Footy skills

April 25, 2019 • 2:30 pm

UPDATE: Speaking of soccer greats, I’d urge you to read this post from 2012, in which I interviewed renowned soccer commentator Seamus Malin about the best games and players he’d ever seen. I really like that post.

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In honor of the birthday of Johan Cruyff, I present a 6.5-minute video of great soccer skills displayed on the field. (This was suggested to me by YouTube when I was watching a Cruyff video, and I liked this one. YouTube suggestions, though, are one of the greatest time sinks around.) If you get a “Go to Youtube” message when you click here, just click on the “Watch on YouTube” line.

I especially like the “seal dribble” (0:30), Ronaldinho’s flick (1:35), Higuita’s save (4:35, but did he need to save that way?), and Draxler’s backwards pass (5:24). But they’re all great; I can’t imagine playing soccer at this level.

Two philosophers guilty of “philosophism” with respect to brain differences and free will

April 25, 2019 • 12:00 pm

If “scientism” is the bad tendency of scientists to pronounce on matters outside their bailiwick, them I hereby proffer a new term: “philosophism“. And I define it as “the practice of philosophers pronouncing on matters outside their expertise”.  In the article below from the Irish Times, two philosophers Helen Beebee (University of Manchester) and Michael Rush (University of Birmingham) decide that questions of brain differences between sexes and genders, as well as the existence of free will, are questions that should not be left to scientists. (It’s common for philosophers to claim hegemony over free will at the expense of neuroscience). Their views constitute a good specimen of philosophism.

To be fair, they don’t completely agree with each other, and give science some room with questions of brain differences, but they still seem confused and muddled on both issues. I’ll explain below, but first read the short piece by Joe Humphreys, who interviews them both (I’ll use their initials when quoting the philosophers).

Joe Humphreys immediately irritated me at the start of the article with this characterization:

Science and philosophy have had a strained relationship in recent times. Their roles resemble that of a wide-eyed child and her grumpy uncle. Each time the youngster runs in with a new discovery, the older relative harrumphs: “Is that all? Sure, that doesn’t amount to anything?”

Philosophical pooh-poohing of neuroscience is particularly pronounced, especially giddy claims that brain scans have unlocked the secrets of human consciousness. Atheistic thinkers like Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne have latched onto current research to declare that free will does not exist. Rather, they say, our every decision is encoded in nature – a stance known as determinism.

First of all, I don’t know anyone who claims that “brain scans have unlocked the secrets of human consciousness.” Further, why are Sam and I described as “atheistic thinkers”? Our atheism has nothing to do with our views on free will or gender differences between brains, views that come from a scientific standpoint, not from our rejection of gods.

But never mind. The first philosophical misstep comes from Rush, who says this (questions in bold come from Humpreys):

Every couple of weeks there is a new study out on whether men’s and women’s brains differ. The majority view among neuroscientists now seems to be that brains are, in fact, gendered but it’s due to nurture rather than nature. What role do philosophers have in this debate?

MR: “If the differences come from nurture – which seems plausible if we’re talking about gender, because gender is a social phenomenon rather than a biological one – then the differences are not in any interesting way differences between kinds of brain; they’re differences in what we do to brains, or what kind of things we can make brains into.

“If we’re talking about the sexed nature of brains – a biological rather than a social phenomenon – then it’s plausible that there are differences between male and female brains, since they are intimately linked to, for instance, hormones, and the presence and levels of certain hormones vary depending on which sex one is.

“One role that philosophers have in this debate, as they have in any debate, is keeping the discussion honest.

“Neuroscientists can tell us what differences there are, if any, between male and female brains; philosophers can explain why the mere existence of the differences wouldn’t entitle us, despite what many people seem to think, to say that they were innate or outside our control.”

Let me be brief. Contra Rush, gender may be a biological phenomenon in an important way: someone who is born, say, in a male body who feels that they are female, and takes steps to look or identify as female, may well have done so because of biology. Transgender people often say that they feel they are of a different gender from their birth sex from a very young age. While this feeling could be socially conditioned, it may well be—and must often be—the result of cryptic biological phenomena, including wiring in the brain.

At least Rush admits that there could be biological differences between male and female brains: I hope so, because there’s plenty of evidence for that.  But what is this with philosophers “keeping the discussion honest”? Do we scientists tend to dishonesty? Further, what is this about scientists being unable to tell us which differences are “innate” (presumably biological differences that may be evolved) or “outside our control.” Both of these are empirical determinations that are the bailiwick of scientists and empiricists, not philosophers. Philosophers can add clarity to discussions, and help weed out bad arguments, but they cannot tell us what is empirically true. Whether a phenomenon is “innate” or “produced by social forces” are empirical questions.

And who is going to keep the philosophers honest? (Curmudgeons like me, I guess.)

The confusion between social conditioning and inborn biological features continues, but let’s pass on to what really interests me: free will.  Note when you read the discussion that neither Beebee nor Rush ever explicitly define what they mean by free will when they pronounce on it. At least “atheist thinkers” like Sam and I define it (we think of it as libertarian “you could have done otherwise” free will). In the bit below, Rush claims that free will is not a scientific matter because you cannot “run an experiment” on it. Jebus! What a canard! (That’s an insult to ducks.)

Another battle ground between neuroscience and philosophy surrounds the question of free will. Is there an experiment that could be designed to settle the matter once and for all?

MR: “No. Whether there is free will is not the sort of thing we can tell by looking. It’s easy to get carried away with the widespread successes of the scientific method and start assuming that it is the only – rather than just a really fruitful – way of getting to know things about the world.

“Some things, like what happens when you chuck caesium in the bath, are most easily discovered by, well, in that particular case, grabbing some caesium and chucking it in the bath. And standing well back.

“Some things we can’t discover by running an experiment. But if we can’t send out a search party to see if we have free will, and we don’t think the question is hopeless, how else might we set about it?

“What we do first is we define in careful terms just what we mean by asking if an action is free. Once we’ve decided what we’re asking about, we consider our other theoretical commitments, and we see if free will is consistent with those. Both those essential tasks are very difficult, but neither is achievable by running an experiment.”

Ummm. . . what about the series of experiments showing that you can predict people’s decisions with a significant level of accuracy by scanning their brains? Those are experiments, aren’t they? What about experiments in which brains are stimulated to produce “involuntary” actions, giving people a sense of agency where it doesn’t exist? What about diseases that efface people’s sense of agency? These are all empirical matters, and many are experiments; all bear on at least my conception of free will.

Rush, I fear, is either ignorant of these data or is using the usual anti-science trope in which something is claimed to be true but outside of science because “you can’t run an experiment on it.” Well, it happens to be the case that a lot of science depends not on experiments but on observations, analysis, and predictions. There are almost no experiments described in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Does that mean it’s not science? What about figuring out how stars evolve over time? That’s observation, not experiment. And so on. This is not rocket science, Drs. Beebee and Rush!

I will claim that because the laws of physics affecting matter are observed to hold universally, this shows that we have no free will in the contracausal sense. Our brains are matter, what we do depends on our brains and what impinges on them, and therefore our actions must be determined by the laws of physics alone. (This includes those laws that mandate some pure indeterminism, like the behavior of electrons. But that indeterminism still comports with the physical determinism of free will because we cannot use our will to affect electrons.)

Here Dr. Beebee also gets muddled about free will:

Thinkers on free will have divided into three camps: determinists (who say all future states of mind have prior causes in line with best scientific thinking), free-willists (who reject determinism), and compatibilists (who see no contradiction between free will and determinism). Which one are you?

HB: “Well, I’m not sure about determinism; I think that’s one for the physicists to figure out. But I’m a compatibilist so I think even if determinism turned out to be true, we would have free will.

“We wouldn’t be controlled by the laws of nature, or by our brains – as though we’d just be puppets being controlled by some unseen puppet-master. To put it crudely, there isn’t enough of a gap between me and my brain for it to really make sense to think that my brain is somehow controlling me. And as for the idea that laws of nature control me, well, I’m not even sure that makes sense.”

The physicists have already figured out that determinism refutes the notion of contracausal free will defined as ‘free will’ by people like Sam and me. Read some Sean Carroll (a compatibilist), Dr. Beebee! But note that she doesn’t define free will.

But she’s a compatibilist, so she has to adhere to at least one concept of free will that’s compatible with determinism. Sadly, she doesn’t say which one. And her second paragraph, in which she denies being a puppet is confusing. Beebee’s statement that “there isn’t enough of a gap between me and my brain for it to really make sense to think that my brain is somehow controlling me” is a simple Deepity. What kind of gap is she talking about? Finally, it makes perfect sense to say that the “laws of nature control me”: that’s what physical determinism of behavior is all about. I get the sense here that Beebee may be out of her depth, or else is using philosospeak to somehow attack determinism.

Some final waffling by Dr. Rush:

What about you Michael? Is determinism a rational stance?

MR: I think the answer is ‘yes’, but there are a couple of questions worth keeping separate. Is it rational to believe that every event was fully caused by some preceding event, according to the operation of some fixed natural laws? Sure.

“Whether that’s true, and what those laws are, look like jobs for physics to concern itself with. The second question is more worrying to some people: Is it rational to believe that if determinism were true we would have no free will? I think the answer to that is ‘yes’ as well.

“It’s also rational to believe we would have free will under those conditions. Whether or not we have free will won’t be decided by whether either view is irrational, just like two scientists can both be rational but disagree about whether the evidence they share points to the existence of a new boson.

Well, at least he argues that determinism (which is true) is a rational stand. As far as the “worrying” second question, “Is it rational to believe that if determinism were true we would have no free will?”, Rush waffles. All he needs to say is “yes, we have no free will in the contracausal sense if determinism is true, but if you define free will in a compatibilist way, then yes, we might have a form of free will.” The first question, whether contracausal free will exists, has already been answered in the negative, by evidence. The question of whether we have compatibilist free will is a semantic and philosophical one, and depends on your definition. Of course compatibilists always define free will in a way that we do have it: that, after all, is why they are compatibilists.

This is not rocket science, but somehow both Beebee and Rush manage to mangle language and thought, and wind up confusing the reader.

I defy the scientifically-minded layperson to read this piece and, at least with respect to free will, come up with a summary of what these two philosophers really think. All I can discern is that they want to elbow themselves into issues of free will that are susceptible to scientific investigation, and, keeping the scientists “honest”, want to tell us, “Hey, listen to us philosophers!”  This is a prime example of philosphism.

 

h/t: Michael

Williams College student council rejects formation of pro-Israel group

April 25, 2019 • 10:30 am

The College Council of Williams College, a student-run group that regulates and votes on student initiatives, has just voted to reject registration for the group “WIFI” : Williams Initiative for Israel.  You can read the article by clicking on the screenshot, though I’ve put the entire text below:

The report:

Last night, College Council (CC) voted 13–8 with one abstention to reject a request from the Williams Initiative for Israel (WIFI) to become a registered student organization. The vote came a week after the club’s request was tabled at a previous CC meeting, and the meeting involved nearly two hours of protracted and heated debate among both CC members and a large number of guests attending.

Before the debate began, numerous members and guests expressed concerns that publicly revealing the names of those speaking, as CC has previously done to some extent through livestreams on its Facebook page and published minutes accessible to students at the College, would make students feel unsafe and prevent them from fully expressing their opinions. Several members and guests cited national news coverage of College events in recent weeks, including cases where specific students were mentioned by name, as justification for these concerns. CC ultimately decided to publish anonymous minutes accessible only to students with College emails.

This is a developing story, occurring exceptionally close to our print deadline.

Is decreasing empathy causing increased disruption on campus?

April 25, 2019 • 9:00 am

This short paper on the NPR website (click on screenshot) describes research suggesting that the empathy of young Americans has decreased over the past fifty years. I’m not familiar with this research, but will provisionally assume that the results described are correct.

Here are a few quotes (it’s a short article):

. . . more than a decade ago, a certain suspicion of empathy started to creep in, particularly among young people. One of the first people to notice was Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University. Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: “It’s not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help” or “Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place.”

Konrath collected decades of studies and noticed a very obvious pattern. Starting around 2000, the line starts to slide. More students say it’s not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else’s perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation — 40 percent!

It’s strange to think of empathy – a natural human impulse — as fluctuating in this way, moving up and down like consumer confidence. But that’s what happened. Young people just started questioning what my elementary school teachers had taught me.

Their feeling was: Why should they put themselves in the shoes of someone who was not them, much less someone they thought was harmful? In fact, cutting someone off from empathy was the positive value, a way to make a stand.

Author Rosin describes some neurological studies of empathy, and notes that what seems to trigger it most strongly is a human conflict in which you favor one side over the other.  This, of course, is intensified by tribalism, in which you don’t have to think very hard about which side to empathize with. Fritz Breithaupt, a professor at Indiana University who studies empathy, says if you embrace the empathy born of tribalism, “basically you give up on civil society at that point. You give up on democracy. Because if you feed into this division more and more and you let it happen, it will become so strong that it becomes dangerous.”

Breihaupt’s solution to this tribalistic empathy seems bizarre, however,

In his book [The Dark Sides of Empathy, to be released June 15], Breithaupt proposes an ingenious solution: give up on the idea that when we are “empathizing” we are being altruistic, or helping the less fortunate, or in any way doing good. What we can do when we do empathy, proposes Fritz, is help ourselves. We can learn to see the world through the eyes of a migrant child and a militia leader and a Russian pen pal purely so we can expand our own imaginations, and make our own minds richer. It’s selfish empathy. Not saintly, but better than being alone.

Maybe it’s better than being alone, but it surely doesn’t inspire the kind of helpful action that is thought to be a benefit of empathy. Yes, empathy can be divisive and increase tribalism, but it can also increase charity. I would favor a less tribalistic empathy but also a striving to see the point of view of your opponents in other “tribes.”

NPR also has a 52-minute show on this topic that you can hear by clicking on the screenshot below (the page also has a transcript). I haven’t yet listened as I just discovered it and must be off.

When I read Rosin’s piece, I started thinking that if the decline in empathy among students is as real and as substantial as touted above, it may help explain the bizarre entitlement and aggrieved behavior of college students like those I’ve described at Middlebury, Williams, and Evergreen State.  For if you consider the inevitable demands that these students make of their college administration, they are rarely about improving society as a whole. Rather, they are about the personal comfort and well-being of the complaining students: demands meant to improve their own local situation. The students want courses that suit their needs and ethnicities, more therapists, weekend trips to the city, segregated housing, free food in the dining halls, and so on. While these demands may cite things like “universal structural racism,” they ask not for a change in society as a whole, but at their college.

This seems to me to contrast with the rebelling college students of the Sixties. The demands back then were more universal and less restricted to the local situation or to the students’ own welfare. The demands were for an end to racism in the country as a whole, an end to nuclear weapons, an end to the Vietnam War, and so on. You didn’t hear demands for therapists, free trips, or free food.

I realize that I may sound like a grumpy old man here, but I do perceive this difference, and wonder what readers think—particularly those of a certain age who have experienced college culture over the past fifty years. For it is the combination of increasing tribalism and decreasing empathy that could well produce the kind of demands and entitled behavior of college students that we’ve seen lately. These demands see the college itself, and its white “structural racism”, as the enemy, and foster a kind of tribalism that manifests itself in demands for “affinity” (segregated) housing in which each ethnic group (presumably Blacks, Asian-Americans, and Hispanics) gets to live by itself. (Imagine what would happen if white students were to demand that kind of housing!) There may be empathy in there, but it’s surely tribalistic empathy and an unwillingness to even engage the “enemy” with civil discourse.

At any rate, there are other theories as well, such as those of Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in their recent book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.

As I wrote last November:

[Lukianoff and Haidt’s] worry is that students have absorbed what they call the Three Great Untruths, and these are what’s driving the bizarre behavior on campus. Those untruths are these, each exemplified with a motto:

1.)  We young people are fragile (“What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.”)

2.) We are prone to emotional reasoning and confirmation bias (“Always trust your feelings.”)

3.) We are prone to “dichotomous thinking and tribalism” (“Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”)

The book is, then, an exposition of this thesis, an exploration of why students have become this way when they were different twenty years ago, and, finally, suggested remedies to buttress the emotional strength of students, make them think more rationally, and stop them from living in a Manichean world of Good People versus Bad People.

The causes of this behavior are, say the authors, sixfold: the rapid growth of campus bureaucracy that gives students someone to complain to, and is itself self-perpetuating; the rising rates of depression and suicide in young people; the lack of unsupervised play in kids (parents don’t let kids roam free much these days); a culture of “safetyism” in parents, who have grown overprotective and micromanaging in the face of an environment that’s far safer than it used to be; increased political polarization in America; and the transformation of students’ desire for “justice” into an ideology that demands equal outcomes rather than equal opportunities (this is the form of social justice that Lukianoff and Haidt decry).

The talk about the tribalism, of course, but not so much about the decrease in empathy. However, overprotectiveness and political polarization could well help erode empathy.

h/t: Wayne

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 25, 2019 • 7:30 am

We have photos from two readers today. The first is a batch from Sean Crawford, whose notes are indented:

I’ve attached some photos of the reed beds in the Norfolk Broads in England, taken from a boat. Aside from the reeds themselves, there are some swans. It’s an amazing habitat that can only be appreciated by boat.

And the swans [JAC: These look like mute swans, Cygnus olor]:

From reader Tim Anderson in Australia:

This magnificent creature is a male gang-gang cockatoo (Callocephalon fimbriatum), a relatively rare forest-dweller. Consider his magnificent topknot.

JAC: This is one of the few sexually dimorphic species of parrot. The female (below, photo from Wikipedia) lacks the bright head coloration and has a smaller crest:

Thursday: Hili dialogue

April 25, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Thursday April 25, 2019. Posting may be light today as I have to hie downtown to the “Apple Genius Bar’ (who’s supposed to be the genius there?) to get the battery on my old—but perfectly serviceable—iPhone 5s replaced. It’s a lot cheaper than a new iPhone, and the new ones are too big to put in my pocket.

It’s National Zucchini Bread Day, a comestible I detest. Isn’t it ironic that the world’s worst vegetable is also the one that grows most prolifically? People are even forced to use it up by putting into cakes and breads! It’s also DNA Day by proclamation of Congress, celebrating the publication of Watson and Crick’s structure of “the molecule of life’ (see below).

On this day in 1792, the robber Nicolas J. Pelletier became the first person to be executed by the guillotine. Wikipedia adds to his biography, “The crowd, however, was dissatisfied with the guillotine. They felt it was too swift and ‘clinically effective’ to provide proper entertainment, as compared to previous execution methods, such as hanging, death-by-sword, or breaking at the wheel. The public even called out “Bring back our wooden gallows!” On that very same day, April 25, 1792 the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise”, was composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.

On this day in 1859, ground was broken for the Suez Canal by engineers from France and Britain.  In 1898, the U.S. declared war on Spain, formally beginning the Spanish-American War. On April 25, 1915, the Battle of Gallipoli began, with the Gallipoli peninsula invaded by troops from Britain, France, India, Newfoundland, Australia, and New Zealand.  After 8 months of failure and slaughter (the latter on both sides), the Allied troops withdrew. The death toll was around 100,000.

It was on this day in 1953 that Watson and Crick published their groundbreaking paper in Nature suggesting the correct structure of DNA, “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid“.  The paper, the most influential in biology of the 20th century, was only a bit more than a page long. Here is most of the text:

 

In 1954, it was on this day that the first practical solar-energy cell was demonstrated by Bell Labs. And, on April 25, 2007, Boris Yeltsin was buried in the first Russian Orthodox funeral of a leader since that of Emperor Alexander III in 1894.

Notables born on this day include Oliver Cromwell (1599), Walter de la Mare (1873), Wolfgang Pauli (1900), Edward R. Murrow (1908), Ella Fitzgerald (1917), Al Pacino (1940), Johan Cruyff (1947), and Dinesh D’Souza, (1961).

One of the greatest soccer players of our time, Cruyff perfected the famous “Cruyff Turn,” which you can see in the highlight video below (or here), and played for Ajax and Barcelona. A heavy smoker when young (I have no idea how you can play soccer so well with that habit), he died of lung cancer at 68.  You can get an idea of how good he was by watching this short video:

Those who took the Big Nap on April 25 include David Teniers the Younger (1690), William Cowper (1800), George Herriman (1944), Dexter Gordon (1990), Ginger Rogers (1995), and Bea Arthur (2009).

Herriman’s Ignatz and Krazy Kat

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Editor Hili refuses to do menial chores:

A: Come and help with the cleaning.
Hili: What were you smoking?
In Polish:
Ja: Chodź, pomożesz sprzątać.
Hili: Chyba coś ci zaszkodziło.
Here’s something I found on Facebook:

A tweet from reader Barry. What has this bipedal cat realized?

https://twitter.com/meowlibrary/status/1119975774063185922

Tweets from Grania. This first one is fricking amazing: synthesizing speech from signals coming from brain neurons. Immensely useful, I’d say, and it works well. Have a look at the linked article, and be sure to put the sound on.

Who doesn’t love tiny black kittens?

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1121077634241376257

Speaking of moggies, this is a very bizarre photo:

I knew vampire bats could amble, but didn’t realize that they could lope!

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1120000240713490432

Bird knees are always above where you think they are:

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1119641253610577920

Tweets from Matthew: a bee is born.

Twenty-five mice a day! (Does anybody know the species of owl?)

A spider mimicking an ant. Count the legs!

I retweeted the tweet above, and Outis sent a response: more ant mimics:

Three days of unnecessary deaths leading up to April 6:

And a first: reader Tim Anderson has supplied today’s black dog, whose name is Angus:

Baby bears cross the road

April 24, 2019 • 2:45 pm

A mother bear gets two distressed cubs to cross the road.  Things to note:

  1. FOUR cubs! That’s a lot; I thought the median number was about two.
  2. Note the babies’ squalling, which is incredibly cute.
  3. The babies appear to be following either the mother’s scent or the mother’s tracks
  4. I love the way the mother lures the cubs: she pretends to run away so that the cubs will follow her, but then comes back when they don’t follow. She does this several times.
  5. Cubs don’t seem to like roads.

Bears are awesome.

Credits: Occurred on April 9, 2019 / Cades Cove, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, USA. Credit: FB/EnteringCadesCove