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24 February 2003  

If This Is the High Ground...

MPAA president Jack Valenti moves to what the New York Times calls a "higher moral ground" in his fight against piracy. The virtues he advocates? "[D]uty, service, honor, integrity, pity, pride, compassion, sacrifice." Well, three out of eight ain't bad.

10:59 AM |

23 February 2003  

Emotional Rescue

A review in today's New York Times illustrates the domain-straddling fun of the topic of emotions. The Times has a philosophy professor (Colin McGinn) reviewing a scientist's (Antonio Domasio) book on emotions in which the scientist cites a philosopher (Spinoza) as foreshadowing his theories. Here's a taste:

[Damasio's] claim is that an emotional feeling is identical to the bodily sensations that manifest it: ''A feeling in essence is an idea — an idea of the body and, even more particularly, an idea of a certain aspect of the body, its interior, in certain circumstances. A feeling of emotion is an idea of the body when it is perturbed by the emoting process.'' The thought here is that an emotion, say fear of being attacked by a bear, consists simply of the awareness one has of the bodily symptoms of the emotion — the racing heart, the adrenaline release, the sweaty palms, the tensed muscles....

I have two things to say about this theory: it is unoriginal, and it is false.

This subject gives me an excuse to mention that I find Ayn Rand's analysis of emotions one of the most fascinating aspects of her philosophy. It made clear and understandable to me an area that was not only confusing, but which almost everyone else seems to think is outside the province of reason. Here's a brief introduction to her unique view:

Just as the pleasure-pain mechanism of man's body is an automatic indicator of his body's welfare or injury, a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death—so the emotional mechanism of man's consciousness is geared to perform the same function, as a barometer that registers the same alternative by means of two basic emotions: joy or suffering. Emotions are the automatic results of man's value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man's values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him—lightning calculators giving him the sum of his profit or loss.

When, as a college teacher, I would reach the topic of emotions in class, my standard procedure was to open the desk, take out a stack of examination booklets, and, without any explanations, start distributing them. Consternation invariably broke loose, with cries such as "You never said we were having a test today!" and "It isn't fair!" Whereupon I would take back the booklets and ask: "How many can explain the emotion that just swept over you? Is it an inexplicable primary, a quirk of your glands, a message from God or the id?" The answer was obvious. The booklets, to most of them, meant failure on an exam, a lower grade in the course, a blot on their transcript, i.e., bad news. On this one example, even the dullest students grasped with alacrity that emotions do have causes and that their causes are the things men think.

06:52 PM |

18 February 2003  

Norman Invasion

Congrats to Fredrik Norman, who made his radio debut last week, and is getting lots of great feedback from Americans who are glad "to hear someone from Western Europe whose moral clock is not set by the United Nations."

10:19 PM |

Badger Flood Appeal

As you may have heard, the town of Badger, Newfoundland is covered in ice and its 1100 residents may not be able to return for months. Newfie blogger Damian Penny has provided information on contributing to the Red Cross appeal for Badger residents, which I'm happy to make use of and pass along. Please consider making a donation to help ease the hardship of people like those described in the linked article:

For Lillian and Frank Saunders, not only has the flood overrun their home, but it has indefinitely shut down their livelihood -- a motel and diner.

Ms. Saunders said the smell of sewage has spread through her diner which fronts the Trans Canada Highway -- the town's water supply is contaminated and the sewer system is down.

"What are we supposed to live on? ... After 20 years of working, I don't want to go on welfare. Don't say go on welfare," said Ms. Saunders.

09:55 PM |

12 February 2003  

Genetic Fallacy

Here's an excerpt from Nick Kristof's op-ed on genetic screening in yesterday's New York Times:

[I]nsurance companies will be tempted to engage in genetic discrimination. They might try to reject women with the mutation associated with breast cancer (unless, say, the women agree to mastectomies and removal of their ovaries).

So now, while this technology is still in its infancy, we must institute a national ban on genetic discrimination by insurers.... This is a grand technology we are hurtling toward, but we need to shape it rather than allow it to shape us.

Aside from being inconsistent, Kristof and his like-minded reality-rewriters ignore the basis of insurance. The whole concept arises only in the context of probabilities and risk; i.e., lack of knowledge. If I come down with a disease requiring thousands of dollars in prescriptions a month, I don't expect to be able to then go buy medical insurance for a few dollars a month. That would be charity, not insurance.

Life insurance would not exist in a world where we had perfect knowledge of when we'll get sick and die. And it makes less and less sense the more we do know about it. Trying to evade this fact by legislative fiat is as dangerous as it is silly.

08:45 AM |

10 February 2003  

When a "Root Cause" Is a Leftist Endeavor

An excellent post by Tim Blair demonstrating the naked evasion and inconsistency of anti-US writer John Pilger.

11:16 AM |

9 February 2003  

U of T Ranks with Ivy League — in Left-Wing Bias

Last week, Andrew Sullivan linked to a Harvard course called "Globalization and Human Values: Envisioning World Community" and wondered whether it wasn't "indoctrination disguised as learning." Not that it will come as a surprise to anyone, Canadian universities are no laggards when it comes to leftist indoctrination. As part of my ongoing, if snail-paced, effort to get a degree of some kind before I die, I was browsing the University of Toronto's website yesterday in search of a course to take later this year. I found listed among the philosophy courses "War and Morality," which is described as follows:

PHL 278H1 S TR 10:30-12 J. Graff
As this is written, and probably when the course is given, Bush's "War against Terrorism" (a misnomer), is being waged and Canada is faithfully joining in the "joy of killing" those who, presumably, either deserve to be killed or at least, are human instruments of organizations which deserve to be destroyed. Of course it is a terrible thing to kill people, shred their limbs and burn them alive. But unless one adopts a principled pacifist stance, one must accept that it is sometimes morally legitimate to kill people en masse, to maim and injure them by the thousands, to turn their properties into rubble, and shatter their political institutions, i.e., to wage war. We will examine historical and contemporary theories bearing on justifications for waging war - just war paradigms and theories of war to end (gross or intolerable) systemic justice. So most of us must accept that waging war may be justified under certain conditions. But unless one is a psychopath, a moral cretin racist, nationalist fanatic or macho nitwit, however, one must also accept that even when waging war is morally legitimate, there are moral limits to who may be legitimately targeted, to the weaponry to be used, to the kinds of individual and cocommunal property which may be turned into rubble, and to what a victor may do once the killing stops. The limits constitute the substance of jus in bello norms whose violations count as war crimes and/or as acts of state or sub-state terrorism. We will take up these issues as well and will explore efforts to explain the kinds of reasons for which people wage war and the kinds of institutional restructuring, if any, which might lead to a world without war.

President Bush seems to be setting the stage for massive, repeated, U.S.-conducted, U.S.-orchestrated, U.S.-supported state terrorism, whose first victims will be the already stricken Afghani [sic] people, all in the name of a war against terrorism. It will be a war of terror against terror, in which super-powerful state terrorists will try to destroy whoever is prepared to attack or to resist them by "fair means or by foul." What looms before us is the threat of an age of techno-barbarism, whose scope and scale we cannot now predict.

02:08 PM |

6 February 2003  

The Spirit of Columbia

Here's an excellent, insightful analysis of why we reacted to the Columbia disaster as we did, by Robert Garmong. An excerpt:

Pundits and scholars have long debated whether America is, at root, a religious or a secular culture. In a sense, both are right. Americans have a deeper sense of the profound—that passionate commitment to the ideal, which is too often considered the exclusive domain of religion—than do citizens of other Western nations. Americans invest the secular world of life and happiness here on Earth with the same reverence once thought appropriate to the worship of a superhuman creator. And, whereas worship of divinity called for humility and faith, the American worship of life calls for pride and the rational, scientific study of nature.

The space program is the condensed essence of this American soul.

02:15 PM |

5 February 2003  

Hanged with His Own Rope

Here's another very good response to Jeff Harvey's Lomborg loathing wrath, this one by "The Elder" at Fraters Libertas (more here, here, and here). I'm still getting email from Harvey, by the way. The latest one complains "you've attempted to discredit me by pasting my comments on your web site." You might want to read that sentence again, Dr. Harvey, and consider its implication.

09:34 PM |

4 February 2003  

No Proof? No Problem!

In my initial reply to Dr. Harvey, I made reference to a study by Robert Bruck. As I pointed out, the relevant part of this study of acid rain's effects on forests looked at a small* sampling of trees subject to unusually harsh conditions. Even so, in the end Bruck made no claims about whether acid rain contributed to the roughly 50% mortality rate observed after a drought and an exceptional ice storm. You may recall that an environmentalist quoted by Harvey said Bruck's study "proves that acid rain and cloud deposition are the primary culprits in the loss of spruce and fir forests." (Harvey actually put these words, wrongly, in the mouth of Bruck himself and refuses to acknowledge his misrepresentation, even in his latest reply to me, which I won't waste your time with. Hypocrisy is far too mild a word for this, considering what he's putting Lomborg through.)

Anyway, I spent considerable time poring over Bruck's study and when I was finally convinced I wasn't missing something, I sent Dr. Bruck an email asking him about the environmentalist's claim. My question was simply: "Do you think the quote is a fair characterization of the findings of your research?" I don't have permission to quote his reply but he basically said that absolute proof is impossible without spending a billion dollars to conduct a controlled experiment. This, of course, doesn't answer the question directly. But the implication is clear: the study doesn't say what the environmentalist claimed but Bruck doesn't mind his study being used that way.

Bruck's response reminded me of an infamous quote from Stephen Schneider (yet another Lomborg basher):

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but - which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.

If I needed any more evidence that Bruck has adopted Schneider's approach to dealing with scientific doubt it was provided when, with this context, I reread the final sentence of Bruck's acid rain study. After having stated in the previous paragraph that "there is no definitive proof that acid deposition is limiting the growth of forests" he closes with this:

I contend that the scientific and policy making communities will have to find new approaches to deal with the problem of "imperfect knowledge" in assessing whether further controls should be adopted to reduce anthropogenic pollutant deposition on spruce-fir ecosystems.

*I just noticed that in my original reply to Harvey, I incorrectly stated that Bruck's research was done on only one stand of trees. It was 16 stands. I have corrected this in the online copy of the reply.

11:37 PM |

3 February 2003  

All Lomborg All the Time

Insight on the News has posted an article by Woody West on the Lomborg affair. An excerpt:

"Objectively speaking," declared the Danish committee, the book is "deemed to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty." And the Danes arrived at this shattering conclusion how? By essentially relying on the slanted ideological essays in Scientific American and (heaven help this poor globe) an article in Time magazine.

The Economist, hardly part of the vast right-wing conspiracy and which editorially admired Lomborg's vigorous analysis when it was published, expressed amazement at the fatuous committee indictment. First, Lomborg's book was not a scientific treatise but a vigorous examination of statistical data from the United Nations, World Bank and other bodies. Second, and most astounding, the Danish committee did not provide any arguments or data to support its condemnation. Neither did the panel offer a single instance of distortion or inaccuracy in Lomborg's detailed analysis, presented with nearly 3,000 sourced footnotes, nor did it report Lomborg's extensive replies to criticisms of his book.

11:24 PM |

A Final Reply to Harvey

First of all, welcome to all of you arriving via Hit & Run, Daimnation! and Ranting and Roaring. I hope you have found my exchange with Dr. Harvey interesting. In this post, you'll find the second and final installment in the series. As Hit & Run pointed out, I'm certainly not the only one out there getting long letters from Harvey. If you have any stamina left for it, I recommend you read his exchange with Jim Peron. Now, on to the conclusion.

[Scroll down to read the email from Harvey that I'm replying to.]

Date: 3 February 2003
From: Mark Wickens
To: Jeff Harvey
Subject: Re: evidence against Lomborg: volumes

Dr. Harvey,

I don't think I can state my objections to the DCSD process and decision any better than I did in my letter. You apparently disagree, while making no serious attempt at refuting the objections. As such, I'll add only that in light of my third point of disagreement on this topic (the intentionally confusing wording of the ruling), it's interesting to note that Pimm's letter incorrectly states that the DCSD found Lomborg guilty of scientific dishonesty.

Regarding the acid rain issue, you have changed your argument. Instead of claiming Lomborg was wrong to say that widespread forest death caused by acid rain wasn't happening, you've switched to saying that he should have pointed out that acid rain has been shown to be highly deleterious. But none of the studies I looked at made that bold claim either. In the quotes I provided, the authors clearly said it was impossible to say whether acid rain was having any effect at all. Perhaps there are studies out there that claim it, but I was responding to the "uncontested example" *you* presented, using the sources *you* provided. I am not interested in getting into a protracted round of you changing (or even clarifying) your charges and throwing more studies at me to refute. As I said, I'll be doing my own research into the issues in my own time.

Finally, I can't let pass without comment the fact that for someone who freely charges Lomborg with falsely attributing quotes to scientists, you are surprisingly unapologetic when it's pointed out that you have engaged in the practice yourself (quoting Bruck as saying "acid rain and cloud deposition are the primary culprits in the loss of spruce and fir forests" when he did no such thing, nor did his study claim it). It does not lead me to place trust in your other opinions or statements.

Despite our disagreements, I thank you for the exchange. It has been a learning experience.

Regards,
Mark

10:34 PM |

Response to a Lomborg Foe

Dr. Jeff Harvey is one of the scientists who brought complaints against Bjørn Lomborg for scientific dishonesty relating to his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. As regular readers know, I have posted many items expressing opposition to and ridicule of the recent ruling against Lomborg by the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD). One of those posts, which linked approvingly to a Charles Freund article at Reason Online, brought a long email from Dr. Harvey explaining why I was wrong to defend Lomborg. Today I'm posting that email and my reply.

12:02 AM |

2 February 2003  

Fitting Tribute

Fredrik Norman has a great idea for a memorial ceremony honoring the Columbia astronauts.

11:42 PM |

Shuttle Chronology

Spaceflight Now has an as-it-happened chronology of Columbia's descent from space. Read from the bottom. Knowing what was to come later, reading those routine entries before the communications loss is eerie, like — forgive me for the comparison — watching an early scene in an Airport movie.

01:01 PM |

Smoking Gun?

Why isn't this story about the defection of Saddam's bodyguard all over the news? (Via ESR Musings, which has a registration-required JPost link to the same story.)

Update: I see LGF has a thread on this.

Update 2: And InstaPundit.

11:11 AM |

1 February 2003  

Space Shuttle Columbia

It's sad but perhaps inevitable that we don't appreciate the heroism of astronauts more until something tragic like this happens. The intent, serious, single-minded pursuit of their goal is always evident in interviews with them, as is their child-like joy in that pursuit. And it's only when disaster strikes that the rest of us truly realize the fact that they live with every day: the price they may pay for realizing their dream is death. In spite of this, they have the courage and perseverance to really live the dream of every kid who says "When I grow up, I'm going to be an astronaut."

As Ayn Rand wrote, "To hold an unchanging youth is to reach, at the end, the vision with which one started." While it is truly tragic that they didn't have time to savor their success, nor achieve new goals, the Columbia astronauts reached their vision. May their lives inspire us to live our dreams.

Commander Rick Husband Pilot Willie McCool Payload Commander Michael Anderson

Mission Specialist Kalpana Chawla Mission Specialist David Brown Mission Specialist Laurel Clark Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon

12:26 PM |