It’s the Thought that Counts

Ever since PZ Myers’ tongue-in-cheek hosting of the last Carnival of the Elitist Bastards (as well as my post about reclaiming slurs, which followed soon after) I’ve been thinking that it’s time we at It’s the Thought that Counts write the essay that everyone else did back on CEB #1 and #2 — that is, to answer the question, “What does it mean to be an elitist bastard?”

I was a little bit distraught when I read PZ’s carnival post, basically because it wasn’t crystal clear whether he was joking, and I know plenty of readers wouldn’t get the joke. The idea was to take the term “elitist bastard” and run with it, to proclaim his superiority over all the contributors and to make fun of all of us for being insufficiently elitist or bastard-like… as a tool to sort of underhandedly point out that we had worthwhile and intelligent things to say and are actually a group of good people, deep down. It was an amusing and clever way to structure the post. Still I wonder if, given the cult of personality that’s grown around PZ Myers, if it didn’t come across as a little too believable in its on-face message.

I’m all for dispelling the myth that being knowledgeable and willing to use that knowledge makes you an “elitist bastard.” (There are ways for that term to be appropriately applied… about a person complaining that the Evian poured for them at a private golf club is a few degrees off the right temperature, or something… but most of the time it’s used with entirely the wrong sense.) It’s not “elitist” to make the observation that, in some quality such as general education level or expertise in a particular area, you are above average — assuming that you’re right. It’s no more elitist for an economist to share an opinion about economic policy than it is for a construction worker to build a sturdy wall, a janitor to wax the floors until they shine, or a figure skater to execute a triple axel. If someone feels bad about having less expertise about something than you, they should rectify it by improving themselves, not by calling you a “bastard.”

Now, I’m all for reclaiming words used as slurs. But there’s reclaiming, and then there’s prophecy fulfillment. Sometimes slur words are just sounds, and sometimes they’re descriptive terms. “Elitist bastard” is one of the latter. I don’t want to deal with this term by saying, “Oh yeah, I’ll show you an elitist bastard!” and being as much of an elitist and a bastard as I can be. It might seem funny to me at the time, but the joke is going to go right over the heads of the very people whose minds I’m trying to change. (Want another example? It’s one thing to pull the rug out from under the derogatory “hebe” and name a Jewish magazine “Heeb.” It’d be quite another thing to try to embrace the term “dirty Jew,” because embracing it would seem to require one to be extra dirty in whatever ways seemed most stereotypical. There’s a reason this doesn’t happen.)

I don’t believe the CEB philosophy is about embracing the term “elitist bastard” as such, so much as it is about pointing out its absurdity by juxtaposing it with ourselves. We’re proud and happy to be intelligent people with carefully thought-out opinions, and we believe we can improve the “marketplace of ideas” by sharing those opinions rather than being shamed into silence by people who equate education with evil. At least, that’s my interpretation, and based on the “What It’s About” section on the carnival blog I’m inclined to say that the rest of the crew would agree with me.

You can help raise the level of our public discourse from the subgutter of stupidity in which it currently resides. All you have to do is celebrate your own intelligence.

You don’t have to be erudite or loquacious. You don’t have to be particularly learned or expert. Just say what you think. What do you think about the dumbing down of the media? Education? Politics? Why do you suppose our cultures celebrate jocks, but not genius?

…Saving the world is a noble goal. Savoring it may be just as important. As Elitist Bastards, I think we can manage both.

To me, being part of the Carnival of the Elitist Bastards means saying, “If by ‘elitist bastard,’ you mean someone who isn’t embarrassed to enjoy learning new things… if by ‘elitist bastard,’ you mean someone who takes pride in making reasonable and logical decisions… if by ‘elitist bastard,’ you mean someone who seeks to use their skills to make the world a better place, then yes, I suppose I am an elitist bastard.”

It’s not about trying to be bastards. It’s about trying to do what we believe is good and right, while acknowledging that we’re probably going to be called bastards for it.

Tags: carnival, culture

The joint appearance of McCain and Obama this weekend at the Saddleback Church was fascinating to watch.  Both candidates said several interesting things, some of which might well be the topic of future posts.  In the end, I felt both candidates did very well, but this was McCain’s audience.  This was a religious right crowd.  My impression was that Obama probably won respect for his views that many in the audience hadn’t felt before, but that he didn’t actually change any minds.  No matter how honest, real, and candid you seem, you just won’t beat the guy who can say he will be a pro-life president.

Rick Warren, though, raised one of the more important subtexts of the night in his introduction.  He said, “I believe in the separation of church and state, but not in the separation of faith and politics.”  Of course, the whole evening was premised on this belief.  It was meant to be a discussion of issues and ideas that were important to evangelicals, which would make no sense as a concept if you didn’t believe that something about being an evangelical Christian changed the way you looked at politics.

It’s also clear that in history, in the current election, and in the foreseeable future, faith and politics have never been and will not be wholly separate from each other.  I do, however, believe that a true separation of church and state depends deeply on the separation of faith and politics.

The reason I believe this is that the line between imposing a religious belief and simply passing a normal law is so totally unclear.  A law against murder, for example, is clearly fine.  A law requiring all businesses to be closed on Sundays is clearly not.  Why?  Well, because the latter is clearly trying to mandate observance of a religious holiday, while the former is serving a legitimate societal goal.  That explanation, though, is much less simple than it sounds.  The ban against murder is also a (very prominent) religious tenet.  Having businesses close on Sundays could also serve some legitimate societal purpose — say, reducing deaths from traffic accidents or oil consumption.  Admittedly, these societal purposes are a bit of a stretch, but other obviously non-religious laws have equally bad justification behind them.

Now the dichotomy above uses examples where common sense clearly delineates the correct conclusion as to whether church-state separation is being violated.  There are, however, a lot of much less clear examples.  Refusing to recognize gay marriage is a good one.  The strong pushback against gay marriage comes almost entirely from the religious right, and the arguments used almost all have strong religious undertones.  (Often God is never mentioned, but things like the “sanctity” of marriage are, treating the whole thing as an implicitly religious issue.)  This is obviously an attempt to impose religious beliefs on the country as a whole.  Nevertheless, the lack of gay marriage isn’t a new thing pushed by the religious right.  It’s been the case since the founding of the republic (well, earlier, really).  It wasn’t remotely controversial until recently.  It was just taken as a given, and wasn’t really thought of as a religious belief being codified so much as just the obvious way things were.  The reasons here are complicated, but the main thing to take away from it is that religious beliefs, moral beliefs, and cultural practices are so closely intertwined as to be at times almost indistinguishable.

Politicians, of course, have figured out this formulation.  They say things like “I don’t legislate my religious beliefs, but my legislative positions are informed by my morality, and my morality is informed by my religion.”  This has become an acceptable formulation.  It’s a good sign that Rick Warren had to claim a belief in the separation of church and state.  There’s no doubt that he frequently takes positions that conflict with most interpretations of the principle, but he has to endorse it in concept because it has been deeply ingrained in the American psyche as one of the accepted truths of good policy.  The alternative formulations, however, allow politicians to endorse undermining the separation of church and state in all but the most technical senses without facing the immediate skepticism that would come from a more direct statement of their beliefs.  Religious beliefs should not be imposed on others through law.  Saying that you’re just making sure politicians you vote for all agree with the key teachings of your religion and believe laws should be made based on those beliefs is fundamentally trying to impose those beliefs.

This creates an awful situation for any court.  How are they supposed to respond to a law that attempts to promote morality rather than religion explicitly, but relies on a belief about morality that is (at least for most supporters) derived from a religious belief?  One option is to look at whether furthering the religion is the primary goal and effect of the law.  That, however, depends on defining what is meant by “the religion”.  A law banning gay marriage is not meant to make more people Christian, and the belief is not even held uniquely by a single religion.  It is, however, a belief about personal behavior that is held for religious reasons and is being imposed on others.  Does it not forward the religion to force other people to live by its teachings?  Wouldn’t that interpretation also outlaw laws against murder, though, if most of their supporters cited religious teachings as part of their argument for the law?  There are other ways of testing constitutionality, such as looking for an appearance of government endorsement of the religion.  Most of these fall to the same type of problem, though.  Does endorsing the idea that gay relationships are immoral count as endorsing a religious belief?

I think we need to create a taboo in our politics against using religious arguments, and against organized religion taking an active role in politics.  Only then can we feel assured that the laws we pass are truly not attempting to impose religious teachings on others.  If a law truly isn’t being passed in order to force religious practices on nonbelievers, then it can be supported with reason and logical argumentation that’s convincing to everyone.  It can be passed without religious groups mobilizing to support it.  That’s the difference between murder and Sunday holidays.  You can make arguments that are plausible for either, both on religious and secular grounds, but you can only make a truly good secular argument for murder.  We can’t ask courts to determine exactly what is a “good” argument for a law.  That puts them too much in the position of simply picking what they feel is good policy.  This needs to happen in the political arena, and the only way we can do so is by reacting negatively to religious argumentation.

I do take some solace in the fact that this does not need to be perfect.  Unlike a lot of constitutional principles, if a little bit of religious argumentation gets by from time to time, we’ll all be fine.  We do, however, need to limit it.  We need to make sure that religion stays out of politics.  (I should say that this is already true in many religious groups.  A lot of religious leaders who would face criticism from their congregations if they gave a political sermon.)  We can’t expect this of candidates.  McCain and Obama, like any other politician, are limited by the political necessities of the time, and as long as there are large, politically active, religious groups, politicians will seek their vote.  This criticism of the activity needs to come from outside politics.  It also needs to be consistent.  Democrats are generally better at keeping faith and politics separate, but have always made an exception for black churches.  This can’t be used as a tool for criticizing religious activism you don’t like — it has to apply to everybody.

Tags: politics, religion, religious freedom, saddleback

While I was out running errands this morning I stumbled again upon the Christian radio station I’ve mentioned a couple times here before. There are a couple in my area, but the others tend to be more Reverend Lovejoy-esque scripture readings and monotonous sermons. This one has the peppy kids’ shows — which is how I recognized it.

“Stay tuned for today’s episode of Adventures in Odyssey,” the voice on the radio said. I thought: Sweet! This will be hilariously entertaining, and maybe I’ll get some good blog fodder out of it too. But the episode today didn’t have any of that delightful arguing-for-the-opposition that the others did. It discussed the biography of hymn writer Horatio Spafford, who suffered through a lot of tragedy but still had buckets of faith. One of the discussion questions on the episode website sounds like the atheist response: “How could Horatio Spafford write ‘it is well with my soul’ even though he lost all of his children and his business?” In other words, it seems a bit strange to say that God is “good” when crediting him with making your life totally miserable, unless you have truly bizarre definitions for “good” and “bad”, or are clinically insane. Christians (and folks of many other religions) say, we can’t understand the complexity of God’s will. Things may seem bad to us but if it’s what God has planned, it must be just and beautiful. And to an extent, they’re right — when you’re talking about a definitionally good supernatural being with powers incomprehensible to the human mind, who knows? The real question is, why are we talking about a definitionally good supernatural and all-powerful being in the first place?

That argument has been hashed out a million times, particularly on the intertubes, so I’m not going to spend any more time on it here. Of much more interest to me was an advertisement I heard just before the Adventures in Odyssey show got started. It was the voice of a girl talking about how she hated her life and wanted to be “anywhere but here” — but there was someone (unnamed…) who helped her realize that everything was great. To find out more, I was supposed to visit NotReligion.com.

Right. Get saved by Jesus, but don’t worry, it’s not religion or anything. The goal of the site is to help people form a “relationship with God,” particularly people who are “skeptical of or turned off by religion.” Newsflash: if you thought you were “skeptical” but you’re duped by this site, you have a lot to learn about critical thinking.

First, let’s take a look at some definitions. Thanks to Merriam-Webster’s for “religion”:

1 a: the state of a religious <a nun in her 20th year of religion> b (1): the service and worship of God or the supernatural (2): commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance
2: a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices
3 archaic : scrupulous conformity : conscientiousness
4: a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith

And just in case there is any ambiguity, “religious”:

1: relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity <a religious person> <religious attitudes>
2: of, relating to, or devoted to religious beliefs or observances <joined a religious order>
3 a: scrupulously and conscientiously faithful b: fervent, zealous

NotReligion.com says that “every question has an answer and that the answers are found in a dynamic relationship with Jesus Christ.” On the topic of this Jesus fellow, they say that he’s “the Son of God. It’s important that you know Him. Your whole eternity depends on it.” Hmm… faithful devotion to a deity and its accompanying system of beliefs? Sounds like a religion, guys!

Of course, what they mean is organized religion. They don’t think it’s necessary to have a papal decree or even a session of elders to declare the details of your beliefs — instead, religion is a personal thing. I agree with this attitude insofar as I don’t think anyone should force religious beliefs on anyone else. But I don’t think that NotReligion.com really counts as religion that’s not organized. They clearly state what it is about God, Jesus, and the afterlife that they want you to believe. If you find spiritual or emotional peace with some other understanding of the world, they think you’re wrong. So it’s not really a personal relationship at all — it’s just an attempt to make Christianity seem more hip. Very sad.

Tags: christian radio, religion

I was reading this Slate article today about why the press should skip the conventions, and found it emblematic of a mindset within the media that I find incredibly counterproductive.  The news media routinely define something as “making news” if it makes clear some piece of information that was previously totally unknown.  The focus is placed on getting these bits of information — sometimes big, secret government surveillance programs, sometimes minor gaffes made by some candidate — and being the first to print/air them.

A lot of this is good — getting information out there is a key job of the press.  However, it does tend to displace other types of coverage.  Analysis, of course, gets pushed aside quite quickly.  It’s hard to get in-depth focus on the issues.  There’s one article in each newspaper about each candidate’s energy plan, written at the time they give their major speech about it.  Then, aside from some finer points where there’s actually new information coming out or related events occurring, nothing is mentioned again.  Of course, to reporters covering the campaigns 24/7, there’s nothing new to say — Obama is for solar credits but McCain opposes them, just like yesterday — but the majority of the country is unaware of these views.  They don’t read every article that comes out, and revisiting an old story that most of your audience didn’t see or doesn’t remember could interest them a lot more (and is a lot more important) than a minor comment that could, if read the right way, be a tiny clue about the eventual VP pick.

It’s of course not just analysis that gets left behind, but old stories in general.  The Reverend Wright scandal got blanket coverage for days, but Obama’s past drug use barely ever gets mentioned.  Maybe I’m crazy, but the latter seems at least as worrying as the former.  Clinton’s questionable real estate and futures dealings never got mentioned.  I’m pretty sure almost no one in the public knows that McCain is very likely an adulterer, and the Keating Five scandal is completely absent from the coverage.  This effect also shows up with stories that were simply never secret.  Everyone deeply involved in politics always knew that for a while McCain’s entire presidential campaign was run by lobbyists on donated time, but not much got written about it, because it was already well-known.  As a result, it remains almost completely unknown amongst the public at large.

This is, of course, an even bigger issue on the general policy and information front than it is with regard to political debates.  At least with political issues, one candidate can give a speech or run an ad on some old but unreported problem with the other candidate, and that speech or ad is “news” enough to generate some coverage of the issue.  Other important issues get no attention at all.  US education, particularly in math and science, is awful.  Business leaders have talked about moving operations overseas because there are no qualified workers in the US.  This gets almost no coverage, despite being much more important to our geopolitical standing than the conflict in Georgia.  Those secret surveillance programs that are so dutifully unearthed are then ignored as nothing gets done about them, because after that first bout of stories, they’re no longer news.

It should be said that this is true not just of newspapers and television, but blogs as well.  Newspapers want citations in other outlets to raise their stature and give them free advertising.  Bloggers want incoming links.  None of that is easily obtained through a good article on the Keating Five scandal, but it happens instantly if you get a leak that maybe Obama is announcing his VP before the Olympics.

I’m not really sure what could be done about this, but it’s pretty clearly hurting the quality of debate in the country.  Just look at a television interview with one of the VP candidates.  A huge percentage of the interview is spent trying to get them to say something about whether they’re being vetted or picked or to make the seem too eager or not eager enough to get the job.  The answers are all perfectly predictable.  It’s just the off-chance that someone says something they shouldn’t that gets attention, but it gets so much attention that we ignore tons of chances to ask meaningful questions of the important people that are doing the interviews.

It’s also the reason that so many in the media are so opposed to convention coverage.  Sure, there’s nothing “new” happening.  We know who will be nominated, and who will speak, and so forth.  But it’s a part of the national debate.  It should be covered for the same reason that the debates should be covered — not because anyone’s saying anything they haven’t said before, but because it’s important enough to be worth a bit of repeating and focus.  Add some fact-checking by the media, and you have the potential for a very healthy democratic process.

Tags: journalism, politics

The 38th edition of the Carnival of Mathematics went up at Catsynth on Friday. It includes A’s recent post about typical math teachers’ efforts to make their classes seem relevant to students. There’s a bunch of other neat stuff in the carnival — you should go and check it out! Of particular interest to me was Jon Ingram’s post on winning and losing at Nim. Nim is a very simple game, but there are a lot of really interesting results associated with it, and it’s the foundation for a lot of stuff in combinatorial game theory. His post is easy to understand even if you don’t have a lot of background in math.

We’re looking forward to hosting the 39th edition of the carnival here at It’s the Thought that Counts. To submit your entry, fill out the submission form by August 21.

Tags: carnival, math

There’s been substantial coverage lately of how the Obama campaign seems to be putting a lot of effort into states that have normally seemed utterly beyond reach for any Democrat.  You can’t really blame them for dreaming — there has been some impressively close polling out of states you wouldn’t expect (Alaska? Indiana?).  Nevertheless, these states have been so lopsided in the past that you can be “impressively close” without really having any chance of winning.  The other reason, of course, why they’re willing to spend a lot of money advertising and organizing in Georgia and Montana is that they have a lot more money to work with than McCain does (though really you need to include the RNC and DNC in these calculations, and that drastically shrinks the gap).  Their efforts in the reach states haven’t prevented them from matching (and usually outdoing) McCain in the traditional swing states.

Still, you’ve got to ask yourself whether this is really the best allocation of resources.  Sure, Obama has been out-organizing McCain in Ohio, even while organizing in Georgia, but wouldn’t it be better if the gap in Ohio was even wider?  The answer depends on what assumptions you make about how state results relate to each other.

One possible assumption is that states generally move in tandem with each other.  If Obama goes up or down nationally, that move is seen roughly equally reflected in each state.  Certain states are just more conservative/liberal than others.  Say Pennsylvania is slightly more liberal than Ohio.  They could both go the same way, or Obama could win Pennsylvania while losing Ohio, but it’d be nearly impossible for him to win Ohio but lose Pennsylvania.  Under this assumption, as Obama becomes less popular, Ohio always flips first.  Now, you could imagine that campaigns can push individual states through greater advertising/campaigning/organizing efforts, but these things being equal, states have a stable ordering in their general willingness to vote one way or the other.

If this assumption is true, there are only a handful of states where the campaigns should be focusing.  The efforts should go not to the place that is most borderline at any particular time, but to the states that are closest to the national average.  That’s because these are the states that will be casting the deciding electoral votes in the event that the election is very close.  There could be national trends that push Obama far ahead, making Georgia very competitive, but in that case he’s winning regardless, so it doesn’t matter if he put the organizing into Georgia that was necessary to push that state in particular over the edge.  Similarly, efforts in Connecticut could help Obama reduce the margin of defeat in some cases, but never change the outcome.  Only states where campaigning could make the difference in the event that the national popular vote is close to 50-50 are worth focusing on.

Under this assumption, Obama’s strategy is very much out of whack.  He should be putting more money and time into Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, and Michigan.  His time in Indiana, Georgia, and his other dream targets is wasted.  The only way it makes sense is if you believe that, given the huge investment already made in traditional swing states, the marginal benefit from additional resources is very low, and that the complete lack of opposition he’s seeing in traditionally Republican states makes them more vulnerable than the swing states.  I don’t think anyone really believes this.  Maybe Obama can win North Carolina, but even with McCain ignoring it, it’s just a tougher target for him than Colorado.

The opposite assumption is that states move greatly in ways that are totally independent of each other.  Because of local differences in media coverage, which issues are important, demographics, etc., it is possible for candidates to go up significantly in some states while going down significantly in others.  In this case, it’s very possible for some of the “stretch” states to go for Obama while the traditional swing states don’t.  If this is true, he should try to get lots of states within range of random variation flipping them.  He should take advantage of the fact that his efforts probably do the most good in states where he’s unopposed, and try to make those states competitive.  If a lot of states are very close, he’ll almost definitely win some of them.

Obviously the truth is in between the two extreme versions of reality, but I doubt it’s far enough towards the latter to really justify the level of attention Obama has been paying to some states that really just look out of reach.  There is, of course, another set of reasons to pay attention to these states, unrelated to the outcome of this presidential election.  One is that over the long term, making the Democratic argument in those states will slowly increase the acceptance of those arguments, and maybe make it so that in some future election these states really are winnable.  In the short term, he could at the very least make his presence on the top of the ticket less of a harm to down-ballot candidates.  These goals are incredibly important, and I’m all for them.  I just hope Obama isn’t biting off more than he can chew.  I’d really like to see him as president, and that is by no means sewn up yet.

Tags: barack obama, politics

Here’s a video that’s worth seeing. (Hat tip to Ben Smith at Politico.com.)

“It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant,” Obama says. I’m thrilled whenever I hear politicians calling each other out on that tactic rather than trying to outdo each other with the old “I’m jest reg’lur folks like you, don’t need no fancypants edjumucation” act. If there’s an effective, logically sound idea out there, we should use it, even if it might sound silly to “reg’lur folks” who don’t want to take the time to think it through. Obama’s banking on the fact that the average voter is actually smarter than that. I hope he’s right.

Sending tire gauges tagged as “Obama’s energy plan” is a cheap trick. It would have been a politically useful cheap trick if it had actually made a legitimate point, but it’s a shameful and easily mocked trick since it deliberately ignores the context surrounding the original suggestion. A man in the audience had asked about what small, everyday thing he could do to contribute to a solution to our gas woes, and Obama suggested a small, everyday thing that has been demonstrated to make a big difference. There’s nothing about that that’s worth poking fun at.

Setting a new record in missing the point, the person who posted this particular clip on YouTube has titled it “Obama Insists Inflating Tires Better Than Oil Drilling.”

Tags: barack obama, energy, oil, politics

There are lots of students who aren’t interested in math, and lots of math teachers who want to motivate them to actually put effort into the subject.  Most of this struggle seems to revolve around how useful math is, with kids saying (or at least perceived to be saying) something like “I’ll never need this” and teachers trying to convince them that math is everywhere.

For a variety of reasons, I’ve never been happy about this way of looking at why one learns math.  Most importantly, I think, teachers are bound to fail at convincing students of the usefulness of math, even with the most applicable of topics.  Part of the reason is that the subjects that apply the math are always taught after the math itself.  Physics, economics, and so forth make the need for quadratic equations very clear, but you would never teach someone physics unless they had first mastered quadratic equations.  This means that the math a student is currently learning is never being used in their other classes as they learn it.  Some students see stuff they learned years before now being used routinely, and they learn to trust that the things they’re being taught now will turn out equally useful in years to come.  That’s a healthy attitude, but even with an explicit explanation of the situation, many students will not adopt it.

It’s also worth mentioning that there are in fact topics taught in high school (especially in a school with a strong math curriculum) that aren’t likely to be used in the future by many of the students.  Calculus is helpful in a variety of occupations, but far from all.  Geometry, barring the straightforward basics, is only helpful in unusual circumstances.  Imaginary numbers are unlikely to come up too frequently.  A teacher is therefore bound to fail at showing the usefulness of these things directly.

I also think, though, that judging math by its usefulness is missing the point.  Why do math teachers need to prove that their material will be vital for daily life in order to make it worth learning?  Poetry would never be able to pass that test, nor would history or art.  You don’t “use” Shakespeare very frequently.  Of course, that’s obviously not the point.  We fully recognize that sonnets aren’t “useful,” but we still learn them.  We think it makes your life better to have the wider, deeper view of the world that comes with having studied art and literature.  We think they’re part of being an educated person.  We think that by studying them you build fundamental skills of critical thinking, imagination, and interpersonal relationships that are important, even if the actual material you’re learning is not.  These things are all true about math as well, but people don’t think of math that way.  They think of it as a prerequisite for other (important) things.

Math should be taught as something you learn because it’s interesting and enlightening.  It should of course be mentioned that it’s also useful, but that should never be seen as the only reason why it’s being taught.  To do this, it would help to change the math curriculum a bit.  Anyone who’s ever taken proof-based math in college knows that mathematicians don’t spend their days doing the stuff that’s taught in high school.  Engineers solve a lot more equations than mathematicians do.  Mathematicians deal with abstract topics, proving new facts.  This kind of open-ended, puzzle-like problem is a lot more fun to do, and a much better way to show students what math is really like, than the computational topics that take up the current standard curriculum.

If math can be taught as something that’s interesting, rather than as something that’s useful, it changes the way students look at it.  It becomes the kind of thing that one would expect some people to really, deeply like.  It can be fun and exciting.  If it’s being done because it helps design bridges, it’s a chore.  The application is cool sometimes, but the thing you’re learning never is.  Math as useful calculation will never be appreciated by anyone who can’t see themselves going into science, engineering, or accounting, but math as clever puzzles that help us understand the wonder of pure reason can be something people really want to learn.

Tags: education, math

There are lots of very difficult, nuanced issues in politics — issues where two intelligent people could disagree, have an intelligent back and forth for hours, and still come out with totally intact, cogent views on the topic.  These are often fundamental questions about the very way our country works.  But there’s another kind of issue.  There’s the kind of issue where there is just an obvious correct decision, with very little room for intelligent discussion.  Sometimes these issues are incredibly important, but more often they are small and just slip by, because only a handful of people is involved in the relevant decision, and they didn’t realize what they were doing.  These issues annoy me the most, because, however minor they are, there’s no excuse for failing to do the obviously correct thing.

The way we measure fuel efficiency is one of these dumb things.  Using miles per gallon is really misleading.  It can make tiny gains seem huge, and huge gains seem tiny.  Let’s take two totally hypothetical vehicles.  One one hand you have a hybrid car, which gets 40 mpg, and you convert it to a plug-in hybrid, which gets 100 mpg.  On the other hand, you have a very inefficient small truck, which gets 10 mpg, and you put in a more efficient engine, pushing it to 15 mpg.  It seems like the former improvement is better.  It’s a 60 mpg improvement rather than a 5 mpg improvement.  It’s a 150% improvement rather than a 50% improvement.  Nevertheless, if we assume both vehicles are driven 1000 miles, the hybrid goes from using 25 gallons to 10 gallons, saving 15 gallons, where as the small truck goes from 100 gallons to 67 gallons, saving 33 gallons.  The gain from improving the truck’s efficiency is massively better than the gain from improving the car’s.

This is a general mathematical fact.  The inefficient vehicles are the ones using lots of fuel, and small changes in their mileage are large percentage changes, so very small mpg changes can save a lot of fuel.  The super-efficient cars use very little fuel anyway, so even massive improvements can’t save that much.  Consumers, obviously, think about mileage in the units that it’s given to them in, so they value it in an irrational way.  (Science Pundit has a great post about this.)  It would make a lot of sense to change to gallons per mile (or per 1000 miles) and get consumers thinking more rationally, but I can understand the reluctance.  The switch to a new unit takes mental adjustment, and it’ll take a while for consumers to get a good handle on what counts as “good” or “bad” mileage, meaning they’ll probably take efficiency into account less during that unit transition.  (Interestingly, it seems that this is already frequently done in many other countries.  Sociological Images posts this video that shows mileage in L/100km.)

What really makes no sense is using mpg in regulation.  US automobile efficiency is regulated by the CAFE standards, which mandate a minimum average mileage for the fleet of vehicles produced by each manufacturer.  The problem is, by using miles per gallon, rather than gallons per mile, the economic incentive is to produce more super-efficient hybrid small cars, whereas much bigger gains could be made through smaller improvements to the worst vehicles.  Adding 3 mpg to a hybrid doesn’t cancel out a loss of 3 mpg in a pickup truck, but that’s how the standards work.  You could easily pick the new required average to be no more or less stringent than the current one — it would just be more intelligent.  If anything, it would help US manufacturers over Asians ones, since it’s the Asian manufacturers that are producing the small, hybrid cars.

There is only one intelligent argument I can think of against this change, which is that these super-efficient cars are the ones that are pioneering technologies that will push down to all vehicles sooner or later.  This might be true, but I doubt it’s fundamentally necessary.  (It’s easier to put a more advanced engine or a battery in a big vehicle than a small one.)  Maybe you can make an argument that this over-counting of gains for small cars is a way of subsidizing the technological innovation behind them.  I don’t really buy that, though.  A change in the regulatory measures seems obviously good.

Tags: economics, energy, environment, math, oil

Due to some scheduling freedom, I’ve lately become a bit nocturnal, and I’ve found myself watching a lot of late-night/early-morning TV. This has given me the opportunity to reflect on the ridiculous ads that companies save until we are maximally sleep-deprived and hopefully stupid enough to believe the crap that they are shoveling. Frankly, it is unbelievable.

I wanted to write something all about Dr. Frank’s No Pain Spray, because I’ve seen about nine zillion commercials for that. But once you get over the fact that it’s an oral spray that looks like a breath freshener but that’s supposed to provide all the way up to post-surgery level pain relief (no, I’ll take the Percocet, please), the fact that it claims not one but ten different homeopathic ingredients (slightly increasing the probability that a single non-water molecule might exist in the spray), and the fact that it’s only advertised at 3 AM (not a good sign for credibility), there’s really not a lot more to mock. Borrr-ing. Besides, someone else has done it more thoroughly than I would care to.

However, I think it’s important to say something about a more general problem I have with this class of advertisements. All these diet pills, “male enhancement” tablets, and so on make their claims of widespread success, then display the tiny text: “This product has not been evaluated by the FDA.” Is that enough to meet our legal standard for truth in advertising?

The Federal Trade Commission has this very clear FAQ about false advertising on their website. In particular I think it’s worth highlighting this one.

What makes an advertisement deceptive?
According to the FTC’s Deception Policy Statement, an ad is deceptive if it contains a statement - or omits information - that:

— Is likely to mislead consumers acting reasonably under the circumstances; and
— Is “material” - that is, important to a consumer’s decision to buy or use the product.

It goes on to explain the process the FTC uses to investigate claims of false advertising, and uses the particular example of a mouthwash that claims to prevent colds. The FTC looks from the point of view of a “reasonable consumer” and evaluates both “express and implied claims,” checking to see if the advertiser has enough proof to back them up. In the particular example of medical or other scientific claims, the advertiser is expected to have “competent and reliable scientific evidence.”

I also found a page on the FTC’s website called Dietary Supplements: An Advertising Guide for Industry. It has a lot of important and relevant information, and in particular in section II.C.3 mentions the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) disclaimer, “that the statement has not been evaluated by FDA and that the product is not intended to ‘diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.’” DSHEA doesn’t explicitly apply to advertisements, but this document does say that it’s a good idea to include the disclaimer “to prevent consumers from being misled about the nature of the product and the extent to which its efficacy and safety have been reviewed by regulatory authorities.” I was glad to see this example used to illustrate the issue:

Example 34: An advertisement for an herbal supplement includes strong, unqualified claims that the product will effectively treat or prevent diabetes, heart disease, and various circulatory ailments. The advertiser does not have adequate substantiation for this claim, but includes the DSHEA disclaimer prominently in the ad. In face of the strong contradictory message in the ad, the inclusion of the DSHEA disclaimer is not likely to negate the explicit disease claims made in the ad, and will not cure the fact that the claims are not substantiated.

This is a good standard to have. There are two prongs to the DSHEA disclaimer; I’ve usually only seen the first half used (in small and hard-to-read print, no less). The second half, that the product is not intended to provide any actual medical service, would seem ridiculous when compared to the explicit claims of medical service made over and over again in the ad. Of course it’s intended to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure something! The first half of the disclaimer, though, is even less effective at offsetting the false advertising. The lies may not have been evaluated by a regulatory agency, but that doesn’t make it okay to lie. It’s the advertiser’s job to make sure what’s in the ads is true, and this feeble attempt to displace blame is laughable.

The problem, then, is not that we don’t have a good standard delineating what’s false advertising, bur rather that the standard is not being enforced. These advertisements aren’t just stupid, they’re nefarious — they’re lies told only when viewers are expected to be at their weakest emotionally and blurriest rationally.The FTC needs to step it up and get these cranks off the air.

Tags: health, law, pseudoscience, science