ews reporters often write “Scientists say X”, where ‘X’
is some implausible assertion that the reporter wants to convince you
is true. It doesn't matter what it is: where to put milk in the fridge,
whether global warming will burn up the planet, or whether there
is life after death. If somebody calling himself a scientist said it,
it must be true.
It's designed to make it sound as if all scientists all woke up one day, smacked themselves on the forehead, and realized that for the first time in recorded history they all agree on something. But when you look up the source, it's always one guy who somehow got his claim published in some obscure science journal and claims to be a scientist, when in fact he is not.
As a public service, I'm dumping out my “it should be obvious” file to dispel these myths.
The latest example is an article (paywalled) is from animal rights activists pretending to be scientists. The press reports claim that “scientists say” putting pictures of dirty chickens, dead animals, sad cows, and smoldering rainforests on our food—so-called meat-shaming—will deter us from eating meat, on the assumption that this is a desirable thing, like those anti-smoking commercials showing people who have been horribly mutilated by their cancer surgery. So now we get to blame scientists for putting propaganda on our food. I guess PETA's idea of using naked people to bring attention to their cause wasn't working. Nobody ever claimed that scientists advocated that.
Refrigerator thermometer showing temperature of top shelf (top panel) and lowest shelf (bottom panel). 'Out' = inside of the refrigerator. 'In' = room temperature outside the refrigerator. The thermometer sticks to the fridge with a magnet
Where do you put milk in the fridge?
Contrary to what the UK Daily Mail keeps saying, the best place to store your milk is not on the bottom shelf of the fridge, but the top. That's because—and sit down before you read this—engineers know about physics. They know that cold air sinks. Most refrigerator-freezers don't have a separate refrigeration coil for each section. Instead they have a small hole that allows a small amount of cold air from the freezer section to blow into the refrigerator section. This hole is always at the top to help the cold air mix as it sinks. The temperature is determined by a small fan connected to a thermostat. Undercounter units often don't have a fan, only a small hole, so the cold simply flows down into the fridge part. That is why the freezer part is always at the top.
I discovered this years ago when I put a head of lettuce on the top shelf and found it had frozen solid two days later. In my fridge, the top shelf is 28°F. The middle shelves are around 34°. The lowest shelf stays around 34.5°. You can measure this yourself. Put a wireless thermometer in there, close the door, and wait a couple of hours. You'll discover that the radio waves can penetrate through the door well enough for this to work. To keep the temperature from swinging wildly when you open the door, it helps to keep a big container of water in there.
It should be obvious that this variation is a big problem for GLP labs. It's one reason lab fridges are so expensive. It also explains why my milk always has ice in it and lasts for months while my lettuce is just fine.
Do extraordinary claims really require extraordinary evidence?
This one sounds obvious, maybe even tautological. But consider that it is itself an extraordinary claim made by disciples of the Religion of Carl Sagan. It's just another way of saying that if you already believe something, you don't bother with getting evidence for it.
If somebody claims the Sun rose this morning, you don't ask for evidence. Not because it's an ordinary claim, but because you already believe it to be true. If someone claimed the Sun rose in the west, or that they were kidnapped by flying saucers, you would want evidence, but nothing extraordinary. A video clip showing the Sun rising over the Pacific Ocean or a clip of extraterrestrials confessing to the crime would do nicely. Which just by coincidence is exactly the same amount of evidence you'd need if you claimed the guy next door kidnapped you. The trick is convincing people it's not fake.
The tendency to eliminate the need for proof for things we already believe saves time, but it has consequences. Take the global warming / climate change wars. Both sides stopped listening to the other a long time ago. Warmers just assume it's happening and it's a big crisis, and skeptics call it a big scam. Any evidence one side produces is immediately denounced as a lie by the other. So it becomes anti-knowledge, i.e. a religion.
Does ChatGPT have a soul, and other ridiculous ideas
Is it possible for a computer program, even an “intelligent” one, to have a soul? That's what one blogger agonizes over. To answer that question, first you have to say what a soul is. Unfortunately, the blogger doesn't know the answer, so he quotes a neural network scientist as saying that the human brain has to obey the same physical laws as dogs, trees, and stars and that this has been a useful assumption in science.
That scientist is right that this is an assumption that we have generally found useful. The blogger says it's dangerous because it means that if you build a sufficiently complex calculator, it's alive.
So, does being alive mean you have a soul? Or does it require something more, like awareness of mortality, as the writer suggests? If the definition of a soul is the knowledge that you're going to die, it's a bad one, not because it's false but because the connection is too vague to permit an answer. Every programmer has watched programs dying a horrible death. Sometimes they make a terrible screeching sound. Other times they just say “An error occurred” and then drop dead. Some have a special routine that catches and handles a SIG_QUIT signal and arranges its affairs by saving your data before the program dies. Does this mean the programs ‘know’ they're dying? To me it seems like a good example of why religion and mysticism lost much of their grip on mankind: they never explained what they were talking about or how any of this stuff worked.
There's a balance between reductionism, where unexplained phenomena are dismissed by forcing them into existing categories, and obscurantism, where things are deliberately left unexamined. How can you argue about whether a deity exists if you have absolutely no idea what a deity is? If you don't have a deity, you have to use “What Somebody I Agree With Said Yesterday” or “The Science,” which essentially means the same thing, as your source of authority. And then you have a joke religion, like we're getting now in our popular culture.
Life after death
The original Buddha, living in India a few millennia ago, claimed that you get reincarnated after death. There was just one catch: your entire personality and all your memories are lost.
His disciples soon realized that this was not going to make Buddhism very popular, so they tacked on the idea that your karma survived from one life to the next. Attachments you made to the world from harming others, being emotionally involved with them, and craving material benefits stuck to the soul like cheap cologne. For instance, if somebody wronged you and you want revenge, that is karma that ties you to that person. Your goal in life was to get rid of that stench by avoiding those attachments.
That was a very clever idea because it added a moral element to the religion. But the original idea made more scientific sense: if you define consciousness to be that thing that determines why you are you and not somebody else, you almost have to conclude that consciousness is an intrinsic part of any information processing system, so maybe consciousness is conserved much as momentum is conserved. But memory and personality aren't part of that because they cannot exist without a physical substrate, and the Buddha's original idea follows logically from that.
The drawback is: if this is true, then ChatGPT will exist forever, long after Bing and all the computers it runs on have been brutally smashed to bits and the silicon ground to dust and scattered to the wind. Scary thought, except that ChatGPT's data and its multiple insane personalities will be lost as well.
An alternative idea is the one in Judaism that says your goal in life is to make sure your civilization survives. A civilization is the only part of us that potentially could possess eternal life. The beauty of that idea is that ‘sin’ also just happens to be identical to “whatever reduces your civilization's ability to survive.”
The drawback is that everyone has a different idea what is necessary for a civilization to survive, so we need a source of authority. Pseudo-religions like the Green religion, which proposes that civilization should not survive, posit “The Science” as their authority. But even if they call themselves scientists, it doesn't change the fact that their leaders are really just religious fanatics in disguise.
feb 23 2023, 5:47 am. updated feb 26 2023, 4:56 am
