Posts Tagged ‘Michael Shermer’
Inside the Neanderthal mind
Posted by: adonis49 on: March 3, 2015
Inside the Neanderthal mind
How science can inform ethics

Why is it wrong to enslave or torture other humans, or take their property, or discriminate against them?
That these actions are wrong, almost no one disputes.
Why are they wrong?
A Moral Starting Point published February 2015 by Michael Shermer
For an answer, most people turn to religion (because God says so), or to philosophy (because rights theory says so), or to political theory (because the social contract says so).
In The Moral Arc, published in January, I show how science may also contribute an answer.
My moral starting point is the survival and flourishing of sentient beings.
By survival, I mean the instinct to live.
By flourishing, I mean having adequate sustenance, safety, shelter, and social relations for physical and mental health.
By sentient, I mean emotive, perceptive, sensitive, responsive, conscious, and, especially, having the capacity to feel and to suffer.
Instead of using criteria such as tool use, language, reasoning or intelligence, I go deeper into our evolved brains, toward these more basic emotive capacities. There is sound science behind this proposition.
According to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness—a statement issued in 2012 by an international group of prominent cognitive and computational neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists and neuroanatomists—there is a continuity between humans and nonhuman animals.
And sentience is the most important common characteristic.
The neural pathways of emotions, for example, are not confined to higher-level cortical structures in the brain but are found in evolutionarily older subcortical regions.
Artificially stimulating the same regions in human and nonhuman animal brains produces the same emotional reactions in both.
Attentiveness, decision making, and the emotional capacity to feel and suffer are found across the branches of the evolutionary tree. This is what brings all humans and many nonhuman animals into our moral sphere.
The arc of the moral universe really is bending toward progress, by which I mean the improvement of the survival and flourishing of individual sentient beings.
I emphasize the individual because that is who survives and flourishes, or who suffers and dies, not the group, tribe, race, gender, state or any other collective.
Individual beings perceive, emote, respond, love, feel and suffer—not populations, races, genders or groups.
Historically, abuses have been most rampant—and body counts have run the highest—when the individual is sacrificed for the good of the group.
It happens when people are judged by the color of their skin, or by their gender, or by whom they prefer to sleep with, or by which political or religious group they belong to, or by any other distinguishing trait our species has identified to differentiate among members instead of by the content of their individual character.
The revolutions for the rights in the past three centuries have focused almost entirely on the freedom and autonomy of individuals, not collectives—on the rights of persons, not groups.
Individuals vote, not genders.
Individuals want to be treated equally, not races.
In fact, most rights protect individuals from being discriminated against as individual members of a group, such as by race, creed, color, gender, and now sexual orientation and gender preference.
The singular and separate organism is to biology and society what the atom is to physics—a fundamental unit of nature.
The first principle of the survival and flourishing of sentient beings is grounded in the biological fact that it is the discrete organism that is the main target of natural selection and social evolution, not the group.
We are a social species, but we are first and foremost individuals within social groups and therefore ought not to be subservient to the collective.
This drive to survive is part of our essence, and therefore the freedom to pursue the fulfilment of that essence is a natural right, by which I mean it is universal and inalienable and thus not contingent only on the laws and customs of a particular culture or government.
As a natural right, the personal autonomy of the individual gives us criteria by which we can judge actions as right or wrong: Do they increase or decrease the survival and flourishing of individual sentient beings?
Slavery, torture, robbery and discrimination lead to a decrease in survival and flourishing, and thus they are wrong.
“You can’t just say, ‘This is the way it is, therefore it ought to be that way.’ You’ve got to have good reasons,” says Michael Shermer, referencing the common “is-ought fallacy” most famously explained by David Hume.
(David Hume is the same ironic philosopher/scientist who replied to the social contract of John Locks’s related to government:
” Is this contract applicable to the peasants and artisans who barely can survive of their miserly income and are unable to leave the country?” )
“Well, I claim that we do have good reasons: Democracies are better than autocracies. Free markets are better than tyrannical, top-down economic systems. There are certain things we know work. You can measure it!”
(What about social State systems that value fairness among all the citizens? And provide a minimum level of dignity to survive, preventive health care, affordable education… You can measure it?)
Most common of errors…Apophenia? Patternicity? Pareidolia?
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 27, 2012
Most common of errors…Apophenia? Patternicity? Pareidolia?
There are different types of mistakes and errors that people commit, like you and me, the little people, managers,“leaders” new and old”, scientists, researchers, politicians…
1. Mistakes “reserved” for management of people https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/13-mistakes-new-learders-makes-this-taboo-number-as-if-older-leaders-ever-diminish-this-number-of-mistakes/
2. Mistakes with complicated created “professional” terms attached to them (for this post)
3. Mistakes organized in taxonomies, or check lists…https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2008/10/04/whats-that-concept-of-human-factors-in-design/
4. Errors and mistakes in conducting controlled experiment, particularly on human subjects
5. Human and machines mistakes https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/whats-that-concept-of-human-factors-in-design-continue-21/
6. Mistakes never reminded of…and never accounted for…and never confronted with
Let’s read the second types of complicated mistakes. I think this list was posted by Graham Coghill on freshly pressed a while ago:
“Apophenia” leads you to believe, wrongly, that you have evidence to support a position when you don’t.
You believe you can continue to gamble because you’re on a winning streak, or that Mars is inhabited because some observers see canal-like patterns on its surface. It can lead you to ignore evidence that falsifies your position, or that supports a contrary position.
What to do when confronted by this tactic?
Since it’s usually wishful thinking that leads us to find non-existent patterns, we need to guard against it first. Look for the signs, and guard against the temptation to dismiss evidence that doesn’t support your wishes.
Beware of those who try to exploit your tendency for wishful thinking and discipline yourself to accept only conclusion that are supported by real-world evidence.
Variations and related tactics:
Michael Shermer calls this cognitive bias ‘patternicity‘. It comes in several forms:
- Pareidolia – finding shapes, such as faces, in things like clouds, geological features and slices of toast.
- The gambler’s fallacy – believing that past random events can influence the probability of future ones, for example, that a flipped coin is more likely to show heads after a run of tails.
- The clustering illusion – believing that the clusters that are always found in random data actually indicate something meaningful, for example, that a run of wins in a game of dice means you are on a winning streak.
In science, apophenia is related to what’s known as a Type I error, in which a test seems to show that two variables are related when, in fact, they are not.
It can also contribute to confirmation bias, in which an investigator deliberately looks for evidence which supports a favoured model and avoids evidence which refutes it.
Apophenia is also related to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, in which a person zooms in on an apparent pattern in the midst of a sea of data, and claims that this is the key to a significant issue (as in the fable of the Texas sharpshooter who fires random shots at a wall, then draws the bullseye around the tightest cluster of bullet holes).
Examples:
- On the political side of the debate over climate change, many fall into the trap of using current weather patterns to support their positions – a cold spell, for instance, is quoted as evidence that the earth is not warming.
- Climate scientists are reluctant to claim that any particular event is due to global warming because they are aware of the dangers of the clustering illusion. Before any such pattern can be held up as real evidence, a convincing argument must be presented.
- James Hansen and colleagues have recently published an analysis (here and here) which, they claim, shows that recent weather events are consequences of global warming.
- Here’s how difficult it is to decide whether the clustering illusion is at work or not. In the early 200s, it became apparent that there was an unusually high occurrence of breast cancer among female employees at the ABC studios at Toowong in Queensland. In 2007, an expert panel found that the rate was 6 times higher than the rate of breast cancer in Queensland, and that there was only a 1 in 25 chance (estimated p value of 0.04) that this could have occurred by chance.
- It found a correlation between breast cancer occurrence and length of service at the studio, but could find no evidence that the cancer was due to any factor related to the site or to genetic or lifestyle factors of the employees.
- A 2009 study investigated breast cancer rates in ABC employees across Australia and found no increased rates in any other site. The ABC abandoned the Toowong studios and now operates from new facilities several kilometres away. Was the cancer cluster a statistical artefact or was there some yet unidentified cause?
- In the early 1900s, German meteorologist Alfred Wegener noticed a pattern in the earth’s continental shapes. The edges of the continents appeared to fit into each other, like pieces of a jigsaw. This led him to believe they had once been joined together and he proposed his model of continental drift.
- Although this model explained many observations, it was not accepted by earth scientists because Wegener was unable to come up with a mechanism that could account for continents moving. Discoveries in the 1950s and 1960s revealed a mechanism, and Wegener’s idea became incorporated into the Plate Tectonic model.
Note 1: Here is the link to Coghill’s post, at his polite request http://scienceornot.net/2012/08/14/perceiving-phoney-patterns-apophenia/.
Note 2: Fortunately, I don’t blog full-time or navigate the net to find out who have borrowed my ideas from the 3,100 articles that I posted: That would be a nightmare to keep track of and of no benefit, as far as I know. All that I am interested in is disseminate what is controversial and need to be discussed and reflected upon…