So today on science Friday on NPR they had some kind of expert on smell on the program. According to him scientists have actually done studies that when women pass gas it has a stronger smell per volume of gas than male emissions. Apparently though men pass a greater volume of gas, perhaps explaining the difference.

Frankly, I’m just amazed that this has been studied. To be fair it was probably a result noticed during a more general study of the subject but it’s still amusing to think that some poor grad student’s job was to document people’s farts and collect samples. Makes me glad I’m not doing an experimental science.

On the plus side that grad student had an interesting answer when people asked what they did but I don’t know if it was a plus for getting dates. It would also make for some amusing work experience on a resume.

I wonder if they have this information up on wikipedia. This is the sort of totally useless information that is important to record and catalog. Both to protect future generations of graduate students and to settle drunken bets.

So in a recent post I pointed out how unreasonable it was to assume that aliens advanced enough to transfer their consciousness into computers would have motives or behaviors anything like what the current human species does. Of course there is an implicit assumption here that a simulation of our brain process on a computer would be just as conscious as we are (the strong AI hypothesis). Here I argue that this isn’t really true. Of course I don’t doubt that artificial conscious beings can be constructed. There is nothing magical about conception, if we manufactured nerve cells in the lab and put them together in a brain it wouldn’t be any less conscious than you or I. However, this doesn’t mean that the particular means by which our brain performs it’s calculation is irrelevant to consciousness. As I shall argue here we actually have pretty good reason to believe that simply simulating what the brain does on a microchip as we know them ¹ is unlikely to give rise to any experiences no matter how faithfully it might reproduce the behavior of that brain². This is a pretty long post so I continue below the break.

(more…)

On the radio program I’m listening to and all over the web people are (or at least were a year ago) wringing their hands over the fact that 13% of US muslims said that suicide bombing could sometimes be justified. What a dumb fucking question. Of course suicide bombing can sometimes be justified. In fact I think the low percent answering yes suggests a troubling failures of logic and imagination.

I mean how many people would really feel that Stauffenberg would really have been doing a moral wrong if he had staid in the conference room with the bomb and actually made sure he killed Hitler instead of failing. You might not believe he was morally obligated to do so but surely giving your life even for a 10% greater chance of saving millions is not morally impermissable. Now true if we look at the actual PEW center study we see the question is posed in a slightly more troubling manner. It asks about suicide bombing against civilian targets for the defense of islam. But even if history doesn’t provide us with easy examples where this sort of action was acutally justified it isn’t hard to imagine ones where it would be justified. For instance suppose Hitler was clearly a civilian leader of the country (as our president and secretary of defense are) and the holocaust had been directed against muslims.

Admittedly the results of the survey are in fact somewhat disturbing given that there were a small but non-trivial percent of respondants who said that suicide bombing was ’sometimes’ or even ‘often’ justified as opposed to rarely (but when you are talking 5% and 1% respectively you have to wonder if they are just blowing off steam from a bad day, or just fucking with people. I mean hell what percentage of Australians answered ‘jedi’ for their religion on the census?). However, little of the hand wringing bothers to go beyond saying that some muslims think suicide bombing can be justified as if that was a facially absurd or immoral view.

I’m not going to take a position on whether the survey itself is disturbing or not (though it has been overblown) but let’s drop this stupid pretense that somehow suicide bombing is facially beyond the pale. Our own movies are filled with heroic suicide attacks, even bombings sometimes against targets that would technically qualify as civilian (evil corporate masterminds bankrolling assassinations and murders, drug kingpins who rely on others to implausibly poision children and so forth). The truth is that we find ‘terrorist’s’ suicide bombings so abhorrent because we view their cause as unjust, their means disproportionate and their targets largely innocent. Indeed we are right to do so but we can’t pretend we aren’t making a substantive moral claim by hiding behind a criticism of the means terrorists use. The bombing of the US barracks in Beirut wouldn’t have been ok if the truck was radio controlled instead of driven by a suicide bomber despite obviously being a military target.

So there is this interesting article in the NYT describing a study that shows girls in highschool who think they have lower social status gain more weight than girls with higher social status. Now I think this is a very interesting direction to pursue but the suggestions the study authors offered in response to it were totally absurd.

Parents concerned about a girl’s weight should look not only at eating habits but also at their child’s social network, encouraging relationships with friends and enrolling kids in group activities, the researchers said.

Have these researchers never been to highschool? Do they really think that having your mother fret over your social relationships is going to help?

And as part of other anti-obesity measures, school officials should consider implementing programs to help girls build social skills, they added.

“I think schools have a lot of influence,’’ said lead author Adina R. Lemeshow, now a project analyst at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “It’s about fostering secure and supportive social environments in which girls feel more accepted.’’

Did they read their own damn article? They reported that social status affects obesity not ’social skills.’ Not everyone can be on top of the social hierarchy. No amount of intervention by the school can change the fact that 10% of the HS will be the least popular 10% of the highschool.

But I’m feeling silly today so I couldn’t help posting a screenshot of this screwup by the MSNBC editing staff.

The original page is here but they have probably fixed the problem by now. Then again you would have thought a big news organization like MSNBC would have had enough editors to never let this happen in the first place. I suspect someone was leaving their job and wanted to do something funny before they left. They deserve to have someone notice their work.

Apparently teachers were tricked into giving students a bunch of electric shocks.

Is it just me or does anyone else think that advertising your brand by paying people to get tattoos of your slogans/logos a horrible idea. I mean sooner or later someone with a brand tattoo gets arrested for some high profile crime? I can just see the press talking about the “Energizer Rapist” or the “Geico Serial Killer.” Even if you avoid this risk using background checks how long will it be before someone gets checky and gets a second tattoo mounting/eating/shooting your logo. Using a slogan, rather than your logo, might minimize these risks but remember how dumb slogans from the 50s sound now? Do you really want to keep people reminded of what your slogan was back in the naughts.

Of course I think most large companies are smart enough to realize this which is why tattoo advertising is nothing but an attempt to gain free press. Once the media gets tired of reporting on the people who were paid to tattoo some corporate logo on their body companies will stop paying them to do it.

Supposedly a Chinese submarine snuck up on one of our aircraft carriers in the middle of a military exercise. However, if this was really true why wouldn’t we pretend we knew about it and did nothing? After all we wouldn’t want to signal to China that our sensors weren’t any better. On the other hand if we had detected it what would we have done about it? Surely we weren’t going to sink the Chinese submarine but we might very well want to pretend that we didn’t see it.

Then again pride plays into it on our side just as it does theres and for the conspiracy theorists out there this is a wonderful ploy to increase support for spending on new weapons systems or sonar tests (I wonder if they were using the whale killing sonar at the time). In short this sort of story, without much more background information, tells us absolutely nothing even if it is kinda amusing.

The big novelty story in the news this week is the study that is being reported as showing that liberals’ brains are wired differently and are better able to “tolerate ambiguity and conflict” than conservatives. Of course no one should ever trust public interest science reporting like this so those of you who have access to Nature Neuroscience can find the original journal article here. While the original article is careful to say nothing that is technically wrong¹ it is almost totally without real content. In particular the original journal article throws together what are essentially two unrelated results.

The study subjected volunteers to a test which required them to quickly press a button in response to a ‘go’ stimulus (for instance a green light) but not to do so when presented with a ‘no go’ stimulus (maybe a red light) and measured their ability to avoid pressing the button when a no go stimulus was presented after they were conditioned with many go stimuluses. They verified as had previously been suspected (or even known) that performance on this test was correlated with activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). They also noted that liberals tended to perform better at this task (less frequently press the button in response to a no go stimulus) than conservatives. Of course in the absence of confounding factors this will likely mean that liberal political orientation will tend to correlate with higher activity in the ACC and the article presents this correlation rather than breaking it down into separate claims as I did.

Now the conclusion of the report that:

Taken together, our results are consistent with the view that political orientation, in part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanism related to cognitive control and self-regulation

is technically true but then again the fact that I’m not a six foot tall intelligent spider is also consistent with that conclusion. Of course the fact that

At the behavioral level, conservatives were also more likely to make errors of commission. Although a liberal orientation was associated with better performance on the response-inhibition task examined here, conservatives would presumably perform better on tasks in which a more fixed response style is optimal.

While this might seems suggestive that liberals and conservatives attitudes might stem from (deep seated) brain differences it is such week evidence that it should barely budge one’s prior probability. No effort seems to have been done to recruit a random sample of subjects from any particular population nor was any regression run to determine if the correlation persisted once other factors were discounted. For instance at a fairly liberal college campus it might turn out that people with lots of friends are going to experience greater social pressure to call themselves liberal and that people who are quicker at go/no go tasks are also quicker whits or more socially apt. A hundred other possible correlations could explain this result. Besides, I think our prior probability that liberal and conservative viewpoints would be correlated with fairly general cognitive features should be quite high. For instance in this era I suspect that being more strongly affected by reactions of immediate sympathy would probably turn out to correlate with liberalism and it would be amazing to me if no broad cognitive feature correlated with political affiliation somehow.

Unfortunately, either do to poor wording or deliberate attempt to make boring research seem more interesting the journal article functions as the perfect template for an urban legend. The introductory statement in the journal article that said

Across dozens of behavioral studies, conservatives have been found to be more structured and persistent in their judgments and approaches to decision-making, as indicated by higher average scores on psychological measures of personal needs for order, structure and closure. Liberals, by contrast, report higher tolerance of ambiguity and complexity, and greater openness to new experiences on psychological measures.

May be technically correct but the media is unlikely to understand “higher tolerance of ambiguity and complexity” as a technical term. Indeed they didn’t saying things like

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

and

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a “flip-flopper” for changing his mind about the conflict. Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

This is just silly. We could describe the exact same thing by saying, “Conservatives are more principled than liberals.” Hell in the sense meant in the article I tend to think that tolerance of ambiguity, while pragmatically useful, is a logical flaw². Unsurprisingly the association of the pretty banal results about behavior correlation with neurological activity tended to result in the impression that whether one was liberal or conservative was the result of inherent properties. When will people learn that all behavioral differences can be traced to brain differences.

I thought that the whole Branson and Colbert thing was probably a set up (though I wasn’t totally sure) and it’s nice to see myself vindicated.