Take the Pro-Truth Pledge (because we’re all fallible)

I  learnt about this pledge from the Skeptic Reading Room. And while I generally loathe public pledges (too much virtue signalling for my liking), I am making an exception for this one, in response to our exceptional times. And the fine print makes admirable reading. Besides,  several hundred public figures and organizations have signed it, including Steven Pinker and Peter Singer, and what’s good enough for them is good enough for me. Many dozens of politicians have signed it as well, and one of the aims is to persuade more to do so, and hold them accountable.

Truth matters. Propagating untruth is big business and big politics. The traditional guardians of truth have abdicated, are compromised, or lack traction. By default, the job of protecting truth falls to us. We need to take our responsibility seriously.

We are all drawn towards confirmation bias, group think (our own group, of course!), lack of diligence in verifying material that agrees with us, lack of charity towards opponents, and more besides. So the pledge is no trivial commitment and I certainly found that reading it gave me much pause for thought about my own behaviour.

Here’s what the pledge commits you to. You can sign it here. I have. Hold me to it.

I Pledge My Earnest Efforts To:

Share truth

• Verify: fact-check information to confirm it is true before accepting and sharing it
• Balance: share the whole truth, even if some aspects do not support my opinion
• Cite: share my sources so that others can verify my information
• Clarify: distinguish between my opinion and the facts

Honor truth

• Acknowledge: acknowledge when others share true information, even when we disagree otherwise
• Reevaluate: reevaluate if my information is challenged, retract it if I cannot verify it
• Defend: defend others when they come under attack for sharing true information, even when we disagree otherwise
• Align: align my opinions and my actions with true information

Encourage truth

• Fix: ask people to retract information that reliable sources have disproved even if they are my allies
• Educate: compassionately inform those around me to stop using unreliable sources even if these sources support my opinion
• Defer: recognize the opinions of experts as more likely to be accurate when the facts are disputed
• Celebrate: celebrate those who retract incorrect statements and update their beliefs toward the truth

What the Bishop said to the Biologist; a Victorian scandal revisited

Yes, Bishop Wilberforce really did ask TH Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog”, whether he would prefer an ape for his grandfather, and a woman for his grandmother, or a man for his grandfather, and an ape for his grandmother. And Huxley really did say that he would prefer this to descent from a man conspicuous for his talents and eloquence, but who misused his gifts to ridicule science and obscure the light of truth. This and more at the very first public debate regarding Darwin’s work on evolution, only months after the publication of On the Origin of Species.

L: The Oxford Museum of Natural History, where the event took place. Click on this and other images to enlarge

The debate took place at the May 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The actual exchange is whitewashed out of the account of the meeting in the gentlemanly Athenaeum, leading some historians to wonder whether it really occurred, but a recently rediscovered contemporary account places the matter beyond doubt. What I find even more interesting, however, is the way in which argument and counter-argument between Wilberforce and Huxley, and between other supporters and opponents of the concept of evolution, prefigure arguments still being used today.

R: 150th anniversary commemorative plaque, outside the Museum

The Athenaeum account is freely available here. The fuller account,

tl; dr Wilberforce-Huxley encounter; Oxford Chronicle and Athenaeum accounts

1: Transcript of discussion following Draper’s initial presentation, from Oxford Chronicle and Berks and Bucks Gazette, 21 July 1860, with Athenaeum account for comparison, as reported by Richard England, with my own paragraphing for ease of reading, and with the most relevant Athenaeum alternatives for comparison; 2: Full transcript of Athenaeum accounts of  this meeting, including Prof. Draper’s presentation, preceded by its account of the meeting of 19th July, where Huxley had been goaded into participation by remarks from Richard Owen

1: Saturday session, Section D.—Zoology and botany, including physiology (Oxford Chronicle)

—Professor HUXLEY, being called upon by the chairman, declined entering into the subject, alleging the undesirability of contesting a scientific subject involving nice shades of idea before a general audience, who could not be supposed to judge upon its merits.

The discussion was then commenced by the Rev. R. GRESWELL, who denied

Evolution Before Our Eyes: Complex Mutations in Microbes Giving New Functions

I cannot improve on this excellent survey, with its refutation of the creationist’s crucial denial that evolution generates new functional information; the most I can do is help publicise it.

Disclosure: I am cited in a footnote

Letters to Creationists

OUTLINE

( 1 ) Barry Hall’s lac Bug

( 2 ) Lenski’s Long Term E. Coli Evolution Experiment

         Lenski’s E. coli Evolve Ability to Metabolize Citrate under Aerobic Conditions

( 3 ) Bacteriophage Lambda Evolves a New Protein Binding Site Using Four Mutations

( 4 ) The Significance of These Complex Mutations

         Plate Tectonics: An Example of Evidences

         Diverse Evidence for Evolution

( 5 ) The Core Issue in Rejecting Evolution

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

( 1 ) Barry Hall’s lac Bug

Lactose is a sugar that bacteria can use as a food. In order to do this, they first have to cut lactose in half, releasing two…

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War on Science, EPA edition

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt (image via Science Magazine article)

The Grumpy Geophysicist is too kind. “It is hard not to look at these actions and them as ostrich-like in trying to avoid hearing things you don’t want to hear.” No; the target is not what they get to hear, so much as what we get to hear. they just don’t want scientific advances that generate news stories about inconvenient facts like global warming or pollution

The Grumpy Geophysicist

UPDATE: Science has a piece fully explaining this latest expulsion of academic science from the EPA.

Some time ago, GG suggested that what many were taking as a “war on science” was more a war on particular parts of science, that the offenders were in fact exploiting science where it was financially remunerative and opposing it where it wasn’t. But actions at the Environmental Protection Agency really look like outright war on science, period.

Consider these actions:

• Reconstituting science panels to only have “committee members [who] will be financially independent from the agency.” Um, so experts who are interested in pollution and are supported by…who is left? maybe industry? If this isn’t the fox watching the henhouse, GG doesn’t know what is.  Why would the EPA not use the science that it has paid for, or trust the scientists that it funded? EPA grants are to determine if…

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How NOT to talk to a Trump supporter

From “29 celebrities who endorse Donald Trump”, Business Insider October 2016

“With every ‘I told you so’ and demand that they apologize to you, personally, for the sin of being wrong, you are hardening [them] against the possibility of changing their minds. I know you may feel that you cannot be happy until they apologize, admit they were wrong, that they were stupid, that everything they ever believed about the war was in error. They know it too… [But] they don’t want to make you happy. Frankly, you haven’t given them any reason to.” Megan McArdle, The Atlantic, writing in 2008, about why so many people still refused to admit that the 2003 invasion of Iraq had led to disaster, and even persisted in believing in the face of the evidence that Saddam Hussein really had had weapons of mass destruction.

Now think how this applies to Trump supporters, as they get more and more opportunities to see what was really meant by “getting rid of Obamacare” or by “cutting taxes” or by “draining the swamp” or by “Make America Great Again”, or by “crooked” or by having someone of Trump’s moral and intellectual calibre in the White House.

Dark green shows where Trump vs Clinton outperformed Romney vs Obama. See New York Times here for key and commentary

Of course, with a little bit of effort you can do even worse than that. You can insult them. Ignore that many of them had voted for Obama (see map on right). Ignore the long slow steady slide of Democratic support in Middle America. Ignore how six decades of business as usual had done nothing or less than nothing for small town rural America. Ignore the loss of American (and other!) lives in undeclared wars that most Americans hadn’t even heard of. Ignore that the alternative to Trump was someone who saw nothing wrong in taking six-figure speaking fees from Goldman Sachs (“that’s what they offered“). Just remind them how stupid you think they are. Call them bigots too, if you like. Or deplorables. Works every time.

The McArdle quotation is from a long and thoughtful essay entitled Anger Management, on the importance of bridge-building, originally written during Iraq’s descent into chaos, but now more relevant than ever. I came across it through  Being Wrong, Kathryn Schultz’s splendid account of how we are all more or less wrong (even you and me, dear reader) most of the time, how essential this is to our growth, and how difficult it is for all of us to admit it. Especially when the Other Lot are self-righteously asking us to do so.

A final quote from McArdle: “I as well as anyone know the delights of unloading one’s accumulated venom on richly deserving targets… But I also understand that unloading, while making me feel better, does not usually advance my cause.”

Venom is not, and should not be, enough to win elections.