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Nine Crazy Ideas in Science
Here's the deck of nine ideas under consideration:
- More Guns Mean Less Crime
- AIDS is Not Caused by HIV
- Sun Exposure is Beneficial
- Low Doses of Nuclear Radiation Are Beneficial
- The Solar System Has Two Suns
- Oil, Coal, and Gas Have Abiogenic Origins
- Time Travel is Possible
- Faster-than-Light Particles Exist
- There Was No Big Bang
So in this review I'm going to give you generalities first, and bury "the butler did it" type information after a SPOILER warning.
One of the problems with the execution of this work is that you can pretty often tell when Ehrlich is enthusiastic about an idea just from his general tone as he writes about it... and conversely, in retrospect I think I should've been able to spot when he disagreed with, because the writing in those chapters was a little confusing.
Part of his schtick is that at the end of each chapter he rates the idea on a scale of 0 to 4 "cuckoos". Oddly enough I often find that I strongly disagree with his cuckoo ratings even just based on the evidence that he presents. But the absolute magnitude of my disagreements are typically no more than a single "cuckoo".
I was worried about some of his evaluation criteria (see the introduction available on-line as a sample chapter), because he includes several points that strike me as fairly dicey: "Who proposed the idea?"; "How attached is the proposer to the idea?" and "Does the proposer have an agenda?" These all relate to judging the person rather than the idea itself. (Consider that "consider the source" and "ad hominem argument" are pretty much the same as far as logic goes.) But he does clearly understand that these are just rules of thumb, and I note with some amusement that he doesn't resort to these particular rules anywhere in the later chapters. He's more interested in the logic of the arguments, which is as it should be.
I could bring up lots of quibbles (and I probably will after the spoiler warning), but overall I found this to be a great breezy read. I learned quite a bit from it. While nothing here made me do a reversal of my beliefs, I was often surprised that the evidence for something was stronger or weaker than I'd supposed.
Here we have an educated, astute, person doing a relatively independent review of some controversial, interesting technical subjects. Why aren't there more books like this?
Ah, but at least there's one more! I see that a sequel has just come out: Eight Preposterous Propositions: From the Genetics of Homosexuality to the Benefits of Global Warming . I bet I'll be submitting a review on that one shortly ...
Anyway, now into the nitty gritty. Here's your SPOILER WARNING. Skip the following if you want to play the "guess where he's going" game with this book. Let's take it chapter by chapter:
More Guns Mean Less CrimeI'm a "right to bear arms" kind of guy myself, and I was surprised that the data doesn't seem to support private ownership of guns as a crime deterrent. Ehrlich argues persuasively that the statistical evidence for this is very weak. I appreciate the fact that Ehrlich concludes that both the pro and anti gun sides are nuts: he rates them 3 and 2 "cuckoos" respectively, where a 3 is "almost certainly not true" and 2 is "very likely not true."
But here, we come to my first strong disagreement with him. If the effects aren't strong enough to measure, why the asymmetry in the "cuckoo" rating for the pro and anti side? I might rate them both at a 2 myself.
AIDS is Not Caused by HIVI've had the impression that the the Duesberg hypothesis was pretty screwy, but I was willing to tentatively consider it might have something of value. For example, what about the possibility that multiple diseases are now being diagnosed incorrectly as one single syndrome "HIV"?
But Ehrlich's analysis satisfies me that there's not much of scientific value in Duesberg's ideas at all. I don't argue with his 3 cuckoo rating (but I wouldn't blame you if you thought it deserved the full 4).
Sun Exposure is BeneficialEhrlich concludes that this looks fairly plausible, and gives it a 0 cuckoo rating, pretty much as I would have expected. Many people might find this surprising though, certainly the popular impression these days seems to be that sunlight is deadly.
Low Doses of Nuclear Radiation Are BeneficialHere, Ehrlich lays out the case for "radiation hormesis", and I really don't think this is that fantastic a notion (the difference between a poison and a medicine is often a matter of dosage, why wouldn't this be true of radiation?). But radiation is so demonized in the popular imagination that "radiation is good for you" comes off an insane joke. Ehrlich takes it seriously, and essentially concludes that while there are reasons for suspecting that this effect exists, it hasn't been entirely established. And here we have one of my quibbles: he awards it 1 cuckoo, which translates to "probably not true, but who knows". But there is no reason for saying it's probably not true. If something is not crazy, just not established, I would be inclined to award it "0 cuckoos," aka "Why not?"
The Solar System Has Two SunsThis is the "Nemesis" hypothesis, which it will probably come as no surprise is rated at 2 cuckoos. The short version of the story: originally they looked at part of the extinction record, and it looked like there was a definite cycle. But if you look at the whole record it doesn't seem to be there.
Oil, Coal, and Gas Have Abiogenic OriginsThis is subject that's been of some interest to me, ever since I heard Thomas Gold give a talk on this idea about a decade ago. It turns out that this is now looking much less like "an intriguing possibility" and much more like a truth awaiting a few funerals before it will be declared established. The odds are good that "fossil fuels" don't actually come from fossils, rather they're from hydrocarbons that pre-existed the formation of the earth, which means we're probably not going to run out of them. (So that means we can ignore those environmental wackos, right? Nope: imagine what happens to the atmosphere if we keep ramping up the rate at which we burn this stuff.)
Ehrlich rates this at 0 cuckoos, but maybe he should have invented a "-1 cuckoo" for this one.
Time Travel is Possible2 cuckoos: no surprises.
Faster-than-Light Particles ExistEhrlich mentions in his introduction in the interests of "full disclosure" that he's actually strongly attached to one of the ideas discussed here (the existence of tachyons), but by the time I'd gotten to that chapter I'd entirely forgotten about this, and I was disappointed to realize that he was being an advocate, not an independent reviewer (it includes a picture of him wearing a "no tardy-centrism" T-shirt).
Ehrlich rates this at 0 cuckoos, but come on. Even just based on the write-up he presents, it's a clear 1 cuckoo.
There Was No Big BangClocks in at 3 cuckoos, as you might expect.
You can purchase Nine Crazy Ideas in Science: A Few Might Even Be True from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I'm not a geologist, but I was under the impression that fossils are regularly found in coal, and that we've observed the intermediate steps of its formation from peat bogs.
No, I don't think it ever was considered a "crazy idea" at all, at least not by anyone who understood it. It was a hit right out of the chute.
(P.s Yes, guns do cause more crime. The rest of the world learnt to read a bar chart years ago.. do they teach them in your schools yet?) /.
Hmmm. In Chicago, New York, Washington DC and others guns are all but illegal and they have very heavy crime problems. But, in places like Vermont and many other places that allow folks to walk around with loaded firearms crime is down. Washington DC and New York really are the biggest counter points to your statement though. Of course this is Karma suicide as a lot of anti-gun nuts reside on
Excessive forking causes un-wanted children.
Not really. As I understand it, it was seen pretty much as a theory that happened to explain certain things, but theories don't mean much until they correctly predict/explain something not originally intended. For general relativity, this happened when Einstein's revised gravity formulas explained the change in orbit of Mercury, something that was unexplained by gravitational pulls of other planets, but perfectly explained by general relativity.
I understand it's possible all of mathematics could be a joke, but from what I have studied and know it would be highly unlikely for that to be true
Actually, mathematics has been proven to be true. One of the classical masters (I believe either Plato or Aristotle) laid the work for it; Basically he took basic set theory, which is not mathematics but a logical framework that is provably true, and used it to prove that all mathematical operations of the time is also provably true.
Certain modern mathematical concepts, most notably i (the square root of negative 1) were not included in this treatise, however.
A little googling couldn't turn up this seminal work. IIRC from my physics class, it's a little over 300 pages and not a very interesting read, but my teacher recommended it as being worth a glance or two...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
The data on gun ownership alone is not particularly correlated with crime deterrent, but that's conveniently ignoring the data on concealed carry licenses published by John Lott, not-coincidentally in a book called "More Guns Less Crime"
His data showed a consistent and predictable decline in violent crime after the passage of concealed carry laws. Furthermore his data shows that violent crime was exchanged for crimes where there was less risk of meeting a person during commision (car theft, etc). Both of these are consistent with basic economic hypotheses (ie. greater risk costs means less people participate)
Of course when it comes to criminals evaluating their risks, it doesn't matter how many people have guns locked in cabinets at home, it matters how many people MIGHT have them hidden under their jacket.
John Lott: More Guns Less Crime
Kleck and Kates: Armed, new perspectives on gun control.
are the two most important available books that use logic and statistics to examine how firearms affect crime.
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) http://www.endpointcomputing.com a scientific approach to custom computing.
Surely he could have found one or two to fit the high end of the scale.
How about crop circles by electromagnetic fields?
Trust me, you can't reason with the pro crop circle camp, I've debated with them over at Space.com
Some other over looked -- way out ideas.
No Anti-Gravity Speculation?
The Anti-Gravity by Spinning Super-Conductor: Seems to be clocking in at 3 cuckoos by my estimate
However
Gravity Wave Detection and coupling to Electromagnetic Fields: a 1 cuckoo currently, but could go higher or lower in the
near future with new experiments.
Multiple Universes: I'd give this a zero, but experimental confirmation is going to be a real bitch.
Dark Mater: a zero cuckoo for sure, but we haven't really seen the damn stuff yet.
Brane Collision origin of the universe: 1 to 2 cuckoos, but could gain respectability. Less violent than Big Bang, less
inflation, but still an abrupt origin in the 10-20 Billion Year range.
String Theory: a zero cuckoo. It's hard to bet against a theory that just keeps changing, refining, and redefining itself.
In the end String Theory will probably be the GUT, but by then will probably have no strings
Underlining process to Universe are computational: Main premis to Stephen Wolfram's "New Kind of Science." I like Stephen, and even use to work for him, but he has a long way to go before being able to claim a truly "New Kind of Science." I'd say 1 cuckoo.
Cold Fusion: I'd give it 2 cuckoos (these guys just won't go away)
Homeopathic Medicine: I'd give this one a 5 on the 4 cuckoo scale.
MOND Modified Newtonian Dynamics: 1 cuckoo probably, but could really upset the apple cart in physics. Has even had write ups in Scientific American
see
Where's the Dark Matter?
These are just a few off the top of my head, I look forward to seeing some other Slashdotters lists.
Letter To Iran
Of course this is Karma suicide as a lot of anti-gun nuts reside on /.
/.
Even though you call me a nut, I'll explain the position:
There are a lot of irresponsible idiots out there.
If guns are freely available, there will be a lot of irresponsible idiots out there with guns.
I therefore think that guns should be regulated in much the same way that we don't allow any idiot to drive around with an 18 wheeler.
There are also a lot of pro-gun nuts on
AFAICT, their opinion is: "I want a gun. I hate and fear all authorities, especially if they are called 'government'. I oppose any steps by said government to either make it harder for me to have a gun or to keep track of who has guns."
I strongly disagree with that position because it gets in the way of stopping irresponsible idiots from getting their clumsy hands on devices designed to make holes in people.
Of course, that makes me an "anti gun nut", because when you don't have rational arguments, name calling is the only substitute.
Damn liberal media...
You can't take the sky from me...
I understand it's possible all of mathematics could be a joke, but from what I have studied and know it would be highly unlikely for that to be true.
It does get a little hairy when you start reducing it to as basic a set of concepts as you can. You start getting hung up on certain things. The Axiom of Choice is a fine example. Almost all modern mathematics requires it to be true. It feels like it ought to be true. Then again youy can do nasty things like the Banach Tarski Paradox if you assume it true. Ouch.
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
For a good read on an advocate of HIV != AIDS, go here.
She has HIV, does not take any of the AZT drugs and is and has been healthy as a horse for a looong time.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
A quick search on Google reveals much:
Tomas Gold has quite a bit of interesting information, including reference to an oil deposit sans sediments.
As an off-topic side note, if this is true then there would possibly be oil on Mars and other planets - a nice kick in the pants for space exploration once we tell George Bush...
If I was worried about Karma, I'd eat tofu.
Actually, mathematics has been proven to be true. One of the classical masters (I believe either Plato or Aristotle) laid the work for it; Basically he took basic set theory
He did? This is interesting since formal set theory wasn't formulated until the mid-nineteenth century. Aristotle did come up with the axiomatic system of deriving all possible truths from a basic set of simple truths, but that's hardly set theory as such.
which is not mathematics but a logical framework that is provably true, and used it to prove that all mathematical operations of the time is also provably true.
Except of course the ones Euclid couldn't prove to be true so he assumed them to be axioms - some of which were later derived from the other axioms.
Certain modern mathematical concepts, most notably i (the square root of negative 1) were not included in this treatise, however.
Imaginary numbers were encountered by mathematicians in the sixteenth century and established as a concept by the early eighteenth century - hardly a modern concept. By comparison set theory, linear algebra and statistical probability theories didn't emerge until late nineteenth/early twentieth century!
P.S Yes, guns do cause more crime. The rest of the world learnt to read a bar chart years ago.. do they teach them in your schools yet?)
Apparently the book actually confirms something I've always considered true; that there simply is too much contradictory evidence to prove either side of the issue. Even though I am a pro-gun person, I tell people that the quantity of guns is irrelevant to crime, one way or another, since you can find all sorts of combinations of crime and gun ownership. Crime is a cultural thing.
There are other things like that. I've been doing a lot of reasearch into red light running cameras, and it appears that you can't prove their usefullness one way or the other (at least, with the current batch of research.) Too many biased studies done at intersections where other things could have been done. Too much money flowing into city coffers.
I think Erdos said this: A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.
Not quite on topic, but I've always liked this quote.
The person behind a proposal is an good heuristic predictor when you review an idea in most areas (probably including science) -- without doing a full research paper on the idea.
For most subjects there are many more ways to be totally wrong than there are ways to be (close to) correct. So, e.g., any randomly choosen answer to a problem (how to stop crime, etc, etc) is almost certainly non-working (or even detrimental).
People of fixed ideas (and of any ideological political (etc) opinions) have pink colored glasses that distort their world view and they base their decisions on how to e.g. solve problems (relevant to their fixed ideas) because of that. This results in an (at least) partly randomly choosen solution -- which probably is bad because randomly choosen solutions don't work (or are incorrect) -- see previous paragraph.
So it is a good heuristic to assume that cranks and people with agendas seldom are correct.
(Of course, the ideology or preconceived opinion might be correct... But it will be accepted if the cranks turn out to do correct predictions. Most to all ideologies are wrong, of course -- see argument above.)
Disclaimer: I'm playing a bit of the devil's advocate here -- at least in the way I've formulated this comment.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Entirely theoretical. Little or no emperical data either way. 3 Theoretical cuckoos to more guns - less gun crime for ignoring the singularity in their argument (There will be more gun crime with 1 gun than with 0).
This statement is wrong if just one instance of an HIV infection caused AIDS. The empirical data for this is extremely large. - 4 Cuckoos
Non excessive sun exposure is healthy. - 0 Cuckoos.
With one cavaet, when it is known to benefit the condition being treated. - 0 Cuckoos.
Look up. - 4 Cuckoos
Possibly, but I doubt it greatly. The ability of RNA as a catalyst to its own replication and that of and other biological materials makes it very likely that there were small ammounts of many organic chemicals, including some functioning RNA, and that the first time frame in which we see huge ammounts of organic chemicals should be the RNA catalysts putting the formation of organic chemicals into exponential growth (until restrained by the resources available). The largest producer of hydrocarbons is photosynthesis. So if lots of this stuff was formed before photosynthesis, we should find even more formed afterwards. 1 Theoretical Cuckoo for overcorrecting.
According to quantum mechanics, to a limited degree, yes. However to move a person back in time about one second you need a negative energy of about the mass of jupiter. We havn't found any negative energy, so don't hold your breath. - 3 Thoeretical Cuckoos.
Not enough research - As an idea 0 Theoretical Cuckoos, be creative. As a statement of fact - 2 Cuckoos - do more research first.
Lots of theory here - As an idea 0 Theoretical Cuckoos, be creative. As a statement of fact - 2 Cuckoos - do more research first. (There was a big bang has the same ratings.)
And you reply: "Good argument!! There are lots of irresponsible idiots so don't let anyone have guns."
So, you have never seen an 18 wheeler in your life, have you?
Who, the HELL, is modding that crap up? Seriously, what is wrong with you. I say "restrict", I get trolled with semi-litterate idiots who say that I said "ban".
Is this bizarro slashdot or something?
Why is it not possible to have a fucking rational discussion about guns when people from the U.S. are around? Its not that hard people: read what the other person actually wrote, not what you are expecting to read!
On to the rest:
So it's OK to let irresponsible idiots drive 3000 pound cars.
No, its not.
And it's OK to let irresponsible idiots buy chainsaws.
Please, PLEASE look up murder statistics. Compare numbers of homicide with firearms to homicide with chainsaws.
Please.
You can't take the sky from me...
I guess we should board up the DMV, Driving schools, get rid of VIN's, abolish all traffic infractions etc.
I mean after all, when you read the constitution all you see is, "The right to bear arms shall not be infringed."
Of course, the reasonable people recognize "A well regulated millitia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
They of course pick up two cuckoos for using statistics for what Samual Clemens invented them for, as do the gun ownership advocates. But for such blatat self delusion, the gun-clubers deserve that extra bird.
Cars are VERY regulated to the point that you might need to by time on a supercomputer to virtually crash one to prove it's safe to drive. Every aspect of the operation, use, ownership and appearence is well regulated.
the nonreducible complexity problem
Nonreducible complexity is a concept put forward by the Intellegent Design advocates. So far, all the examples of irreducible complexity (the exact term they use) aren't really irreducible.
If you have a specific example of irreducible complexity, I'll give it a shot. The famous example given is the eye, which has been shown to be a) useful in all intermediate stages and b) existant in nature in all intermediate stages.
But your analogy to a lottery winner is silly.
The analogy is a tool meant to illustrate, not to argue. When one takes the metaphor too far, it breaks. Specifically, when I used the lottery metaphor, I was making the point that it would not be logical to assume that the lottery maker intended Bob XXX to win when he designed the lottery. There was no further implications of my lottery example, and none should be drawn. I am aware that the lottery is indeed an intelligently designed thing, but to say that my example supports intelligent design is to stretch the metaphor past the breaking point.
I repeat, the analogy was only to illustrate my point. The argument is not the same thing as the analogy.
Let me rephrase the argument without the lottery in it:
We are here 12 billion years after the event at the start of the universe. There are many things that have happened in that time, and all of them have so far led to us on this little planet. The probability of this exact chain occurring is very small. So small, that some of us think that it wasn't an accident. Some of us think that an intelligent being MUST have started the universe in such a way that it resulted in people on this little planet.
This particular outcome is a result of a chain of unlikely events, and each of those events is just as likely as any other. When we look back, it's not proper to say that there's a 99.99% chance that we weren't here, but a 0.01% chance that we are here. You have to remember that the liklihood of all the small events is exactly the same, and that one of those events must happen.
(Here I interject the analogy again, in a different form. Note that it's not an argument, just an example of the argument given in the paragraph above. I do not argue by analogy, therefore it is not logical to make suppositions about my analogy to disprove my argument. This is why you can't point out the fact that a lottery need not occur and expect that it refutes my argument. It does not.)
When I roll the percentage dice in D&D (if you never played, it's two 10 sided dice, read off and interpreted as a two digit percentile number), and I get a '37', the odds of that happening are very remote. Only 1 in 100. What are the chances of that happening? Is it logical to assume that an intelligence ordained that the '37' should be rolled? No, because we realise that all numbers are equally likely to be rolled, and that no matter how unlikely, once the dice are rolled a percentage must come up.
(end of the analogy, used for illustration only)
Finally, if some other sequence of events resulted in a lifeless universe, then we wouldn't be around to ask about the intelligent designer. Nevertheless, the universe would still be here.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
According to Stephen Hawking in one of his books, the theory was not popular because it showed strong evidence against there being "absolutes" in the Universe, which implied that not only were things like absolute location and absolute speed nonsensical, it also implies that absolute time, and thus absolute existance are merely constructs for us to better wrap our minds around our Universe.
Hawking argues that the theory of Relativity itself does in fact fly in the face of the existance of "God" because it refutes even other absolutes like "all powerful" and "absolute morals" or "absolute truth" and other such constructs of religion.
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Why don't nine-foot seams of Ordovician or Silurian coal exist below Carboniferous strata then? Also, why does Pennsylvanian coal contain carbonized Lycopodium stumps a yard wide? There are brown coal seams from the Cretaceous, and pre-coal deposits from relatively Recent peat bogs. The four cuckoos this one deserves will outlast the funerals of Western Civ.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
can it really be said to exist in any practical way?
"Practical way" subtly implies an observer, so it can't exist in a practical way. It can't exist in a non-practical way either, because that implies that there is a practical way, which implies an observer. It would have to exist in a way that is completely independent of practical. I have no idea what that means, but it's logical.
'irreducible complexity' problem WRT the eye. Can you point me in the right direction?
First the ID side, which I think is wrong, but probably not maliciously so:
Home page of Michael J. Behe. For more info, pick up books or writings on the web by Behe, and William A. Dembski. Google is your friend, there's a huge amount of stuff out there.
Now, for the skeptical side:
The talkorigins website
When someone puts forward the idea of irreducible complexity, remember two things: first, it's up to the person saying that the eye is irreducible to prove that it is. The argument must satisfy the skeptic. Second, irreducible complexity sounds a lot like the fallacy of argument from lack of imagination. Just because one cannot imagine how something could happen is not a reason to believe that it did.
The talk origins website has a lot of information on there, hope you enjoy reading some of it.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!