Sunday, January 24, 2016

The Folly of Scientism

I was reading through a rant that someone posted on an atheist site today in which the poster claimed that science is only the religion of the moment and has no more to back it up than religion does. It's an odd claim to make, but upon reading more, I could see what the poster was trying to express, although the choice of terminology could have been better.

What he was trying to rail against was not science, but scientism. One is often mistaken for the other, and the term "scientism" is not well known. Scientism is a trap easily fallen into for many science-minded people. I find it difficult to define in any succinct way, but essentially it is a glorification of science beyond any reasonable level. The particular version of scientism argued against in the post, though, was the glorification of scientific results.

Science, by its nature, never arrives at an answer. One of its core ideas, really, is that you can approach knowledge, but you can never fully attain it. You put forth a hypothesis and test it out, and if your hypothesis is demonstrably better than every other hypothesis, it becomes the leading theory on whatever it is about. But if someone else comes along with a better one, well, yours is gone. There is a constant progression toward knowledge without ever a true acquisition of it. Even something as seemingly obvious as Newtonian physics was upended when Einstein came along with something better. Nothing is sacred, and nothing is set.

However, one who has fallen into the scientism trap will often take whatever the latest consensus is on a given topic and treat it as irrefutably proven. Let's look at global climate change as an example. All the evidence we have points to it being real and being influenced by human activity. As it stands now, that is the overwhelming scientific consensus. It could be wrong, and all true scientists must admit that it could be wrong, but it represents the best explanation for the data that we have.

The general public has a hard time with the lack of certainty in science. Unscrupulous talking heads will often prey upon this by sowing an inordinate amount of doubt in a scientifically reached consensus. There is usually some political or personal motivation behind this. Someone will go on television to point out some perceived inconsistency, claiming it refutes the consensus view. It can be very tempting for a scientist or a science-minded person to counter back with a claim that the consensus view is irrefutable fact. This is one of the traps of scientism. It is unscientific to claim any fact is irrefutable.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't consider global climate change to be a real and legitimate threat. If we were to wait around for things to be proven before acting on them, we'd never do anything. We all have a threshold beyond which we consider something to be proven well enough to act on. It's important to keep that threshold consistent and to understand what it is. Science is a tool to help us do that. When scientists write up results, they usually include a confidence interval, which basically gives you an idea of how likely their conclusion is correct based on the data. The confidence interval is never 1.00 (a "perfect score"). Acknowledgement of the possibility of error is built into science.

Most scientists do understand this, but it's very hard for the human mind to handle uncertainty well, it seems. We find what we think works and we stick to it, and we're loath to admit when we're wrong. We don't want our personal philosophies to be undermined. We aren't logic machines. Science is an acknowledgement of that, and it presents us with a way to move forward without denying the uncertainty.

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Self Imprisonment

The sting of social isolation can be a little more barbed at some times than it is at others. While I am often most comfortable when I'm alone with my thoughts, lately I have been feeling a real emptiness when I look left and right and see no one. Don't get me wrong. There are people all around me. I have wonderful kids who give my life meaning, great relations with my coworkers, and even an ex-wife with whom I get along very well. But there are certain roles that can only be filled by certain kinds of people, and the empty places in my life have been increasingly on my mind.

This is partially of my own construction, although I would hesitate to say that it has been a willing construction. It is more the sort of thing I've done as a defense of sorts. I am responsible for these two boys of mine, and they rely on my attention quite a bit. I adore them more than I could ever adore anything else. Anytime I have attempted to build a life for myself outside of my children and my job, things have gone off the rails for me. It has become a major distraction, and the areas of my life I care about most have suffered.

My default state has always been one of being alone. Left to my own devices, I do not seek companionship. This is not because I don't want it, but because it doesn't come naturally to me. It is a true effort to seek out and form relationships of any kind with other people. It requires time, energy, attention, and focus. When I devote those resources toward forming relationships, I take them away from other places, and those other places (home, work) are the ones that need the most attention, especially the home. I've generally been able to live with this.

Well, now it's getting harder.

Now I'm starting to see some negative impact of my complete lack of a social life. The emptiness I am feeling in one area of my life is affecting how I feel at unrelated times. As someone who has spent a good deal of time thinking about the human mind, this isn't surprising to me. An imbalance in life like the one I have isn't really mentally healthy. But I've been trying to sneak by like this for as long as possible.

My old friends are mostly all busy with their own lives now. Everyone is married or in a relationship and doesn't have a lot of time to get together. And, to be honest, I really have no idea how to make new friends at my age. When I was younger, there seemed to be so much time. Friends could get together on a whim, and there could always be people around. Now that I'm in my forties, the only way to meet people is through some kind of structured program like online dating or meetup or something like that. I suppose I could find a nice meetup group or something, but I find myself coming back to the issue of time and energy.

I find myself wishing for some kind of romantic partner as well, even though the last time I tried to make that happen, a few months ago, it just didn't work out. Again, time and energy. But if this frustration and emptiness keeps clawing at me from inside, it's going to reach some breaking point where I just need to do something. I'm not there yet, but I can see it coming.

I have a lot to think about.

Sunday, January 10, 2016

Flawed Arguments

I am an unapologetic liberal. Or, as liberals tend to call themselves today, "progressive." While I don't agree with the liberal consensus on every little thing, I'm overwhelmingly supportive of liberal causes and ideas. There was a time when I would have called myself "middle of the road," but two things happened to change that. For one, the "road" veered right, leaving me farther to the left of it, and for another, age has had the opposite effect on me that it is said to have on people: it has made me more liberal in my views.

That said, I can't help but cringe sometimes when I visit progressive websites. Just as I'm sure there are many conservatives who hold their heads in their hands when they see the loonies on Fox News, I often find myself rolling my eyes at some of the items I see on liberal sites. Without going into specifics (because I don't want to get caught up in them, since they are not the point here), I'll see people defending behaviors by members of the progressive "team" for which they would have derided conservatives. I see people using extremely flawed logic and straw men to make arguments, and then basking in the echo chamber of righteousness. I see people overstating a case, making things far more black-and-white than they really are, or distorting information to fit it into their argument, blurring the line between fact and opinion. And if you call them on it, they say, "Well conservatives do it too!"

The most powerful arguments are ones backed up by facts. They don't appeal to authority or to some nebulous concept of "common sense." They flow logically from evidence, making as few suppositions as possible along the way. Unfortunately, despite being more powerful, such arguments are, the vast majority of the time, unsexy. They lack in superlatives and generally come across as half-measures to both sides in a debate.

Look, any argument will have opinions and interpretations in it. No answer is so straightforward that it can be arrived at through pure reason. Science is messy and has to make due with real world situations. Not everything can be tested in a randomized controlled trial. But it really gets to me when people build assumptions on top of one another and treat those sets of assumptions as fact.

 It's been suggested before that language developed not to communicate truth but to win arguments. If that's the case, then I guess this is a lost cause. But I do wish that people would care less about winning the argument and more about reaching a truthful conclusion.

Monday, January 4, 2016

Music and Life, Recorded and Live

I can't rightfully call myself a musician anymore. I write that sentence with feelings of sadness, and a bit of both shame and guilt. After all, I spent many years thinking of myself primarily as a musician. Right up until the arrival of my first son, and even for some time after that, I saw myself as a musician, and whatever job I had as a way of making money until music worked out. Admitting that I am not a musician anymore is a little difficult, but it is also obvious. These days, most people who meet me are surprised even to learn that I once was a musician.

In truth, "musician" was never a fully appropriate word for me. I played keyboards a bit, but playing music was never central to my experience with the art. First and foremost, I always considered myself a composer. And, I'm happy to say, that part of me still exists, although no one can hear the music I write these days. Lacking the means to record it (due to physical space limitations and the time restrictions involved in being a single parent), everything I write these days stays in my head. But I still think up new music all the time.

Most people probably think of music as a live art form. Throughout most of history, the only way for music to be heard was if people played it live on instruments. Only with the innovations in recording sound near the end of the 19th century did that change. By the latter part of the 20th century, one could purchase recorded music of such quality that it could sound crisper and cleaner than even live music could.

Similar innovations around the same time came in film. Before the late 19th century, actors were people who performed live in front of an audience. When movies came to prominence in the early 20th century, film was an art form that grew very much out of theater. Early movies were essentially filmed plays. It didn't take long, though, for filmmakers to experiment with new techniques that would set film apart from theater. Even in its very early days, special effects brought images to film that could not have been shown on a stage. A Trip to the Moon, a famous 1902 French silent film directed by Georges Méliès, is an amazing work for its time that showed the world what possibilities film held.

Over time, film became its own art form, distinct from theater in many meaningful ways. The use of camera angles and special effects were the two most obvious, but even the acting styles changed. Film actors do not need to project their voices for an assembled crowd, and they can use nuanced facial expressions in ways that would be invisible on stage. Film is a much more visual art form than theater.

What is interesting to me is how the same thing did not happen with music. As with film and theater, the innovations allowing for the recording of music led to techniques that could only be applied to recording. We got the ability to record on multiple tracks, allowing musicians to record together asynchronously, without even meeting. As recording quality improved, more details could be added to the music. Quiet background noises that would have been drowned out in live performances could be added to recorded music. Sound could be manipulated post-recording. We would eventually get pitch correction and the integration of computers. Nowadays, you can directly edit waveforms on a simple personal computer. In a sort of meta twist, sampling - essentially, recordings made from other recordings - became popular in the 1980s, particularly in hip hop music, which is itself a genre born almost completely out of the manipulation of recorded music.

Still, people tend to think of recorded music and live music as two modes of the same thing, whereas theater and film are different. With rare exceptions, people don't go to see live versions of the movies they love. The actors don't follow up a film with a tour of performances. And we don't expect even the most popular plays to produce a film version with the same set of actors. Yes, there are film versions from time to time, but they are always quite different in flavor and feature a different set of creators.

There are bands that do not record their music, to be sure, but generally speaking, recording your music is considered to be an essential part of making it. Likewise, there are certainly people who only record music and don't play live, but it's not anywhere near the standard. The expectation in music is that you will have both a live and a recorded product, and that they will reflect one another. Ideally, the musicians involved in both versions are the same. 

Nowadays, of course, it's not really possible to make a living purely on recorded music. And that is one of the big reasons (among a few other big reasons) I gave up when I did. I never had any drive to play live music. I was always much more interested in recording it, in playing with waveforms on computers and fooling around in a room to come up with new music. When I was younger, I dreamed of making a career of that. Not of recording other people's music, mind you - that job exists in the form of a record producer. I wanted to make my own music, send it out there, and let the money roll in.

Of course it doesn't work that way. Music is not like film. Nowadays, if you are not a top pop singer, you aren't making money on recorded music. In fact, if you make it, you're probably losing money or breaking even. It's hard to sell recorded music because it's just so easy to make a perfect digital copy.

This is a shame to me. I think of recorded music as a distinct art form. I enjoy it far more than I enjoy live music, and that feeling has only increased as I've gotten older. I realize that I'm very much in the minority on this, but music, for me, has always been best experienced in headphones. I can hear all the details, all the background stuff, all the texture. Live music sounds muddled and messy, and while I do enjoy that from time to time (especially if performed by highly skilled musicians), it doesn't bring me the joy that listening to a really good recording does.

I'm not even what you'd call an audiophile. I don't collect vinyl, and mp3s are usually clear enough to me. I don't make minute adjustments to graphic equalizers for different albums. I just like the experience of hearing recorded music.

When I was recording music myself, I made music that I wanted to hear. I made it to be listened to in headphones. But that's not something that can be a career anymore. Given the other elements that led me to abandon music as a career path - my parental responsibility, my lack of affinity for self-promotion, maybe my self-doubt, etc. - this was by no means the only thing that led me to give it up, but it was certainly a contributing factor.

Saturday, January 2, 2016

New Year, New Me

I have pretty much always scoffed at the idea of New Year's resolutions. Not because I feel like I'm above them, but because I don't think I've ever met anyone who has kept a resolution for more than a month or so before giving up on it. It's all well and good to promise the universe that you're going to do (or not do) something, but the actual act of changing your habits in some substantial way is a lot more difficult. In the case of a resolution made solely based on the fact that it's a new year, well, there's a reason you're not already doing whatever it is you have resolved to do, and until you've addressed that reason, you need to do more than make a resolution.

Today is the first day of 2016. Actually, by the time I post this it will probably be the second day, since that is five minutes away and I'm not likely to finish this in one quick blast. Despite what I said in the first paragraph, I have decided to make a resolution for this year. In fact, I've decided to make two, which is either overly ambitious or a good way to give myself a fallback option in case one doesn't work out (so that I can say I at least partially kept my resolution!).

The first resolution I'm making is one I've thought about every year but have dismissed as a setup for failure. It's the same resolution that roughly 90% of the people who make resolutions make (by my very unscientific calculation): exercise more. Now, I know if I don't define it any better than that, it will never happen. No one ever keeps the resolution to exercise more because it doesn't provide any measurable goal.

So what I am going to do is to set a goal for myself that is so ridiculously easy to reach that I really have no excuse not to reach it. I'm going to say that I will set aside five minutes every weekday explicitly to exercise. This doesn't mean walking to and from the train station. That's just incidental exercise. What I mean is that I will specifically have a five minute period of time whose main goal is to exercise. I can either lift some dumbells, use this elliptical machine that has been gathering dust, or do some other aerobic or calisthenic activity not in the service of some other goal. Just five minutes. I can do more if I want, but that doesn't mean I can exercise less the following day. No banking exercise minutes.

I have no reason I can't meet that goal. I have done it plenty of times before, but I'm usually too lazy to bother. I say, "well, I walked instead of taking the bus today, so I got exercise." I can't do that. I mean, I can walk instead of taking the bus, but that doesn't count toward the exercise quota. I'm hoping that by setting the bar so low, I can create a pattern of behavior that I can expand upon over time. Once I'm setting aside a few minutes a day, it becomes simpler to simply increase the number of minutes. We'll see how it works.

So that's the first resolution.

My second resolution is to write at least one entry for this blog per week. A quick look at the history here shows that I got off to a pretty good start with this thing, but I faded fast and have only on rare occasion come back to post some random thing or other. I skipped all of 2014 and made one miserable post at a weak point in 2015. No one is reading this anyway (except for the void, I suppose), so it's not like I'm interacting with others, even if I am publishing. It's easy to say that there's no point.

However, I do like the feeling of keeping a blog going. I like the idea of it. I feel a small sense of accomplishment each time I post. I'd also like to hone my writing skills a bit, as I think they've fallen off somewhat from when I was younger and more energetic about things. I'm middle-aged now. Let this be my crisis. I am not going to try to enforce a focus for this blog, although I guess it's possible one could develop. I'm just going to post about anything and everything I find interesting.

So here I go, 2016. I've put it out there for all to see. Can I do it? I'll make updates here, and I'll be honest if I fail.