It’s trivial to use this incident to support the exact opposite of Greenwald’s conclusion. If bankers are complaining that they haven’t gotten anything in exchange for their political contribution to Democrats, then presumably cash donations do not have much influence on politics. (As for Greenwald’s implication that taxpayers are funding bankers’ ill-gotten bonuses, I refer you to Karl Smith.) To see this as evidence that Obama and Congress have been “bought” by Wall Street strikes me as a very twisted perspective.

But really, my intuition is worth approximately nothing here. As is Greenwald’s. Viewed in isolation, this one data point can be fit into radically opposed narratives. It’s easy to see what you want to see if you look at the world anecdote by anecdote. To determine how much money influences politics it really is necessary to approach the question in a much more careful, methodical manner.

Finally, Will Wilson says he is unconvinced by Julian’s reductionism; it’s part of Wilson’s piece that I want to address.

In fact, pace Julian, there exists such a binary property which I would consider to be the only property that matters — in fact I suspect that it’s the one that most of our pragmatic and moral determinations end up piggy-backing off of — namely the property of it being me. Yes, I’m being cute; but I’m also making a serious point.

The problem with postulating being me as a fundamental metaphysical property is that we lack adequate epistemic access to that property. An example will illustrate the problem.

Suppose Alice walks into a hospital and asks the doctor to make a carbon copy of herself (she always wanted a twin). She fills out the paperwork, and then the doc sedates her. Later, as she groggily wakes up, she observes another person who looks exactly like her lying in the next bed over who is also groggily coming out of sedation. At this point the doctor walks into the room, looking very embarrassed, and informs them that due to a clerical mishap, no one is certain which is the original and which is the newly created duplicate.

By hypothesis, there’s no physical way to distinguish the two. Introspectively, each of them thinks “Yes, of course, I am Alice. I remember signing all those forms!”. However, if you maintain that being Alice is an irreducible metaphysical property then one person has it and the other does not. It’s just that neither one has any epistemic access to the being Alice property — intuition and introspection don’t help.

I’m pretty unimpressed by philosophers who posit epistemically inaccessible metaphysical properties, for exactly the same reasons I’m unimpressed by scientists who propose empirically vacuous theories.

Well, actually no. Rather, this is an example of the sort of ridiculous result you can obtain if you’re not properly attentive to the possibility of false positives when separating noise from signal in fMRI scans. And it’s a nice example of how progress in epistemic methods is a partly empirical enterprise.

…on a slightly related note, I’m off to ponder the foundationalist / coherentist split now.

Flores, 44, has said he was acting on a divine revelation and wanted to warn Calderon of an earthquake that would occur in 2012. That year has been widely mentioned on the Internet as the date for potentially catastrophic events, based on astronomical alignments and purported ancient prophesies.
“I am never going to regret it,” Flores told Milenio Television Friday. “My intention was to do good, to announce, without regard to my life or liberty, that we should join together and pray for the earthquake not to occur.”
“I am happy because I know this is God’s” work, he said as he was transferred to prison.

The operative theory here seems to be that God has foreknowledge of an impending earthquake and wants to prevent it. So God told Jose Flores to tell Felipe Calderon to tell the all people of Mexico to… ask God to prevent the earthquake. Apparently God likes seeing people beg.

It’s not clear whether God or Flores originated the idea to hijack an airplane, but the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost did allegedly participate in the hijacking. Police who stormed the airplane could not locate the divine trio, however.

Ok, so Jose Flores is crazy. And it’s not really fair to assign moral blame to other Christians for what he did. That said, the very insanity of the entire incident raises an important epistemic question for all the non-airplane-hijacking Christians out there: Why exactly do you think that the divine revelations which you receive (or which other people received and wrote down to form the Bible) are any more reliable than Flores’s revelations?

Doing science is hard to begin with. When large amounts of taxpayer money get handed out based on what “the evidence” says, a host of new obstacles arise.

DEAR BILLY GRAHAM: Why do people get involved in cults? My cousin has gotten involved in one, and no matter what we say to him, he refuses to listen. He says we are the ones who are in the dark, and he alone in our family has found the truth. — S. McM.

to which Graham replies,

DEAR S. McM: One characteristic of cults is that they strongly believe they alone are right in their beliefs and everyone else is wrong. Thus they reject the central truths of the Bible that Christians have held in common for almost 2,000 years and substitute their own beliefs for the clear teaching of Scripture.

What’s stunning about this is not merely the epistemic authoritarianism but that Graham seems to have never imagined that other epistemic methods might exist. How many science teachers so utterly failed in their charge to convey the essence of science to Graham and his fellow students?

Since the topic of cults has come up, I’ll take the opportunity to link to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s insightful posts on how cults arise, what “cultishness” is, and how to tell if you’re in a cult.

Figuring out who is right and who is wrong can be difficult and complicated. I can, however, suggest a starting point. If you have to fabricate data to support your theory, then no, you are not the next Galileo.

Sam considers whether the most unlikely possible event is not presently occurring. By ‘the most unlikely possible event’, Sam intends to designate whatever was, at the immediately preceding instant, t – 1, the possible event most unlikely to occur at the next instant, t, which is the moment at which her deliberation occurs. Sam understands the proposition in question. Solely in virtue of that understanding, it seems to her—i.e. she intuits—that the proposition is true, though not necessarily so. On the basis of this intuition, she believes that the most unlikely possible event is not presently occurring. Her belief is true.

To be a bit more precise, Sam starts out believing “X will not occur” with probability 1-ε. By hypothesis, she has some justification for believing so. After drawing on her powers of intuition, she believes “X will not occur” with probability 1. Turri claims that this tiny increase in certainty is justified.

Turri never explains why he builds this argument using the “most unlikely” event instead of an unlikely event, but he does admit that ε must be small in absolute terms for his argument to work. He arbitrarily proposes an upper bound of 10^-18 for ε.

I maintain that Sam’s intuition has committed a rounding error. Under the circumstances Turri sets up, there is abundant reason to mistrust human intuition. One need travel no farther than the nearest casino to observe humans attempting to do probabilistic reasoning by intuition. Human intuition doesn’t just commit tiny rounding errors, it commits big errors — errors of much greater magnitude than 10^-18 — and commits them quite frequently. Given this extremely spotty record, an optimist might hope that Turri would proceed to demonstrate that in this particular case intuition guides us true.

If [a philosopher] reproached Sam, “Pardon me, Miss, but you of course meant that [the unlikely event] is almost certainly not occurring,” she could rightly respond, “Oh, come on! It’s not occurring, and we all know it.”

That’s Turri’s argument.

Actually, there’s a little bit more to Turri’s argument, but it’s really nothing more than semantic smoke and mirrors. He worries extensively about the definitions of knowledge and assertion. Personally, I think that one can do epistemology quite well without ever using those words. But for the sake of argument, I’ll accept whatever definitions Turri happens to prefer. My question is this: are these concepts (however you’ve chosen to define them) suitable for addressing delicate probabilistic reasoning and small variations in degrees of certainty?

If the answer is No, then there simply isn’t any difference between gaining an ε of knowledge and gaining zero knowledge. There’s no longer a meaningful distinction between knowing/asserting that X is true with probability 1 vs. probability 1-ε.

If Turri wants to answer Yes then I want to see him explicitly wed those concepts to the axioms of probability and redo his argument in a correspondingly rigorous fashion.

Hat tip to Rebecca Watson.

the complete breakdown of traditional information flows, and a loss of confidence in the models used to evaluate that information. Markets need information to work properly, and the information financial markets need is not available.

For example, investors can no longer trust what ratings agencies tell them. A crucial piece of information, information designed to break informational asymmetries between firms and investors, turned out to be unreliable. In addition, investors can no longer believe the numbers they see on bank books. The numbers might say the bank is solvent, but how reliable are those numbers? And even if the numbers are meaningful today, will they be meaningful tomorrow? Is there any way to actually value the assets a lot of these banks have on their books when there is essentially no market for them, no way to engage in price discovery?

The general question of how best to form beliefs based on second-hand testimony, when one has little or no direct evidence, is an extremely difficult problem which admits few good solutions. One of those rare solutions is the market pricing mechanism, which in ordinary circumstances does an astonishingly good job of broadcasting reliable information. These, clearly, are not ordinary circumstances.

Mark Thoma proceeds to suggest various ideas about how to fix the information flows which markets rely upon and how to restore confidence in their accuracy. That is, he offers advice on how to help the market return to ordinary circumstances. The greater challenge is to understand how and why the market became so epistemically dysfunctional in the first place. Presently, there is no consensus among economists as to the root cause of even relatively simple cases of epistemic dysfunction in the markets, such as assest price bubbles. (In the current crisis, the bubble in house prices has lead to a much bigger and more complicated mess.) It is difficult to devise means to prevent future financial crises when such basic questions about their causes remain unanswered.

In a recent post, he carefully explains why it is unreasonable, in light of our best physical theories, to believe in telekinesis and other parapsychological phenomena.

If you haven’t already seen it, make sure to read Sean’s essay on What I Believe But Cannot Prove, which is a broad discussion of logic, observational evidence, proof, and the limits of our knowledge.

The only reason I’m posting this is because I’ve long dreamed of launching an array of satellites able to act as a huge billboard in the sky. On the first night, I’d arrange for them to read “I am God and I am real”. As for subsequent nights, well, the possibilities are limitless. (“God says: Thou shalt honor the sabbath day by breakdancing to minimalist music in a kiddie pool full of borscht.”)

Please leave suggestions as to what God should say in the comments. The best ideas will appear in the night sky just as soon as my satellites are up and running.

Actually, there is a broader point to this post: if you see some extraordinary phenomenon, don’t just assume that it’s beyond your mortal comprehension. Take a closer look. Investigate. Make an attempt to understand what’s going on. Be curious about the world.

This evening I encountered a creationist while working on math in a cafe. This particular creationist thought that stars burn out on a timescale much shorter than billions of years, and hence the Earth could not possibly be that old. The creationist, who happened to be an engineering student, couldn’t give any particular reason as to why he thought the entire astrophysics community was so egregiously wrong. However, what I found most appalling was that he had not the slightest interest in figuring out just why accepted models make such terribly wrong predictions about stellar lifetimes. He didn’t care at all about how stars work.

Ask an angry atheist why they dislike religion, and you’ll most likely hear about how religion encourages humankind’s worst impulses: sexism, out-group hostility, violence, etc. There’s plenty of reason to be angry at the Osama bin Ladens of the world, but right now I’m just as furious at religion for what it did to the kid I met in the cafe as I am for what it did to the World Trade Center. That kid, that engineer, was not a stupid person. Yet he was told — by some non-violent, moderate, downright friendly pastor — that all of The Answers can be found in the collected mystic ramblings of a bunch of desert nomads. Those theists took a smart, talented kid and utterly crushed his sense of curiosity about the world. I’m mad at Christianity for destroying what was best and most noble in that kid, and so many others like him.