Meta-issues with petition

Earlier, I wrote about a petition to the FDA to disapprove the drug Flibanserin (brand name Addyi), and expressed my (lukewarm) support of it. The petition is no longer circulating, since the FDA has already made its decision. It was approved.

Previously, I made an error: I said that Flibanserin was a treatment for Female Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder (FSIAD).  In fact, it was tested for Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD), which is an out-of-date diagnosis.  That's bad because HSDD doesn't have a loophole for asexuals.  Furthermore, HSDD is defined to include people with "interpersonal difficulties", which means if their partner is unhappy with it they could get diagnosed.

So now that it's done, I have to say, I really don't get the point of the petition.  A drug should be approved or disapproved on scientific grounds.  And a petition is not exactly proper scientific protocol.

The basic problem with petitions is that they only contain information about how many people agreed, and not how many people disagreed.  Circulate a petition widely enough, you can get as many signatures as you want.  Even petitions signed by scientists are pretty useless, as parodied by Project Steve.

Many people signing the petition dwelt long on arguments over whether the clinical trials show that Flibanserin is effective.  I don't see how that is relevant to the petition.  The FDA already knows about the clinical trials.  It doesn't need thousands of people on the internet to offer their own opinion.  That's why, in my argument in favor of the petition, I waved away the results of clinical trials in favor of discussing the social ramifications of the drug.

At the same time, I'm highly doubtful that the FDA even considers social ramifications in its approval process. I'm also doubtful that they should.  Say that the FDA is deciding on a contraceptive drug, do I really want them to even consider arguments that birth control ruins our culture?  I don't think so.

The Ace Flibanserin Task Force was also plugging another petition which urges the FDA to stick to the science and ignore all the pro-Flibanserin PR.  The thing about that petition, its message is inconsistent with first petition.  One petition says, just look at the science and nothing else.  The other petition says, also look at these social ramifications.  Well.  That's politics I guess.

Really, the main point of this petition seems to be to get people in the asexual community to talk about Flibanserin.  Fine, it got me to talk about it.  It didn't get me to stop being a cynic.

Now that it's been approved, I suppose we'll see what its social ramifications are.

The petition against Flibanserin

Background

Flibanserin (trade name: Girosa) is a drug that treats low sexual desire in women (Female Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder, or FSIAD).  It is not publicly available because it has not (yet) been approved by the FDA.  The FDA will approve or disapprove of it by the end of the week.

Flibanserin is not like Viagra, although that's a common misunderstanding.  Viagra does not treat low sexual desire, but rather erectile dysfunction.  Furthermore, Flibanserin is intended to be taken on a regular basis.  Trials show that women with acquired sexual desire disorders who take Flibanserin had on average 0.7 more satisfying sexual events per month, as compared to placebo.  Specifically, it increased the number from 2.8 to 4.5, whereas placebo increased it from 2.7 to 3.7.  There are also side effects, though I'm not too familiar with what they are.

The Ace Flibanserin Task Force is circulating a petition among aces to recommend that the FDA disapprove.  The existence of Flibanserin would encourage doctors to diagnose asexuals with FSIAD, and it is likely that the Flibanserin/Girosa ad campaign will involve shaming women for low sexual desire.

This has sparked some argument over whether the petition is right.  Asexuals may be "happy" with a lack of sexual desire (though there are always external factors affecting their happiness), but that doesn't mean that everyone is happy with it, and perhaps some people have conditions that are best treated within a healthcare framework.  Is it right for asexuals to take away that choice?

These are good questions to ask.  Way back in 2010, Flibanserin was also being considered for approval by the FDA (it was rejected), and a similar petition was being circulated.  So I helped create this interview with a sexual dysfunction activist, so that we could learn what the "other side" is concerned about.

Why I support this petition

Is it right for asexuals to take away the choice of people who want effective treatment for sexual desire disorders?  While this is an important question, it is not the same as the question of whether to sign the petition.  A petition simply doesn't have the power to take away an effective medical treatment.  The petition is neither created or signed by scientific experts, and the FDA knows this.

The purpose of the petition, in my view, is to ask the FDA to consider the externalities of approving Flibanserin.  Principally, I am worried about that public ad campaign which will amplify the social shaming of low sexual interest, and doctors' inability to distinguish between asexuality and sexual desire disorders.  The harms caused by these externalities would be difficult, if not impossible to measure with scientific studies, but they are still real harms.  And without a petition, the FDA would not have much of a basis to consider these harms.

In many of the arguments over the petition, people are talking about the scientific research into Flibanserin, and its exceedingly marginal effect.  If you're willing to read the research, you may let that inform your decision.  However, in principle, you shouldn't have to.  It's the FDA's job to consider the body of research, and as a non-expert I cannot meaningfully contribute to that.

All that matters is that, at a glance, the effects of Flibanserin look marginal, so there's a chance that the external costs might matter.  The FDA can weigh the petition in their own cost-benefit analysis, and can still decide either way.  Since I am not an expert, I trust the FDA's judgment more than my own.

On people with sexual dysfunction

In the interview with the sexual dysfunction activist in 2010, we learned a few important things. 
While it is true that many asexuals have difficulty getting their doctors and therapists to recognize their asexuality, the flipside is that people with sexual dysfunctions have the same difficulty.  Even when the dysfunction literally causes pain, doctors may not recognize it or offer treatment.

Furthermore, there are also many feminists who oppose any drug to increase sexual desire, even if effective.  Instead they take the view that "low sexual desire" is a social problem, or that we're socialized to think it's a problem.  I looked around to see what feminists are saying against Flibanserin now, and they do raise many valid concerns.  On the other hand, the articles minimize or wave away people with sexual dysfunctions.  As our interviewee observed in 2010, voices from people with sexual dysfunctions are entirely absent.

Though I support the petition, I do not support the silencing of the concerns of people with sexual dysfunctions.

Corrections 8/18/2015: Flibanserin's brand name is Addyi, not Girosa, and it was tested to treat Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) rather than FSIAD.

What is an apology?

There are countless cases in the news where a public figure does something wrong, and we all collectively ask, "Why don't they just apologize?" or "Why don't they apologize the right way?"  In the mean time I've often thought, "Why does anyone apologize ever?  What is an apology aside from a collection of emotions with no rational analogue?"

An apology is a sort of script.  Alice wrongs Bob.  Bob demands an apology from Alice.  Alice apologizes.  Bob forgives Alice.

OR

Alice refuses to apologize.  Bob is angered and seeks other means to punish Alice.  He could deny her trust, deny her social status, or even punish through legal means.

But what's in it for Alice?  What's in it for Bob?  As far as Alice is concerned, the outcome of apologizing is clearly better than that of refusing to apologize.  As far as Bob is concerned, punishment may provide either a psychological or game-theoretic value--why should any of that change just because Alice arranges some words in a particular way?

We've all been in Alice's place at one time or another, so we intuitively know the answer.  Apologizing is humbling, and feels bad.  Refusing to apologize feels empowering.  This is backed up by psychological research (and reading the intro to that paper helped frame some of the thoughts in this post).  Thus, Alice is weighing the psychological benefit of refusing to apologize against the potential for reconciliation upon apologizing.  And if Alice feels bad about apologizing, this serves some of Bob's psychological and game-theoretic needs, in place of punishment.

It's crucial to the script that Alice can actually prove that she feels bad when she apologizes.  Anyone can just say that they feel bad.  And yet, we have the phenomenon of the "non-pology".  A non-pology is when someone tries to apologize, but since they don't actually feel bad about their wrong-doing, it comes across as insincere.  It seems that people are not very good at mimicking sincerity when it comes to apologies.  Thus when people sound sincere, this often suffices as proof.

Apologies start to make more rational sense now.  However, they only make rational sense because we're living in an irrational psychological landscape.  In particular, we need that:

1. Apologizing feels bad.  Refusing to apologize feels good.

2. People are bad at mimicking sincere apologies.

3. People are good at detecting insincere apologies.

This psychological landscape needs an evolutionary explanation--although not necessarily an adaptive explanation.  I will not offer any specific hypothesis, although I will compare it to the phenomenon of the Duchenne smile.  People have two kinds of smiles, the kind they make spontaneously, and the kind they make voluntarily.  We are able to spot the spontaneous smile, called the Duchenne smile, and it appears to us as the "truer" smile.  And yet, despite the advantages a Duchenne smile, most people are unable to make one at will, unable to mimic sincerity.  Why did this evolve?

In any case, thinking this through has given me a better understanding of why people apologize, and why they don't apologize.  An apology is a way of communicating psychic pain, one that we are naturally bad at faking.

How religious people *should* relate to science

Some years ago, I attempted to illustrate the different views on the relationship between science and religion.  For each view, I drew two diagrams: one showing how science and religion relate, and another showing how they should relate.  This is the all-important is/ought distinction.  In fact, most people talking about the relationship between science and religion don't explicitly make an is/ought distinction, but I infer an is/ought distinction because frankly nothing makes sense otherwise.

But perhaps I've been too charitable to people who argue that there is no conflict between science and religion.  Recently Friendly Atheist hosted an essay by Sean McDowell which argues that there is no conflict.  The argument is primarily based on citing various religious scientists.  You can tell that they are not making an is/ought distinction, not even implicitly, because their argument is incoherent any way you slice it.

Interpreted one way, they are arguing that science and religion ought not to conflict.  If so, then why do they make historical arguments?  Why do they merely refer to religious scientists without making any attempt to justify the views of those scientists?

Interpreted the other way, they are arguing that science and religion do not conflict.  If so, it makes sense to refer to religious scientists, but it does not make sense to ignore the fact that they are in the minority.  Nor does it make sense to ignore the millions of religiously motivated creationists in the US.  It does not make sense to say,

The idea that science and religion are at odds is a popular myth in our culture, perpetuated by news headlines like “God vs. Science” in Time magazine.

since descriptively, it is entirely true that there is conflict between science and religion.

The arguments religious people make in favor of the compatibility of science/religion are nonsense.  Here are the arguments they should be making:*

1. Religion has conflicted with science in both the past and present.
2. If possible, it would be better if science and religion did not conflict.
3. It is reasonably possible for religion not to conflict with science.
4. Religious scientists are presented as models for this possibility.

*Whenever an opponent offers advice on how you should make your argument, it should be considered suspect at best and disingenuous at worst.  My advice is no exception.

Note how this argument is different from Sean McDowell's argument, in that it does not deny the conflict between science and religion.  In fact, it's important to recognize that conflict, because that's the first step in resolving a conflict.  It's important to study why religious people oppose evolution.  It's important to think hard about why religious scientists are the exception rather than the rule.

It's important to confront the ways in which religious scientists fail as models.  For example, Francis Collins is a great ally against Intelligent Design, but has argued that evolution cannot account for altruism, implicitly rejecting the entire field of evolutionary altruism.  Another scientist mentioned was Owen Gingerich, and I am appalled to find that he thinks some beneficial mutations must be "inspired".  (I looked into the third example named, Paul Davies, and he seems more acceptable.)

Collins and Gingerich have only minor problems, but why is it that even when people think their religion does not conflict with science, the conflict often remains?  Why is it that religious people who consciously reject the "god of the gaps" simultaneously accept the "god of the gaps" under a different name?  People who advocate the compatibility of science and religion should be thinking hard about this problem so they can solve it.  When people deny the conflicts between science and religion, they become examples of the conflict.

Stereotype threat vs self-fulfilling prophecy

Here's an experimental idea: How does stereotype threat affect people's behavior in the ultimatum game?  If you tell a group of people that the purpose of your study is to measure gender differences in cooperation, will this cause women to behave more cooperatively in a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Let me step back a bit and define our terms.  Stereotype threat is when you remind people that they're part of a negatively stereotyped group, and this reminder causes them to perform more poorly on a performance test, confirming the negative stereotype.  In the classic experiment, subjects are given an academic test.  When told that the test was diagnostic of intellectual ability, this negatively impacted the scores of African American subjects compared to other subjects, because they were reminded of negative stereotypes of their group.  (There is also an opposite effect, called stereotype lift, where people who are not part of the stereotyped group perform better when primed with the stereotype.)

The ultimatum game is a game often used in studies of social behavior.  Two players are offered a chance to split $100.  The first player decides how to divide the money.  The second player considers the first player's offer, and either accepts it or rejects it.  If the offer is rejected, then no one gets any money.  A more cooperative player offers more money to the other player.

The stereotype threat is often explained as a "self-fulfilling prophecy".  Mention a stereotype, and it causes the stereotype to become true!

However, every study on the stereotype threat seems to only look at performance tests.  The proposed mechanism for stereotype threat is that reminding people about their membership of a stereotyped group causes anxiety and taxes cognitive resources.  (Stereotype lift, on the other hand, reduces anxiety.)  This may cause people to confirm stereotypes when the stereotype is that they'll perform more poorly on a test.  But what happens when you study a stereotype that does not have to do with test performance?  For instance, could stereotype threat also "confirm" stereotypes about being more or less cooperative?  If so, could it also "confirm" other stereotypes, like gay men being effeminate or black people being religious?

That's why I think it would be interesting to see if stereotype threat affects how people behave in the ultimatum game.

Unfortunately, I don't have the resources to perform this experiment, but we can find answers in existing literature.  A brief literature search found the following paper: Social Identity and Preferences by Benjamin et al.

The paper finds that when Asian-Americans and (non-immigrant) black Americans are made to think about their own ethnicity, this affects their patience (with respect to receiving money rewards), and their risk aversion.  The authors infer that there are ethnic norms about patience and risk-aversion which are enhanced by priming.  The specific results of the paper aren't relevant here, but what's interesting is that it appears to be a self-fulfilling stereotype which is not about a performance test.

What's more, the authors do not use stereotype threat as an explanation.  Rather, they consider stereotype threat as one possible explanation, and reject it.  It cannot be stereotype threat, because they find that their method of priming people does not increase their anxiety.  Instead, the authors understand their results within self-categorization theory.  Priming people causes them to see themselves as more part of a group, and modify their behavior according to what is expected within that group.

This clarifies something I may have misunderstood about stereotype threat.  Stereotype threat is not just any mechanism by which stereotypes become self-fulfilling prophecies, it's just one particular mechanism.  Stereotype threat operates by causing anxiety and taxing cognitive resources, incidentally creating self-fulfilling prophecies when stereotypes are related to performance on certain tests.

The important thing about stereotype threat is not that it causes people to confirm stereotypes, the important thing is that negative stereotypes cause people anxiety, and this anxiety has measurable impact on their performance of real world tasks.

As for my experimental proposal, I predict that priming people with gender may in fact cause women to behave more cooperatively, but not by the mechanism of stereotype threat.  Rather, by self-categorization theory, men and women may see themselves as more part of their gender, and modify their behavior to better accord with gender norms.   But that's just my prediction, who knows whether it would carry out.

Asexual and scientific classifications of love

This post was cross-posted on The Asexual Agenda.  Because of the audience over there, I assume readers have knowledge of asexual models of attraction, but do not assume knowledge of Helen Fisher's model.

Asexual communities are renowned for building complicated models of love and attraction.  These models are formed through the decidedly non-scientific processes of listening to lots of anecdotes and mass speculation.  There are definitely some weaknesses to the process, but it's quite valuable for what it is.

Scientists have their own models of love and attraction, formed independently and through different methods.  The strengths of the scientific method and that used by asexual communities complement each other.  Wouldn't you like to compare the results?

Though there are likely many models created by scientists, I will stick to the model of love defined by Helen Fisher.*  She classifies three emotional systems used in mammalian mating and reproduction: lust, attraction, and attachment.  Not all mammals have all three emotional systems, but they exist in all human cultures studied.

Lust is also known as sex drive or libido, is the urge for sexual consummation.  Lust is associated with estrogens and androgens, and with activity in the amygdala and hypothalamus.

Attraction is an emotional system which causes an individual to prefer courtship with a specific other individual.  This saves on resources used for courting and provides a fitness benefit if the attraction is directed at mates who will produce more fit offspring.  In humans, it is also known as passionate love, romantic love, and obsessive love.  Attraction is associated with increased activity in dopamine and norepinephrine, and decreased activity in serotonin in various parts of the brain. There is a long list of symptoms associated with attraction:

• The loved one takes on special meaning
• An inability to love other individuals
• Intrusive thinking about loved one
• Crystallization, or tendency to focus only on the loved one's positive qualities
• Quickly changing psychophysiological responses including euphoria, sleeplessness, shyness, flushing, butterflies in the stomach, dilated pupils, accelerated breathing, and anxiety.
• profound empathy for loved one
• sexual desire for the loved one

In humans, attachment is also called companionate love.  It's basically the emotion which keeps long-term partners together.  It's associated with feelings of calm, security, and emotional union with the partner.  Neurologically, it associated with oxytocin and vasopressin in certain parts of the brain.

This model can be compared to asexual models of attraction.  Asexuals have this concept of sexual attraction, which is distinguished from sex drive and also from other forms of attraction, most notably romantic attraction.  There's also the concept of romantic relationships vs platonic relationships, with some people desiring one, both, neither, or not fitting within the distinction.  And then there are crushes, which are a specific component of romantic attraction, and squishes, which are the platonic equivalent.  How's that for a quick summary?

It's interesting that both asexuals and Helen Fisher draw a distinction between attraction and sex drive.  Although in my view that distinction is not drawn on precisely the same lines.  I would say sexual attraction is those feelings which causes you to desire sex with people you see out and about, or perhaps only with particular individuals that seem attractive to you.  But that's really two definitions, the first one falling within Fisher's lust, and the second one being one of the symptoms of Fisher's attraction.**

Some of the other symptoms of Fisher's attraction, we might refer to crushing or squishing.   And of course, crushes and squishes are part of larger wholes, romantic attraction and platonic attraction respectively.  But asexuals don't seem to distinguish between companionate and passionate love.  I personally think they should, because my own experience is that passionate love very neatly describes that which I don't experience, more so than "sexual attraction".

For fun, I drew a visual summary of my comparison, though there are many ways to draw it differently.

[Transcript: In blue I show Fisher's model, which includes Lust, Attraction, and Attachment.  In red I overlay an asexual model, with Sex Drive being part of Lust, Sexual Attraction being part of Lust and of Attraction, and Platonic Attraction and Romantic Attraction each covering part of Attraction and Attachment.]

It's natural to ask why the models are different, and if the models are compatible with each other.  I believe there are lots of valid distinctions between the different components of love and attraction, and the different models simply highlight different sets of distinctions.  Note that each model also contains finer distinctions that I ignored for simplicity.

The distinctions drawn by Helen Fisher are between different emotional systems associated with different chemicals in different parts of the brain.  They're distinctions that become apparent in cross-species research.  The distinctions drawn by asexuals are mostly social distinctions.  If some particular component of attraction is noticeably missing in a set of people, and it's socially useful to talk about that component, then asexuals will put a name to it.

And of course the categories associated with different chemicals are not identical to the categories associated with sets of traits that are commonly missing.  After all, it's not the chemicals themselves which are commonly missing!  I don't know anything about neuroscience, but surely there are lots of other possibilities, like neuroreceptors in some part of the brain behaving differently, I don't know.  It's also likely that there are many different neurological differences that are socially useful to group together, thus why asexuals don't make use of every distinction found in neuroscience.

As I said, the scientific and asexual models complement each other.  I hope the comparison has expanded your conceptual world.

------------------------------------

*If you're interested in reading into this, I first recommend Helen Fisher's TED talk.  This post also uses lots of paraphrasing of the following references:

Fisher, H. Lust, attraction and attachment in mammalian reproduction. Human Nature 1998, vol. 9, No. 1, pp.23-52.
Fisher, H. The drive to love: The neural mechanism for mate selection. ed. by R.J. Stenberg and K. Weis. The New Psychology of Love, 2006.

These references were kindly suggested by Massimo Pigliucci and Ronnie de Sousa.

**The truth is that most asexual models involve multiple definitions and lots of fuzzy lines.  No doubt the same is true in scientific research, but of course it looks much more unified when I only consider the studies done by a single researcher, Helen Fisher.

A portrait of an "unsolved problem"

I study high-temperature superconductivity (henceforth HTSC).  It's one of the largest fields of condensed matter physics, which itself is the largest field of physics.  HTSC is one of the outstanding unsolved problems in physics, and unsolved problems attract research.  The two big questions are:

• What is the mechanism for HTSC?  That is, how does it work?
• Can we find a superconductor that works at even higher temperatures, like room temperature?

My own work is purely on currently known superconductors, and is thus not directly related to the search for new superconductors.  My research is more directly related to the mechanism for HTSC.  But I'm an experimentalist, so I don't come up with mechanisms myself.  It would be more accurate to say that I test theories proposed by other scientists.

So my perspective is very limited.  Superconductivity is a vast field, and I occupy one tiny little corner.  I don't have a great idea of the big picture, because I'm too busy trying to understand the details of the stuff near my own corner.  And I don't even fully understand that.  Consider this a distorted portrait.

What "unsolved" means

In fact, superconductivity is already understood.  It was solved in 1957, when BCS theory was proposed.  BCS theory is named for its creators: Bardeen, Schrieffer, and Cooper.  The solution is that electrons pair up.  In order to pair up, there needs to be an attractive force between electrons.  There is an interaction between electrons and the ionic lattice that creates an effective attractive interaction between electron pairs.

But superconductivity reasserted itself as a mystery with the discovery of HTSC in 1986.  BCS theory does not work for HTSC materials.  It does not predict that superconductors could exist at such high temperatures (ie minus 140 degrees celsius).  We need a new theory of superconductivity for the newly discovered materials.  But it's not completely up for grabs.  We're still fairly sure that electrons must be pairing up due to some effective attractive interaction.  We're just unsure where the effective attractive interaction comes from.

Mind you, when I say low-temperature superconductivity is "understood" and high-temperature superconductivity is not understood, I'm not referring to my personal level of understanding.  I don't really understand BCS theory.  That is to say, I don't know how to calculate the electron-phonon interaction, and I don't know how to get from the microscopic theory to the Ginzberg-Landau theory.  But that previous sentence might have been gibberish to most of you.  Perhaps what I call "not understanding" is a much deeper understanding than the most educated lay person.

Surely when HTSC is solved, the solution will involve all these little technicalities.  I will not be able to understand the solution.  I will understand the cartoon picture that accompanies the solution, but I will not understand the calculations.

An excess, not a scarcity, of theories

People generally don't talk about mechanisms for HTSC.  The expression "elephant in the room" comes to mind.  My impression is that lots of mechanisms were proposed around 1986-1990, and then it became unfashionable.  The problem isn't that we don't have a theory, it's that we have too many theories.  We need evidence to knock down some of those theories.

New mechanisms for HTSC are occasionally proposed on ArXiV (which is where most physicists share their upcoming publications).  I often wonder if these are cranks.  There's nothing really to stop cranks from putting things up on ArXiV, since it's not peer-reviewed.  I'm told there's even an unwritten special section for cranks (the "general physics" section).  But perhaps many of these papers are completely legitimate and respectable.  The point is I wouldn't be able to the difference.  I've never gotten the impression that they have high impact anyway.

At March Meeting (a huge condensed matter physics conference with over 8000 talks) a few weeks ago, I saw a couple proposals for HTSC mechanisms.  One proposal was made during a 12 minute talk trying to explain the observations of some recent experiment.  The talk sounded exciting, but I didn't understand it at all.  That's not unusual; I don't understand most of the talks.

The other proposal occurred in a poster presentation.  The guy had a theory that did not involve electron pairing.  That makes it "wacky".  I had the impression that he was sort of a crank, since he said he was unable to get published or get funding.  But I respected him anyway.  I don't understand BCS theory, and I didn't understand his theory.  If I'm honest, I can't argue with him.  Let the knowledgeable theorists do the arguing.

I mentioned my impression that people don't really talk about mechanisms for superconductivity.  He said that's because everyone thinks superconductivity is already solved, and that the solution happens to be the idea they themselves proposed.  He alluded to (Nobel Laureate) Phil Anderson's theory.  I'm told that Anderson's mechanism involves electron pairing, but a repulsive force is sufficient to allow the pairing.  That sounds "wacky" too, but what do I know?

Approaching the problem indirectly

Earlier I said that as an experimentalist, I just test ideas proposed by theorists.  But we don't really talk about mechanisms for HTSC.  Instead, we test smaller ideas.

For example, one of the big debates is about a "kink" in the electronic structure.  Is it caused by an interaction between electrons and phonons, or an interaction between electrons and magnons?  And is it related to superconductivity or not?  I suppose there must be a class of theories involving phonons, and a class of theories involving magnons, but we don't talk about the theories directly.  We're just trying to establish the basic facts.

Another big debate is about the so-called "pseudogap" state, which is a strange state that has been observed above the superconducting temperature.  What is the nature of this state of matter?  Is it competing with superconductivity, or is it perhaps an incipient form of superconductivity?  Perhaps it has something to do with CDWs or stripes?  Not that any of this makes sense to you unless you're in the same field as me.  But once we figure out the answer, I'm sure I'll be able to draw a cartoon of it that you'll understand.

I think when we think of historical physics discoveries, we often think of the Eureka! moment.  Someone writes a great paper, and all the problems are solved as it clicks into place.  I'm suspicious of this narrative, because that's not how the field of HTSC looks.  It will be a slow and incremental progression.  Slowly working out incomprehensible technicalities.  But afterwards it will have looked simple.  We'll have a nice cartoon, and we'll tell stories about the scientists who, in a flash of brilliance, dreamed up those cartoons.

Unwrapping an enigma

This was cross-posted on The Asexual Agenda.

In Psychology & Sexuality‘s special issue on asexuality, there was an article called A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma, which was basically an interview with several of the article authors.  A few people have complained that this article revealed that “many of the researchers seem wildly out of touch with actual ace communities and discourses.”

Therefore, it might be an interesting exercise to see how people actively involved in ace communities would respond to the same questions.  I’m going to answer the questions, and I invite you to answer one or more of them in the comments or on your blogs.


What motivated your initial engagement with asexuality research?

I initially started reading (a)sexuality research during the time that I was questioning the extent of my asexuality.  What I really wanted to know: how does science break down attraction into components?  AVEN had one way of breaking it down (and since this was four years ago, it was not the quite same way it’s broken down now), but I wanted a second opinion.  I didn’t get much of an answer from academic research, and perhaps it was foolish to expect one.  But I continue to be interested in academic research as a second opinion on asexual issues.

Are there issues particular to asexuality research which differentiates it from other forms of sexualities research?

I think the main difference is the community structure.  Because the community is very centralized, a lot of asexuals will have more or less the same conceptual understandings.  Because it is primarily internet-based, we transcend national boundaries (but language boundaries not so much).  Because asexual awareness is very low, there is a huge population of “potential asexuals”, people who do not identify as asexual, but who might identify under the right circumstances.  All of this has a big influence on what kind of research is feasible.

Unlike Bishop, I don’t really have a problem with classifying asexuality as sexualities research.  I wouldn’t usually use “PC” in a pejorative sense, but I think this is a case of being excessively PC.

How can researchers disentangle asexuality from diagnostic entities such as ‘hypoactive sexual desire disorder?’

There are probably some clear-cut cases, such as the happy asexual, or the person who suddenly loses their libido and is very distressed about it.  But there are always going to be some ambiguous cases.  How do we tell between lifelong HSDD, and a potential asexual who is distressed about not fitting into the norm?  I’m not convinced that there is in fact a difference, and I suspect it’s really a moral question about the best way to respond to such people.

In ambiguous cases, I would like clinicians offering the possibility of asexuality to their patients, and seeing how they react.  And I would like to see research evaluating the results of such an approach.

In a recent review article, C.J. Chasin raises several provocative questions. First, do you think asexuality should be categorised as a sexual orientation or as a meta-category akin to sexual? Second, how might asexual men and women rationalize or justify engaging in sexual activity and what are the potential consequences of doing so?

I’m with Hinderliter, in that I can’t think of any empirical difference between asexuality being a sexual orientation, and being a meta-category.  I don’t think it’s a scientific question at all.  It’s a political question.  Is it more politically beneficial to consider asexuality an orientation or as a meta-category?  I think it is better to think of it as an orientation, because: a) the parallel to LGB is educationally useful, and b) conceptualizing gray-A as half of a sexual orientation is needlessly confusing.

I think the second question is loaded.  Asking how asexual people “rationalize” engaging in sexual activity suggests that asexuals who have sex are necessarily disempowered, and they only have sex for the “wrong” reasons.  According to Aicken et al. (2013), most potential asexuals who are having sex enjoy it, suggesting that it isn’t always a kind of disempowerment.  The researchers had several good answers for why asexuals might have sex (satisfying partners, expressing intimacy, desire to reproduce), but I would add that some asexuals may also have sex for pleasure.  It would be cool to see research on the relative prevalance of these different motivations.

How is the negativity directed toward asexual individuals similar to/different from the negativity directed at other sexual minorities (e.g., gay men, lesbian women, etc.)?

There are a lot of different ways in which individuals and society express homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, and ace-hate.  It’s hard to compare the different categories when each category is so varied!

There are some notable differences in the canonical forms of negativity directed at different groups.  Asexuals experience erasure and denial, whereas gay men experience bullying, and trans women experience serious violence.  These canonical forms of negativity partly reflect reality, but they also reflect back-and-forth political framing.  Bisexual erasure doesn’t get much attention, nor does the fact that bisexuals have higher rates of suicide than gay and lesbian folk.  There’s also a tendency to see these as being problems for white men, when usually minorities and women are disproportionately affected (eg).  Research is what helps us tangle out the details.

What directions do you expect asexuality research to take over the next decade?

I expect a lot of it to rehash what most people within the asexuality community already know.  Maybe years down the line they’ll “discover” gray-As and demis.  The queer and feminist theorists will “discover” that asexuals have the potential to break down romantic/non-romantic boundaries. Etc. etc.  There will probably also be a lot of research on HSDD.  And that’s all important research.

Although, what I’d like to see is more information that would be news to me.  Academic research can give us knowledge that we in the community would otherwise not have access to.  In particular, we don’t know much about potential asexuals, since by definition we don’t hang out much.  And we know very little about the relative prevalence of different experiences.

Improving on the queue

Speaking of social science technologies...

I grew up in Los Angeles, so I went to Disneyland a lot.  By now I've seen everything a hundred times, so the experience is not so enjoyable.  But when I was a kid, the problem was that I couldn't get enough of the rides, because the lines were so long.

When I was 11, Disneyland introduced the Fastpass system.  At the front of each major ride there were these magical boxes.  You'd put your park ticket in, and you'd get out a Fastpass which had a time printed on it.  The time is calculated based on how many other people have gotten Fastpasses so far that day.  At the printed time, you could get in a special line at the ride which moved much faster than the normal line.  The drawback was that you could only have a single fast pass per park ticket.

The fastpass sure was gratifying, because we'd get to zoom past lines that would normally take over an hour.  But the rides can only serve a certain number of people per unit time, so it couldn't possibly benefit everyone, could it?  Was the benefit of the Fastpass all an illusion, or was there more to it?

My hypothesis is that there is a real benefit, and it has to do with game theory.  Normal queues are a prisoner's dilemma, and the Fastpass system mitigates the problem.

The swimming pool analogy

Imagine, for instance, that we're in a swimming pool, and the diving board is so popular that there's always a line for it.  We all prefer staying in the swimming pool, but we're also willing to stand out of the water for a while in order to try the diving board.  The shorter the line is, the more people willing to get into it, which makes the line longer again.  So the length of the line reaches a sort of Nash equilibrium.

However, the equilibrium line length is not the best line length.  The best line length would be zero.  Instead of everyone lining up, people could stay in the pool.  Then people would voluntarily go up to the diving board at a steady pace, always maintaining a line length of zero.  In this scenario, just as many people get to use the diving board, and no one has to stand for long outside of the pool.  To get in line is to take the defecting strategy in a prisoner's dilemma.

And unfortunately, this is a prisoner's dilemma that involves many people (as many as there are in the swimming pool).  So it's virtual certainty that everyone will defect.  Tragedy of the commons.

You could imagine queueing systems that attempt to defeat the prisoner's dilemma.  For example, you could have people write their names on a list (on a waterproof board?), while one person calls people to the diving board at the appropriate times.  You'd have to restrict the number of times people can sign their name to prevent people from just signing over and over with virtually no cost to themselves.  This new system would allow everyone to stay in the swimming pool.  Unfortunately, since the cost of diving is lower, the "line" would be much longer, consisting of many people who only marginally enjoy diving.

The Fastpass

The Disney Fastpass system is similar to the queuing system I proposed for the swimming pool.  Rather than having everyone wait in line, they get Fastpasses, which is just like signing your name on a board.  The time on the Fastpass is the time when the ride calls you up.  The Fastpass system doesn't allow more people to enjoy the ride, but it does allow people to spend less time in line overall.

What do people do with that extra time?  If you really like this one ride, you might just get in the normal line over and over again.  But if that's your behavior, then it's unlikely that the Fastpass system benefits you.  The Fastpass line makes the normal line slower.*  So even though you're getting the benefits of the Fastpass line every few hours, on average you're doing no better, or possibly worse.

*There's also an equilibriating response--fewer people are willing to line up in a slow line.  The wait is the product of the speed of the line and the number of people in it.  Despite the equilibriating response, the total wait will be longer.

A more beneficial way to spend the time is to watch shows or go on other less popular rides.  These attractions would normally operate at less than full capacity.  But because of the Fastpass system, more people may have time to take these rides and watch these shows.

Another alternative (one which I suspect is Disneyland's favorite) is to use the extra time to patronize shops and restaurants.

That's my hypothesis.  But what does Disneyland think are the advantages of Fastpass?  Take a look at the Fastpass patent:

Not only is the customer frustrated at not being able to access more attractions, but the amusement park itself suffers from having underutilized attractions because the customers are waiting in line for other attractions. Instead of waiting in line for a single attraction, a customer could be riding other attractions, eating food, shopping at stores, playing games, or other activities.

Yep.  I got it right.  It's a brilliant idea IMO.

Social science technologies

Here's an interesting paper I found via Physics Today:

A recent poll showed that most people think of science as technology and engineering—life-saving drugs, computers, space exploration, and so on. This was, in fact, the promise of the founders of modern science in the 17th century. It is less commonly understood that social and behavioral sciences have also produced technologies and engineering that dominate our everyday lives. These include polling, marketing, management, insurance, and public health programs.

The paper details each of those technologies and gives some specific improvements brought by research in those areas.  For example, it was social science research that developed the surgical safety checklist, which measurably reduces the risk of complications in surgery.  One of the "management" examples was the realization that workers at a Fiat auto plant had to bend and stretch to work, and that new machinery could eliminate this problem and increase productivity per worker.

Probably a few of these technologies get a really bad rap, especially marketing and management.  The paper says:

It is commonly recognized that the same knowledge about atomic structures that brings us nuclear medicine can also bring us nuclear winter. The same knowledge about operant
conditioning can bring relief from terrifying phobias or, as with advertisements for tobacco, it can kill.

So it's not the technology itself that's bad, it's how you use it.  Do you buy this?

Does physics make you less religious?

I'm sure that this has never crossed your pure and innocent minds, but as a godless physicist, I fit into a sort of godless physicist stereotype.  But is there any truth to the stereotype?  Does studying physics tend to make you less religious?

Nope!  At least, not undergraduate physics.  According to this longitudinal study, studying biological or physical sciences has no overall effect on the religiosity of students.  Humanities and social sciences have a negative effect.  Education and business have a positive effect.  Or that's what the summary says.

I looked at the paper too, and as you'd expect there are a few more wrinkles.  It seems that studying physical sciences does have a slight negative effect on the self-assessed importance of religion, but no significant effect on religious attendance, whether the church should have less influence, or other religious measures.  For some reason engineering causes people to think the church should have less influence, and that less should be left up to God, but there was no significant effect on other measures.

This is in addition to a larger background trend where average religious attendance declines 12% in the 5-6 years after high school.  It also ignores the selection effect where the kind of people who enter into certain majors are more or less likely to be religious in the first place.

The study does not report raw religiosity scores in different majors (presumably it was reported elsewhere), but it does discuss how religiosity affects what majors students switch into.  Higher religiosity scores predict a higher probability of switching into education, humanities, biology, and a lower probability of switching into social sciences.  There appears to be no significant affect on switching to physical sciences.  Higher religiosity also increases the chance that people will go to college.

So on average, science doesn't make people less religious, and we have the evidence to show this.  If it seemed otherwise, that was an illusion caused by your limited and biased sampling of reality.

Quantum interpretations are scientific

Quantum Mechanics is famous for having multiple interpretations.  Among them, the two most common interpretations are the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) and the Copenhagen interpretation.

According to the Copenhagen interpretation, when you measure a system that is in a mixed quantum state, then the system "collapses" into a definite state (that is, a state that gives you only a single result for your measurement).  There are different probabilities for the system to collapse into different states, but it will always be a definite state.

In contrast, MWI says that there is no collapse.  Rather, when you measure a system in a mixed quantum state, now you are in a mixed quantum state.  One component of your state consists of you having measured one outcome; another component consists of you having measured the other outcome.  These different components don't interact with each other, and evolve independently.  The ultimate consequence is that the entire universe is in a mixed state with many components that don't interact with one another.  Thus the name "many worlds".

MWI and the Copenhagen interpretation give identical predictions in all experiments.  So it's impossible to falsify one in favor of the other.  That's why some contend that the interpretation question is non-scientific.  I do not agree, for two reasons:

1. Different interpretations suggest different directions for future theories.
2. Experiments might have something to say about Copenhagen vs MWI after all.

1. Directions for future theories

I want to quote something Richard Feynman said.  Not because Feynman said it, therefore it was right, but because Feynman put the idea into my head.  This occurred in a lecture series Feynman gave at Cornell (specifically, the second lecture, section 8).  Feynman explained that there are three different ways to state the law of gravitation:

1. Each object senses where all the other objects are, and feels a force towards each object of magnitude GmM/R^2.
2. There is a gravitational potential in every point of space, governed by laws that only look at its surrounding neighborhood, without looking at far away objects.  The gravitational force is determined by this potential.
3. Given a start and end point, an object travels by the path that minimizes a particular quantity.

So the question is, which of these theories is correct?  Is this a scientific question?  Feynman said:

They are equivalent, scientifically; it is impossible to make a decision, because there's no experimental way to distinguish if all the consequences are the same.

Psychologically, they're very different in two ways.  First, philosophically, you like them or don't like them--training is the only thing you can do to beat that disease.  Second, psychologically they're different because they're completely unequivalent when you go to guess at a new law.

As long as physics is incomplete, and we're trying to find out the other laws, and to understand the other laws, then the different possible formulations give clues as to what might happen in another circumstance.  And they become not equivalent in psychologically suggesting to us to guess as to what the laws might look like in a wider situation.

Physics has developed a lot since we discovered the law of gravitation, so we know for a fact that the different interpretations have different uses.  The second theory has helped us understand some of the fundamental character of quantum field theory.  But the third theory gave us Feynman path integrals, which are related to Feynman diagrams, an easy way to represent fundamental particle interactions.  The first theory has not been very useful, and that's that.

MWI and the Copenhagen interpretation are in the same situation as the law of gravity.  They're equivalent in terms of predictions, but they lead to different ways of thinking which suggest different directions for expanding physical theories.  The first thing that comes to mind is that MWI is deterministic and unitary (meaning it is deterministic if time plays backwards too).  That's useful because it suggests that we can continue coming up with fundamental laws that obey time-symmetry.  There may be other uses too.

As I argued in "Multiverses are scientific", scientific ideas can serve many roles.  There are observations, hypotheses, experiments, theories, predictions, and so forth. Quantum interpretations also fulfill a role in science--they suggest different directions for future theories.  They do not fulfill the role of hypotheses which can be tested.  And that is okay, because not all scientific ideas need to fulfill every single role at once.  A hypothesis doesn't also need to be a theory, and an interpretation doesn't also need to be a hypothesis.  So the fact that the interpretations are not falsifiable doesn't necessarily mean it is unscientific.


2. How to (possibly) verify MWI

First, I need to explain how the Copenhagen interpretation and MWI, despite their differences, vary continuously into one another.  Consider a thought experiment where a mechanical device detects whether a radioactive atom decays within a half-life.  If it does, then it turns on a laser pointer, which provokes a cat to run through a hallway.  At the other end of the hallway, I can see if the cat appears or not.  Whatever I see, I publish my results for other scientists to see.

The question is, when does the collapse occur?  Does it collapse when radioactive atom observes itself decaying?  Does it collapse when the mechanical device observes the radioactive atom?  Do the mechanical device and radioactive atom both collapse when the cat sees the laser pointer?  Do the cat, device, and atom collapse when I see the cat (or not)?  Do the cat, device, atom, and I all collapse when other scientists see my results? Etc. etc.

If you answer "no" ad infinitum, you are taking the MWI.  But if you eventually answer "yes", you are taking the Copenhagen interpretation.  To make the Copenhagen interpretation similar to the MWI, all you have to do is say "no" lots of times before eventually saying "yes".

We don't know the answer to all those questions, and cannot know.  But we do know the answer to the first few is "no".  We can verify that small systems are in mixed states because we can measure interference effects.  With more complex systems, it's harder because of the sheer randomness that occurs when you have lots of particles at a non-zero temperature.  In my knowledge, the largest quantum system created was 40 microns in length, and needed to be cooled down to 0.1 K.

It will be hard to push that limit, but we definitely could, in very small steps.  We could push the Copenhagen interpretation closer and closer to MWI, though we will never quite reach it.  Alternatively, MWI could be falsified if it's found that mixed states do not exist past a certain point (ie if no interference is found where it is expected).

Conclusion

People sometimes say that MWI is unscientific, because it posits parallel worlds that cannot be observed.  This is mistaken because it assumes that every single idea in science needs to be verifiable.  Scientific ideas may also serve other roles, such as suggesting future directions for theories which themselves would be experimentally verifiable.  Secondly, it so happens that MWI is partially verifiable in very small increments.

My position on emergence, as a physicist

Rationally Speaking is starting a new series on emergence.  So far, I like it merely because it starts out by talking about Renormalization Group theory, which comes from condensed matter physics.  Finally, the philosophers are talking about my field, rather than all that stuff about cosmology and particle physics.

I should take this opportunity to explain my position on emergence as a condensed matter physicist.  And yes, here I am speaking as a physicist, not because my study of physics has compelled me to view it one way or another, but because physics has greatly influenced my view.  I can definitely imagine another physicist coming to the opposite conclusions as me, but surely their opinion would also be greatly influenced by their study of physics.

In a way, condensed matter is all about emergence.  Condensed matter is about throwing ~100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms together, and trying to predict what they will do.  It is not an easy task.  Consider: a single helium atom is already an unsolvable problem, because it's just too hard to solve the quantum mechanical equations for the nucleus and two electrons.

How do we solve the problem?  Approximation upon approximation upon approximation upon approximation etc.  Really, there are too many approximations stacked up to fully comprehend them all at once.  One could say that condensed matter physics is the art of making approximations, and using experiments to test that they're sufficiently approximate.

An approximation is all about throwing out information, clearing out some of those irrelevant details so that we can zoom out and see the big picture.  In fact, Renormalization Group theory is literally about zooming out.  In the theory, we zoom out by some scaling factor--say, if we removed every other atom, and the remaining atoms were 1 micrometer apart from each other, instead of 0.5 micrometers.  What laws governing this sparser atomic lattice would cause them to behave just like they did in the original atomic lattice?  That is, how are the parameters, such as the coupling strength between atomic neighbors, affected by zooming out?

Renormalization Group theory explains the behavior of phase transitions (like gas to liquid) by showing that when you zoom out on a liquid, the parameters change in a different direction than when you zoom out on a gas.  It's a very powerful theory.

On Rationally Speaking, emergent behavior was defined in the following way:

The idea being that a phenomenon is emergent if its behavior is not reducible to some sort of sum of the behaviors of its parts, if its behavior is not predictable given full knowledge of the behaviors of its parts, and if it is somehow new.

I'm sort of on board with emergence, but I'm sort of not.  Emergent behavior is everywhere, and in particular it's right in front of me on my desk every work day.  Call emergence an illusion if you will, but by that standard so is superconductivity, which IMHO is a pretty hard-sciencey thing.  I suppose I'm taking the slippery slope here:  I think superconductivity is a real thing, therefore emergence is a real thing, and therefore even highly-emergent patterns like the stock market and the internet are real things.  Yes, I'm willing to bite the bullet and say that the internet is real, despite appearances to the contrary.

But at the same time, I think the standard way of describing and understanding emergence is all wrong.  As with the above definition, emergence is about something new that appears in the big picture.  But having worked with emergent systems, I do not think it's about adding something new.  It's about taking information away.

Perceived patterns do not indicate a greater amount of information, they indicate less information.  Usually, a pattern would consist of many things repeated over and over.  Repetition and redundancy do not convey more information.  Repetition and redundancy do not convey... oh, you get it.

When you find emergent pattern that is difficult to predict, the problem isn't that you can't reduce it to fundamental physics.  The problem is that you have to reduce it far, far beyond fundamental physics.  You have to eliminate large swaths of useless information in increasingly creative ways.  You have to do experiments on all levels to make sure that you didn't lose any of the important information.

Alternatively, you can take a more phenomenological approach, and "guess" the result of the information-elimination based on empirical observation and intuition.  I get the sense that this is what many people call emergent behavior, because by taking guesses they're adding something new.  Guessing is an tried-and-true practice used everywhere in science, so I'm cool with that.

Multiverses are scientific

Skeptics have their principles.  One of those is Occam's Razor: Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.  Another principle is that knowledge of the real world must be founded in empirical observation.  The theory that there is a multiverse appears to break both of these principles.  Why posit multiple parallel universes when one is enough, and when we could never observe those other universes?

There is a simple response to these concerns: Multiverses are not scientific theories in themselves.  Rather, multiverses are predictions of certain theories of physics.  The same theories that predict multiverses can make other predictions which are verifiable.

For example, take the theory that the universe is uniform on sufficiently large scales.  There are galaxy filaments, huge thread-like structures made of galaxy clusters and superclusters.  But if you zoom out, you will not find the galaxy filaments organizing into super-filaments, super-filaments organizing into ultra-filaments and so on.  Instead, you will find that they are placed uniformly and randomly.  That is a prediction we can verify.

But there is another prediction that can't be verified so easily: if the universe is uniform (and the curvature of space is non-positive), then the universe is infinite in extent.

While an infinite universe is more complicated in the sense that there is more stuff in the universe, it makes for a simpler theory with fewer parameters.  If the universe is infinite, then I don't need to measure its size and shape, or measure our position relative to its center.  In absence of evidence to the contrary, I will believe that the universe is infinite, because that is the simpler theory.

It is true that the scientific method requires hypothesizing, predicting, testing, interpreting, and theorizing, just like you see in middle school science fair experiments.  But this is absolutely not true if you chop science into little pieces (say, into individual PhD theses).  Science is not fractally structured.  A single scientist can work entirely on theorizing without doing any experiments herself.  Another scientist can work entirely on experimentation, and then just borrow interpretations from the other scientist.  And if you take a single idea in science, it's unlikely that it would fulfill the roles of hypothesis, theory, prediction, and interpretation all at once.

In saying that multiverses are predictions, not theories, I'm repeating a point made by Max Tegmark in Scientific American.  Tegmark also has a useful classification system for multiverses:

When talking about parallel universes, I find it useful to distinguish between four different levels: Level I (other such regions far away in space where the apparent laws of physics are the same, but where history played out differently because things started out differently), Level II (regions of space where even the apparent laws of physics are different), Level III (parallel worlds elsewhere in the so-called Hilbert space where quantum reality plays out), and Level IV (totally disconnected realities governed by different mathematical equations).

Earlier I said that multiverses are predictions of certain theories of physics.  Theories plural.  Different theories predict different kind of multiverses.  For example, the theory that the universe is uniform on sufficiently large scales predicts a Level I multiverse.  The theory that there is no quantum wavefunction collapse predicts a Level III "many worlds" scenario.  Certain theories of particle physics predict that the physical constants of nature will vary over very large scales, leading to a Level II multiverse.

Level IV is not predicted by any theory I know of.  So maybe Level IV multiverses are unscientific.  They can't all be winners!

Even though multiverses are predictions of certain theories of physics, the argument for multiverses that most people are familiar with is the anthropic principle.  The argument goes that the reason our universe is so exceptional as to allow life is that there are many parallel universes and we only see the exceptional one.  But while this is a satisfying result of multiverses, I don't think it is a very strong argument for multiverses.  It doesn't even predict any particular kind of multiverse.  This contrasts with the scientific arguments for multiverses, which are more specific in their predictions.

Why I'm agnostic on cosmology

In my previous post, I said that there were many solutions to the entropy problem, but I did not want to pick one.  I think I should better explain my motivations for this.  Why am I so agnostic about cosmology?

Part of it is that I really just don't know.  I'm a grad student in condensed matter.  I know a little about quantum field theory, general relativity, and cosmology.  But like the saying goes, the more you know, the more you know you don't know.  I know that there is a lot of cosmology I don't understand.  I know that cosmology is a complicated field that you can't truly understand just by reading Brian Greene.

I tend to think that if I don't have an opinion on cutting-edge questions of physics, nor should lay people.  I mean, if I don't know enough to speak, and lay people know less than I do, then clearly lay people shouldn't be speaking either.  Just because they read some Brian Greene doesn't mean they understand anything!  That's how physics cranks are born, you know.  They read some popular physics and think they understand.

But I am being unfair to lay people.  They can enthuse about physics all they want.  Physics is cool!

Of course, when lay people speak about physics, they don't get taken seriously.  When I speak about physics, I get taken more seriously.  If I were to even speculate on whether inflationary theory is correct, then I would appear to be giving my expert opinion.  But I don't have the necessary expertise, and I want to make that clear.  My expertise allows me to speak on certain things: the foundational theories of physics, the consensus of physicists, understanding what other physicists say.  But I do not have the expertise to go beyond the consensus.  For the most part, I cannot even go beyond the consensus in my own field, much less cosmology.

But there's another side to this too.  I don't like the idea of atheists being ideologically committed to one particular cosmological scenario.  The situation bears too much resemblance to Creationists, who are committed to a relatively young universe.  It bears too much resemblance to liberal Christians like William Lane Craig, who hold that the universe must have had a beginning.  Of course, mere resemblance to something bad does not mean it is bad.  But it makes me uncomfortable to see atheists advancing one particular cosmological theory in a philosophical argument.  What if that theory is wrong, huh?

Here's a specific example.  I most often see atheists advancing one particular solution to the entropy problem.  The solution is that when the universe was very small, its maximum entropy was also very small, and that's why we start with a highly ordered state.  As the universe expanded, the ceiling on the entropy rose, allowing the entropy to increase as described by the Second Law.  The purpose is to demonstrate that yes, there are possible explanations for the Second Law besides God.

Though I agree that there are many alternative explanations besides God, I am not convinced that this particular explanation is necessarily true or complete.  If a small universe has less maximum entropy, that seems to imply that if the universe undergoes a big crunch, then the entropy will decrease.  Does that mean the arrow of time will be reversed?  People have seriously proposed this, but Wikipedia calls it "a highly controversial view".  There's also the question of why the universe ever compact to begin with.  If a small universe has low entropy, this means that the there are very few possible ways for the universe to be small.  So why was the universe small and compact, out of all the ways it could have been? Some people would argue that at the universe has to be small and compact at its beginning (due to General Relativity), but this basically concedes that the Second Law implies that the universe has a finite age.   I don't think we should concede that.

Keep in mind that I am not an expert, and I could be completely wrong about these objections.  I don't wish to appear an expert where I'm not (see above).  However, I believe that experts in the relevant fields have raised similar objections.

And that is why I take an agnostic approach to cosmology in the cosmological argument.  I don't know enough about it, though I appear to be an expert.  I don't want us to be ideologically committed to a theory which may or may not be correct.  I don't believe this hinders our refutation of the cosmological argument.

Personality tests: MBTI and FFM

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a personality test with four different axes: Introverted/Extraverted, Intuitive/Sensing, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving.  It was created by two non-psychologists, based on ideas published by Carl Jung in 1921. 

The Five Factor Model (FFM) is a personality test with five different axes: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.  It is based on empirical research and factor analysis.  Basically, they asked people a bunch of personality questions, and used quantitative analysis to make the most predictive model using the smallest number of factors. 

Years ago, I used to be annoyed by MBTI, because it's so obviously unscientific.  I would give FFM as an example of a personality test that is actually science-based.  But these thoughts never made it to my blog, probably because they were half-baked.  More recently, I've reevaluated MBTI upwards, and FFM downwards.  I no longer think that the MBTI needs to be science-based to be useful, in the sense of resonating with us, and describing patterns that we deem important.  As for FFM, we'll get to that later.

Skeptoid summarized the criticisms of MBTI well, but I should summarize them separately here, along with my thoughts.

1. MBTI isn't psychology.  Psychologists don't take MBTI very seriously, and the scientific study of personalities is very far from MBTI.  Carl Jung was a psychologist but he belongs to the proto-scientific era of psychology (eg he believed in anecdotes over statistics).

2. MBTI does not describe underlying psychology.  Obviously, since MBTI isn't psychology.  But I wanted to include this point because people jump so quickly from "patterns that resonate with us" (ie "usefulness") to "the way stuff works".  There isn't any "extraversion" chemical which is more concentrated in extraverts' brains, but extraversion could still be an emergent pattern.  And if a pattern resonates with us, or seems important, that fact emerges from even more complicated stuff like society and culture.  It's likely that a useful personality model would bear no relation to the underlying psychology, and a personality model based on underlying psychology would not be very useful.

Note that FFM, though it comes from psychological research, is not based on underlying psychology either.  It's a phenomenological model.

3. MBTI is not a typology.  Though people's results are often summarized by listing their "types" (eg INTJ, ENFP), each of the four axes is just a normal distribution centered on the dividing line.  That means most people sit on the dividing line or close to it.  Calling it a typology suggests that people would cluster into the 16 different types, with a lower density of people on the dividing lines.

Note that MBTI practitioners mostly agree that MBTI is not a typology, even though that is what the T stands for.  I'm not sure about FFM, but as far as I know it does not purport to be a typology.  So the fact that MBTI isn't a typology isn't so much a criticism as a comment.

4. MBTI is not self-consistent.  Meaning, people who retake the test tend to get different results.  Or so Skeptoid claims.  I generally trust Skeptoid, but to properly support this claim, I need a broad literature survey, which I'm unwilling to do.

5. MBTI may be influenced by the Forer Effect.  The Forer Effect is when people accept vague positive descriptions of themselves as highly accurate, even though they could describe nearly anyone.  I think the names of the four axes are neutral, but the 16 "types" often come with additional flattering descriptions.  If the Forer Effect influences MBTI, people may accept results as highly accurate even if the descriptions were all randomized.

Earlier, I described "usefulness" as a subjective quality.  If a personality test describes patterns that resonate with us, then it is useful.  The Forer Effect is a way for a personality test to appear useful, but not actually be any more useful than a test that spits out random flattery (eg astrology).  However, it is not clear if the Forer effect is at work here.  I think that would be interesting to research.

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Okay, so here's what annoys me about FFM.  FFM is predictive, meaning it makes predictions that could be true or false.  So it's not really affected by the Forer Effect.  We could call the five axes in FFM 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and it would still succeed just as well in its purpose in making predictions.  However, psychologists decided to tack on additional descriptions of the five axes, calling them Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.  Of those five words, three are normatively positive (Openness, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness), one is normatively negative (Neuroticism), and one is neutral (Extraversion).

Couldn't psychologists have come up with less normative descriptions?  It could be the case that Agreeableness really is correlated with characteristics that nearly everyone deems positive, but surely this is something to demonstrate with research, not an assumption to sneak into the axis name.  Scientists have been known to do things like describe butterflies with same-sex behavior as immoral, and I think this is similar.

I am not really sure where the names came from.  But I spotted this history in a 1990 paper:

(click for a bigger picture)

Psychologists are laughably inept at coming up with non-normative names.  "Likeability",  "Culture",  "Positive emotionality", "Psychoticism"?  Srsly.

Science and Religion illustrated

There are maybe three or four major views on the relationship between science and religion.  I'm in an artistic mood, so I decided to illustrate these views.  It's also an exercise in understanding one's opponents, though it is inevitable that I misrepresent them in some way.

1. Science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria.

NOMA is simple enough, and the easiest to represent.  I don't have a scanner, can you tell?

2. Science and religion should interact for mutual benefit

People with this view ask why there must be so much conflict between science and religion.  Clearly, we can only answer our most profound questions if they team up.

3.  Science and religion are in conflict, and religion is in the right.

This representation is the one I'm least sure about, since who knows what creationists really think?  I guess they think that science is only honest if it confirms religious precepts.  I'm not sure how to draw that.

4. Science and religion are in conflict, and science is in the right.

Since this is the camp I'm in, I can vouch for the accuracy of this representation.  However, I know it does not represent all views in this category.  Some might say religion should merely have a reduced role, or science should have an expanded role.

Religious feeling is not the only motive for science

In a previous post, where I quoted Einstein, I took care to look up a bit of the context of the quote.  There I found some other views of Einstein that I for one consider abhorrent.

I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics!

-Albert Einstein (source)

Very pretty prose, but pshaw! I say.  That only shows is that cosmic religious feeling is a very pretty motive for scientific research, not that it is the strongest and noblest.  By calling it the strongest and noblest, Einstein is basically insulting all other possible motives, and praising the one motive that he himself happens to hold.

I am aware that Einstein uses "religion" and "religious feeling" in idiosyncratic ways; however, regardless of what he means, he's still holding one particular motive above all others.  Surely there is more than one respectable motive to do science.  Just as there are many motives to go into law or medicine (two other disciplines that require immense effort and devotion).

If you're having trouble imagining any other motive to do science, a few examples are offered by modern scientist archetypes.  The first one that comes to my mind is the cynical scientist archetype, greatly popularized in House, M.D.  Dr. House's main motivation is the puzzle.  He won't even take a case unless he thinks the medical puzzle is interesting enough.  It's not so much about the truth, as it is about the challenge of figuring out the truth.  This archetypical narrative certainly has its flaws, but I think it more closely reflects my own motivations than does the narrative painted by Einstein.

What about other archetypes, like the geeky engineer?  Totally motivated by cool explosions, right?  That sounds way more noble than whatever Einstein said.

Superconductors: a picture of progress

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.