Tag: science and society

Same as it ever was

The battle over climate science in US environmental policy has come to an odd watershed:

The Senate overwhelmingly voted, 98-1, in favor of an amendment stating that “climate change is real and not a hoax.” In an amusing twist, the chamber’s most notorious climate denier, Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, signed on to the amendment at the last minute, mostly because it didn’t attribute a cause to global warming. “The climate is changing. The climate has always changed,” Inhofe said. He then criticized supporters of man-caused climate change by saying that the real “hoax” was “that there are some people that are so arrogant to think” they can change the climate.

This reminds me of an obscure event in modern German history. Searching for an appropriate new president to succeed the highly esteemed Richard von Weizsäcker in 1993, the first new Bundespräsident since reunification, Helmut Kohl looked east, and selected the little-known former theologian and then justice minister of Saxony, Steffen Heitmann. Unfortunately, Heitmann scuttled his own candidacy by proving himself to be even more prone to embarrassing press comments than Kohl himself.

For the first time in nearly 50 years Germany was not occupied, but rather was preoccupied, with the “Schlussstrich” debate. It’s an untranslatable German word for the line drawn under a column of numbers before totting them up. The question was whether Germany should stop examining its conscience about the Nazi period and Cold War, and draw a balance, the better to march forward to a bright new dawn, as the right wing (!) wanted. (I’m presuming they assumed the balance would come out negative, though what the sum would be was never really a part of the discussion.) Exactly the opposite of Faulkner’s famous dictum about the past, and this was the position that Heitmann allied himself with, which was controversial enough. But his choice of words really grabbed people’s attention:

Ich glaube, daß der organisierte Tod von Millionen Juden in Gaskammern tatsächlich einmalig ist – so wie es viele historisch einmalige Vorgänge gibt. Wiederholungen gibt es in der Geschichte ohnehin nicht.

I do believe that the organised death of millions of Jews in gas chambers was unique — just as there are so many unique events in history. In any case, history never repeats itself.

As one commentator satirised it, “Of course you are my one true love, darling. As are all my girlfriends.”

I was also intrigued by the following comment, cited by Jonathan Chait,

“I do think there are those [who] think there is some kind of climate change happening and are tired of fighting the science or just don’t want the fight and who would rather focus on the economics — I don’t think that means they are ceding the argument that manmade climate change exists, though,” said one Republican Senate aide in a comment echoed by several others.

I’ve never seen such an explicit statement from inside the Republican party that science is seen as an enemy to be “fought”, rather than a discipline that should inform all sensible policy.

Examination socialism

I was talking with someone recently about the bizarre British practice of allowing the A-level exams to be set by competing exam boards. It’s bizarre because of the well-known agency problems in examinations: The customers are the schools, whose interest is in high marks, not in effective exams. So we get government ministers persistently fulminating against watering-down of exams.

This is typically presented as a capitalist approach, reflecting the British enthusiasm for market-based solutions instead of big government. In fact, while this solution has the trappings of capitalism, it suffers all the theoretical and practical defects of socialism. As I understand it, those who theorise the superiority of capitalism tend to focus on the diffusion of decision-making to the periphery, where the expertise resides, and the virtues of aligning incentives with goals, which is far more efficient than central planning. Then comes the bracing effect of competition to achieve those goals.

In this case, the natural incentives of those looking to make a profit by selling their product to schools are clearly misaligned. Yes, they can fruitfully compete on accuracy and speed of marking, but the essential content and rigour of the exams is a race to the bottom. (This might not be the case if they were providing distinct qualifications, that might be competing for influence with universities. There is the competing International Baccalaureate, adding an extra level of complexity, but the multiple exam boards are supposed to be producing evaluations of the same qualification, the A-levels. We have a similar problem with university degrees, where there seems to be a pious fiction that “first-class degree” is an absolute standard, whether from Imperial or London Metropolitan; but this is clearly not taken very seriously.) The bottom is set by elaborate government regulations — central planning — and all the competitive ingenuity goes into formally hitting those standards while maximising the marks. (I don’t know if this is really true; but that is what you would predict, theoretically, and it would explain the downward spiral of A-levels.)

James Watson has cashed in his Nobel prize

So can we ignore him now?

Of course, he couldn’t sell the prize, only the medal. But the fact that this deeply mediocre and bigoted mind received so much attention and adulation for so long casts a harsh light upon the scientific cult of genius. Exalted prizes and prestigious chairs often serve a similar purpose to those plaques that we see on buildings around Oxford, marking the place where an important intellectual event once occurred. There might be a frisson to sitting in the room where Robert Boyle discovered the gas law, but you wouldn’t really expect any important scientific insight to come out of it. Continue reading “James Watson has cashed in his Nobel prize”

Billions, schmillions: Immigration edition

The Telegraph writes in big text

New report shows immigration over the Labour government years cost the public purse billions of pounds, while recent migration from inside Europe generated a £4 million surplus.

Then, in the main article, the study found

that recent immigration from Europe – driven by the surge in arrivals from eastern European – gave the economy a £4.4 billion boost…

More billions schmillions.

Default settings, encryption, and privacy

One essay that powerfully shaped my intellect in my impressionable youth was Douglas Hofstadter’s Changes in Default Words and Images, Engendered by Rising Consciousness, that appeared in the November 1982 issue of Scientific American (back when Scientific American was good), and Hofstadter’s associated satire A Person Paper on Purity in Language. Hofstadter’s point is that we are constantly filling in unknown facts about the world with default assumptions that we can’t recognise unless they happen to collide with facts that are discovered later. He illustrates this with the riddle, popular among feminists in the 1970s, that begins with the story of a man driving in a car with his young son. The car runs off the road and hits a tree, and the man is killed instantly. The boy is brought to the hospital, prepped for surgery, and then the surgeon takes one look at him and says “I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.” As Hofstadter tells it, when this story was told at a party, people were able to conceive of explanations involving metempsychosis quicker than they could come to the notion that the surgeon was a woman. It’s not that they considered it impossible for a woman to be a surgeon. It’s just that you can’t think of a human being without a sex, so it gets filled in with the default sex “male”. (The joke wouldn’t really work today, I imagine. Not only are there so many women surgeons that it’s hard to have a very strong default assumption, but the boy could have two fathers. On the other hand, a “nurse” has a very strong female default, so much so that a male nurse is frequently called a “male nurse”, to avoid confusion.)

Continue reading “Default settings, encryption, and privacy”

The CDC misunderstand screening too

Last week I mocked the Spanish health authorities who refused to treat an Ebola-exposed nurse as a probable Ebola case until her fever had crossed the screening threshold of 38 degrees Celsius (or, in the absurdly precise American translation, 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit). Well, apparently the Centers for Disease Control in the US aren’t any better:

Before flying from Cleveland to Dallas on Monday, Vinson called the CDC to report an elevated temperature of 99.5 Fahrenheit. She informed the agency that she was getting on a plane, the official said, and she wasn’t told not to board the aircraft.

The CDC is now considering putting 76 health care workers at Texas Health Presbyterian Dallas hospital on the TSA’s no-fly list, an official familiar with the situation said.

The official also said the CDC is considering lowering the fever threshold that would be considered a possible sign of Ebola. The current threshold is 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

Most disturbing is the fact that they don’t seem capable of combining factors. Would it be so hard to have a rule like, For most people, let’s hold off on the hazmat suits until your fever goes above 38. But if you’ve been cleaning up the vomit of an Ebola patient for the past week, and you have any elevated temperature at all — let’s say 37.2 — it would be a good idea to get you under observation.

The tyranny of the 95%

The president of the National Academy of Science is being quoted spouting dangerous nonsense. Well, maybe not so dangerous, but really nonsense.

I found this by way of Jonathan Chait, a generally insightful and well-informed political journalist, who weighed in recently on the political response to the IPCC report on climate change. US Republican Party big shot Paul Ryan, asked whether he believes that human activity has contributed to global warming, replied recently “I don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t think science does, either.” Chait rightly takes him to task for this ridiculous dodge (though he ignores the fact that Ryan was asked about his beliefs, so that his skepticism may reflect a commendable awareness of the cognitive theories of Stephen Stich, and his need to reflect upon the impossibility of speaking scientifically, or introspecting coherently, about the contents of beliefs), but the form of his criticism left me troubled:

In fact, science does know the answer. Climate scientists believe with a 95 percent level of certainty (the same level of certainty as their belief in the dangers of cigarette smoking) that human activity is contributing to climate change.

Tracking through his links, I found that he’d copied this comparison between climate change and the hazards of smoking pretty much verbatim from another blog, and that it ultimately derived from this “explanation” from the AP:

Some climate-change deniers have looked at 95 percent and scoffed. After all, most people wouldn’t get on a plane that had only a 95 percent certainty of landing safely, risk experts say.

But in science, 95 percent certainty is often considered the gold standard for certainty.

[…]

The president of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, Ralph Cicerone, and more than a dozen other scientists contacted by the AP said the 95 percent certainty regarding climate change is most similar to the confidence scientists have in the decades’ worth of evidence that cigarettes are deadly.

Far be it from me to challenge the president of the National Academy of Sciences, particularly if it’s the “prestigious” National Academy of Sciences, or more than a dozen other scientists, but the technical term for this is “bollocks”. Continue reading “The tyranny of the 95%”

One-fifth of a teaspoon

I was brought up short by this odd sentence in a NY Times article on attempts to protect health-care workers treating Ebola patients:

At the peak of illness, an Ebola patient can have 10 billion viral particles in one-fifth of a teaspoon of blood. That compares with 50,000 to 100,000 particles in an untreated H.I.V. patient, and five million to 20 million in someone with untreated hepatitis C.

“One-fifth of a teaspoon” is an odd reference unit. I had to think a moment to realise that the reporter had presumably translated into American from Scientific the sentence

At the peak of illness, an Ebola patient can have 10 billion viral particles in one milliliter of blood.

As I discussed before, the partial conversion to the metric system has left fault lines between and within nations. And the attempt to cover over those cracks mechanically creates odd dissonances. Thus, the 19th century estimate of average human body temperature of 37 degrees Celsius (plus or minus about half a degree) gets turned into the incredibly precise sounding 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. It makes as much sense as saying “28 grams of prevention are worth 454 grams of cure”.

If the reporter had thought about it, she might have translated less mechanically, writing “an Ebola patient can have 50 billion viral particles in a teaspoon of blood”. But that still leaves the weird resonance of “teaspoon of blood”. A millilitre can be water or blood or Martian atmosphere, but when I hear “teaspoon” I subliminally feel like it’s supposed to go in my tea, or cake, or soup. The thing that people like so much about these traditional units is their historical and narrative specificity, their attachment to human-scale measuring activities, but that also makes them awkward for transferring measurements between domains. I could state my height in furlongs, and my weight in grains, but I’ll just confuse people.

Before posting, I just wanted to check that I was right about the size of a teaspoon in milliliters. I asked Google, and received the information “1 Imperial teaspoon =5.91939047 millilitres”. So, first of all, I was surprised to learn — if indeed it is true — that the teaspoon has been standardised to the hundred-billionth of a litre. Second, I found the thought of “the imperial teaspoon” hilarious.

False positives, false confidence, and ebola

Designing a screening test is hard. You have a large population, almost all of whom do not have whichever condition you’re searching for. Thus, even with a tiny probability of error, most of the cases you pick up will be incorrect — false positives, in the jargon. So you try to set the bar reasonably high; but set it too high and you’ll miss most of the real cases — false negatives.

On the other hand, if you have a suspicion of the condition in a particular case, it’s much easier. You can set the threshold much lower without being swamped by false positives. What would be really dumb is to use the same threshold from the screening test to judge a case where there are individual grounds for suspicion. But that’s apparently what doctors in Spain did with the nurse who was infected with Ebola. From the Daily Beast:

When Teresa Romero Ramos, the Spanish nurse now afflicted with the deadly Ebola virus first felt feverish on September 30, she reportedly called her family doctor and told him she had been working with Ebola patients just like Thomas Eric Duncan who died today in Dallas. Her fever was low-grade, just 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit), far enough below the 38.6-degree Ebola red alert temperature to not cause alarm. Her doctor told her to take two aspirin, keep an eye on her fever and keep in touch.

She was caring for Ebola patients, she developed a fever, but they decided not to treat it like a possible case of Ebola because her fever was 0.6 degrees below the screening threshold for Ebola.

A failure of elementary statistical understanding, and who knows how many lives it will cost.

Jews and evolution

Salon has published an interesting interview with former Commonwealth Chief Rabbi of the soi-disant Orthodox Jonathan Sacks about his new book about the relationship between science and religion. The man who did as much as anyone in recent years to break down cooperation and mutual respect between Orthodox and progressive streams of Judaism in the UK has rediscovered the virtues of mutual respect and toleration since stepping down last year from his post as Orthodox Chief Rabbi. At least, he believes strongly that atheists should respect him more.

One particular exchange caught my attention:

Why do so few Jews take issue with the theory of evolution, while creationism is common among Christians?

I think Christians tended to think that religion and science were part of the same universe of discourse. So they assumed that the Bible was telling us scientific stuff, as well as moral and spiritual stuff. Whereas Jews don’t read the Bible that way.

It surprises me that the good Rabbi feels so confident accepting the premise of the question, that Orthodox Jews are hip to modern (i.e., post-medieval) science. It’s hard to believe that he has become so disengaged from the cause of Jewish education in Britain in the past year that he failed to note the scandal earlier this year, when a Jewish girls’ school in London (state-funded, natch!) was found to be removing questions from A-level biology exams “because they do not fit in with their beliefs.”

Fifty-two papers were altered by Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls’ School to remove questions on evolution.

This being Britain, where everything is a sport, no one cared much at first about the children being taught bogus biology; they only cared about the game being fair:

The examinations body, OCR, says it was satisfied that the girls did not have an unfair advantage. It now plans to allow the practice, saying it has come to an agreement with the school to protect the future integrity of the exams.

On more mature reflection, the exam regulator Ofqual did decide that excising questions from exams would be deemed “malpractice”.

Until I read of this controversy, I would have felt confident agreeing with Lord Sacks that there is no Jewish tradition for rejecting scientific biology. Now I’m obviously not so sure. Perhaps this represents part of the harmonic convergence between Orthodox Jewry and American Evangelical Christianity — rather like the way they’ve come to a consensus on supporting Israel, even if the motives may be discordant — Jews wanting Israel as a place to live, Christians wanting it as a place to stage Armageddon.