A hierarchy of epistemic operation levels and levels of abstraction in cartoon interpretation

// upside down because Vi is not radical enough.
(

ObjectiGeeks + UsersOfObjectivism: Enjoy.

Others: Don't give up. you are starting to get it.

)

0.0. Look! A funny cartoon!

0.1. A funny cartoon about a man killing his wife.

0.2. Domestic violence is not funny.

0.3. This funny cartoon conveys a socially important message about the pervasiveness of domestic violence.


1.0. Look! A funny cartoon about President Obama killing Hilary Clinton.

1.1. This cartoon of President Zero killing Her Hilariousness is funny, but the guy needs to learn how to draw reflections and faces.

1.2. Civility, and civilization, are so absent in America, that it is acceptable to publish the delusional claim that the President is plotting to murder a member of His cabinet.

1.3. We So own this judge that we can get him to accept a cartoon as Probable Cause.


2.0. Stupid cartoonist thinks that we don't get that it's about President Obama killing Hilary Clinton.

2.1. Audit him. When someone draws our President making a Killing, he must think that we cannot find his money and audit it. We can.

2.2. The only thing that this cartoon does not tell us about the cartoonist is whether or not he was born.

2.3. We know what we know. You don't.


3.0. When drawing the Phallos is taboo, cartoonists will draw phallic symbols.

3.1. The taboo interpretation is always funnier.

3.2. The subtext is always more taboo.

3.3. Skip to subtext. Is funny.


4.0. I can't believe someone actually drew this cartoon.

4.1. I cannot fathom how this cartoon was not flagged as a violation of the Terms of Service.

4.2. The Terms of Service guy must have read this cartoon as a socially important message about the pervasiveness of domestic violence.

4.3. In Communism, the Censor is called The People's Censor. In Fascism, the Terms of Service are Regulated only by the most minimal Regulations, which are necessary to make sure that the Terms of Service call the expression on the Service "Free Expression," and that the censor is called "the Terms of Service guy."

4.4. Totalitarianism begins, when there is a censor.  Totalitarianism begins to end, when the Terms of Service guy starts pretending that he doesn't get the joke.

How "Axiomatic" became "Foundational:" The true (and only marginally fictionalized) history of the philosophy of physics.

It the beginning, there were academic Philosophers. And later, there were also Academic philosophers. Immanuel Kant said, "One can't know." Auguste Comte said "True is what the majority thinks."  And the Physicist saw that it was Bad.

And the Economist heard what the Academic philosophers had said, and arbitrarily decided that it was Good. The Economist had the most brilliant Contribution To Economics Ever.  He had most amazingly solved the problem that tested his Faith that Blind Risk is, in the long term, profitable. He made investments in blind risks, to provide the definitive falsification of the faithless claim, that blind risk causes loss of wealth. But his faithful investments in blind risks could also lead to short-term cash flow Bottlenecks, as his Faith allowed. And his Faith was tested when a short-term cash-flow problem made it impossible to pay the servant.

And the Economist passed the Test of his Faith cleverly. He moved his family from a comfortable house to a tiny apartment in a tenement. He did not need to pay the servant, because his wife thought that she did not have any choices. And it followed, from not having any choices, that she chose to do the work, that servant was once paid to do, when the servant left.  And the economist arbitrarily decided that his cash flow problem was totally solved.

This Proved the total Faith, of the totally great Economist, to the totally great Economist. It also provided him with funds, from the sale of their previously comfortable house, for more investments in blind risk, to further falsify the ridiculous claim  that investing in blind risk can cause loss of wealth. Thus he had proven his Faith that he was the most clever and important Economist in the Universe.  And Intuitively he also had Faith that Philosophy takes precedence over mere knowledge, and he knew it from Faith. For he already Knew, having read Kant and Comte, that knowledge is impossible.

But the truth of his Faith was hidden from others.  For his wife said, my husband has a gambling problem.

And the Economist said, I shalt show them! I have the Faith of Comte, that true is what the majority thinks. Therefore I shalt call "One can't know" an Axiom. And on this Axiom I shalt forever Prove, that Blind Risk is in the long term, however many millenia I shall arbitrarily call "long term," totally Profitable.

And the Mathematician saw. And the Mathematician intuitively had Faith.  For the Mathematician said: Thus the Economist hath solved All problems.  For if I wished to prove whatever arbitrary crawling Theorem that I wished to prove, the Faith of the Economist hath proven it for me. For with the Faith of the Economist I can Prove anything, by calling whatever arbitrary String that I need, to Prove whatever I arbitrarily wish to Prove, an Axiom.

Another [for the word "Atheist" is not Holy enough to be written in Scripture] said, I don't believe it.

And the Physicist saw that it was Bad.

Another said, Axiom is stolen, and thus Physics is destroyed.

And the Physicist said, they only steal words. I still have the concepts. I'll write "Foundational Principle" instead of "Axiom."  And my words will say, "there is nothing to destroy here."

And the thieves said, Physics is destroyed, let's go destroy something else.

And the Engineer said of Physics, I Can Use!

And the Technology is Good. Very Good.

I just got home. The root canal was so great that I'm blogging about it.

At 67, I expect an occasional tooth canal, but I did not expect that today's root canal was to be this wonderful.

Yes, root canal. Back when I was born, several hours of the greatest pain that one could experience and still be alive afterward.  The proverbial root canal. The previous one for me, about a year ago, lasted an hour and a half, with a moment of pain now and then.

Today's root canal was done by the same dentist. I chose him because he is a Geek like me, but I didn't even expect This Geek.

He must have wanted me to enjoy a surprise; he didn't even show me his new computer-controlled high-power laser root canal gizmo. He just did the root canal with it. A second and a half later I saw and smelled a small puff of smoke. And that was it. The technician put the temporary cover back in, and said it's done, see the receptionist on the way out because to put in a crown.

Pain happens when some neurotransmitter gets out of a damaged cell and hits a pain nerve. Laser, no pain. The whole cell is vaporized to fast that the pain stuff doesn't have time to get out of the cell before it's smoke.

No pain. no risk of pain. not even a possibility of pain.

This is what I experienced: the whole Suffering thing is nearly down to a maybe-once-in-a-lifetime unprevented accident. And we Humans are working on "unprevented."

If it were not for Christians enforcing their "Suffering is a precious gift of God" faith on me, I'd expect Suffering to be a once-a-year-or-so thing before I die.

2500 years ago Suffering was obviously, visibly co-extensive with life. It was so universal that it was one of the first universal facts ever induced. "Life Is Suffering" was a Noble Truth.

And now it is gone in a little puff of smoke.

Hero: UI Psychologist Working On Dropbox Icons

If you experience joy when you identify a Hero - and what user of Objectivism doesn't? - today's information systems are a mine of Joy.

The problem (or, if you like Herakles, the Labor:)

The out-of-buffers bug. Born of some deadline-or-other in the original source of Bell Labs Unix, by 1999 it infected every operating system on Earth. Then it was discovered by criminals, who used it to spread denial-of-service attacks. By 2003 the good guys removed it from every serious OS, including Windows XP. But the out-of-buffers bug survived, silently, in Windows Phone. And then... Windows Phone was injected into Windows 7 to make Windows 8. Applications on Widows 8 were being screamlessly castrated by the out-of-buffers bug as it thrived again. Users of Dropbox thought that their worthy-of-Dropbox files were being immortalized in Dropbox, when they weren't, and would not be until Windows 8 was started anew.

The Hero's Victory, PWN:

Make It Visible. The Hero made the connection visible as a circle in the lower-right quadrant of the Dropbox icon. The circle spun like a hero's shield when the connection was busy with work. When it was idle because everything had been (at least for the moment) won, it displayed the V checkmark of victory. And when the out-of-buffers bug struck it down, it fell, like a hero waiting for the user to invoke Panakeia to bring him again to his feet, and to victory.

Our descendants will envy us, for living in an age when it was possible to be a giant.

Hero, PWN.

H/T Homer.

An lp for cygwin

Windows NT (i.e. all MS Windows distros in recent years) has a System V Unix kernel, badly mangled but still POSIX. Cygwin, from cygwin.com, is a free Linux-style superstructure that one can download and run on top of Windows NT, creating a complete Unix environment as solid as any Linux or Apple distro. With one thing missing: lp.
 
lp (originally short for line printer) is the original Unix print sink. Many commands in the Unix/Cygwin toolkit are meant to send plain text, or postscript, into lp:
 
$ man -t anycommand | lp
 
$ ls -l | pr | lp
 
and so on. And one can copy any text on the screen, and print it by pasting it into the standard input of  lp. Cygwin is incomplete without lp. (Cygwin has a rudimentary lpr command that can send postscript to some postscript printers, but it's not the same thing.) And so...
 
Cygwin does have enscript. Enscript, if properly configured, can accept text or postscript as input, and send its output to a (configurable) postscript spooling command. And a perfect spooling command for Windows NT is available: 'gsprint -', installed as part of ghostview for windows NT. Gsprint, in turn, uses ghostscript (gswin32c.exe) to convert the postscript that gsprint accepts into its standard input, into the appropriate printer format, and spools it to the default Windows NT printer. Note that gsprint uses the regular Windows NT ghostscript, not the cygwin version. The steps are:
 
(1) Download and install
 
http://downloads.ghostscript.com/public/gs907w32.exe
 
(2) Add the ghostscript bin and lib directories (';C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.07\bin;C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.07\lib' on Windows XP) to the Path variable of your Windows NT distro. Reboot.
 
(3) Download and install
 
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/download/gsv50w32.exe
 
(4) Add the gsview directory (';C:\Program Files\Ghostgum\gsview' on Windows XP) to the Path variable of your Windows NT distro. Reboot.
 
(5) Place
 
GeneratePageSize: false
Spooler: gsprint
 
in ~/.enscriptrc
 
and
 
export ENSCRIPT='-MLetter'
export GROFF_TYPESETTER='latin1'
alias lp='/usr/bin/enscript -zZlf Courier-Bold@10.9/10.2 --printer-options=-'
 
(or a different font if you prefer) in ~/.bashrc. Reboot. Enjoy lp in cygwin!

Pragmatism and the Patent-Troll Problem

A patentable invention must be novel, not obvious, and reduced to practice.

A "patent-troll" is a pseudo-inventor who obtains a patent on an obvious (to practitioners, if not to patent examiners or to judges) application of a known concept in a new context, and then just waits for engineers, programmers or business managers to do... the obvious: apply the same known concept in the "patented" context. At this point the patent troll will sue for infringement of the "patent."

Back when "non-obvious" first became a criterion for patentability, its meaning was objective and clear. "Obvious" means "not requiring the induction of a new concept." "Non-obvious" means "requiring the induction of a new concept." The applicability of an existing concept to new contexts is part of the concept of "concept," going back to Aristotle or before. A patentable, non-obvious invention was one that required the induction of a new concept.

When Pragmatism took over American law, this changed. The existential import of Pragmatism is the denial of the applicability of concepts to existence. The objective definition of obviousness was replaced by a vague sort of "I know it when I see it" ("it doesn't seem obvious to me") non-objective intuition on the part of patent examiners and judges. Hence "patent trolls."

Why is this important? Because the existence of patent-trolls is being used as an argument against intellectual property as property. And it is NOT a valid argument against intellectual property. It is, however, a valid argument against Pragmatism, and especially against Pragmatism as a "Philosophy of Law."

Ayn Rand, Illegal Immigrant

Ayn Rand's 106th birthday is being celebrated today by people all over the world, including many who would (if they only could) escape the various tyrannies under which they happened to be born, people whose most burning desire is to become Americans. Her birthday is also being celebrated, incoherently, by many Americans actively engaged in keeping those would-be Americans out.

Ayn Rand was an "Illegal Immigrant." Scare quotes because, in the moral sense, it is the laws that deny, to some persons, the enjoyment of their natural individual rights solely because of the happenstance of where they were born (and that deny to American citizens our undeniable individual right to employ, and to trade with, the peaceable persons of our choice) - it is America's current immigration laws that are illegitimate.

To obtain a visa to America, Alisa Rozenbaum went through great effort to convince American consular officials, and falsely swore, that she intended to return to Soviet Russia to marry a fellow Soviet citizen to whom she was engaged. Under American law, this constituted (1)perjury, (2)making false statements to a government official, (3)falsification of official documents; and a string of lesser felonies. Her visa, being the fruit of these deliberately committed felonies, was never legally valid. Fortunately, back in the 1920s most Americans understood (as Rand herself understood) that principles are not intrinsicist rules, but guidelines for contextually chosen action. Immigrants from Soviet Russia (and later from Nazi Germany) were not, as a rule, prosecuted for whatever felonies they had committed in order to escape their previous rulers and migrate to America.

Ordinarily, Ayn Rand would have become what today would be formally an "illegal immigrant" when she got work, which was not permitted by her "family visit" or tourist visa. Soviet passports were for 3 years, at least for those without Pull in the High Nomenklatura. Alice's - her passport name - was issued October 29, 1925. It expired, together with any visas and visa extensions that were stamped into it, on or before October 29, 1928. She was somehow able to obtain a total of 3 extensions of her tourist visa, although working while on a tourist visa made her a visa violator until her marriage to an American citizen the following year. The marriage entitled her to become a legal resident (this is no longer the case today.) Working while on a tourist US visa is not a felony, but it is a serious misdemeanor - one for which even mothers of young American citizens have been deported in recent years. Of course, back when most Americans could still think in concepts, such minor technical violations of immigration law were not a problem for any American. Today this is no longer the case. Pragmatist control of American "education" has produced a generation of Americans bereft of normal human conceptual faculties. They have learned that it is racism, to deny a person the enjoyment of her natural rights because of where her ancestors were born. But they are OK with denying a person the enjoyment of her natural rights, because of where she herself was born.

The mantra of today's conservatives is law enforcement first, immigration reform only "after the borders have been secured." American consular officials are under no obligation to respect the individual rights of foreign nationals abroad, and, like all bureaucrats, enjoy the exercise of arbitrary authority over their helpless legal inferiors. The current legal immigration process typically subjects the immigrant to years of waiting in a legal limbo, punctuated by periodic rituals of humiliating subjection to the arbitrary whims of petty consular bureaucrats. The gauntlet of waiting through years of arbitrary obstacles and humiliations, functions as a filter, letting through only those who, once they have arrived in America, will obey our emerging tyrants. The message of our immigration laws to independent-minded people, including those who today celebrate the birthday of American illegal immigrant Alisa Rozenbaum, is simple: we don't want you here.

First Grade With Concepts: How I Learned to Multiply Without Memorizing Tables.

This post will ground a discussion of the existential implications of the differences between an education proper to humans - a conceptual education - and the pseudo-education foisted upon Americans by Pragmatist "educators," and increasingly spread by them to the rest of the world. When Ayn Rand discussed the issue in The Comprachicos, the Pragmatists were still in the initial stages of taking over. Today, many adult Americans don't even know that there is any workable alternative, to the Pragmatist dogma that education consists of (1) learning skills and facts by practice and rote, without conceptual understanding; and (2) of testing "educational achievement" by examinations during which the student has no time to think and no time to apply concepts - and the teacher has no choice but to "teach to the test" by imposing rote memorization on the student, and prohibiting conceptual thought lest the student think, and "waste time," on the eventual test.

A properly human, conceptual education has only the most limited contact with memorization. Most things that can be memorized, can be as fluently learned by repeated reasoning from first principles. I can multiply as fast as, and probably faster than, an adult who did memorize the multiplication tables in first grade. After reasoning out some specific result from first principles two or three times, the result will be remembered and retrieved faster, than if it had been memorized. And, having been understood, that result will be usable in solving problems beyond the grasp of the memorizer. (There are contexts where memorization is necessary - a surgeon cannot take the time to think about evolutionary anatomy while operating - but such contexts are rare.)

I had the enormous good fortune to have learned first grade arithmetic with the Łukasiewicz curriculum. Jan Łukasiewicz, an Aristotelian philosopher of mathematics best known for Aristotle’s Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic, had been, in 1919, independent Poland's first Minister of Education, and created its distinctly Aristotelian K-12 mathematics curriculum. This is what I remember of the sequence of ideas in first-grade Arithmetic:

1. Digital (finger) counting; cardinal and ordinal numbers; addition.

2. Doubling; odd and even numbers; halving of even numbers.

3. (Single digit) subtraction; zero and negative numbers; equations.

4. (Single digit) multiplication (beyond doubling) as repeated addition.

5. Exponentiation as repeated multiplication; powers of 10.

6. Number bases; place-order (Arabic) notation; the carry; multi-digit operations.

7. Multiplication shortcuts.

8. Modular (Clock) Arithmetic; telling time; clock arithmetic (time) operations.

Multiplication shortcuts took the place of memorized multiplication tables. All the shortcuts had a derivation from previously integrated concepts, so that I had a conceptual understanding of what I was doing:

x 2, AKA "doubling:" Add the starting number to itself.

x 10. Move the digits one place (base 10!) to the left and put a zero at the end (in the ones' place - the number of ones, after multiplication by the base, is zero.)

x 5. 5 is half of 10, so first multiply by 10, and then halve the result.

x 9. Multiply by 10 and subtract the original number from the result.

x 4. 4 is the second power of 2, so double twice.

x 3. 3 is (2 + 1,) so double and then add the original number again.

x 6. Multiply by 5 and add another instance of the original number.

x 8. Double thrice.

x 7. Multiply by 5 and add twice the original.

In a comparative test after the first grade, we (unlike a class of memorizers) would have understood what we were doing, although we would have been slower, than memorizers just recalling what they learned by rote. By the end of the second grade, we would have had enough accumulated practice to be equally fast - and incomparably superior in understanding what was going on, and in being able to figure out new calculation methods for new contexts.

The essential advantage of learning conceptually is that what one learns makes sense. And that makes multiplication, and all of Arithmetic, and all that comes after, natural and easy. There wasn't a single pupil in my first-grade class who could have thought, "I am not good at math."

Hard Atheism: Why a "God" is Impossible

Philosophers distinguish between "Soft Atheism" and "Hard Atheism."

"Soft Atheism" is the position that, as long as there is no evidence for the existence of a God, there is no more reason to believe in a God than to believe in gremlins or unicorns. In the absence of evidence, a reasonable human holds that gremlins, unicorns and gods are fictions that don't exist in reality.

"Hard Atheism" is the position that a belief in the existence of a God would contradict known facts of reality. Historically, "hard" Atheism was typically associated with the position that the properties attributed to the God or Gods of some specific religion were mutually contradictory, or stood in contradiction to known facts. This is not difficult to establish with respect to, for example, the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence traditionally ascribed to God in Abrahamic monotheisms. But the attributes ascribed to God differ from religion to religion; a Hindu or a Deist need not ascribe to her God any of the traditional attributes from this list. Until the last half-century, hard Atheism was always associated with preclusion of some specific religious conception of God, rather than of God/Gods in general.

A "hard Atheism" independent of any specific religious conception of God can only be based on a contradiction between reality and those attributes that are shared by every conceivable God of any conceivable religion. There are two such attributes: consciousness and non-measurability. A measurable entity cannot be "transcendent," and an entity incapable of awareness cannot be "spiritual" in any religious sense of those terms. Thus, a demonstration that the same entity cannot be simultaneously non-measurable and aware would be a foundation of a Hard Atheism independent of any specific religion's list of the attributes of its God. It would be the foundation of a simultaneously "hard" and universal Atheism.

The steps in demonstrating the contradiction are as follows:

(1) Mass and energy are measurable. To be non-measurable, a God cannot be physical in the sense of being composed of, or containing, matter or energy. A God is non-physical.

(2) To be aware is to be aware of the identity of something. To be aware, an aware God must have information about the identity of whatever it is ware of. A God must have information.

(3) The quantity of information in an entity, is given by Shannon's Law applied to the range of possible states of its physical attributes. For that quantity to be non-zero, the entity must have physical attributes with measurable properties. But only physical entities composed of matter and energy can have measurable properties and states. Therefore only physical entities composed of matter and energy can contain or carry information. (For more detail on this, an explanation of the need in every data network protocol stack, for a physical layer to carry the information, can be found in any standard textbook on data networks.)

(4) Therefore only a physical entity can be aware.

(5) Therefore a God, being non-physical, cannot be aware. QED.

Thus Shannon's Law precludes the possibility of there being a God who is simultaneously non-measurable and aware. If one understands Shannon's Law, and the evidence on which it stands, one must be a Hard Atheist - or incoherent.

The Supposed Atheisms of Hitler and Stalin

One of the last century's most persistent urban legends is the supposed Atheism of two of its largest-scale mass murderers. Interestingly, this myth never took root in Poland, a country that suffered deeply under both Hitler and Stalin, perhaps because many Poles read Russian and German, and the older ones remember the two dictators' policies.

Hitler

Hitler consistently identified himself in his writings as a Christian, and a life-long Catholic. Before the Nazi party came into power, a faction led by Ernst Roehm successfully campaigned for the votes of German secularists, neo-Pagans and homosexuals. Hitler exterminated the top 61 leaders of this secularist faction in The Night of the Long Knives in 1934. Non-religious heterosexual Aryans were allowed to remain in the Nazi Party, but after 1934 the remaining Atheists had no political influence.

Germany's Churches, both Catholic and Protestant, and Catholic and Protestant religious parties, overwhelmingly supported Hitler, giving him special praise for his anti-abortion and anti-homosexual policies and for his "War Against Judeo-Bolshevism." Hitler repaid the favor, re-establishing state religions in previously secular conquered countries in Europe. Hitler created two new countries, Slovakia and Croatia, as Nazi satellites; both were established as Roman Catholic theocracies with Roman Catholic clergy at the head of their governments.

Purported "evidence" for Hitler's alleged Atheism comes mainly from "Hitler's Table Talk," a compendium "edited" by notorious pathological liar Martin Bormann. None of the supposed "documents" of Hitler's supposed "Atheism" has been reliably authenticated; most are demonstrably forgeries, fabricated long after their alleged dates.

Stalin

Joseph Stalin ("Party Name" of Yosip Dzhougashvili) had been a child prodigy whose religious poetry was celebrated by critics and widely published while he was still in his teens. Receiving a scholarship at 16, he chose to attend a seminary for future Orthodox Christian priests rather than a secular university. Shortly before his final exams, Dzhougashvili decided that the emerging Communist movement embodied Christian altruism more perfectly than the established Orthodox Christian Church, and became a Communist activist.

Arguments for Stalin's supposed Atheism hinge on the fact that he remained in the Communist Party during Lenin's brief anticlerical campaign (after the Orthodox Christian Church, which as an established church had played in Tzarist Russia a role analogous to that of the Communist Party in the subsequent Soviet regime, was dis-established and the Soviet State was made secular.) Stalin's one authenticated "Atheist" statement, from an extemporaneous speech ("You know, they are fooling us, there is no God...all this talk about God is sheer nonsense") dates from that period.

Once Lenin was dead, Stalin resumed his prior habit of making frequent mention of "God" and "God's will" in his speeches. Stalin consistently refused to include Atheist books in his library, calling them "antireligious waste-paper" ("Stalin's Secret Life," B. S. Ilizarov 2004.) While Stalin deported many priests to the Gulag during the Great Purge, the priests were mostly permitted to live - in contrast to (usually Atheist) "Old Bolsheviks," most of whom were tortured and killed.

According to pro-Stalin activists in the Russian Orthodox Church today, Stalin had a "born again" Christian spiritual experience in 1941, and remained a devout Christian, and was a devotee of the folk mystic St. Matryona of Moscow until his death. Convinced that the German invasion was divine punishment for the dis-establishment of the Orthodox Church and the imprisonment of its priests, Stalin not only released the few priests still imprisoned by 1941, but also re-established the Russian Orthodox Church as the official Church of the State; priests, monks, patriarchs and bishops were placed on Soviet state payroll and given privileges comparable to the privileges of members of the Communist Party.

In Soviet satellite states, such as Poland, local churches (such as the Roman Catholic Church in Poland) were given considerable political authority. For the first time in Polish history, attendance at lessons in the Catholic Catechism, taught by Catholic priests, was made mandatory in all government schools. (Before Stalin, these classes were optional, although in some schools dissenting students were kept in unheated hallways, even in the notorious cold of Polish winters, and many attended the catechism classes just to keep warm.) In the Soviet Union itself, persecution of believers and clergy was limited to sects and churches considered heretical by the Patriarchs of the Established Orthodox Church.

Post-Stalin, questions of religion and Atheism were delegated to the leaders of local Communist Parties, with extreme differences from country to country.

On Disagreement As A Tool Of Reason

The use of disagreement as a tool of reason appears to have been pervasive in Hellenistic culture (I leave the identification of its first discovery to historians.) It reached its highest refinement in Talmudic discussions of "disagreement for a higher purpose" ("machloket l'shem shamayim," lit. "disagreement in the name of the sky.") The "higher purpose" was to get closer to truth - in contrast to ordinary, polemical disagreement. The purpose of polemical disagreement is other-directed: to convert another to what one already believes to be true. The purpose of "high-minded" disagreement is inner-directed: what Ayn Rand would call "selfish," and her less frank contemporaries would describe as serving one's own "self-actualization" or "self-realization." The purpose of "higher" (that is, selfish) disagreement is to get one's own views into closer alignment with reality external to consciousness - that is, into closer agreement with what actually exists.

The reason for the selfish utility of intellectual disagreement is simple, and rather obvious. When two sane, intelligent, honest and knowledgeable persons disagree, it must be, that at least one of them knows something that the other does not know, or, that at least one of them has made an error of reasoning, or some combination of these. Because I know that I am neither omniscient nor infallible, and I because I want the content of my awareness to be aligned as closely as possible with what actually exists in the world, every disagreement with one of my intellectual peers presents me with what could be an opportunity to extend my knowledge, or to correct an error in my understanding of the world. Such a disagreement is a selfish opportunity that I, as a rational man, am not minded to waste.

It is unfortunate that we live in a Christian-Moslem-Altruist culture in which disagreement is viewed, mainly, as an other-directed opportunity to improve the other person by converting her to one's own, presumed-to-be-truer viewpoint. Intellectual disagreement is a useful tool of selfish reason, and deserves to be used for this, its eminently higher and more moral function.

Configuring a Virtual Printer Using RedMon 1.7 on Windows 7

The RedMon 1.7 Redirection Port Monitor is an open source product of GhostGum Software, frequently used to configure virtual printers on Microsoft operating systems based on Microsoft Windows NT technology. Among other uses, RedMon is often used to configure a virtual PostScript printer to bypass bugs in printer drivers provided by printer manufacturers (e.g. the current PrintStik driver from PlanOn) or to provide a network print server for clients that don't have native drivers for the shared printer.

RedMon 1.7 was released in 2001, and its design did not anticipate the new security features that Microsoft would add to Windows Vista and Windows 7 (as well as Windows Server 2008 and later.) RedMon extends explorer.exe, which in Windows 7 is started, by default, without the Administrator privileges needed to configure a virtual printer port. Running explorer.exe as an Administrator is deliberately made difficult in post-XP versions of Microsoft Windows, so as to deter the severe security vulnerabilities that may result. The following instructions assume that you are a skilled system administrator with a thorough knowledge of security considerations, and of system administration technologies such as the CygWin toolkit. If you are not in this category, please do not try, and do not blame me if you try and your system becomes compromised and useless because you did.

1. Make sure that you have, and know how to use, a shell tool capable of launching a background process on the Microsoft Windows distribution of your choice. I use XTerm, which runs under XWin from CygWin.com. You will need to have XWin running on your system in advance before you launch a privileged XTerm as described below.

2. Install all the software that you will need. For example, in order to configure a virtual PostScript printer, you will have installed GhostScript, gsprint and RedMon in advance.

3. Back up the system, so that you will be able to restore it if it becomes compromised while explorer.exe is running in privileged mode.

4. Before you run explorer.exe as Administrator, cut off all potential vectors through which a privileged instance of explorer.exe can be exploited (and through it, your system.) Shut down all applications that can act as web or e-mail clients, and do not start any such applications again until you have finished configuring the virtual printer. Physically unplug the network from your computer if you can. If you can't, disable all external network interfaces. If you are administering remotely, make sure that the network you are using for remote administration is physically isolated from non-secure networks, and disable all external network interfaces other than the one you are using.

5. Start a privileged instance of your shell tool. For example, right-click XTerm in the Start->Programs menu and select "Run as Administrator." Then change directory in this shell tool to /cygdrive/c/Windows or equivalent.

6. Use the Task Manager to kill the default instance of explorer.exe.

7. Background a privileged instance of explorer.exe with your shell tool. For example, in the above privileged instance of XTerm give the command "./explorer.exe &".

8. Configure your virtual printer.

9. Use the Task Manager to kill the privileged explorer.exe and to start a new default instance.

10. Restore network connections.

Most administrator tasks that worked in Windows XP but don't work in Windows 7 can be made to work with a work-around similar to the above.

Why Evolution Doesn't Do Design: Part IV

(Please read Part I, Part II, and Part III first.)

7. Insulin and Low-Carbohydrate Diets

The revival of Brand's doctrine of CoEvolution in recent years was sparked by increasing popularity of low-carbohydrate diets (Atkins etc.) These diets have a principled, scientific basis derived from the study of the role of insulin in the human body.

Insulin is secreted into the blood stream in response to high levels of glucose in the blood. Insulin promotes the conversion of excess glucose into triglycerides, and eventually body fat: this is how energy is stored in times of abundance for use in times of famine.

The first function of insulin is to protect the body from excess levels of glucose. Diabetes, a group of diseases marked by the lack of normal release of insulin in response to an excess of glucose, leaves the body exposed to severe damage from excess glucose.

The second function of insulin is to convert the overly abundant glucose into triglycerides, and eventually into body fat for energy storage. The absence of insulin causes the reverse: conversion of stored fat to usable energy.

The third is to increase hunger. Until the last half-century, most human populations were plagued by famines, often exacerbated by tyranny and war. A human who had stored enough fat in times of plenty could survive a famine more often; insulin hunger encouraged more eating, and the formation of more stored fat, in those rare times when there was more than enough to eat. More fat also meant more cardiovascular disease and a shorter lifespan, but in most cultures, what happened to the individual after the age of reproduction and child-rearing had little evolutionary impact. In most local environments human evolution favored fat for surviving a famine, and a lifespan of 30-40 years.

In recent decades modern agricultural technology changed this picture. With the threat of famine removed, first in the West and then elsewhere, humans started to aim for a longer individual lifespan. In the context of changed goals, such as achieving lifespans of eight decades or longer, fat became an obstacle instead of an advantage. The logical solution, in view of the scientific identification of the three roles of insulin, was to fight fat and its consequences by limiting the intake of carbohydrates, and thus limiting blood glucose levels to below the threshold for the release of insulin. Hence the advice, from Atkins 1972 onward, to limit one's intake of bulk carbohydrates to less than one gram per two kilograms of body weight per day.

This advice was not unopposed. Before the three roles of insulin had been identified, diets were based on a well-understood principle: the law of conservation of energy. Every calorie of energy eaten must be either excreted, expended, or stored. To store less energy in the form of body fat, one must eat fewer calories. The advice to stop counting calories, even if only to count grams of carbohydrates instead, seemed unprincipled. The advocates of low-carb diets were telling patients to stop acting on principle and to act on a gimmick instead. The trouble was that for many, albeit not for everyone, the gimmick worked.

Of course the low-carb diets did not repeal the law of conservation of energy. They worked because, in the absence of insulin, the low-carb dieter was not hungry and ate fewer calories. (The Atkins diet also encouraged the consumption of high-fiber greens, facilitating the elimination of excess food from the digestive tract.) In contrast, the traditional calorie-counting dieter often consumed most of her closely watched calories in the form of bulk carbohydrates - and her insulin spiked, causing hunger. And so the calorie-counter was discouraged, stressed, tempted to cheat. The difference was, and is, a fascinating illustration of the importance of tracking the context when one is following a principle.

8. CoEvolution Becomes "Paleo."

Stewart Brand renounced the doctrine of CoEvolution when phyletic gradualism, on which the doctrine was based, had been disconfirmed and replaced by punctuated equilibrium. But, just like dietitians attached to the principle of calories, the now disconfirmed principle of CoEvolution had adherents who evaded, ignored, or simply did not understand the principle of punctuated equilibrium.

One anthropological observation sometimes cited in favor of low-carbohydrate diets was that pre-European-contact Eskimos lived on what was practically the highest-fat, lowest-carbohydrate diet on the planet, yet were physically fit enough to thrive in the world's most adverse environment. To the remaining believers in CoEvolution this made sense: the Eskimos lived without agriculture or industry, much as Paleolithic men had lived ten thousand years ago. Similarly, pre-agricultural tribes inhabiting tropical islands where there had never been famines, did not exhibit the cardiovascular pathologies observed in environments where fat accumulation had evolved as an adaptation to periodic famine. In the context of punctuated equilibrium, these would be viewed as examples of rapid (and possibly recent) evolutionary adaptation to local conditions. Believers in CoEvolution, however, saw in those selected anthropological observations a validation of their belief that a return to a Paleolithic lifestyle was a recipe for the achievement of optimal health - optimal health that humans had been designed for by slow (Co)Evolution over hundreds of thousands of years. Thus was CoEvolution re-born as "Modern Paleo." Unlike punctuated equilibrium, it was a principle that one did not need measure theory to understand. Thus one could do a low-carbohydrate diet not as a "gimmick" using the peculiar relation of hunger to insulin, but as part of the application of "The Principle of Evolution." It was no longer the principle of how evolution was understood to work, by those who cared to understand how it worked. But it did correspond to how evolution had been formerly thought to work, and how it was still thought to work by nearly everyone else. And for the popular self-help culture that was good enough.

Unfortunately for adherents, the Modern Paleo Principle leads to something quite different from optimal health - unless modified by altogether non-paleolithic, industrial-strength food supplements. The most telling example is iodine. No one really knows why, but a low-carbohydrate diet, when it does not include plenty of seafood and kelp, sometimes causes an iodine deficiency severe enough to end in hypothyroidism. And so "Modern Paleo" adherents are the world's best consumers of un-paleolithic, industrially purified, high-potency Iodine/Potassium Iodide tablets.

It happens that all "contemporary Paleo" cultures that have been found by anthropologists to enjoy relatively good health, live on islands or on seashores, where they get plenty of iodine in their diet from seafood and from kelp and other marine vegetation. Somehow even the most non-Paleolithic islanders, such as the modern Japanese, are also very healthy, as long as they get enough iodine from seafood and kelp. Even if, as in the case of the Japanese, the bulk of their diet is rice and other modern grains.

One explanation of the iodine link is that iodine is needed to live without bulk carbohydrates. So how did inland primitives live and reproduce without industrial iodine? It turns out that they ate bulk carbohydrates. Wild sugar cane is a favorite of inland primitives in New Guinea. Wild rice (Zizania) was a staple in the diet of pre-Columbian inland North Americans. Low-carb might not be, for at least some of us, a return to the diet of our stone-age ancestors.

Another potential explanation is that some of us may have had more recent ancestors who lived on islands or by the shore. The very rapid evolution to local optima - an aspect of punctuated equilibrium - would have moved the relevant ancestral genomes in the direction of dependence on abundant iodine in the diet. Some people today may need industrial iodine supplements, because some of their specific ancestors had evolved to depend on high levels of this specific nutrient.

Evolution does not do design. We are not "designed by evolution" to eat the food or live the lives of our Paleolithic ancestors. What evolution is known to have done, is to quickly if imperfectly adapt one's specific ancestors, who lived in hundreds of different environments, to be fit to survive and reproduce in those specific environments - and not in the ancestral environments of other humans. The daily food of one may be pain or death to another. The real universal principle is to use one's mind to create for oneself, by systematic self-knowledge and by the artifice of one's mind, a diet and an environment that will compensate for evolution's lack of design.

Why Evolution Doesn't Do Design: Part III

(Please read Part I and Part II before this part.)

5. Why Punctuated Equilibrium Matters






So far, this discussion dealt mainly with an issue that, at first glance, might not seem important to anyone outside a narrow circle of systematic and theoretical biologists. Hardly anyone outside this narrow circle has even heard of "phyletic gradualism" or of "punctuated equilibrium." Yet this first glance is deceiving. Up to about 1990, even knowledgeable biologists often conflated what we now call "phyletic gradualism" with evolution as such (much as the "Copenhagen Interpretation" of quantum physics is often conflated, even in the minds of the less knowledgeable physicists, with just quantum physics.) Even today, there are many professors of biology, not to mention biology teachers in middle schools and high schools, who are out of their intellectual comfort zone in measure theory and genetic algorithms - and therefore, who still think of phyletic gradualism as simply "Evolution." And therefore, so do almost all non-biologists. Most people today, if they have any ideas having to do with evolution at all, have ideas based on a false picture of how evolution works.

And thus we come to the most important reason why punctuated equilibrium matters. An important aspect of rationality is the use of principles as a guide to everyday life. One of the most useful principles is that the human body is a product of evolution. A false idea of how evolution works can sabotage the application of this principle to one's life. At worst, a false idea of how evolution works can trap the user into activities and habits that worsen, rather than improve, one's health and one's performance at life.

Unfortunately, there are many diet, exercise, and other self-help regimens that claim to be principled applications of the principle of evolution - and are actually applications of the (disconfirmed) phyletic gradualism model. Most of these regimens are based on a specific embodiment of the phyletic gradualism model: Stewart Brand's once popular doctrine of "CoEvolution."

6. "Co-Evolution" and Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand's work has affected more people who don't know his name than the work of any other near-anonymous intellectual on the planet. An early associate of Ken Kesey and his "performance art" collective the "Merry Pranksters," he had unblemished Hippie credentials, combined with (unusual for a Hippie) a genuine love of science and technology. The mainspring of the hippies' movement was opposition to anything that might be a part of "the system:" not merely against the political system, but against everything from systematic thought to industrial production to intelligible art. This took many of the early hippies into lives of applied nihilism that often led to the mental hospital or to the grave. Brand, with his love of history and technology, was a rebel among rebels.

By 1968, many of Brand's hippie friends were dead from rejection of science and, especially, from rejection of technology. In 1969, Brand began publishing The Whole Earth Catalog, a compendium of technologies (books, maps, garden tools, specialized clothing, carpenters' and masons' tools, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, professional journals, electrical gear and so on) that might be useful for survival in various degrees of isolation from "the System." It became an instant best-seller, reaching a million and a half copies in 1972. The Whole Earth Catalog was not only a survival manual for hippies, but also for a wide range of "survivalists" preparing for eventualities that ranged from nuclear war and a Communist invasion, to an immediate collapse of civilization (as in "Atlas Shrugged" read by a literalist.) The Whole Earth Catalog was also used by millions who were neither hippies nor survivalists, but who found many of the technologies in the book simply useful for living better lives.

In the meantime, Brand developed something that the early hippies had disdained: an ideology that grounded their anti-industrial attitude and lifestyle in the evolutionary science of his time; that is, in what today is called the phyletic gradualism model. Brand's "ideology of the Hippies" came to be known as the doctrine of CoEvolution, after one of its key ideas. Brand propagated his ideas in a periodical, founded in 1974, that he called "Co-Evolution Quarterly."

According to Stewart Brand's doctrine of CoEvolution, for the first several millions of years of hominid evolution our ancestors, and the life-forms in their environment, had co-evolved into a state of optimal human health in an environment optimally suited for human life. This optimal co-existence came to an end at the breakpoint between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic periods of human prehistory. It ended when humans stopped waiting for the life in their environment to co-evolve with them, slowly, into a harmonious state optimal for the well-being of all life. Instead, humans started to change their environment by means of agriculture, engineering, and eventually the building of cities and industries. These changes resulted in an environment that was no longer suited to optimal human health and life.

The other prong of the doctrine was that, given how slow evolution appeared to be under the phyletic gradualism model, human biology today was essentially unchanged since paleolithic times. Therefore the existential counsel of Brand's doctrine of CoEvolution was that, to achieve optimal well-being, one should try to live today as closely as possible to how our paleolithic ancestors lived ten thousand years ago; while trying to live in an environment approximating, as closely as possible, their environment - and working to bring the global physical environment back to what it was then. It was not a coincidence that the result also resembled how many of the Hippies already lived, as a result of trying to live apart from "the System."

The specific recommendations were, first, to avoid eating foods created or processed by industrial or artificial methods such as milling, canning, or chemical reactions or adding artificial preservatives or flavors. Then, to avoid the products of industrial agriculture, and to grow one's own, or to barter or trade with small-scale, home-based farmers, and then only those who did not use any artificial chemicals or other artificial methods. Eating, if possible, only those breeds of animals and plants that were closest to what existed before the beginning of agriculture. Avoiding foods that could not have been hunted or gathered by pre-agricultural humans.

The CoEvolution lifestyle went beyond diet. Footwear was to be avoided in favor of going barefoot; at most, it was to be limited to protecting the bottom of the sole. Lift, lateral support and arch support footwear was out. Exercise was to be limited to the natural motions of running, climbing, and hefting - no artificial positions or exercise machines. No shaving; no artificial cosmetics, shampoo, soap, or deodorant. No furniture for sleeping or sitting off the floor (but mats and pillows, in place of paleolithic animal pelts on the floor, were OK.) Any work that could not be done on the floor was to be done standing.

Elements of the CoEvolution lifestyle caught on with many people who would never have thought of themselves as hippies, often for good reasons. Many men stopped shaving, both to save time and to avoid the inevitable nicks and cuts. Some found it easier to work standing than sitting; many slept better on futons than on beds. Most of all, Americans began to re-learn how much better authentic, unprocessed food tasted than the processed, industrial kind. Stewart Brand changed how we lived, and how we thought about living.

Yet within a few years, the phyletic gradualism model at the foundation of the CoEvolution doctrine began to be disconfirmed by increasing evidence for punctuated equilibrium. Brand, who had been a biology major at Stanford, was among the first to abandon the doctrine to which he had given life. In 1985, "CoEvolution Quarterly" became "Whole Earth Review," and CoEvolution was not heard from again. Brand re-invented himself as a corporate futurist, in 1988 co-founding the Global Business Network and working for, among others, Royal Dutch/Shell, Volvo, and AT&T. But Brand's doctrine of CoEvolution would not die with its founder's change of mind. Few non-specialists understood the evidence that had disconfirmed phyletic gradualism and put punctuated equilibrium in its place. And two decades later, CoEvolution re-entered the marketplace of self-help ideas under other names.

(Continued in Part IV.)

Why Evolution Doesn't Do Design: Part II

(please read Part I first.)

3. The Evidence

The first factor in the overthrow of phyletic gradualism was the identification of the actual mechanism by which the information carried by the DNA is expressed. A sequence of DNA codes is nothing like a blueprint for some specific trait. Instead, each DNA code identifies a specific amino acid in one of thousands of strings of amino acids. These strings are called peptides. Each peptide, in turn, may have one or more functions that it performs in the organism: as part of the structure of a protein, or as an enzyme, or a hormone, or a neurotransmitter, or as a part of the molecular "skeleton" that determines the structure of tissues and organs. These, in turn, participate in biochemical pathways and physiological and anatomical structures responsible for the observed traits of the organism. Thus, the correspondences between the codes and the traits are manifold, multivariate, non-linear and often discontinuous. They result in complicated probability-of-reproductive-success surfaces that have many small local optima, most of them low hills whose peaks are far below the high peak of a global optimum.

The second was discovered (see MODPAC: A modular package of programs for fitting model parameters to data and plotting fitted curves. Reed, Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation, 1976) by mathematicians and computer scientists working on the problem of finding the optimal values of the parameters of a quantitative model to fit a body of data. All the methods, including not only algebraic approximations but also "genetic programming" methods that simulate the mechanisms of genetic evolution (Koza, Genetic Programming, MIT Press 1992) when invoked on a problem with multiple local optima, converge rapidly on some happenstance local optimum near the starting point. Once at this happenstance local optimum, the parameter-fitting mechanisms are at equilibrium. The values of the parameters stay permanently frozen, with a fit often far below the global optimum, unless dislodged by additional computational techniques (exploration, explosion, simulated annealing) that have no equivalent in natural evolution.

The third came from paleontology. In the fossil record, new traits and species appear in the course of only a few dozen generations, only to continue practically unchanged for tens of thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands, or millions of generations thereafter. It was this observation that first led to the label "punctuated equilibrium."

The fourth came from engineering. Until the 1970s, it was generally assumed that evolved organs, particularly those that remained unchanged over many millions of generations, and passed unchanged from very ancient classes of organisms to new ones, had evolved to a structure that was optimal for their biological function. Even when the evolved structures were not what an engineer would have designed, it was assumed that the result of evolution was optimal under some set of as yet unidentified constraints. In the 1970s, mechanical and electrical engineers began to look at evolved systems in the hope of identifying designs that might work better than those they already knew. They found only a few rare cases where the results of evolution were anything close to objectively optimal. They were confronted, instead, with all manner of clumsy contraptions just barely good enough for organisms to survive. The vertebrate eye, for example, has not changed in its basic structure from fishes to humans. Yet if an engineer were to design an array of light sensors - as for a digital camera - she would attach the outputs to cabling on the back or the side of the sensors, so that nothing would disperse, or block the path, of light coming into the front of the sensors from the lens. In the vertebrate eye, on the other hand, the optic nerve, which carries the output of retinal sensors from the eye to the brain, comes from the brain into the inside of each eyeball through a hole in the retina. This hole in the array of retinal sensors is why we have a blind spot in each eye (which digital cameras don't have.) The neurons of the optic nerve then pass in front of the light sensors, in the path of incoming light, and connect to the light-sensing rods and cones from the front (where the light comes in.) This is just one of thousands of examples of globally sub-optimal, clumsy structures; just-good-enough-to-survive local optima frozen by evolution.

The fifth was the discovery of recent, ongoing evolutionary changes in human traits whose relevance to reproductive success was affected by recent changes in the human cultural environment. One such change was the introduction of military conscription in Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and the introduction of footwear with stiff lateral support at around the same time. Before mass production of boots and shoes most humans went barefoot. When most travel was by foot, and most work was done walking or standing, anatomical abnormalities of the feet were severely disabling. The effect of flat feet and other inherited abnormalities was so adverse, and the abnormalities so rare, that men with these abnormalities were (and, in countries with conscription, still are) exempt from conscription. This exemption had two effects. Men with anatomical abnormalities of the foot were much less likely to be killed or maimed in war. More importantly, they stayed and reproduced, while conscripts were away from their neighborhoods and families for a large part of the duration of their prime reproductive years.

Switch to the 1990s. The Achilles Project (Burzykowski et al 2003) measured the incidence of foot disease, including the prevalence of inherited anatomical abnormalities of the feet, in a sample of 1085 randomly selected subjects in 16 European countries. The incidence of anatomical abnormalities of the foot varied between 20.4% (one in five subjects) and 24.8% (one in four.) This in a mere 8 generations after a changed cultural environment moved the local optimum for reproductive success to a different place.

4. Punctuated Equilibrium

Two thousand years ago, Archimedes' formulation and derivation of Archimedes' Principle demonstrated that the laws of nature can be not merely observed and measured, but grounded and understood through the application of reason - of logic and mathematics - to more fundamental and evident laws and facts. The principle of derivation set what is still the highest standard in scientific understanding of how nature works. Punctuated Equilibrium is the fact that when a change in the environment changes the locations of local optima for reproductive success, the traits and species affected by this change are efficiently and quickly moved by natural selection to new local optima - where they may stay, without further modification, until the location of the local optima changes again. The local optima of evolutionary equilibrium do not correspond to "design," in the sense of some global optimum of fitness or health. They are, rather, the product of a random process, which converges on some local optimum without regard to its optimality in any global sense. And this fact can be mathematically derived, in the best tradition of Archimedes, from the application of mathematical measure theory to genetic programming.

(continued in Part III.)

Why Evolution Doesn't Do Design: Part I

1. Introduction

This blog post is about how the Phyletic Gradualism model of evolution is disconfirmed and false, and why the Punctuated Equilibrium model is right. Who cares? If you use (or try to use) the conclusions of evolutionary science to improve your health and your life, you ought to care.

Most people (even scientists) who believe in a God or Gods, and also "believe in evolution," even if they deny the explicit interventionist versions of "intelligent design" still think of evolution as design by other means. In other words, they believe that God's creation is perfect; that God set up and used the laws of nature to result in organisms capable of optimal life and optimal health. The reason for this blog post is to make it easier for my fellow Atheists to separate the science from the beliefs of scientists.

2. The Intellectual Origin of Phyletic Gradualism

It is not the custom of scientists to challenge cultural preconceptions without first having confronted and assembled overwhelming evidence. The religious belief in the perfection of God's creation was not seen by Darwin and his contemporaries as challenged by the theory of evolution. In their day, to contradict, from evidence, the scriptural account of creation, in favor the operation of natural laws that might or might not have been created by a God, was challenge enough. As late as 1970, the phyletic gradualism model was generally accepted by evolutionary biologists, in part because it did not contradict the notion of evolution leading to, or at least moving in the direction of, organs and organisms optimally suited to an optimally healthy existence in their natural environment.

Since the course of evolution is set by a random process of mutations followed by natural selection through differences in reproductive success, its Archimedean derivation is necessarily based on measure theory, probability theory, and mathematical and computational statistics. (Reader, do not be intimidated. You do not need to be a mathematician to understand the essence of the derivation; I will give pictorial hints so that you can let your visual imagination do most of the work.) In measure-theoretic representations of evolution, the probability of reproductive success can be visualized as the height of a variable surface, above the multi-dimensional space representing the state of the genome. A peak at which this probability is higher than it is at all points around it, is called a local optimum. The global optimum, corresponding to the highest possible likelihood of reproductive success, is the highest peak.

Up until the identification, in 1953, of DNA as the genetic material of life, biologists thought of "genes" as direct blueprints for all the tissues, organs and structures of the organism. Assuming this correspondence between the genes, and the traits of the organism, led the scientists of the time to think of the probability-of-reproductive-success surface as having a single optimum only: the location at which the genetic "blueprint" corresponds to the optimal, rational design for the given structure, organ or tissue. Then natural selection selects those mutations that move up the upward slope, rather than down the downward slope, from the present spot on this surface. Gradual evolution to the single, global optimum: this is the mathematical expression of the "Phyletic Gradualism" model.

It took two decades, roughly from 1971 to 1992, for this model to be overturned.

(continued in Part II)

No, I do not "publish in JARS."

I have heard from a friend that someone is circulating, in media to which I don't have access, the rumor that I publish - note the use of the present tense - in Chris Sciabarra's "Journal of Ayn Rand Studies." In reference to peer-reviewed media, "publish" would mean that I'm still submitting original articles for publication in JARS. (I understand, from comments, that some may be tempted to replace this meaning of "publish" by other meanings that this word has in other contexts; and then twist the result into a contradiction - and accuse me of dishonesty or incoherence, on the basis of equivocations thus manufactured. In this note, I am using "publish" in the one specific sense stated above, where "He publishes in Journal X" means "He submits his original articles for publication in Journal X.") I have not submitted an original article to JARS for years, and I have no intention of doing so, ever. The rumor is false.

In my early, pre-tenure years at my university, beginning in the 2000-2001 academic year, I did some research on the origin of the parallels between the schemata of knowledge representation in Ayn Rand's Objectivist epistemology and in object-oriented programming languages. JARS was a new journal that had just published its first volume, and its charter - to document Ayn Rand's influence on the history of ideas and culture - fit my research. I submitted my article on the origin of the parallels, and it was published. I noticed the poor quality of Sciabarra's editorial process, but I ascribed this to the "teething pains" of a new publication. I communicated my concerns about editorial laxness to Sciabarra, and I expected the quality of his editorial policy to improve.

Sciabarra's editorial policy did not improve. By 2006 he had published several articles of such low quality that they were clearly counterproductive to his stated goal, of getting Ayn Rand's intellectual and artistic influence to be taken seriously in academia. I communicated with Sciabarra at length, and I suggested changes that, had they been made, would have turned JARS into what, according to its published charter, it should have been. Sciabarra discussed the changes that I had suggested to him with his editorial board, but no changes were made. JARS continued to publish articles that were, in my judgment, unscholarly, intellectually disreputable rubbish. It was at that point that I decided never again to submit an original article for publication in JARS.

About a year later, JARS published a couple of articles on Objectivism and religion. My notes on those articles evolved into commentary that, in my judgment, needed to be aired. When I publish an article that may invite commentary, I expect that commentary to appear in the same journal, where I will see it and where I can reply. This is standard academic practice, with which I agree. While I would not submit an original article to JARS, it was and remains my judgment that my commentary was productive and useful. Therefore I followed normal practice, and sent my commentary to the journal that had published the articles that I was commenting on.

There was also an article that I submitted to JARS back in May 2005, and which was accepted for publication after being reviewed, by a peer reviewer whose work with me was unusually productive and well-informed (especially for JARS!) and continued well after the article was accepted. Peer review work is unpaid and anonymous; the reviewer's only payment is in the quality of work published in the journal to which the reviewer contributes her otherwise un-renumerated work. I participate in the peer-review process of a broad range of meetings, journals, and granting agencies. If a paper I had worked on were withdrawn after acceptance, for any reason short of its author repudiating the content, I would judge this as a breach of trust, the work I had worked having been wasted and unpaid-for. Therefore, I would not consider withdrawing an already accepted article, whose content I still stand by, as an ethically justifiable option. This last article was recently printed, bringing all association that I've ever had with JARS to a final close. (I have been told that the person who started the rumor - that I still submit articles to JARS - had prior access to the full text of the article, and should have read in the top footnote that it was submitted in May 2005, but only mentioned that the article was printed recently - not that it was originally submitted 5 years ago.)

I agree, after long scrutiny, with everything Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff have written about the principle of moral sanction. I find nothing in this principle, or in Ayn Rand's own actions on this principle, that would mandate more than I have already decided and done. I have no proof that the failure to disclose the May 2005 submission date of the article, which I deduce is what started the rumor, was deliberate; and therefore I am not ready to judge its moral import.

The quality of JARS has continued to fall, so I'm not likely to find another of its articles worthy of comment in the future. I've let my subscription expire years ago (although, as is standard for refereed journals, I did receive an author's copy of the recent issue.) In the present, the rumor that I publish in JARS is false.

Kenyan, Nigerian, all the same...

From the morning's e-mail:

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E-MAIL:davidgarfieldsr@gmail.com
garfield.david@krovatka.su


".SU" is the country code of the former Soviet Union. "Krovatka" is Belorussian for "where we make cows."

My Premise-Checking Habit

What is the difference between a philosopher and a scientist? When the philosopher comes to a contradiction, she checks her premises. The scientist does not wait for a contradiction.

Maybe. My own premise-checking habit predates my career choice. When I first realized that some grownups believed, and told me, things that were false, I decided that I would rather doubt a hundred truths than believe one falsehood. Later, on encountering the derivation of Archimedes' Principle, I was so taken with the realization that the facts of reality not only could be observed, but could be understood by reason, that I decided to make this my future job. It helped me to know that as a scientist, I would never need to pretend that I knew, when I doubted.

Later, when I began to read the work of Ayn Rand, I was struck by the similarity between her approach to knowledge and that of the scientists I had met. The scientists knew that certain assumptions had to be made for scientific investigation of nature to be possible; Ayn Rand pointed out that these "assumptions" were really axioms that could not be contradicted without self-exclusion, which made them certain. I already knew that in science the results of replicated measurements comparing an observed value with an external standard were "practically certain;" from Ayn Rand I learned the principles that make them contextually certain. Laws that exactly describe some set of contextually certain measurements are also contextually certain, in the context of the precision and range of the measurements that such laws describe. Logically necessary deductions from already certain premises are contextually certain in the intersection of the contexts of their premises. As long as one tracks context in one's deductions and derivations, one can be certain about what one knows with contextual certainty; and one can know in what contexts that which one knows is certain. Everything outside those contexts is rightly open to doubt, regardless of how many people think it true or wish it were true.

Later, as a student of cognitive psychology, I learned about confirmation bias: the universal human tendency to notice and think about evidence that confirms one's prior beliefs and hypotheses, and to ignore and evade evidence to the contrary. I trained myself, as rigorously as I could, in the habit of going against my own confirmation bias; of looking for experiments and observations that would produce, if such evidence existed, evidence against the hypotheses that I myself advanced and wanted to be true. And, like many in the human sciences, I worked on methods for guarding the process of science against confirmation bias and other biases common to all men, including scientists such as myself.

One of my PhD mentors was Ray Hyman. Ray studied physical scientists who had become interested in "psychical" (later called "paranormal") phenomena. Physical scientists, like Objectivists, pride themselves on thinking conceptually, yet grounding even their most abstract ideas in observable and measurable fact. Yet physical scientists, ignorant of their own confirmation bias, were always the first to be fooled by "evidence" that invariably disappeared under the lens of bias-proof methods worked out by cognitive psychologists. More recently, those of us who look at the work of physical scientists through the lens of cognitive psychology were treated to "climategate:" the ultimate spectacle of physical scientists intoxicated with confirmation bias, and keeping their data secret lest their hypotheses be debunked, as alleged "paranormal phenomena" have been, if subjected to the methods of bias-proof analysis that have become standard in the human sciences.

In Objectivist circles, it is customary to give to ideas held by fellow Objectivists the benefit of the doubt. Surely, the reasoning goes, one's fellow Objectivists have sound epistemology, and therefore are less likely to be mistaken than non-Objectivists. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Ayn Rand knew what we now know about confirmation bias. My guess is that she didn't, because she would have advised Objectivists to guard against it, if only she had known. And so some Objectivists, as I recently found out, regard my own attitude - that I would rather doubt a hundred truths than believe one falsehood - as a flaw of character. As one put it in a letter, 'it indicates a juvenile "iconoclastic" mentality rather than a strive (maybe "a striving?") for knowledge.'

The iconoclasts were early Christian fanatics who defaced artwork, lest statues and paintings receive admiration that the iconoclasts reserved for God. How one gets from an observation of habitual premise-checking to a diagnosis of "iconoclasm" I don't know. What I do know, is that no idea should be exempt from doubt because of who holds it. Even if that person is an Objectivist. Even if it is an idea held by many Objectivists. If this be "iconoclasm," make the most of it.

Healthy Weight

If one were to ask someone who is not familiar with the history of "Public Health" about the meaning of "ideal" ("acceptable," "normal," "healthy") human weight, she would probably guess, that it is the weight range at which the risk of death is, other things being equal, at minimum. What, then, is one to make of these statements in the abstract of a recently published study (Orpana HM, Berthelot JM, Kaplan MS, Feeny DH, McFarland B, Ross NA. 2010: BMI and mortality: results from a national longitudinal study of Canadian adults:)

A significant increased risk of mortality over the 12 years of follow-up was observed for underweight (BMI 18.5-35; RR = 1.36, P l.t. 0.05) and obesity class II+ (BMI to 35; RR = 1.36, P l.t. 0.05). Overweight (BMI 25 to 30) was associated with a significantly decreased risk of death (RR = 0.83, P l.t. 0.05). The RR was close to one for obesity class I (BMI 30-35; RR = 0.95, P l.t. 0.05). Our results are similar to those from other recent studies, confirming that underweight and obesity class II+ are clear risk factors for mortality, and showing that when compared to the acceptable BMI category, overweight appears to be protective against mortality.

"Overweight appears to be protective against mortality." Then why is it called "overweight?"

"Public health," like "public education," was imported to America from Prussia. The Prussian state was founded by a military order of armed monks, who imposed on the people they conquered an order of Christian discipline similar to their own. Their ideal subject was a man optimally suited for military service. Their ideal soldier was a dragoon, that is, a mounted infantryman: Dragons could be used either as highly mobile infantry or as light cavalry. This meant that the ideal soldier, and therefore the ideal Prussian subject, had to be light enough to ride all day without exhausting the horse. The acceptable weight for conscripting a Prussian dragoon is still with us as the range of "acceptable weight" used in public health studies. Adapted to America's greater variation of human height by substituting height-adjusted BMI for weight, the old Prussian standard of "acceptable weight" remains in world-wide "public health" use to this day.

An objective science of human health would set ideal weight to the weight at which the likelihoods of disease and death from disease are minimized. The corresponding measurement is the relative risk of death: the ideal weight is the weight at which the long term (say 12 year) risk of death is at its local minimum. In other words, the real, objective ideal weight has nothing to do with the desiderata of the Prussian General Staff. It ought to be set by measuring the facts of reality. And, from the facts measured to date, it is clear that the objectively optimal weight is nothing like the "acceptable weight" found in "public health" directives. It is almost certainly somewhere in the range that "public health" professionals call "overweight:" BMI between 25.1 and 29.9.

From the perspective of objective scientific methodology there is much wrong with BMI as the independent variable in health research. Optimal weight should be measured by plotting long-term (e.g. 12-year) mortality versus actual weight in the context of sex/gender, age and height. Unfortunately, I do not have access to the raw data that I would need to set an objective target range for my own weight. In the absence of such data, I use a target of BMI 27.5, the midpoint of the BMI range with the lowest observed mortality risk in nearly all quantitative studies to date.

The continuing use of the Prussian "acceptable weight" ranges, objectively known to be sub-optimal for human life and health, should be an epistemic scandal. It is a public folly with political uses. It permits "public health" authoritarians to claim that individual choice must be restricted to save us from the supposed epidemic of fat. Because if one accepts the Prussian pseudo-standard, 68% of Americans are overweight or obese. And this Prussian pseudo-standard is seldom challenged, because Americans "educated" in Prussian-standard public schools are so concept-deprived that they will believe anything, as long as it comes with a number and a percent sign somewhere - and will submit to the authority of the hoax.