Category: Science

Here are some thoughts:

So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility:
the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American
one. Aassve put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to
promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The
U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in
terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social
stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially
accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very
accepted.”

By this logic, the worst sort of system is one that
partly buys into the modern world – expanding educational and
employment opportunities for women – but keeps its traditional
mind-set. This would seem to define the demographic crisis that Italy,
Spain and Greece find themselves in – and, perhaps, Japan, South Korea,
Hong Kong, Taiwan and other parts of the world. Indeed, demographers
have been surprised to find rapid fertility changes in the third world,
as more and more women work and modern birth-control methods become
standard options. “The earlier distinct fertility regimes, ‘developed’
and ‘developing,’ are increasingly disappearing in global comparisons
of fertility levels,” according to Edward Jow-Ching Tu…the birthrate in 25 developing countries – including Cuba, Costa Rica,
Iran, Sri Lanka and China – now stands at or below the replacement
level.

Eating lunch in a working man’s restaurant in Hong Kong I hear mostly Cantonese but with occassional English words, "passion," for example.  Borrowed words or loanwords surely tell us something important about ideas or concepts that the first language lacks.  Most loanwords are for things (e.g. mouse for a computer device), it’s pretty easy to explain the adoption of such words.  But what about words for which the thing has always existed but not the word?  Chinese speakers tell me that there is a word for love but passion is more difficult to translate.

What are some of the major conceptual loanwords?  What do loanwords tell us about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? What loanwords does English need?  There appears to be a large literature in linguistics on the adoption and evolution of loanwords but less on the cultural significance of loanwords.  Comments?

Here is a fascinating article from The New Yorker, mostly about itching but not just.  Here is my favorite part:

A new scientific understanding of perception has emerged in the past few decades, and it has overturned classical, centuries-long beliefs about how our brains work–though it has apparently not penetrated the medical world yet. The old understanding of perception is what neuroscientists call “the naïve view,” and it is the view that most people, in or out of medicine, still have. We’re inclined to think that people normally perceive things in the world directly. We believe that the hardness of a rock, the coldness of an ice cube, the itchiness of a sweater are picked up by our nerve endings, transmitted through the spinal cord like a message through a wire, and decoded by the brain.

…Yet, as scientists set about analyzing the signals, they found them to be radically impoverished. Suppose someone is viewing a tree in a clearing. Given simply the transmissions along the optic nerve from the light entering the eye, one would not be able to reconstruct the three-dimensionality, or the distance, or the detail of the bark–attributes that we perceive instantly.

…The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor–a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.

And sorry, readers, for shouting in the header; sometimes I get carried away.  By the way, don’t let defenders of naive realism tell you that any attempt to contradict it is self-refuting.  Science proceeds in pieces, cross-tested in various ways, and the sum total of those pieces can revise our understanding away from naive realism without producing self-contradiction.

In reference to my Bloggingheads appearance, one loyal MR reader emails me:

you said don’t be certain, be 90-10 or 60-40 then [you] said 1-99 that humanity dies out when sun’s gone.

Yes, I believe the chance is very small that humanity survives the death of our sun or even gets close to that point.  I’ll give it p = .005.  But what’s the chance I think that is the correct p or even in the neighborhood of the correct p?  Maybe 60 percent.  Of course my p estimate could go either up or down and after I apply meta-rationality p = .005 is where I end up, for better or worse.  I expect that fragile estimate to undergo lots of revision as I age, read more, etc.  I just don’t know if it will go up or down, thereby satisfying one of Robin Hanson’s canons of rationality (or some approximation thereof).

Why am I skeptical?  The Fermi paradox, for one thing, plus I observe that humans aren’t very good at solving large-scale collective action problems.  Our environment may be more fragile than we had thought and that’s without even considering the impact of man.

Under one scenario, the shy become more extroverted and everyone enjoys their new bon mots and witty asides.  Gains from trade increase all around.  Under another scenario, shyness and extroversion are part of a larger positional game.  Some people take the anti-shyness drug, but the previous extroverts, facing new competition for sex and friends, become even more extroverted, thus feeling more strain.  Many of them start taking the drug to stay ahead.  The previously shy exhibit more "juice," so to speak, but without much net result in terms of an improved life since they are still coming in second, so to speak.  And those who don’t take the anti-shyness drug are even worse off than before, given the new and higher standard for extroversion.

Some of the remaining shy, however, might in fact feel relieved.  If the new standard of extroversion rises so high that they can’t possibly meet it, they might, to some extent, withdraw from social competition.  The truly shy might even form social clubs and band together in the interests of promoting shyness.  If they can signal that they do not take the drug, their shyness might become more socially acceptable than before.

Seth Roberts asks:

The photo shows the full faces of 22 men; 7 of them are touching
their mouths. I have noticed something similar at many faculty
meetings. I started to notice this after I read about its observation
in a study designed to measure something else.

I’ve known about this for many years but have never read an
explanation. Do we enjoy touching our mouths – or is the absence of
touch for a  long time unpleasant? If so, why?

Here is one poker player’s answer.

…the modelling, done by the world-renowned Hadley Centre at the Met
Office but using emissions calculated by the Stockholm Network,
highlighted three problems: ‘Current policy comes in too slowly, it
internationalises too slowly and it binds developing countries too
late.’

Privately, many climate scientists believe it will be impossible to
meet the 2C target, but they are reluctant to say so because they do
not want to discourage moves to cut emissions.

Here is more and that is from The Guardian not National Review.  I believe that some parts of the world will be in for a very rough ride.

By the way, while I was in Japan I read that a) about half the world’s people are consuming subsidized energy, not taxed energy, and b) Chinese energy-users are typically paying about half of the world price.  Recent energy price increases in India have induced riots.  Those are all signs of the magnitude of the problem.

Here and here.

Hat tip to Kottke.

Until recently, nearly all the thinking about the risks of space-rock strikes has focused on counting craters.  But what if most impacts don’t leave craters?  This is the prospect that troubles Boslough.  Exploding in the air, the Tunguska rock did plenty of damage…

That is Gregg Easterbrook in the latest Atlantic Monthly, June issue, "The Sky is Falling," not yet on-line.  Here are previous MR posts on the asteroid problem.

I am still thinking about Nick Bostrom’s stimulating essay (and Robin Hanson’s precursor essay).  Nick of course is worried about finding signs of alien life, which would suggest that life has arisen many times, leading to the question "where are they?" and the fear that life dies out pretty easily.  For Nick it is cheerier, from our point of view at least, to think it is very hard for life to get underway in the first place.

In pondering the Fermi question, I often wonder if I am not simply missing the party, so to speak.  Most people already *do* think they see signs of an alien presence of some kind, of course defining that concept broadly to include The Gods.  So how can we say we don’t see "them"?  Maybe I, the agnotheist, don’t see "them" (Him?) but surely most other people think they do.

Doesn’t that make the Fermi paradox go away in a snap?  No one cites Blind Boy Blake and screams "He doesn’t see them!".

Another way of putting it is to say we don’t take David Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion seriously enough.  We really have just one data point, so who can say what "they" look like, or what kind of "display" they would have made for us?

Alternatively, I am struck by the tension between the Fermi paradox with the "We are probably living in a simulation" claim.  Both are popular with the same group of people because they are nerdy ways of making you believe something weird; in reality the two conundrums don’t fit together.  If you take the simulation option seriously, you again see the creators all around you, albeit in disguised or cloaked form.  Of course you had to use Bayesian inferential reasoning to see them, but what’s wrong with that?  Better than a telescope, some would say.  And since most people believe in God, the creators might even consider their artwork to be already "signed."  (I’ll note rapidly in passing that the arguments against the simulation hypothesis also strike at the Fermi worries, but establishing that would take lots of work.)

Either way, it seems we see "them," or ought to think we see them, even if that turns out to be a visual mistake of sorts.

Addendum: I liked Michael Goodfellow’s point:

After that first species gets control, it makes all the rules.  If it shells over all the stars, no other life can even develop, since all the planets are frozen solid.  If it wants to let biological evolution continue, it can do that, by avoiding stars with fertile planets.  It can prevent any other technology from arising (by monitoring all the planets where life is evolving.)  It can guide or change any life that it does find.

This may seem horrible to you — little robots putting all the stars out!  Spreading like a weed and killing or preventing any new life from developing.  But you’re looking at it the wrong way…The first species out there gets to decide the future, for every species that follows.  For lack of any other evidence, let’s hope it’s us.

Splendid, but I part company at the last sentence.  There is some other evidence (of the Bayesian sort) and I think the most logical assumption is — whether you believe in God or space aliens — to think of ourselves as their product, one way or another.

Or to put it yet another way, what’s the principle of individuation here?  Isn’t "seeing us" and "seeing them" more or less the same thing?

Hail David Hume!

Economists say that people buy insurance to cover themselves if something bad happens.  Some experiments by psychologists suggest that people buy insurance because they think it will prevent the bad thing from happening.   John Tierney has more.

Wow.  It’s supposed to amount to about 90,000 pages; here is an article about the project.  Here are a few indicated highlights.