‘Healthy’ red wine data is bogus - Science, science and #scientism

An AP story has the details:

A University of Connecticut researcher known for his work on the benefits of red wine to heart health falsified his data in more than 100 instances, and nearly a dozen scientific journals are being warned of the potential problems after publishing his studies in recent years, officials said Wednesday.

UConn officials said their internal review found 145 instances over seven years in which Dr. Dipak Das fabricated and falsified data, and the U.S. Office of Research Integrity has launched an independent investigation of his work.

There’s no indication of the motive, but the university just turned down nearly $1 million in federal grants related to the fake research.

Meanwhile, at least one resveratrol seller is scurrying to distance itself from these findings.

It's not surprising.


First, even legitimate medical claims have a much lower margin of error for false positives, or p-value, than do natural sciences research. 5 percen vs. 0.01 percent is huge indeed.


But, that's secondary to the huge nature of the fraud, and the second half of the header for this post.


Scientism is obvious to those who know about.


For those who don't, it's a bit of hyperrationalism that says almost everything in your, my and Horatio's universe is understandable by scientific investigation. Some Gnu Atheists engage in it, notably Sam Harris. Some "professional skeptics" at least skirt its edges.


Other "professional skeptics," along with some scientists, don't go that far but are bad enough.


For them, Science with a capital-S is put forth instead of science.


I use the capital-S Science for a Platonic Idea of science, if you will. The professional skeptics and some scientists claim that science is not only the best endeavor of the human mind, but that it's on a plane all by itself. In situations such as the above, though, they're stuck. Was Das never a scientist? Or, rather, a Scientist? Like a lapsed Christian, was he once a Scientist, only to become a heretic?


And here, though Science doesn't have exactly the same take on scientific research as does scientism, the end result ... idealizing science some way, and even as a quasi-belief system, is the same.


The reality? Science is no less a human endeavor and no more one, as far as ethics of its practitioners, than any other. Beyond the laughable but mild problems of Gnu-style atheists, we've seen Nazi and Japanese medical experimentation, Soviet Lamarckianism at the hands of Lysenko and much more.


The idea of rational, ethical, human behavior is one we hope for in fields outside of science, anyway. We shouldn't expect science to do better at it than we do other fields.

Some poetic thoughts on the "real" cowboy Texas

LITTERED LANDSCAPES

Opportunisitic prickly pear

Prickly pear. Agave. Mountain cedar.

Patches of mesquite and the occasional crown of thorns.

Each sightly at times,

Picturesque, naturalistic.

But often, in the Texas Hill Country,

A sign of something else –

Man’s scarring of the soil,

Littered landscapes.

Opportunistic plants from dryland edges

Found their chance to invade

Overgrazed pasturelands, stony hills and cloudy draws.

When you eat that Texas beef on your plate,

The fuzzy-edged, grasping and extending fingers

Of the Chihuahuan Desert,

And its semidesert outliers,

Thank you.

When you admire an “authentic” Hill Country mock ranch

For artifice from drier lands

The desert flora thank you.

Yes, a few of the specimens were in place

Before Texas cattlemen, or “Old West” realtors

But not like this.

Beauty is in the eye – and the knowledge – of the beholder.

            Jan. 7, 2012

R. Joseph Hoffmann: frenemy of modern secular humanism

R. Joseph Hoffmann, religious scholar, former chair of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, and former associate editor of the journal Free Inquiry is a good secular humanist in many ways.

He’s insightful enough about the realities of religion, and knowledgeable enough about the history of secular humanism, that Gnu Atheists can’t refute most of his claims against their atheist evangelism and the concepts on which it is built.

But, in a blog post like this, “Complacency and Excess,” he earns the title above: “frenemy of modern secular humanism.” I’m not a fan of neologisims that are Internet or entertainment derived, but I make an exception in this case.

I’ve said before that Hoffmann’s brand of humanism is an Enlightenment-era humanism, one from the era when scientists were still “natural philosophers.” I don’t know if Free Inquiry founder Paul Kurtz was quite as much that way as Hoffmann is, but Hoffmann is definitely that way.

For example, in a blog post of about a month or two ago, he went beyond criticizing overblown claims some neuroscientists make for what tools like fMRIs of today show about brain functioning to, at least as I saw it, criticizing the entire idea of daring to make too much scientific investigation of what the mind is.

The “frenemy” part, and related concerns, starts here:

Let me stay with that last point for a minute–the belief that only science can answer all of our questions.

While it’s true that many Gnus believe that, not all do. More to the point of my previous critique, successors to fMRIs, CT scans, single-emission positron scans, etc., may just reveal much more of the brain’s working, on a smaller scale, and in something nearer to “real time.”

Next comes a “huh” comment like this:

Can the numinous collapsing of all empirical religious traditions into the word “religion” (equivalent to the equally mystical collapsing of all scientific inquiry into the word “science”) be justified on the basis of a prior assumption–because that’s what it is–that gods don’t exist?

I agree with the idea behind the first half of the quote. Liberal Episcopaleanism is nothing like the Church of Christ, for example. But, the part in parenthesis is a head-scratcher, at the least.

First of all, when did “collapsing” become “mystical” in this instance? Second, is Hoffmann confounding “science” with “scientism”? Take away “mystical” and I’d agree with his parenthetical observation IF that is the case. But, IF that is the case, then Hoffmann’s engaging in either sloppy verbiage or goalpost shifting.

And there's more that to come, if you'll look below the fold.

The worse angels of Steve Pinker's bloviating

John Gray nails it; Pinker, as a libertarian with hard Pop Evolutionary Psychology leanings (Gray himself doesn't call Pinker out on that), kind of boxed himself in a corner in "Blank Slate" a decade ago. And, so, "The Better Angels of our Nature" starts out behind the curve.



If people's minds are largely a fixed template, it's hard to explain evolution to non-violence, or lesser violence, isn't it? Of course, Gray does note what I've noted: In the U.S., violence-making has been institutionalized due to the repressive policies of the War on Drugs. And, more interestingly, and more hypocritically, Pinker doesn't object, to the degree he looks at U.S. incarceration rates at all.


He also, as I've noted elsewhere, ignores World War I, WWII, the Holocaust (even using a 1930s European Jewish writer as his starting point) and more.


Timothy Snyder discusses other problems with and failings of the book. To consider violence as strategic, not just hydraulic, a result of societal pressures, means that H. sapiens has great capacity for cynical behavior, among other things. And, it ignores other loads of social science research.


One other brief observation on my part: While Pinker may be right that some people have a Rousellian, or "Gods Must Be Crazy," naivete toward the past, at the same time, he has a Pop Ev Psych "bloody red in tooth and claw" counter-naivete. Fact is that pre-agricultural humans were scavenger-gatherers long before they were hunter-gatherers, among other things that Pop Ev Psychers like to ignore. That issue alone has relevance to the issue of human violence and individual and social psychological malleability.

Book review: 'Cynics'

Cynics by William Desmond

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a very good introduction to Capital-C Cynicism the philosophy, which is much different in many ways from cynicism the social behavior, though Cynics did at times act in a way that we might today call specifically cynical.

In the first semester of my college Philosophy 101 course, Cynics (and Skeptics) got short shrift among ancient Greek philosophies, not only compared to Socrates/Plato/Aristotle, but also compared to the Stoics, the Presocratics and to a degree, even the Epicureans.

Which is too bad, and was partially founded on wrong ideas.

First, the Cynics aren't sprung from the font of Socrates; the movement arguably has Presocratic roots, as Desmond shows. And, since Zeno the founder of Stoicism studied from a Cynic before going off on his own, Desmond notes the parallels between the two, and the likely direction of influence, an influence that continued as late as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius both shows tints of Cynic stances.

Second, Desmond shows that Cynics were acting the way they were in what might be called an activist Westernized version of Zen. At their best, Cynics were encouraging a kind of activist detachment from conventional thoughts and mores, and even from all but the barest of physical needs.

That said, while some of their antics, like Diogenes telling Alexander to get out of his light, sound courages and enlightened, others, like Diogenes' masturbating in public, were as repulsive to his fellow Greeks as they are to readers today. But that was the intent.

Finally, Desmond addresses the "new search for the historical Jesus" types like John Dominic Crossan, who claim Jesus was the Jewish equivalent of a Cynic sage, and finds them largely wanting. It is true that Gadara of Legionary demoniac fame was an old center of Cynic thought, but the parallels between Jesus and a Iamblichus or similar are few and tendentious.

You'll learn all that and much more in this easy-to-read introduction to a sadly neglected and misunderstood school of philosophical thought.



View all my reviews

Sometimes the trouble does never happen

Mark Twain has a famous quote, which has been botched a bit here and there, but which I believe is authoritatively rendered as, "I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened."

Well, I can personally relate to that.

I had a notice from the Postal Service in my box Tuesday night, to sign for a certified letter at the post office. My mind was racing.


Did my old apartment complex suddenly decide it wanted additional money from me somehow? (Even as I have two noncertified letters, one from the complex, one from the parent company, both of which came in the last week, on my table. But, I know what I signed, and signed for, when I moved.)


Did that traffic ticket I got lawyered out of two of three counts, but paid the remaining one, have the money order incorrect? 


Something worse?


Well, it was from the Dallas County Sheriff's Office, which made me more nervous at first, since they're the folks who pulled me over in 2009.


What was it actually for?


I had a applied for a PR job, public information officer, with the office. I was being notified I didn't make the final cut - notified by certified letter.


I've played Twain's quote in my head many a time, but never before have I had this concrete of confirmation.

Poem: Too soon to tell

TOO SOON TO TELL

A new job.

New bosses. New responsibilities.

Not-so-new computers.

Anger. Antsiness. Impatience. Control issues.

Was this the right decision?

Did I choose wisely in coming here?

Per Zhou Enlai,

When he was asked about the success

Of the French Revolution:

“It’s too soon to tell.”

It’s too soon to tell.

My mind will be a jumble

And even a bit shell-shocked

For more than a month.

Will weekend visits to Austin help?

To the degree they do,will they be worth the price?

It’s too soon to tell.

Was it just fear of change?

Or was my intuition correctly ringing out

A blaze of three alarms or more?

Should I have suffered

Through yet more feelings of being trapped,

Through low-grade ongoing anxieties,

Rather than the potential of high-voltage unknowns?

It’s too soon to tell.

When I left Dallas for Odessa,

The first domino of moving to fall in this chain,

After two months of unemployment,

Anxious over job hunting,

And recognizing the severity of the recession,

Yet loath to move

And depressed as I drove across the Permian,

Was it good or bad?

It’s too soon to tell.

Good and bad are relative, and utilitarian;

I did nothing “wrong” any of these times.

But I made decisions

In uncertainty, without knowing even

Rough percentages on outcomes.

And, so, in that utilitarian sense,

As to whether these choices were good or bad?

It’s too soon to tell.

December 26, 1963 – was it good or bad?

It’s too soon to tell.

            Jan. 3, 2012