Genetic fatalism

The Extended Phenotype, p. 13:

The important point is that there is no general reason for expecting genetic influences to be any more irreversible than environmental ones. What did genes do to deserve their sinister, juggernaut-like reputation? [...] Why are genes thought to be so much more fixed and inescapable in their effects than television, nuns, or books?

Apparently there seems to be a sort of prurient attraction, an irresistible itch towards viewing genes as Threads of Destiny weaved by the norns of fate. Scientology exploits the ease with which you can combine scientific trappings and superstition: but this rise of the popular superstition of genetic fatalism is potentially much worse.

We can see it already beginning to hurt people in this LA Times story, U.S. military practices genetic discrimination in denying benefits, detailing how the US military, exempt from the usual genetic-discimination laws, treat genes that give a small increase in the risk of disease as an inescapable fate, a preexisting condition.

But Nunes said the armed forces' disability policy was flawed by a fundamental misunderstanding about the biology of inherited diseases.

This is a chilling reminder of how much more justified superstition can seem when it adopts a superficial appearance of being rooted in scientific results.

[Technorati determinism fatalism genetic determinism genetic fatalism genetic predestination high-tech superstition norn DNA prurience science-superstition]

Enemies of Scientism

Enemies of Reason pt. 1 is out. It has an excellent soundbite where an astrologer's response to bringing up swapping people's horoscopes is I think what you're up to here is mischief. Ooh-la-la. Remember: scrutiny equals mischief.

Next he says: I just don't believe in the experiment, Richard. It's that simple. (Magical thinking? He can make everything uncomfortable go away by simply not believing in it?)

In defense of his livelihood the Observer astrologer responds (via):

For scientism, however, personal experience is not admissible. Everything must be subject to randomised, controlled double-blind trials, just like medical drugs - 'drugs that work' as Dawkins insists.
...
Scientism, of course, hates meaning. It prefers to view humanity as a random accident, isolated in a cosmos of 'indifferent vastness' - the legacy of the post-Copernican enlightenment that Dawkins claims is now being 'betrayed'. The opposing view, that the world has soul and purpose, that humanity and the cosmos are linked, is to be found not, as he and others claim, in the dogma of religion, but in art and in the depth psychology of Freud and Jung that Dawkins holds in contempt.

What a brilliantly straightforward demonstration of 'meaning' used to signify unwarranted self-importance on the part of humanity.

Hmm, scientism. There's a blemish of a word.

The first quote for the 'overzealous' sense of scientism in OED is Shaw's 1921 Back to Metuselah, running through FA Hayek to the welcoming embrace of people feeling miffed at their bread-and-butter getting questioned.

Huston Smith: Scientism adds to science two corrollaries: first, that the scientific method is, if not the only reliable method of getting at the truth, then at least the most reliable method; and second, that the things science deals with—material entities—are the most fundamental things that exist. You know, material entities, like beams of light. Or perhaps he's using "material" in the sense of not imaginary.

This is from GR Peterson's Demarcation and the Scientistic Fallacy:

Thus, scientism would not be said to occur in the proper discouse of metaphysics and theology, not because these disciplines do not make claims about the ultimate nature of knowledge and reality (they do) but because making such claims is part of the proper function of these disciplines, which are not commonly understood to be among the sciences.

Ahh, I think I get it now. This is about people who are sore because they're afraid that their cushy little gravy-train of never getting questioned might run out of steam.

Good.

[Technorati Enemies of Reason atheist bastardry demarcation faith as shield free respect gravy-train religion magical thinking scientism scrutiny equals mischief suspension of disbelief truth equals mischief unwarranted self-importance]

Humility in spam

Concluding this three-part series on drawing lessons from scummy internet baiting, we have a tactic I just culled from the end of a bit of comment spam:

(Please feel free to delete this post if you don't want it on your blog. Thanks for the informative blog and opportunity to post.)

I should feel free to delete it? Wow, I think I just might take you up on that incredibly generous offer.

What do you even file this under? Spamming them with kindness? Correctly predicting that people who read it will instantly be filled with a desire to delete it, cheekily granting a permission that isn't theirs to grant?

Perhaps superficial humility, appearing humble simply to throw people off with the unexpected attitude, mixed with the psych! of saying that you can go ahead and do what you were going to do anyway. If in marketing you don't want people getting defensive, in spam you often don't want people getting offensive when they're able to delete your message.

Interestingly, this demonstrates that the technique of killing them with kindness—commonly presumed to be invariably angelic—is readily adopted by spammer scum.

[Technorati angelic kindness comment spam glorious spam killing them with kindness spam lessons spam taxonomy spamma from heaven spamming them with kindness superficial humility]

Don't worry me

Reading up on e-mail fraud, aka. phishing, I found this illuminating paper by M Jakobsson: The Human Factor in Phishing [PDF], which has this juicy tidbit relevant to general psychology:

Subjects did not like that this website said phishing attack in progress in three different locations. Some commented that phishing is too obscure a term for a financial institution to use in their communications – the phrase identity theft was offered as a plausible substitute. In Tsow et al. [44], it was established that if the focus on security was downplayed, then there was a significant increase in trust (p < 0.022).

So if you try to alert people that there's reason to be worried, they'll only be all too happy to shoot the messenger. Negativity and fear is judged on the basis of superficial association with things that look worrisome, not on what is genuinely detrimental or fearsome — in the words of the paper, People judge relevance before authenticity.

Which is to say, no other reason than that they don't like what they hear.

Further on:

This highlights why phishers often have higher click-through rates than legitimate providers of advertisements: Fraudsters can offer much nicer enticements than legitimate service providers, as they are not tied to their word.

About Markus Jakobsson.

[Technorati Markus Jakobsson diffuse fear messenger-shooting negativity not tied to their word shoot the messenger shooting the messenger superficiality what you want to hear]

A better world with spam

...no, I'm not talking about MAKING.VISIBILITY.FA$T, I mean that a lot of psychological fallacies that used to be difficult to talk about can now be readily illustrated, due to the increasing number of people who've seen some amount of spam in their inbox.

For instance, have you ever received spam with a sender's address that was similar to the name of someone you knew? This is a deliberate exploitation of apophenia, people's tendency to promiscuously connect the dots with little justification. The spammer only has to come close, the recipient will walk the rest of the way.

We have phishing, where people are deceived into going to a site similar to one where they may have a subscription and fooled into entering their password — ie, conning, giving off a superficial look of genuinity in the manner of the stereotypical used-car dealer who says you can trust me, I'm a Christian.

We have spam that inserts a block of text specifically designed to make it seem more relevant, mimicking the superficial form of genuine content. This might serve as an illustration of cargo-cult science, scientology etc. that only mimics the surface of real research.

Last but not least, people are much more likely to believe something that reaffirms them: witness the tenacity of comment spam that says Great post! Here are some links you might like, the omnipresent marketing technique You have already won! and of course the widespread ILOVEYOU e-mail worm that dashed romantic hopes and wasted man-weeks across the world.

[Technorati apophenia cargo cult conning deception fallacies illustrated glorious spam reaffirmation spam pedagogics spam psychology vikings singing]

Elaboration

It would seem the mind abhors a vacuum. Shortly after I'd invented the farcical example of a dodecahedron-shaped earth, I found myself thinking that, surely, major rivers would form along its edges.

Immediately on thinking that, I was almost revolted with myself for my capacity to come up with useless Time Cube-grade nonsense. So why did I think it? Apparently having inflicted the concept of a dodecahedron earth on myself wasn't enough; maybe the concept was simply too bare that it could be put to rest. Like some sort of obsessive-compulsive toymaker, my mind simply had to sew some ridiculous tassels on to the already ludicrous idea of the dodecahedron to really give it the style it deserved.

I'm not sure what category to chalk this up under. I'd like to say it's something like reducing uncertainty, but Uncertainty reduction is taken, it's apparently a part of social communication theory.

Of course, there is such a thing as being too complex to be commonly understood as well. It'd appear that there's an optimum level of complication that makes for a good yarn for most people. If The Magical Number Seven is to be believed, you'd expect the upper bound on this to be somewhere around seven "major features" — but of course, this raises the question: how do you define what's a major feature?

[Technorati apophenia chewing cud dodecahedron earth magical number seven obsessive elaboration posts needing categorization seven registers stylish tassels uncertainty reduction]

Huge silly controversies

Flat Earth vs. spherical Earth is often used as an example of opposing viewpoints. However, a lot of popular propositions are all of them so far off the mark, they could just as well be debates on whether the shape of the earth is flat or pyramidal.

Once a conflict between absurdities becomes a big thing, it can be difficult to make people see beyond the spectacular clash of horrible idea against awful idea. Take hypertext visionary Ted Nelson, who under the heading "The huge silly controversy" says I see almost no difference between the Macintosh and the PC. Stunning and unheard of? Exactly. Seeing beyond this particular conflict is perhaps especially difficult because computers are things that you buy — if no alternative is available off-the-shelf this is the same, to a consumer, as no alternatives being conceivable. The mouse and the clicking and the icons is simply the way of things. Invented, you say? But it's so natural! It's what everyone does!

When two sides of the same coin become the only viable currency like this, people tend to see everything in terms of it, leading to some very strange categorization. Returning to the hypothetical case of flat earth vs. pyramidal earth, say you came to a debate panel — perfectly balanced with equal time for 'flat' and 'pyramid' views — and said the world was round. To someone who primarily kept the farcical conflict in mind, the first thing they'd say would probably be, Oh, right, you think it's like a flat disc? I'll chalk you up with the flat-earth side, then.

It's as if, once a side or two has become sufficiently elaborated, people are painted into a corner, having severe trouble backing up to a position where they can approach something without preconceptions or singing vikings, where they'll let you order something that doesn't have any spam in it.

What I have in mind in particular is the assumption that not carrying the card of a religion is like not wearing a caste mark. You have to wonder if this is for the benefit of people so they know which stereotype to apply to you.

If you want a mark for effort, you can approach the pyramidal-earth people and try to convince them that it's sort of like a pyramid... with more sides. You know, like a dodecahedron, only with lots and lots of sides? If you succeed in doing anything other than disgust or confuse them, you'll then see the flat-earthers chalking up a victory against the now fragmented pyramid-earthers while ridiculing the minority position of a dodecahedumb-earth.

[Technorati consumer choice consumer mentality dodecahedumb elaboration far-fetched Python refs framing framing the debate glorious spam group fragmentation group mindset lovely spam minority opinion pyramidal earth spam and eggs spam spam spam two sides of the same coin vikings singing we have always been clicking icons winning by default]

Containing multitudes

I just had a really kooky thought. This was spurred by having my concept of genetic information straightened out.

The upshot is, the technical sense of 'information' is reduction of uncertainty, and this leads to some counterintuitive results. Eg., if you have two notes with the exact same thing written on them, you might be tempted to say that this is more information, but that's not the technical sense: technically, once you've read a sentence, reading it again contains nothing new, hence no 'information'. That is, 'information' is measured by how much it informs.

When we take this application of information theory to genetics and turn it back on informatics, we get some wonderfully strange results: after all, when you learn something you gain information, yes? Now, in meme-type theories, you tend to think of one mind as one organism, because that's nice and intuitive. But, the human mind is able to contain far more uncertainty than any single organism's genes. Wouldn't this make the human mind more like a species?

More astute wackiness ensues when we consider that the information in a genotype typically increases under selection pressure. Information in a mind increases while learning; hence, studying becomes the meme-equivalent to selection pressure.

Yes, you are reading Blogger, home of half the crackpot theories in the universe. But still, it amuses me to think of exams as extinction events.

[Technorati Shannon 1948 crackpot theory extinction exams information theory kookiness meme theory memetics mimetics selection pressure]

Wondering is better than knowing?

Lovely capsule description.

BusinessSpeak

The relation of Unspeak™ to advertising slogans and such seemed like it should be obvious, but I couldn't put my finger on it until I read apenwarr's old post about IBMese — the strange language involving "paradigm shifts" and "issues" and "core competencies".

Why are these two examples interesting? Because I finally found the common theme: "non-arguability." [...] It's not that you don't argue with it because everyone agrees; it's that you can't argue with it because the person making the statement wins by default.

[...] But sales - and by extension, people hacking - is different. In that case, you're messing with someone's emotions with the goal of getting them to agree with you and eventually do something for you (eg. buy your stuff). And the biggest barrier to sales is (ironically?) defensiveness: the feeling that someone is trying to sell you something. Being non-controversial helps avoid making people defensive.

This would be a type of framing, then, akin to winning by default because you're playing on home ground and your local supporters won't let anyone else on the field.

Non-arguability appears to be one step up on the ladder from what was the previous state-of-the-art of advertising, knowing common criticisms of advertising and preempting them in the manner of: You might ask yourself, why does a famous celebrity like me go on TV to tell you about the wonders of Pro-Vital™? Why, it's because you'll do anything for money, of course. But the real answer is preempted by following up with The answer is, Pro-Vital™ really is that good!

With this higher-level defensiveness, you usually can't just shoot it down with well-timed snappy truth. Someone trying to take the non-arguable proposition apart to expose it as a load of old toss, no matter if it actually is, will come off as negative, pessimistic, a hair-splitting naysayer who wants to argue about Those Things That Everyone Knows. You'll want to watch out. That could mean he's not only a hair-splitter, but a... reductionist.

More on this later, maybe.

[Technorati advertising rhetorics bizspeak businessSpeak businesspeak defense-lowering framing framing the debate non-arguability noncontroversiality people hacking reductionism reductionists soundbite culture stealth marketing unarguable war on specifics winning by default]

Genetic cybernetic

So I took Dawkins' own advice, and read The Extended Phenotype.

What struck me afterwards was that the influence from artificial-intelligence types is obvious enough that he could almost have called it animal cybernetics. I mean, apart from the bit where everyone would make horrible jokes about bionic badgers and things.

This is perhaps to be expected from the analogy of parasites pulling levers to manipulate their hosts: after all, the word "cybernetics" comes from concepts of piloting. The difference between cybernetics and the extended phenotype would perhaps be that the extended phenotype is concerned with drawing the shortest lines between genes and behavior. The feedback from behavior to genes is through differential survival, so the feedback loop wouldn't be tight enough, nor the causality tightly enough connected, that we can talk about cybernetic systems proper.

...or maybe we can, if we talk about cybernetic systems on the level of an entire genome and up. Apparently there's something called Schmalhausen's cybernetic approach.

He was the first to propose an evolutionary scenario of interaction of the main components of biosphere, from the subcellular level to the biocoenotic one. Evolution and speciation are considered in this scenario as a cybernetic cycle of regulated processes with direct and feed back

(I'm guessing that last bit would be direction and feedback.)

There's also this, which sounds intriguing, and this which I haven't the faintest idea what is but it sounds totally sci-fi.

eg., biocybernetics seems to be the study of regulatory processes within the organism.

[Technorati Richard Dawkins bionic badger cybergenetics cybernetic cybernetics extended phenotype lever-pulling]

T-shirt

Hmm. Hmmm.

A?

The scarlet letter? You're kidding. That's, um... very... postmodern?

Now I sort of want a T-shirt that says "Diagoras Fanclub" on it. I mean, one that isn't the logo for FC Diagoras. S'pose I'll have to make it myself.

Don't say a word — it's easy to pass as a Christian or a Muslim, you know.

Yes, and you'll find it easier to persuade people when they don't discount you as an outgroup member to be opposed from the outset. Shouldn't matter objectively of course, but given humanity's tendency to tribalism...

[Technorati A Out Campaign atheist bastardry]

DNA newly recovered episode

This interview with Douglas Adams was apparently recorded in 1979 and promptly failed to get sold to anyone: the tapes then spent two decades composting in a cupboard before being unearthed and published in Darker Matter. Lost episodes. How appropriate.

Especially interesting is that this has an early instance of the story of how the name hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy popped into his head. From this interview, we hear:

Then I suddenly remembered what had struck me six years previously – but I hadn't done anything about it and hadn't even remembered in the intervening time – which was when I had been hitchhiking around Europe, when I was a student or just before I went up to Cambridge, I had this book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe. And I remember wandering into a campsite in Innsbruck late one night, being not entirely sober, and the stars were all out and I just remember thinking at that time 'Somebody should write a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.'

Contrast with the version at Wikipedia.

Edit: I see from looking at Darker Matter's Technorati tag that it's in the process of closing. Oops.

[Technorati Darker Matter Douglas Adams hhgg]

Eternal meaning

More Douglas Adams:

It's very clear in the end - is it an A or a B? - ah! it's an A, because the person writing it was writing the word apple and that's clearly what it means. So, in the end, in the absence of an intentional creator, you cannot say what life is, because it simply depends on what set of definitions you include in your overall definition. Without a god, life is only a matter of opinion.

Which recalls the old complaint that without an authority-figure deity to mandate the dividing lines, we burn away the original ties that bound the meaning of mathematics to the world and instead leave it stranded on a solipsistic island of the human imagination. Because clearly, meaning has nothing to do with the human imagination; if the world doesn't conform 1:1 with what's in my head then everything is meaningless for all time.

Of course, the definition of life has always been a matter of opinion. It's just that with religion, people tend to deliberately suppress that things have ever been different — after all, it's an eternal truth, so how could it ever have changed? We've always been at war with Eurasia, etc.

[Technorati Orwellian atheist bastardry deliberate forgetting]

After education

Really catching up here, this news is only a week old. From The Register: Conservapedia too pinko? Try Metapedia.

Metapedia — literally after education, presumably it's where you would go when you're done learning — is an alternative wiki devoted to the pro-European cultural Kampf.

(Honestly, Pro-European? These people must be Americans to whom 'European' means 'white'.)

Oh look, it's our old friend cultural Marxism, complete with hallucinated conspiracies by The Frankfurter School. I told you the bastards had adopted "political correctness" as a convenient cover for creeping racism.

Well, at least now you can research white-supremacy pricks in one convenient place. I'd look into it more, but I have to find a way to block that bloody logo in the upper corner first. It's going to give me nightmares.

This probably needs to be refuted, since people will believe anything as long as it's blamed on communists:

Anti-racism is the Marxist ideology of opposition to “racism.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary the term “racist” was coined by Leon Davidovich Bronstein (Leon Trotsky). Anti-racism is a major focus of Cultural Marxism.

Of course, if they'd bothered to look up racialism they would have found an instance from 1907, long before Trotsky's 1930 book.

[Technorati European meaning white Frankfurter school Metapedia blame the commies creeping racism creepy logo cultural Marxism free speach hallucination political correctness retardpedia war on memory white scumbags]