Check out the comments on this Amazon.com entry for Tuscan Whole Milk.

This is the kind of thing that restores my faith in humanity.

I am amused by the fact that the same group of people say:

“the vast web of trillions of interactions between different plant and animal species is so thick and complicated that it’s folly and arrogance for us to step in and start messing with things that we don’t understand”

and also say

“the vast web of trillions of interactions between economic actors is so simple that we philosopher kings with our law degrees and 129 IQs should absolutely step in and start messing with things that we don’t understand”.

– TJIC

… a Young’s Double Chocolate Stout.

I must admit, I’m not familiar with any other Young’s offering besides this one, so nothing more to say. Right on to the review…

It pours a dark brown, almost black, with a thin bit of tan foam. Aroma is of roasty malts, coffee, and chocolate. Taste too is of coffee and chocolate — but a bittersweet chocolate, rather than a sweet milk chocolate. Very nice stuff.

I rated this a 3.6 on RateBeer.com, where its average score is a 3.77. It is a 99th percentile beer in its style (stouts) and 98th percentile overall.

According to the research described in this Boston Globe article,

Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

I’ve been aware of this phenomenon for a while now, but have not found an existing label or definition. So, prompted by this article, I shall henceforth refer to this as the backfire bias: the tendency to entrench our opinions even deeper when confronted with countering evidence and arguments, rather than admit we are wrong. I have seen people who are prone to this bias, and it is sad to behold — all the more so because the very built-in coping mechanisms that cause the backfire bias (rationalization and revisionist memory, for example) make people blind to the very fact they are doing it. It is all but impossible to convince such a person that he/she has a problem.

And it is related to what I’ve informally thought of as the “I just know” bias: the tendency of people to cling to opinions without any evidence- or logic-based justification, because they “just know” that they are right.

…

Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”

…

Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods.

HT to Rationally Speaking.

Here’s what I’ve read recently…

Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, by Orson Scott Card. I don’t love all of his books, but I loved this one. A scientist attempts to alter the past to spare humanity from the tragedy of bloodshed and brutality stemming from Columbus discovering the new world.

The Covenant of Genesis, by Andy McDermott. It didn’t suck, but it bent the readers’ suspension of disbelief to the breaking point and was pretty trite at times. I do not recommend.

On The Origins of Joy Boy’s Chasm, by Liam James Leaven. A crazy, quirky, and  humorous novel written by a blogging friend. I absolutely loved it.

Here’s what I’m currently reading…

Three Days to Never, by Tim Powers. Great pretext for a supernatural/sci-fi thriller: a scientific discovery that Einstein chose to not reveal, and now all the powers are after it, including the Israeli secret service and an ancient European cabal of occultists. But it is executed a bit awkwardly; it doesn’t flow well and is hard to follow at times.

The Road to Serfdom (The Definitive Edition), by F. A. Hayek. A true classic on political and economic philosophy.

Here’s what I hope to read soon…

Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. It’s next in my to-read stack, so I will soon rectify my crime against literature of having not yet read this masterpiece.

The Fatal Conceit, by F. A. Hayek.

Under the Dome, by Stephen King. Really looking forward to this one.

Changes, the latest Harry Dresden novel, by Jim Butcher. I LOVE this series. Horror, sci-fi, and humor, all in one.

Fever Dream, the latest novel by Lincoln and Child.

From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, by Sean Carroll.

Up Jim River, by Michael Flynn. TJIC recommended it so it must be good, because TJIC likes Heinlein. (Bonus points: what fallacy did I just commit?)

I was listening to Dennis Prager on the radio while out at lunch a few days ago. For those of you unfamiliar with him, Prager usually falls somewhere towards the rather sparsely populated “level-headed and reasonable” end of the conservative talk show host spectrum. Usually. This time, though, on the subject of global warming, he said this (I’m paraphrasing from memory here):

We can’t even seed clouds to make it rain, and yet we think we can raise the global temperature?

Analogies are, generally speaking, a pretty weak form of argument. The point being made with an analogy is only as good as the analogy itself. Mathematically speaking (or systems theoretically speaking, for that matter), we can regard an analogy as an isomorphic mapping between the salient features in the case being examined and the case to which an analogy is being made. A stronger analogy will have more numerous and directly relevant mappings; a weaker analogy, fewer and/or less relevant mappings.

Prager’s analogy appears to have only a single salient factor in common between the two cases: they both have to do with humans changing the environment. And in entirely different ways, too (precipitation versus global average temperature), so it’s not a particularly relevant mapping. Leaking a bunch of oil into the Gulf has to do with humans changing the environment too, but Prager didn’t choose that analogy.

The science is pretty straightforward on this: if you add a bunch of CO2 to the atmosphere, the atmosphere will grow warmer over time. CO2 is fairly transparent in the wavelengths of incoming sunlight (i.e., it lets most of the sunlight through), but is more opaque in the longer infrared wavelengths of heat released by the Earth. Thus, it traps heat in the atmosphere. The effect is a diminishing one in that each amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere produces less warming than the previous such amount did. For example: if raising the CO2 in the atmosphere from 200 parts per million (ppm) to 400 ppm produces a global average temperature increase of X, then to get another increase of X you would have to go from 400 ppm to 800 ppm. And for another increase of X you’d have to go from 800 ppm to 1600 ppm. And so on.

This doesn’t mean that all the warming we’ve had since the 1850’s is due to man-made CO2. Since the last minima of the “Little Ice Age” in 1850 the Earth has been warming naturally, and humans have only been dumping significant amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere since about 1950. In fact one model suggests that only a small fraction of the global temperature increase to date is due to man-made CO2.

Where were we?

Oh yes. Prager’s analogy sucked.

“Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you’re wrong.”
– Unknown

Two ways to avoid this moment are (1) don’t be wrong; and (2) don’t argue.

The first way is best served by developing critical thinking skills, which will help you move your opinions as close as possible to the most defensible, justifiable opinions — the opinions most likely to be right.

The second way is to view debate not as a competition of people with opposing viewpoints, but as a mutual collaboration intended to jointly move your opinions closer to what is most defensible and justifiable — the opinions most likely to be right.  In other words, you should live in tents, not castles.

That is all.

In this Overcoming Bias post, Robin Hanson reviews data from an earlier study and a more recent study (purchase required) that suggests our genes influence our various political beliefs.

I would never have guessed this myself. These results are really fascinating. Here is the fraction of opinion variance that is explained by genetics for various topics, for men (V_AM) and women (V_AF):

If these studies are accurate, then your “default” opinions are partly to mostly hardwired into you for no reason other than genetic predisposition. And since we already know that evolution selects to reinforce certain cognitive biases, there is no reason (that I’m aware of) to think evolution selects for correct opinions. This is all the more reason to develop your critical thinking skills and be able to overcome your own human nature when it comes to thinking and forming opinions.

This National Review Online article by Kevin D. Williamson warns us to not buy it when Republicans try to convince us they are “ready to rumble in the holy struggle for smaller deficits and less-unbalanced budgets.” Here’s why:

The Republicans have done nothing in recent years to earn our trust.

HT to TJIC.

Please someone at work by remaining calm and impartial.

I am almost always calm and impartial. That’s part of good critical thinking.

I can think of a few people whose desk I should drop a copy of this fortune on, though.