Category: Science

New discoveries, the scientific method, and all matters relating to the scientific study of the physical world

On the stability of personality

One of the most interesting questions arising within biology, psychology, and philosophy is: “What are we?”.

We aren’t a particular collection of atoms and molecules, because that is constantly in flux. With every breath we take and meal we eat, we incorporate matter from the world into our bodies. At the same time, we lose matter whenever we exhale or excrete. A carbon or nitrogen atom that is in your brain or bone today could be in your blood tomorrow and in the air or your local river tomorrow. There are probably hardly any of the atoms you were born with still inside your body, and few of the atoms inside your body now will be there when you die.

We also aren’t disembodied souls or spirits. Our minds and the experience of mental life are fundamentally tied to our physical brains in predictable ways. There are structures within the brain that operate the various features of mental life, and our experiences are related to them. These things change in response to physical stimuli, such as exposure to psychoactive drugs or a brick to the head. There isn’t some abstract ‘I’ that enjoys cycling and coffee, but which dislikes intense heat and polka music. Rather, those preferences reflect changeable facts about my mind and brain. If I fell in love with a polka musician, my feelings about the genre could change. Similarly, with a few more spectacular crashes, my ardour for cycling could diminish.

There is one partial answer to the identity question that has arisen from psychology. Psychologists have identified a ‘Big Five’ set of personality traits that vary between individuals but which tend to remain stable for a particular individual over time. If you test a group of young children, you will find that they score differently from one another on the five traits. But if you come back decades later and test the results, they will likely score similarly to how they did as children.

As described by Wikipedia, the traits are:

  1. Openness – (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious). Appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience.
  2. Conscientiousness – (efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless). A tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behaviour.
  3. Extraversion – (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved). Energy, positive emotions, surgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation in the company of others.
  4. Agreeableness – (friendly/compassionate vs. cold/unkind). A tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.
  5. Neuroticism – (sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident). A tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability.

Thinking about myself, I can pretty easily estimate where I lie with respect to others on each of these:

  1. I think I am unusually open. If someone offered me an interesting job in Paris or Tokyo tomorrow, I would take it. At the same time, I am not the sort of person willing to devote their entire life to the search for novelty. I do enjoy learning and using difficult words, spending time on reflection, and considering abstract problems. I would find myself hopelessly frustrated and bored in a life with no novelty, even if it was very comfortable.
  2. I also think I am unusually conscientious. I have been following a personal strategy for years that has involved a fair bit of investment and delayed gratification. I like keeping to-do lists, and I rarely miss appointments or allow things to ‘fall through the cracks’. I rarely lose things.
  3. I am on the borderline between introversion and extroversion. At the wrong sort of party (with dancing), I am likely to be at the edge, but I am likely to be right in the middle of a party that is to my liking (with talking). I am generally comfortable around people and open to talking to strangers. At the same time, I definitely need solitude and time to myself. I would never be happy in a life that afforded no opportunities to be alone.
  4. Compared to most people, I don’t think I am especially agreeable. I tend to be critical and judgmental and I do not care very much about feelings for their own sake. At the same time, I think having people of that sort is defensible and necessary. For injustice and wrongdoing to be stopped, there need to be people who will speak out against it. Similarly, if we give excessive attention to how people feel, we risk ignoring the facts in any particular situation.
  5. I am more neurotic than most. I wouldn’t be the person who I am if I didn’t worry about climate change every day. To reverse the tautology, If I didn’t worry about climate change every day, I would not be the person who I am. I don’t usually feel much anger, but I do get anxious and sometimes depressed. I worry a lot, and my moods vary a great deal.

All this seems like an important part of the answer to the identity question. These personality traits tend to remain stable across the course of a normal human life (if you get a railroad spike through your head all bets are off about the stability of your personality). They are not substantially altered by common but important occurrences like adolescence, emergence into adulthood, marriage, reproduction, or aging. Even though the traits probably arise from a combination of genes and experience (studies suggest that about half of the explanation for how we score is genetic), this nonetheless seems like a valid and useful way to understand the meaning of an individual.

Recognizing checkmate

There comes a time in most games of chess (those not doomed to end in a draw) where one king can no longer evade the opposing forces and stands checkmated. This position can be expressed with mathematical precision and is undeniable for anyone who accepts the current rules of the game.

Nothing quite so clear-cut exists when it comes to logical arguments, but there can be cases where it comes close. For instance, if there are two theories about what is causing some effect, testing can be used to develop strong confidence about which cause explains it. If my computer will not turn on and the problem could be either that the hard drive has been removed or there is no electricity, I can undertake trials to determine the cause. I can check that the power cord is plugged in. I can test the socket by putting something else into it. I can open up the computer case. I can try booting from a DVD or a network drive.

Similarly, it is possible to forcefully rebut a logical argument on the basis of logic itself. This mostly applies to very narrow computer-science-type problems, but it is still worth recognizing. For instance, we can evaluate self-contained logical statements like: “Object X is either part of Group A or Group B. It is part of Group A. Therefore, it is not part of Group B.”

More often, we combine logic with factual claims about the world. The patient cannot be having an allergic reaction to the antibiotics, because they have not been administered yet. My keys cannot be in my apartment, because they are here in my hand. The atomic bomb cannot detonate, because the plutonium pit has been removed.

To me, it seems that there are some large and important questions where we have basically achieved checkmate, when it comes to how certain we can be that one perspective is correct and another is not. For example, the claim that the universe is 6,000 years old is demonstrably false. The case is closed. We know the universe to be billions of years old. The same goes for the fact that evolution takes place.

Less certain, but still very close to checkmate, are positions including: “The Earth’s climate is being altered by human activities.”.

Then there are positions that are very certain, but which involve less concrete claims, such as: “There is no evidence the universe was created by a sentient being.” and “There is no evidence of any kind of divine being that cares about human behaviour.”. The only real rebuttal to these arguments is that people have strong feelings or intuitions that contradict them, but feelings are neither logic nor evidence.

Ultimately, it is important to keep proving and re-proving claims that we believe to be true. Oftentimes, we find that we were basically right but that there was more complexity than we expected. Other times, we discover that we have been more comprehensively wrong. Awareness of our own fallibility is a critical part of the advancement of knowledge.

At the same time, we should not allow ourselves to be paralyzed with uncertainty, especially when it is those last lingering wisps of uncertainty that remain alive only because people have strong feelings about a subject. Every human decision involves dealing with some level of uncertainty, and yet it is demonstrably the case that it is better for people to act once they have done their due diligence than it is for them to dither forever while evaluating evidence and arguments. When one is in checkmate, the only sensible thing to do is to accept it and start thinking about what the lessons of the game have been. It is frustrating for me – then – that there are still vast numbers of people who believe that the planet is 6,000 years old, all the world’s land animals were once on one big boat, every organism was created in its current form and doesn’t change, or that all the climate change we are observing is caused by natural forces. How can we continue to improve humanity’s understanding of the world when there are people who will never accept that they have been checkmated, no matter how many times you point out the pieces blocking every possible avenue of escape for their king?

Global emission pathway, made manifest

Over lunch yesterday, I had an idea for a climate change art installation that would represent the task that needs to be completed and, crucially, the kind of raw work that needs to go into it.

The central feature would be a steel bar extending up diagonally to the right, shaped like historical and projected future global greenhouse gas emissions, expressed in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. It would be anchored at the point of the present, but flexible and free-standing beyond that.

Toward the far end of the bar would be some physical mechanism for bending the whole thing downward. People who saw the installation would contribute physically to the process, which would take weeks or months. Some ideas for mechanisms:

  • A pulley system with a large array of blocks and tackle, allowing people to slowly wrench the bar downward
  • Platforms attached to the bar onto which weights could be progressively moved, lowering it
  • A chain attached near the end of the bar, connected to a large wheel that can slowly be turned

Whatever the mechanism, there would need to be a ratchet system in place to make sure the bar would not swing violently upward if something went wrong.

At the beginning, the whole setup would look like a business-as-usual projection, with annual emissions rising right out to 2100 as humanity continues to exploit coal and unconventional oil and gas (the conventional stuff plausibly being already exhausted by then). At the end, it would look like the curves from the Copenhagen Diagnosis, bent down to carbon neutrality.

An important part of the installation is that the process of moving the bar should be physically hard work for the people viewing the exhibit. It should be uncomfortable in formal clothes, and leave people feeling the strain of it for a couple of minutes afterward. With weights, it could be calibrated to the different strength levels of visitors. Some could move 1kg, some 10kg, some 20kg.

The installation would illustrate how a task that is impossible individually becomes possible when two things happen: when lots of people make an appropriate contribution, and where someone sets up a mechanism that directs and coordinates those actions.

I don’t think you could do this in North America. Some tourist would drop a weight on their foot and sue you and the gallery for millions of dollars. Maybe it could be done in England. If the city of Oxford was willing to take on the liability risks involved in Luminox, maybe there would be some English venue willing to tolerate those associated with a big steel bar under increasing tension.

Questioning religious beliefs

In The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris repeatedly questions the societal taboo against critically evaluating religious beliefs. For instance, people are hesitant to raise evidence or arguments that contradict religious claims, as well as point out instances in which different claims made by the same religion contradict one another.

This is at least a bit different from evaluating religiously motivated actions, as was discussed here earlier. As in that case, however, I think Harris argues convincingly that it is wrong to put religious beliefs into a special category deserving special respect. Of course, this is a provocative claim, given that many religious beliefs simply cannot stand up in the face of evidence and critical examination, and people find it awkward when important parts of their religious belief structure are shown to be in a state of obvious contradiction with the kind of every-day mechanisms they use to evaluate new information. People tolerate the fact that claims are made in holy publications and from the pulpit which cannot be made with any credibility in a newspaper or political speech.

The idea that religious beliefs deserve special protection often comes from religion itself. Religions are often extremely hostile toward ‘heresy’, which is understandable from a kind of institutional evolutionary perspective. In many circumstances, faiths that maintain theological and ideological coherence are likely to attract more adherents and last longer than those that tolerate a broad variety of views. Faiths of the latter kind are probably more likely to fragment and fracture, and they are also probably less likely to attract extreme devotion, dedication, and efforts to convert the masses. It is no coincidence that the first commandment (though the notion that there are a clear set of ten is disputed) is that you should make sure not to honour the wrong god. It also doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that the more dogmatic forms of Christianity (to choose one example) are winning more converts around the world than the more progressive forms.

Of course, humanity has a whole has an enormous interest in understanding the world well. It is demonstrably the case that our understanding of things like physics and biology allow us to live richer, healthier, and more fulfilling lives. Particularly in cases where scientific claims based on evidence and reason contradict religious claims based on someone’s supposedly divine authority, I think it is bad for humanity when large numbers of people place the religious claim above the scientific one. There are plenty of contemporary examples. Access to contraception and sex education demonstrably improves the kinds of lives people live, and yet one major force preventing those things from being universally available is religious beliefs that oppose them (arguably, with a hidden patriarchal motivation).

Ultimately, people possess a right to understand their own bodies and control their own sexuality and reproduction that is more important than the religious preferences of others who would seek to restrict and control those rights within the general population, especially among women.

If we lived in a world that took the kind of evidence that Harris finds convincing more seriously – things like the psychological consideration of what effect various circumstances have on human flourishing – I think we would ultimately find it preferable to a world where we continue to rely upon the kind of ‘evidence’ that supports substandard education and medical care for women, or the prohibition of promising types of medical research, or the teaching of utterly refuted theories about the history of life on Earth. People often argue that we should give respect to religious beliefs in the name of ‘tolerance’. While that argument might be somewhat convincing when it comes to benign beliefs, like the existence or non-existence of the Easter Bunny, it seems indefensible in the case of beliefs that have large and harmful effects on the lives of a great many people. Those beliefs – whether religiously motivated or not – deserve to be challenged honestly, openly, and vigorously.

Feynman and the Trinity test

This post have been revamped in response to a perceptive comment. The old version is available here.

In Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, American physicist Richard Feynman speculates that he may have been the only person who watched the Trinity Test relatively directly, using a windshield to exclude ultraviolet light. Everyone else, he claims, was looking through something akin to welding goggles.

This claim is contradicted in chapter 18 of Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, in which Rhodes claims that Ernest Lawrence considered watching the test through a windshield, but decided to step out of the car and watch it directly, and that Robert Serber also watched with unprotected eyes.

Feynman does come up a few times in Rhodes’ Pulitzer Prize-winning book. He is quoted on the limitations of human understanding (p.32-33 paperback), the boundaries of science (35), and the status of Seth Neddermeyer‘s plutonium implosion setup in 1943 (479). The book also describes Feynman coining of the term ‘tickling the dragon’s tail’ to describe Otto Robert Frisch‘s dangerous criticality experiment (611), and fixing a shortwave radio being used during the Trinity test itself (668). In one of his books, Feynman describes how he began fixing neighbourhood radios as a small boy.

Quite possibly, people other than Feynman did watch the test without welding goggles and he never found out about it, or at least learned of it after the wrote the speculative comment in his book.

Arkeology

One thing I find a bit perplexing is that there are actual archeological expeditions that set out to find Noah’s Ark. The fact that these expeditions are assembled and deployed suggests that there is a very unusual class of people out there: those who (a) have the knowledge and experience required to assemble an archeological expedition and (b) actually believe that there was a physical boat that carried all the world’s terrestrial species to save them from a global flood.

I find it difficult to understand how someone with the knowledge and practicality required for (a) could simultaneously be willing to believe (b). Perhaps there are no such people, but rather there are archeologist who are willing to investigate the fancies of others, in exchange for funding or other benefits.

Local environmentalism

Perhaps it is unwise for me to criticize environmental groups at the moment, given that we are all trying to push a difficult issue forward at a time of considerable political hostility. Reagan’s 11th Commandment is a major reason why the Republicans are so strong in the United States. At the same time, it is disheartening to see people expending their useful energy on the wrong thing, when there is something they would care about a lot more available. Also, given that the environmental movement makes choices based on things that are still at the edge of scientific knowledge, there is a benefit in having public discussions, and making the strongest possible cases to one another. We should not assume ourselves to be infallible, but rather to be in a dialogue with an ever-emerging collection of complex information on how the climate operates.

All that said, I must confess that I am perplexed by how many environmental groups seem to focus their time. It might be a terrible thing that some ugly new development will replace a nice bit of woodland, but I think people need to consider the scale on which humanity is smashing nature. That little plot of forest is threatened along with a whole lot of other forests if catastrophic or runaway climate change occurs.

It reminds me of a person wandering in the middle of a battlefield, looking for their glasses. They realize one problem – that their glasses have been dropped – and they are working diligently at solving it by scrutinizing the ground. At the same time, bullets are flying all around them. They see the small problem, miss the big one, and focus their efforts in the wrong way as a consequence.

Climate change really is the over-riding environmental priority right now. If we warm up the planet five or six ˚C, it will ruin all conservation efforts that have been undertaken in the meanwhile. We need to solve climate change first – taking advantages of co-benefits where possible.

In any case, I think I can see the appeal of being a part of a group dedicated to saving the local bog. It has locavore chic. Also, the area might have a special importance to you personally. Finally, it has the benefit that even if your quest fails, the outcome isn’t so bad. Being part of something friendly and local is a lot more pleasant than confronting a terrifying spectre of global destruction. And yet, that seems to be what we are facing.

Now or Never

Tim Flannery’s slim book Now or Never: Why We Need to Act Now to Achieve a Sustainable Future does not mince words, when it comes to describing the seriousness of the situation humanity now finds itself in, with regards to the diminishing capacity of the planet to sustain human flourishing:

There is no real debate about how serious our predicament is: all plausible projections indicate that over the next forty to fifty years humanity will exceed – in all probability by about 100 percent – the capacity of Earth to supply our needs, thereby greatly exacerbating the risk of widespread starvation, or of being overwhelmed by our own pollution.

Flannery, previously known for his book The Weather Makers, describes the latest climatic science as detailed by James Hansen before scoping out some of the options that exist for mitigating its seriousness, if humanity acts quickly enough.

Flannery is also forthright on the matter of just how difficult it will be to prevent unacceptable amounts of climate change – hinting (but never saying directly) that geoengineering may be required. The book places a strong emphasis on the possibility of drawing carbon dioxide from the air and into biological sinks, and considers the role that carbon markets and offsets could play in driving such actions. It does not adequately consider the issue of certainty, however. To be really worthwhile, the carbon needs to be removed from the atmosphere indefinitely – something that cannot really be ensured by planting trees (which could burn or be cut down) or enriching soils with carbon (which could be re-released).

All in all, I wasn’t hugely impressed with Flannery’s argument. He seemed overly focused on defending livestock agriculture, too bullish on pyrolysis and biochar as sequestration techniques, and overly eager to attribute intentions to nature. At many points, Flannery brings up the Gaia Hypothesis, which I think is often dangerously misleading in its implications. There is no reason to believe the Earth ‘prefers’ one state or another, or that it will always respond to shocks by moving back in the direction of how it was. Rather, there is evidence from the paleoclimatic record that when the climate system is pushed aggressively enough, it can swing into dramatic new states, in a way that could be profoundly hostile for humanity and most of the planet’s other species.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the inclusion of responses written by prominent individuals including Peter Singer (who very effectively rebuts Flannery’s argument that meat eating isn’t too problematic) and Bill McKibben. In his response, Gwynne Dyer neatly responds to some of the book’s Gaia language, while also making a key overall point:

Whether you want to dress [knowing human manipulation of the climate] up as human beings becoming the consciousness of Gaia, or just see us as the same old self-serving species we always were, we are taking control of the planet’s climate. This billions-strong human civilization will live or die by its success in understanding the global carbon cycle and modifying it as necessary to preserve our preferred climate.

Those key points – the seriousness of the risk of climate change and the importance of taking action in response – have not yet really been absorbed by either the general public or the world’s political elite. If that is to change in time for the very worst possible outcomes to be avoided, that needs to change quickly. By helping to publicize those key facts, Flannery certainly seems to be helping that process, even if there are valid criticisms that can be raised against some of his perspectives and proposed responses.

Outliers: The Story of Success

One thing that sets apart the writing of Malcolm Gladwell is the ease with which it is devoured. His books always provide the reader with the sense that they are taking in important new information, and doing so unusually quickly and easily. In Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell argues convincingly the the level of success people achieve has an enormous amount to do with the conditions in which they lived. How your parents raise you is important, as is the cultural legacy you inherit. Even arbitrary-seeming things like when in the year you were born can have a demonstrable effect, particularly in sports.

This book has been analyzed to death in the popular press, so there isn’t much point in me recapping it. Talking about highly successful people like Michael Jordan and Bill Gates, Gladwell argues that:

[They] appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don’t. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky – but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

In the course of his examination, Gladwell reaches practical conclusions for both individuals and societies. As an individual, if you wish to prosper you must practice an exceptional amount – effort put in can be the most important factor. For society at large:

To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success – the fortunate birth dates and accidents of history – with a society that provides opportunities for all.

He provides some concrete examples of how that could be done: for instance, by delaying the streaming of young children by talent, by providing summer school for low-income children, by encouraging children to assert themselves around and question adults, and so on.

I only have a few quibbles with the book. Sometimes, Gladwell uses vague language. What does it mean to say that $X were ‘involved’ in mergers and acquisitions during the 1980s? Occasionally, he speculates beyond what the evidence he includes can justify. I also think Gladwell is wrong to say that a Boeing 747 contains “212,000 kilograms of steel”. Aluminum is a lot more likely.

Gladwell’s book is engaging, using techniques that many academics would shun as showmanship. For instance, Gladwell sometimes makes a bold promise early in a chapter, saying he will prove an unlikely-seeming statement to be true (“it is possible to… predict the family background, age, and origin of [New York City’s] most powerful attorneys, without knowing a single additional fact about them”), or adds a bit of theatre (“in this chapter, we’re going to conduct [an aircraft] crash investigation”). Partly through such techniques, the book gets across some interesting examples and arguments quickly. It is particularly interesting to see him explain situations in which things that seem like disadvantages – like anti-Semitism in New York law firms – turn out to be highly advantageous to the people who you would expect to be disadvantaged (because they ended up going into areas of law shunned by the established firms, which became important and profitable).

Gladwell’s message is simultaneously empowering and disempowering. By revealing some apparently important underlying dynamics, he may help readers decide how to focus their energies. At the same time, he points out how a lot of the characteristics our lives will have emerge predictably from pre-set characteristics which we cannot alter or control. Indeed, by influencing our thinking about the sources of success, Gladwell affects the inputs that go into our reasoning about ethics. In particular, if people achieve high levels of financial success largely because of arbitrary factors outside their control (or fail financially for the same reasons), the argument for income redistribution looks a lot stronger.

[Update: 7 February 2011] I reviewed another of Gladwell’s books previously: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.