Examining the man behind the curtain

I was reading earlier on "The man behind the curtain"
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/num2/2011/3/the-man-behind-the-curtain/2 , where Tony Rothman describes how the lay person understanding of physics ascribes a higher level of clarity to them than what they really have, and that the scientist have been hiding this, equating it to the way Dorothy saw the Wizard of Oz for the first time.
But I wonder...Is this description truthful? It seems to me that some of the most famous science popularizers of physics have always described this state of lack of knowledge as the most intriguing part of physics (and of science in general). Feynman was the greatest at stating this, in multiple ways, like  "Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get "down the drain," into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that." (Source of Quote: Wikipedia). Even more modern ones like Brian Greene don't hide this. He even has a section called "Puzzles and Progress" in his book, The Fabric of Cosmos, and I would say that he is one of the most "positive" physicists in regards to the possibilities of science. 
So, where does this perception comes from? I would use Mr. Rothman's quote from Eugene Wigner's book, "The Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the Natural Sciences"  to find an answer. Well, the thing with physics is that it works (http://xkcd.com/54/) . To an unreasonable level. The fine structure constant has a precision of 0.37 parts per billion. We have now quantum clocks that won't get out of synchronization of more than 1 second in one billion years. And I could go on and on with examples of superbly precise levels of knowledge.
And for most of the general public, the "science" part that they see is what will affect them, not what it explains of nature. So they see the great advances, the absurdly precise measurements, and they do not care about the little details. I do agree with Mr. Rothman that we should probably increase the public understanding about the real nature of science, which is to constantly doubt what you think is certain, and to constantly look where you haven't before. This would help us a lot when parts of science that have high probability of certitude but not the complete details of reality (like climate change for example) are being attacked due to "lack of 100% certitude.

Another point where I disagree with the article is in his tirade against the freshman/pre graduate level text books, and their lack of precision. Yes, they overgeneralize, and smooth out the rough points that are present in the edge of physics. But you know what? At the edge of physics (or any other science) there SHOULD be rough edges. That's why it's called research. Because we don't know what we are going to find!. But just as you don't teach the ballet beginners of all the issues that they may have on their joints/muscles on the first class (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11567921, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7618011, and lots of other ones), you don't expect that freshmen in any area of knowledge will see the doubts that arise in the harshest of the intellectual environments. It's not the way that you teach people about anything.

There is also the issue of the conflating the present with the future. Yes, we may not know now how/what it is exactly happening, but it's a logic error to think that this will always be the case, that we will always remain completely ignorant.

And following this point, what he seems to be approaching is the issue of the possibility of knowledge, and how detailed can we get before we can't go further down, and if the fact that we can't have complete knowledge of anything without using unproven priors nullify the possibility of knowledge. As Feynman said "We can't define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers… one saying to the other: "you don't know what you are talking about!". The second one says: "what do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you? What do you mean by know?" (Source of Quote: Wikipedia) That is more for philosopher's to discuss than for physicists, although when the field becomes so advanced, it would probably benefit the physicist to dabble in philosophy, to clarify exactly are the epistemological issues of what they are doing. I don't think that the fact that we don't understand a problem completely means that we don't know anything about the problem. That ignores the fact that nature seems to have magnitude scale differences.  Even if  you don't know what happens in the lower scale, you can  KNOW what is happening in the upper scale.
He finishes saying that we should not confuse description with understanding. I would say that he shouldn't confuse incompleteness of knowledge with lack of knowledge.

Procrastination

A couple of days ago, I was listening to the podcast "Philosophy Talk", about procrastination. As probably anybody that has ever blogged in their life knows, it is so easy to leave a post for "later on", when you have more time to "concentrate" on the blog post, when you can "really write" what you want.
Most of the time, this means..., well, no post.
Some of the concepts in the podcast that tickled my fancy were "short term mood repair" and "unfairness to your future self". Let me explain a little bit.
The first one, short term mood repair, has to do with one of the possible reasons of why we procrastinate. And it has to do with our natural tendency to favor things that will make us feel better, in the short run. It may be by eating, having sex, sleeping, etc, but the important thing is that we give undue importance to these short term advantages, even when you are completely conscious that you will pay the consequences afterwards (obesity, divorce, being late).
 This is very important, as it is an underlying concept not only of procrastination, but of multiple other concepts. For example, you could define maturity simply as a transition from caring only for the short term mood repair to realizing the importance of long term goals.
Also this could be one of the main factors affecting our current economy troubles, as most large publicly traded corporations need to have their quarterly earnings showing improvement, even at the cost of long term investments (unless you have other checks and balances, which are very weak in this day and age.
The second concept, unfairness to your future self, has to do with the morality (or lack of it) of procrastination. Most people consider procrastination as an issue dealing with the question of free will and/or how the different decision modules of our brain coordinate a final decision.
But rarely I've heard the morality of procrastination being discussed. I don't mean that people don't consider this factor, but I have the impression (not based in data at this time) that most people intrinsically consider procrastination as a "bad" moral action, without thinking "why" is it bad. Here is where the concept of unfairness to your future self comes in. Because by not doing something you actually ARE doing something, that is you are affect the time distribution of your own self in the future, restricting its freedom, just because of your procrastination. And it's even worse, as you are doing it on purpose!. This argument really made my day, as I had never hear it before.
I do think this argument is not completely airtight, because the you in the future is completely dependent on your actual self, and you can't avoid going to the future, so even if the side effect of procrastinating is in the future, taking the decision in the present is appropriate. Negating this would imply that you don't have much rights over your own self, and things like private property, the right of suicide/abortion/healthcare decisions should not be left to us,
Anyways, I have to go do something else. Or play this nice video game here....

Coevolution and "species"

Reading this article (http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-instant-evolution-whiteflies-bacteria.html ), about how a group of sweet potato whiteflies increased their fitness after being infected by a bacteria (Rickettsia, to be specific), made me think about how we define organisms and "species".

In today's evolutionary biology there is a large discussion of how to define "species"(Jerry Coyne wrote a great blogpost about that here http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/more-on-species-part-1/). But most people don't really have this fine appreciation of the difficulties in using the concept. In most places, the equivalence of species to one of the "platonic" (in quotes, because I don't think people use it consciously) types is what people use. So a dog is a dog is a dog. People don't realize that there is a large degree of variation, and lots of dogs are more similar to a wolf than other, the same way that a lot of wolves are more similar to a dog than other, depending on the population.

And things like this symbiosis between a bacteria and a whitefly makes it even more confusing, as you could always argue that the whiteflies that have the bacteria are a completely different species, to the point that they replaced almost all the ones without a bacteria. But then you would have to say that just by symbiosis you changed your species! This obviously would make even more interesting (conceptually at least) the study of the microbiome (the ecosystem of microorganisms) of the human gut, to see if you have subpopulations that have a significant different microbiome to the others, to the point that they have different functions. How interesting it would be if we could manipulate this to give ourselves extra abilities (Yes, sir, take an enema of this microbiome, and your cholesterol level will drop by half).

I think that as the thinking species in our world, we have to start becoming more open to use the symbiosis that we have available to modify our health and our intrinsic characteristics as the "human" species.

3 moral quandaries to think about

Reading this article "Expertise in Moral Reasoning? Order Effects on Moral Judgment in Professional Philosophers and Non-Philosophers", by Eric Schwitzgebel, I had to review some of the most interesting thinking points in morality. Even more because I've realized that everytime I think about them I reach different conclusions.

Moral Luck: You can be declared morally responsible for something that is not completely under your control...or not? Typical example is the drunk trailer truck driver. If he arrives home without an accident, do you blame him as much as you would if he, completely by chance, runs over a little girl instead? If you do, then you would have to have a very severe application of moral guilt, for a lot of actions that all of us take almost every day. But if you don't, then you are saying that the action that he did by volition (drinking) is not determining the morality endpoint, but the action that he did by chance (running over the little girl) is. Therefore you could have morality decisions depending of random situations.

Double effect: Is it worse to harm a person as means to save others versus harming that person as a side effect of you saving them? This to me it is a specific case of the moral luck dilemma, because if you know in advance that the side effect is going to happen, then you knowingly are harming the patient. On the other hand, if you don't know, then we are going into the moral luck question again.

Action and Omission: Is it morally worse to cause somebody to drown, or to not save that person (taking into account that saving the person wouldn't affect you in a significant fashion) if you are able to?

One of the problems that I see with answering these questions (and I suppose it is one of the main ones with any kind of philosophical questioning) is that it has a large number of suppositions integrated in the questions. And this makes it difficult to think and discuss with others, as they may have different assumptions about the same premises. It has to do with how do you view determinism versus free will, and the responsibility of the individual over the societal ones.

Again, an interesting read.

How to divide your pirate map.

Say you have 5 pirate descendants(you are the pirate King after all). You want them to remain united, at least 3 or more.

You left them a map of your treasure. How do you make sure that only one or two can't find it?

Make a circle, with the treasure at some point of the circumference (for example the southernmost). Mark 5 points on that circle. Give the direction of a point to each of your descendants. Now by geometry they HAVE to have 3 or more points to find where is the treasure (as 2 points can't really reconstruct a circle, you need at least 3!)

Genius.

http://edge.org/q2011/q11_9.html

Trying new approach

Well, clearly blogging once a year is not the best.

I'm going to try something different. Put one idea/concept that I thought it was great/interesting and discuss it a little bit.

This will help me also to remember it and have it for reference later.

Twitter thinking

As millions before me, I've discovered twitter (at www.twitter.com). For those who don't know, Twitter is a way of exchanging short messages (of 140 letters or less) between you and your "followers", that is, people that has subscribed to your list of comments. I have to admit that it's a very entrancing way of communicating with other people. The immediacy of it gives you a feeling of personal interaction that you can't find in most of the other media. But there are other things to consider about it.

While you can use it as a information gathering tool, or just a a blog advertising venue, a lot of people utilize Twitter to post comments or short thoughts about a particular topic. And this is the factor that I don't like. Due to the 140 characters' limitation, your comments on a particular topic have to be, by the nature of the media...up to 140 characters. And while this has the laudable characteristic of making you be more concise and precise in your thought pathways(something that I approve completely and don't apply sadly most of the time!), it has the negative effect of oversimplifying the issues. 

This characteristic makes Twitter a tool only to publish "first level" thinking (see previous post of September 29, 2008). That is, the most basic and rough conclusion that you can come up for a particular problem. While this is avoided when you only publish a link to a more extensive article, what this makes in most of the cases, is to make people complacent on their thoughts. They publish this rough idea, and a lot of times you will not continue developing it, because...well, because you already talked about it!. 

One possible objection to this line of thinking is the conception that if you can't explain something in a short sentence or couple of sentences, then you don't really understand what you are talking about. While I may agree with this premises for certain type of explanations, like basic concepts or definitions that you need to know for a problem, I disagree completely that you can explain a multi layered thought pathway in 140 characters. Saying it in another way...you may easily make a screwdriver with 2 pieces, but the car that you are building with it will by necessity need many pieces. 

What can be the consequences in the long run? Well, if you get used to this way of exchanging ideas, you have the risk of becoming used to it, and start self editing your thought pathways away from Twitter, and making decisions based on this poor amount of evidence. And due to this our grasp at reality will become much more basic(in the bad sense of the word) and tenuous. 

Also this may foster non productive discussions, when 2 members discuss different points of views, without realizing that each one misinterpreted the original statement due to the lack of clarification.

So for myself, I will try to control my impulse of publishing all my thoughts there, without further polishing in a more extensive media...like this blog! Also, I don't want to be unfair with Twitter. I think it's a great tool for exposing yourself to different experiences and thought pathways of people in very different areas of human culture. Just know that you may not be getting their whole depth.

This post is obviously more than 140 characters, I think now it's time to think another thought!