From The Edge: To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.
Yes, it's time again to marvel at the stimulating ideas put forward in highly condensed form by some of the world's leading scientists, philosophers and so forth. The question for 2012:
What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?
Last year's was especially good, considering the topics on this blog:
What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?
My choice? Well, obviously that would be Occam's Razor, as reflected in Einstein's Blade in Ockham's Razor by Kai Krause.
Other Edge questions over the years were:
Monday, February 6, 2012
The Edge's question for 2012
Thursday, January 5, 2012
False balance is an abomination
A false balance is abomination to the Lord: but a just weight is his delight. — Proverbs 11:1
From Wikipedia: False balance, also known as false compromise or argument to moderation, or argumentum ad temperantiam - a logical fallacy which asserts that given two positions there exists a compromise between them which must be correct.
Also from Wikipedia: "Today, false balance is used to describe a perceived or real media bias, where journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence actually supports."
Hat tip to Dr. Harris Steinman from CAMCheck for drawing my attention to the excellent editorial, When balance is bias, in the British Medical Journal. The full text is behind a paywall, but can be read in CAMCheck.
What more is there to say? Political correctness and fear of being accused of bias often make cowards of us all. In many debates there is only one logical, or scientifically viable, position. To pretend otherwise in order to appease the illogical or scientifically nonsensical side of the debate, is disingenuous.
Examples include the anthropomorphic global warming debate, the vaccination debate and the evolution debate.
Wikipedia seems to have a handle on the issue of managing the appropriate balance. Dave Snowden in Cognitive Edge points out that Wikipedia requires a balance of reliable sources, not a balance of political perspectives. Hat tip to Snowden for a good book relating to this issue, Farhad Manjoo's True enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.
* Image of no-go scale from The Gleaming Retort.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
God, guns and crime
Michael Shermer over at Skeptiblog had an interesting discussion on whether more God, or more guns, equal less crime. He based his discussion on his interaction with Professors Byron Johnson (More God, less crime) and John Lott (More guns, less crime).
Both these premises could of course lead to massive correlation-causation confusion. Shermer found the evidence advanced by John Lott much more convincing than Johnson's. It should be noted that John Lott is a very controversial figure, but that despite questions about his methodology and even ethics, on the whole his premise that more guns equal less crime has held up, at least in developed countries.
According to Shermer, Johnson's conviction that more God equals less crime, is based primarily on prison conversions. Shermer is very skeptical about prison conversions and I share his skepticism. I am not aware of research that shows what percentage of felons who converted to any religion in prison, remained in and practiced their new found faith after prison (and of course did not engage in crime again).
Sadly, the contrary may be true. Shermer quoted Gregory Paul from his well-known 2005 study: "In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies,..." I doubt that these correlations will hold true in a country such as South Africa, but this should be food for thought in religious communities everywhere.
