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Two obituaries in one day. . .

Dicky Betts, one of my favorite rock guitarists of all time, died in Florida last Thursday. He was 80, and had been plagued by illness (exacerbated by drugs, drinking, and smoking) for some time. When he was at his height with the Allman Brothers, especially when playing with Duane Allman before Duane’s untimely death, he was incomparable, and had a sound that could be identified immediately.  You can read the NYT obituary by clicking below, but I’d to memorialize him with his music rather than with words. From what I hear, he was probably somewhat of a jerk, and often didn’t get along well with his bandmates, but of course many great artists, musical or otherwise, weren’t exemplary people. I know virtually nothing about Betts as a person (look him up on Wikipedia if you want information), but I know his music, and I’ve put four great examples below.

You can read the NYT obit—in line with house style, they call him “Mr. Betts”—by clicking on the headline below, or see it archived here.

An excerpt:

Despite not being an actual Allman brother — the band, founded in 1969, was led by Duane Allman, who achieved guitar-god status before he died in a motorcycle accident at 24, and Gregg Allman, the lead vocalist, who got an added flash of the limelight in 1975 when he married Cher — Mr. Betts was a guiding force in the group for decades and central to the sound that came to define Southern rock.

Although pigeonholed by some fans in the band’s early days as its “other” guitarist, Mr. Betts, whose solos seemed at times to scorch the fretboard of his Gibson Les Paul, proved a worthy sparring partner to Duane Allman, serving as a co-lead guitarist, rather than as a sidekick.

With his chiseled features, Wild West mustache and gunfighter demeanor, Mr. Betts certainly looked the part of the star. And he played like one. Nowhere was that more apparent than on the band’s landmark 1971 live double album, “At Fillmore East,” which was filled with expansive jams and showcased the intricate interplay between Mr. Betts and Mr. Allman. It sold more than a million copies.

“The second half of ‘At Fillmore East’ is as vivid and exhilarating as recorded rock has ever been,” Grayson Haver Currin of Pitchfork wrote in a 2022 appraisal.

A centerpiece of the album was “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” a haunting, jazz-influenced instrumental written by Mr. Betts whose title was taken from a headstone at a graveyard in the band’s hometown, Macon, Ga. That track’s “textural interplay,” Mr. Currin continued, “resembles Miles Davis’s then-new electric bands, organ and guitar oozing into one another like melting butter and chocolate.”

“Duane and I had an understanding, like an old soul kind of understanding of let’s play together,” Mr. Betts said in a 2020 interview with The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Florida. “Duane would say, ‘Man, I get so jealous of you sometimes when you burn off and I have to follow it,’ and we would joke about it. So that’s kind of Duane and mine’s relationship. It was a real understanding. Like, ‘Come on, this is a hell of a band, let’s not hot dog it up.’”

Mr. Allman made his feelings about his bandmate clear. “I’m the famous guitar player,” he once said, “but Dickey is the good one.”

Note that last sentence.  Yet on Rolling Stone‘s bizarre list of “The 250 greatest guitarists of all time,” Betts ranks at only #145 (sandwiched between Mike Bloomfield and Odetta), while Duane Allman comes in at a respectable #10. (#1 is Jimi Hendrix, while Eric Clapton is only #35.) That list is just wonky. Hendrix’s position makes sense, but to put Clapton at #35 and Betts at #145 is insane. Best to ignore that list!

Although the NYT and others name “Ramblin’ Man” as Betts’s biggest success, I still find”Blue Sky” preferable, and it’s my favorite song of his (he wrote it, sang it, and played it, alternating with Duane Allman). Here is “southern rock”—I’ve never been sure what that is—at its finest. I heard the Allman Brothers, sans Duane, play this song live, and was only about 10 feet from the stage in a standing crowd. After playing “Blue Sky,” Betts threw his pick into the audience, and I’m sad that I didn’t catch it.

The solo on this piece is incomparable, and you can hear the original recording here. Warren Haynes alternates with Betts, but Betts outshines him. (Dickie is, of course, the one with the cowboy hat and boots.)

Another favorite of mine, the instrumental “Jessica“.  This was also written by Betts, who does a great job playing it live in 1982. I love Betts’s great solo that starts with a big guitar whine at 3:39, slows and then speeds up at 4:51. The original is here.

This song, “Whipping Post,” was written by Greg Allman, but it’s one of the few examples on video of Betts playing with Duane Allman. Duane is the star here, but Betts gets his licks in starting about 5:40.  You judge who’s best. This is the full original band, and the original recording is here.

I’m throwing in this version of Gregg’s song “Melissa‘ because it’s all-acoustic performance and shows Betts’s skill on acoustic guitar, especially in the final solo with Haynes. Greg wrote this song out of frustration, feeling unable to write any good songs. He finally succeeded with this one, despite the lameness of some of the words. The original recording is here.

Well, this is unexpected, and details will be forthcoming. He was 82.

Renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett has died https://t.co/Dbk0VgBZnY pic.twitter.com/q22ug7sYSv

— Ferris Jabr (@ferrisjabr) April 19, 2024

I have lots of stories about Dan, and found him amiable and charitable, though sometimes he could be domineering, especially when I professed a lack of belief in free will. But I once jumped in his lap and asked for a hug after I was attacked by Robert Wright at a conference lunch. Being enfolded by a replica of Santa was the best thing I could think of.

There will be a lot of obituaries, I’m sure, and if you want to read about his life he wrote an autobiography called I’ve Been Thinking.  I’ve read it, and you can see that he was far more talented and into far more things than you could ever imagine.

RIP, big guy!

Some photos from 2012 and 2019 (this is Rockwell’s original “Freedom of Speech” painting:

Perplexed at a symposium with Reza Aslan. Dan was NOT happy here!

Going to the Moving Naturalism Forward conference at Stockbridge, MA.

Untangling what happened in our Solar System tens or hundreds of millions of years ago is challenging. Millions of objects of wildly different masses interacted for billions of years, seeking natural stability. But its history—including the migration of the giant planets—explains what we see today in our Solar System and maybe in other, distant solar systems.

New research shows that giant planet migration began shortly after the Solar System formed.

Planetary migration is a well-established idea. The Grand-Tack Hypothesis says that Jupiter formed at 3.5 AU, migrated inward to 1.5 AU, and then back out again to 5.2 AU, where it resides today. Saturn was involved, too. Migration can also explain the Hot Jupiters we see orbiting extremely close to their stars in other solar systems. They couldn’t have formed there, so they must have migrated there. Even rocky planets can migrate early in a solar system’s history.

New research in the journal Science establishes dates for giant planet migration in our Solar System. Its title is “Dating the Solar System’s giant planet orbital instability using enstatite meteorites.” The lead author is Dr. Chrysa Avdellidou from the University of Leicester’s School of Physics and Astronomy.

“The question is, when did it happen?” Dr. Avdellidou asked. “The orbits of these planets destabilised due to some dynamical processes and then took their final positions that we see today. Each timing has a different implication, and it has been a great matter of debate in the community.”

“What we have tried to do with this work is to not only do a pure dynamical study, but combine different types of studies, linking observations, dynamical simulations, and studies of meteorites.”

The meteorites in this study are enstatites or E-type asteroids. E-type asteroids have enstatite (MgSiO3) achondrite surfaces. Achondrite means they lack chondrules, grains of rock that were once molten before being accreted to their parent body. Specifically, this group of meteorites are the low-iron chondrites called ELs.

When giant planets move, everything else responds. Tiny asteroids are insignificant compared to Jupiter’s mass. Scientists think E-type asteroids were dispersed during the gas giants’ outward migration. They may even have been the impactors in the hypothetical Late Heavy Bombardment.

Artist concept of Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment period. Scientists have wondered if E-type asteroids disturbed during giant planet migration could’ve been responsible for the Bombardment, but the authors of this research don’t favour that explanation. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab.

Enstatite achondrites that have struck Earth have similar compositions and isotope ratios as Earth. This signals that they formed in the same part of the protoplanetary disk around the young Sun. Previous research by Dr. Avdellidou and others has linked the meteorites to a population of fragments in the asteroid belt named Athor.

This work hinges on linking meteorites to parent asteroids and measuring the isotopic ratios.

“If a meteorite type can be linked to a specific parent asteroid, it provides insight into the asteroid’s composition, time of formation, temperature evolution, and original size,” the authors explain. When it comes to composition, isotopic abundances are particularly important. Different isotopes decay at different rates, so analyzing their ratio tells researchers when each meteorite closed, meaning when it became cool enough that there was no more significant diffusion of isotopes. “Therefore, thermochronometers in meteorites can constrain the epoch at which major collisional events disturbed the cooling curves of the parent asteroid,” the authors explain.

The team’s research shows that Athor is a part of a once much larger parent body that formed closer to the Sun. It also suffered from a collision that reduced its size out of the asteroid belt.

Athor found its way back when the giant planets migrated. Athor was at the mercy of all that shifting mass and underwent its own migration back into the asteroid belt. Analysis of the meteorites showed that this couldn’t have happened earlier than 60 million years ago. Other research into asteroids in Jupiter’s orbit showed it couldn’t have happened later than 100 million years ago. Since the Solar System formed about 4.56 billion years ago, the giant planet migration happened between 4.5 and 4.46 billion years ago.

This schematic from the research shows what the researchers think happened. Red circles are planetesimals (and their fragments) from the terrestrial planet region. The black solid curves roughly denote the boundary of the current asteroid inner main belt. Eccentricity increases from bottom to top.

A shows the formation and cooling of the EL parent planetesimal in the terrestrial planet region before 60 Myr after Solar System formation. In this period, the terrestrial planets began scattering planetesimals to orbits with high eccentricity and semimajor axes corresponding to the asteroid main belt. B shows that between 60 and 100 Myr, the EL planetesimal was destroyed by an impact in the terrestrial planet region. At least one fragment (the Athor family progenitor) was scattered by the terrestrial planets into the scattered disk, as in (A). Then the giant planet instability implanted it into the inner main belt by decreasing its eccentricity. C shows that a few tens of millions of years after the giant planet instability occurred, a giant impact between the planetary embryo Theia and proto-Earth formed the Moon. D shows that the Athor family progenitor experienced another impact event that formed the Athor family at ~1500 Myr. Image Credit: Avdellidou et al. 2024.

Another important event happened right around the same time. About 4.5 billion years ago, a protoplanet named Theia smashed into Earth, creating the Moon. Could it all be related?

“The formation of the Moon also occurred within the range that we determined for the giant planet instability,” the authors write in their research. “This might be a coincidence, or there might be a causal relationship between the two events.”

“It’s like you have a puzzle, you understand that something should have happened, and you try to put events in the correct order to make the picture that you see today,” Dr. Avdellidou said. “The novelty with the study is that we are not only doing pure dynamical simulations, or only experiments, or only telescopic observations.”

“There were once five inner planets in our Solar System and not four, so that could have implications for other things, like how we form habitable planets. Questions like, when exactly objects came delivering volatile and organics to our planet to Earth and Mars?”

Artist’s impression of the impact that caused the formation of the Moon. Could giant planet migration have caused that impact? Credit: NASA/GSFC

The Solar System’s history is a convoluted, beautiful puzzle that somehow led to us. Everything had to work out for life to arise on Earth, sustain itself, and evolve for so long. The epic migration of the gas giants must have played a role, and this research brings its role into focus.

Never mind habitability, complex life, and civilization, the migration may have allowed Earth to form in the first place.

“The timing is very important because our Solar System at the beginning was populated by a lot of planetesimals,” said study co-author Marco Delbo, Director of Research at France’s Nice Observatory. “And the instability clears them, so if that happens 10 million years after the beginning of the Solar System, you clear the planetesimals immediately, whereas if you do it after 60 million years you have more time to bring materials to Earth and Mars.”

The post The Giant Planets Migrated Between 60-100 Million Years After the Solar System Formed appeared first on Universe Today.

Identical twins seem to experience more similar levels of pleasure when listening to music than non-identical twins, which suggests it has a genetic element

I hope John McWhorter’s latest column, which I see as misguided, doesn’t show that he’s running out of gas. His point is to show that substantial progress in racial relations between blacks and whites has occurred over the years. But who could deny that? African-Americans are represented far more in the media than they were when I was a kid, they are beneficiaries of Civil Rights Acts passed in the Sixties, there is affirmative action so that universities and businesses are far more integrated, and one sees and hears far less bigotry than was evident to me as a kid. Do we need more evidence.

McWhorter has given ample evidence of this progress before, and gives more in this column, including a bit on how Mother Jefferson (Zara Cully, a black woman), despite being a better actress on television than was Mother Dexter (Judith Lowry, a white actress) on “Phyllis”, was given short shrift. That wouldn’t happen today, and black actors are getting far more roles, and good ones, than they used to.

Despite this palpable progress in racial relations—progress that, if you listen to some black activists, is illusory—McWhorter says, correctly, that overall black people are treated worse than white people by the police, and have been for years:

For Black people in Los Angeles recalling how the L.A.P.D. had treated them for decades, for Black people in Philadelphia not long past the all but open racism of the police force there under Mayor Frank Rizzo, for Black people in Chicago remembering the racist profiling and abuse by the cops called the Flying Squad, the sheer fact of a Black man getting off on a murder charge was of epic significance. If anything, the fact that he was obviously guilty only amplified the victory.

For all the statistical discrepancies between Black and white Americans, interactions with the police may be the central driver of how many Black people experience racism. I noted this in my research and conversations in preparation for my book “Losing the Race” in the late 1990s, when I was sincerely trying to figure out why so many Black people spoke of racism almost as if it were the 1890s rather than the 1990s. There is a reason that the main focus of the Black Panthers was combating police brutality, that anti-cop animus was central to gangsta rap and that today Black Lives Matter may be more influential than the N.A.A.C.P.

Well, I won’t comment on whether the differential influence in the last sentence is true, or, if true, is a good thing; but differential police treatment of races surely accounts for the different reactions of blacks and whites to O. J. Simpson’s acquittal of murder in 1995. And to McWhorter, that difference would be reduced today. McWhorter calls this “progress in race relations”. I think that, if it were true, it would be progress in performative antiracism, but not genuine progress.  But read his column by clicking on the headline, or find the article archived here:

 

First, McWhorter makes it clear, as it is be to anyone with neurons, that O. J. was guilty as hell of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. McWhorter makes that view clear several times, including in the first paragraph, where he describes the racial differences in reaction to Simpson’s acquittal (all bolding is mine):

Among the signature images of O.J. Simpson’s acquittal of the murders of his ex-wife and her friend was the contrasting tableaus of Black people grouping in front of television screens applauding while white people watching it were shaking their heads — appalled, perplexed and even disgusted by a verdict that flew in the face of obvious fact. Those contrasting perspectives have gone down as demonstrating a gulf of understanding between the races.

That gulf persists, but it narrows apace, and if the verdict came down today, it would be a lot less perplexing to many white people than it was back then. Many would understand why the jury acted as it did. We might even see some of them applauding along with Black people.

To McWhorter, that last sentence instantiates racial progress, but more on that later.  More on his opinion of Simpson’s guilt:

The evidence of Simpson’s deed was overwhelming despite the ineptitude of the prosecution team. The verdict and the response to it among the Black community weren’t signs of support for Simpson; they were protests against a long legacy of mistreatment and even murder at the hands of the police.

. . . the sheer fact of a Black man getting off on a murder charge was of epic significance. If anything, the fact that he was obviously guilty only amplified the victory.

I agree with McWhorter. I was on Simpson’s defense team, and the DNA material I got must be kept confidential. But I will say that it’s my personal opinion, from all the evidence that came out during the trial and thereafter, that Simpson was guilty as hell. But the prosecution apparently could not convince the jury that he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, so he walked. (DNA evidence, for one thing, seemed to only confuse the jury. And then there was the glove and the racism of Mark Furman.)

So a black man, in the face of all the evidence (and yes, the prosecution was inept) was acquitted of murder. Black people applauded because, though perhaps many thought him guilty, his acquittal represented a black man beating a racist system. White people groaned because many also thought him guilty, and there may also have been some racism in that reaction.

I can fully understand these reactions. But understanding them doesn’t mean I approve of them.. A man was on trial for his life, yet he was apparently being judged by the public on his pigmentation and historical racism by cops. If you thought he was guilty but applauded the verdict because Simpson was black, you’ve judged the system, not the man.

And now McWhorter avers that if the trial took place today, it’s likely that, because of improved racial relations, many white people would also judge the system and join blacks in applauding the verdict:

Today I see white people far more aware. That’s why when I fast-forward the Simpson verdict to 2024, I picture some white people getting the news on their phones and doing high-fives and group hugs, some of them in tears. They would be no more likely to see Simpson himself as a hero than were the jurors of 1995, especially given that modern America is more sensitized not only to racism but also to abuse of women. But they would be more likely to see the acquittal as a kind of payback for all of the white cops who have been exonerated for murdering Black people. It would be processed, I imagine, as a teaching moment of sorts.

This smacks strongly of Robin DiAngelo. High-fiving and group hugs as a reaction to Simpson’s acquittal is a performative act: it’s saying, “Look, I understand that black people are mistreated by the cops! I’m not a racist!”  But if you’re celebrating and still thought Simpson did the crimes, then you’re happy because a guilty man went free—and only because that guilty man was black. To me, that’s making Simpson stand for all blacks, though, as McWhorter notes, Simpson really wasn’t considered part of the black community,and was not an activist. A verdict should be judged on the content of the man’s crime, not on the color of his skin.

Others may agree with McWhorter, but I think this hypothetical scenario, if it occurred, would be evidence not of real racial progress, but of performative antiracism by whites. If you see that as progress, so be it. I can give a lot of harder evidence that there’s been racial progress in the past three decades, and especially in the past six decades. You don’t need to make up some dumb scenario to show this, just as a way to mark Simpson’s death.

As for me, I am a white man who always thought Simpson guilty. His acquittal was bad for society (look what happened to him afterwards), and that was the last trial in which I acted as an expert witness for DNA.  I didn’t see the acquittal as a sign of improved racial relations, but as a miscarriage of justice largely due to the incompetence of the prosecution. I ran out of gas at the moment he was acquitted, and from then on turned down all requests by defense lawyers to use me as an expert witness.

If the acquittal happened today, I would not be high-fiving others, crying, or engaging in group hugs. That doesn’t prove that I’m a racist, because I agree that cops treat blacks worse than whites. But I also believe in evidence, and the evidence adduced in the Simpson case, and revealed soon after by reporters, is not a reason to celebrate his acquittal.

And I’m wondering why McWhorter had to confect this hypothetical, performative scenario to demonstrate that racial relations have improved in America.

McWhorter:

All that leads me to think that America has a problem with police violence in general. But here’s the thing: I am accustomed to vigorous resistance to that argument from not only Black but white people, too.

It is in this context that the stark racial divide in the reception of the Simpson verdict three decades ago seems rather antique. There has been, regardless of the disagreements that inevitably persist, progress.

There are, I’m sure, better ways to show progress.

******************************

“If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”:

 

 

Today’s photos come from reader Bill Dickens, whose notes and IDs are indented. You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them, and don’t miss the eclipse photo at the bottom.

I’ve been camping at Flamingo, Florida in the Everglades National Park. April is a good time of year to visit with warm temperatures and before the rains arrive and turn much of the coastal prairie into mud. (The mosquitoes though are a constant.)

Here are some wildlife shots taken along the Coastal Prairie Trail – a 13-mile round-trip along a historical trail once used by local cottonpickers and fishermen. It’s now a part of the Everglades National Park. The trail winds through an open prairie of succulents and buttonwoods both leaved and dead, presumably from constant inundation by flooding.

It was the dragonflies that are the real star at this time of year. Swarms of them.

Plus a bonus shot taken of the eclipse. I drove from my home in Florida to the Texas Hill Country to view it from Tow, Texas. The weather was cloudy most of the morning leading up to the eclipse. Then the cirrus clouds were headed one way, lower-level clouds the other and five minutes before the eclipse it cleared and stayed clear.

The Wildflowers were out in the Hill Country and this makes it a pretty time of year to visit.

Coastal Prairie Trail:

Pileated Woodpeckers (Dryocopus pileatus) – there are actually two in the frame:

Osprey (Pandion haliaetus),:

Osprey with Fish tail:

Halloween Pennant Dragonfly (Celithemis eponina):

Blue Bonnets, the official flower of the Lone Star State, at Lake Buchanan in Tow, Texas  (there are 5 different species of Blue Bonnet. I’m not going to guess):

The 2024 eclipse viewed from The Texas Hill Country:

Curved wing tips inspired by the world's heaviest flying bird could enhance the efficiency of wind turbines by of 10 per cent, according to simulations

Boston Dynamics (now owned by Hyundai) has revealed its electric version of its Atlas robot. These robot videos always look impressive, but at the very least we know that we are seeing the best take. We don’t know how many times the robot failed to get the one great video. There are also concerns about companies presenting what the full working prototype might look like, rather than what it actually currently does. The state of CGI is such that it’s possible to fake robot videos that are indistinguishable to the viewer from real ones.

So it’s understandable that these robot reveal videos are always looked at with a bit of skepticism. But it does seem that pushback does have an effect, and there is pressure on robotics companies to be more transparent. The video of the new Atlas robot does seem to be real, at least. Also, these are products for the real world. At some point the latest version of Atlas will be operating on factory floors, and if it didn’t work Boston Dynamics would not be sustainable as a company.

What we are now seeing, not just with Atlas but also Tesla’s Optimus Gen 2, and others, is conversion to all electric robots. This makes them smaller, lighter, and quieter than the previous hydraulic versions. They are also not tethered to cables as previous versions.

My first question was – what is the battery life? Boston Dynamics says they are “targeting” a four hour battery life for the commercial version of the Atlas. I love that corporate speak. I could not find a more direct answer in the time I had to research this piece. But four hours seems reasonable – the prior version from 2015 had about a 90 minute battery life depending on use. Apparently the new Atlas can swap out its own battery.

In addition to being electric, the Atlas is faster and more nimble. It can rotate its joints to give it more flexibility than a human, as demonstrated in the video. The goal is to allow it to flexibly operate in narrow work spaces.

Tesla has also unveiled its Optimus Gen 2 robot, which is a bit more oriented around personal rather than factory use. Tesla hypes that it could theoretically go shopping and then come home and cook you dinner. By way of demonstration, it released a video of Optimus delicately handling eggs. To be clear, Optimus is a prototype, not ready for commercialization. Tesla knows it needs to make continued improvement before this product is ready for prime time. Musk claims he is aiming for a sub $20,000 price tag for the commercial version of Optimus – but of course that does not mean much until they are actually for sale.

There is no question that the latest crop of electric robots are a significant improvement on earlier robots – they are more agile, lighter, with longer battery life. These robots can also benefit from recent advances in AI technology. Currently there are estimated to be 3.4 million industrial robots at work in the world, and this number is growing. The question is – are we really on the cusp of robots transitioning to non-industrial work and residential spaces? As is often the case – it’s hard to say.

As a general rule it’s good to assume that technology hype tends to be premature, and real-world applications often take longer than we anticipate. But then, the technology crosses the finish line and suddenly appears. All the hype of personal data assistants merging with cell phones and the internet lasted for at least a decade, before the iPhone suddenly changed the world. There is a hype, a post-hype, and then a reality phase to such technologies. Of course, the reality may be that the technology fails. Right now, for example, we appear to be in the post-hype phase of self-driving cars. But we also seem to be rapidly transitioning to self-driving cars as a reality, at least to some extent.

It still feels like we are in the hype phase of residential robots. It’s hard to say how long it will be before all-purpose robots are common in work spaces and the home. The difference, I think, with this technology is that is already does exist, for industrial use. This is more of a transition to a new use, rather than developing the technology itself. But on the other hand, the transition from factory floor to home is a massive one, and does require new technology to some extent.

There is also the issue of cost. Are people going to pay 20k for a robot? What’s the “killer app” that will make the purchase worth it? Where is the price break where people will feel it is a worthwhile appliance, worth the cost. When will robots become the new microwave oven?

On the encouraging side is the fact that these robots are already very capable, and steady incremental advances will add up quickly (as they already have). On the down side, it’s hard to see such an appliance will be worth the cost anytime soon. They will need to become either incredibly useful, or much cheaper. Will they really provide 20k worth of convenience, and be more cost-effective than just hiring people to do the jobs you don’t want to do? There is a threshold, but we still may be years away from crossing it.

The post New Generation of Electric Robots first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

A site in Siberia has evidence of human presence 417,000 years ago, raising the possibility that hominins could have reached North America much earlier than we thought

Teams of staff usually return e-scooters to where they will be needed, but adapted scooters that can balance and stop themselves, and be controlled remotely, are a step towards autonomous ones that can take themselves wherever they have to go

Set in an English manor in 1890, Botany Manor is a video game that places you in the shoes of a botanist working on a herbarium of forgotten flora

Part 3: Dr. John Ioannidis said his biggest mistake was the he "underestimated how much power politics and media and powers outside of science, could have on science." Really? 

The post Dr. John Ioannidis: “The Biggest Mistakes I am Sure Are Mine.” first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

On October 17, 2005 the talk show host and comedian Stephen Colbert introduced the word “truthiness” in the premier episode of his show The Colbert Report:1 “We’re not talking about truth, we’re talking about something that seems like truth— the truth we want to exist.”2 Since then the word has become entrenched in our everyday vocabulary but we’ve largely lost Colbert’s satirical critique of “living in a post-truth world.” Truthiness has become our truth. Kellyanne Conway opened the door to “alternative facts”3 while Oprah Winfrey exhorted you to “speak your truth.”4 And the co-founder of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, has begun to regularly talk to his podcast guests about objective external truths and subjective internal truths, inside of which are historical truths, political truths, religious truths, literary truths, mythical truths, scientific truths, empirical truths, narrative truths, and cultural truths.5 It is an often-heard complaint to say that we live in a post-truth world, but what we really have is far too many claims for it. Instead, we propose that the vital search for truth is actually best continued when we drop our assertions that we have something like an absolute Truth with a capital T.

Why is that? Consider one of our friends who is a Young Earth creationist. He believes the Bible is inerrant. He is convinced that every word it contains, including the six days of creation story of the universe, is Truth (spelled with a capital T because it is unquestionably, eternally true). From this position, he has rejected evidence brought to him from multiple disciplines that all converge on a much older Earth and universe. He has rejected evidence from fields such as biology, paleontology, astronomy, glaciology, and archeology, all of which should reduce his confidence in the claim that the formation of the Earth and every living thing on it, together with the creation of the sun, moon, and stars, all took place in literally six Earth days. Even when it was pointed out to him that the first chapter of Genesis mentions liquid water, light, and every kind of vegetation before there was a sun or any kind of star whatsoever, he claimed not to see a problem. His reply to such doubts is to simply say, “with God, all things are possible.”6

Lacking any uncertainty about the claim that “the Bible is Truth,” this creationist has only been able to conclude two things when faced with tough questions: (1) we are interpreting the Bible incorrectly, or (2) the evidence that appears to undermine a six-day creation is being interpreted incorrectly. These are inappropriately skeptical responses, but they are the only options left to someone who has decided beforehand that their belief is Truth. And, importantly, we have to admit that this observation could be turned back on us too. As soon as we become absolutely certain about a belief—as soon as we start calling something a capital “T” Truth—then we too become resistant to any evidence that could be interpreted as challenging it. After all, we are not absolutely certain that the account in Genesis is false. Instead, we simply consider it very, very unlikely, given all of the evidence at hand. We must keep in mind that we sample a tiny sliver of reality, with limited senses that only have access to a few of possibly many dimensions, in but one of quite likely multiple universes. Given this situation, intellectual humility is required.

Some history and definitions from philosophy are useful to examine all of this more precisely. Of particular relevance is the field of epistemology, which studies what knowledge is or can be. A common starting point is Plato’s definition of knowledge as justified true belief (JTB).7 According to this JTB formulation, all three of those components are necessary for our notions or ideas to rise to the level of being accepted as genuine knowledge as opposed to being dismissible as mere opinion. And in an effort to make this distinction clear, definitions for all three of these components have been developed over the ensuing millennia. For epistemologists, beliefs are “what we take to be the case or regard as true.”8 For a belief to be true, it doesn’t just need to seem correct now; “most philosophers add the further constraint that a proposition never changes its truth-value in space or time.”9 And we can’t just stumble on these truths; our beliefs require some reason or evidence to justify them.10

Readers of Skeptic will likely be familiar with skeptical arguments from Agrippa (the problem of infinite regress11), David Hume (the problem of induction12), Rene Descartes (the problem of the evil demon13), and others that have chipped away at the possibility of ever attaining absolute knowledge. In 1963, however, Edmund Gettier fully upended the JTB theory of knowledge by demonstrating—in what has come to be called “Gettier problems”14—that even if we managed to actually have a justified true belief, we may have just gotten there by a stroke of good luck. And the last 60 years of epistemology have shown that we can seemingly never be certain that we are in receipt of such good fortune.

This philosophical work has been an effort to identify an essential and unchanging feature of the universe—a perfectly justified truth that we can absolutely believe in and know. This Holy Grail of philosophy surely would be nice to have, but it makes sense that we don’t. Ever since Darwin demonstrated that all of life could be traced back to the simplest of origins, it has slowly become obvious that all knowledge is evolving and changing as well. We don’t know what the future will reveal and even our most unquestioned assumptions could be upended if, say, we’ve actually been living in a simulation all this time, or Descartes’ evil demon really has been viciously deluding us. It only makes sense that Daniel Dennett titled one of his recent papers, “Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism.”15

So, what is to be done after this demise of our cherished notions of truth, belief, and knowledge? Hold onto them and claim them anyway, as does the creationist? No. That path leads to error and intractable conflict. Instead, we should keep our minds open, and adjust and adapt to evidence as it becomes available. This style of thinking has become formalized and is known as Bayesian reasoning. Central to Bayesian reasoning is a conditional probability formula that helps us revise our beliefs to be better aligned with the available evidence. The formula is known as Bayes’ theorem. It is used to work out how likely something is, taking into account both what we already know as well as any new evidence. As a demonstration, consider a disease diagnosis, derived from a paper titled, “How to Train Novices in Bayesian Reasoning:”

10 percent of adults who participate in a study have a particular medical condition. 60 percent of participants with this condition will test positive for the condition. 20 percent of participants without the condition will also test positive. Calculate the probability of having the medical condition given a positive test result.16

Most people, including medical students, get the answer to this type of question wrong. Some would say the accuracy of the test is 60 percent. However, the answer must be understood in the broader context of false positives and the relative rarity of the disease.

Simply putting actual numbers on the face of these percentages will help you visualize this. For example, since the rate of the disease is only 10 percent, that would mean 10 in 100 people have the condition, and the test would correctly identify six of these people. But since 90 of the 100 people don’t have the condition, yet 20 percent of them would also receive a positive test result, that would mean 18 people would be incorrectly flagged. Therefore, 24 total people would get positive test results, but only six of those would actually have the disease. And that means the answer to the question is only 25 percent. (And, by the way, a negative result would only give you about 95 percent likelihood that you were in the clear. Four of the 76 negatives would actually have the disease.)

Now, most usages of Bayesian reasoning won’t come with such detailed and precise statistics. We will very rarely be able to calculate the probability that an assertion is correct by using known weights of positive evidence, negative evidence, false positives, and false negatives. However, now that we are aware of these factors, we can try to weigh them roughly in our minds, starting with the two core norms of Bayesian epistemology: thinking about beliefs in terms of probability and updating one’s beliefs as conditions change.17 We propose it may be easier to think in this Bayesian way using a modified version of a concept put forward by the philosopher Andy Norman, called Reason’s Fulcrum.18

Figure 1. A Simple Lever. Balancing a simple lever can be achieved by moving the fulcrum so that the ratio of the beam is the inverse of the ratio of mass. Here, an adult who is three times heavier than the child is balanced by giving the child three times the length of beam. The mass of the beam is ignored. Illustrations in this article by Jim W.W. Smith

Like Bayes, Norman asserts that our beliefs ought to change in response to reason and evidence, or as David Hume said, “a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”19 These changes could be seen as the movement of the fulcrum lying under a simple lever. Picture a beam or a plank (the lever) with a balancing point (the fulcrum) somewhere in the middle, such as a playground teeter-totter. As in Figure 1, you can balance a large adult with a small child just by positioning the fulcrum closer to the adult. And if you know their weight, then the location of that fulcrum can be calculated ahead of time because the ratio of the beam length on either side of the fulcrum is the inverse of the ratio of mass between the adult and child (e.g., a three times heavier person is balanced by a distance having a ratio of 1:3 units of distance).

If we now move to the realm of reason, we can imagine substituting the ratio of mass between an adult and child by the ratio of how likely the evidence is to be observed between a claim and its counterclaim. Note how the term in italics captures not just the absolute quantity of evidence but the relative quality of that evidence as well. Once this is considered, then the balancing point at the fulcrum gives us our level of credence in each of our two competing claims.

Figure 2. Ratio of 90–10 for People Without–With the Condition. A 10 percent chance of having a condition gives a beam ratio of 1:9. The location of the fulcrum shows the credence that a random person should have about their medical status.

To see how this works for the example previously given about a test for a medical condition, we start by looking at the balance point in the general population (Figure 2). Not having the disease is represented by 90 people on the left side of the lever, and having the disease is represented by 10 people on the right side. This is a ratio of 9:1. So, to get our lever to balance, we must move the fulcrum so that the length of the beam on either side of the balancing point has the inverse ratio of 1:9. This, then, is the physical depiction of a 10 percent likelihood of having the medical condition in the general population. There are 10 units of distance between the two populations and the fulcrum is on the far left, 1 unit away from all the negatives.

Figure 3. Ratio of 18 False Positives to 6 True Positives. A 1 to 3 beam ratio illustrates a 25 percent chance of truly having this condition. The location of the fulcrum shows the proper level of credence for someone if they receive a positive test.

Next, we want to see the balance point after a positive result (Figure 3). On the left: the test has a 20 percent false positive rate, so 18 of the 90 people stay on our giant seesaw even though they don’t actually have the condition. On the right: 60 percent of the 10 people who have the condition would test positive, so this leaves six people. Therefore, the new ratio after the test is 18:6, or 3:1. This means that in order to restore balance, the fulcrum must be shifted to the inverse ratio of 1:3. There are now four total units of distance between the left and right, and the fulcrum is 1 unit from the left. So, after receiving a positive test result, the probability of having the condition (being in the group on the right) is one in four or 25 percent (the portion of beam on the left). This confirms the answer we derived earlier using abstract mathematical formulas, but many may find the concepts easier to grasp based on the visual representation.

To recap, the position of the fulcrum under the beam is the balancing point of the likelihood of observing the available evidence for two competing claims. This position is called our credence. As we become aware of new evidence, our credence must move to restore a balanced position. In the example above, the average person in the population would have been right to hold a credence of 10 percent that they had a particular condition. And after getting a positive test, this new evidence would shift their credence, but only to a likelihood of 25 percent. That’s worse for the person, but actually still pretty unlikely. Of course, more relevant evidence in the future may shift the fulcrum further in one direction or another. That is the way Bayesian reasoning attempts to wisely proportion one’s credence to the evidence.

Figure 4. Breaking Reason’s Fulcrum. Absolute certainty makes Bayes’ theorem unresponsive to evidence in the same way that a simple lever is unresponsive to mass when it becomes a ramp.

What about our Young Earth creationist friend? When using Bayes’ theorem, the absolute certainty he holds starts with a credence of zero percent or 100 percent and always results in an end credence of zero percent or 100 percent, regardless of what any possible evidence might show. To guard against this, the statistician Dennis Lindley proposed “Cromwell’s Rule,” based on Oliver Cromwell’s famous 1650 quip: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”20 This rule simply states that you should never assign a probability of zero percent or 100 percent to any proposition. Once we frame our friend’s certainty in the Truth of biblical inerrancy as setting his fulcrum to the extreme end of the beam, we get a clear model for why he is so resistant to counterevidence. Absolute certainty breaks Reason’s Fulcrum. It removes any chance for leverage to change a mind. When beliefs reach the status of “certain truth” they simply build ramps on which any future evidence effortlessly slides off (Figure 4).

So far, this is the standard way of treating evidence in Bayesian epistemology to arrive at a credence. The lever and fulcrum depictions provide a tangible way of seeing this, which may be helpful to some readers. However, we also propose that this physical model might help with a common criticism of Bayesian epistemology. In the relevant academic literature, Bayesians are said to “hardly mention” sources of knowledge, the justification for one’s credence is “seldom discussed,” and “Bayesians have hardly opened their ‘black box’, E, of evidence.”21 We propose to address this by first noting it should be obvious from the explanations above that not all evidence deserves to be placed directly onto the lever. In the medical diagnosis example, we were told exactly how many false negatives and false positives we could expect, but this is rarely known. Yet, if ten drunken campers over the course of a few decades swear they saw something that looked like Bigfoot, we would treat that body of evidence differently than if it were nine drunken campers and footage from one high-definition camera of documentarians working for the BBC. How should we depict this difference between the quality of evidence versus the quantity of evidence?

We don’t yet have firm rules or “Bayesian coefficients” for how to precisely treat all types of evidence, but we can take some guidance from the history of the development of the scientific method. Evidential claims can start with something very small, such as one observation under suspect conditions given by an unreliable observer. In some cases, perhaps that’s the best we’ve got for informing our credences. Such evidence might feel fragile, but…who knows? The content could turn out to be robust. How do we strengthen it? Slowly, step by step, we progress to observations with better tools and conditions by more reliable observers. Eventually, we’re off and running with the growing list of reasons why we trust science: replication, verification, inductive hypotheses, deductive predictions, falsifiability, experimentation, theory development, peer review, social paradigms, incorporating a diversity of opinions, and broad consensus.22

We can also bracket these various knowledgegenerating activities into three separate categories for theories. The simplest type of theory we have explains previous evidence. This is called retrodiction. All good theories can explain the past, but we have to be aware that this is also what “just-so stories” do, as in Rudyard Kipling’s entertaining theory for how Indian rhinoceroses got their skin—cake crumbs made them so itchy they rubbed their skin until it became raw, stretched, and all folded up.23

Even better than simply explaining what we already know, good theories should make predictions. Newton’s theories predicted that a comet would appear around Christmastime in 1758. When this unusual sight appeared in the sky on Christmas day, the comet (named for Newton’s close friend Edmund Halley) was taken as very strong evidence for Newtonian physics. Theories such as this can become stronger the more they explain and predict further evidence.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.4
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Finally, beyond predictive theories, there are ones that can bring forth what William Whewell called consilience.24 Whewell coined the term scientist and he described consilience as what occurs when a theory that is designed to account for one type of phenomenon turns out to also account for another completely different type. The clearest example is Darwin’s theory of evolution. It accounts for biodiversity, fossil evidence, geographical population distribution, and a huge range of other mysteries that previous theories could not make sense of. And this consilience is no accident—Darwin was a student of Whewell’s and he was nervous about sharing his theory until he had made it as robust as possible.

Figure 5. The Bayesian Balance. Evidence is sorted by sieves of theories that provide retrodiction, prediction, and consilience. Better and better theories have lower rates of false positives and require a greater movement of the fulcrum to represent our increased credence. Evidence that does not yet conform to any theories at all merely contributes to an overall skepticism about the knowledge we thought we had.

Combining all of these ideas, we propose a new way (Figure 5) of sifting through the mountains of evidence the world is constantly bombarding us with. We think it is useful to consider the three different categories of theories, each dealing with different strengths of evidence, as a set of sieves by which we can first filter the data to be weighed in our minds. In this view, some types of evidence might be rather low quality, acting like a medical test with false positives near 50 percent. Such poor evidence goes equally on each side of the beam and never really moves the fulcrum. However, other evidence is much more likely to be reliable and can be counted on one side of the beam at a much higher rate than the other (although never with 100 percent certainty). And evidence that does not fit with any theory whatsoever really just ought to make us feel more skeptical about what we think we know until and unless we figure out a way to incorporate it into a new theory.

We submit that this mental model of a Bayesian Balance allows us to adjust our credences more easily and intuitively. Also, it never tips the lever all the way over into unreasonable certainty. To use it, you don’t have to delve into the history of philosophy, epistemology, skepticism, knowledge, justified true beliefs, Bayesian inferences, or difficult calculations using probability notation and unknown coefficients. You simply need to keep weighing the evidence and paying attention to which kinds of evidence are more or less likely to count. Remember that observations can sometimes be misleading, so a good guiding principle is, “Could my evidence be observed even if I’m wrong?” Doing so fosters a properly skeptical mindset. It frees us from the truth trap, yet enables us to move forward, wisely proportioning our credences as best as the evidence allows us.

About the Author

Zafir Ivanov is a writer and public speaker focusing on why we believe and why it’s best we believe as little as possible. His lifelong interests include how we form beliefs and why people seem immune to counterevidence. He collaborated with the Cognitive Immunology Research Initiative and The Evolutionary Philosophy Circle. Watch his TED talk.

Ed Gibney writes fiction and philosophy while trying to bring an evolutionary perspective to both of those pursuits. He has previously worked in the federal government trying to make it more effective and efficient. He started a Special Advisor program at the U.S. Secret Service to assist their director with this goal, and he worked in similar programs at the FBI and DHS after business school and a stint in the Peace Corps. His work can be found at evphil.com.

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