Paul M. Jones

So let me explain what science actually is. Science is the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation. That's the science that gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet. But what almost everyone means when he or she says "science" is something different.

To most people, capital-S Science is the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It is a thing engaged in by people wearing lab coats and/or doing fancy math that nobody else understands. The reason capital-S Science gives us airplanes and flu vaccines is not because it is an incremental engineering process but because scientists are really smart people.

In other words -- and this is the key thing -- when people say "science", what they really mean is magic or truth.

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What we now know as the "scientific revolution" was a repudiation of Aristotle: science, not as knowledge of the ultimate causes of things but as the production of reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation.

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If you ask most people what science is, they will give you an answer that looks a lot like Aristotelian "science" -- i.e., the exact opposite of what modern science actually is. Capital-S Science is the pursuit of capital-T Truth. And science is something that cannot possibly be understood by mere mortals. It delivers wonders. It has high priests. It has an ideology that must be obeyed.

This leads us astray.

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This is how you get the phenomenon of philistines like Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne thinking science has made God irrelevant, even though, by definition, religion concerns the ultimate causes of things and, again, by definition, science cannot tell you about them.

You might think of science advocate, cultural illiterate, mendacious anti-Catholic propagandist, and possible serial fabulist Neil DeGrasse Tyson and anti-vaccine looney-toon Jenny McCarthy as polar opposites on a pro-science/anti-science spectrum, but in reality they are the two sides of the same coin. Both of them think science is like magic, except one of them is part of the religion and the other isn't.

What you probably mean when you say "I love science" is "I love my tribe." Via How our botched understanding of 'science' ruins everything - The Week.

A 27-year-old Philadelphia mother who says she mistakenly entered New Jersey with a handgun legally registered in her state, was not accepted into a pre-trial intervention program, unlike the former Baltimore Ravens running back who was caught on an elevator surveillance camera punching his then-fiancée and current wife. The disparate decisions, made by the same prosecutor and approved by the same judge, leave Allen facing more than three years in prison and Rice free, though disgraced.

via Uneven playing field? Judge, prosecutor who let Ray Rice walk toss book at single mom.

The evidence that abstinence from alcohol is a cause of heart disease and early death is irrefutable--yet this is almost unmentionable in the United States. Even as health bodies like the CDC and Dietary Guidelines for Americans (prepared by Health and Human Services) now recognize the decisive benefits from moderate drinking, each such announcement is met by an onslaught of opposition and criticism, and is always at risk of being reversed.

Noting that even drinking at non-pathological levels above recommended moderate limits gives you a better chance of a longer life than abstaining draws louder protests still. Yet that’s exactly what the evidence tells us.

Via Truth We Won’t Admit: Drinking Is Healthy - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society.

Most of the outrage over this is from people who are spring-loaded in the "offended" position. You all need to start exercising some judgment. Or maybe figure out that most feminist outrages are not about what you think they are about (hint: it's not "equality").

New v2 releases, and hey, what's this about Aura.Di finally getting auto-resolution of typehinted parameters?

First, we have brand new 2.0.0 stable releases of these v2 packages!

• Aura.Dispatcher
• Aura.Router
• Aura.Cli
• Aura.View
• Aura.Html

Next, the Aura.Di package just got bumped to 2.0.0-beta2. This package in particular has seen some great new improvements, most notably auto-resolution of typehinted constructor parameters, and a brand-new README. Check it out at https://github.com/auraphp/Aura.Di.

Emphasis not in original; read the whole notice at http://auraphp.com/blog/2014/09/03/new-releases/.

Auto-resolution of typehinted parameters is something I've been against since the beginning of Aura.Di. After having used implicit magical convention for a long time, I have learned to prefer explicit configuration. However, auto-resolution turned out to be relatively simple to add, and the tradeoff of not having to explicitly specify every lazyNew('ClassName') every time on every parameter seems reasonable. (One hopes one does not get burned later for having made this concession.)

Read the Reddit discussion about this post here.

People who avoid carbohydrates and eat more fat, even saturated fat, lose more body fat and have fewer cardiovascular risks than people who follow the low-fat diet that health authorities have favored for decades, a major new study shows.

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The new study was financed by the National Institutes of Health and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. It included a racially diverse group of 150 men and women -- a rarity in clinical nutrition studies -- who were assigned to follow diets for one year that limited either the amount of carbs or fat that they could eat, but not overall calories.

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By the end of the yearlong trial, people in the low-carbohydrate group had lost about eight pounds more on average than those in the low-fat group. They had significantly greater reductions in body fat than the low-fat group, and improvements in lean muscle mass -- even though neither group changed their levels of physical activity.

While the low-fat group did lose weight, they appeared to lose more muscle than fat.

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By the end of the yearlong trial, people in the low-carbohydrate group had lost about eight pounds more on average than those in the low-fat group. They had significantly greater reductions in body fat than the low-fat group, and improvements in lean muscle mass -- even though neither group changed their levels of physical activity.

While the low-fat group did lose weight, they appeared to lose more muscle than fat.

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In the end, people in the low-carbohydrate group saw markers of inflammation and triglycerides -- a type of fat that circulates in the blood -- plunge. Their HDL, the so-called good cholesterol, rose more sharply than it did for people in the low-fat group.

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Those on the low-carbohydrate diet ultimately did so well that they managed to lower their Framingham risk scores, which calculate the likelihood of a heart attack within the next 10 years. The low-fat group on average had no improvement in their scores.

Score another one for Atkins, Taubes, et al. Note also that this is a direct refutation of the Food Pyramid the Federal government has been shoving down our throats for years. What else have they gotten wrong? Via A Call for a Low-Carb Diet - NYTimes.com.

Rhat gave unions their big push in the 1930s was federal legislation allowing them to be the sole bargainer for employees, even for employees who had no wish to join or pay dues. What we do call an organization that is the sole seller? We call it a monopoly. And not the kind of monopoly that some people say Microsoft is or had been. Microsoft always has to compete with other software companies.

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Unions, moreover, have a pretty ugly track record on race relations, which is why two prominent early 20th century black leaders, W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, who agreed on little else, agreed that unions were bad for black workers. When people forcibly prevent you from competing and figure out ways to exclude you from working, you don't feel very good about them.

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Our big challenge with unions nowadays is to rein in unions of government workers who are negotiating high wages and high pensions. That is what is wrecking state and local government budgets all over the United States.

Emphasis mine. Via The Role of Unions, David Henderson | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

I have argued elsewhere that certain features of empathy make it a poor guide to social policy. Empathy is biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background. And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data. As Mother Teresa put it, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Laboratory studies find that we really do care more about the one than about the mass, so long as we have personal information about the one.

In light of these features, our public decisions will be fairer and more moral once we put empathy aside.

via Against Empathy | Boston Review.

Except it's not white misogynist Christian Western men attacking college-educated Strong Independent Western women, it's Pakistani Muslim immigrants in Britain attacking children:

At least 1,400 children were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, a report has found.

Children as young as 11 were raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted, trafficked to other cities in England, beaten and intimidated, it said.

The report, commissioned by Rotherham Borough Council, revealed there had been three previous inquiries.

Council leader Roger Stone said he would step down with immediate effect.

Mr Stone, who has been the leader since 2003, said: "I believe it is only right that as leader I take responsibility for the historic failings described so clearly."

The inquiry team noted fears among council staff of being labelled "racist" if they focused on victims' descriptions of the majority of abusers as "Asian" men.

("Asian" is apparently a euphemism for "Pakistani Muslim" in this case.) Via BBC News - Rotherham child abuse scandal: 1,400 children exploited, report finds.

There's so much wrong here I don't know where to start, not least of which is that the police and legal systems turned a blind eye to this horrible activity, thereby enabling the perpetrators. At this time, none of the usual rape culture reporters find it interesting enough to report on. One wonders why.

I can tell you right now, you are not going to like this essay from Fred On Everything. I didn't like it, and yet it shows some sense. You should read the whole thing, but this part especially stands our for me:

As a fresh cop, you will notice that the standard editorial notion, that cops are heavily armed brutes amid a helpless unarmed populations, isn’t quite accurate. When you are on the sidewalks of a bad neighborhood, where you know you are disliked by all and hated by many, you will become aware of your vulnerability. You have to pass close to people. Any of them could blow your head off from behind, stick an ice pick in your back, or brain you with a piece of rebar.

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Ah, but how do you know when your life is in danger? Therein lies the rub.

As an object lesson, watch the following video where an armed (!) police officer gets beaten senseless by an unarmed (!!) assailant:

Now, if she had shot him, we would have heard about another white cop killing an unarmed black man. But as we can see, "unarmed" does not mean "harmless, timid, or otherwise not-dangerous". She was lucky that he did not kick her head in while she was down. Keep this in mind the next time you hear about someone being "unarmed."