Claremont Theist Embarrassed By Theology

In the conservative Claremont Review, Spencer Klavan uses the Marvel multiverse to launch a survey of many-worlds theory that starts well but stumbles badly halfway through.

Klavan ably summarizes the Marvel multiverse and the related science of quantum physics. He touches on the idea of possible intelligent design in the life-friendly fixing of our universe's two-dozen fundamental constants. He even admits that we can dispense with a designer if we take the simple but breathtaking step of considering all possible universes to be equally real. But his stumbling begins when he posits that this step is just hubris from physicists, instead of exploring the academic philosophy behind the idea: Modal Realism.

Klavan is trivially correct to complain that multiversal realism should not pretend to be a scientific/empirical truth, on par with quantum physics or Big Bang cosmology. But he uses this strawman to ignore the possibility that a multiverse theory can be epistemologically superior to his preferred theory (involving a loving God who "invites" humankind to know "His glory"). Klavan simply shrinks from the challenge of comparing two philosophical theories: 1) that all universes are equally real, or 2) our universe was created and fine-tuned by a loving superhero of unknown origin, operating via unknowable mechanisms, and who reportedly has an obsessive interest in H. sapiens.

Here is the closest he can bring himself to a bake-off between those two theories:

They are competing theologies—one of them handed down to us through ancestral wisdom, the other dictated to us by scientistic pseudo-clerics and by the spirit of our fractious age. One way of adjudicating between theologies, though, is to ask whether they can inspire art that expresses the full range of man’s nature in a satisfying way. 

That's it. No discussion of parsimony. No discussion of the epistemological trade-offs in the two offerings. Just a fawning hand-wave toward "ancestral wisdom", coupled with a drive-by ad-hominem against "scientistic pseudo-clerics". And then a silly attempt to use artistic track records as a way to adjudicate the truth-value of competing theories.

The giveaway, of course, is that Klavan calls them "competing theologies" instead of "competing epistemologies". In doing so, he circularly smuggles into his argument his foregone conclusion: that any fundamental explanation of existence should be considered a "theology". With his unquestioned assumption that any theory of reality must posits gods (or their equivalents), it's easy to shill for your society's traditional sky-fathers.

The subtext here is amusing: Klavan recognizes that the crutch of "theology" is embarrassing for any modern philosophy, and his only defense of it is to allege that the other side is guilty of it too. Only a few centuries ago, theologians were proud of their vocation, and claimed to have multiple independent proofs of the existence of their god. (Aquinas had five!) Now, even theists accidentally use "theology" as a kind of intellectual slur. Game over.

Claremont is supposed to represent the pinnacle of current intellectual conservatism. Is this really the best they've got?

Subconscious Mammalian Thermal Footprint Memory

When I return to a spot that I had recently occupied (on a chair, bed, etc.) I don't particularly notice that it's still warm. But if I settle onto a spot that is warm from some other mammal recently recently being there, it's keenly apparent. (The most palpable version of this is when you sit on recently-occupied toilet seat.)

I bet that humans have a subconscious memory of where they have recently left thermal footprints. So we subconsciously discount our own warm spots as uninteresting, but it bubbles up to our consciousness when our backside detects a potential interloper.

A redditor opines that it's because when you're sitting in your own spot you're in thermal equilibrium. But that doesn't explain the differential between self vs. other, because the feeling is quite different if the person who left the seat two minutes earlier was you vs. not you.

I noticed it again this morning when my dog and I both got up from bed at the same time. He'd been laying near my feet on top of my thick comforter. When I returned to bed after a few minutes, the spot recently warmed directly by a 230lb mammal felt unremarkable. But the spot recently warmed through a comforter by a 35lb mammal felt very warm.

Do other people notice this, or am I a mutant? My family thinks I'm crazy for "smelling" food after I remove it from the microwave, but I explain to them that my snout is a very sensitive heat detector, allowing me to check my food without burning a finger. And when raising three daughters I found that I could measure forehead temperature with my hand to ±1°F. 

My other superpower is recognizing voices, especially celebrity voiceovers. I'm constantly amazed that people watching a show with me don't immediately recognize many of the voices like I do. Alas, none of these superpowers are very good for crime-fighting...

Fairly Dividing Cake or Chores

There are entire books on the topic of fair cake-cutting.  "Fair cake-cutting is the subject of intense research in mathematics, computer science, economics and political science." As a parent of three self-interested daughters, I'm very interested in this topic!

But I'm not interested in procedures that re-divide shares. A cake should have N contiguous shares, period. Don't ruin the cake.

And I'm not interested in procedures with a moving knife. Nice theory, but players will argue about where and when the knife stopped. (And a moving knife doesn't work on chores, which are somewhat discrete rather than continuous.)

And I'm not interested in envy-free. Players gonna envy. I just want no complaints of favoritism or collusion or election-rigging.

And I don't want a referee. If we can appeal to a fair authority, there is no need for a procedure!

And I want to minimize randomness. Players have their own utility functions, and that's what creates gains from trade.

I've come up with a procedure that I think is better by the above criteria than anything I could find during a hasty scan of the existing scientific literature. The best procedure I could find is this one by Dan Hulme in 2014. But his technique leads to unfairness complaints, as your position in the circle can totally exclude you from the best shares.

The 2nd-best procedure I found is Who Shall Have This. It's inferior to mine because shares are assigned randomly, leaving no room to exploit heterogenous preferences about the shares.

A Battleship Would Not Float In A Bathtub

Update on 2020-07-31: I was wrong. My mistake was in thinking that Archimedes' Principle required there to be a direct mechanical balance between the weight of the floating object and the weight of the water that is being held above what was the level of the water before the object was inserted. I had thought that when an object is inserted into the water, it will sink to the point where it has displaced upward an amount of the existing water equal to its weight. And that happens to be true any time there is more water than the object can displace.

But fluid mechanics makes no distinction between the existing water and the battleship. The battleship can be modeled as a weightless transparent arbitrarily-thin battleship-shaped water bowl that is filled with water to the battleship's waterline. Seen this way, it's obviously not just the water outside the ship-shaped bowl that is contributing to the final water volume in the tub. Each virtual column of water within the footprint of the ship has to be in balance with every other virtual column of water in the tub. For the ship to settle below its waterline (i.e. for the ship to sink to the bottom and maintain a cavity above it), it would require that a taller column of water outside the ship's footprint is balanced by a shorter column of water inside the ship's footprint. That's impossible. So the ship will stop sinking when the water in the bathtub -- no matter how small its original volume -- rises to the level of the ship's waterline.

Archimedes' principle states that "the upward buoyant force that is exerted on a body immersed in a fluid is equal to the weight of the fluid that the body displaces."  It does not mean "the fluid that the body has displaced".  It means "the fluid that the body is taking the place of" i.e. "the fluid that would fill the cavity created by the body". It doesn't matter if there isn't enough of the original fluid at hand, because the body itself acts like a very large particle of the fluid.

Credit for enlightening me goes to the explanations at https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/304245/can-a-ship-float-in-a-big-bathtub, especially the diagram at http://www.wiskit.com/marilyn/battleship.jpeg.

Original post from 2012-09-08:

The world thinks (e.g. here, here, here, here, here) that a battleship could float in form-fitting tub of water after it displaced all but a tiny fraction of the water in the tub.  These writers cite Archimedes' Principle that the upward buoyant force exerted on a body immersed in a fluid is equal to the weight of the fluid the body displaces. They ignore Archimedes' assumption that the body of water has enough water and enough unused volume to combine together to balance the weight of the immersed body.

A floating ship is hydraulically balanced against the mass of the top layer of water that the ship has displaced upward in the body of water on which the ship floats.  A ship can only float if the body of water can contain that top layer of water and that water has a mass equal to that of the ship. If that water escapes or is otherwise not present, the equilibrium fails and the ship sinks.

Another way to think about it is to ask whether the battleship in the empty bathtub could be floated simply by pouring in the water to fill the bathtub around it. Battleship floaters claim this would work with an arbitrarily small amount of water.  But there is no free lunch -- you can't do the enormous work of lifting a massive ship merely by balancing it against a small mass of water.

Some floaters point to canal locks (e.g. the Miraflores in Panama) that can float a ship with just a foot of clearance on the sides (and allegedly the bottom).  However, they ignore the clearance at the front and back. After a ship enters a canal lock, you can bet that there is a new top layer of water (relative to the prior water level) whose mass is equal to that of the ship.

Floaters tell naive skeptics that when an object is floated in a full tub, the system doesn't remember that some water overflowed when the object was added, and that it floats just as well when it is taken out and then added back to the tub -- which now will not overflow at all.  However, what the floaters don't notice is that the no-overflow system has just enough room at the top to hold the mass of water that balances the object.

Some floaters point out that large machines like telescopes are often "afloat" on a thin film of oil. However, these lubricants are kept pressurized in a sealed system, and the pool of oil is not open to the atmosphere. It's a safe bet that such a telescope cannot be levitated (i.e. lifted) by a thin film of oil unless there is some balancing mass of oil (or some other way of pressurizing the oil).

It seems the physics folks who promote the bathtub battleship meme need to talk to some hydraulic engineers.

Adaptation-Executers, More Than Fitness-Maximizers

On Earth's most interesting blog Overcoming Bias, Eliezer Yudkowsky quotes John Tooby and Leda Cosmides: "Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than as fitness-maximizers." That's something that all of us fans of evolutionary psychology need to keep firmly in mind. While Yudkowsky's example of fatty foods is hits close to home as I finish my second week of The Blogger Diet (see graph above left), much more interesting cases are discussed in his posting about Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization. Transhumanists vastly over-estimate the probability of a technological singularity in the next couple of centuries (and its associated existential risks for humanity), while at the same time under-estimating the possibility that our species will (as he quotes Simon Funk saying) market itself out of existence. Meanwhile, over on the Lifeboat Foundation's private discussion list, G. David Brin has pointed us to his 1982 paper that coined the term the Great Silence. He acts quite unimpressed at recent discussion of the Fermi Paradox, so I'll be eager to read whether he properly considered the extent to which runaway consumerism helps explain it.

3-D View of Current Solar System

If you can cross your eyes to view a crossed stereo pair in 3-D, then click the solar system image in the sidebar at left and enjoy.

Does Optimal Virulance Imply Super-Germs Are Possible?

I suspect that the greatest anthropogenic extinction threat in this century is the possibility of a natural pathogen engineered (perhaps somewhat accidentally) to spread easily from person to person, persist in the environment, resist antibiotics and immune responses, and cause 100% mortality without evolving toward less virulence. I would like to hear expert opinion on whether evolutionary pressure toward optimal virulence has kept pathogens from exploring the most dangerous parts of the virulence landscape. I'm hoping that pathogens spread by intermediaries (e.g., vectors and wastes) have had little incentive to avoid those parts of the landscape, and that mad scientists will thus not find any magic bullets there. But just as certain well-known technologies (e.g. the wheel, internal combustion) seem to be unreachable in evolution's search space, I worry that there are techniques for increased virulence that a mad scientist could find much more easily than evolution ever could.

I also worry that I'm simply ignorant of the heights of virulence that evolution has already been able to reach. Is there a survey of the worst known and suspected cases of pathogenic (near-)extinction in humans, mammals, and animals in general? For example,

• Variola major and a couple other pathogens were together able to kill somewhere between 25% and 95% of native Americans as a result of the Columbian Exchange -- including 100% of the population of Hispaniola.
• The enterobacterium Yersinia pestis in the 14th century killed up to 1/3 of Eurasia's population.
• The Spanish Flu of 1918 killed up to 5% of the world's population.

As horrific as these and other pandemics have been, they are obviously not as bad as extinction. My casual searching on the web found no discussion of continent- or planet-wide animal extinctions caused by pathogens, but I'm skeptical that there haven't been any.

Earth's Ultimate Environmental Problem

Over the next millennium and for the rest of human history, earth's major environmental problem will be warming due not to greenhouse gases but rather to increased waste heat from non-solar energy (initially petrochemical, but then fusion). The problem emerges when a world population in the tens of billions all enjoy an energy budget equivalent to levels in the industrialized West in 2000. Humans in 2000 consume 10 terawatts, wherease the total solar energy received by Earth is estimated variously at 109000 to 174000 terawatts. Ten billion humans at U.S. levels of energy use would consume 1000 terawatts. All the waste heat from all the energy uses adds up, and the laws of thermodynamics guarantee that energy use always creates heat exhaust. Heat pollution will have to be managed to prevent a runaway greenhouse effect like on Venus.

Feminism, The Bible, and Female Reproductive Strategy

My response to a friend asking about feminism and the Bible:

I don't agree that the Bible was written with the conscious purpose of suppressing women. That is, I don't think the guys who wrote it said beforehand: "gee, women aren't suppressed enough, let's write a book and do the job right." I think the Old and New Testaments were written by men who desperately needed to believe that there was something supernaturally special about the Jewish people and Jesus, respectively. It just so happens that these men never stopped to question their culture's treatment of women. So I don't think the Bible represented a turning point in the status of women.

I do agree that a key aspect of conventional morality in Judeo-Christian and Moslem society is the suppression of women. The most important aspect of this suppression is making sure that women are not free to have sex outside of a contractual arrangement whereby the father of any resulting child has to support it.

But who is really suppressed the most under this system? Recall that the ideal reproductive strategy of females is to invest a lot of resources (egg, pregnancy, child-rearing) in a few offspring, while trying to persuade a male to also invest his resources (food-gathering, etc.) in those offspring. By contrast, the ideal reproductive strategy of males is to invest few resources (sperm) in as many offspring as possible, while avoiding any obligation to invest in raising those offspring. In many species, the alpha males are free to have children with as many females as possible, but this is not the case under traditional Western morality. The fact is, traditional Western morality enforces the ideal female reproductive strategy, and bans the ideal male reproductive strategy. (For example, female reproductive fantasies -- romance novels -- are considered acceptable by society, but male reproductive fantasies -- pornography -- are considered unacceptable.) Unfortunately for women, the ban is enforced by restrictions ON WOMEN instead of on men, because parents of daughters have more incentive to protect their child's chastity than do parents of sons.

Western society is not alone in favoring the female reproductive strategy; pair-bonding (and restrictions on daughters) is the norm in most populations of Homo sapiens. I see Christian morality is just our version of the enforcement mechanism; Asian and African societies have equally effective mechanisms that don't involve the Bible at all. So I'm a feminist, but that isn't the reason why I'm not a Christian. I choose not to be a Christian simply because I don't think there is any credible evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was divine.

It is ironic that while the feminist movement of the last few decades has won more individual (and particularly sexual) freedom for women, women have paid a price. Feminism results in getting more women to participate in the male strategy of women having sex outside of marriage, and the result has been more single mothers and more poverty for women due to easy divorce. My hope is that these effects will be temporary, only affecting women who were caught off-guard by the changing rules of the game. I hope future generations of women will have the economic and reproductive self-determination necessary to enjoy their new-found freedoms.

Yes, the Eden story is bass-ackwards. The biological fact is that women are the default gender, and males serve a very limited purpose. The current thinking is that the males (i.e. sexual reproduction) only exists because asexual reproduction can't keep ahead of parasites like viruses. In asexual reproduction, the cloned daughters are so much like the mothers that viruses have a very easy biomolecular lock to pick, because the combination can only change across generations if there is a mutation. The purpose of males seems to be to spin the combination, so that each generation parasites have to start from scratch in trying to pass themselves off as 'self' cells to not get attacked by the immune system.

I highly recommend a book called _The Redundant Male_, which is where I read about this. It goes on to show how, since males have so little purpose in many species except to be chosen by females to spin the combination to the immune system, runaway sexual selection has resulted in some pretty odd male traits like bright colors, long tail feathers, and big antlers. The selection is considered 'runaway' because females want their sons to be attractive to future females, so they choose males with a trait that they consider by some arbitrary criterion to be attractive. The result is a runaway exaggeration of that trait.

As you can see, my perspective on these issues is quite zoological. But I think science is the best basis for feminism because it is objective, and can't be accused of self-bias.

[I wrote the above in 1995, and I don't see anything I disagree with eleven years later.]

Global Warming & Our Generation's 2 Greatest Crimes

The vast majority of the debate over global warming is caused by two kinds of misdirection. In the first kind, industry interests opposed to amelioration efforts exaggerate the uncertainty and minimize the risks for obvious reasons. In the second, climate researchers exaggerate both the uncertainties and the risks to keep the climate research gravy train going. Anthropogenic global warming is not an urban legend. The urban legends are 1) that global warming might be much more than the expected 2 degrees C over the next 100 years, and 2) that modest global warming will have overwhelmingly negative consequences. The Cato Institute acknowledges that modest warming is underway but recognizes that it will likely provide a modest benefit: http://cato.org/research/articles/michaels-031016.html

My primary worry about anthropogenic global warming is the highly-uncertain possible risks to species in marginal ecosystems. Extinction of species and forgetting of languages are pretty much the only crimes against Earth that wealthy future generations will hold against us. Warming's two biggest threats -- to the Gulf Stream thermohaline circulation and the West Antarctic ice sheet -- are very unlikely to be realized, and moderate warming (up to 2C) would have a net positive impact on the developed (i.e. temperate) world. [For more on this, see Skeptical Environmentalist p301].

2 planets, 2 moons, and 2 asteroids

[XXX need to restore photos from original blog posting]

Humanity has acquired photos from the surface of 2 other planets, 2 moons, and 2 asteroids. We also sent a penetrator into Jupiter, but the gas giant has no surface to show in a photo.

Runaway Consumerism Explains the Fermi Paradox?

I would like to see people get more quantitative in their handling of the Fermi Paradox. The Drake Equation is too constraining to let us give probability estimates for all the various possible explanations of the "paradox". The Wikipedia article on the paradox gives a workable taxonomy of possible explanations, so next we should assign probability estimates, in a way similar to my analysis of explanations for the gospel evidence. Meanwhile, here are some notes I made in 2001:

1. Aliens among us. No, UFOs are not aliens.
2. Apocalypse. No, since we are only a few centuries from beginning to explore the entire galaxy through self-replicating intelligent probes, it seems unlikely that *no* intelligent species could do it.
3. Chariots of the gods. No, we have no such evidence.
4. Isolation. Yes, low density of intelligence is part of the answer.
5. Quarantine. No, aliens could not mask all electromagnetic evidence of their existence.
6. Aggressive aliens. No, this doesn't explain why our ecosystem hasn't been scouted and obliterated.
7. Anthropic. Yes, that we are among the early birds is likely to be part of the answer.
8, 9, 10. Stay at home. No, you can't expect that no aliens would ever launch a self-replicating probe.
11. Transcendence. No, there is no credible evidence for transcendent modes of existence, and there are strong arguments against them.

Since then, discussions like the following have somewhat increased my estimate of the relative importance of the stay-at-home factor, even while not contradicting the point that it only takes one civilization to start the expansion.

---

Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox
by Geoffrey Miller

The story goes like this: Sometime in the 1940s, Enrico Fermi was talking about the possibility of extra-terrestrial intelligence with some other physicists. They were impressed that our galaxy holds 100 billion stars, that life evolved quickly and progressively on earth, and that an intelligent, exponentially-reproducing species could colonize the galaxy in just a few million years. They reasoned that extra-terrestrial intelligence should be common by now. Fermi listened patiently, then asked simply, "So, where is everybody?". That is, if extra-terrestrial intelligence is common, why haven't we met any bright aliens yet? This conundrum became known as Fermi's Paradox.

The paradox has become more ever more baffling. Over 150 extrasolar planets have been identified in the last few years, suggesting that life-hospitable planets orbit most stars. Paleontology shows that organic life evolved very quickly after earth's surface cooled and became life-hospitable. Given simple life, evolution shows progressive trends towards larger bodies, brains, and social complexity. Evolutionary psychology reveals several credible paths from simpler social minds to human-level creative intelligence. Yet 40 years of intensive searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence have yielded nothing. No radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings, no close encounters of any kind.

So, it looks as if there are two possibilities. Perhaps our science over-estimates the likelihood of extra-terrestrial intelligence evolving. Or, perhaps evolved technical intelligence has some deep tendency to be self-limiting, even self-exterminating. After Hiroshima, some suggested that any aliens bright enough to make colonizing space-ships would be bright enough to make thermonuclear bombs, and would use them on each other sooner or later. Perhaps extra-terrestrial intelligence always blows itself up. Fermi's Paradox became, for a while, a cautionary tale about Cold War geopolitics.

I suggest a different, even darker solution to Fermi's Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today.

The fundamental problem is that any evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself. We don't seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that tended to promote survival and luscious mates who tended to produce bright, healthy babies. Modern results: fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote our real biological fitness, but it's even better at delivering fake fitness — subjective cues of survival and reproduction, without the real-world effects. Fresh organic fruit juice costs so much more than nutrition-free soda. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends on TV. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity.

Fitness-faking technology tends to evolve much faster than our psychological resistance to it. The printing press is invented; people read more novels and have fewer kids; only a few curmudgeons lament this. The Xbox 360 is invented; people would rather play a high-resolution virtual ape in Peter Jackson's King Kong than be a perfect-resolution real human. Teens today must find their way through a carnival of addictively fitness-faking entertainment products: MP3, DVD, TiVo, XM radio, Verizon cellphones, Spice cable, EverQuest online, instant messaging, Ecstasy, BC Bud. The traditional staples of physical, mental, and social development (athletics, homework, dating) are neglected. The few young people with the self-control to pursue the meritocratic path often get distracted at the last minute — the MIT graduates apply to do computer game design for Electronics Arts, rather than rocket science for NASA.

Around 1900, most inventions concerned physical reality: cars, airplanes, zeppelins, electric lights, vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, bras, zippers. In 2005, most inventions concern virtual entertainment — the top 10 patent-recipients are usually IBM, Matsushita, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Micron Technology, Samsung, Intel, Hitachi, Toshiba, and Sony — not Boeing, Toyota, or Wonderbra. We have already shifted from a reality economy to a virtual economy, from physics to psychology as the value-driver and resource-allocator. We are already disappearing up our own brainstems. Freud's pleasure principle triumphs over the reality principle. We narrow-cast human-interest stories to each other, rather than broad-casting messages of universal peace and progress to other star systems.

Maybe the bright aliens did the same. I suspect that a certain period of fitness-faking narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life evolves. This is the Great Temptation for any technological species — to shape their subjective reality to provide the cues of survival and reproductive success without the substance. Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children.

Heritable variation in personality might allow some lineages to resist the Great Temptation and last longer. Those who persist will evolve more self-control, conscientiousness, and pragmatism. They will evolve a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive drugs, and contraception. They will stress the values of hard work, delayed gratification, child-rearing, and environmental stewardship. They will combine the family values of the Religious Right with the sustainability values of the Greenpeace Left.

My dangerous idea-within-an-idea is that this, too, is already happening. Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, and anti-consumerism activists, already understand exactly what the Great Temptation is, and how to avoid it. They insulate themselves from our Creative-Class dream-worlds and our EverQuest economics. They wait patiently for our fitness-faking narcissism to go extinct. Those practical-minded breeders will inherit the earth, as like-minded aliens may have inherited a few other planets. When they finally achieve Contact, it will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox. They will toast each other not in a soft-porn Holodeck, but in a sacred nursery.