Wielded by an expert, the sharp sword of rationality cuts deep, exposing underlying layers of confusion, intellectual laziness, or willful misunderstanding in what might on the surface appear to be logical arguments.
Take for example, this superb skewering by University of Chicago Professor Raymond T. Pierrehumbert of the disappointing new book, Superfreakonomics, and the badly flawed positions of its authors:
By now there have been many detailed dissections of everything that is wrong with the treatment of climate in Superfreakonomics, but what has been lost amidst all that extensive discussion is how really simple it would have been to get this stuff right. The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them. The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking needed to see if what they were saying (or what you thought they were saying) in fact made any sense. If you were stupid, it wouldn’t be so bad to have messed up such elementary reasoning, but I don’t by any means think you are stupid. That makes the failure to do the thinking all the more disappointing. I will take Nathan Myhrvold’s claim about solar cells, which you quoted prominently in your book, as an example.
As quoted by you, Mr. Myhrvold claimed, in effect, that it was pointless to try to solve global warming by building solar cells, because they are black and absorb all the solar energy that hits them, but convert only some 12% to electricity while radiating the rest as heat, warming the planet. Now, maybe you were dazzled by Mr Myhrvold’s brilliance, but don’t we try to teach our students to think for themselves? Let’s go through the arithmetic step by step and see how it comes out. It’s not hard.
So, Professor Pierrehumbert applies some basic first-year university level math to the issues at hand and quite easily demolishes several of the book’s more noteworthy claims. It’s a tour de force of sharp-edged clinical rationality, elegantly reasoned and beautifully described. I won’t quote any more of it here, but I urge you to read the whole thing. It might just be the single best blog article of 2009.
Similarly, Jeff Schweitzer, a marine biologist and former Clinton White House Science Advisor, brings us a stirring defense of reason combined with a stinging attack on those who would mislead the public for their own short-term gain:
The most depressing statistic I have read in recent years is embedded in a 2009 Gallup survey showing that 41% of Americans believe that climate change is exaggerated or a hoax, up from 38% two years ago. Worse, the number of Americans who agree that the scientists are correct about our climate declined from 66% to 57%.
We are just a few votes shy of descending into another Dark Age in which ignorance and faith triumph completely over reason and fact. We have entered a time in which scientific illiteracy has reached that catastrophic point where science transmutes from a search for objective truth to just another opinion, carrying no more weight than the blathering of a talking head with an opposing view.
Denying the reality of climate change is tragic on many levels. We are condemning millions to an unfortunate future of coastal flooding, mass migrations, agricultural disruptions, exposure to the northward march of tropical diseases, and inevitable wars over shifting and scarce resources. When these tragic events unfold, an apology from the faithful will be inadequate. Sorry does not suffice in the face of millions of unnecessary deaths and the preventable disruption of hundreds of millions of lives.
Then Schweitzer lays out the case that should convince even the most hardened pro-business, anti-environment, climate change skeptic:
But the tragedy of denial is also one of missed opportunity. The next economic superpower will be the country that masters, and then sells to the rest of the world, the next generation of green technologies. We can be sure now that the United States will not fill that role given the growing influence of anti-intellectualism and increasing disdain for science in this country. The scientific community has come to be seen by many conservatives as a liberal cabal to be dismissed outright.
As a consequence, while the shift from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy is inevitable, we will be left in the dust as the rest of the world invests in green technology research. China is now the world’s leading exporter of photovoltaic panels. Germany now invests more than the United States in renewable energy. We’re losing it folks. We became a superpower because we harnessed and dominated the industrial revolution. We have lost our lead because we “dithered” while the rest of the world embraced the green revolution. Can we say “sorry” to our children as we bequeath to them a country in decline?
And if the real-world costs and the lost opportunities of corporate-sponsored global warming denialism are not bad enough, we also must contend with the irrationality of those who continue to promote anti-vaccine pseudo-science. Their well-intended but misguided attempts to counter what seems to be growing levels of autism among children leads, unfortunately, to panicked parents skipping shots which, in the end, endangers us all.
Wired Magazine profiles Dr. Paul Offit, a Philadelphia pediatrician who is the coinventor of a rotavirus vaccine that could save tens of thousands of lives every year, and whom they describe as “the most hated man in America”:
So what has this award-winning 58-year-old scientist done to elicit such venom? He boldly states — in speeches, in journal articles, and in his 2008 book Autism’s False Prophets — that vaccines do not cause autism or autoimmune disease or any of the other chronic conditions that have been blamed on them. He supports this assertion with meticulous evidence. And he calls to account those who promote bogus treatments for autism — treatments that he says not only don’t work but often cause harm.
As a result, Offit has become the main target of a grassroots movement that opposes the systematic vaccination of children and the laws that require it. . .
This isn’t a religious dispute, like the debate over creationism and intelligent design. It’s a challenge to traditional science that crosses party, class, and religious lines. It is partly a reaction to Big Pharma’s blunders and PR missteps, from Vioxx to illegal marketing ploys, which have encouraged a distrust of experts. It is also, ironically, a product of the era of instant communication and easy access to information. The doubters and deniers are empowered by the Internet (online, nobody knows you’re not a doctor) and helped by the mainstream media, which has an interest in pumping up bad science to create a “debate” where there should be none.
In the center of the fray is Paul Offit. “People describe me as a vaccine advocate,” he says. “I see myself as a science advocate.” But in this battle — and make no mistake, he says, it’s a pitched and heated battle — “science alone isn’t enough … People are getting hurt.”
Consider: In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children’s diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever. And the number of people who choose not to vaccinate their children (so-called philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West) continues to rise. In states where such opting out is allowed, 2.6 percent of parents did so last year, up from 1 percent in 1991, according to the CDC. In some communities, like California’s affluent Marin County, just north of San Francisco, non-vaccination rates are approaching 6 percent (counterintuitively, higher rates of non-vaccination often correspond with higher levels of education and wealth).
That may not sound like much, but a recent study by the Los Angeles Times indicates that the impact can be devastating. The Times found that even though only about 2 percent of California’s kindergartners are unvaccinated (10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk.
Again, I can’t print the whole article here, but I encourage you to read it in its entirety. It is frightening to imagine the potential consequences for a society that falls prey to irrational, anti-science, anti-Enlightenment propaganda.
We should be deeply indebted to those scientists, educators, and communicators who are willing to speak out boldly in defense of reason. One of those is Massimo Pigliucci, a Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University in New York.
Similar to the way that our Jamais Cascio has criticized the chain of unsupportable assertions that can lead singularitarians to assume that A must lead to B which must result in C—when it ain’t necessarily so—Pigliucci takes on the badly reasoned arguments for the near-certainty of a coming intelligence explosion:
David Chalmers is a philosopher of mind, best known for his argument about the difficulty of what he termed the “hard problem” of consciousness. . . Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing Chalmers in action, live at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, telling us his thoughts about the so-called Singularity, the alleged moment when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, resulting in either all hell breaking loose or the next glorious stage in human evolution—depending on whether you typically see the glass as half empty or half full.
Chalmers’ (and other advocates of the possibility of a Singularity) argument starts off with the simple observation that machines have gained computing power at an extraordinary rate over the past several years, a trend that one can extrapolate to a near future explosion of intelligence. Too bad that, as any student of statistics 101 ought to know, extrapolation is a really bad way of making predictions, unless one can be reasonably assured of understanding the underlying causal phenomena (which we don’t, in the case of intelligence). . .
Be that as it may, Chalmers went on to present his main argument for the Singularity, which goes something like this:
1. There will soon be AI (i.e., Artificial Intelligence)
2. There will then soon be a transition from AI to AI+
3. There will then soon be a transition from AI+ to AI++
Therefore, there will be AI++
Chalmers was obviously very proud of his argument, but I got the sense that few people were impressed, and I certainly wasn’t. First off, he consistently refused to define what AI++, AI+, or even, for that matter, AI, actually mean. This, in a philosophy talk, is a pretty grave sin, because philosophical analysis doesn’t get off the ground unless we are reasonably clear on what it is that we are talking about. Indeed, much of philosophical analysis aims at clarifying concepts and their relations. You would have been hard pressed (and increasingly frustrated) in finding any philosophical analysis whatsoever in Chalmers’ talk.
Second, Chalmers did not provide a single reason for any of his moves, simply stating each premise and adding that if AI is possible, then there is no reason to believe that AI+ (whatever that is) is not also possible, indeed likely, and so on. But, my friend, if you are making a novel claim, the burden of proof is on you to argue that there are positive reasons to think that what you are suggesting may be true, not on the rest of us to prove that it is not. Shifting the burden of proof is the oldest trick in the rhetorical toolbox, and not one that a self-respecting philosopher should deploy in front of his peers (or anywhere else, for that matter).
There is a lot more, which I hope you will read, and you might also want to take a look at this defense of (some of) Chalmers’ arguments.
The point here is not that artificial general intelligence is impossible, because it’s likely not, or that when creating autonomous/intelligent systems we shouldn’t attempt to include some manner of ethics, because obviously we should, or that something like a technological singularity won’t ever happen, because it might. The message is that we need to apply rigorous thinking and hard rationality to these tough problems. We should strive to avoid being caught up in the euphoric belief in transcendent possibilities and should steer clear of hand-waving at all times.
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