Nosimpler

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 11, 2015 is:

velleity • \vuh-LEE-uh-tee\  • noun

1 : the lowest degree of volition

2 : a slight wish or tendency : inclination

Examples:

Samuel sometimes mentions that he would like to go back to school, but his interest strikes me as more of a velleity than a firm statement of purpose.

"It should be enough of an advantage for online retailers … that you can order items from them the instant your internet-browsing fingers conceive a velleity to own something; exploiting and maintaining anachronistic tax loopholes is uncalled for." — The Economist (online), 9 Sept. 2011

Did you know?

Allow us, if you will, to volunteer our knowledge about velleity. It is a derivative of the New Latin noun velleitas,from the Latin verb velle, meaning "to wish or will." You might also wish to know that velle is the word that gave us voluntary (by way of Anglo-French voluntarie and Latin voluntarius) and volunteer (by way of French voluntaire). While both of those words might imply a wish to do something (specifically, to offer one's help) and the will to act upon it, the less common velleity typically refers to a wish or inclination that is so insignificant that a person feels little or no compulsion to act.

Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living…his new and shocking indictment demonstrates that the failures of the [Afghanistan] intervention were worse than even the most cynical believed. Gopal, a Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor reporter, investigates, for example, a US counterterrorist operation in January 2002. US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, had identified two sites as likely “al-Qaeda compounds.” It sent in a Special Forces team by helicopter; the commander, Master Sergeant Anthony Pryor, was attacked by an unknown assailant, broke his neck as they fought and then killed him with his pistol; he used his weapon to shoot further adversaries, seized prisoners, and flew out again, like a Hollywood hero.

As Gopal explains, however, the American team did not attack al-Qaeda or even the Taliban. They attacked the offices of two district governors, both of whom were opponents of the Taliban. They shot the guards, handcuffed one district governor in his bed and executed him, scooped up twenty-six prisoners, sent in AC-130 gunships to blow up most of what remained, and left a calling card behind in the wreckage saying “Have a nice day. From Damage, Inc.” Weeks later, having tortured the prisoners, they released them with apologies. It turned out in this case, as in hundreds of others, that an Afghan “ally” had falsely informed the US that his rivals were Taliban in order to have them eliminated. In Gopal’s words:

The toll…: twenty-one pro-American leaders and their employees dead, twenty-six taken prisoner, and a few who could not be accounted for. Not one member of the Taliban or al-Qaeda was among the victims. Instead, in a single thirty-minute stretch the United States had managed to eradicate both of Khas Uruzgan’s potential governments, the core of any future anti-Taliban leadership—stalwarts who had outlasted the Russian invasion, the civil war, and the Taliban years but would not survive their own allies.

Gopal then finds the interview that the US Special Forces commander gave a year and a half later in which he celebrated the derring-do, and recorded that seven of his team were awarded bronze stars, and that he himself received a silver star for gallantry.

From a 2014 review by Rory Stewart in the NYReview of Books. Have a nice day.

It is widely accepted that synaptic transmissions and gap junctions are the major governing mechanisms for signal traveling in the neural system. Yet, a group of neural waves, either physiological or pathological, share the same speed of ~0.1 m/s without synaptic transmission or gap junctions, and this speed is not consistent with axonal conduction or ionic diffusion. The only explanation left is an electrical field effect. We tested the hypothesis that endogenous electric fields are sufficient to explain the propagation with in silico and in vitro experiments. Simulation results show that field effects alone can indeed mediate propagation across layers of neurons with speeds of 0.12 ± 0.09 m/s with pathological kinetics, and 0.11 ± 0.03 m/s with physiologic kinetics, both generating weak field amplitudes of ~2–6 mV/mm. Further, the model predicted that propagation speed values are inversely proportional to the cell-to-cell distances, but do not significantly change with extracellular resistivity, membrane capacitance, or membrane resistance. In vitro recordings in mice hippocampi produced similar speeds (0.10 ± 0.03 m/s) and field amplitudes (2.5–5 mV/mm), and by applying a blocking field, the propagation speed was greatly reduced. Finally, osmolarity experiments confirmed the model's prediction that cell-to-cell distance inversely affects propagation speed. Together, these results show that despite their weak amplitude, electric fields can be solely responsible for spike propagation at ~0.1 m/s. This phenomenon could be important to explain the slow propagation of epileptic activity and other normal propagations at similar speeds.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Neural activity (waves or spikes) can propagate using well documented mechanisms such as synaptic transmission, gap junctions, or diffusion. However, the purpose of this paper is to provide an explanation for experimental data showing that neural signals can propagate by means other than synaptic transmission, gap junction, or diffusion. The results indicate that electric fields (ephaptic effects) are capable of mediating propagation of self-regenerating neural waves. This novel mechanism coupling cell-by-volume conduction could be involved in other types of propagating neural signals, such as slow-wave sleep, sharp hippocampal waves, theta waves, or seizures.

One big grift.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) is asking why a small Department of Defense task force charged with developing the Afghan economy spent nearly $150 million on private villas, security guards and luxury meals while operating in the country between 2010 and 2014.

But we can't have any nice things at home.

The Finnish government is currently drawing up plans to introduce a national basic income. A final proposal won’t be presented until November 2016, but if all goes to schedule, Finland will scrap all existing benefits and instead hand out 800 euros per month—to everyone.

It sounds far-fetched, but it’s looking likely that Finland will carry through with the idea. Whereas several Dutch cities will introduce basic income next year and Switzerland is holding a referendum on the subject, there is strongest political and public support for the idea in Finland.

A poll commissioned by the government agency planning the proposal, the Finnish Social Insurance Institution or KELA, showed that 69% support (link in Finnish) a basic income plan. Prime minister Juha Sipilä is in favor of the idea and he’s backed by most of the major political parties.

There is more here, by Olivia Goldhill, via Matt Yglesias.

From a new paper in Nature, Scientific Reports:

Microbial communities are ubiquitous in both natural and artificial environments. However, microbial diversity is usually reduced under strong selection pressures, such as those present in habitats rich in recalcitrant or toxic compounds displaying antimicrobial properties. Caffeine is a natural alkaloid present in coffee, tea and soft drinks with well-known antibacterial properties. Here we present the first systematic analysis of coffee machine-associated bacteria. We sampled the coffee waste reservoir of ten different Nespresso machines and conducted a dynamic monitoring of the colonization process in a new machine. Our results reveal the existence of a varied bacterial community in all the machines sampled, and a rapid colonisation process of the coffee leach. The community developed from a pioneering pool of enterobacteria and other opportunistic taxa to a mature but still highly variable microbiome rich in coffee-adapted bacteria. The bacterial communities described here, for the first time, are potential drivers of biotechnologically relevant processes including decaffeination and bioremediation.

The authors note:

The presence of bacterial genera with pathogenic properties and the fast recovery of the communities after rinsing the capsule container, strongly suggest the need for frequent maintenance of the capsule container of these machines.

In related news from a few years ago, scientists in the US have genetically modified an E.coli strain so that it is ‘addicted’ to caffeine. Yes, but will E. coli prove theorems?

Hat tip: Paul Kedrosky.

I went to an AMS conference with my High School Student Naveen (who presented  this paper)  and an ugrad from my REU program Nichole (who presented this paper). Note that this is a math conference- low prestige, mostly unrefereed, parallel sessions, but still a good place to pick up some new problems to work on and learn some things, and meet people.

Both Naveen and Nichole later got email from a journal urging them to submit their work! They were also invited  to be on the Editorial Board! I can understand inviting a HS student who is a SENIOR to be on an editorial board, but Naveen is a SOPHMORE!

Naveen and Nichole  both emailed me asking what this was about and I looked around and found, not to my surprise, that the journal is an author-pays journal of  no standards. On the other hand, it was open access, on the other other hand, they had an article claiming that R(4,6)=36 (might be true, but if this was known, I would know it, see this blog post for more on that proof technique).

The pay-to-publish model is not necc. bad, and is standard in some fields, but is unusual for math. Of perhaps more importance is that the journal had no standards. And they prey on the young and naive.

Or do they?

Consider the following scenario:  Naveen  publishes in this journal and this publication is  on his college application, hence he gets into a good college with scholarship. He knows exactly what he is buying. Or Nicole does this to help her Grad school Application.  Or I do this for my resume and get a salary increase. Or an untenured prof does this to get tenure ( Deans can count but they can't read). And it gets worse--- the school gives the prof tenure, knowing the papers are bogus, but now they can say they have a prof who publishes X papers a year! At some point I don't know who is scamming who.

This blog post (not mine) gives several criteria for when a journal is bogus. I'll add one: When they ask a 15 years old to be on their editorial board.

We experimentally demonstrate mutual synchronization of two free-running nanomechanical oscillators separated by an effective distance of 30 meters and coupled through light. Due to the finite speed of light, the large separation introduces a significant coupling delay of 139 nanoseconds, approximately four and a half times the mechanical oscillation time period. We reveal multiple stable states of synchronized oscillations, enabled by delayed coupling, with distinct synchronization frequency in the coupled system. These states are accessed by tuning independently the directional coupling strengths. Our results demonstrate rich dynamics and could enable applications in reconfigurable radio-frequency networks and novel computing concepts.

Author: Beverly A. Purnell

Apparently.  Heather Sarsons has a paper on this phenomenon (pdf), the abstract is this:

Within academia, men are tenured at higher rates than women are in most quantitative fields, including economics. Researchers have attempted to identify the source of this disparity but find that nearly 30% of the gap remains unexplained even after controlling for family commitments and differences in productivity. Using data from academic economists’ CVs, I test whether coauthored and solo-authored publications matter differently for tenure for men and women. While solo-authored papers send a clear signal about one’s ability, coauthored papers are noisy in that they do not provide specific information about each contributor’s skills. I find that men are tenured at roughly the same rate regardless of whether they coauthor or solo-author. Women, however, suffer a significant penalty when they coauthor. The results hold after controlling for the total number of papers published, quality of papers, field of study, tenure institution, tenure year, and the number of years it took an individual to go up for tenure. The result is most pronounced for women coauthoring with only men and is less pronounced the more women there are on a paper, suggesting that some gender bias is at play. I present a model in which bias enters when workers collaborate and test its predictions in the data.

See also this very interesting paper on “Confidence Men,” in economic science, women seem to have more epistemic modesty than men.

Hat tip goes to Dina Pomeranz.

Same-sex sexual behavior is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, but its adaptive origins remain a prominent puzzle. Here I suggest the possibility that same-sex sexual behavior arises as a consequence of the competition between an evolutionary drive for a wide diversity in traits, which improves the adaptability of a species, and a drive for sexual dichotomization of traits, which promotes opposite-sex attraction and increases the rate of reproduction. A simple analytical "toy model" is proposed for describing this tradeoff. The model exhibits a number of interesting features, and suggests a simple mathematical form for describing the sexual orientation continuum.

Microexpressions reveal your deepest emotions, even when you are trying to hide them. Now a machine vision algorithm has learned to spot them, with wide-ranging applications from law enforcement to psychological analysis.

Most people are good at recognizing the ordinary emotions on other people’s faces. But there are another set of facial expression that most people are almost entirely unaware of. In the late 1960s, psychologists discovered that when humans try to hide their emotions, they often display their real feelings in “microexpressions” that appear and disappear in the blink of an eye.

I spent 14 years on the faculty at the University of Chicago. I know László Babai well, we collaborated on some of my best known work. I also know Ryerson 251, a room where I've seen hundreds of talks and given more than a few myself. So I could imagine the excitement in that room on Tuesday as Babai gave the most anticipated talk in the history of theoretical computer science, the first of several talks Babai is giving on his new algorithm for graph isomorphism [Video]. Gabriel Gaster extensively live tweeted the event. Jeremy Kun has some details. Update (12/14): Paper now posted.

For this post instead of doing a bad job trying to overview Babai's proof, I'll explain the graph isomorphism problem and why it is important in the complexity world.

Suppose we have two high schools, say HS North and HS South, each with 1000 students. Consider a diagram (or graph) containing a point for each student at HS North with lines between students who are facebook friends, and a similar diagram for HS South. Is there a 1-1 map from the students at HS North to the students at HS South so that these diagrams look identical? That's the graph isomorphism problem.

To determine whether these two graphs were isomorphic you could look at all the possible mappings between students, but that's 1000! or more than 4x10²⁵⁶⁷ possible maps. There has long been known how to search a smaller number of possibilities, especially if we put some restrictions on the diagrams, but always exponential in n (the number of students) in the worst case. Ideally we'd like a polynomial-time algorithm and Babai gets very close, an algorithm that runs in time n^logkn time for some fixed k.

Graph Isomorphism is one of those few problems, like factoring, known to be in NP but not known to be in P or NP-complete. Graph non-isomorphism is the poster child for the class AM, the problems solved by a randomized verifier asking a single question to a powerful prover. Graph non-isomorphism in AM implies that Graph Isomorphism is not likely NP-complete and that under reasonable derandomization assumptions that Graph non-isomorphism is in NP. Kobler, Schöning and Toran wrote a whole book on the computational complexity issues of graph isomorphism.

Even small progress in graph isomorphism creates waves. At a theory conference in the late 80's a speaker caused a major stir when he casually mentioned he had a proof (he didn't) that Graph non-isomorphism was in NP. Babai's announced caused a huge tsunami and those of us who know him realize he wouldn't make such an announcement without being sure he has a proof. The talk put together a large number of ideas from combinatorics and graph theory. My impression is that those who saw the talk didn't leave convinced of the proof, but did feel Babai had found the pieces to make it work.

With Babai's breakthrough algorithm, the smart money says now that graph isomorphism sits in P. It took decades to get from quasipolynomial time to polynomial time for primality testing and the same time frame may be needed to get polynomial time for graph isomorphism. But it will likely happen and the complexity of graph isomorphism then gets a whole lot simpler.

A couple of thoughts: All the breakthrough results that I can remember were released as papers, ready to devour. This is the first result of this caliber I remember being announced as a talk.

Also we think of theory as a young person's game, most of the big breakthroughs coming from researchers early in their careers. Babai is 65, having just won the Knuth Prize for his lifetime work on interactive proofs, group algorithms and communication complexity. Babai uses his extensive knowledge of combinatorics and group theory to get his algorithm. No young researcher could have had the knowledge base or maturity to be able to put the pieces together the way that Babai did.

More on Babai and graph isomorphism from Scott, Luca, Bill, Tim, Dick and Ken, Reddit, Science News, New Scientist and Science.

You’ve probably heard of Lawvere’s Hegelian taco. Now here is a paper that introduces the burrito to category theorists:

• Ed Morehouse, Burritos for the hungry mathematician.

The source of its versatility and popularity is revealed:

To wit, a burrito is just a strong monad in the symmetric monoidal category of food.

Frankly, having seen plenty of attempts to explain monads to computer scientists, I thought this should have been marketed as ‘monads for chefs’. But Mike Stay, who pointed me to this article, explained its subtext:

Haskell uses monads all over the place, and programmers who are not used to functional programming often find them confusing. This is a quote from a widely-shared article on the proliferation of “monad tutorials”:

After struggling to understand them for a week, looking at examples, writing code, reading things other people have written, he finally has an “aha!” moment: everything is suddenly clear, and Joe Understands Monads! What has really happened, of course, is that Joe’s brain has fit all the details together into a higher-level abstraction, a metaphor which Joe can use to get an intuitive grasp of monads; let us suppose that Joe’s metaphor is that Monads are Like Burritos. Here is where Joe badly misinterprets his own thought process: “Of course!” Joe thinks. “It’s all so simple now. The key to understanding monads is that they are Like Burritos. If only I had thought of this before!” The problem, of course, is that if Joe HAD thought of this before, it wouldn’t have helped: the week of struggling through details was a necessary and integral part of forming Joe’s Burrito intuition, not a sad consequence of his failure to hit upon the idea sooner.

The article is this:

• Brent Yorgey, Abstraction, intuition, and the “monad tutorial fallacy”, January 12, 2009.

If only I'd been smart enough to start a Ted Cruz Super PAC.

The super PACs backing Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential run have yet to reserve any TV time in the early primary states — or anywhere else — despite a combined $38 million war chest that ranks second among presidential contenders only to Jeb Bush’s $103 million operation.

The total absence of ads has created confusion and growing consternation inside the Cruz campaign, which cannot legally communicate with its allied super PACs and has had to watch as its rivals lock in tens of millions of dollars in ads before prices spike, as they typically do as elections near.

So funny.

A man dubbed the Drone Slayer for shooting a miniature aircraft out of the sky has had a criminal case against him thrown out.

William Meredith drew his shotgun and took out a Phantom 3 drone after spotting it above his home in Hillview, Kentucky, this summer – landing him in jail and prompting legal proceedings.

Mr Meredith was charged with criminal mischief and wanton endangerment for destroying the $900 drone in July – but this week had both of them thrown out by a judge.

Izabella Laba, a noted mathematician at the University of British Columbia, recently posted some tweets that used me as a bad, cautionary example for how “STEM faculty should be less contemptuous of social sciences.”  Here was the offending comment of mine, from the epic Walter Lewin thread last fall:

[W]hy not dispense with the empirically-empty notion of “privilege,” and just talk directly about the actual well-being of actual people, or groups of people?  If men are doing horrific things to women—for example, lashing them for driving cars, like in Saudi Arabia—then surely we can just say so in plain language.  Stipulating that the torturers are “exercising their male privilege” with every lash adds nothing to anyone’s understanding of the evil.  It’s bad writing.  More broadly, it seems to me that the entire apparatus of “privilege,” “delegitimation,” etc. etc. can simply be tossed overboard, to rust on the ocean floor alongside dialectical materialism and other theoretical superstructures that were once pompously insisted upon as preconditions of enlightened social discourse.  This isn’t quantum field theory.  Ordinary words will do.

Prof. Laba derisively commented:

Might as well ask you to explain calculus without using fancy words like “derivative” or “continuous.”  Simple number arithmetic will do.

Prof. Laba’s tweets were favorited by Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician who wrote the excellent popular book How Not to Be Wrong.  (Ellenberg had also criticized me last year for my strange, naïve idea that human relations can be thought about using logic.)

Given my respect for the critics, I guess I’m honor-bound to respond.

For the record, I tend not to think about the social sciences—or for that matter, the natural sciences—as monolithic entities at all.  I admire any honest attempt to discover the truth about anything.  And not being a postmodern relativist, I believe there are deep truths worth discovering in history, psychology, economics, linguistics, possibly even sociology.  Reading the books of Steven Pinker underscored for me how much is actually understood nowadays about human nature—much of it only figured out within the last half-century.  Likewise, reading the voluminous profundities of Scott Alexander taught me that even in psychiatry, there are truths (and even a few definite cures) to be had for those who seek.

I also believe that the social sciences are harder—way harder—than math or physics or CS.  They’re harder because of the tenuousness of the correlations, because of the complexity of each individual human brain (let alone 7 billion of them on the same planet), but most of all, because politics and ideology and the scientist’s own biases place such powerful thumbs on the scale.  This makes it all the more impressive when a social scientist, like (say) Stanley Milgram or Judith Rich Harris or Napoleon Chagnon, teaches the world something important and new.

I will confess to contempt for anything that I regard as pompous obscurantism—for self-referential systems of jargon whose main purposes are to bar outsiders, to mask a lack of actual understanding, and to confer power on certain favored groups.  And I regard the need to be alert to such systems, to nip them in the bud before they grow into Lysenkoism, as in some sense the problem of intellectual life.  Which brings me to the most fundamental asymmetry between the hard and soft sciences.  Namely, the very fact that it’s so much harder to nurture new truths to maturity in the social sciences than it is in math or physics, means that in the former, the jargon-weeds have an easier time filling the void—and we know they’ve done it again and again, even in the post-Enlightenment West.

Time for a thought experiment.  Suppose you showed up at a university anytime between, let’s say, 1910 and 1970, and went from department to department asking (in so many words): what are you excited about this century?  Where are your new continents, what’s the future of your field?  Who should I read to learn about that future?

In physics, the consensus answer would’ve been something like: Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Dirac.

In psychology, it would’ve been: Freud and Jung (with another faction for B. F. Skinner).

In politics and social sciences, over an enormous swath of academia (including in the West), it would’ve been: Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Lenin.

With hindsight, we now know that the physics advice would’ve been absolute perfection, the psychology and politics advice an unmitigated disaster.  Yes, physicists today know more than Einstein, can even correct him on some points, but the continents he revealed to us actually existed—indeed, have only become more important since Einstein’s time.

But Marx and Freud?  You would’ve done better to leave the campus, and ask a random person on the street what she or he thought about economics and psychology.  In high school, I remember cringing through a unit on the 1920s, when we learned about how “two European professors upset a war-weary civilization’s established certainties—with Einstein overturning received wisdom about space and time, and Freud doing just the same for the world of the mind.”  It was never thought important to add that Einstein’s theories turned out to be true while Freud’s turned out to be false.  Still, at least Freud’s ideas led “only” to decades of bad psychology and hundreds of innocent people sent to jail because of testimony procured through hypnosis, rather than to tens of millions of dead, as with the other social-scientific theory that reigned supreme among 20^th-century academics.

Marx and Freud built impressive intellectual edifices—sufficiently impressive for a large fraction of intellectuals to have accepted those men as gurus on par with Darwin and Einstein for almost a century.  Yet on nearly every topic they wrote about, we now know that Marx and Freud couldn’t have been any more catastrophically wrong.  Moreover, their wrongness was knowable at the time—and was known to many, though the ones who knew were typically the ones who the intellectual leaders sneered at, as deluded reactionaries.

Which raises a question: suppose that, in the 1920s, I’d taken the social experts’ advice to study Marx and Freud, didn’t understand much of what they said (and found nonsensical much of what I did understand), and eventually rejected them as pretentious charlatans.  Then why wouldn’t I have been just like Prof. Laba’s ignorant rube, who dismisses calculus because he doesn’t understand technical terms like “continuous” and “derivative”?

On reflection, I don’t think that the two cases are comparable at all.

The hard sciences need technical vocabularies for a simple reason: because they’re about things that normal people don’t spend their hours obsessively worrying about.  Yes, I’d have a hard time understanding organic chemists or differential geometers, but largely for the same reasons I’d have a hard time understanding football fans or pirates.  It’s not just that I don’t understand the arguments; it’s that the arguments are about a world that’s alien to me (and that, to be honest, I don’t care about as much as I do my world).

Suppose, by contrast, that you’re writing about the topics everyone spends their time obsessively worrying about: politics, society, the human mind, the relations between the races and sexes.  In other words, suppose you’re writing about precisely the topics for which the ordinary English language has been honed over centuries—for which Shakespeare and Twain and Dr. King and so many others deployed the language to such spectacular effect.  In that case, what excuse could you possibly have to write in academese, to pepper your prose with undefined in-group neologisms?

Well, let’s be charitable; maybe you have a reason.  For example, maybe you’re doing a complicated meta-analysis of psychology papers, so you need to talk about r-values and kurtosis and heteroskedasticity.  Or maybe you’re putting people in an fMRI machine while you ask them questions, so you need to talk about the temporal resolution in the anterior cingulate cortex.  Or maybe you’re analyzing sibling rivalries using game theory, so you need Nash equilibria.  Or you’re picking apart sentences using Chomskyan formal grammar.  In all these cases, armchair language doesn’t suffice because you’re not just sitting in your armchair: you’re using a new tool to examine the everyday from a different perspective.  For present purposes, you might as well be doing algebraic geometry.

The Freudians and Marxists would, of course, claim that they’re doing the exact same thing.  Yes, they’d say, you thought you had the words to discuss your own mind or the power structure of society, but really you didn’t, because you lacked the revolutionary theoretical framework that we now possess.  (Trotsky’s writings  are suffused with this brand of arrogance in nearly every sentence: for example, when he ridicules the bourgeoisie liberals who whine about “human rights violations” in the early USSR, yet who are too dense to phrase their objections within the framework of dialectical materialism.)

I submit that, even without the hindsight of 2015, there would’ve been excellent reasons to be skeptical of these claims.  Has it ever happened, you might ask yourself, that someone sat in their study and mused about the same human questions that occupied Plato and Shakespeare and Hume, in the same human way they did, and then came up with a new, scientific conclusion that was as rigorous and secure as relativity or evolution?

Let me know if I missed something, but I can’t think of a single example.  Sure, it seems to me, there have been geniuses of human nature, who enlarged our vision without any recourse to the quantitative methods of science.  But even those geniuses “only” contributed melodies for other geniuses to answer in counterpoint, rather than stones for everyone who came later to build upon.  Also, the geniuses usually wrote well.

Am I claiming that progress is impossible in the social realm?  Not at all.  The emancipation of slaves, the end of dueling and blasphemy laws and the divine right of kings, women’s suffrage and participation in the workforce, gay marriage—all these strike me as crystal-clear examples of moral progress, as advances that will still be considered progress a thousand years from now, if there’s anyone around then to discuss such things.  Evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, reciprocal altruism, and countless other developments likewise strike me as intellectual progress within the sciences of human nature.  But none of these advances needed recondite language!  Ordinary words sufficed for Thomas Paine and Frederick Douglass and John Stuart Mill, as they sufficed for Robert Axelrod and for Kahneman and Tversky.  So forgive me for thinking that whatever is true and important in the social world today, should likewise be defensible to every smart person in ordinary words, and that this represents a genuine difference between the social sciences and physics.

Which brings us to the central point that Prof. Laba disputed in that comment of mine.  I believe there are countless moral heroes in our time, as well as social scientists who struggle heroically to get the right answers.  But as far as I can tell, the people who build complex intellectual edifices around words like “privilege” and “delegitimation” and “entitlement” and “marginalized” are very much the same sort of people who, a few generations ago, built similar edifices around “bourgeoisie” and “dialectical” and “false consciousness.”  In both cases, there’s an impressive body of theory that’s held up as the equivalent in its domain of relativity, quantum mechanics, and Darwinism, with any skeptics denounced as science-deniers.  In both cases, enlightened liberals are tempted to side with the theorists, since the theorists believe in so many of the same causes that the enlightened liberals believe in, and hate so many of the same people who the enlightened liberals hate.  But in both cases, the theorists’ language seems to alternate between incomprehensible word-salad and fervid, often profanity-laced denunciations, skipping entirely over calm clarity.  And in both cases, the only thing that the impressive theoretical edifice ever seems to get used for, is to prove over and over that certain favored groups should get more power while disfavored ones should get less.

So I’m led to the view that, if you want to rouse people’s anger about injustice or their pity about preventable suffering, or end arbitrary discrimination codified into law, or give individuals more freedom to pursue their own happiness, or come up with a new insight about human nature, or simply describe the human realities that you see around you—for all these purposes, the words that sufficed for every previous generation’s great humanists will also suffice for you.

On the other hand, to restrict freedom and invent new forms of discrimination—and to do it in the name of equality and justice—that takes theory.  You’ll need a sophisticated framework, for example, to prove that even if two adults both insist they’re consenting to a relationship, really they might not be, because of power structures in the wider society that your superior insight lets you see.  You’ll need advanced discourse to assure you that, even though your gut reaction might be horror at (say) someone who misspoke once and then had their life gleefully destroyed on social media, your gut is not to be trusted, because it’s poisoned by the same imperialist, patriarchal biases as everything else—and because what looks like a cruel lynching needs to be understood in a broader social context (did the victim belong to a dominant group, or to a marginalized one?).  Finally, you’ll need oodles of theory (bring out the Marcuse) to explain why the neoliberal fanaticism about “free speech” and “tolerance” and “due process” and “the presumption of innocence” is too abstract and simplistic—for those concepts, too, fail to distinguish between a marginalized group that deserves society’s protection and a dominant group that doesn’t.

So I concede to Prof. Laba that the complicated discourse of privilege, hegemony, etc. serves a definite purpose for the people who wield it, just as much as the complicated discourse of quantum field theory serves a purpose for physicists.  It’s just that the purposes of the privilege-warriors aren’t my purposes.  For my purposes—which include fighting injustice, advancing every social and natural science as quickly as possible, and helping all well-meaning women and men see each other’s common humanity—I said last year and I say again that ordinary words will do.

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Update (Oct. 26): Izabella Laba has written a response to this post, for which I’m extremely grateful. Her reply reveals that she and I have a great deal of common ground, and also a few clear areas of disagreement (e.g., what’s wrong with Steven Pinker?). But my most important objection is simply that, the first time I loaded her blog, the text went directly over the rock image in the background, making it impossible to read without highlighting it.

A hat tip to Miss C at Neatorama for posting a most interesting story from Buzzfeed.

A couple had a child with fertility assistance, but later found out that the child’s blood type did not match either parent. A paternity test, using cheek swabs, determined that the man was not the father of the baby. The couple had more tests, and was prepared to sue the fertility clinic. Then they did a genetic test through 23andMe, which tests many more markers than a standard paternity test in order to establish genetic ties in extended families. That test said the man was the baby’s uncle!

The explanation is that the man is a genetic chimera. Before he was born, he had a fraternal twin that did not develop into a viable baby. But the vanished twin’s DNA survived by being absorbed into the surviving twin...

However, since the cells of his lost twin brother are a part of him, he is still the father. The case shows how a person cannot be defined by their DNA. About one in eight single-child births start out as multiple pregnancies, so chimerism is probably more common than we know.

Last year I posted a similar article involving a young mother:

In order to qualify for financial assistance in supporting her young family, Fairchild was required to undergo DNA testing to prove that she was the mother of children for whom she was claiming... To her horror, the young mother was informed that she would be the subject of an investigation into possible welfare fraud as the DNA tests had revealed no genetic link between her and the children she claimed were hers...

More information at the links, or type "chimera" in the new search box in the right sidebar to see unusual butterflies, apples, and legendary monsters.

One wonders how many lives have been affected/disrupted by genetic testing that did not take the possibility of chimerism into account - especially paternity cases.

Author(s): Otto X. Cordero

High-resolution tracking of the population abundances in a simple, closed microbial ecosystem shows that the intrinsic dynamics of the system are strongly deterministic.

[Physics 8, 101] Published Mon Oct 26, 2015

Resonant cavities are one of the basic building blocks in various disciplines of science and technology, with numerous applications ranging from abstract theoretical modeling to everyday life devices. The eigenfrequencies of conventional cavities are a function of its geometry, and, thus, the size and shape of a resonant cavity is selected in order to operate at a specific frequency. Here, we demonstrate theoretically the existence of geometry-invariant resonant cavities, i.e., resonators whose eigenfrequency is invariant with respect to geometrical deformations. This effect is obtained by exploiting the unusual properties of zero-index metamaterials, which enable decoupling of the time and spatial field variations. This new class of resonators may inspire alternative design concepts, and it might lead to the first generation of deformable resonant devices.

Random projections have proven extremely useful in many signal processing and machine learning applications. However, they often require either to store a very large random matrix, or to use a different, structured matrix to reduce the computational and memory costs. Here, we overcome this difficulty by proposing an analog, optical device, that performs the random projections literally at the speed of light without having to store any matrix in memory. This is achieved using the physical properties of multiple coherent scattering of coherent light in random media. We use this device on a simple task of classification with a kernel machine, and we show that, on the MNIST database, the experimental results closely match the theoretical performance of the corresponding kernel. This framework can help make kernel methods practical for applications that have large training sets and/or require real-time prediction. We discuss possible extensions of the method in terms of a class of kernels, speed, memory consumption and different problems.