Oobleck and stupidity

In his 1980 essay "The Cult of Ignorance," scientist, novelist, and polymath Isaac Asimov wrote, "The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through [American] political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

Asimov's words are, if anything, truer today than they were forty years ago when he wrote them.  It's an attitude I have a hard time comprehending.  My opinion has always been that of course I want our leaders to be more intelligent than I am; I know I'm not nearly smart enough to be the president.  But we've gone beyond the acceptance of ignorance Asimov pointed out into the realm of celebrating abject stupidity -- and, all too frequently, electing it to public office.  We've entered a terrifying time of living in the Upside Down, where individuals who can't put together a single sensible, grammatically-correct sentence, who engage in playground taunts that would sound immature coming out of the mouth of a third-grader, are lauded as "plain-spoken" and "willing to say what's on their mind."

Of course, as Stephen Colbert pointed out, "My drunk uncle says what's on his mind, and I don't want him to be president, either."

The American attitude toward intellectuals jumped out at me just a couple of days ago because of a charming piece of research into the behavior of "oobleck" -- the bizarre cornstarch/water mixture most of us got to play with as children.  Oobleck is a dilatant fluid, one in which the viscosity increases in proportion to the amount of shear strain.  Put more simply, if you hit it, it acts like a solid; if you press it gently, it acts like a liquid.  It is one of a group of weird substances called non-Newtonian fluids, which alter in viscosity dependent on stress, and include materials that are thixotropic (the fluid thins when it's stressed, like yogurt and ketchup) and ones that are rheopectic (the fluid thickens when it's stressed, like printer ink).  (Nota bene: it sounds like dilatant and rheopectic fluids are the same thing, but there's a technical difference in that rheopectic fluids continue to increase in viscosity the more they're shaken, while with dilatant fluids it's kind of an either/or thing.  But that's a minor point.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Baminnick, Cornstarch Experiment Materials, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In any case, the research I referenced above came out last week in Science Advances, and had to do with the old party trick of filling a shallow basin with oobleck and having people run across it barefoot.  Because of oobleck's dilatant nature, the faster you run, the harder the soles of your feet strike the surface -- so its viscosity and resistance increase, and you can run on the surface of something that's technically a liquid.

It turns out that there's a simple way to defeat this ability; all you have to do is rotate the basin.  The twisting motion means that when your foot strikes the surface, there's not only a vertical stress from the impact, there's horizontal shear from the basin turning under you, and that perpendicular shear reduces the viscosity and gets rid of the dilatant effect.  In other words, try running in oobleck on a rotating basin, and you'll sink.

I thought this was a pretty fun piece of research about a substance's very odd behavior, and noted with approval that it had been posted on social media...

... until I started reading the comments.

Here is a sampler.  Spelling and grammar are as written, because I don't want to run out of sics.

• This is what the scientist's are doing?  Taking taxpayer money and playing with goop.
• I read bullshit like this and I'm supposed to take "climate science" seriously?
• The usual libtard jerking off on the public dime.
• Youd think they had more important things to do, like inventing the next "pandemic."
• This is typicle waste of money.  They wonder why no one has faith in education when this is the kind of thing they spend time on than call it science.
• Check out where this happened.  A universtiy.  Color me surprised.

*brief pause to scream obscenities and kick a wall*

Okay, let me point out a few things, now that I've gotten that (mostly) out of my system.

First, just because the experiment was performed using something associated with kids' parties, they think it has no other applications?  What this shows is that they didn't even bother to read the paper itself, because the authors say the following:

The ability of OSP [orthogonal superimposed perturbations, the application of a rotational shear to flowing fluids] to de-solidify plugs formed under extension and fast compression has potential industrial applications where it is important to increase the flow rate or control the viscosity or unclog a pipe.  These applications range from high-throughput processing of dense suspensions such as cement and concrete to avoid jamming in narrow pipes and three-dimensional printing.

Stop for a moment and consider how many examples you can come up with of thick fluids flowing through pipes.  You think coming up with a simple, inexpensive way to stop those pipes from clogging is "the usual libtard jerking off?"

Second, there is a huge value to pure research.  I dealt with this here at Skeptophilia a very long time ago in a post that was spurred by the same kind of cretinous anti-intellectual commentary as this one was.  It looked at how pure research (which the uninformed call "just messing around") gave us, amongst many other things, antibiotics, x-rays, Teflon, and our understanding of anaphylactic shock and how genes produce proteins.  Just because you (not you personally) can't see the utility of a piece of research doesn't mean the scientists can't see it.

Third, why do these people think everything has to have utility in the first place?  Science used to be rightly revered for its capacity to expand the mind, to open our eyes to the wonder of the universe, to understand a small piece of it a little more clearly.  The subtext of the commentary from the yahoos I quoted above seems to be, "I'm fine being stupid and you have no right to try to fix that, or even to be smarter than I am."  This is, essentially, being arrogant about stupidity. as if being an absolute moron was a virtue, as if they were proud (and fortunate) that their brains had never been contaminated by any of that useless book-learnin'.

I honestly don't know how we've gotten here.  The popular attitude toward science and the intellect has become a race to the bottom.  A race we seem to be winning, given that we have a senator who thinks that a snowball disproves climate change, a representative who thinks we shouldn't be limiting our production of carbon dioxide because it's necessary for plant growth, and a president who makes so many ludicrous and ignorant statements daily that they're hard to keep up with.

A lot of it probably has its origins in the misguided egalitarianism that Asimov pointed out.  No, my ignorance is not as good as your knowledge.  All opinions are not equal.  My fifteen minutes of online "research" is not equivalent to the ten years of intensive study you spent to become an actual scientist.

Now, I'm not saying ignorance is necessarily shameful.  We're all ignorant about some things.  But we shouldn't be proud of it, either, and -- more to the point -- we should all be trying to remedy it.  Science remains our best way of doing that, and that means actual science, done by actual trained scientists who know how to evaluate data and who know when a hypothesis is supported and when it isn't, not the latest bizarre claim by some self-styled expert who happens to have a computer, a microphone, a YouTube channel, and a vastly inflated sense of the validity of his own opinions.

But once you've decided that ignorance is desirable, you've crossed a line into outright stupidity.  Ignorance is inevitable; stupidity is a choice.  Or, as it was put by my dad -- who wasn't well educated, but was one of the wisest, smartest people I've ever met, and who worked like hell to learn and to fill in those gaps in his knowledge left behind from his impoverished childhood -- "Ignorance is only skin deep; stupidity goes all the way to the bone."

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that should be a must-read for everyone -- not only for the New Yorkers suggested by the title.  Unusual, though, in that this one isn't our usual non-fiction selection.  New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is novel that takes a chilling look at what New York City might look like 120 years from now if climate change is left unchecked.

Its predictions are not alarmism.  Robinson made them using the latest climate models, which (if anything) have proven to be conservative.  She then fits into that setting -- a city where the streets are Venice-like canals, where the subways are underground rivers, where low-lying areas have disappeared completely under the rising tides of the Atlantic Ocean -- a society that is trying its best to cope.

New York 2140 isn't just a gripping read, it's a frighteningly clear-eyed vision of where we're heading.  Read it, and find out why The Guardian called it "a towering novel about a genuinely grave threat to civilisation."

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A conspiracy of denial

I find it interesting how reluctant rational people are to saying to the irrational, unscientific ones, "You're wrong."

You'd think it'd be clear, right?  Science provides us with a straightforward protocol for establishing whether a particular model works.  There is hard evidence -- the theory is supported.  No evidence, or worse still, evidence against -- the theory must be revised or abandoned.  In practice, producing and interpreting the evidence might be difficult, time consuming, costly, or all three, but in principle, the idea is simple enough.

So why do even skeptics have such a hard time coming out and making an unequivocal statement that people like climate change deniers and creationists and anti-vaxxers are not just wrong, but wildly, dangerously wrong?

Some do, of course.  There have been some scathing papers written on the subject.  But the further you get from the science journals themselves, the more people tend to waffle, and say things like, "Well, that's your opinion" or "More research needs to be done."

My sense is that it's to avoid accusations of bias, of being controlled by special interests.  Tolerance of a variety of viewpoints has morphed, somehow, into the toxic attitude that we can't come right out and say that a blatantly incorrect claim is, simply, wrong.  Add into the mix the tendency of politicians to pander to the most vocal of their supporters, and you might have an explanation for why we have a 97% consensus (or higher) amongst scientists that climate change is real and anthropogenic in origin, but 56% of the majority party in the United States Senate are climate change deniers -- and a significant percentage of the minority party has chosen to remain silent on the matter.

[image courtesy of Victor Komyenko and the Wikimedia Commons]

But a recent study by Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer, and several other social psychology researchers at the University of Western Australia has shown that there is another reason that even skeptics are reluctant to speak up.  Their paper, "Recurrent fury: Conspiratorial discourse in the blogosphere triggered by research on the role of conspiracist ideation in climate denial," was published in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, and it makes an interesting claim: unscientific claims, such as the denial of climate change or humanity's role in it, go hand in hand with conspiratorial thinking.

In other words, the rejection of science because of ideology is often coupled with a strong belief that the opposition is in cahoots with, perhaps even in the pay of, the unscrupulous, greedy, or outright evil.  We see it with the anti-vaxxers -- the countless scientific studies showing that vaccines are safe and effective were sponsored by, and therefore biased by, "Big Pharma."  The scientists who can demonstrate hard data supporting anthropogenic climate change are either falsifying the numbers so they can scare people and thus get grants from funding agencies, or are (in the words of Ted Cruz) "driven by politicians who have always supported more government control."

And of course, those who accept evolution are the worst of all, because they're just being controlled by Satan himself.

The study by Lewandowsky et al. studied blogs that had mentioned an earlier paper by the same researchers entitled "NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science" that had appeared three years ago in the journal Psychological Science.  This paper tried to show that people who exhibited conspiratorial thinking were more likely to hold unscientific views on other topics.  Considering the subject matter, the paper got a lot of mentions in blogs (both positive and negative).  So Lewandowsky et al. realized that this was, in itself, an excellent data set to study.

They sorted the commentary into two groups; comments that had come from climate-denial sites, and criticisms that had been made of the paper in legitimate science journals.  Conspiratorial thinking was broken down into the following subcategories:

• Survey responses were scammed by "warmists"
• “Skeptic” blogs were not contacted
• There was no presentation of intermediate data
• Different versions of the survey were used, thereby biasing the results
• Control data was suppressed
• Access to authors' websites was blocked
• Global activism and government censorship has suppressed dissenting views

These were differentiated from criticisms that had to do with methodology, data analysis, and research protocols.

The comments were given (without sources) to undergraduates, who were asked to distinguish which criticisms had come from scientists, and which from climate change deniers.

The results were unequivocal.  Not only did the test subjects correctly identify which were which, but they recognized even subtle differences between a legitimate critique and accusations of conspiracy.  Climate change denial, it turns out, correlates across the board not with legitimate scientific criticism, but with conspiratorial thinking.  "I do not recall ever having seen such a strong effect in thirty years of behavioral research, and I have certainly never encountered ratings that favored the extreme end of the scale to the extent observed here," Lewandowsky said.  "Conspiracism, by definition, is not skepticism. Hence it is important to show that self-anointed 'skeptics' are not skeptical...  The [climate change denying] blog content was identified not only as conspiracist, but also as lacking in scholarly incisiveness.  This is very important because it shows that conspiracism isn’t 'a price you pay for skepticism'—on the contrary, conspiracism detracts from scholarly critique."

Me, I find this an unsurprising result.  And it explains why the politicians, even the ones who are reasonable and rational, have been unwilling to stand up and say "bullshit" to the likes of Ted Cruz and James Inhofe.  In politics, the ideal is to be unbiased, to listen to all sides, and not to be beholden to special interests.  It's risky to take a stand -- especially when powerful and vocal people are likely to accuse you of being a shill, a part of the evil conspiracy to fool the honest citizenry.  Easier to stay silent, to pretend that there still is a debate on the topic, than to come right out and say, "You're wrong."

Of course, the climate itself will eventually force our hand.  Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."  Here, we have a darker twist on this aphorism -- the climate will continue to change, the world to warm, regardless of how many snowballs idiots like Senator Inhofe throw onto the floor of the Senate.  2015 is already shaping up to break the temperature record -- set, by the way, in 2014.  Just in the first six months of the year we've had unprecedented droughts in California, floods in Texas and the Midwest, deadly heat waves in Pakistan -- and in March, three months past the solstice, Antarctica had its warmest day since records have been kept -- 63.5 degrees Fahrenheit, recorded at Esperanza Base on the Antarctic Peninsula.

Reality, it seems, has no particular problem with being part of the conspiracy.

Hydra heads and creation museums

Apparently having one Creation Museum in the United States (in Glen Rose, Texas) wasn't sufficient.  So in 2007, a bigger and better one opened in Petersburg, Kentucky.  Then those museums started having some financial problems due to declining attendance, with projects like the infamous "Ark Encounter" being put on hold because of loss of revenue.  So clearly, there was only one possible solution.

Build yet another Creation Museum.

This is getting ridiculous.  Fighting these things is becoming a little like trying to lop off the heads of a really stupid Hydra.

This one is in Boise, Idaho, which certainly makes sense, site-wise.  Boise is the capital of Idaho, a state where over 80% of citizens are Christians, where last month a group introduced a proposal to have Idaho officially declared a "Christian state," where just two weeks ago three legislators boycotted an invocation given in the Senate because it was delivered by a Hindu.

So I have no doubt that yet another expensive boondoggle meant to celebrate a completely counterfactual and unscientific view of biological and geological science will turn out to be wildly popular.

At least, that's the hope of Douglas Bennett, who is one of the museum's founders, and who is (mystifyingly) a trained geologist.  How someone who has a degree in geology can actually subscribe to the idea that all of the Earth's sedimentary rocks were laid down by one cataclysmic flood five-thousand-odd years ago is beyond me.  You'd think that the single question, "Where did all of the water go afterwards?" would be sufficient to raise questions for anyone with scientific training, wouldn't you?

Of course, if the rain was magicked down by god, maybe it was magicked away again.  Or maybe there's a big floor drain at the bottom of the ocean.  I dunno.

Be that as it may, what perhaps sets this museum apart from the others its that for each exhibit, there will be the biblical explanation side-by-side with the explanation that comes from actual science.  "The museum is dedicated to the fact that creation science can explain the evidence we see in the world around us and that it is not just religion," Bennett said. "Because we feel we don't have anything to hide.  If we put both out there, a person that's actually seeking the truth will look and say, 'Ah, the biblical explanation fits what I see in the world around us a lot better than evolution.'"

Me, I find this troubling.  Because you can bet they didn't hire an actual evolutionary biologist or geologist (I'm discounting Bennett, here, for obvious reasons) to write the scientific explanations.  I'm pretty certain that the point/counterpoint was written by people who buy the whole creation story wholesale, which means that the scientific explanations will be misrepresented, oversimplified, or just plain wrong.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So this whole enterprise sets up the evolutionary side of the argument (i.e., reality) as one great big straw man.  I probably shouldn't let this bother me; after all, it's unlikely that the museum is going to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced.  But this kind of slick, hyped-up marketing makes the anti-science crowd even more convinced of their beliefs -- that the scientists are a bunch of godless charlatans trying to bring the world to wrack and ruin.  It's also appealing to children, who are more easily convinced, especially when their parents are telling them that anyone who tries to show them evidence to the contrary is making an evil, Satan-inspired end run on their immortal souls.

And the last thing we need is yet another generation growing up with a lousy understanding of science.

Oh, yeah, and I haven't told you about the other thing the Idaho creationists are trying to do.  They're wanting to raise money for a "life-sized Ark" that will be next to the interstate somewhere between Boise and Nampa.

Because we all know how well that ended for the Kentucky "Ark Encounter" project.

So on the whole, I suppose I should be glad that the creationists are sinking their funds into these kinds of mare's nests.  The more money they put toward building monuments to silly, counterfactual worldviews, the less they'll have to put toward buying congresspeople who support their views.

Inconvenient science

There is a frightening tendency for policymakers to request advice from scientists, and then ignore it if said advice doesn't agree with the party line.

Give us advice, in other words, unless it's inconvenient.

The perception of science as dangerous to political expediency has resulted in a number of troubling moves in the last few years.  Here in the United States, the general approach has been to put the wolves in charge of the sheep, explaining why the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology is populated at least in part by creationist climate change deniers.  It's why the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is soon to be led by Senator James Inhofe, who once compared the EPA to the Gestapo, and the Senate Subcommittee on Science and Space by notoriously anti-science Senator Ted Cruz.  It's also why Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has forbidden scientists to speak to the media without rigorous prior approval, and has cut the position of National Science Advisor.

Toe the line, in other words.  You can play around in your labs and wear your white lab jackets and so on.  But if you make a discovery, you damn well better make sure that you're discovering something that supports our political stance.

It's not just the right wing that does this, of course.  The left has its own bêtes noires, and one of the main ones is genetic modification.  GMOs are evil, goes the party line.  The big genetic research companies are trying to profit at the expense of human health, and all GMOs should be banned.  Further, they claim, the research facilities are suppressing any information that might get out showing the dangers of genetic modification, because that could hurt their bottom line.

It's this kind of categorical, zero-sum thinking that led to the axing this week of the position of Chief Scientific Advisor to the Juncker Commission, the executive body of the European Union.

Why?  Largely because of pressure from Greenpeace and other virulently anti-GMO groups.  Outgoing CSA Anne Glover was perceived as too pro-GMO, even though her position was supported by a vast consensus of scientific researchers and oversight organizations -- including the World Health Organization.

This is just as anti-science, and irrational, as the right's insistence that climate change isn't happening.  There are rigorous testing protocols for establishing the safety of GMOs, and when health problems are found, the crops are pulled from production.  Just this week, in fact, a genetically modified pea was scrapped after it was established that consuming it caused allergic lung damage in mice... after it had been in testing for ten years.

Not exactly the heartless behavior the anti-GMOers would have you believe, is it?  But even this gets spun the other way; I've already seen the above-linked article posted several times, with messages that amount to, "See?  We TOLD you that GMOs were dangerous and cause allergies!"

So even when the scientists publicly announce that they have cancelled an expensive program because of human health concerns, they're cast in the role of Dr. Frankenstein, trying to unleash their monster on the unwitting public.  You can't win.

Unless, of course, you just crowbar your political stance into place by ignoring the scientists altogether, or duct-taping their mouths.

Facts are facts, folks, and scientific consensus is what it is.  And when political or philosophical dogmatism blinds you to what the science actually says, you do so at your own risk.