The particle horizon refers to the current distance of those objects whose light from billions of years ago is just reaching us now. Currently, the particle horizon is 46 billion light years away. Therefore, the size of the observable universe is 93 billion light years across!

The hubble sphere is the distance at which the rate of expansion is equal to the speed of light. Beyond the hubble sphere, objects are receding from us faster than the speed of light. It's allowed to be faster than light, because it's an expansion of space, not motion through space. The relativistic speed limit only applies to the relative motion of objects that are near each other.

The light cone is the region of the universe's past that we can presently see. Remember that the further away we look, the further into the past we look. And the further back into the past, the more dense the universe used to be. This is not the same as the particle horizon, which refers to the current position of galaxies whose past we can see, not their past positions.

The event horizon is the largest region that will ever be in the light cone. If the scale factor were increasing at a constant rate (or decelerating), there would be no event horizon. That is, light from every part of the universe from any time would eventually reach us. But since the scale factor is accelerating, there is an event horizon. There are some parts of the universe that we will never see!

I hope this illuminates some of the many confusing aspects of cosmology. As the paper's title suggests, there are a variety of misconceptions about the expanding universe. One of those misconceptions is that the expansion of the universe isn't allowed to exceed the speed of light. This mistake is even made by physicists when speaking to the public! If you want to read more, I recommend a more popular version of this article, which appeared in Scientific American.

*These are based on solutions to the Friedmann equations in a flat universe.

Dream: the little girl

2011-11-02T16:40:00.000-07:00

I dreamt the story of a little girl with pigtails. Much of the details are lost, but the point was largely to show how bitter she was. Also, there is something wrong with her eyes. She's not blind, but her eyes look strangely dark, and no irises are visible.

I remember the end. The end comes in the form of a flashback. She's walking with a little black boy, her friend. She says bitterly to him, "You know, a black person once stole my eyes." The camera slowly shifts so that we see that at this younger age, her eyes still look mostly normal. She goes off, as the little boy stands there, somewhat angry. After a minute, the boy goes running after her, following her into a room where her mother is. Her mother is black. The boy shouts, "A black person didn't steal your eyes... you are black!" Suddenly, the audience understands... she is an albino black girl, and that's why she's so bitter.

Then my dream replays an earlier scene. There was one scene where it was said that the girl has to stay out of daylight at certain hours and undergo some light therapy. A white woman and man appear in this scene to help her, referring to themselves as "Your father and I". But in retrospect, it seems that they were really talking to a boy who was with her; they were the boy's parents.

The reveal seems like such a shameless and nonsensical retcon. For one thing, the girl obviously couldn't be albino since her hair was black (obviously based on Zimmy from Gunnerkrigg Court). One day I would like to write a work of fiction, but it's never gonna happen if my subconscious comes up with such terrible ideas.

Stumbling over their own rhetoric

2011-10-31T21:03:00.000-07:00

I'm really late to this one, but PZ Myers had some posts criticizing Greg Epstein's humanist chaplaincy. If I read PZ correctly*, he doesn't like using a church-like model for community organization. If you want to read more, I recommend Crommunist's response (which inspired parts of this post).

*It is entirely possible that I misread him.

I think of this as atheists stumbling over their own rhetoric. Atheists openly criticize many aspects of religions, and for plenty of valid reasons too. But atheists, being human, will make mistakes about which aspects of religion cause it to be so bad.

For example: I've heard lots of atheists jokingly say that atheism is great because it frees up your Sundays. If these are the kind of idle jokes you make, you might have a negative reaction to atheist groups that have weekly meetings, particularly if they're on Sundays. But is that really what's wrong with Christianity, the mere fact that there is a tradition of Sunday meetings? Obviously not... But the rhetoric is there, and we're stumbling over it. And it sure doesn't help that outsiders will stupidly grab onto any similarity between atheists and religious people, as if that were a valid criticism of anything.

This may be a silly example. Who would let such an little thin get in the way of going to weekly meetings of atheists? Nobody I know, but then most of my vocal atheist friends I know through organizations that meet weekly.

I believe there is a whole collection of other examples of atheists stumbling over their own rhetoric.

Evangelism. We agree that evangelism is bad. What is bad about it? I consider it bad because it's done in socially awkward situations, and the views espoused are often offensive, wrong, and offensively wrong. But lots of atheists apparently think that trying to persuade people on religious topics is bad in general, and criticize other atheists as too evangelical.

Spirituality. Most atheists I know recognize that it is silly to let the lack of a spiritual realm get in the way of expressing awe, wonder, and other profound emotions. They do, however, see it as a good reason to not use the word "spirituality", since if spirits don't exist, that's not really what it is. I don't sympathize with the need for awe and wonder, but good for them for not letting any rhetoric prevent them from enjoying themselves!

Ritual. I quote PZ Myers: "Tapping into our psychology to get us to sit and get sucked into pointless ritual is not how I want to see the atheist movement evolve. I want us to think and act, not reassure ourselves by going through repetitive motions, through superstitious behavior." But then, I think lots of atheists are fans of Halloween, which is also filled with pointless rituals. (I don't particularly like Halloween.) What's that, some people enjoy Halloween? Who am I to begrudge that?

Priests. Obviously something has gone wrong with the Catholic priesthood, but what? Is it because any sort of leader or authority figure is bad? Is it because celibacy is unnatural? Surely we can think of a more nuanced reason that doesn't also apply to student group leaders, public intellectuals, or people who personally choose to remain celibate. How about... upholding a group as morally superior, to the point of concealing any evidence to the contrary?

Church. I must say that I completely agreed with PZ's title: "Atheist church? NO THANK YOU." I really hated church because it was boring. Also, I think church music is terrible. Yes, gospel music too. I think it is hypocritical that many atheists will say I'm letting my atheism get in the way of enjoying religious music (even though I also disliked it when I was religious), and simultaneously let their own atheism get in the way of recognizing the value of a church-like community structure. Are we incapable of seeing that different people have different tastes?

I certainly don't share the taste of atheists who feel the need for a humanist chaplaincy, but I don't see what is so wrong with that. People can do what they want, or not do what they don't want. People can also complain about other people's terrible taste. But let's not get completely carried away there.

An answer to a nosy question

2011-10-26T10:45:00.000-07:00

If you're asexual, do you masturbate?

This is, in my experience, the most frequently asked question about asexuality (although usually people use a euphemism). Here is my straight answer:

Presumably you are not so much interested in my personal life, but interested in whether asexual people in general masturbate. Unfortunately, answering the question directly would not satisfy your curiosity, because A) you don't know whether I am representative of asexuals, and B) you probably don't have any idea how much non-asexual people masturbate either.

What you really want is some capital-letter SCIENCE!

No, really. In general, it is very difficult to scientifically quantify asexuality, but it's relatively easy to just make a survey asking how often people masturbate. Someone must have done it.

I'll save you time. A survey was hidden in this paper by Prause and Graham.

(From Table 2) Frequency of masturbation:
asexuals: 3.7 +/- 2
non-asexuals: 4.5 +/- 1.9
The scale is from 1 (never masturbated) to 7 (4 times/week or more)

The followup question that everyone asks is...

But how can that be?

Forget how things can be the way they are. They just are. We've shown it empirically with SCIENCE!

But presumably you meant to ask, how is this consistent with the definition of asexuality? An asexual plus sexuality equals not-an-asexual, am I right?

No, that's the wrong definition of asexuality. Asexuality does not mean a lack of sexuality, it means a lack of sexual attraction (or sexual interest or sexual desire--the definitions vary). In other words, there are multiple dimensions of sexuality, and asexuality just refers to one of those dimensions. One of the reasons asexuality is so hard to study is because suddenly it becomes necessary to disentangle all these different dimensions that people usually assume go together. Masturbation and sexual attraction are two of the easiest dimensions to disentangle; even a survey can do it.

Other frequent questions: Do asexuals think of it as a sexual activity? What do asexuals masturbate to?

Unfortunately I don't think this is in the scientific literature (you may scan it for yourself). Based on the accounts I've seen, nearly all answers are possible. Asexuals may think of it as sexual, or not. They may masturbate to objects, concepts, people, or nothing in particular. If that seems strange... I am not really sure what is meant by a non-strange sexuality. Anyways, it is hard to tell whether this is statistically different or similar to non-asexual masturbation habits.

Another frequent question: Is it strange or creepy of me to ask about this?

Not strange, no. It is creepy though. It was probably also creepy of me to answer.

The ant and the universe

2011-10-24T13:39:00.000-07:00

Because light in our universe has had a finite amount of time to travel, we can only see a finite part of our universe. We call this the observable universe. But did you know that, even though the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years, we can actually see further than 13.7 billion light-years?

According to Hubble's Law, distant galaxies are receding from us at a speed proportional to their distance. In fact, beyond 13.8 billion light years away, objects are receding from us faster than light. Did you know that the furthest objects we see are actually receding faster than light?

Believe it or not, these facts are easy to understand with only elementary knowledge of cosmology.

There is a classic puzzle involving an ant on a rubber band. The ant tries to run from one end of the rubber band to the other, but every second we stretch the rubber band longer. Will the ant ever reach the other side, or will it just get further and further from its destination as the rubber band stretches?

An ant comes across a rubber band... (Ant image from here)

The ant on the rubber band is a lot like the path of light through the expanding universe. The ant crawls at a constant speed, but only relative to the rubber band. As the rubber band stretches, the ant may become further from its destination. Similarly, light travels at a constant speed. But as space itself expands, light from far away galaxies may actually become further from us over time.

(Note that the far away galaxies aren't breaking any speed limit even if they recede faster than light. They are receding because the space between us is expanding. The relativistic speed limit only applies to the relative velocities of two objects at nearly the same location. Analogously, we can say that even if we stretch the rubber band really fast, this doesn't mean the ant is breaking its own crawling-speed limit. It just means the rubber band is stretching.)

So, will the ant make it or not? It depends how quickly we stretch the rubber band. If we were feeling devious, we could stretch the rubber band at exactly the right rate so that the ant is running in place, never getting any closer to its destination. But let's consider a stretching rate which is a little more like our universe. Suppose that the ant crawls one inch per second, and each second we stretch the total rubber band's length by one foot.

At first, the ant will gain an inch, and lose a foot. But after the ant covers some distance, I waste a lot of effort stretching the part of the rubber band that is already behind the ant. So eventually, the ant may catch up! Indeed, we can show that it will catch up, if we consider the total fraction of rubber band that the ant covers each second. In the first second, the ant covers 1/12 of the rubber band. In the second second, it covers 1/12 * 1/2 of the rubber band (since now the rubber band has been stretched to twice its previous length.) The next second, the ant covers 1/12 * 1/3. And so forth. We get a sequence like this:

The series in parentheses is known as the harmonic series. The harmonic series can arbitrarily big, just by adding more terms (but it takes an exponentially large number of terms). If we were to graph the ant's trajectory, it would look like this:

Note: I calculated this assuming continuous stretching, not by discrete stretching. This is more true to cosmology.

So that's how the ant traverses the rubber band even though the rubber band was stretching faster than the ant could crawl. Similarly, light can reach us from far away galaxies even if they're receding faster than light.

How far did the ant travel? The ant is traveling an inch per second, and traveled for over 160,000 seconds. Therefore, it traveled over 160,000 inches. But there's another distance we can ask about: How far away is the point on the rubber band from which the ant started? Because the opposite end of the rubber band moves at a foot per second, it must be over 160,000 feet away.

With light we can ask the same questions. According to NASA, the furthest galaxy we know of is 13.2 billion light years away, by which they really mean that the light has traveled 13.2 billion light years to get to us. But how far away is that galaxy now? It is probably much further than 13.7 billion light years away, because it is receding from us very quickly.

But there are additional complications when we apply this to the universe. As it turns out, the universe does not expand at a uniform rate, like our rubber band. The two additional complications are matter and dark energy. This will be explained in the next part.

Old news: Today is the end

2011-10-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

Here's an old story from May 24th:

Harold Camping, who announced the Rapture would occur Saturday [May 21], has had another revelation: The world will now end on October 21.

Harold Camping claims the world will end by earthquake. I'm not sure what exact hour. Actually here we had a couple of quakes yesterday!

I'd be sort of interested if the same prediction was made by the quake quack. That would be like alignment of the planets, but instead of planets, different spheres of woo. Alas! A glance suggests that there is no such alignment.

The ant and the rubber band

2011-10-19T08:17:00.000-07:00

In a draft I'm writing, I'm including a classic puzzle as a demonstrative example. But I should let my readers have a try first!

There is an ant on a rubber band. The ant is crawling from one end of the rubber band towards the other at 1 inch per second. The rubber band is one foot long, but getting longer. After each second, the rubber band's length grows by one foot.

Question: Will the ant ever reach the other side of the rubber band?

(It's an infinitely stretchy rubber band, and the ant lives infinitely long. Since I am a physicist, I will not worry about whether the rubber band is stretching instantaneously every second or stretching continuously. Just assume whichever you prefer.)

You have less than a week to solve this one. Bonus points if you can predict what my draft is about.

(solution contained here)

Woohoo, 4th bloggiversary!

2011-10-18T22:01:00.000-07:00

This year, I remembered my mother's birthday, but not my blog's (which was on October 5th). Ah well, my blog probably doesn't care as much as my mother would.

So, another year, another set of highlights:

Physics!
Dreaming boltzmann brains
Electricity, magnetism, space, and time
One: the universe's favorite digit

Atheism!
The interminable tone debate
Religion-shaped hole: spirituality

Critical thinking!
Nature/Nurture and causality
Astrology: a different nonsense than you thought
Opinions are relative

Asexuality!
A brief history of antisexuality
Erasure: What's the harm?
On asexual relationships

Puzzles!
Fractal maze
The tiger and the lake

Miscellaneous!
Actual and potential infinities (a new series spanning math, physics, and the cosmological argument)
(Also see last bloggiversary's link roundup)

Looking back, I think the hardest posts to pick are the physics ones. I really like most of my physics posts, and many of my thoughts on critical thinking seem too rambly and poorly formed in retrospect. It probably has to do with the fact that physics posts require more effort, giving me more time to think about the way they're framed. But another possible explanation is that physics is easy, critical thinking is hard.

A lot of Brillouin Zones

2011-10-17T11:05:00.000-07:00

In condensed matter physics we deal a lot with crystals, which is a repeating structure of atoms. Every crystal is associated with a lattice,* which is an infinitely repeating set of points.

For example, if the points shown above were to repeat infinitely over the plane, they would make a lattice.

A useful concept is the first Brillouin Zone, which is the set of all points which are closer to the center point of the lattice than to any other point of the lattice. In the above example, the first Brillouin Zone would simply be a square around the center.

Interestingly (but less usefully) there is also a definition for the Nth Brillouin Zone. The Nth Brillouin Zone is the set of all points such that the center point of the lattice is the Nth closest point in the lattice. I thought it might be pretty to draw the first few Brillouin Zones, and then I went totally overboard.

The first 27 Brillouin Zones. The first Brillouin Zone is the red square in the center, and successive Brillouin Zones are each in a different color, moving outwards. Click to enlarge.

The Brillouin Zones have the interesting property that each one has equal area. And for any given Brillouin Zone, you can translate the different pieces by integer distances and form a square out of them.

I think one thing that attracted me to condensed matter physics is that there's all this geometry in it... and it's actually useful for describing reality. Not this Nth Brillouin Zone stuff though, that's useless. Hardly anyone thinks about the second Brillouin Zone, much less the third or twenty-seventh.

You can get Brillouin Zones of different shapes if you have different kinds of lattices! And you can even have 3D lattices, producing 3D Brillouin Zones. Note that even though real crystals exist in 3-dimensional space, they can be layered in 2D structures and thus be associated with 2D lattices. For example, the 2D lattice I showed is the correct lattice to use for the cuprate superconductors that I study.

*The locations of the atomic nuclei in a crystal often make a lattice, but for complicated reasons, this is not the one I'm talking about. Every crystal is also associated with a completely different "reciprocal lattice", which is the one relevant to Brillouin Zones.

Arguments: offline or online?

2011-10-12T18:37:00.000-07:00

I saw a talk by JT Eberhard, and he said that whenever someone invites him to discuss the fate of his immortal soul over a cup of coffee, he agrees on the condition that the discussion can be put online. This put on my mind the question of whether it is best to argue in public or private. "Maybe I should blog about that," I said to my notepad. And then Greta Christina blogged about it instead.

In a private debate, you only have a chance at persuading one person. In a public one, you have a chance at persuading dozens, or hundreds, or thousands, depending on how big a forum you have.
...
People may be ashamed to express stupid ideas in public — but once they’ve done so, they’re likely to get even more entrenched in them. Once we’ve made an assertion in public, it’s harder to walk it back. It shouldn’t be, but it is.

Noooooo! Now that everyone on the atheowebs is talking about it, how can I possibly hope to contribute anything worthwhile? It is the curse of blogs everywhere.

I don't like the way the choices are presented: Either have a private argument over coffee, or have a public argument over coffee. I simply don't have arguments over coffee. I don't like one-on-one arguments, or coffee. And opportunities for arguments over coffee never appear. In my circumstances, this is the more realistic set of choices:

Talk about atheism without any provocation.
Talk about atheism with the slightest provocation.
Talk about atheism online.
A combination of some, all, or none of the above.

When I talk online, the fact that it's public is not the biggest difference. The biggest difference is that I produce my own opportunities instead of waiting for them. The second biggest difference is that it's in writing, not spoken word (where I am far less articulate). The third biggest difference is that, since my preferred medium is blogging, I decide the focus, and argue with no one in particular.

Is arguing publicly more effective? Among my choices, in my circumstances, it is definitely the most effective at, well, everything. It's more satisfying to you, more satisfying to me, more likely to persuade people, and has a more positive effect on my relationships. But it's so tangled up in other inseparable issues, it's hard to say that it has much to do with the public/private aspect.

Show discordant evidence

2011-10-10T15:56:00.000-07:00

I saw Richard Muller give a talk about climate change. Perhaps you've heard of him. He's that physicist that got funding from oil companies to do an independent reanalysis of Earth surface temperature data. And then when Republicans chose him as a witness for a congressional hearing, he surprised them by testifying that his results, even after correcting for biases, confirmed previous analysis.

Muller's thesis was that you should have been skeptical of climate change before, but you should not be now (now that Muller published his research, har har). I'm not really sure what this has to do with synchrotron light sources, which is what the conference was about, but it was a good talk.

Anyway, if you remember Richard Muller from the news, you may also remember when the e-mails of a bunch of climate scientists got leaked. Much was made of a particular e-mail that spoke of a "trick" used to "hide the decline". The "trick" of course simply refers to a trick of the trade. The decline refers to tree ring data. It's well-known in the scientific literature that tree ring data diverges from more reliable temperature measurements after 1960, for reasons unknown. Thus, the trick is to ignore tree ring data after 1960 and show more reliable estimates in its place.

Muller made a point which I feel I missed at the time. The correct thing to do is show data, even when it is discordant with your conclusions. And then you should be able to convince your audience anyways.

It's not uncommon for some particular bit of data to contradict one's conclusions. That doesn't necessarily mean your conclusions are incorrect or unpersuasive, it just means that not every single piece of data supports it. There are lots of reasons why data can be wrong. So show the data and explain why you think it's wrong.

But I can also think of a few situations where it would be appropriate to hide the data. For example, if it's a well-known effect with a standard procedure for correction. Relating to my own research, no one would complain if I neglected to mention the data I took from obviously dirty superconductor samples.

I'm not sure whether, in this specific case, it was okay to hide the discordant data. The divergence of tree ring data is known in the literature, and the researchers openly state that they correct it.

Eh, I guess I don't care either way. I'm more interested in the general principle, that it is good to show discordant evidence. Even moving away from science, when I relate anecdotes, I like to note the limitations of my experiences as evidence. Of course, I hope to convince despite limitations, but if I fail, that's that.

Tower of Hanoi variant

2011-10-06T21:37:00.000-07:00

The Tower of Hanoi is a classic puzzle that looks like this:

Image borrowed from Wikipedia

The idea is to get all the disks from the left rod onto the right rod. This might seem easy (just dump them out and put them back on the other one), but there are a few rules you have to follow. First, you can only move one disk at a time, and only from one rod onto another. Second, no larger disk is allowed to be on top of a smaller disk.

The solution to the Towers of Hanoi is not too difficult, though the number of moves required increases exponentially as the number of disks.

Let's play a variant of the Towers of Hanoi. Instead of three rods, there are five. And there's an additional rule: a disk can only lay on top of another disk only if the one below is exactly one size bigger.

My question is: What's the tallest tower that you can move from one rod to another?

Afterwards, you can try the same variation with six rods.

(This is an original puzzle, inspired by too many games of Freecell, which obeys the same rules. However, I would be surprised if I'm the only one who has ever thought of this variant.)

See the solution

Sex-negativity and asexuality

2011-10-04T12:17:00.000-07:00

When I talk about reactions to asexuality, I mostly discuss reactions from sex-positive and non-religious people. This emphasis is decided by what's most relevant to me in my own life. My social circles mainly consist of queers, physicists, and skeptics, none of which are particularly sex-negative or religious.

But a fuller understanding demands that I also speak of the reactions from sex-negative and religious people.* Do they love asexuals? Do they think asexuals are aberrations to be discouraged? Do they shrug their shoulders and move on? Do they shrug their shoulders and stab asexuals in the back when it comes to substantive issues? If only I had the relevant experience to say!

*In American culture, religion tends to be associated with sex-negativity, but of course this isn't true in general. All my comments have limited applicability.

Nonetheless, I will blather on as if I really did know what I was talking about. I will give two examples. These are not representative examples, but the worst examples I have ever seen on the internet. (I wouldn't be surprised if the only hits these websites get anymore are from angry asexuals.) These examples do not tell you what will go wrong, but what could go wrong.

Here's the first one:

Question: What do you call a person who is asexual? Answer: Not a person. Asexual people do not exist. Sexuality is a gift from God and thus a fundamental part of our human identity. Those who repress their sexuality are not living as God created them to be: fully alive and well. As such, they're most likely unhappy.
--"Eight Myths about Religious Life", on the Catholic Religious Vocation Network

The authors of this article are responding to myths about people in religious orders. One of those myths is that these people are asexual. Of course, the authors don't know that there is actually a group of people who identify as asexual, they just see "asexual" as an insult. Therefore, this is not an intentional attack on asexuals. It's unintentional. It's still an attack though. (It's not as if good intentions magically reverse reality.)

You can see in there several myths about asexuality right off the bat. "Asexual" is an insult, the ultimate way to dehumanize someone. Asexuals must be repressing themselves. They must be unhappy. And you can see that these myths spring directly from their view of sexuality as a gift from God.

It's definitely possible to reconcile asexuality with the view of God-given sexuality. But if you believed in God-given sexuality, asexuality is certainly not what you'd initially expect! You wouldn't have guessed that God gave one of his greatest gifts to only some people. You wouldn't have guessed that these people can come to value different things and be just as happy.

Sometimes atheists get asked, disingenuously, how they can believe in love when it's just a bunch of bouncing chemicals. But I actually think this is one of the greatest things about the naturalistic worldview. Love is just a chemical pattern, which doesn't mean it can't be great. But its greatness is not a fundamental fact of reality, it is derivative, contingent. So if you have some people who don't fall in love, or other people who don't care for sex, that can be great for them too.

The other example is from Celibrate, a website that "provide[s] support, encouragement, advice, information and acceptance for everyone living without sex". By itself that's fine enough. Since asexuality is one reason people might be celibate, they have a nice section on asexuality. And then there's this paragraph at the end:

Misleading websites have appeared that suggest asexuality has much in common with homosexuality, some going so far as to say that one can be homo-asexual. However, a person identifying as such is more likely to be a homosexual practicing celibacy. Of course, asexuals often have an aesthetic attraction to either one sex or the other, but this is not the same as a sexual attraction. Generally speaking, in terms of sex drive and desire, the homosexual and the asexual could not be further apart.
--From Celibrate: Celebrating Celibacy

This reminds me of a dream I had.* I was watching TV (who does that anymore?) and there was a newsperson giving a public service announcement, something about cigarettes and cancer. And then the newsperson inexplicably stops as if something more important just came up. He turns his head, looks at me--not any else--and says, "Fuck you."

*This is fictional.

Yeah, so the quote is pretty homophobic. It seems out of place in an introduction to asexuality. No parallel comments are implied about hetero-asexuals. And you can tell that they're using the stupid version of the sexual spectrum. (I'm pretty sure I stole this idea from Kaz at some point.)

asexual -------------- straight -------------- gay
robots? ----------- normal folks ----------- OMG buttsex

And that's why their response to asexual plus gay is "Does Not Compute".

Homophobia really is a serious barrier to accepting asexuality. I can't talk to people about asexuality when they don't even accept the more basic concept of homosexuality. Like, if someone still thinks being gay is a choice, or that homosexuality is wrong because men and women are complementary, or that gay stereotypes are accurate, what am I supposed to say to that? How am I supposed to talk about attraction vs behavior vs identity in any sophisticated way? How am I supposed to talk about societal expectations, gender roles, or asexual stereotypes?

And if they don't like the significant fraction of asexuals who are gay/lesbian, who knows what other subgroups they'd toss out. Bi asexuals. Asexuals with gender issues. Asexuals who talk about sex, or make sex jokes. Asexuals with a sexual history, or present sexual activity. Asexuals who look at porn. Kinky asexuals. These groups are not just necessary for the people within them, but also for the community's spirit of self-exploration. It's hard to explore when large swaths are declared off-limits for no good reason.

The worst part about it is that it makes me paranoid. Even if a sex-negative person gives a positive or neutral response to asexuality, I tend to distrust them. Do they yet know what the asexual community is like? And when they find out, will they still be friendly?

Finally, I'd like to say that sex-positive people have got it all wrong about sex-negative people. Sex-positive people are like:

T-Rex is so lovable

But so-called sex-negative people can be sort of the same way. Remember, "sex-negative" is only a term given them by their opponents. Sometimes, sex-negativity is really all about how unquestionably great sex is, as long as you are having sex the right way at the right time.

And other times, sex-negative people are not so bad. Darn it, why people gotta be so varied? They're preventing me from overgeneralizing.

Happiness as knowledge

2011-10-02T10:05:00.000-07:00

Since my blog seems to be dwelling on the deepest and/or silliest questions of philosophy lately, I thought I'd finally pass on an article I bookmarked some time ago: "The Spoils of Happiness".

The article poses a hypothetical dilemma:

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences? [...] Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think that it’s all actually happening [...] Would you plug in?. (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 3)

Some people would gladly plug in the machine; others would not. For those in the latter group, why not? Don't we aim to be happy?

The writer's answer is that happiness is like knowledge. That is, it is possible to think that you're happy and be wrong about it. For example, if you think you have great friends, but they actually hate you (or if they're actually a set of fine silverware and china), you might think you're happy but you're not.

One thing I don't particularly like about this idea is that the way he defines "happiness" does not really match the way it is usually used. Happiness is usually thought of as an experience, not as a relationship between experience and external facts. But the writer refers to this concept as "pleasure" instead. Happiness is to knowledge as pleasure is to belief. The idea is that we prefer happiness over pleasure, just as we prefer knowledge over belief.

I don't have anything else to add, I just thought it was interesting.

Solution to coins on a table

2011-09-28T17:25:00.000-07:00

See the original puzzle

The first player has the winning strategy. The first move is to place right in the middle of the table. After the second player places a quarter, the first player plays a quarter on the exact opposite side of the table. The idea is to keep the arrangement of quarters perfectly symmetric about the center of the table. No matter where the second player places a quarter, there will always be an empty spot on the exact opposite side of the table. Eventually, the second player will have no place to put a quarter.

If you want a more serious version of this game (ie, one you could actually play, because the winning strategy is not at all obvious), you could try the "misère" version. A misère game is simply a game where the win and lose conditions are switched around. So to win the misère version, you must be unable to place a quarter during your turn. As far as I know, there is no simple symmetry-based solution to the misère game.

Causes vs justifications of morality

2011-09-26T20:53:00.000-07:00

Have I ever mentioned that I am in SANE, the UC Berkeley secular student group? Anyways, in an earlier meeting there was some sort of moderator fail, and we spontaneously started talk about all the most trite atheist topics imaginable. Case in point: "Where do your morals come from?"

Among the many answers, there were the usual ones claiming that we evolved morality. I think this is a fairly reasonable claim (though possibly incorrect), and there are several possible mechanisms for the evolution of morality. However, I am far from an expert on the subject, and would only offer a link to Wikipedia.

Instead, I would like to talk about why I think this answer misses the point.

It's easy to miss the point of the question, because its wording is ambiguous. If I ask where something comes from, it's perfectly reasonable to think that I am asking what causes it. But I think in this case the point of the question is to ask for a justification for morals. Not, "What causes you to have morality?" but "Why should you have morality?"

I believe the question gets misinterpreted because its "correct" interpretation is kind of senseless. When you ask why you should do something, you are asking for a moral or ethical justification. Thus the question is asking for a moral justification for morals. It's asking for something circular. I don't think anyone, religious or otherwise, could possibly answer the question in a satisfactory way.

In my mind I'm imagining several fictitious conversations...

"Why should you be moral?"
"God wants us to be moral."
"Why should you do what God wants?"
"Because God created us."
"Why should you do what your creator wants you to?"
"Because it is good to honor one's creator."
"Why is it good?"
"You can't just keep asking why! At some point you'll hit the bottom!"

(My mind's Christian is probably not very accurate, by the way.)

"Why should you be moral?"
"To go to heaven to be with God."
"Why should you try to be with God?"
"Because God will give us eternal happiness."
"Why should you try to achieve that?"
"Wouldn't you like to be happy forever?"
"Yes, but why should I try to get what I like?"
"This is pointless! You can ask why about anything!"

I imagine many atheist answers failing for similar reasons.

"Where do your morals come from?"
"We evolved a sense of morality."
"Yeah, but why should you try to get what evolution wants?"
"It's not what evolution wants. It's what evolution caused me to want."
"But why should you try to get what you want?"
"I misspoke: it's not what I individually want, but what we collectively want."
"There's still the same problem. Why should you try to get what people collectively want?"
"Would you argue that something is good even though it goes against what everyone wants?"
"That's not a justification."

The evolution answer misses the point, because all straightforward answers miss the point.

And lest this post be all about tearing things down, let me suggest a better question, a pragmatic one. If I think someone else is doing something evil, how can I convince them that it is evil? To use persuasive moral reasoning, we must have some sort of common basis, even if it is not a fundamental basis. So what is that basis?

Religion: Not like gender

2011-09-22T09:05:00.000-07:00

Via Pharyngula, the JREF newsletter said the following:

We at the JREF do take diversity seriously, and it's something we strive to achieve at our events. If the skeptics community is going to thrive and grow, it's essential that no one feel unwelcome or excluded due to race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation.

Of course, everyone is eying the word "religion". There is some value in working with religious people towards common goals. But there is also concern that in order to do this, we'd need to push aside a lot of atheist discourse. I am not sure how I would weigh the value of these two things against each other.

However, I gotta say that the inclusion of religion is not like the inclusion of race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Whenever skeptics talk about inclusion of religion, it's common to bring up Martin Gardner as an important skeptic who was also religious. But this feels an awful lot like tokenizing. 1) He’s the only major example most people can think of from the past 40 years. 2) Much is made of the fact that he was a fideist, as if to underscore how only the most minimal of theistic beliefs is acceptable.

Imagine if people could only name one notable female skeptic from the past 40 years, and they always made a point about how it was okay because she wasn’t hysterical or anything. That would be inclusion of women done wrong.

There are two contradicting conclusions we can draw from this. One, we are doing inclusion of religion horribly wrong. Or two, inclusion of religion is not the same as inclusion of women.

I'll take the latter conclusion. I think we can do inclusion of religion better, but it will never be quite like inclusion of women or people of color.

I feel like this is one of those things that is different online and offline. Online it's very easy to make broad pronouncements about Religious People and Attempts to Silence Atheists. But offline, the situation I usually see is quite different. Instead, we end up having a group of atheists who suddenly discover that there is a theist in their midst. And then they treat that person as a representative of Religious People, and give all the standard responses. And they don't realize that if there is a theist hanging out in a skeptical group, they probably have heard all these responses before. Also, they're probably atypical theists (who might not even be religious), and most responses don't apply to them. I can see this being pretty annoying, not because atheists are daring to question religion, but because atheists are being stupid.

Note again the difference between inclusion of women and inclusion of theists. If we were only inclusive of atypical women (eg, those that feel comfortable around lots of men ogling them), that would be inclusion done wrong. But I don't feel nearly as bad about the idea of only being inclusive of atypical theists.

(The point about Martin Gardner is stolen from a comment I made on Skepticblog, which was in turn stolen from a post I wrote last year.)

What is real?

2011-09-19T19:25:00.000-07:00

This post is a part of my ongoing series, "A few things wrong about the cosmological argument." Previously, I gave several examples of actually infinite sets of objects in physics. The next logical step is to argue that these objects are "real" objects, thus showing that real objects can be actually infinite.

But wow, arguing over what is real just seems like the the pinnacle of metaphysics silliness. It belongs in the same category as questions like, "If you replace all the wood of a boat plank by plank, is it the same boat?" or, "What if you're just a brain in a vat?"

It's not clear to me that there is any consensus about the definition of "real". Thus, I think that any argument which hinges on the details of the definition of "real" is a flawed argument, since it assumes something we don't agree on. I'm not sure there is any point to arguing over such a thing, so I think I will just muse about physics instead.

Physicists use "real" in a number of distinct ways.

Sometimes, we simply mean "that which is not caused by instrumental artifacts and experimental errors". For example, if we use a digital caliper to measure some lengths, we might read the numbers 0.015, 0.330, 0.845. The lengths are discrete (in multiples of 0.005 inches), but this is only a limitation of our device. Thus we would say that the discreteness is not real, and that lengths are really continuous.

Other times, "real" means "actualized in nature", as opposed to "maybe self-consistent, but not actualized in nature". Neutrinos are real, but tachyons probably are not. Minkowski space is real, classical space is not. Stable carbon nuclei are real, stable uranium nuclei are not. And so on. This definition is used to talk about theories which seem self-consistent, but are nonetheless false in our universe. Note that all these theories are basically mathematical,* so I have no problems with saying that a mathematical concept is real. In fact, I have more problems with the claim that there is anything real which is not mathematical.

*Neutrinos and tachyons have different four-velocities, Minkowski space has a different geometry from classical space, carbon and uranium are defined by different numbers of protons.

We might also use "real" to mean "that which is most fundamental". Of course, the most fundamental object in physics is the universal wavefunction, which specifies the state of the universe. The universal wavefunction is a ray in Hilbert Space, which is (you're going to like this) a space with an infinite number of dimensions, each of which can take on an infinite number of values.

But what does fundamental mean? A fundamental theory is one that is valid everywhere, and from which other theories can be derived (though it may be too difficult to actually derive them).We can also talk about theories which are more or less fundamental. The more fundamental a theory is, the larger its range of validity, and the more things can be derived from it. Particle physics is more fundamental than statistical physics, which only applies to systems much larger than our ability to calculate. Statistical physics is more fundamental than biology, which only applies when there is a particular large-scale pattern of molecules. Biology is more fundamental than psychology, which is more fundamental than sociology, and so forth, you know the deal.

We could define "real" as "that which is sufficiently fundamental", given some arbitrary threshold for fundamental-ness. If I happen to think baseball is real, I have to say sociology, psychology, biology, and physics are real too, since they're all more fundamental than baseball.

I'm pretty sure that physicists are not using the same definitions of "real" that philosophers are. But that's the point. There are lots of sensible definitions of "real", and not all of them allow the cosmological argument to work. So if we consider the premise, "Infinities may not exist in reality," we must know what definition of reality applies.

The applicable definition of "reality" is decided by how we argue for the premise! If the argument involves instrumental artifacts in experiments, then the applicable definition is "that which is not caused by instrumental artifacts." If the argument involves theories which are self-consistent, but not true in nature, then the applicable definition is "that which is actualized in nature". If the argument is just hand-waving, then we don't know what the applicable definition is, and the cosmological argument is flawed.

(I will also make a weaker argument, that I cannot think of any non-pathological definition of "real" which has the qualities that the cosmological argument requires. William Lane Craig thinks that there are a finite number of past events which are real, and that future events are not real. But on a fundamental level, the past and future are equally real.* And the idea of a finite number events seems contingent on what we, with all our human biases, consider to be events or not. Incidentally, in physics, an "event" is just a point in space-time, which is a far more objective definition. By this definition, there are an infinite number of events in the past, present, and future. Lastly, one of my examples of real infinities was particles which are beyond our observable range. It would take an unusual definition of "real" to exclude objects simply because we cannot see them.)

*I note that my favorite physics blogger said exactly the same thing earlier this month, and it's clear he's not even thinking about the cosmological argument.

"A few things wrong about the cosmological argument"
1. Actual and potential infinities
2. Actual infinities in physics
3. What is real?
4. The "absurdity" of Hilbert's Hotel
5. Interlude: God is infinite

Projection

2011-09-15T18:20:00.000-07:00

I think the first time I ever heard of the idea of "projection" was in the context of a burn.

"You're such a hypocrite!"
"Nuh-uh, you're just projecting your own hypocrisy onto me!"

Since that's excessively silly, I think it was some time before I took projection seriously as an idea.

Projection is a fallacy in which we attribute certain characteristics to others because we see them in ourselves. Most of the time, this is a very reasonable assumption to make, and one we make very often. If you ever want to understand other humans, the first and best place to look is in the one human whose experiences you have most access to: yourself. But we can take this too far, and when we do it's called projection.

I feel that it's almost too clinical to call projection a mere logical fallacy or cognitive bias. Projection is pretty much a way of life. No, the way of life. Everyone does it nearly every day. (I know this because I do it every day.)

This was illustrated in a recent Subnormality comic: We Assume of Others What We Know of Ourselves.

I recognize projection as a major source of my own irrationality. For example, I believe that if people only listened to my music, they would like it as much as I do. Never mind that even I don't like much of the music I liked in the past. I believe that because I don't get angry, neither does anyone else. Sometimes, my initial reaction to anger is laughter, since surely they are expressing anger ironically. I believe that since I don't like fashion or formalities, nobody else does either (they're just playing along). I believe that people are much less sexually active than they are. I have been enlightened by some statistics, but they still surprise me. The surveyor says many of his students expressed surprise at how common virginity was, but since I'm less interested in sex, my own biases are in the opposite direction.

What about you? What sort of things do you project onto others?

Daydream: Healing Touch

2011-09-12T19:24:00.000-07:00

Today, I underwent a very painful (but not at all risky!) medical procedure to drain an abscess. I had a short daydream about what would happen if a nurse tried to use healing touch on me.

Nurse hovers hands above me, moves them back and forth.
"Uh, what are you doing?"
"I'm manipulating your bioenergetic field with my hands. I'm a trained practitioner of healing touch."
"You're using healing touch? On me? I know the placebo effect is most effective on subjective symptoms such as pain, but do you realize that I don't even slightly believe in the effectiveness of healing touch? The placebo effect won't do me any good."
"It's not the placebo effect. Studies have shown..."
"Stop it already! It's stressing me out!"

I imagine healing touch rather than any other alternative medicine because we talked about it a lot at UCLA. I remember at the UCLA hospital, they allowed someone to give a lecture on healing touch, and we were pretty mad about this. She also swung a pendulum with her hand to assess patients' energy fields. I find myself wondering how this reduces patient stress, knowing that your nurse practices spiritual medicine in addition to real medicine.

Of course, my daydream is completely counterfactual, so there's no reason to think that's actually what would happen. However, I do remember hearing that healing touch is also practiced on sleeping patients. Why? Even if we felt the practice was justified by the positive placebo effects, the placebo effect is not going to work unless the patients are at least aware that healing touch is being used.

(Also, part of the placebo effect, though not all, is a self-reporting bias. Patients want their medicine to work, so they report less pain, even if they are not actually be experiencing less pain.)

Atheists on asexuality

2011-09-08T10:30:00.000-07:00

People often ask me, "What does religion have to say about asexuality?"

How should I know? I left religion years before I even started to question my sexuality. I didn't even have a sense for how anti-gay the Catholic Church is until quite some time after I left it.

I get Google alerts on asexuality, and every so often someone asks a Christian forum what they think about asexuality. The results are mixed. Christianity is old, asexuality is recent. Expecting Christianity to have anything to say about asexuality is like expecting Christianity to have anything to say about modern science... Oh wait. But the point is that no religious group I know of is sufficiently aware of asexuality to have an official line on it. So on the forums, Christians simply give opinions that they've formed individually, on the spot. Since I only have a few examples on the internet, it is hard to say how Christian reactions compare to reactions from the general populace.

But did you know? Most people on AVEN are nonreligious. According to a survey from 2008, 54% are not religious, and 26% are Christian. An informal poll indicates 39% are atheist/agnostic/nontheist. Yet another poll says 42% don't think gods exist, and 14% think gods probably don't exist. These are all terribly unreliable polls, but they seem to converge on the fact that the internet asexual community is nonreligious-dominated. The reasons for this are not forthcoming. I suspect that atheists are simply more likely to discover the concept of asexuality, choose to identify that way, and then want to discuss it on the internet.

I think this raises another question, one which is more relevant to the internet asexual community, and which I'm more capable of answering: What do atheists have to say about asexuality?

A quick clarification: I'm talking specifically about atheists who participate in some way in atheist activism, atheist discourse, or the atheist movement. Some people have hangups about trying to describe atheists' views on anything but gods (since atheism is nothing more than lack of belief in gods), but I'm going to ignore these hangups as the distractions they are.

Like with Christians, atheists as a group have no dominant view on asexuality. When encountering asexuality for the first time, atheists form their own individual opinions on the spot. The results are mixed. There are some patterns though.

Atheists are sex-positive. There are good sex-positive responses, and bad sex-positive responses to asexuality, which are different from the good and bad sex-negative responses. For instance, sex-negative people might dislike the queer associations, or dislike the alternative relationship structures. Sex-positive people, on the other hand, might dislike the abstinence associations, or may simply be incapable of grokking asexuality. Or they can contribute to sexual normativity (eg making fun of people who don't masturbate, insisting that sex is essential to every relationship). Or they can dismiss the concept of sexual normativity, and dismiss the idea that there is any need for an asexual identity. I could go on, but I'm sure this will not be the last time I blog about it (nor the first).
Atheists are skeptical. Atheists don't take things at face value. Even if you're just talking about identity and personal experience, there is often some claim about objective reality embedded within, and atheists will find and question this claim. Sometimes I hear asexuals (and other queers) say that no one has the right to question their personal identity because it is their personal identity. I always shake my head, because this argument would never fly with atheists. There are lots of groups who incorporate questionable claims into their identity. Religious groups for starters. 9/11 Truthers. Abductees. Indigo children. Hell, people identify by their astrological signs.

Of course, I'm all in favor of the skeptical mindset, and therefore I contend that the problem is not in the skepticism, but in the execution. The existence of asexuality is worth questioning, but let's not ignore the evidence right in front of us. Asexuals claim that the experience of asexuality exists. As evidence, they offer... experiences of asexuality. The other side offers offers misunderstandings of evolution (ask me later), personal experiences that are improperly generalized, and unfounded speculations elevated to theories. They offer the presupposition that everyone is sexual, everyone is gay or straight (or maybe bi). And why are homosexuality and bisexuality more accepted, when the evidence for them is in pretty much the same form?
Atheists are anti-religious. Note that the atheist community is more than gay-friendly, it's actively pro-LGB. An adoption agency shuts down in reaction to legalizing same-sex marriage? A Christian pastor makes fun of non-conforming gender expression? A hurricane hits a gay neighborhood? Atheists are on it! (Examples taken from Friendly Atheist.) Oddly, atheists have a less admirable track record on women and people of color. Let me advance a possible explanation: supporting LGB people is more politically expedient.

It's quite clear, after all, that religions are systematically anti-gay. There are a lot of dumb and hateful things said about LGB people by religious leaders. There is also a strong human-interest aspect to it, because those religious leaders are attacking people (as opposed to just a field of science). So there is a lot of motivation to talk this up. And in the mean time, the atheist community gets educated on queer issues, and it develops from a political tool to a sincere concern. No such mechanism is at work for women or people of color. Religions often say sexist things, but this usually only trains atheists to recognize overt sexism. Black people are, if anything, associated with churches.

Sometimes atheists have a negative reaction to asexuality because it's assumed that religion and asexuals are pals. This assumption does not come from any real experiences, but from an oversimplified view of religion and asexuality. Religions don't like sex, therefore they must like asexuals, who don't have sex. I feel at a loss as to which way to respond. One, some asexuals do have sex, and some are LGBT. Two, so-called "sex-negative" people are not actually against sex in that way. Three, why should the only worthwhile causes be those that are opposed by religion? It is a straw man atheist that thinks religion is the root of all evil, and yet some people behave like that straw man.

Of course, plenty of responses are positive too. Especially since atheists are very educated, as a group, about queer issues. Many atheist get it. Queer issues are not just about same-sex marriage or opposing the religious right, they're about diversity. In fact, I might even say that positive and neutral responses are the most prevalent. It's hard to say, since my own experience certainly has its share of biases (and I'm keenly aware of my failure to provide specific examples).

But I focus on the negative patterns, because that is the part that needs work. It's like, when I walk around with my boyfriend, I don't think about the hundreds of people with no adverse reactions. I think about that one guy who called me a fag, you know? When the results are a mixed bag, that's not good enough.

Coins on a table

2011-09-06T18:08:00.000-07:00

This is a game for two players. We take turns placing quarters on a round table. The round table has five times the diameter as the quarters. When a player cannot place their quarter fully flat on the table (not on top of any other quarters) without disturbing any of the other quarters, that player loses.

Which player has the winning strategy? What is the winning strategy?

(This is not an original puzzle.)

See solution

Recent reading

2011-09-03T08:39:00.000-07:00

My reading habits have changed in the past year. There are two major changes:

I started going to the public library. Libraries are awesome! The books are free and I don't need to keep them afterwards. I really don't care about keeping books on my shelf to show off; they just feel like dead weight. Anyways, now I have goodreads to keep track of what books I read.
I have a boyfriend. I would brag about him more, only this would break my general rule of not talking about my boring life on my blog. Anyway, I regularly take train trips to see him, which means I have more time to read. I used to only get reading done during summer vacation, but this is no longer the case.

This past year, I read Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion. Hyperion is hard to describe. It is about seven pilgrims traveling to the planet Hyperion to see the Shrike, a thorny monster from the future who places its victims on a giant Tree of Pain. Each pilgrim tells a story (like The Canterbury Tales) of their relationship to Hyperion. It is a good book.

I also read Fiasco, by Stanislaw Lem. It is about humans trying to make first contact with an alien planet, and failing (as the title suggests) due to anthropomorphism gone horribly wrong. A lot of the book is taken up by the humans' fantastic theoretical models, all of which tell us more about the humans than the aliens. I like the concept but sometimes the execution was tedious.

And I read two books by Ursula K. Le Guin: The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. The Dispossessed is about a physicist who tries to enact social change! That's cool, but I think now I want to read some books where the characters and plot actually matter. In both of these books, the plots were just excuses to talk about the societies where they take place.

I think I am reading too much sci-fi. It's not so much I'm a sci-fi fan, but that I usually only read books on recommendations, and I tend to get recommendations from sci-fi fans. Speaking of which, what books have you read lately? Any recommendations?

Next on my reading list is Gravity's Rainbow. Yes, it is ambitious. The narrative style is stream of consciousness, which means that there are many sentences with indecipherable sentence structure, and others with hardly any structure at all. My wishful thinking is that after reading this, physics papers will seem easy. But I'm not saying the book is bad so far. It's kind of engrossing actually.

Juxtaposed: Interfaith and Sex-positive

2011-09-01T06:39:00.000-07:00

What's the point of having a blog with very disparate topics if I can't juxtapose them once in a while?

An Interfaith Challenge offered by an Interfaith Office can’t be fully open to and inclusive of atheists. It rejects atheists in the very language it uses. We shouldn’t be pretending it doesn’t.
--Ophelia Benson

Even apart from what the movement's done to me, I really, really hate the word "sex-positive".
...
It grates, it really grates, to see people framing sex as universally positive. Because that's dismissing my experience. That's dismissing a lot of people's experience. And that that is the clear origin of a lot of the shit asexual people are putting up with now.
--Kaz

I make no claims as to how far this analogy holds. This is to get you thinking, as I write a post on asexuality and atheism.

Actual infinities in physics

2011-08-29T10:33:00.000-07:00

This is a continuation of my series, "Here are a few things that are wrong about the cosmological argument." Previously, I tried to define, precisely the distinction between "actual" and "potential" infinities. Now, I will try to provide examples of actual infinities in physics. But before we get on with the examples, I will outline the possible conclusions.

My definition of actual and potential infinities is no good. Bring your objections to my previous post.
I've somehow misapplied the definition.
The objects in question are not "real" or "existing" objects. Many people contend, for instance, that the set of all positions is not a set of real objects.
The theory of physics I'm describing must be incorrect (not just possibly incorrect).
Contrary to William Lane Craig's argument, sets of real objects in the real world may be actually infinite.

In this post, I will not argue for any particular conclusion (though I claim that 2 is incorrect). But I would definitely like to hear what you think for each example.

A. Real Numbers

Real numbers are abstract entities, so you might wonder why I am including them in a set of physics examples. The reason is that real numbers are so ubiquitous in physics. Nearly every quantity in physics lives in the set of real numbers, including time, distance, energy, electric field, temperature, brightness, pressure, to name a few.

Note that there are two ways in which the real numbers have an infinite cardinality. First, it extends to arbitrarily large numbers, just like the set of natural numbers. Second, between any two real numbers (say, between zero and one), an infinite number of real numbers are packed in between.

Now, as to whether this is a potential or actual infinity is a bit tricky. It depends what we are talking about. If I'm talking about the set of all possible distances, this is a set with infinite cardinality, and thus actually infinite.

However, if I talk about one particular distance, say the distance between two stars, this is not an infinite set. The distance between the two stars has only one value. And yet, perhaps there is some possible world where they are further apart. Perhaps the two stars can, in the set of all possible worlds, be arbitrarily far apart. If this is the case, then the distance between the two stars is potentially infinite.

But what if the two stars are moving towards each other? Then the distance between the two stars really does have an infinite cardinality of values (in this world, not in other possible worlds), though in different moments of time. The set of distances between the two stars would be actually infinite.

And if we're talking about points in space themselves (or moments in time, or events in space-time), these are of course actually infinite. In standard physics, space is infinite in extent, and events are densely packed. Yes, I know that there are theories in which space is not infinite, and theories in which space is made up of indivisible atoms. The question is, are you willing to accept these theories on a purely philosophical basis without any empirical evidence?

One last note is that the very idea of taking a derivative relies on actual infinities. For example, if I consider the velocity (which is the derivative of position with respect to time) of an object, the idea of a "velocity" is only coherent because the object exists in an infinite number of locations at different instants.

B. Fields

A field is something that has a value at every point in space. There are scalar fields, whose value at every point is a real number, and vector fields, whose value at every point is a magnitude and direction. For example, temperature is a scalar field and wind velocity is a vector field. Of course, these two examples don't really exist at every point, since on the smallest of scales, there is no temperature or wind velocity between the air molecules.

But physics has many examples that are more fundamental. One example is the electric potential. The electric potential has a value at every point of space. And thus, just like the points in space are actually infinite, the values of the electric potential are actually infinite. Furthermore, we also speak of the electric field, which comes from the derivative of the electric potential. If the electric potential did not exist at an infinite number of points, this concept would not even be coherent.

Fields are also a fundamental part of other fields of physics. There is the gravitational potential and gravitational field. In general relativity, we have the metric tensor. In quantum physics, we have the wavefunction. In particle physics, every one of the different particles is associated with a different field. It is not a stretch to say that fields are one of the most fundamental components of physics.

C. The singularity

The singularity is a hypothetical point in time at the "beginning" of the big bang. Note that Big Bang theory has little to do with the singularity, and is merely the theory in which distances between all galaxies is increasing over time. But if you naively follow the trajectories of these galaxies backwards through time, then they all cross at one point. My expert opinion is that the existence of the singularity is disputed, but for now I will analyze it as if it really existed.

I'm going to point to this video debunking the Kalam cosmological argument, starting at 3:38. Monica points out that William Lane Craig's position is inconsistent, because he denies the existence of infinities in realities, and yet asserts the existence of the singularity, which he himself describes as having infinite density, pressure, temperature and curvature.

I'm going to disagree with Monica. WLC's position, in this case, is consistent. The density, pressure, temperature, and curvature of the singularity are only potentially infinite, at least by the definitions we've discussed. My argument? None of these properties correspond to an infinite set.

By infinite density, we really mean that there is some set of massive objects in zero volume. Unless this set of massive objects is itself an infinite set (see example D), then there is no actual infinity to speak of. Instead, the density is potentially infinite, because for any finite value M, we can find an instant in time where the density is greater than M. At the singularity itself, the density is technically undefined, divide by zero.

(Of course, the set of all densities is actually infinite, but then this is going back to example A.)

Similarly, pressure and temperature do not correspond to infinite sets. I'm going to admit that I am ignorant as to whether curvature represents an infinite set, but I suspect not.

D. Uniform cosmology

You may have heard that the universe is finite in size. But actually, you misheard. The correct statement is that the observable universe is finite in size. The speed of light is finite, and has had a finite amount of time to travel through space. When we look far into space, we are looking far into the past. If you look too far back in time, you reach the "time of last scattering", which is when the universe became transparent.* But theoretically, if we had an omniscient view of everything, we would find that the universe goes on forever.

*Note that this is not the same time as the Big Bang. It occurs 380,000 years afterwards. This is where the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation comes from.

In standard cosmology, not only does the universe go on forever, but it is uniform on the largest scales. On a small scale, the universe is not uniform, because the sun is not at all like the earth, which is not at all like the space between them. But on a very large scale, larger than galaxies, larger than galaxy clusters, larger than galaxy filaments, the universe is uniform. That is, the density of matter is the same everywhere throughout the infinite universe.

A corrolary of uniform cosmology is that there are an actual infinite number of particles, stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters. This is not a potential infinite, because the infinite set exists entirely in this universe, not in some possible universe.

Mind you, there are theories of cosmology in which the universe is not uniform or not infinite. For instance, I recall that blogger Sean Carroll once authored a paper proposing that the universe is just a bit lopsided. However, the universe would still have an infinite amount of matter in this scenario.

So, what are your conclusions? 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5? Myself I would agree with different conclusions for different examples.

"A few things wrong about the cosmological argument"
1. Actual and potential infinities
2. Actual infinities in physics
3. What is real?
4. The "absurdity" of Hilbert's Hotel
5. Interlude: God is infinite

Tracking a silly syllogism

2011-08-24T18:28:00.000-07:00

Though I did not read the hundred page paper (by Mercier and Sperber) on argumentative theory that I mentioned earlier, I did spot this:

Categorical syllogisms are one of the most studied types of reasoning. Here is a typical example: “No C are B; All B are A; therefore some A are not C.” Although they are solvable by very simple programs (e.g., see Geurts 2003), syllogisms can be very hard to figure out – the one just offered by way of illustration, for instance, is solved by less than 10% of participants (Chater & Oaksford 1999).
(Mercier and Sperber, pg 30)

The syllogism is being used as an example of how people are poorly motivated to falsify their own conclusions. The problem is that the syllogism they give is false. We need an additional premise: "There exist some B."

It's somewhat surprising to spot such a straightforward logical error. It's as if I found a misspelled word in the title. I was curious if the paper they cited, by Chater and Oaksford, made the same mistake. It turns out that the paper, "The probability heuristics model of syllogistic reasoning," is not only correct, but interesting in itself.

The paper is about formally correct syllogistic inferences vs the inferences that people actually make in practice. The paper proposes a new model for how people draw inferences.

People may not be trying and failing to do logical inference, but rather succeeding in applying probabilistic reasoning strategies.
(Chater and Oaksford, pg 193)

It's another long paper--70 pages--which I'm not willing to read because I am not that invested in it. And yet already, it seems that Mercier and Sperber seem to have missed the point of the paper. It is not about how people are poorly motivated to falsify their own conclusions, but how people use probabilistic reasoning rather than formal logic.

I noticed that in Table 1, they show three systems of syllogistic reasoning. The table is full of cryptic letters and codes, but I took the time to figure out what it all meant.

Aristotle's logic:* You are allowed to assume that there exist at least one object of A, B, and C. However, in Aristotle's logic, the order of the syllogisms matters! If the first premise uses A and B, and the second premise uses B and C, then the conclusion must be of the form C-A. That is, the conclusion is either "All C are A," "No C are A," "Some C are A," or "Some C are not A." We may not conclude "All A are C," because the premises are in the wrong order.
Johnson-Laird's logic: This is the same as Aristotle, except that the order of the premises does not matter.
Frege's logic: We are not allowed to assume the existence of objects in every category. If I say "All A are B," that just means that given an object in A, it must also be in B. However, it could be the case that there are no objects in A, thus it would also be true that no A are B. The ordering of premises does not matter.

*Just because they naming this after Aristotle, I would not assume that they are actually trying to attribute it to Aristotle. After all, this is a cognitive psychology paper, not a classics paper.

Chater and Oaksford are essentially constructing a fourth system of syllogistic reasoning, using additional quantifiers of "most" and "few". It's quite complicated, but when compared with survey data, this fourth system mostly agrees. (A caveat: just because this model has been proposed in a paper does not mean it is correct. That simply means it has been proposed, and some evidence put forward. The paper has 144 citations, which suggests that experts consider it a serious contender.)

The syllogism at the top of this post, “No C are B; All B are A; therefore some A are not C,” is valid according to Aristotle and Johnson-Laird, but not Frege. It is unsurprising that I use Frege's logic, because I have mathematical training, and that's the appropriate reasoning for mathematics. But it was premature of me to label the syllogism as simply incorrect; it simply uses different syllogistic reasoning.

In any case, it seems that most people draw a conclusion that is incorrect by any formal logic system. 60% conclude "No A are C" or "No C are A". 10% draw the conclusion which is correct according to Aristotle and Johnson-Laird. 25% draw no conclusion, which is correct according to Frege. The other 5% draw other conclusions entirely. While that's still pretty bad, as far as formal logic goes, I still feel that Mercier and Sperber misrepresented the results by only citing the 10% figure.

More panadaptationism: cognitive biases

2011-08-22T08:19:00.000-07:00

Someone sent me a link to a NY Times article called "Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth". (The age of the article tells you something about how long these ideas sit in my draft bin.) It's about "argumentative theory", which claims that human reasoning evolved to win arguments, rather than to reach truth. In this view, even our many cognitive biases are adaptations to improve debate skills. This goes against the more common view that cognitive biases represent limitations of natural selection.

Given these two diverging views, I was curious about the evidence for each side. But I was disappointed in how little evidence the article presented. In fact, it presented no evidence at all! I've decided the article is a self-referential parody.

The article instead talks about how resilient cognitive biases are.

Mr. Mercier, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, contends that attempts to rid people of biases have failed because reasoning does exactly what it is supposed to do: help win an argument.

If cognitive biases are adaptive this does not imply that they are harder to be rid of. If cognitive biases represent limitations of evolution, this does not imply that they are easier to be rid of.

“People have been trying to reform something that works perfectly well,” he said, “as if they had decided that hands were made for walking and that everybody should be taught that.”

Never mind that no evidence has been put forward for argumentative theory, let's march onwards to even more questionable conclusions! In this case, the inference is that if we're adapted for something, we better not mess with what nature wants.

Later, the article gets into the political implications of argumentative theory.

Because “individual reasoning mechanisms work best when used to produce and evaluate arguments during a public deliberation,” Mr. Mercier and Ms. Landemore, as a practical matter, endorse the theory of deliberative democracy...

I'm not sure what this has to do with argumentative theory at all, but then, we don't even know whether argumentative theory is true or not, so what does it matter?

The NY Times article does cite its original source, which is a hundred-page paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. I not willing to read this paper, so I will remain agnostic as to whether the lack of evidence is NY Times' fault, or the scientists' fault. However, my boyfriend was trying to read the paper earlier, and said it was merely a review of evidence for cognitive biases, without any evidence that these are adaptive. There is additional hearsay from Massimo Pigliucci, who says, "The first substantive thing to notice about the paper is that there isn’t a single new datum to back up the central hypothesis."

I could write a rant about panadaptationism, but then it's not like these rants are in short supply.

Opinions are relative

2011-08-19T19:23:00.000-07:00

Two friends were arguing over nature vs nurture. As we all know, asking whether a trait is caused by social or inherent factors is a bad question. All the same, we can ask similar questions which are good questions, or at least passable questions.

Let's consider how women do in, say, math. There are more men who study math than women, at least in the US. How much of this gap would remain if we somehow cleared the slate of social constructions? Would women participate just as much, and do equally well as men, or might there still be a gap in one direction or the other?* And how big would this gap be?

*Google's answer was this article. No comment.

One friend started talking about abuses of evopsych. He's seen lots of people blithely constructing just-so evolutionary stories to explain why male/female mathematical differences are innate. He's seen questionable explanations for why homophobia is adaptive, or why men are naturally doms and women subs. My friend accepts the possibility that a few of these narratives can be true, but how often they are stated without evidence in order to justify our prejudices!

The other friend started going on about postmodernism. He's met many postmodernists in liberal arts departments who absolutely insist that everything is only a social construction. Women have exactly the same mathematical aptitude, and any difference is proof positive of a biased culture. Everyone is really fluid/bisexual and genderfluid; our identities are just a social construction. If science provides an evolutionary explanation for some particular trait, that's just another narrative with no more reality than the narratives provided by religion or political ideologies.

(The above conversation is based on a true story, but details are not factual.)

As for myself, I was struck by this perfect example of how we think of opinions in relative terms.

Questions of nature vs nurture have a spectrum of answers. Unless we get into specifics, it is difficult to express our opinions in absolute terms. So instead we express them, and think of them, in relative terms. "I lean towards nature." "I lean towards nurture." But to talk of "leaning" one direction or the other, we have to specify a center. And where is the center?

We could define the center to be wherever the correct position lies. If so, I believe I'm in the center, and you believe you're in the center. At least one of us is wrong (I think it's you).

Or we could define the center to be where popular opinion lies. But we seem to have such divergent views of where that is. One friend had bad experiences with liberal arts professors. The other had bad experiences with libertarian blog commenters. It's funny how a scientific issue, when discussed in casual conversation, gets reduced down to personal experiences. And when we get an impression of popular opinion, it usually comes down to less than a dozen specific examples, completely fraught with selective biases. It has to do with where we live, who we hang out with, and where we get our news. Sometimes our beliefs really do hang on a string.

Not to say that both sides are equally right or any such nonsense. Obviously I lean towards nurture.

Solution: ten rows of three

2011-08-17T18:02:00.000-07:00

See the original problem

Image of solution

I had a book when I was much younger that had a handful of puzzles just like this. Use X points to make Y rows of Z points each. My blog has featured several variations of other puzzles that appeared in this book. I rummaged through the house earlier and I found my copy! 100 Perceptual Puzzles. I recommend it.

Actual and potential infinities

2011-08-15T15:37:00.000-07:00

I've spent much time on the ontological argument for God, but only ever invested one post, years ago, on the cosmological argument. Looking back, my essay is a jumble of too many objections in too small a space. I also pushed some of the most interesting objections aside because they were not particularly important. Therefore, I am declaring a new blogging series: not "Why the cosmological argument is wrong," but "Here are a few things that are wrong about the cosmological argument."

I will place emphasis on math and physics, and deemphasize the cosmological argument itself. I trust this post will demonstrate what I mean.

Actual and Potential Infinities meet Mathematics

In William Lane Craig's version of the cosmological argument, he makes a distinction between "potential" and "actual" infinities. William Lane Craig (henceforth WLC) contends that potential infinities can exist in the real world, but actual infinities cannot.¹

The thing is, in mathematics, there is no distinction between actual and potential infinities. At least not one I've heard of. Luckily, WLC explains. He identifies actual infinity with the cardinality of natural numbers, ℵ₀ ("Aleph-nought"). As for potential infinity...

Crudely put, a potential infinite is a collection which is increasing toward infinity as a limit, but never gets there. Such a collection is really indefinite, not infinite. The sign of this sort of infinity, which is used in calculus, is ∞.

From a mathematician's perspective, WLC's definition of actual infinity is perfectly well-defined, but his definition of potential infinity is poorly-defined. In calculus, ∞ doesn't actually have any meaning on its own, but when inserted into mathematical expressions it gives the expressions new meaning.

These are two possible contexts in which ∞ can be used, and it technically has a different meaning in each context.² WLC appears to be using ∞ in yet a third context where the meaning is unclear. I can guess fairly well what he's trying to say, and the charitable thing to do would be to simply give potential infinity a precise and appropriate definition, even though WLC could only be bothered to give a crude definition. But if I did that, WLC's supporters would likely claim that I've defined it incorrectly.

But let's try it anyway.

Any particular set of objects has an exact "size", called its cardinality. The cardinality may either be a finite number (eg 0, 1, 2, 3), or an infinite cardinality (ℵ₀ or larger). We say that the set of objects is actually infinite if its cardinality is ℵ₀ or larger.

Potential infinity is not a cardinality, and does not refer to any particular set of objects. If we say that the set of all apples in the world is potentially infinite, we are really talking about the set of all possible sets of apples. And if we say that distance between two stars is potentially infinite, we are really talking about the set of all possible distances between two stars.

We say that a set of objects is potentially infinite if for every finite number M, there exists some possible world where that set of objects has cardinality greater than M. Similarly, we say that a number X is potentially infinite, if for every finite number M, there exists some possible world where X is greater than M.

Notes on my definition:

Even if the set of all apples in the world is potentially infinite, this does not necessarily imply that there is some possible world in which the set of apples is actually infinite. It just means that there is no maximum number of apples in the world.
However, if the set of all apples in the world is potentially infinite, this does imply that the set of all possible worlds is actually infinite. I think this is okay with WLC, because he would not consider possible worlds to be "existing" objects.
Mathematically speaking, this is still poorly-defined because the set of all possible worlds is poorly-defined in mathematics. However, I think it will suffice for my purposes.

I sincerely hope that my definition is satisfactory to WLC's supporters, but I couldn't know for sure. It stands to reason that they should be able to tell me whether the definition is satisfactory before I apply the definition. Therefore, I offer a pause here for objections (though it's a symbolic pause, since realistically I don't expect any supporters to pay attention to a little blog).

----------------------
1. This is relevant to the cosmological argument because WLC contends that a universe without beginning is an actual infinity, and I suppose he contends that a god is not. But let's not get sidetracked.

2. Equation (1) means that for any positive number ε, there exists some number M such that for all x greater than M, 1/x is between -ε and ε. Equation (2) means that for any number M, there exists some positive number ε such that if x is between 0 and ε, then 1/x is greater than M.

"A few things wrong about the cosmological argument"
1. Actual and potential infinities
2. Actual infinities in physics
3. What is real?
4. The "absurdity" of Hilbert's Hotel
5. Interlude: God is infinite

Google adventures: Ys and infinities

2011-08-14T14:35:00.000-07:00

I was thinking of writing a post about the (bad) math in the cosmological argument. But you're not going to see it yet. Instead let me tell you something funny that happened during research.

For reference, I decided to use Lane Craig because he is widely cited.* And I used this article, which was recommended by a friend who like Lane Craig.

Lane Craig says this:

The sign of this sort of infinity, which is used in calculus, is ¥.

At first I saw that symbol, the Y with double-strike-through, and thought, "What the hell? Is he using some obscure concept of infinity that was mentioned once by who knows which mathematician?"

To Google!

I quickly found another website which used the same symbol. Apparently, the double-struck-Y was a symbol invented by John Wallis in 1655. Who also, it seems, invented the sideways-8 symbol for infinity, the lemniscus. But the website didn't explain why there were two symbols, or even seem to acknowledge it.

To Google?

I could not find a single other article which mentioned the Y-with-equals-sign as a symbol for infinity. It looked pretty suspicious! And whenever I tried searching John Wallis, only the lemniscus was ever mentioned. I thought maybe the lemniscus was just so much better-known that it overran any mention of the plus-plus-Y symbol.

Eventually, with more Google, I was able to solve this mystery. It's a Symbol font problem. With certain browsers, using the Symbol font will cause the wrong symbol to appear. In particular, if you try to make the lemniscus symbol, ∞, it will appear as the Yen symbol. If your internet browser does not have this problem, I guess you've just solved the mystery of WTF Is Miller Talking About?

You learn something new every day. Sometimes things you didn't really want to learn.

*Okay, it's more like, I have had three or four independent personal experiences where someone mentioned William Lane Craig. Funny how we form impressions out of such scant evidence.

On asexual relationships

2011-08-11T13:53:00.000-07:00

Did you know? XKCD once had a comic about asexuality.

Okay, not really. But it's relevant. As most sexual people know, sexual relationships create all sorts of drama. So if you're asexual, you get to avoid all that, right? No such luck.

Asexual relationships fall into two categories: the conventional and unconventional.

Conventional relationships include romantic relationships, friendships, family relationships, coworker relationships, and so forth. Some asexuals--I call them "classic" aromantic asexuals--have entirely conventional relationships, except for romantic relationships, which they avoid entirely. There are other asexuals who have entirely conventional relationships including sexual romantic relationships. They may do this as a compromise with a partner, or because they're only borderline asexual, or because they just want to do it, or because they don't know they're asexual, or any other number of reasons.

Unconventional relationships fit in none of the above categories, and may come with entirely different social rules. In theory, an unconventional relationship can be anything at all. In practice, only a small range of unconventional relationships actually get discussed. The simplest is the nonsexual romantic relationship, which is pursued by "classic" romantic asexuals. It's basically a conventional romantic relationship only without sex.* The man on the street asks, "But isn't romance just friendship plus sex?" It would seem that classic romantic asexuals are empirical evidence to the contrary!

*This might not even be considered unconventional.

But the man on the street may be right about some people. Lots of asexuals--let's call them WTFromantics--really do feel confused about the difference between friendship and romance. Well, not confused exactly. It's more like, they want friends with more commitment and cuddles, or they want romantic partners with more independence and space. They want a relationship which fits neither the friendship nor relationship category. They want an unconventional relationship.

Some non-asexuals tell me that these ideas resonate with them too. Feel free to borrow them.

I come from the perspective of forming only conventional relationships, including romantic relationships. I don't feel comfortable with unconventional relationships, just as some WTFromantics don't feel comfortable with conventional relationships. But I have it easier, because I already have this set of rules made out for me, and WTFromantics have to make it up as they go along. I'm betting this results in drama drama drama, as if conventional relationships didn't already have enough drama.

Discussion of unconventional relationships is very common in asexual communities. It's kind of frustrating for me, because I feel like an outsider to this discussion. But why should I be frustrated at a discussion that helps other people? So I suck it up.

But it still frustrates me when asexuals imply that we should all want unconventional relationships. It's a pretty easy mistake to make. First you're complaining about people who think there's no middle ground between romance and friendship. Next you're complaining about people who refuse to be in the middle ground. I feel this is akin to a bisexual complaining that not everyone is bisexual. Or more aptly, a polyamorous person complaining that some people are monogamous, or a monogamous person complaining that some people are polyamorous. It sucks, I know, and you want to complain. But I don't feel comfortable with complaining about other people's sexualities when that's just a part of who they are.

I should provide a specific example for my asexual readers so they know what I'm talking about. Two words: "relationship hierarchy". The relationship hierarchy is the idea that romantic relationships are somehow "more" than friendships. This is decidedly untrue for aromantics, and for some other asexuals. So asexuals complain about it a lot. The problem begins when they complain about other people's relationships. Here's one example:

I believe with absolute conviction that there are far more human beings on this earth who have a capacity to experience romantic and platonic emotions on a spectrum, rather than in two regimented boxes that never intersect.

See also: "Everyone is really bisexual."

They try to explain that a romantic partner you aren’t fucking is different from a friend because your romantic partner is The Most Important Person in your life and The Only One that you have formal expectations of, want to live with, feel possessive of, spend all your time thinking about, want to be with all the time, etc. And this annoys me because I’m trying to GET AWAY from the Relationship Hierarchy, I think the world would greatly benefit if most people got away from it too...

It's hard not to feel slighted by this characterization (especially when it got wide approval in the asexual tumblr community). I do feel like my romantic partner is more important than any of my platonic relationships. This is because I prefer wide circles of relatively distant friends. In fact, this is what I like about friendships, that they are low commitment. My boyfriend is different; he prefers a small group of much closer friends. Diversity is pretty fascinating that way.

Suddenly, I feel bad that this post started out as an exposition to the wonders of asexual relationships, and turned into a rant on the ugly side of asexual discourse.

Two puzzle competitions

2011-08-09T09:05:00.000-07:00

Every year I plug the US Puzzle Championship, which this year happens on August 27th. What happens is I print out the puzzles, doodle on them with colored pencils, and type numbers and letters into an online form. It's fun! Register ahead of time, ie now.

You should also try all these fillomino puzzles. The puzzles are part of a different sort of competition where you're the judge. You vote on your four favorite puzzles, using any criterion. Vote for mine! (I'm not allowed to say which one it is.)

Fair and balanced

2011-08-08T19:41:00.000-07:00

It's pretty fashionable to decry "fair and balanced" reporting. "Fair and balanced" reporting involves featuring a person from each side, even if one side is plainly wrong.

If the news decided to write a story on the health impact of EMF radiation, they might find one person who claims to get headaches from them, and another person to say that they're totally safe. Someone who reads this might conclude that the middle ground is most likely correct--that EMF radiation requires caution and further study. (It's forgotten that further study has already been done, and baseless caution causes harm.)

But what is the alternative to "fair and balanced" reporting? Would you like the article to declare one side right and the other side stupid? This runs afoul of my rule against pointless opinions. It doesn't really matter what the journalist thinks, because the journalist is just this person, you know? The journalist doesn't have any special knowledge about the subject, because all the evidence is right there in the article. If one side is so plainly wrong, the journalist doesn't need to say so in order for it to be plain.

On the other hand, people who complain about "fair and balanced" may have a point after all. The alternative is not for the journalist to express a pointless opinion, but to let their investigation go beyond the balance. If on one side they have a concerned father, and the other side a health researcher, it may seem that there is parity, since it's testimonial against testimonial. But the researcher's opinion is really a reference to a scientific study--maybe it's worth investigating? If one side has more relevant things to say, let them say it without having to "balance" it with irrelevant anecdotes.

(Some) opinions are worthless

2011-08-04T10:51:00.000-07:00

I once took a class that compared evidence in a court of law vs evidence in other disciplines. According to the ideal, the lawyers present facts to the jury, and the jury makes inferences based on those facts. But there are some kinds of inferences that the jury can't make on its own. For this, we need the witness to give an "opinion". It may be something as simple as the opinion that a noise sounded like a gunshot. Or it may be an expert opinion, which is an inference that is too difficult for the typical juror.

Of course, I've probably got the description completely wrong somehow, and courts probably don't match the ideal. But it doesn't matter, because I'm really talking about blogging, not the law.

Whenever I blog an opinion, I have to think about what I'm doing. Have I presented new evidence for this opinion? Have I presented new arguments that you couldn't have thought of yourself? Or am I just trying to persuade by sheer force of personality?

Let's take a short case study, dug from my blog archives. Back in February, I posted a video of a panel of atheist men discussing sexism. Some people thought the panel was no big deal, and others thought the panel was terrible. My comment on it was brief:

I don't think I have anything especially insightful or persuasive to say about this, but I will express my opinion that the whole panel was deeply disturbing.

I was not stating a new position. I was not presenting a new argument or new evidence. I was merely saying which side I was on, namely the side that thought the panel was terrible. Nobody should find this persuasive, just because some random guy on the internet said it. So what was the point?

In this case, the point was to provide evidence for a different claim, one that was unstated. I was claiming that some skeptical men are concerned about sexism, since I myself am one such person.

But suppose I had said something similar about UFOs:

I don't think I have anything especially insightful or persuasive to say about this, but I will express my opinion that UFOs are Unidentified Flying Objects, and not Alien-Identified Flying Objects.

That would be a worthless opinion, because it's not a novel position, and has no new supporting arguments or evidence. Perhaps I would persuade people anyway if I stated my opinion in an especially succinct way, or if (hypothetically) I were a widely respected blogger. But you, dear reader, should see through it.

How I feel about same-sex marriage

2011-08-01T22:28:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, Hemant wrote this:

If I asked you what came to your mind when I said the word “homosexuality,” what would you think of?

The Illinois Family Institute's answer is "sodomy". Hemant's answer is his gay friends, pride parades, and the lack of marriage equality.

My impression is that this is representative of the range of reactions I get from straight people. Sodomy, and gay marriage. (It's really same-sex marriage, since it applies to some bi and trans people, but this is frequently forgotten.) Sodomy and gay marriage.

For some reason, same-sex marriage has become the issue of gay rights. It's the focus of most of the major gay rights organizations. Millions of dollars are spent on it. It's what makes the big news. It's one of the first things straight people think about when they hear the word "homosexuality."

But I can think of more pressing issues. Homelessness is really common among youth. Employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is still legal in most states. Suicide is much more common than a few well-known cases; according to a statistic I once cited, gays and lesbians are three times as likely to consider suicide as compared to straight people, and bisexuals five times as likely.

And marriage? Marriage is only accessible to people who are doing well enough for it (I include myself in this category). And the laws don't really stop people from marrying anyone of the same sex, by the way, they just stop it from being recognized by the state. And legalization doesn't really stop individuals from seeing the marriage as invalid.

Not that same-sex marriage is bad to have or anything. On the contrary, it's something that is very obviously good. In fact, it's ridiculous that same-sex marriage gets opposed at all. I believe that opposing marriage equality simply does not belong in the Overton window. It would be better if we were arguing over whether government should be recognizing all marriages or none.

How did it come to be this way? Among my queer friends, the cynics say that it's because same-sex marriage concerns the affluent, and it's the affluent who provide campaign funding. The others say the issue was forced upon us by the opposition, or that it's a necessary political strategy. Nobody I know thinks it's an ideal situation.

I don't know whose fault it is, if anyone. I don't know that knowing whose fault it is would help solve the problem. I don't know if it would be any better if it were some other issue that dominated the gay agenda.

So how do I feel about same-sex marriage? I wish it were legalized already so we could move on to more important things.

Ten rows of three

2011-07-28T10:44:00.000-07:00

Here is a way to arrange eight dots into four rows of three.

Can you find a way to arrange nine dots into ten rows of three?

For the purposes of this puzzle, a row is just a set of distinct colinear points. No two rows may lie on the same line.

See the solution

Diversity vs itself

2011-07-25T20:54:00.000-07:00

Something exciting happened at TAM (The Amazing! Meeting, annual skeptical conference). No, I didn't go this year, but I've read Jen's liveblogging. There was heated disagreement during the "diversity" panel.

On the one hand, to increase diversity in a movement, you must make sure that the focus isn't only on the concerns of middle class white men.

Jamila adds that if we care about the state of everyone, we need to be outspoken about police brutality, the drug war, and crime. [...] We need to offer some social programs. We love hard facts and evidence, but we also need to understand that the people who need us may not be drawn in just by meeting Neil deGrasse Tyson (as crazy as that sounds to us).
--Jen McCreight

On the other hand, broadening the focus constitutes mission creep, and may reduce the diversity of views allowed under the same tent.

This empirical focus has allowed the skeptical community—old and white and bearded as it may have been—to enjoy other kinds of diversity. If political ideology is not a topic for our movement, then anarchists, libertarians, liberals, and conservatives can happily share the same big tent. If science-based skepticism is neutral about nonscientific moral values, then the community can embrace people who hold a wide range of perspectives on values issues—on the environment, on public schools, on nuclear power, on same-sex marriage, on taxation, gun control, the military, veganism, or so on. It’s a sort of paradox: the wider the scope of skepticism, the less diverse its community becomes.
--Daniel Loxton, in his recap of the panel

I'm not sure what to think of this; I agree with both sides, but it's clear they contradict.

First things first. My blog, though it is about a variety of topics, is not an attempt to widen the scope of skepticism. I consider my blog to be a skeptical blog that very frequently goes outside the scope of skepticism. Practically all the time, in fact. This is okay because I'm an individual, not a skeptical organization.

But come to think of it, there is no single "scope of skepticism." There is the scope of large skeptical organizations. The scope of small student organizations. The scope of skeptical blogs. The scope of things we agree on, and the scope of things we disagree on (but like to talk about). Perhaps a call for a broader focus should be taken as a call for widening the scope of skeptical chatter, but not of skeptical organizations.

An alternative path to reconciling the two sides is to note that even non-skeptical topics have skeptical questions embedded within them.

As [Greta Christina] argued, there are testable, empirical, pseudoscientific claims embedded within the arenas of social values, political discourse, and yes, religion as well. The forest may be out of scope, but some of the trees are not. (D.J. offered the example of harmful pseudoscience within gay rights debates.)
--Daniel Loxton

This would, of course, rule out Jamila's suggestion of social programs. Actually, if I wanted to volunteer with social programs, I would simply do that and not bother with "skeptical" social programs. But I would be perfectly happy with skeptical assessments of police brutality, the drug war, and crime issues, if there are any skeptics qualified to give such assessments.

However, I think there are some topics that skeptical organizations must tackle even if there are no embedded empirical claims. If, for instance, the skeptical community gets overrun with people who think same-sex sex is morally wrong (this is in no danger of happening), that would be a problem regardless of whether they made any empirical claims. If skeptical men are hitting on skeptical women in elevators, that is a problem regardless of any statistics on elevator rape. If skeptical conferences indirectly push away women by failing to provide child care, that is a problem.

Skeptical organizations must talk about these things not because they are skeptical but because they are organizations. Organizations must deal with people in all their variety. It's one thing to be pushed away from a group because it's outside your realm of interest, or because you disagree with its positions. It's another to be pushed away because the environment is totally unfriendly. Sometimes this means weighing one kind of diversity vs another (eg would we rather be inclusive of queers or homophobes?). Luckily I think skeptical organizations like JREF already understand this point, perhaps better than I do.

Current labwork: Vacuums

2011-07-20T09:47:00.000-07:00

My mother is begging me to write about my current summer research. I have already talked about my general research topic, but let's talk a little more about the experimental details. Let's talk about this thing:

(Image credit)

My reaction (and possibly yours too) is, "What the hell is that?" I've toured a bunch of physics labs, and many of them are inhabited by these strange Physics Devices. They just look like jumbles of spheres, windows, tubes, wires, and aluminum foil. Who knows what those mad physicists are up to?

But after working on these Physics Devices for weeks, I've unlocked some of their secrets. In short, they are vacuum chambers.

Actually, they are all sorts of different devices for different experiments, but vacuum chambers are a very common component. A vacuum has obvious utility for lots of experiments. In my own experiment, air will interact with the surfaces of the superconductors, and thus ruin the experimental results (which are very surface-sensitive). Therefore, the superconductor has to be kept under vacuum.

Why do vacuum chambers look the way they do? First, you need those spheres to prevent air from coming into the vacuum. And then you need the windows so you can actually see what's happening inside. You need additional spheres as loading chambers (so you don't let the air in everywhere whenever you load a material). And then you may need additional chambers between the main one and the loading chamber in order to slowly step up the vacuum power. There are also multiple vacuum pumps and pressure gauges.

And then, you need some way to transfer materials from the loading chamber to the main chamber. This is tricky. I'm going to zoom in on the solution.

That long cylinder is a manipulator arm. On the very right end is something you can slide back and forth to move the arm. Typically, you'd have a sample (eg a superconductor) screwed onto a "stage" in the loading chamber, and you'd use the manipulator arm to unscrew the sample, move it into the main chamber, and then screw it onto another stage.

What's with all the aluminum foil? Water molecules tend to stick to the inner surfaces of the vacuum chamber, and they slowly come loose, to the detriment of the vacuum. We need a really good vacuum, down to 10^-11 atmospheres or so! Therefore, before starting any experiments, we need to heat up the chamber, and boil off all the water so it can be pumped out. This is called a "bake-out". The aluminum foil is there to keep the heat in during the bake-out. Grad students are usually too lazy to take the foil off afterwards, especially since they'll just have to put it on again for the next bake-out.

The wires are there to supply power and record data. All the data ends up on a computer, which is actually where I do most of my work. But that's boring to describe, so back to the vacuum.

Depending on the experiment, there could be lots of other attachments to the vacuum chamber. In my experiment, we need to take off a layer of the superconductor while it's in the vacuum in order to expose a new surface that has never touched air before. This is also quite tricky. The solution involves gluing a little peg to the sample beforehand, and then using a "wobble stick" in order to jab the peg off. I am not making this up.

My experiment also requires the addition of a hemispherical analyzer (shaped like a hemisphere), and a laser (which comes with a whole new jumble of lenses, mirrors, cameras, and other optics). There's probably even more stuff that I don't understand. Who am I kidding, I don't even fully understand the things I've described!

I'm no atheist activist

2011-07-18T19:07:00.000-07:00

I am questioning my identity. No, the other identity. No, the other other identity. I'm talking about my identity as an activist for atheism.

Calling myself an activist made a lot more sense when I was running a student organization. But these days, what is it I do exactly? I don't go to any protests (I don't like them). I don't write letters to congressmen, or even to newspapers. I don't support any atheist organizations. All I have is this blog, which I really don't think counts. There is a swarm of atheist blogs already, and I'm pretty sure that this little raindrop is not responsible for the flood.

For some reason, I feel sorry to see my activist identity go. Maybe it's because I'm doing nothing to help the atheist movement which I know and care about so much. Personally, I think it is for the much sillier and selfish reason that being an activist greatly boosted my ability to smash stereotypes of atheists. Nobody could chalk me up as an individual exception; I was a leader. Never mind how ridiculously elitist that is, or how minor a leader I was.

But reality compels me to say goodbye. I have started thinking of myself as a radical atheist instead (yes, like Douglas Adams), because it's something I'm still very serious about. But I am completely incapable of dredging up the will to do anything about it other than a bit of reading and writing. Pretty much the same boat as most of my readers, which maybe isn't so bad!

On a related note, Cerberus planted a little idea in my head (emphasis mine):

Yes, atheists can, do, and should point out issues in the Religious Right all around the world, both Christian and Muslim, pointing out egregious behavior and making it impossible to hide them from the public eye and public condemnation. To make it easier for people to leave those communities and try to reach those who can break from the oppressive conditions they find themselves in.

But the thing about that is that comes with a lot of downtime.

Cerberus goes on to say that the most important thing to do during this downtime is work on our own community and ourselves.

Well, here I am, in permanent activist downtime. I'm quite sure that my blog has no real effect on the religious right. But I am happy to simply participate in this community, and do what little I can there.

Where are the citations?

2011-07-16T13:04:00.000-07:00

In a previous post, I spent some time complaining about people who don't provide examples of the things they are criticizing... and yet I did not provide any examples myself! Savor the ironic hypocrisy for a moment. I know I'm savoring it.

Anyway, I did have some examples in mind from some time ago, which I would probably not bring up except for aforementioned hypocrisy.

The example is the asexual blogosphere, which, as much as it pains me to generalize, has a habit of not citing the things it criticizes. We'll begin with Sciatrix.

So in the wake of the shitstorm that’s been happening on Tumblr this week I’ve seen one thing over and over again, and it bugs the shit out of me.

No links or quotes of even one of those times you saw it? And though I may know which shitstorm is being referenced, not everyone does, and hardly anyone knows which part of the shitstorm it was.

There were lots of other examples (found through Sciatrix' excellent linkspams) about the same drama which similarly failed to provide links or quotes:

Where the fuck is all this ‘heteroromantic aces can’t call themselves queer’ BS coming from? [The title of this post. The question remains unanswered, since no links are provided.]

So there is a situation I’ve ran in to quite a few times that I find rather ironic, and I noticed it just recently from some of the bullies/trolls on tumblr.
[From here. No links provided when there is a clear opportunity.]

...there's been some massive awfulness directed at asexuals on tumblr and some big livejournal communities I shall not name over the past few weeks...
[Kaz at least has some conviction about not linking drama]

Sooo I know some of you saw that debacle. In sf_d. A lot of you probably didn't? But that's alright because I'm pretty sure the things I want to say here can stand completely separate from that, but I do have a few words to say on that first, as to why I'm now writing a post on it;
[From here. I think a link still couldn't hurt.]

Another big misconception is the idea that groups are ordered from most privileged to least privileged.
[The worst example. The drama that inspired it isn't even mentioned. From Skeptic's Play.]

There are plenty more, not all having to do with the same drama, but that's probably enough--I already feel like a blogging-etiquette nazi. Hell, let's throw in one more recent example for good measure.

But yeah, providing specific examples of the views being criticized is generally a good thing. To rehash, this gives opponents a chance to respond, gives allies a chance to join in, shows that you are not making straw men, and reduces confusion over what views are being criticized.

It's jarring to see so many bloggers deliberately missing out on opportunities for citations. In contrast, I have not seen a single post on elevatorgate in the skeptical blogosphere which did not link to relevant posts. However, there is still lots of confusion over who is criticizing whom... so yeah.

Since this is an inherently belligerent post, I should remind you of my comment policy: Anything but spam.

Cite your opponents

2011-07-13T07:04:00.000-07:00

There was another interesting discussion that came out of the whole "elevator" thing. I should provide a quick summary of the "elevator" thing so you actually know what I'm talking about.

1) Rebecca Watson says she is tired and wants to go to bed. It’s 4:00a.
2) Unknown Male approaches Rebecca in the elevator and asks her if he’d like to come to her room.
3) Rebecca says no and then goes to her room.
4) Rebecca makes a video in which she mentions the situation.
5) Stef McGraw responds to the video saying that situation doesn’t sound as bad as Rebecca made it out to be.
6) Rebecca calls out Stef in front of her friends and peers at a conference.

(Summary stolen from Hemant, with names inserted)

And then people complained that Rebecca was wrong to name Stef when she criticized her. Rebecca doesn't agree!

For me, this is a question of respect: I have enough respect for the person I am criticizing to not make them guess that I am talking about them or guess at what they said that needs to be defended, and I have enough respect for my audience to allow them the opportunity to double check my work. If I hide the person and the exact words that I am criticizing, how does anyone know whether or not I’m creating a strawman? How can the person in question respond?

I acknowledge that naming a person may subject them to public humiliation... but not naming names is passive-aggressive.

I should add, this is not just about naming names. It's a more general issue of citing the opposition. That means naming, linking, quoting. Or at the very least, you should cite evidence showing the existence of the beliefs you criticize. Failing to do this is one of the major ways an opinion essay can fail.

Have you ever read something that you felt like it was trying to criticize you, but you're not sure because it doesn't identify anyone or any group? Have you ever wondered: Is this criticizing other people who are stupider than me, or is it trying to claim that I'm that stupid?

And even if you're on the same side as the critic, you might want to know: Is this a straw man? Where do these beliefs come from, and how prevalent are they? Where can I read more about what your opponents say, possibly so I can write some criticism myself?

I consider citing opponents to be particularly important, because blogging experience tells me that it is one of my own weaknesses. Because of the way I think and the way my memory works, I tend to avoid naming names. I get some impression or idea in my head, and it becomes completely disconnected from the context of its inspiration. And then, weeks or months later I write a post about "privilege", "utopianism", or the like. This okay to do once in a while, but unless I put in some effort, it will happen all the time. Seriously, I shudder to look at the older parts of my blog archives.

Privilege: the invisible thing I believe in

2011-07-10T12:22:00.000-07:00

I've become very interested in minorities within social movements, which, of course, means I paid attention to the "elevator" controversy. But let's not speak of it yet. I just wanted to say that I liked the title of one of the posts, "The Privilege Delusion".

Because that's how some people see it, isn't it? Privilege is an invisible thing that other people believe in. "Sure," they say, "Minorities encounter problems, but so do I. How do they know it has anything to do with race or gender?" The cynics might even believe that "privilege" is an attempt to tip the scales by claiming that they are not already balanced. (See: belief in "reverse racism")

Many privileges are invisible. And they are not only used to justify things like common decency (which should hardly need justification!), but also things like affirmative action. So how can we provide evidence for its existence?

First, I think we should explain why privileges are invisible, and why this is unsurprising. Let's cut through the rhetoric; privileges are not about advantages, but about disadvantages. But if we call it a disadvantage, then it looks like Someone Else's Problem. By reframing it as a privilege, it becomes more about the privileged person, and more relevant to the privileged person. To illustrate, let's look at the first three items from the White Privilege Knapsack.

1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.

The whole point of the privilege knapsack is to get you to realize... non-white people do not have these privileges. They can't easily arrange to be in the company of people their own race. They have to deal with culturally trained mistrust on a day-to-day basis. They have to worry about housing discrimination, which was legal as recently as 1968, and which may still exist de facto.

I think privileges are a valid way to reframe disadvantages, but for the purposes of this discussion, it is unhelpful. If you think of them as disadvantages, of course they are invisible to people who do not experience the disadvantages. They are not about your experience, they are about someone else's experience.

Therefore, the problem is not explaining why privilege is invisible. The problem is that the evidence for privilege mostly comes from the personal experiences of underprivileged people. How can those people translate personal experience into objectively acceptable evidence? How can we correct for conflict of interest (since underprivileged people obviously have an interest in demonstrating the existence of privilege), without overshooting?

Though I posed this problem, I will not be able to pose much of a solution.

The obvious way is to point to studies showing real disparities in income and health, like what I did to show gay and lesbian privilege over bisexuals. I'm sure similar studies show a variety of disparities between white and black people, and between men and women, but I will not cite them since my readers are just as good at googling as I am.

Another way is to recount specific experiences where race or gender clearly played a role. But anecdotes have their own slew of evidentiary problems. In any case, it usually isn't clear that race or gender played a role. If, for example, people are talking over you, how do you know it's because you're a woman? All you know is that it seems to happen pretty frequently. This is one of the problems cited by feminists, but it would be hard to produce any sort of "elevator" controversy out of it.

Dear readers, can you think of any ways to provide evidence for invisible privileges?

Rigged card game solutions

2011-07-07T17:17:00.000-07:00

I am considering reducing the rate of puzzles on this blog. I haven't been inspired to write many lately.

See the original puzzle

The three triplets are like rock paper and scissors. If you pick the rock triplet, I'll pick the paper triplet. If you pick paper, I'll pick scissors. And so on. The hard part is figuring out what card combinations will create the rock-paper-scissors structure.

Rock: 3, 4, 8
Paper: 1, 5, 9
Scissors: 2, 6, 7

If I pick the right one, then I have a 5/9 chance of beating you.

How did I get those numbers, you ask? Each triplet contains a card from the set {1, 2, 3}, from {4, 5, 6}, and {7, 8, 9}. If I pick a number from {1, 2, 3} and you pick one from {4, 5, 6}, then it's a lost cause for me. But if we both pick one from the same set, notice that I will win 2/3 of the time.

Large-scale critical thinking

2011-07-05T23:20:00.000-07:00

There is a particular aspect of critical thinking that I will introduce by way of an analogy. Critical thinking is a way of spotting and fixing errors in an argument for a claim. Debugging is a way of spotting and fixing mistakes in a computer program, such as a computer simulation.

For those who have never done any debugging, imagine this. Writing computer code is never the hard part; 90% of programming is debugging. After writing any moderately complex code, it has a pretty good chance of failing. The best kind of failures are the ones that stop the program and tell you where it went wrong. The worst failures are when the program appears to be fine, but gives incorrect results.

A major problem is that you don't always know where the bug is. Now you could locate the bug by reading the code line by line and checking the all the syntax, control loops, and so forth. But any program of moderate complexity will have thousands of lines of code. And if we could spot the bug that easily, we would have spotted it as we wrote it in the first place. A more effective way of locating the bug is to use tests to isolate it within a small region, and then look line by line.

Most arguments don't involve thousands of steps, so most of the time you can find errors by just going through step by step. But there are exceptions.

Many arguments, for instance, involve scientific papers. As a blogger, I think laziness is a perfectly valid excuse to not examine a scientific paper in detail, but if you don't accept laziness, there are other reasons. If there are problems in a paper, they may be impossible for a lay person to spot. Or they may just be plain impossible to spot. They may involve details omitted by the authors, or details in other papers. We could also be cherry-picking a single study, but we'll never know unless we look outside the study.

Another example are conspiracy theorists and physics cranks. Such people construct a whole universe of details to support their view. The worst part is that often each universe is unique. Even if you spent all that effort to locate the errors, you've only debunked the claims of... one person.

In these situations, and others, we may need to resort to larger-scale critical thinking. How can we examine an argument for a claim without going into the details? How do we find a bug without looking at code line by line?

A common technique is to execute the code with simpler inputs and watch what goes wrong with the output. This would be analogous to using reductio ad absurdum. For example, if I accept the argument that homosexuality is wrong because the Bible says so, mustn't I accept the same argument against wearing clothes with mixed fabrics? Clearly there is an error in the argument, but we still need more work to pinpoint it. Pinpointing the error might consist of discussing where the Bible came from, and why this is an inappropriate source.

Another example that I have actually blogged about is the ontological argument. Most treatments of the ontological argument simply say that it is absurd to prove the existence of something with mere logic and without any investigation of the real world. But this does not pinpoint the exact error in the ontological argument. Knowing this, I thought it would be an interesting exercise in modal logic to pinpoint the error. But there are other times on my blog where I take the opposite approach and look at the big picture only.

There are more critical thinking techniques that may not have any analogy to debugging. Appealing to experts comes to mind. Why locate an error when you can instead locate an expert who will locate it for you? Of course, you have to trust that the expert really does know how to spot errors, and that the expert is not omitting errors in the other direction. A good critical thinker tries to understand the nature of experts, and does not use them indiscriminately.

One major difference between critical thinking and debugging is that the debugger must locate the precise error to fix it. The critical thinker only needs to show that there is an error somewhere, and does not need to pinpoint it. And yet, if you can pinpoint the error, or show that there is none, this trumps all large-scale analysis. It doesn't matter if an expert made the argument, if we can show the argument is incorrect.

And yet, small-scale critical thinking does not really trump large-scale critical thinking. In such a detailed analysis, it is easy to make mistakes. To miss errors or see errors that aren't there. Also, as with investigations of paranormal phenomena, these details can be completely lost to time. Even in absence of laziness, large-scale critical thinking is an important component of any analysis.

I think this is another one of my posts where the conclusion is, "Critical thinking is hard."

A Carnival of Aces 3: Community

2011-07-02T11:18:00.000-07:00

This is the third edition of the Carnival of Aces, with the theme, "Community".

Photo used with David Jay's permission

Sciatrix explains why community is important.

Ace Student thanks the chat rooms.

Norah talks about being in an MMO community.

Elizabeth explains to what extent we are responsible to communities.

Childfreeace learned something from an asexual community.

Ace Eccentric had experiences in multiple ace communities.

And lastly, I wrote about trying to build offline communities.

Thank you, everyone, for your submissions! The next carnival will be hosted by Neutrois Nonsense.

Asexuality at SF pride 2011

2011-06-29T18:39:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I went to a pride parade for the first time. I marched in SF pride 2011 as part of the asexual contingent.

But first, the day before the parade, we had a party at David Jay's house. Which, of course, means cake.

Cake!

I met a bunch of cool people, and a nonempty subset of those cool people are also well-known in asexual circles. Some shout outs: There was Dallas, the asexual sexologist. Southpaw and Cale, vloggers on Hot Pieces of Ace. Lizzie from tumblr. Cerberus, who blogs at Singularly Bizarre, and is part of the Order of the Molly. And of course, Ily from Asexy Beast, though I already knew her. Some of these people came from very far away.

In previous years this party time was used to make signs for the parade, but this year we had someone design the art to give us a more organized look (to be shown further down). So instead, we organized a conference on the spot. We came up with topics, organized them into sessions, and had volunteer facilitators. Topics included future directions for the community, asexuals on TV, the DSM, kinky asexuals, and so on.

On the day of the parade, we actually spent a lot more time waiting to march than actually marching. We have to wait for everyone else to go first. So we spent that time setting up and dancing.

Click for a bigger picture of DJ dancing on roller blades, sporting our shirt and an asexual flag cape.

In front of us was some union group. Behind us were Amnesty... and the East Bay Atheists. I know some of them! I have one last shout out for Greta Christina who was marching with the East Bay Atheists. I stopped to talk to her at one point, but of course she has no idea who I am.

Ingrid and Greta

Since we had asexual flags handy, I commented that we have no pictures on the internet of these flags waving around in the sky. Well, now we do.

Taking pictures of flags is so hard...

After the long period of waiting, we finally got to march. Being in the group, I couldn't take any good pictures of this, so here's one that someone else took.

Click for bigger. Image credit: Amanda

Not sure what else there is to say about the parade, but it was a lot of fun.

After the march, I bought a shirt that said, "I'm not gay, but my boyfriend is". I'm sure slightlymetaphysical will get a kick out of that.

The pink beast

2011-06-28T07:44:00.000-07:00

I heard this story, which at first, I didn't know what to make of.

The story focuses on a YouTube sensation. In the YouTube video, he and another man are dressed in big body suits that look a bit like Big Bird. They're playing with a little baby, who is crawling all over their big fluffy costumes. The other man needs to go, so he turns to leave and starts walking away. And then our man delivers the punchline. Holding out the baby he says, "Hey! You forgot your baby!"

But the YouTube video itself isn't really relevant. Later, the guy hears a legend about a great pink beast somewhere at the bottom of a particular lake. Somehow he becomes convinced that this pink beast is the spirit of his dead wife. So he meets with a local man, who is extremely skeptical, but willing to help. To get the beast to reveal itself, he drives a car into the lake, as the local man stands by to help.

After he swims out of the car and lake, he starts shouting that there's something there. The local man rushes to the edge of the lake, and watches the water, which has suddenly become clear. The dirt at the bottom moves around until a small ledge appears, which lifts up, becoming the ceiling of an impossible cave. Inside, clear as day, is the pink beast. I saw clear video documentation of this, and I thought the beast looked like a buffalo.

The story ends there. I puzzled about the explanation. Clearly the beast isn't really his dead wife. Could the two men be liars and hoaxers? Maybe Brian Dunning should do an episode about this.

Then I woke up, and the explanation became obvious. This also explains why the man was wearing his Big Bird costume as he drove into the lake.

LGBTA: Building offline spaces

2011-06-25T08:48:00.000-07:00

I wrote this essay for the Carnival of Aces. I would very much like if it is not the only entry, so please consider contributing before July 1st!

Tomorrow I'm marching in SF Pride with an asexual group. But why do I bother trying to educate LGBTQ people about asexuality? The easy answer is that LGBTQ people are just as good targets for education as any other group. The other answer is about community.

Building an asexual community is damn important, perhaps even more important than countering BS from external sources. If you encounter erasure and alienation, coming home to a community you trust can make it better. To my mind, erasure is bad not merely because it makes people feel invisible, but also because it makes it hard to find and form communities. Most of my life I felt confused, not as a direct consequence of erasure, but because erasure prevented me from learning about asexual identity and the asexual community. Community matters.

Speaking of community, I'm aware that at least a few asexuals in the asexual blogosphere are here because they had some problem with the AVEN forums. Let me tell you why I'm here. I have never had any horrible drama on AVEN (sorry to deprive you of the schadenfreude). There have been some people I've disagreed with, and people I've really disliked, but they never chased me away. In fact, I'm still on AVEN, posting at the same steady rate I always have. But I don't feel I have made any real friends or connections through AVEN. The members of AVEN just seem like a collection of faces I recognize. But there are too many of them, and they move too fast. I treat AVENites as a means to finding ideas, and have trouble treating them as people in themselves.

This happens on every internet forum I've ever been on. What can I say, forums just aren't my thing. Blogs are my thing. I feel far more connection to my readers and other bloggers than to any forumite.

But what about people who don't feel comfortable on forums OR blogs? What if they don't feel comfortable on tumblr, on podcasts, on YouTube? What if they don't feel much connection to any kind of internet community at all? Such people, by their nature, have very little voice in an internet community, but we need to think of them.

I believe that many of these people who want offline spaces first consider joining the LGBTQ community. It's what I did, anyways. To a novice asexual, it made sense. I needed a support group for minority sexualities. LGBTQ was the only thing that offered it. It also offered community centers, student organizations, counseling services, big national organizations, and political goals I cared about. So I tried it, cautiously at first, going to a few student group meetings as an ally. Long story short, it transformed my social life, and I found all the support I needed and more.

But I have read many accounts of asexuals trying the same thing, with horribly negative results. It's unsettling to think that my success was dependent on a number of lucky coincidences. Luckily, the group had at least heard of asexuality. Luckily, they knew enough not to say horrible things about it. Luckily, I identified as borderline gay and asexual after a few months. Luckily, I'm not averse to sex. Luckily, I had previous experience with student groups, and had the persistence to make the experience worthwhile.

The asexuals who are not so lucky? Probably most are scared away by the very image of the LGBT community, and never even try seeing it for themselves. Those who aren't scared by the image may find the reality even scarier. There are queers who are naively sex-positive (because everyone wants sex). There are gay people who don't believe in bisexuality, much less asexuality (if they've even heard of it). There are queers who make lots of noise about hate, but think erasure is not worth mention. I bet most asexuals don't even get as far as coming out to the group.

Remember, many of the people I'm talking about are novice asexuals. It's true that there are all kinds of LGBTQ groups and spaces. It's true that LGBTQ people need some spaces to talk about sexual things that would make most asexuals uncomfortable. But do you think the asexual who is just stepping into a community for the first time appreciates that? Who wants to deal with all that when you're just trying to figure yourself out?

My concerns are pragmatic. Asexuals are wandering into LGBT spaces, either by accident, or because they have no better community to go to. I would like it if the communities they wander into know how to deal with them. Start by being educated. Then make it clear that you're educated, so you don't scare asexuals before they even come out. And if you can't provide a safe space, figure out where you can redirect them. These are very basic things to ask for, but they could go such a long way to helping.

I found a community, and I want others to have the same opportunity.

Massive and massless electrons

2011-06-23T08:04:00.000-07:00

Some seemingly unrelated questions:

Now that I've explained electronic band structure, what are its consequences?
Why is it that some materials conduct electricity with electrons, and some conduct with holes?
What is so scientifically exciting about graphene that it won a Nobel Prize?

Effective mass

In classical physics, we have the following equation for kinetic energy:

E = 1/2 mv²

Earlier, I said k was the quantum analogue of velocity. I lied. k is really the quantum analogue of momentum, which is mass times velocity. For some reason (silly physicists!) momentum is represented by the letter p. So this is another equation for kinetic energy:

E = 1/2 p²/m

So if we just replace p with k, we get the quantum analogue:*

E = 1/2 k²/m

The important thing is that this relationship depends on m, the mass.

The sharper the curve of the parabola, the smaller the mass it represents.

That's the picture of particles in a vacuum. But in a crystal, the picture is more complicated. In my explanation of electronic band structure, I left off with this image:

The four lines represent possible states for electrons within a crystal. But as I said before, I am only showing a part of the electronic band structure, namely, the "first Brillouin Zone". That's because the rest of the band structure is just repeating. Here, three copies are shown:

This picture of electrons in a crystal is very different from the electrons in a vacuum. And yet, there are some places where they're nearly the same. Near points A, C, and E, you can see the similar parabola shape that you would see in a vacuum. However, some of these parabolas are more sharply curved than others. That tells you something about the electron's "effective mass". An electron at point A would have a smaller effective mass than an electron at point E. The effective mass tells you something about how the electrons respond to a voltage.

*I am ignoring some constants. Or, as physicists say, I'm setting h-bar equal to one.

Holes

Notice that there are also upside-down parabolas at points D and B. Do electrons at these points behave as if they have negative mass?

The answer is yes, sort of. Except you won't really find any electrons at points D and B. An electron at B will just naturally fall down towards point C, and an electron at D will fall down towards point E. The only way to really prevent this is if there are already electrons occupying those lower states.

Imagine, if you will, that there are electrons occupying all of the states on the green line. Electrons at point B cannot fall down because no two electrons are allowed to occupy the same state. But if the electrons cannot move along the curve, they can't conduct electricity!

So now imagine that electrons occupy nearly all the states on the green line. There are a few empty states at the top, near B. Electrons at B have negative effective mass. But a lack of an electron at B would have a positive effective mass. We call this abstraction a hole. Like electrons, holes have a positive mass (because it is a lack of a negative effective mass), and unlike electrons, holes have positive charge (because it is a lack of a negative charge).

One of the easiest ways to observe holes is by measuring the Hall Effect. Without going into detail, the Hall Effect creates a voltage which is proportional to the charge of the particles that carry the electricity. So in materials that conduct by holes, the Hall voltage is in the opposite direction you would expect.

Graphene

Graphene is a 2-dimensional material made of carbon atoms in a honeycomb pattern.

(Image credit)

I can't really explain all the scientifically interesting things about graphene, but I can explain one thing that has to do with its band structure. Since graphene is 2-d, we have to draw the band structure with a 3-d graph. The horizontal directions represent the two components of k, while the vertical direction represents E, the energy.

(Image credit)

That's a bit hard to look at, so we'll just zoom into the important part, at one of the corners of the black hexagon.

(Image credit)

This is what's called the Dirac Cone. It appears because of certain symmetries in the graphene structure. What's interesting about it is that it does not look like a parabola. E is not proportional to k², but is instead proportional to k. Translating to classical physics, E is proportional to momentum.

It turns out that in classical physics, there is another situation when E is proportional to momentum. It's true of massless particles, such as light. And so, electrons on the Dirac Cone behave as if they are massless. (If you like, you can think of the cone as being an infinitely sharp curve.) Electrons on the Dirac Cone are relativistic particles! If that sounds exciting, imagine how it sounds to a physicist.

That concludes today's answers to physics questions you thought you'd never understand. Until next time...

The premiere of (A)sexual

2011-06-21T20:54:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, I saw the world premiere of the documentary (A)sexual at the Frameline International LGBT Film Festival.

To be honest, I did not entirely expect to give this film a positive review. I thought that, since I'm an asexual blogger, I'd inevitably spot something horribly wrong with the film. I'm also not a fan of the documentary genre. And to top it all off, I'm one of those movie critics who gives movies thumbs down by default.

But I liked this film. It opened with a bunch of people on white screens giving their first reactions to the word "asexual". They're fairly standard ignorant reactions, though told in a funny way. The audience was laughing the whole time. Eventually, these reactions become juxtaposed with further information showing the fundamental mistakes being made. Many topics are introduced this way, including "Do asexuals masturbate?", "Shouldn't you try sex first?", "Can asexuals fall in love?", and "Why should asexuals ever want to gather?"

The main thread of the movie was a profile of David Jay, the founder of asexuality.org. We get to see DJ's mad rollerblading skills. We see people recoiling from him at the Pride Parade, as if he were contagious (or cheering him on enthusiastically). We see his close relationship (romantic? non-romantic?) with a couple, and the subsequent breakup. This is great, because it provided a much-needed depiction of not just romantic and aromantic asexuals, but asexuals who fail to fit the binary.

Other asexuals are profiled too. The ones that got the most screen-time were Swank Ivy (creator of educational YouTube videos), an asexual couple, and this older woman whose asexuality was a life-long experience. A few of the people were portrayed as rather eccentric (one person in the couple demonstrated her nail-in-nose trick), but it was humanizing rather than excessive.

Of course, I'd inevitably spot something wrong, so despite my positive review I must also devote some words to my biggest complaint. Basically, there is no mention of the sexual/asexual spectrum (except in the Q&A session). Being on that spectrum, I naturally consider this important.

The movie correctly defines asexuality as not experiencing sexual attraction. But as far as the movie is concerned, the major consequence of this is not being interested in having sex. It's made pretty clear that asexuals can and do have sex, but it's mostly assumed that they'd really rather not. As far as generalizations go, this is a pretty accurate one, but there are exceptions. And the exceptions become more frequent as you consider people on the asexual/sexual spectrum. But that spectrum was never mentioned, not as far as I recall.

The closest approach was an interview with DJ after his breakup. He said he was interested in trying out partnered relationships rather than community relationships for a change. And then, clearly conflicted about it, he said that sex might have to be part of that, since it's hard to find partnered relationships without it. Frankly, this interview was confusing. In the Q&A session, someone asked if he didn't feel like he was betraying the community by saying such things. On the contrary! That short interview was the closest the film came to representing the asexual/sexual spectrum, as well as the whole possibility of asexual/sexual relationships. I just wish it had been portrayed more fully and positively.

My boyfriend thought the asexual couple seemed a bit tokenized. I'm not sure how he caught this, but it's true. Romantic asexuals are common; actual asexual couples are not. But for some reason the public is enamored with the idea, so the AVEN media team always has to have a couple handy. The same does not hold true of asexual/sexual relationships, even though I suspect they are slightly more prevalent.

This documentary will show in Newfest film festival in New York in July.

What is electronic band structure?

2011-06-14T13:09:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna do it! I'm going to attempt the impossible: to explain electronic band structure for a lay audience.

Why should you care about electronic band structure?

Condensed matter physics is one of the largest fields of physics with some of the biggest practical applications. Pretty much all of our electronics are built on it. Now, this knowledge is neither necessary, nor helpful to our everyday use of electronics. But doesn't it bother you that you don't know the first thing about it? That is, you don't have any idea what electronic band structure is?

There is a reason you've never heard of it. Unless you've taken courses in quantum mechanics, electronic band structure is a very inaccessible concept. And yet, it's one of the most basic concepts in condensed matter physics. So let's do this!

First, a familiar concept

E = 1/2 mv²

Does this look familiar? This is the equation for E, the kinetic energy of an object, given v, its velocity. We're going to analyze the heck out of this equation. Look, a graph!

In the above graph, v is simply a number, positive or negative. But in reality, v is a vector, containing components in x direction, y direction, and z direction. If we were to include two directions, this is what the graph would look like:

But that's complicated, so we'll just consider v in a single direction.

But now we have to add in quantum mechanics. Even if you understand nothing about quantum mechanics, you probably know it has to do with combining the concepts of particles and waves. It turns out that the velocity of a particle is proportional to how much the wave goes up and down per unit length. We usually call this quantity k, the wavenumber, which is defined as 2 pi times the number of cycles per meter.

E is proportional to v², which is proportional to k². And so, if we were to graph E vs k, it would look like this:

Congratulations! We've just constructed an electronic band structure!

Band structure in a crystal

The band structure we constructed is the band structure in a vacuum. That is, if we have electrons in a vacuum, then each electron will fall somewhere along that line. But most electrons are not wandering freely in vacuums, they're trapped in sold objects. For simplicity's sake, I will only consider the simplest of solid objects, a crystal. A crystal is a solid which has a repeating structure.

Now I'm going to wave my hands around wildly. Woooo! Math omitted! A repeating crystal structure leads to a repeating band structure. (Mind you, the crystal is repeats in space, while the band structure repeats in k. k is measured in units of inverse meters, so it's more like the reciprocal of space.)

But if the band structure is just repeating itself, then we might as well keep only the first copy. In other words, we'll limit k to the "first Brillouin Zone".

Okay, but we forgot something. The electrons are attracted to the atomic nuclei, and repelled by each other. This changes the energy of the electrons in ways that are difficult to calculate. But qualitatively, the effect is most noticeable whenever those lines cross each other. That's because when the lines cross, it's easy for electrons to exist in a superposition of those two lines (and that's all the explanation you'll get out of me).

The dashed lines represent the original band structure, and the solid lines are our correction.

Okay. So far, pretty simple (I see people in the audience shaking their heads saying, "Um... not simple, no."). But as we add more dimensions, we can get even stranger-looking band structures. For example, this is the band structure of graphene:

(image credit)

The horizontal axes are k in the x and y directions. The vertical axis is E. The black hexagon represents the first Brillouin Zone.

My point in showing this is to demonstrate that the electronic band structure can be quite complicated, and look very different for different kinds of solids.

Discreteness

And now I'm going to connect the band structure with another concept which you might find familiar. In an atom, electrons have discrete energy states. It's almost as if electrons are only allowed to be in certain orbits around the nucleus.

(Image credit)

Of course, this is not an accurate picture of electrons (which are waves, not just particles), but it's still true that electrons have discrete energy levels. This is true of the electronic band structure as well. I drew a continuous line, but in reality it is a set of discrete points.

And so, electrons are only allowed to have certain values of E and k.

How many points are there? Well, how many atoms are there in the crystal? The answer: millions of billions of billions. So I might as well draw the band structure as continuous.

And yet, the fact that E and k are discrete has an important consequence. According to the Pauli Exclusion Principle, no two electrons* may have the same values of E and k. And we also know that there are millions of billions of billions of electrons. As a result, the electrons fill up all those energy levels, starting with the lowest energies, going upwards, until we run out of electrons.

*ignoring spin

Note that if we ignore k, we actually get bands of allowed energies. And sometimes there are gaps between these bands, where no electrons are allowed to exist. Physicists call these energy bands, and energy gaps. It's not uncommon for electrons to exactly fill up an entire energy band, right up to the energy gap.

Conclusion

The electronic band structure is the set of allowed energies and k-values of electrons. In a vacuum, E just has to be proportional to k² (due to kinetic energy), but in a solid object, we have to consider the energy of attraction to nuclei and repulsion from other electrons. This results in distortions in the relationship between E and k, and may even create energy gaps. Energy gaps are values of energy which are forbidden to electrons.

Since there are lots of electrons, and they obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle, they fill up the electronic band structure, from the lowest energies upwards.

Now that I've explained the electronic band structure, you may look back at my post on semiconductors, which may make a bit more sense. I also hope to write a few more essays explaining other things that should now make sense. In the meantime, are there any questions?

All images, except those credited, were created by me. They may be used if they are attributed. I think 11 images in one post is some kind of record for me.

What happened to BASS?

2011-06-11T10:12:00.000-07:00

Long time readers know that last year I was president of BASS, the Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists, a student group at UCLA. Of course, I want to compare BASS during my regime to BASS now. If it's doing worse now, that means that maybe I wasn't so terrible a president as I thought. If it's doing better now, that means things are looking up for BASS. Since I'll feel good about either result, I guess I don't even need to know the results before feeling good!

Being in another city, I don't know what's going on with BASS most of the time, but I can still stalk them on Facebook. Here are some of the events they held this year:

They had a UFOlogist come over to speak, AND they made a bunch of cool hand-drawn posters, AND they made alien-head shaped cookies for the event.

They counter-protested the Westboro Baptist Church (the "God Hates Fags" people), who in addition to picketing funerals, also picket at the Golden Globes every year.

They had Rebecca Watson give a talk: "The Religious Right vs Every Woman on Earth".

They went to a Hammer Museum exhibit called Demon Hill, which was based on those "gravitational mystery spots".

Brian Dunning gave a talk: "Myth or Miracle: The Virgin of Guadalupe".

I'm sure I left other things out too.

If you were paying attention, you noticed that the Rebecca Watson poster mentions two student groups: BASS and Bruin Atheists. Bruin Atheists is a new spinoff group, with some overlapping membership. When I was at UCLA, there was a similar spinoff group called Infidels, but unlike Infidels, it appears that Bruin Atheists will survive past its first year.

I consider this a positive development. As the single skeptical group and single atheist group, BASS served multiple purposes, which, while not in competition with each other, were hard to do all at once. Bruin Atheists helps pick up some of the slack. Also, if one of the groups goes defunct or fails to produce much activity, the other group will still survive. On a related note, BASS is also considering renaming itself to Bruin Skeptics.

I am also happy to report that more women participated in BASS and Bruin Atheists this year. They might even outnumber the straight men now. A few of them were officers; I hope more become officers next year.

I believe the results show that BASS is doing better this year. Big thumbs up to the co-presidents Tommy and Jenny!

Necessity isn't so necessary

2011-06-09T10:14:00.000-07:00

Following my retrospective on the ontological argument, I just remembered another thing I always thought was funny about it. According to the argument, part of God's definition is that God necessarily exists. But why?

I can just imagine, what if there were some powerful being which shared every property with God, except for the necessary existence. That is, this being is exactly like God in every way, except that unlike God, it only exists in our world, not every possible world. By definition, this being would not be God. After all, it's not the greatest being imaginable. We can imagine a being that is greater: one that exists in every possible world, not just ours.

But a fine distinction that would be if in our world, we're being subjugated/loved/ignored by an all-powerful and vengeful/benevolent/passive being! I don't know about you, but I'd call that thing a god, even if it doesn't quite fit the definition in the ontological argument. As for those other possible worlds where the being doesn't exist, who cares about 'em? Depending on who you ask, there isn't even any metaphysical significance to the other possible worlds, they're just ideas.

That leaves the ontological argument in a funny position. The god it argues for does not necessarily have any of the properties we normally assign to a god. But it does have this extra property, necessary existence, which I do not think is necessary to qualify a being as a god. Does it really have anything to do with gods, or is it just a logical game, as I've been treating it? (Also applies to nearly every other philosophical argument for gods.)

And yes, I do have some idea of how ontological argument proponents would respond. A transcendent being such as a god must also transcend all possible worlds, thus necessary existence is an inseparable quality of God. But if we understand other possible worlds as mere ideas, this doesn't make any sense.

The rigged card game

2011-06-07T10:41:00.000-07:00

I place nine cards on a table, 1 through 9, face down. They are grouped in triplets. First you pick a triplet, and then I pick another triplet. Then we each reveal a random card from the triplet we picked, and the higher card wins.

I know what cards are in which triplets, but I don't know which random cards we will reveal within those triplets. How can I arrange the cards such that, no matter which triplet you pick, I am more likely to win than you?

(This game is taken from an article by Martin Gardner called "Nontransitive Paradoxes", which attributed it to Leo Moser and J. W. Moon.)

See solution

Solution to the confused passenger

2011-06-06T08:51:00.000-07:00

See the original puzzle

This puzzle can be solved by induction. First consider the 2-passenger case, and then see what happens when we increment the number of passengers. You will find that no matter how many passengers there are, there is always a 50% chance that the last passenger gets the correct seat.

However, there's another way to solve it. Do like physicists do: ignore all details of the problem and just consider the symmetries.

Let's number all the passengers from 1 to 100 in the order that they board. By the time passenger 100 boards, seats 2-99 are guaranteed to be filled. Among the seats 1 and 100, exactly one is filled. But none of the passengers 1 to 99 make any distinction between seats 1 and 100. (In other words, seats 1 and 100 are symmetric with respect to switching.) Therefore, seat 1 and 100 are equally likely to be filled, each with a 50% chance.

The malicious passenger

1% of the time, the confused passenger sits in his own seat, which allows the final passenger to get the correct seat. The other 99% of the time, the confused passenger acts exactly like the malicious passenger. Therefore, we get the following equation:

0.5 = 0.01 * 1 + 0.99 * X

...where X is the probability that the final passenger gets the correct seat if the first passenger is malicious.

Solving for X, the probability is 49/99

Privilege is not ordered

2011-06-02T20:08:00.000-07:00

One of the words commonly thrown around by social justice advocates is "privilege". A privilege is simply some sort of benefit or advantage that a certain group has. It's a fairly basic concept, but I'm not sure I'm a fan. It seems to breed a lot of misconceptions, like the idea that privileges are always bad.

As an example, one privilege straight people have is the ability to go through life without labels for their sexual identity. Arguably, this privilege is unavoidable, as long as straight people are in the majority. All the same, if you are aware of this privilege, you should understand why it is insensitive to tell queer people not to bother with labels.

Another big misconception is the idea that groups are ordered from most privileged to least privileged. In truth, two groups can each be privileged over the other in different ways. For example, consider white women and black men. It may be the case that one group has more privileges than the other (supposing that you found some way to quantify "more privileges"), but nonetheless, each group has at least a few privileges that the other does not.

As another example, consider aromantic and romantic asexuals.* Romantics are privileged over aromantics because people are less likely to think they are devoid of all emotion. Aromantics are privileged over romantics because in non-romantic relationships they generally aren't expected to be sexual.

*If you don't recall, romantic asexuals are the ones who are interested in romantic relationships, and aromantics are the ones who are not.

I feel this is a fairly obvious point, and if people miss it, it's because they just haven't taken a moment to think about it. I guess this will be a short post!

For the fallacy geeks: What kind of logical fallacy is this? I'm thinking it's a false dilemma: either group A has privileges over group B, or group B has privileges over group A. Or maybe it's tu quoque: "I have privileges? You have privileges too!" This is a fallacy because pointing out another person's privileges does nothing to refute the existence of one's own privileges.

Carnival of Aces 3: Call for participation

2011-06-01T17:03:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the 3rd edition of A Carnival of Aces, the asexual blogging carnival!

Your host this month is me, miller (aka Siggy), and the theme is community. I intentionally picked a very broad theme, because that's what I like. Here are a few possible ideas:

How do you feel about the asexual community? What are some interesting aspects of it?
Are you part of other communities? What's it like to be asexual in those communities?
We talk so much on partnered relationships, but how do you feel about the idea of relationships with whole communities?

The above list is incomplete, of course. If you talk about how great/terrible any particular community is, keep in mind that some readers and writers may have opposite impressions and opinions as you do, so try not to insult them with generalizations!

How to submit an article

Send me an e-mail at skepticsplay at gmail dot com, or leave a comment on this post. The deadline to submit is July 1st. Unlike previous hosts, I'm unwilling to host guest posts on my own blog, but Sciatrix offered to host any guest posts if it's necessary.

About the Carnival of Aces

A blogging carnival is an event in which many people write blog posts around a single theme. These posts are then collected at the end of the carnival and linked together by the carnival’s host. For example, the previous edition was about the intersection between race/ethnicity/culture/nationality and the asexual identity.

This blog carnival is an effort to encourage a variety of different voices to speak about asexuality from their own perspectives. Anyone can participate, but the responses should deal with asexuality or the asexual spectrum (grey-As, demisexuals) in some way, and relate in some way to this month's theme, community.

We do need more people to volunteer to host. If you're interested, see the masterpost.

An anecdote on obscurantism

2011-05-31T11:57:00.000-07:00

You know what I realized earlier? It's been over a year since I've talked about the ontological arguments for a god. Perhaps it is because I think the last post I wrote summarizing the flaws in the modal ontological argument is about as clear as I can manage.

In the course of blogging about the ontological arguments for years, I attracted a handful of self-described philosophers who argued with me rather persistently, perhaps because I am one of the few people on the internet who is willing to discuss what is wrong with the ontological arguments in detail, rather than what is wrong with them in the big picture. Of course, I found out that most of these self-described philosophers were unable to speak of logic without making the most basic of errors, even when it was irrelevant to the argument.

Buried somewhere in the archives, buried in dozens of long comments, buried in jargon and symbols, is a joke I thought so funny that it's stuck with me over a year later. It starts like this:

What can you do to make an already obscure argument even more difficult to understand?

As I explained before, the basic modal ontological argument has just a few steps:

Premise 1: If God exists, then God necessarily exists.
Lemma: If God possibly exists, then God exists. (proof omitted, as it is irrelevant to this post)
Premise 2: God possibly exists.
Conclusion: God exists.

But what if we were to make this argument instead? The difference is in bold.

Premise 1: If God exists, then God necessarily exists.
Lemma: If God does not exist, then God does not possibly exist.
Premise 2: God possibly exists.
Conclusion: God exists.

It's the same argument, only the lemma has been replaced with its contrapositive. Every if-then statement has a logically equivalent contrapositive statement. For example:

If Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal.
Contrapositive: If Socrates is not mortal, then Socrates is not a man.

The contrapositive of the contrapositive statement is the original statement. So whenever we make an if-then statement, we have two choices in how to say it. Why not choose the one that is most clear and intuitive to lay audiences? Often times the two statements can each be unclear for different reasons, but that's not the case here. The lemma as originally stated is shorter, allows the conclusion to use modus ponens rather than modus tollens, not to mention that it flows more naturally from the proof I omitted. So why replace it with its contrapositive?

That's more or less what one of the philosophers did. It's a very small thing that hardly matters, but I couldn't help but think... why? Why take these tiny steps to make an obscure argument just a tiny bit more obscure? I asked him, and he said it was the simplest way to state the argument. He also seemed to have trouble understanding whenever I stated the argument the other way. I found all of this hilarious.

Some might say this is to be expected, since obscurantism is what philosophers are trained to do. I suspect that the person simply didn't understand the argument well enough to spot a purely unnecessary step that was added in.

Summer research: High-Tc Superconductors

2011-05-27T13:32:00.000-07:00

As you know, I am currently working on my physics Ph.D. with a specialization in condensed matter. I am finally starting research this summer, next week in fact. My research project is on one of the hottest topics in condensed matter physics, High-Temperature Superconductors.

I've written about superconductors before, but in case you're too lazy to read that... *clears throat*

Just like many liquids freeze below a certain temperature, there are some materials which change into superconductors below a certain temperature (that temperature is called Tc). They won't look any different, but they have awesome properties like zero electrical resistance and magnetic levitation (which are used in MRIs and maglev trains respectively). For the earliest discovered superconductors, Tc was 30 degrees above absolute zero (-243 Celsius), but so-called High-Tc Superconductors have a Tc as high as 135 degrees above absolute zero (-138 Celsius). Which is still very cold. Many physicists seek to understand High-Tc Superconductors with the dream of discovering superconductors at room temperature.

More specifically, I will be investigating superconductors through the use of the ARPES method. ARPES stands for angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. ARPES involves shooting a photon at the material, and looking at the electrons that pop out. It's a lot like the photoelectric effect experiment which won Einstein his Nobel prize.

But ARPES is a little more sophisticated, because it doesn't just measure the energy of the electrons that come out, it also measures the angle at which they come out. The angle tells you about the electron's momentum. And so we can plot graphs of energy vs momentum. This is a graph of the electronic band structure, which is of such great importance that I don't know how to properly convey it. One of these days I will write a better explanation for lay people. For now, remember those energy bands which were so crucial to the understanding of conductors, insulators, and semiconductors? Those energy bands are merely a simplified form of the electronic band structure.

Note that I haven't yet fully described my research project; ARPES plus Superconductors is way too broad for a single research project. But that's just as well, as I don't start until next week. Perhaps I will write more then, and say something about what exactly I'm doing in the lab.

Though, if it's anything like previous summers, I will probably never fully describe my research here, and instead opt for inside jokes.