1. Are antidepressants taking the edge off love?

Comment #60967 by Mushroom on August 3, 2007 at 7:53 am

You were never a fan of Back To The Future?? My mother warned me the internet was full of weirdos ;)

As to the quote, with Google at my fingertips, I can remember all lyrics. Soon I will reach God-like omniscience, mwa ha ha ha ha!

As you were.

2. Are antidepressants taking the edge off love?

Comment #60954 by Mushroom on August 3, 2007 at 7:07 am

Cartomancer: Nevertheless a dispassionate and detached view of the evidence indicates that as well as having powerful and measurable positive effects on some individuals, romantic love has equally if not more powerful negative effects on others.

Huey Lewis said it best:
The power of love is a curious thing
Make a one man weep, make another man sing

...

First time you feel it, it might make you sad
Next time you feel it it might make you mad
But youll be glad baby when youve found
Thats the power makes the world go round

3. In defense of dangerous ideas

Comment #58497 by Mushroom on July 25, 2007 at 3:46 am

I have to agree with Dr. Benway, the homosexuality question doesn't have a self-evident answer, and nobody's come up with a strong argument why it should. The fact that homosexuality occurs in other animals only shows that a single infectious agent probably can't be the only cause.

This thread seems to demonstrate a more subtle rejection of dangerous ideas - we sophisticated freethinkers can't be seen to be rejecting these questions on mere emotion, so we come up with "intellectual" reasons which still allow us to reject them out of hand - but these reasons still don't stand up to scrutiny.

Having said that, the question was worded to be intentionally provocative, presumably in order to make the author's point. Dr. B's given us far less contentious ways of phrasing the same question, and in the real world one needs to be highly sensitive with "dangerous ideas", peppering them with caveats and assurances that they needn't lead to dangerous outcomes. This is necessary to
a) get the ideas discussed at all in polite company or mainstream media, and
b) hopefully ameliorate the influence of people who want to jump on these ideas to reinforce their own prejudice, without fully understanding them.

4. In defense of dangerous ideas

Comment #58295 by Mushroom on July 24, 2007 at 9:20 am

Re: Frying Pantheist

Thanks, that was interesting, hadn't seen it before. The only version I'd seen was in a logic course in which all the other operators were defined in terms of ==> and FALSE, in which case any weird result ultimately comes from the counter-intuitive properties of ==>

You don't need to use "implies" in this counter-intuitive sense (Indeed it doesn't work, since "X -> Y" does not imply Y)

Good point, I missed a step - from a contradiction X & ¬X we can prove FALSE using the fact that ¬X is equivalent to (X ==> FALSE)

Then what I said before applies - we can use (FALSE ==> Y) to derive any result.

PS you can use the html < blockquote > tags to mark quotes here, see the comment posting guidelines above the comment area

E2A: I still think Pinker's statement was silly. Even when people do hold incorrect or contradictory ideas, they don't use formal logic to prove arbitrary new statements from them. There are many dangers to holding false beliefs, but this isn't one of them.

5. In defense of dangerous ideas

Comment #58133 by Mushroom on July 23, 2007 at 3:38 pm

Excellent article. Airing dangerous ideas in public is extremely difficult to do sensitively, but it's gotta be done.

It's nitpicking a bit, but this line was silly.

logicians tell us that a system of ideas containing a contradiction can be used to deduce any statement whatsoever, no matter how absurd

That's only true because "x implies y" in logic is defined to be always true when x is false, so e.g. "the pope shits in the woods" implies "the bible is true" is a true proposition. All this means is that logical "implies" doesn't capture the meaning of implication in normal English, as Pinker surely knows.

As for the homosexuality question, I don't think it's ridiculous on its face. As others have pointed out, an affirmative answer wouldn't rule out other causes of homosexuality. Wikipedia can't be considered a reliable source for such a controversial topic, but it has an interesting discussion if you're interested

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathogenic_theory_of_homosexuality

6. The Panel

Comment #55477 by Mushroom on July 11, 2007 at 8:30 am

I'll bow out now, someone else can have a go. I'd be interested to know the answer to the bonus question though?

7. The Panel

Comment #54083 by Mushroom on July 5, 2007 at 8:57 am

Haha thanks, they don't make it look difficult do they?

Re Q6: very tricksy! I took "having in our bodies" to mean "part of our bodies", so ranked neutrinos lowest, but I guess your answer works. Have to disagree about the ordering of the others though. We have about as many protons as electrons in our bodies (unless you go around with a strong negative charge - I've met some very repulsive people in my time, but I don't think this was their problem), so we've got at least twice as many up-quarks as electrons.

As to up vs down, you might be right that we have more up than down. My reasoning was that every element except hydrogen has at least as many neutrons as protons, so at least as many downs as ups, and quite a few have more neutrons than protons, probably enough to outweigh the hydrogen. But after having a quick refresher on the periodic table, I see O-16 and C-12 are the most common isotopes of each element (equal p's and n's), so with all that water in our body, it's probably enough to swing it in the ups' favour - don't think any other element will be abundant enough to make a difference.

As to antineutrinos, wikipedia has something to say

Experimental results show that (nearly) all produced and observed neutrinos have left-handed helicities (spins antiparallel to momenta), and all antineutrinos have right-handed helicities, within the margin of error. In the massless limit, it means that only one of two possible chiralities is observed for either particle. These are the only chiralities included in the Standard Model of particle interactions.

It is possible that their counterparts (right-handed neutrinos and left-handed antineutrinos) simply do not exist. If they do, their properties are substantially different from observable neutrinos and antineutrinos. It is theorized that they are either very heavy (on the order of GUT scale — see Seesaw mechanism), do not participate in weak interaction (so-called sterile neutrinos), or both.

Hope that means something to you

8. The Panel

Comment #54067 by Mushroom on July 5, 2007 at 7:00 am

Regarding the questions posed in the article, one of them illustrates how seriously it should be taken:

"Q: Is a clone the same as a twin?
Answer: Yes, up to a point (see Robert Winston's answer)."

If you go beyond that point, the answer will be "no". This means that the correct answer is "yes and no", and so all the answers are correct. The question leads nowhere.

I think this was a case of Robert Winston knowing a lot more than the researcher who set the questions!

It's an interesting question: what science should the average person know, before they can call themselves well-educated? I'd be inclined to say the most important things are to do with our place in the cosmos - an idea of how long the universe and the solar system have been around, some knowledge of the history of life on Earth, and an idea of the differences in scale between protons, small molecules, cells, people, planets, galaxies etc. And also an understanding of the scientific method, and how to tell science from pseudoscience. Hmm... also some basic statistics/probability theory for interpreting news reports and evaluating risk... anyone else have suggestions?

Only one of the above questions, the age of the Earth one, fits those categories. No one really needs to know why the sky is blue, although it's a nice bit of knowledge to have. I have a rough idea (would have said same as #28), but I've no idea why short-wavelength light is preferentially scattered, so I'm not really any better off than Daisy Goodwin who said "it's the colour of the atmosphere", which isn't incorrect.

OK Rtambree, now I'll have a go at yours since no one else is!
1. 20-30k I think
2. Mercury, and I think Iodine?
3. Ours! Or is there solid ice under Neptune and Uranus? Not certain of that one.
4. 4-5 billion years I think until it becomes a red giant, then some short period of time before it becomes a white dwarf
5. Nitrogen.
6. I'm gonna go with down quarks, had to look up the composition of protons and neutrons first though.
7. A neutron, by a tiny margin
8. Special relativity is the easy one. Think the others would be that Brownian motion is caused by jiggling atoms (thus proving atomic theory), and something about quanta. Did he show Planck's ideas about blackbody radiation also explain the photoelectric effect?
9. Mercury
10. Hmm.. maybe nothing that we can detect? Except that they annihilate when brought together? Do we know yet whether neutrinos have mass?

9. Photos of The God Delusion Event in Second Life

Comment #46891 by Mushroom on June 2, 2007 at 5:14 am

My 2nd life avatar is so boring, he just sits in his room all day playing 3rd life :-(

10. Groundbreaking Research Has Scientists Talking With Apes

Comment #46415 by Mushroom on May 31, 2007 at 6:44 am

I'm not qualified to comment on the research myself, but it's worth knowing that the people who study language in humans are extrememly skeptical of claims of language understanding in other apes. This is from the linguist Geoff Pullum:

I do not believe that there has ever been an example anywhere of a non-human expressing an opinion, or asking a question. Not ever. It would be wonderful if animals communicated propositionally -- i.e., could say things about the world, as opposed to just signalling a direct emotional state or need. But they just don't.

Monkeys saying things again -- NOT

the study of the possibilities of human/ape linguistic interactions is much colored with love, enthusiasm, empathy, creative interpretation, and wishful thinking on the part of the humans, and the whole project is scientifically suspect.

Voluble apes? I don't think so


Not directly related to this story, but to similar stories that appear in the press -

If you truly imagine that American Sign Language has ever been taught to an ape of any species other than ours, just stop relying on the trainer to tell you what the gesticulating creature is saying, and ask a native user of ASL to view a videotape and pass judgment. It isn't there. Apes cannot control ASL, or come anywhere close.

Stupid fake pet communication tricks


Steven Pinker expresses a similar view in The Language Instinct.