Back, with gratuitous advertising
Hello again! I’m back to blogging again. I missed you; how’ve you been?
While I sift through my list of post ideas and put together some real articles for the coming days, here’s a video for you. This makes me smile every time I see it on TV. I don’t plan to put real ads on this site any time soon, but Intel deserves some extra buzz for this fantastic campaign. As fellow thinking people, I thought you’d get a kick out of it as well. Isn’t it nice to see marketing that emphasizes how smart can be cool and exciting?
(It makes me want to work for them, actually, more than it makes me want to buy Intel products.)
When it’s good to argue
I wanted to post a rant about the “cars for clunkers” legislation making its way through Congress, but that will have to wait for another day. In the meantime, I just have to tell you about this amazing essay called “Teach a Kid to Argue,” by Jay Heinrichs.
Heinrichs’ basic premise is that by raising his children to be good at arguing, he’s also taught them to be good thinkers and productive problem-solvers. I couldn’t agree more. A good argument isn’t combative, but rather constructive. Disagreement is inevitable between any two people, but even more so between a parent and a child. I think Heinrichs’ distinction between an argument and a fight is very apt:
And let’s face it: Our culture has lost the ability to usefully disagree. Most Americans seem to avoid argument. But this has produced passive aggression and groupthink in the office, red and blue states, and families unable to discuss things as simple as what to watch on television. Rhetoric doesn’t turn kids into back-sassers; it makes them think about other points of view.
I had long equated arguing with fighting, but in rhetoric they are very different things. An argument is good; a fight is not. Whereas the goal of a fight is to dominate your opponent, in an argument you succeed when you bring your audience over to your side. A dispute over territory in the backseat of a car qualifies as an argument, for example, in the unlikely event that one child attempts to persuade his audience rather than slug it.
Go read the rest of the essay; I think it’s outstanding advice, particularly the five tips at the end. (I’m not a parent yet, but I do remember being parented, so I think I have some grounds to judge.)
More on words
As it happens, I’ve been rereading Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, and I thought this paragraph was worth quoting after yesterday’s post. If you don’t know the story, it’s about a mentally retarded man who receives experimental brain surgery to drastically increase his IQ.
Am I a genius? I don’t think so. Not yet anyway. As Burt would put it, mocking the euphemisms of educational jargon, I’m exceptional—a democratic term used to avoid the damning labels of gifted and deprived (which used to mean bright and retarded) and as soon as exceptional begins to mean anything to anyone they’ll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression only as long as it doesn’t mean anything to anybody. Exceptional refers to both ends of the spectrum, so all my life I’ve been exceptional.
(Emphasis is original.) That was written in 1966.
Am I a jerk?
I’m perplexed by the recent campaign against the “r-word” (retard, retarded, etc.). In the interest of not being a total jerk I’m going to include their promotional banner here, but then I’m going to do a bit of the critical thinking thing and ask whether their campaign actually makes sense. To cut to the chase: I agree with the conclusion, but not the means of getting there. Hopefully that doesn’t make me a bad person.
I want to make it clear that I don’t think calling anyone names is acceptable. I would never say, “You’re such a retard” to a person, or even say “He’s such a retard” behind someone’s back, whether or not that person was actually mentally retarded. I admit that I have occasionally used the adjective “retarded” to refer to plans or situations that I think result from people not understanding what’s going on or not being able to think through the complexities of an issue. When the campaign refers to “everyday” use of the word, I assume they mean this latter case. I do think I should stop doing it, but not for the reason the campaign suggests. (I’ll get to my reason later.)
The first thing I think the Spread the Word campaign is forgetting is that no matter what word is used to describe people with severe and broad learning disabilities, that word is going to be used as an insult that means someone is stupid. “Mental retardation” was at one point the kinder, euphemistic term replacing previous terms like “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “moron.” Seriously, those were the scientific terms for different ranges of IQ scores. This commenter on a disability advocacy blog pointed out that “special needs” is already resulting in the playground insult, “You’re special.” You can’t stop this phenomenon by eliminating one word at a time.
People described as “mentally retarded” are described that way because they learn slower and comprehend less than other people. Guess what? That means they are less intelligent. That doesn’t mean they’re not good people or that they’re not a valued part of society. It also doesn’t mean that they’re not skilled at anything. But you can’t say that random things count as intelligence (like “bodily-kinesthetic intelligence” and “naturalist intelligence”) and then declare everybody to be equally intelligent.
The thing is, using the “r-word” for the most part evokes qualities that are actually related to the term “mental retardation.” Because of this, I don’t think of it as such a grave insult the way that the Spread the Word campaign is characterizing it. The “r-word” isn’t being used as a synonym for “bad” or “uncool” just arbitrarily, to be mean. It’s not like seeing a boy try out for the school musical and saying, “That’s so gay!” It’s more like seeing two men kissing and saying that. Like… yeah. It sort of is.
The problem is — and this is the problem I recognize — it isn’t really. It’s actually more like poking your slightly pudgy stomach while you look in the mirror and saying, “I’m obese.” Or, in a more real-life example, leaving that difficult exam and exclaiming, “I was raped!” Using the word “retarded” to describe someone who merely disagrees with your understanding or to describe a situation which was simply sub-optimally planned trivializes the reality of mental retardation. It’s a complicated condition, a real challenge for people who have it. It’s disrespectful to those people to describe your everyday inconveniences using this serious medical term. Imagine if your friend dropped something accidentally and you said, “Jeez, it’s like you have cerebral palsy or something.” Or if he stumbled over his words while thinking of what to say next, and you said, “What is it, do you have Parkinson’s?” People do commonly exaggerate in everyday speech (It’s like a million degrees outside today! or, It took a thousand years to download that song!) but I can certainly see the argument that exaggeration downplays the significance of these serious conditions.
The Spread the Word campaign is based around the idea that the “r-word” insults people by implying that they are less capable, while in reality they have so many abilities. (Just look at the Special Olympics!) But the fact is that mentally retarded people are less capable in this specific set of situations involving comprehension and learning. That’s why we call it a disability. It seems to me that it would be more appropriate and effective to acknowledge this, and combat everyday use of the “r-word” on the grounds that it is a trivialization of a serious challenge that many good, respectable people have to face.
Are you here for advice?
We get a significant amount of traffic for searches like
- do you have to be good at math to understand sciences
- bad at math but a good engineer
- smart people who are bad at math
- why do i always do bad at math
- can you be successful if youre bad at maths
because of a few of our old posts on innumeracy and attitudes about it. It seems like people are looking for advice and answers, and our posts don’t really provide them, so I thought I’d give it a shot today.
It appears that many of you Googlers (or Yahooers, or what-have-you) want to know whether it’s possible to be a good engineer or scientist while being bad at math. My short answer is: probably not. My longer answer begins with a question back to you: what do you mean by math? For most things I’d consider engineering or science, you need to have a good handle on geometry, high school algebra, trigonometry, statistics, and calculus. If you’ve taken classes with those names and failed them, a career in the sciences is probably not for you.
I assume most people who would ask this type of question are already in school to become a scientist or engineer, though, and are having second thoughts. Don’t worry, university classes are supposed to be harder than high school, and it’s normal to struggle a bit in the transition. Maybe you’re taking your first math class that includes serious proofs as part of the curriculum. If you’re good at calculations but struggle with proofs, there’s no problem with a career in engineering and plenty of available paths to take in the sciences. You probably won’t end up a string theorist, but we’ll still love you. (I suppose I should also ask, what do you mean by science? If you consider anything ending in -ology to be science, you have a wider range of options, including some that use almost no math.)
Then there are those of you asking why you are bad at math. I don’t know. I would obviously need some more information. Maybe you’re not taking notes or paying attention. I tutored some kids during high school that were failing math for that exact reason. Once I suggested that they bring their notebooks to class and, you know, write things down once in a while, their grades shot right up. Maybe you have a terrible teacher. That’s far from impossible, based on my experience. It’s also a possibility that you just don’t naturally think in the way that math requires you to think. It’s good to try to think that way — don’t write off math from the very start — but if you find that over and over again you just can’t seem to get the hang of it, perhaps math is not for you. That doesn’t mean you’re bad, and it also doesn’t mean that math is bad. Find something to do that you enjoy and excel at, and please, continue to respect people who are good at math — the same way that I respect people who are good oboists, or good swimmers.
It’s certainly possible to be successful and bad at math and/or science. (Just look at Congress!) I would also say that it’s possible to be smart without being good at math, though I’m a little more hesitant. What you mean by “smart” and what you mean by “good at math” plays a big role. I don’t think it’s possible to be smart without being capable of logical analysis. You can be smart without knowing that “integral” is a noun as well as an adjective. There are plenty of brilliant lawyers and insightful columnists and effective managers who never got the hang of l’Hôpital’s rule, and I’d still consider them smart. (I think Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences doesn’t have much merit as science, but it does offer some insight into what we mean when we talk about being smart. There’s more than one way to do it.)
Any more advice for our search engine visitors? Feel free to leave it in the comments.
What to do with opposing views?
Two months ago Dr. Steven Novella, who writes at NeuroLogicaBlog, was invited to be an expert on an acupuncture debate, and directed readers of his blog there to see more and comment. I followed his link and found Opposing Views, a website that hosts debates between experts in the topics debated, and allows readers to comment on individual arguments as well as the broader questions.
There are quite a few debates there that I think readers of this site would be interested in. If debunking pseudoscience is your thing, check out Are Autism and Vaccines Linked? or Does Intelligent Design Have Merit? The more religiously (or irreligiously) opinionated of you might want to take part in Should Religious Symbols be Displayed on Public Property? or even the more fundamental Is There a God? There are of course the classic debates on same-sex marriage and the electoral college, and many others. What’s really nice about the format is that they have verified experts representing their respective sides. While I can’t exactly say I’d vouch for the credibility of some of them (for example, the Discovery Institute), they certainly are experts in whatever it is they’re defending. No one can pout later about how their side was unfairly represented by someone who was unprepared and ill-informed.
So, I’ve been hanging around there for a while, commenting to point out nerdy things like post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies and trying to engage people in intellectual discussion. I like it, but sometimes I wonder if I’m caught in a bit of a “someone is wrong on the internet” trap. (If these crazy people are on a debate website, I think to myself, surely they want someone to explain to them how they’re being irrational. Four hours later….) Incredibly, the site management does moderate comments. They’re successful at weeding out the YouTube sunshine, but they can’t exactly cull all the stupid ones because that would often introduce a pretty strong bias with respect to a particular debate.
Another reservation I have is that it’s tricky to pick truly debatable topics, and to phrase the questions in ways that facilitate debate with actual clash. Consequently, some of the dialogue gets more frustrating than it really needs to be. Should We Recycle? is actually about whether recycling should be government-mandated or market-driven. Both experts in Should Prayer Be Allowed in Public Schools? ended up agreeing that there’s no problem with students who choose to pray on their own in a non-disruptive way, although many of the commenters (and probably many of the users voting in the poll) didn’t get the memo.
Perhaps more important, however, is an issue about debate philosophy that I’ve struggled with for some time. Is it better to challenge ridiculous opinions out in the open, and let them either flourish or die in the marketplace of ideas, or should we instead refuse to dignify certain viewpoints with a formal recognition such as a debate? Some beliefs are so ludicrous that even agreeing to debate them gives them more credit than they’re due. On the other hand, if any meaningful number of people did hold such beliefs, it would be pretty scary — the kind of thing you might want to take action against. (Would you waste an hour trying to convince an audience not to listen to the Timecube guy? Probably not, unless there actually was an auditorium full of Timecube believers. In that case, I might be tempted to spend a lot more than an hour, if I didn’t run screaming.) A few of the questions on Opposing Views are pretty clear examples of this type of gray area. Are Generic Drugs as Effective as Name Brands? Yes. Yes, they are, because they’re chemically identical. There are also the cases where it’s not so much that one side is definitionally correct, but that anyone who’s devoted some intelligent thought to the matter reaches the same conclusion. Debates like those are harder to pinpoint, but they’re the ones I referred to before, in which eliminating the vapid comments would leave the thread sounding pretty one-sided. Is that debate really worth it, or is it making the struggle to educate and convince people even harder?
I don’t have answers to these questions yet, but I believe they’re worth thinking about and trying to answer. In the meantime, I’ll be around on Opposing Views, and for purely selfish reasons, I hope some of you will be too. There are these structural and philosophical difficulties that may or may not ever be overcome, but I still hate to see someone be both wrong and unchallenged on the internet. (More than 80% of responding users think that acupuncture works, despite the studies that have shown pretend acupuncture to be more effective than the real thing.) If some of you are there with me, we can make a dent in some of those poll results, and fill the comment threads with some higher-level critical analysis. At least for now, I’m naive enough to believe that it makes a difference.
Who can be my president?
I’ve been mulling over the proposal, from our friend Progressive Conservative, that we all take and publicize the Wendell Wilkie Pledge. He’s named it for the Republican presidential candidate who lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. Wilkie’s “Loyal Opposition Speech” is a reminder that politics is about choosing the best policies rather than about personality clashes, and that one can continue to oppose a party’s or politician’s ideas while respecting the rule of law and authority of the office held. In his explanation of the pledge, he writes:
When we vote we are making a promise. A promise to honor the results. A promise to honor the office. A promise to claim the president as our own, even when we disagree with him most. That is the oath I ask you all to take. I urge you to accept the results of this election. Regardless of who you vote for in November, our country can only go forward if we give our new president our loyal support, though I am not asking anyone to blindly follow this President.
I like this idea very much, and I wish that I was writing this post to affirm my support for the pledge and call on others to join me. However, I think the circumstances of this election make that impossible for me to do. I personally support the Obama-Biden ticket, and I would of course honor the results even if the McCain-Palin ticket were to win instead, but I don’t think I could wholeheartedly refer to McCain as “my president” when he and his campaign have gone so far out of their way to specify that they are absolutely no such thing.
I confess: I’ve finished college, and I’m a graduate student. In physics. I don’t live in a tiny town in a landlocked state; I live in a big city, near a coast. (Horror of horrors — the one on the east!) I’m not a Christian. I don’t even believe in a god. Because I’m an educated, metropolitan, “East-coast liberal” atheist, John McCain and Sarah Palin are willing to demonize me and others like me in an attempt to win the votes of everyone else. Why should I pledge my loyal support to a ticket that charges me with the problems of our time?
This hateful rhetoric is not new to Palin, though she did recently refer explicitly to “real America” and “the pro-America parts” of the country. Her speech at the RNC was all about how small-town people are good people (and not-so-subtle implications that if you don’t meet the Mayberry R.F.D. stereotype, you don’t really love your country). I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the irony meter-breaking RNC speech delivered by Mitt Romney, who ripped on “Eastern elites” despite being one himself. Just recently, McCain campaign adviser Nancy Pfotenauer dismissed northern Virginia as not “real Virginia,” but merely infiltrated and contaminated by “Democrats [who] have just come in from the District of Columbia.” North Carolina representative Robin Hayes told a McCain rally that “liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God.” Today, McCain explained to NBC’s Brian Williams that the “elitists” live “in our nation’s capital and New York City.” (In the same interview, Palin pointed out that an elitist is anyone “who [thinks] that they’re better than anyone else,” which puts an interesting new twist on the concept of a political campaign.)
Can you imagine what would happen if Obama and Biden were campaigning in the same way? What if they repeatedly warned of what “conservatives from fly-over states” would do to the government? What if they promised to rid Washington of “Texas bigotry,” or “backwater Mississippi racism,” or “evangelical Christian ignorance?” What if when Republicans derisively referred to Obama’s Ivy League education, Democrats countered by pointing out that McCain graduated 894th of 899 in his college class, and that the best of the four colleges Palin transferred around between was the University of Idaho? I’d love to see each use of the adjective “latte-drinking” as an insult followed by a reminder that the McCain-Palin ticket is instead targeting the alcoholic demographic. Imagine if they argued, as Adam Cadre did not too long ago, that “Republican political ads spew insults — or at least epithets that Republicans think are insults — while Democrats hold out their hands and coo that ‘There is no them — there is only us.’ There’s a reason the guy who said that moved to New York after his presidency instead of back to Arkansas: New York is better than Arkansas.”
Of course, this would be outrageous. The media wouldn’t let the Democrats get away with a presidential campaign with that kind of language in it, and neither would the voters. Even though many of us do believe, deep down, that there’s something seriously wrong with states where creationism is taught in science classes, or where racial segregation is still the norm, or where everything from terrorism to hurricanes gets blamed on “the gays,” we believe that it would be both rude and unproductive to accuse everyone in an entire region of being blindingly ignorant or racist or bigoted as part of a campaign. A candidate willing to make such sweeping and divisive generalizations would be difficult to vote for, even if there were some truth behind them.
It feels like many eons ago now, but there was this time back in April when Obama, at a closed fundraiser event in California, commented that some Pennsylvanians were “bitter” about the government and the economy and as a result “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” It’s a reasonable characterization of what’s going on, and while it’s not something anyone would be happy to hear said about themselves, it doesn’t seem particularly vicious. I could even see it as sympathetic. But when his comments got out, the only words anyone remembered were “cling to guns and religion” which was interpreted to mean that Obama wants to repeal the Second Amendment and ban God. Obama backtracked, calling his statement “boneheaded.”
So then, why is it acceptable, even encouraged, for Republicans to make much worse comments in the opposite direction? I’ll set aside the obvious fallacy of assuming that everyone in New England is a liberal or that everyone in the Deep South is conservative. While that is insulting to our intelligence, it’s at least statistically likely to be true. My bigger problem here is with the divide between the supposedly good Americans and supposedly bad Americans. Republicans seem to think that the good Americans live in the small towns, with limited education, limited exposure to other countries or cultures or ways of life, and limited sobriety. They all work in manufacturing or construction or farming, and this is good, honest work. They all live in “real America,” the states or districts that are colored red on electoral maps. On the other hand, there are the bad Americans, who live in cities big enough to have more traffic lights than you can count on your fingers, tend to go to college and occasionally travel abroad, and have a wide variety of ethnic background and religious traditions. As a result of their college education, they have bad jobs in fields like law, journalism, or scientific research, which means they live in an elite Ivory Tower where they scheme about ways to ruin the lives of good Americans. Naturally, they do not live in “real America,” because their states or districts get colored in blue.
I wish I was making all this up. I wish I could honestly say that we can all get along, but I didn’t make this divide — I usually speak out against it. But when the demonization has gone so far that we appear to have a new Joe McCarthy in Congress, I think it’s gone beyond what I can handle in personal conversations. Republicans need to stop talking about who’s “pro-America” or “anti-America,” who lives in “real America” and who doesn’t. We all love our country; we just have different ideas on how to keep it great and make it better. If Republicans continue to characterize any and all opposing viewpoints as “anti-American,” I don’t see why anyone should be willing to be their “loyal opposition” providing respectful and reasoned debate. Unless John McCain and Sarah Palin suddenly decide to vehemently denounce this kind of rhetoric and seriously apologize for the tone of their campaign and the direction in which they’ve led their party, I just can’t see being able to call McCain “my president.”
Dancing about architecture
Elvis Costello said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture — it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.” What a great image. While I’m not sure that I agree with him, I do think that a similar thing could be truthfully said about popular science. Writing about science is often just as effective as dancing about architecture, although it’s hardly a stupid thing to want to do well.
I used to enjoy reading, listening to, or watching reports on science for a general audience. That was back when I was still part of the general audience. Once I began to study physics at the university level, I realized how empty most of those reports really are. The conventional wisdom says that they have to be, since most people don’t have enough background knowledge to process most of the content. You can’t talk about Lorentz invariant quantities, since most of your audience thinks a matrix is a place without spoons, and will tell you to just relax if you mention a tensor. Obviously you can’t get that technical.
Still, I really can’t stand seeing all those books that claim to explain some scientific concept “with no equations at all!” or “made simple for everyone” or some similar promise. There are lots of them. Even Einstein wrote one on relativity subtitled “A Clear Explanation that Anyone Can Understand.” Yeah, right. Einstein was a great writer and a clear thinker and all that, but maybe it’s okay to admit that your audience is not really “anyone” and “everyone.” It would be nice if everyone really could understand relativity, but either not everyone can understand it, or you’re not really explaining relativity (you’re just dancing about architecture, as it were).
I’m all for improving science literacy. Don’t get me wrong. I just think that science literacy would be better served by being willing to communicate how complex the scientific process is, rather than smoothing everything over and pretending no math was involved. If all you know about string theory is the animation of a donut and coffee cup morphing into each other (illustrating their topological equivalence), as was shown over and over and over again in that PBS Nova special, it’s hard to imagine why string theory is hard. What are string theorists doing all day? Staring at coffee cups and playing cellos? Of course it’s not worth funding them — being in academia is easy street! …Even if people intellectually acknowledge that math is involved in science, the sugar-coated version of science presented in popular media still downplays the reality of the scientific method: it’s a long process of theory, experiment, data analysis, comparison with theory, and back-to-the-drawing-board. Depicting science as something reducible to sound bites and cute animations ultimately harms science literacy rather than helping it. It also encourages people who have dismissed the entire field of mathematics as not worth their time, since it implies you can understand science while being bad at math.
I don’t blame the science reporters for this. Some of them have almost no science background themselves, and are presenting the analogies and handwaving that felt like an effective explanation when they heard it. Most of the reporters that do have science background have editors who don’t. Nevertheless, in an ideal world I would hope that science writers stop billing their works as math-free, and stop asking Nobel Prize-winners to explain their research in a mere sentence or two. Dumbing down the reporting doesn’t help us appreciate the intelligence behind what’s reported on.
Pandering to the stupid
I wanted to write something in response to the vice presidential debates last week, but I didn’t have much to say about the actual content, and just kept returning to an almost impossible to articulate sense of revulsion. (I’m sure a lot of people feel that after listening to Sarah Palin, though.) Watching news coverage and SNL clips over the weekend, I began to hear the cause loud and clear. In the debate, Palin said, “One thing that Americans do at this time, also, though, is let’s commit ourselves just every day American people, Joe Six Pack, hockey moms across the nation, I think we need to band together and say never again.” (Well, maybe not so clear, but still.) Joe Six Pack. She’s saying that in order to get “average people” on her side.
Hockey moms, I can understand. It sounds a little less trite than “soccer moms,” and it reminds everyone just how tough people are in Alaska. They’ll take a body check over a slide tackle any day, you betcha. But “Joe Six Pack” — I almost can’t believe it. Wasn’t that a derisive term, not so very long ago? Urban Dictionary defines it as “Average American moron, IQ 60.” Webster’s explains the etymology as “from average ‘Joe’ watching TV with a six-pack of beer” and points out the usage is “derogatory slang.” The term is found in the Wikipedia entry on John Q. Public, which notes that “Roughly equivalent, but more pejorative, are the names Joe Six-pack, Joe Blow, and Joe Schmoe….” We’re talking about a person whose defining qualities are a beer in hand and a low IQ. Is the McCain-Palin ticket actively trying to paint this picture of their supporters — and of typical Americans?
It’s not just about the general public, either. On conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt’s program, Palin recently declared, “It’s time that [a] normal Joe Six-pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency, and I think that that’s kind of taken some people off guard… we put government back on the side of the people of Joe Six-pack like me….” We’re supposed to be voting for the McCain-Palin ticket because Palin is herself a Joe Six-pack. Do they even know what this term means?
Maybe people really are identifying with this rhetoric. But let’s not encourage them, please! Low intelligence and perpetual inebriation should not be glorified, and should certainly not be held up as desirable qualities in a politician. Americans working blue-collar jobs — well, really all Americans, since this is about us everyday, regular folks, and who isn’t? — should be insulted when they are described in this way by someone purporting to represent them and their interests. It’s belittling; it’s basically a synonym for stupid.
Even if you are intellectually disengaged and proud of it, you should at least be able to acknowledge that in order to have a functioning government, your leaders should be slightly more informed and engaged than you are. Politicians who call you stupid probably shouldn’t earn your vote. But a politician who brags about being just as stupid as you? That should really be a no-brainer.
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