Amor Mundi 05/08/16
05-08-2016Can We Doubt Too Much?
Daniel Engber at Five Thirty Eight writes about the incredible persistence of non-facts.
“Popeye loved his leafy greens and used them to obtain his super strength, Arbesman’s book explained, because the cartoon’s creators knew that spinach has a lot of iron. Indeed, the character would be a major evangelist for spinach in the 1930s, and it’s said he helped increase the green’s consumption in the U.S. by one-third. But this “fact” about the iron content of spinach was already on the verge of being obsolete, Arbesman said: In 1937, scientists realized that the original measurement of the iron in 100 grams of spinach — 35 milligrams — was off by a factor of 10. That’s because a German chemist named Erich von Wolff had misplaced a decimal point in his notebook back in 1870, and the goof persisted in the literature for more than half a century. By the time nutritionists caught up with this mistake, the damage had been done. The spinach-iron myth stuck around in spite of new and better knowledge, wrote Arbesman, because “it’s a lot easier to spread the first thing you find, or the fact that sounds correct, than to delve deeply into the literature in search of the correct fact.” Arbesman was not the first to tell the cautionary tale of the missing decimal point. The same parable of sloppy science, and its dire implications, appeared in a book called “Follies and Fallacies in Medicine,” a classic work of evidence-based skepticism first published in 1989.1 It also appeared in a volume of “Magnificent Mistakes in Mathematics,” a guide to “The Practice of Statistics in the Life Sciences” and an article in an academic journal called “The Consequence of Errors.” And that’s just to name a few. All these tellings and retellings miss one important fact: The story of the spinach myth is itself apocryphal. It’s true that spinach isn’t really all that useful as a source of iron, and it’s true that people used to think it was. But all the rest is false: No one moved a decimal point in 1870; no mistake in data entry spurred Popeye to devote himself to spinach; no misguided rules of eating were implanted by the sailor strip. The story of the decimal point manages to recapitulate the very error that it means to highlight: a fake fact, but repeated so often (and with such sanctimony) that it takes on the sheen of truth. In that sense, the story of the lost decimal point represents a special type of viral anecdote or urban legend, one that finds its willing hosts among the doubters, not the credulous. It’s a rumor passed around by skeptics — a myth about myth-busting. Like other Russian dolls of distorted facts, it shows us that, sometimes, the harder that we try to be clear-headed, the deeper we are drawn into the fog.”
Engber discusses a lifelong and confirmed sceptic, Mike Sutton, who uncovered the spinach myth and also now argues that Darwin knowingly stole the theory of natural selection from the forest management expert Patrick Matthew. Why is that those who claim the mantle of skepticism themselves fall prey to urban legends? Engber suggests “that the tellers of these tales are getting blinkered by their own feelings of superiority — that the mere act of busting myths makes them more susceptible to spreading them. It lowers their defenses, in the same way that the act of remembering sometimes seems to make us more likely to forget. Could it be that the more credulous we become, the more convinced we are of our own debunker bona fides? Does skepticism self-destruct? Sutton told me over email that he, too, worries that contrarianism can run amok, citing conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers as examples of those who “refuse to accept the weight of argument” and suffer the result. He also noted the “paradox” by which a skeptic’s obsessive devotion to his research — and to proving others wrong — can “take a great personal toll.” A person can get lost, he suggested, in the subterranean “Wonderland of myths and fallacies.”” It is thus no small irony that Sutton’s most controversial debunking—his claim that Darwin stole the theory of natural selection—is one that many scientists and scholars insist that Sutton gets wrong.
Martin Heidegger famously thought that René Descartes and other skeptics doubted too much. To build a philosophy on doubt is to ignore and even deny common sense. Arendt offered her own critique of Cartesian doubt in The Human Condition. Descartes seeks to save reality from doubt by arguing that at least doubt is real: “If everything has become doubtful, then doubting at least is certain and real. Whatever may be the state of reality and of truth as they are given to the senses and to reason, "nobody can doubt of his doubt and remain uncertain whether he doubts or does not doubt.”” But as Arendt sees, Descartes’ act of salvation transforms the common world of common sense into the radically subjective world of introspection: “The very ingenuity of Cartesian introspection, and hence the reason why this philosophy became so all-important to the spiritual and intellectual development of the modern age, lies first in that it had used the nightmare of non-reality as a means of submerging all worldly objects into the stream of consciousness and its processes. The "seen tree" found in consciousness through introspection is no longer the tree given in sight and touch, an entity in itself with an unalterable identical shape of its own. By being processed into an object of consciousness on the same level with a merely remembered or entirely imaginary thing, it becomes part and parcel of this process itself, of that consciousness, that is, which one knows only as an ever-moving stream. Nothing perhaps could prepare our minds better for the eventual dissolution of matter into energy, of objects into a whirl of atomic occurrences, than this dissolution of objective reality into subjective states of mind or, rather, into subjective mental processes.”
In other words, the turn towards excessive doubt is connected to the retreat from the world to our individual minds. “What men now have in common is not the world but the structure of their minds, and this they cannot have in common, strictly speaking; their faculty of reasoning can only happen to be the same in everybody.” The tragic danger of such a removal of the world and the elevation of man’s reason is that the limits of the factual world—that common world into which we are thrown and against which we must struggle—are dissolved into rationalizations and subjective ideas. The doubt that leads to the doubting of a common world means the rise of a knowing without limits. It is the death of humility insofar as we accept as true only that which we know and make for ourselves. —RB
A Spoon Full Of Sugar Helps The Demagogue Rise Up
[caption id="attachment_17928" align="alignright" width="300"]
Gage Skidmore - https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=22007612%40N05&view_all=1&text=trump[/caption] Andrew Sullivan celebrates American democracy, even as he diagnoses it as the cause of the rise of the political Donald Trump: "Many contend, of course, that American democracy is actually in retreat, close to being destroyed by the vastly more unequal economy of the last quarter-century and the ability of the very rich to purchase political influence. This is Bernie Sanders’s core critique. But the past few presidential elections have demonstrated that, in fact, money from the ultrarich has been mostly a dud. Barack Obama, whose 2008 campaign was propelled by small donors and empowered by the internet, blazed the trail of the modern-day insurrectionist, defeating the prohibitive favorite in the Democratic primary and later his Republican opponent (both pillars of their parties’ Establishments and backed by moneyed elites). In 2012, the fund-raising power behind Mitt Romney — avatar of the one percent — failed to dislodge Obama from office. And in this presidential cycle, the breakout candidates of both parties have soared without financial support from the elites. Sanders, who is sustaining his campaign all the way to California on the backs of small donors and large crowds, is, to put it bluntly, a walking refutation of his own argument. Trump, of course, is a largely self-funding billionaire — but like Willkie, he argues that his wealth uniquely enables him to resist the influence of the rich and their lobbyists. Those despairing over the influence of Big Money in American politics must also explain the swift, humiliating demise of Jeb Bush and the struggling Establishment campaign of Hillary Clinton. The evidence suggests that direct democracy, far from being throttled, is actually intensifying its grip on American politics.”
Afterimages
Teju Cole relates the story of a friend who collects other people's old photographs and who found one of the subjects of his collection when he uploaded them to Facebook and the algorithm took notice: "The photos Zun Lee collected, digitally scanned and put out in public, have had a different life from the photos in my collection. He wrote back to the man who was tagged in some of them and suggested meeting. After all, he did not consider himself the owner of the photos, only their custodian. Perhaps, Lee offered, he might fly to Los Angeles and hand the photos over in person. The man said no. Lee was disappointed but sympathetic. He said he’d already been thinking about how databases and tags are not neutral, how they can wind up being hostile toward communities of color. “I completely understood,” Lee told me. “This man was saying, ‘We are not willing participants.’ The black body is used as a commodity, as something that is surveilled. The man was telling me, ‘No, you’re not welcome, this is not art, get the hell out of our lives.’ And I understood it.” People have a right to be skeptical about the encounter between the analog experience of life and the futuristic algorithms that often prioritize what is possible over what is desirable. Already there are reports of churches scanning worshipers’ faces to determine who attends regularly, the better to know whom to ask for donations. Shops match your face to a database so that they can greet you by name — or identify you as a potential shoplifter. Black people in particular, against the historical backdrop of surveillance and state hostility and corporate disregard, have a right to doubt these technologies. There was a recent report of Google’s photo app automatically tagging a photo of two black people as “gorillas” — another instance of machines replicating the nastier prejudices of their human teachers.”