The Second Law and its misuses

An OrbitCon session brought to my attention to the fact that Steven Pinker spouts a lot of bullshit about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (The Second Law is, “entropy cannot decrease over time in a closed system.”) In Pinker’s book, Enlightenment Now, he begins by refuting the creationist argument that the Second Law contradicts the theory of evolution. This is easy to do, you just say that the earth isn’t a closed system, and dramatically point at the sun. But Pinker then proceeds to forget about the sun, and argues that the Second Law of Thermodynamics explains poverty. I don’t have the book available, but Pinker has written an essay along similar lines:

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter does not just arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can not to become our food. What needs to be explained is wealth.

Here’s the thing: creationists are really really wrong about the Second Law. There’s plenty of room to be less wrong than creationists, but still really really wrong. For those of us who have taken an interest in fighting creationism, we know we can just point at the sun and be done with it. But just because you’re familiar with this argument, please don’t mistake that for an understanding of the Second Law. Don’t be like Steven Pinker.

Here I will state and explain a few basic principles about entropy, with the goal of going beyond a mere refutation of creationist arguments.

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Things that bug me: gluten

As I sift through the ruins of organized skepticism, I recall something that always bugged me.

Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder that causes a bunch of chronic gastrointestinal problems.  The treatment to celiac disease is to switch to a completely gluten-free diet.  However, people with celiac are not by themselves the cause of the many gluten-free products sold in stores.  Many people buy those because they believe they have a different condition, Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity (NCGS).  They believe that when they go on a low-gluten or gluten-free diet, they have fewer gastrointestinal symptoms (e.g. they feel less bloated).  I say “believe”, because there is no consensus that NCGS exists.

The standard skeptic’s line on NCGS is that there is no evidence that it exists, and there is no reason for people to go on gluten-free diets unless they think they have celiac disease.  One study that has been used in support of this position, is a paper from 2013, which says in the title “No effects of gluten in patients with self-reported non-celiac gluten sensitivity“.

The interesting thing about this paper is that it says that people who report NCGS do experience a significant reduction in symptoms when they change their diet.  However, the important change in their diet is not the elimination of gluten, but the elimination of another category of chemicals, known as FODMAPs.  FODMAPs are generally present in the same grains that include gluten, so it’s easy to get them confused without having a study designed specifically to separate them.  In other words, it is possible that people who believe they have NCGS are correct about having symptoms that improve with a change in diet, but incorrect about the source of those symptoms.

I recall that back in 2013, skeptics were saying, “This is another confirmation of what we’ve been saying all along: NCGS doesn’t exist.”  And I recall reading the news reports and thinking, wait.  This means we were wrong.  People who thought they had NCGS were correct to change their diets.  We were wrong.  Why weren’t skeptics acknowledging that they had been wrong?

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Skeptical content creation

As I mentioned in my bloggiversary post, good skeptical content creation is hard. In order to debunk something, and do a good job of it, you have to do research. You have to do a lot of research, even if it’s something ridiculous, like 9/11 conspiracies or bigfoot. Talking about a conspiracy theory is an invitation for conspiracy theorists to start arguing with you, and they tend to be pretty familiar with the topic, because it’s their topic. In contrast, the skeptic needs to spread themself thin, because there’s just so much bunk in the world.

That was fine decades ago, when “skepticism” basically referred to a committee of experts who dedicated their time to it. It doesn’t work so well today, when most content creators are hobbyists, or at least start out as hobbyists. My experience as a new blogger was that research was sometimes fun, but it got tiring really fast, and I didn’t have the readership to justify putting a lot of work into it. And rigorous research doesn’t get rewarded, because it’s not necessarily entertaining. Furthermore, “research” would mostly consist of me repeating things I had learned from basic resources, and what’s the point of that?

There are ways around this problem, but I don’t think they were very healthy for the movement. One method is to gloss over the lack of rigor with humor and mockery. Another method is to get by with a few general principles of reasoning, the stuff we call “critical thinking”. I took the latter approach, so I will talk about that.

The trouble with fallacies

Critical thinking in the skeptical movement was an odd beast. What exactly is it? How do you practice it? Can you name any principles of critical thinking?

Some of the most recognizable principles are the logical fallacies. You know, ad hominem, begging the question, argument from authority, etc. Many people such as myself gravitated towards logical fallacies, because it’s fun to learn about all of them and read silly examples of them. I liked to write about them too.
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Biased Tests

[cn: Bayesian math]

Suppose that I create a test to measure suitability for a particular job. I give this test to a bunch of people, and I find that women on average perform more poorly. Does this mean that women are less suitable for the job, or does it mean that my test is biased against women?

Psychologists do this all the time. They create new tests to measure new things, and then they give the tests to a variety of different groups to observe average differences. So they have a standard statistical procedure to assess whether these tests are biased.

But I recently learned that the standard procedure is mathematically flawed. In fact, rather than producing an unbiased test, the standard procedure practically guarantees a biased test. This is an issue that causes much distress among psychometricians such as Roger Millsap.

Following Millsap, I will describe the standard method for assessing test bias, sketch a proof that it must fail, and discuss some of the consequences.

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Paper: Attack of the psychometricians

Suppose that you want to demonstrate that baby boomers are more narcissistic than other generations, or that women are more agreeable and neurotic than men, or that people of different races have different amounts of intelligence. How do psychologists do that? Can they in fact do that?

Typically, the method is to come up with a bunch of questions that superficially appear to measure the intended characteristic. Then the questions are “validated”, for example, by making sure the questions all correlate with one another. Once the questionnaire is declared valid, psychologists can then measure a variety of different groups and make far-reaching claims about how our current political/social situation was caused all along by the thing that they happen to study.

If you find this methodology questionable, but aren’t sure exactly what went wrong, you might be interested in hearing about psychometrics, the field concerned with psychological measurement. According to psychometricians, part of the problem is that psychologists are failing to follow best practices. That is the subject of this paper:

Borsboom, D. (2006). The attack of the psychometricians. Psychometrika, 71(3), 425–440.

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Christian Doubt

This is a repost of an article from 2014. Usually I like to repost articles that are related to my recent topics, but this is unrelated and just for fun.

When I grew up in Catholicism, I was never taught to think that doubt was a bad thing.  In fact, doubt was a good thing, ennobling even.  Doubts were something that everyone experiences.  Why then, is it said that Christianity is all about faith, dogma, and purging all doubt?  Where does this image come from?

Let me tell you what happened next.  I started doubting Catholicism.  And even though I was never taught that doubting was bad, I knew that the particular way I was doing it was bad.

What I was doing was reading on some arguments against Catholic beliefs, comparing them to the arguments for it.  I knew that changing my mind on so many things all at once was impossible, so I considered each issue independently, one at a time.  I worried about the consequences of deciding one way or the other, but I tried not to let that affect my judgment.  Finally, I collected my many thoughts and tried to draw some overall conclusions on Catholicism and God.

In my mind, this is more or less the proper way to deal with doubt, so why did I know in my gut I was running afoul of some rule of my religious upbringing?  The truth is that doubt was accepted in the Catholicism I grew up in, but only if the doubt fit into a specific narrative.  Doubt was not an epistemological tool, but a personal struggle to be overcome.  This is a fundamentally negative depiction of doubt.

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Boghossian is no Sokal

Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (henceforth B&L) have an article titled “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct: A Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies” on Skeptic.com.  The article describes a nonsense paper submitted, and accepted, to the journal Cogent Social Sciences.  The authors consider it an indictment of gender studies and pay-to-publish journals.

This being a Sokal-style hoax, it’s worth recapping some of the strengths and weaknesses of the original Sokal hoax.  First the weaknesses:

  • Sokal’s paper was accepted to The Social Text, which is a journal of only mediocre impact.
  • Peer review isn’t intended to weed out bad faith actors, but to enforce some minimum standard.  The real test is later, when the academic community cites (or ignores) the publication.
  • Sokal only had N=1. Distinguishing between good and bad papers is in general a difficult problem, and one expects that in the perfect balance, some good papers would be rejected, and bad papers accepted.

Now the strengths:

  • The Sokal hoax is immediately compelling to general public, even when people don’t look into the details.  There’s value in bringing the issue to popular attention.
  • When I did look into the details last year, I found the paper’s content to be a damning indictment of the entire field:

    It’s not simply that Sokal liberally salts his article with absurdities, it’s that he quotes plenty of postmodern academics doing the same damn thing.

    Even if Sokal’s paper were rejected, one would have to account for all the nonsense already published and respected within the field.

  • There was a clear way that The Social Text could have avoided being hoaxed, if anywhere in the review process they had asked someone in physics, biology, or math to glance at it.

B&L’s and  attempt at a hoax falls short of Sokal, having worse weaknesses, and missing important strengths.

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