When technology undermines science

On the day the iPad was launched, Apple sold over 300,000 of the tablet computers. Since then, over 3 million iPads have been sold. Our society is infatuated with technology, and this affects us in ways both obvious and subtle. Here I want to examine how our adoration of technology influences the way we think about science, and in turn how we see our whole world. I should note that I write this as a scientist, and someone with a long-time interest in, and fascination with technology.

Because the words science and technology are often paired, their meanings tend to be conflated. But science can be pursued with few technological spin-offs (as is the case with astrophysics, for example) and technology can be developed without the use of science (as was the case with the early technologies developed by trial and error in prehistory). Certainly scientific discoveries can often be used to develop new technologies, and existing technologies can be evaluated scientifically. But science itself is not about developing technology, it's about learning through systematic observation and (sometimes) experimental manipulation. Some would argue that this distinction is mere semantics, but I will argue that confusion between science and technology leads to some very unfortunate consequences.

Because we're so taken with technology, and because of the close connection between science and technology, it's not surprising that science is held in high esteem. But this is a double-edged sword. The downsides of technology (e.g. sedentary behaviour patterns and burgeoning rates of obesity, global warming from carbon emissions, toxic waste, etc.) are sometimes blamed on science. On the one hand, this is fitting: for better or worse, without science, modern technologies could never have been developed. On the other hand, surely it is our society's moral, economic, and political choices that determine how scientific knowledge is applied, and responsibility for those choices should fall to the decision makers. But our terminological confusion blurs such distinctions, and science and technology are routinely seen as one and the same. Praise or criticism of one is seen as identical to praise or criticism of the other. This has lead to a curious polarization of views.

The church of science

On the one hand, a triumphalism of science has become more and more common. Science is increasingly seen as providing the most trustworthy information, or perhaps the only reliable source of knowledge, not just about the physical world, but about all aspects of life.

I believe two factors underlie this tendency. First, the products of technological wizardry provide a concrete demonstration of the mastery and control that scientific knowledge can provide. The most important point here is the universality of this demonstration: no special knowledge or education is required to appreciate the power of technology. This technological factor rides on top of an epistemological claim. As Luke Muehlhauser puts it:

the massive success of science leads me to suspect that methods condoned [sic] by science are the most successful methods of knowing we have discovered yet.

And while it seems likely that a philosophical argument such as this will only appeal to a limited audience, it nevertheless provides the intellectual muscle beneath the alluring skin of technology.

Triumphalism about science has a long historical lineage, expressed in the first half of the 20th century in the school of logical positivism, and more recently in some of the writings of the so-called new atheists. In their extreme forms, such arguments tend towards scientism, the view that only scientific statements have any meaning and that, ultimately, science will provide all the answers. The trouble is, if science is seen as having all the answers, it must either expand to encompass a much broader range of concerns, or else dismiss such concerns as meaningless. Where does that leave ethics, philosophy, literature, history, art? While science can inform each of these fields, a radical redefinition of science would be required to assimilate them. And yet that is just what is being proposed.

Philosophy. Luke Muehlhauser argues: "I think philosophy will be most productive when it functions as an extension of successful science ... ". Commenting on such thinking, Massimo Pigliucci writes:

There are profound differences in method, style and type of problems between science and philosophy, and frankly I think that people who deny or minimize this simply have not taken their time to read any philosophy, or they would immediately see how bizarre it is to deny the difference.

More broadly, I am having a really hard time understanding the agenda of people here who wish at all costs to dismiss philosophy or absorb it into science. Why are you so bent on arrogating more epistemological power to science than it possesses? Why is it not good enough to say that science is by far the best approach we have devised to understand the natural world, but that there are problems that lie outside of it and other disciplines that are better equipped to address those problems?

Ethics. Sam Harris recently gave a TED talk titled “Science can answer moral questions”, in which he argues that "The separation between science and human values is an illusion". Massimo Pigliucci described the "malady that strikes Harris: scientism, the idea that science can do everything and provides us with all the answers that are worth having." Thinkmonkey, a commenter on Pigliucci's blog wrote:

Sam Harris has simply not done the hard work needed to understand the historical and ongoing arguments in ethical theory and metaethics - the context in which the argument he wishes to make *must* be situated. Perhaps these arguments have not settled very much, but they have at least established some shared terminology and made important distinctions: Without knowing the terminology and understanding the important distinctions (and the reasons for them), Harris cannot help but be confused - and to introduce still more confusion when he attempts to engage with his critics.

Philosophy may be where all the unanswered questions live, and may not get a lot of respect thereby, but at least we try to avoid these kinds of messes. Or, as Sydney Morgenbesser famously described our collective work: "You make a few distinctions. You clarify a few concepts. It’s a living."

The Humanities. The academic disciplines concerned with the human condition include history, literature, law, languages, art, and religious studies. Aspects of these and related fields may be studied using the methods of social science. But large parts of these disciplines use methods that are not scientific. Criticism of these disciplines is increasingly common. For example, the website of Edge: The Third Culture sneers:

The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.

... the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.

Mathematics. Interestingly, the claim that science provides the only reliable source of knowledge is easily refuted. Mathematics uses deduction to arrive at certain knowledge, something that science cannot achieve. One response to this is to claim that mathematics is part of science. Certainly mathematics is a key tool of science, but claiming that it is part of science goes too far. A different response is to point out that mathematical knowledge pertains to abstract entities, and thus in itself is not practical. This is indeed correct, but it highlights the key point that there are different kinds of knowledge, which cannot be seen as competing, because they belong to entirely different spheres.

Science is sometimes identified tout court with rationalism, and in a you're-either-with-us-or-against-us manoeuvre, everything else is simply deemed to be irrationalism. This is more a rhetorical trick than a line of reasoning, but once again we see the definition of science being expanded at will.

Science as fiction

At the other extreme, is an anti-science sentiment that manifests itself in support for pseudoscience, quackery, and superstition. From Deepak Chopra to crystals to the anti-vaccination movement, anti-science thinking is surprisingly prevalent. As I suggested previously, some of this is a reaction against the evident problems engendered by technology, coupled with a confusion between science and technology. But some of the anti-science thinking is a reaction to the kind of triumphalism of science that I have described.

What is to be done?

I've argued that fuzzy definitions have done real damage, fueling a grandiose vision of science and its flip side, a crude resurgence of superstition and anti-science thinking. The pairing of science and technology is here to stay, and the allure of technology will continue to promote an exaggerated conception of science. What can be done in the face of this tendency?

First, it remains important to distinguish between science and technology. The careless fusing of the two terms contributes to the unwarranted expansion of the notion of science. Second, it is important to challenge attempts to expand the purview of science to non-empirical matters such as ethics. This does no good to either science or ethics. While science can certainly inform ethics, the primary focus of ethics is normative, not predictive or explanatory. Science provides the best way to understand the physical world, but it is not a source of values or meaning. Third, pseudo-science, superstition, and quackery should be challenged by insisting on high-quality evidence. However it should be remembered that such delusions are nourished by out-sized claims about the universal dominion of science. Attempts to discredit new-age nonsense can backfire when metaphysical claims are denounced as being unscientific. Science can only address empirical claims. Non-empirical claims may certainly be challenged, but not by science.

Mind your own business

Many of the issues I have discussed are particularly vexing where the mind is concerned. Advances in neuroscience have encouraged a physicalist view that in its most extreme form argues that the mind is nothing more than the activity of neurons. This idea has an interesting connection with technology. Early computers were described as being "like a brain". As computers became more familiar, the simile was inverted, and the brain was seen as being "like a computer". More recently this process has reached its conclusion, and it is common to hear that the brain simply "is a computer".

Of course it's true that the brain computes, albeit in a way rather different from our digital computers. But somehow, along with the computation, we experience consciousness, a sense of self, the impression of free will. We experience sensation (rather than simply processing signals), we feel emotion, we delight in beauty and we abhor ugliness. Questions about these aspects of mind have occupied philosophers from the earliest times. Naturally, developments in the scientific understanding of the brain have had an important impact on philosophy of mind. But the fundamental questions remain.

Unfortunately, reductionist views about the mind are flourishing, nourished by both enthusiasm about developments in neuroscience and uncritical acceptance of the technological metaphor that "the brain is a computer". It is perhaps noteworthy that Sam Harris, who argues in his new book that Science Can Determine Human Values, has a PhD in neuroscience. In a New York Times review of Harris's book (with the telling title Science Knows Best), Kwame Anthony Appiah writes:

when he stays closest to neuroscience, he says much that is interesting and important ... Yet such science is best appreciated with a sense of what we can and cannot expect from it ...

Indeed we should approach all science this way.

Rainbow particles

My son enjoys creating Flash applications. Check this one out:

An ORnery problem

Some time ago, I wrote about missing values and how they complicate the life of an applied statistician. A particularly tricky case concerns logical variables, and I give a more detailed explanation here.

Suppose X is a variable representing whether a person is at risk for developing type-2 diabetes. Two known risk factors are (A) being older and (B) being overweight. If we had a database containing the age and weight of each person in a group, we could compute X using the following logical expression:

X = A OR B.

(X, A, and B are known as logical variables, and they each take values TRUE or FALSE according to whether the corresponding condition holds.) But what happens if some ages and weights are missing from the database? Fortunately statistical software packages like R and SPSS have built-in rules that will correctly evaluate the logical expression, even if A or B (or both) are missing. The complete truth table is as follows (where T means TRUE, F means FALSE, and a dot means missing):

Note that if A is FALSE and B is missing, the result is missing. That makes sense because if the actual value of B were TRUE, the result would be TRUE, but if the actual value of B were FALSE, the result would be FALSE. Thus it is not possible to say what the value of X is.

The trouble is, this logic can sometimes be perverse. Suppose X instead represents whether a patient tests positive for infection with a certain virus. But there may be two different blood tests (A and B), and patients may receive one or the other, or perhaps both. Suppose that if any of the tests is positive, the patient will be considered to be infected. The logical variables A and B take the values TRUE, FALSE, or missing according to whether the corresponding tests were positive, negative, or simply not performed. Shouldn't the logical expression X = A OR B handle this situation correctly? Unfortunately not. Suppose only one test was performed, and it was negative. Then the truth table shows that X will be missing, even though the patient tested negative!

Why does the logical expression handle missing values the way we want in the first case, but fail to do so in the second? The answer is that in the first case a missing value represents the fact that the age or weight of a given person is not available, whereas in the second case, when a test outcome is missing from the database, it means that no test was performed, thus the variable representing the outcome is not applicable. Another common case of variables that are not applicable occurs with data representing observations on multiple occasions. For example, suppose a database records whether hotel guests eat at the hotel restaurant on the first day of their stay (EAT1), the second day (EAT2), or the third day (EAT3). Some guests stay for just one day, while others stay longer. The database may look like this:

This is an example of a ragged array, and as with the blood test, the issue is that the denominator (the number of tests performed, or the number of days a guest stays at the hotel) varies. To determine whether a guest ate at the hotel restaurant at least once (which we will represent by the logical variable EAT), we might try:

EAT = EAT1 OR EAT2 OR EAT3.

Unfortunately, as with the blood test example, this can fail when there are missing values. Guest number 4 in the table above stayed just one day at the hotel and did not eat at the restaurant, so EAT should be FALSE, but the expression above gives a missing value.

Workaround in R

In R, the vertical bar operator | represents OR, and missing values are represented by NA. For the diabetes example, the following behaviour is just what we want:

> FALSE | NA
[1] NA

In other words, when a person does not have one of the risk factors, but we don't know about the other one, then we don't know if the person is at risk. But for the blood test example, we need to use the following code:

> sum(FALSE,NA,na.rm=TRUE)>0
[1] FALSE

The sum function adds up logical values by treating TRUE as 1 and FALSE as zero. If the sum of the logical values is greater than zero, then at least one of the values must have been TRUE. Setting na.rm=TRUE tells sum to ignore missing values.

Workaround in SPSS

The situation is much the same in SPSS. For the diabetes example, the following works:

COMPUTE X = A OR B.
EXECUTE.

But for the blood test example, we need to use:

COMPUTE X = SUM(A,B)>0.
EXECUTE.

Note that the SPSS function SUM ignores missing values.

Missing value mistakes

The hard part, of course, is thinking through how the missing values in a given situation should be handled. I suspect that this issue has resulted in countless errors in data analyses. Proceed with caution: a miss is as good as a mile!

The prince and the polemicist

I've written before about Christopher Hitchens and his penchant for overblown rhetoric. Well, he's at it again, this time with a scathing attack on none other than Prince Charles. As a longtime advocate of the dismantling of the monarchy, you might think this would be music to my ears. Well, it's not. Hitchens' diatribe is mean-spirited and intellectually flawed.

The mean-spirited aspects are easily catalogued and of lesser significance. Hitchens calls Prince Charles "a very silly man", "a moral and intellectual weakling", "a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts" whose "empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant".

What is of more interest to me than all this name calling is the substance of Hitchens' piece, which concerns a speech the prince gave recently at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. It turns out that Prince Charles is the patron of the Centre, and in his speech he said:

It has been a great concern of mine to affirm and encourage those groups and faith communities that are in the minority in this country. Indeed, over the last twenty-five years, I have tried to find as many ways as possible to help integrate them into British society and to build good relationships between our faith communities. I happen to believe this is best achieved by emphasizing unity through diversity. Only in this way can we ensure fairness and build mutual respect in our country. And if we get it right here then perhaps we might be able to offer an example in the wider world.

Hitchens contemptuously labels this as "Islamophilia" and writes:

... as he paged his way through his dreary wad of babble, there must have been some wolfish smiles among his Muslim audience.

This kind of innuendo is typical: here and in his other writings, Hitchens often hints at Muslim fanaticism. In this case, at least, it seems to be entirely the product of his imagination.

Prince Charles' speech was titled "Islam and the Environment". He pointed out that "Many of Nature's vital, life-support systems are now struggling to cope under the strain of global industrialization", and went on to argue that:

... what is less obvious is the attitude and general outlook which perpetuate this dangerously destructive approach. It is an approach that acts contrary to the teachings of each and every one of the world's sacred traditions, including Islam.

Prince Charles explained that he was referring to "a mechanistic and reductionist approach to our scientific understanding of the world around us." It is perhaps not surprising that Hitchens, one of the "new atheists" and author of Good is Not Great, characterizes this as a claim that "the scientific worldview" is "an affront to all the world's "sacred traditions." But this misconstrues what the prince was saying. Later on in his speech, Prince Charles argued that:

... there is a point beyond which empiricism cannot make complete sense of the world. It works by establishing facts through testing them by the scientific process. It is one kind of language and a very fine one, but it is a language not able to fathom experiences like faith or the meaning of things – it is not able to articulate matters of the soul.

Hitchens dismisses this as "vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe". But although the prince made liberal use of words like "soul", "spiritual", and "faith", his arguments do not stand or fall on a narrow religious interpretation. He was pointing out that science has limits, and the temptation to pretend otherwise may lead us astray. Prince Charles sees part of the solution in "the traditional teachings, like those found in Islam that define our relationship with the natural world". Not everyone will share his interpretation, but it's hardly the "farrago of nonsense" that Hitchens alleges.

I found the prince's speech interesting and even thought-provoking. Read it yourself and see what you think.

JustPacifism

I just launched a new blog devoted entirely to pacifism, defined as a commitment to peace and opposition to violence and war. It's called JustPacifism.com and it's meant to be a place to discuss pacifism from the broadest standpoint, without focusing on any single tradition or framework. Here's part of my introductory post:

I see pacifism as a direction of thought and action rather than a fixed point, as I have illustrated below:

At the far right-hand side is what some have termed "absolute pacifism". In its strongest form such a commitment would prohibit violence even in self defense, and perhaps violence against non-human living things. At the other extreme is a total lack of concern about violence. Someone holding this view might oppose a given war, but not because it involves violence. For example such a person might object that this particular war is not cost effective.

I suspect that not many people hold to one of the views at either end of my diagram. Instead, most of us fall somewhere in between. If it were possible to formulate a "pacifism index", then someone with no concern at all about the use of violence would score a 0%, and an absolute pacifist would score a 100%. I would be interested in where readers would place themselves (or perhaps historical figures) on such a scale. Of course it's just a thought experiment, but it demonstrates how pacifism is not a fixed point, but a tendency. To the extent that you believe that your society is too ready to use violence, I would say that you have pacifist leanings.

What I find particularly striking however, is that discussions of pacifism so often gravitate towards debating the absolute pacifist position. Although I recognize the philosophical value in considering the boundaries of an issue, I think that one must not ignore the domain where most choices are actually faced. One shouldn't spend too much time worrying about scaling Mount Everest if one has trouble climbing a couple of flights of stairs. And yet pacifism is routinely dismissed based on this sort of reasoning!

I'd like to invite folks to visit JustPacifism.com, and join the discussion!

Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama

The links between Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama are hard to miss. Obama's historic election as the first African American President of the United States seemed to echo the stirring words of King's 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

Obama's inauguration took place on Tuesday, January 20th 2009, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day. This Monday—one year later—Martin Luther King Jr. Day will again be celebrated, and with the one-year mark of Obama's presidency imminent, connections between the two men will again be drawn—including the fact that both were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But an examination of Obama's December-10th acceptance speech suggests some striking differences.

The Nobel committee's selection of Obama so early in his presidency was controversial. Fuel was added to the fire when, just nine days before accepting the prize, he announced that he was sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. His acceptance speech was unapologetic:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

Yet he went on to say:

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

Can you feel a "but" coming?

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.

So there it is. King and Gandhi had great "moral force", but, apparently unlike them, Obama faces "the world as it is". This strikes me as a shocking distortion: King and Gandhi were deeply involved in practical action, and indeed were instrumental in bringing about change.

The rhetorical pattern we see here is repeated throughout Obama's speech. Moral principles are praised (as long as they remain principles), but "hard truth" is emphasized. Carefully crafted oratory is used to sell the Orwellian idea that "War is Peace". But the awkward fact remains that Martin Luther King Jr. was a proponent of non-violence. What does Obama make of that?

The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached -- their fundamental faith in human progress -- that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.

It would appear that non-violence can be dispensed with when required. What is apparently fundamental is something rather vague and comforting: "love" and "faith in human progress". Of course Martin Luther King Jr. did talk above love, but as a basis for moral decisions rather than a distraction from them.

King's 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech is strikingly different from Obama's, as this excerpt suggests:

After contemplation, I conclude that this award which I receive on behalf of [the civil rights movement] is a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time - the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s words apply to the world as it is in 2010, just as they did in 1964.

Update (18-Jan-2010): Jeff Nall has written an excellent piece on "How Obama Betrays Reverend King’s Philosophy of Nonviolence".

You are responsible for your feelings. Or are you?

These days everyone seems to be in favour of people taking responsibility. But in the self-help world, an unusual spin on this idea has become popular: "You are responsible for your feelings." (Sometimes the word "emotions" is used instead of "feelings", and here I'll treat the two terms synonymously.) Now it makes sense to talk about taking responsibility for your behaviour—although it's easier said than done—but what would it mean for a person to take responsibility for their internal state of being? The question hinges on what we mean by the word "responsibility".

Consider the following scenario: suppose you're helping to organize a party and you take responsibility for the drinks. In this case, taking responsibility means looking after, taking care of. Applying this to our feelings makes a good deal of sense. Ultimately, each of us needs to look after and take care of our feelings. Other people's behaviour can of course have a great impact on our lives, but each of us is the only one with direct access to our own feelings. Given this unique position, a passive approach doesn't make much sense. Part of what it means to "take responsibility for your feelings" is embodied in the familiar term from the U.S. Declaration of Independence: "the pursuit of happiness".

But there's another sense to the word "responsibility". The sense of causation—and blame. For example, "Who's responsible for this mess?" and "The Taliban took responsibility for the attack." In what way can you be the cause of your feelings? Well, it turns out there's a very popular model in psychotherapy that suggests just that.


It's called the A-B-C model and it was introduced by Albert Ellis, the founder of rational emotive behavioral therapy, a type of cognitive behavioral therapy. The A-B-C model counters the common notion that people and events make us feel certain ways. Ellis argued that between the activating event (A) and the emotional consequences (C) lie our beliefs (B). Changing our "irrational" beliefs can change how we feel about the events in our lives. While this approach seems reasonable—and indeed studies have shown that it can be very helpful for some people—the A-B-C model has its limitations.

For example suppose you're taking a pleasant walk in the woods when a bear jumps out at you. Your response may have little to do with your beliefs and a lot to do with thousands of years of evolution telling you that you're in mortal danger! Another limitation of the A-B-C model is that while thoughts can influence emotions, emotions can also influence thoughts. The work of neuroscientists such as António Damásio has revealed the intricacy of how thoughts and emotions are intertwined in the brain. The A-B-C model strikes me as a drastic oversimplification. And that's ok; it's only a model after all. An imperfect theory can still be useful.

But the limitations of the A-B-C model often seem to be overlooked in pop psychology. If people's emotions are caused by their beliefs, then can't it be said that they "choose" their emotions? It's not hard to see how this can lead to "blaming the victim". For example, people who have suffered traumatic life events often experience serious emotional consequences. It would be callous in the extreme to suggest that their suffering is "caused" by their own beliefs.

In the end, compassion is essential, both towards others and towards ourselves. I find it hard to see how simplistic notions of emotional causation will engender such a response.