Climategate underscores the importance of projects like Clear Climate Code. They’re software engineers who are rewriting a key model (GISTEMP, which models Global Historical Climate Network data from the Goddard at NASA) so that the model is clear and understandable and verifiable. I tried to write a multiprocessing extension for a school project, but couldn’t verify the results due to equipment problems.

Science models & data are massaged all the time. A dirty fact, but common across many disciplines. The bottom line is, if the models in question have predicative power, anthropogenic climate change is real. If not, then climate change may still be real, but we must wait for better data and/or better models. Academic models of complex, schocastic systems are always ugly code in my experience. That doesn’t negate their validity.

That being said, scientists writing models aren’t often software engineers, and the data collection and collation is incredibly complex and messy with many possibilities for errors. Code and data should always open-sourced for verification, and keeping such things to yourself is inexcusable and a violation of how science should be done.

However, I highly doubt there’s a climate conspiracy cabal hiding a secret data db. All the data I’ve seen is open and freely available (and really messy!). Seeing those emails as suspicious appears as confirmation bias to me, no matter how much of a persecution complex the individuals in question appear to harbor.

Yesterday, my wife looked over my shoulder and saw this:

“Oh! It’s beautiful homework,” she exclaimed. It does seem impressive.

Like my yellow highlight color, we would do board work with yellow chalk. One glorious day, in the same yellow-chalked-equipped building but a different classroom, a history professor of mine walked into class a few minutes late, picked up a piece of chalk, snarled at it, threw it into the wall across the room whereupon it dissolved into sharp, white bows of dust. He swung around and proclaimed, “This is ridiculous. I can’t work with white chalk.” He then stalked out of the classroom. This 30-second whipsaw left us temporarily stunned. He never came back that day. We waited for ten minutes, and then left. I knew he was gone as soon as the chalk exploded into dust.

Wittgenstein: What a mathematician gives you is a model which can then be used for certain purposes.

What is the relationship between trying to solve it and solving it? How would it be intelligible to say, “He looked for it and then found it”? Isn’t it absurd to say that?

Turing: Is it not at all absurd. It is like “He looked for a white lion” or “a white animal between a lion and a horse”.

Wittgenstein: But it is not like that. The very point of this discussion is to see the great difference…Have you found a white animal if you’ve drawn it? Could I draw the construction of the heptagon before I find it?

Turing: One could explain how to recognize the construction of the heptagon.

Wittgenstein: Yes, but that is very different from the description of a white lion. In the case of the white lion you can say what it will be like when you’ve found it. But not so in the case of the heptagon…The result of one’s search for the construction is that one finds that the question is meaningless.

Isn’t it queer–you look for something by drawing things. What the hell? You’re not looking for something.

I knew my way to Alice. I knew where to find her. I walked across the campus that night writing a love plan in my head, a map across her body to follow later. It wouldn’t be long. She was working late hours in the particle accelerator, studying minute bodies, pushing them together in collisions of unusual force and cataloging the results. I knew I’d find her there. I could see the swell of the cyclotron on the scrubby, sun-bleached hill as I waked the path to its tucked-away entrance. I was minutes away.

Unlike the physicists, my workday was over. My department couldn’t pretend it was on the verge of something epochal. When the sun set we freed our graduate students to scatter to movie theatres, bowling alleys, pizza parlors. What hurry? We were studying local phenomena, recent affairs. The physicists were describing the beginning, so they rushed to describe it or bring about the end.

As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem

This is also a legacy that Mr. [Martin] Gardner leaves to generations of researchers, teachers and entertainers: don’t try to understand the whole world at once. Take only a small part of it. Or better yet: invent your own universe in which there are very few elements and very few rules — a game, a puzzle, a theory. These circumscribed and artificial worlds are like sheets of paper subject to the rules of folding, yet they can yield remarkable results having almost uncanny power.

Regarding such uncomfortable arrangements, there’s a vague twist in the belief of the South Africans in both the witch doctor’s spells and in technology’s saving power. I suppose my dismissal of their perspective says more about my faith in technology than their faith in spells. It’s silly to ask the question of whether science and faith coexist. They do. Just look. Imagining from such an assertion, technology and miracles are equally mysterious, and become less so through intensive study. Neal Stephenson pointed out in one of his books that geeks became priests in the Middle Ages just as naturally as they do hackers now.

Both professions realize that you can’t take it with you. Fie on the materialism of the consumer and the metaphysicist.

There is a science–religion conflict

• Science performs a doxastic job of religion (answers the same questions as religion)
• Who are we
• Where do we come from
• Is there hope?
• Conflict is in naturalism and evolutionary theory (or any other science)
• You cannot sensibly accept both naturalism and evolution
• Naturalism is stronger than atheism. Atheists aren’t necessarily naturalists.
• Exemplary naturalists
• Sagan, Gould, Armstrong, Darwin (later), Dewey, Russell, Dennett, Atkins, Dawkins

The argument

• Cognitive Faculties
• Eg perception, sympathy, induction
• Theists expect cognitive faculties to be mostly reliable
• Aquinas: “In the image of God in virtue of having an intellect…an image that includes an intellect is most able to imitate God…rational creatures attain a representation of that type…He understands, and so do we”
• Is there a problem of reliability for the naturalist who thinks that our cognitive faculties are the result of a blind process of random mutation?
• Dawkins: “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
• Plantinga: Dawkins is wrong
• The ultimate purpose of our cognitive faculties is not true belief, but maximal fitness.
• P. Churchland:
• Natural selection doesn’t care what you believe. It simply penalizes maladaptive behavior with death, and rewards adaptive behavior with survival
• Darwin say a problem here
• Argument from Conditional Probability: P (A / B)
• Argument in Brief: Are our cognitive faculties are Reliable (> 75%) given Naturalism and Evolution
1. P (R / N & E) is low
2. If 1 is true, then someone who believes N & E has a defeater for R.
3. If you have a defeater for R, then you have a defeater for any belief produces by your cognitive faculties, then you have a defeater for all your beliefs
4. IF you have a defeater for all beliefs, you have a defeater for N & E.
5. Therefore, N & E is self-defeating.
• Darwin’s Doubt, Developed
• Behavior & belief are related
• Two possibilities for this relationship
• Semantic Epiphenomenalism (SE)
• Epiphenomenalism: Beliefs don’t cause behavior.
• Semantic E: Belief is a Longstanding neural event with two properties:
  • NP: Electoral-chemical or neural-physiological properties (number, signals, state, etc)
  • Content: Belief of proposition P
• Beliefs cause behavior not by virtue of Content property, but NP property.
• Example from Dremski: Soprano hits high C, glass shatters. Content or meaning of the sound doesn’t matter. Physical properties of the note causes behavior.
• P (R/N & E & SE) is low
• Both Content & NP cause behavior (~SE)
• P (R/N & E & ~SE) is not much higher.
• Regarding SE: Theorem of total probability
• P (R / N & E) = [P (R/N & E & SE) * P (SE / N & E)] + [P (R / N & E & ~SE) * P (~SE / N & E)]
• Example: [.1 * .8] + [.9 * .2] = .26
• Regarding ~SE, here are some analogies
• Suppose we invent God thanks to wish-fulfillment. If wish-fulfillment beliefs are likely false, those beliefs have a defeater.
• Cartesian Evil Genius: if the evil genius causes all my beliefs, those beliefs have a defeater.
• Returning to N & E, those beliefs have a defeater.
• It is irrational to believe N & E.
• If you accept N & E given P (R / N & E) is low, you have a defeater for any belief you may hold.
• So, you have a defeater for N & E.
• Therefore, N & E is irrational.
• Therefore, there is a religion–science conflict: that between Naturalism and Evolution
• One who is torn between Naturalism
• If I accept naturalism, I have good reason to be agnostic about naturalism
• The traditional theist has no reason to disbelieve cognitive faculties produce true belief. If she believes in evolution, then she believes in an intelligent designer.

Questions

• Evolutionists doesn’t care if P is low; “hurray we won the lottery!”
• Any defeater of this type is susceptible to that objection.
• Theists don’t object to arguments that God is highly improbable by saying hurray we won the lottery.
• What about Clarkian occasionalism?
• Occasionalism can only apply to theists.
• If you try to defeat naturalism using Occasionalism, you must appeal beyond theists.
• How do you handle other causes of adaptation (hedonistic, etc).
• Given N, SE is highly probable.
• But then your beliefs are improbable
• As long as you take a materialist position, you are susceptible to this problem, no matter the motivator of adaptation.
• Can naturalists give arguments that our cognitive faculties are reliable?
• How would you do that? You can’t, because any argument presupposes such faculties are reliable.
• “If a man’s honesty were called into question, it would be ridiculous to refer to the man’s word whether he be honest or not. The same absurdity there is in attempting to prove by any kind of reasoning that our reasoning is not fallacious.”—Reid
• On the average and aggregate, our faculties appear to be reliable.
• But that doesn’t help. Sociological investigations don’t confirm anything because my cognitive faculties aren’t reliable.
• Basically, without reliable faculties you fall into solipsism, no matter what “external” confirmation you get.
• Does the acceptance of your argument depend on the P of theism?
• Doesn’t seem to be. It is just a defeater for N & E.
• The P (fine-tuned universe / N & E) is low
• P (fine-tuned / T) is high

[Update]: Gillikan posted his notes to the same lecture early this morning.

Method

• Philosophers like to talk about method
• So do scientists
• It’s admired just as much as guessing

A True Conflict between Religion & Science

• Evolutionary Psychology
• Understand all distinctive features of humans in terms evolutionary origin.
• Art, humor, play, poetry, love, religion, et al are understood in terms of evolution
• “This particular trait arose {suddenly | gradually} by random mutation, it was then found to be adaptive and adopted for further evolution by natural selection”
• Examples
• A bad explanation for religion: As prey, the switch from prey to predator resulted in a celebration. Religion is that celebration.
• Better explanation: Religion is a spandrel of rational thought. Natural selection encouraged the development of natural thought. Attempt to acquire non-existent goods by negotiating with nonexistent supernatural beings. (R. Stark later became a Christian and now teaches at Baylor)
• Michael Ruse: The group with moral intuitions will do better. However, there is no such thing as
• Herbert Simon
• D. S. Wilson: “see if the detailed properties of Calvin’s Church [in Geneva] can be interpreted as adaptation to its environment.” The aims and goals of the Church are provided by evolution.
• Plantiga interjects: I believe that I live in Indiana because that’s what is the case. There’s no goal in my belief. What’s up, Reid.
• Freud: Religion isn’t a dysfunction of cognitive faculties, but those faculties don’t function as to produce true beliefs.
• Plantiga:
• Why do scientists come up with theories incompatible with Christian belief?
• Belief in atheism
• Methodological naturalism
• Science proceeds as if God is not a given
• The data set for a proper scientific theory can’t refer to God or employ what one knows or thinks one knows by way of revelation
• Proper scientific theory can’t refer to God or employ what one knows or thinks one knows by way of revelation
• The background information for a proper theory can’t include propositions entailing the existence of God or employ what one knows or thinks one knows by way of revelation.
• Scripture Scholarship
• Traditional Biblical Commentary
• Tries to explain what the Word of God means.
• Take for granted divine revelation
• Once you figure out what God is saying, God is not required to defend it.
• Historical-Critical Biblical Scholarship
• An Enlightenment project
• Understand the Biblical books from reason
• Does not assume divine revelation
• Proceed with biblical criticism in a scientific manner
• Two ways to be scientific in regard to scripture scholarship
• Troeltschian
• God never does anything specially.
• Duhemian
• Use only evidence or beliefs everyone accepts.
• Defeaters for Christian Belief
• Suppose Christians are committed to a high view of science. Further suppose that science opposes Christian belief. Does that constitute a defeater for Christian beliefs? What should the reaction be?
• No.
• Traditional Christians think they have a source of warranted belief (faith and testimony). Such sources require the defeater to argue that they are wrong.
• Science is already a part of a Christian’s evidence base. So some part of my evidence base says that some other part of my evidence base is unlikely.
• eg the sources of information about you whereabouts are both memory and what people tell you and video surveillance. That these accounts differ does not mean that my belief about where I was is defeated.
• Analytic epistemological logic mumbo-jumbo.

Questions

• Should METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISM be fought in courts?
• The Dover case relied on expert witnesses, philosophers of science, who said that science requires METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISM, and that science make empirically verifiable propositions.
• I am so going to sue somebody and then claim that the defense of a settlement in my favor ruining the defendant is dependent on economics being a science, and that it cannot do so under the Dover case.
• Should Dembski’s quasi-methodological naturalism be accepted?
• Yes. Except that since Christians have a bigger set of beliefs, they should be coming up with explanations that include elements of that larger set.
• Should biblical scholarship be treated the same as Shakespearian scholarship?
• Questions of authorship, diverging accounts, etc do not present a problem to for Christian belief.
• Metaphor of an archer.
• Yes, accept. But Christians should do splience, using the empirical method and Christian beliefs to arrive a explanation that incorporate the elements of their evidence base.
• Okay. Where’s the beef?
• There may not be a difference between science and splience. But there are projects that arise from Christians beliefs, and we should pursue those projects. Atheism produces unique results, so should Christianity.
• Response to methodological naturalism’s use of Occam’s Razor type arguments against Christian’s evidence base.

This is a fascinating area, and one that I am just getting my feet wet in. I’ll take you along for the ride of my education process. Hopefully I’ll convince a few people with greater credentials than I to contribute to the discussion as well. And finally, I hope to draw some connection from Alife back to the regular interests of this blog: law firms, technology, philosophy, and whatever else catches my fancy. Watch this category for continued postings, or subscribe to it via RSS.

Last week I noticed iTunes introduced https://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/ITCSBrowse.woa/wa/Browse?destination=StanfordPublic”>a selection of class lectures from Stanford profs, along with other silly university marketing content. I listened to a discussion on whether philosophy is the handmaiden or queen of the sciences with Peter Godfrey-Smith, guesting from Harvard University. Not a terribly stimulating session, but the potential is there for exposing your pedagogy and advancing your thinking in a way that is both hip and accessible.

Stanford is the first university to take advantage of Apple opening up iTunes for free hosting and distribution of college/university content. Josiah, I know that you were working on something like this for some Covenant faculty. Perhaps a setup like Profcast could assist in getting that off the ground–between Profcast and the new iTunes U, you have the recording, editing, hosting, and distribution of content, close to maximally automated.

Turns out there are two issues. First, Knuth was using an old-and-busted, non-standard DTD that wasn’t even available on the web anymore (which means any new web browser would not be able to guarentee support). One point from Mr. Knuth. Second, the validator folks removed the DTD without notification, when they knew that the DTD would work most of the time and was pretty close to other, standard DTDs. One point from Web Standards.

What did I learn? Standards are not possible at the beginning of something new, but they need to happen, and when they come, make the compliance process as friendly, verbose, and easy as possible.

Kudos to Dare Obsanjo for spotting and blogging this thread.

First Question.

What ever happened to distributed peer-based digital signatures and public keys using webs of trust? I am reading The Code Book, and today at lunch hit the chapter on the development of public-key crypto and the saga of Phil Zimmerman. I remember quite a fuss in the mid-90s about cypherpunks bootstrapping a decentralized trusted-key infrastructure. It seems quite relevant and do-able today. Has that project met demise and failed to get off?

Next question.

Has anybody done thinking on the epistemological criteria of encryption systems? Is there a formulation for knowledge wandering around which includes encryption? The history of crypto has seen a succession of knowledge-claims about the unbreakability of systems, and a matching set of persuasive counter-examples. Is there work in this area of philosophy? Additionally, what is the status of encrypted information? Is it knowledge, and what affect does the encryption state have on status?

Last question.

In day-to-day practice, I’ve supplanted my previous criteria for precise knowledge (being able to ask a good enough question that I can get a useful answer from someone knowledgeable) with the criteria “be able to formulate a Google search query which returns the desired information.” Is that wrong? What is the qualitative difference between the two?

Please answer below, or in trackbacks. I exist to be enlightened by someone other than myself.

Proposed class or classes of copyrighted work(s) to be exempted:
Motion Pictures, Software, Audio Recordings, and Digital Text.
Brief summary of the argument(s) in support of the exemption proposed above:
These classes of works (Motion Pictures, Software, Audio Recordings, and Digital Text) have traditionally been granted copyrights for the purpose of encouraging the public dissemination of the works for the benefit and use of the public by providing a property incentive to the originator for a short period of time. The DMCA ignores this traditional cause of granting a copyright, and moreover establishes crippling restrictions on the aforementioned “benefit and use of the public”. As such, the DMCA’s use should be restricted to the text of the DMCA itself, with the consequence being that any private party which attempts to discern the workings of the DCMA with the intent to apply it in any broader fashion outside of the text of the Act itself would be committing a punishable, criminal action under the DMCA.

Just an idea
I am awaiting a response from the LoC.
Found via Slashdot.

Thank you!

The following information was submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office at 17:35 on 11/3/05. Please print this page for your records.

[I have read the notice of inquiry and acknowledge that my attached submission will be posted on the Copyright Office website.]: Acknowledged

[Name]: Noel Weichbrodt

[Title]: Application Developer

[Organization]:

[Street Address]: The Volunteer Building

[Address Line 2]:

[City]: Chattanooga

[State]: TN

[ZIP]: 37402

[Phone]: 4237858262

[Fax]:

[Submitter's email]: nweichbrodt millermartin com

[Proposed class or classes of copyrighted work(s) to be exempted]: Motion Pictures, Software, Audio Recordings, and Digital Text.

[Brief summary of the argument(s) in support of the exemption proposed above]: These classes of works (Motion Pictures, Software, Audio Recordings, and Digital Text) have traditionally been granted copyrights for the purpose of encouraging the public dissemination of the works for the benefit and use of the public by providing a property incentive to the originator for a short period of time. The DMCA ignores this traditional cause of granting a copyright, and moreover establishes crippling restrictions on the aforementioned “benefit and use of the public”. As such, the DMCA’s use should be restricted to the text of the DMCA itself, with the consequence being that any private party which attempts to discern the workings of the DCMA with the intent to apply it in any broader fashion outside of the text of the Act itself would be committing a punishable, criminal action under the DMCA.

[Attached file]: ExceptionProposal.doc

We’re networking 15 million kids across the globe together.

The poor are defined as those who lack resources. Hey Brazillian street kid: here’s 15,000,000 resources. Hey Honduran farmer kid: here’s a thingy that can be the Farmer’s Almanac, 21-century style. Hey Congolese orphan kid: here’s a way to inform the planet about your situation and story, something that hasn’t been heard in over a hundred years.

This is The Young Ladies Illustrated Primer in real life.

$100 laptops + Social web + 15 million fresh faces? Technology that brings freedom. That’s what I’m talking about.

But models do have their uses, bringing out features that we cannot access IRL. It gets better when the models allow unconstrained real-time interaction with the data they represent. When you can run those models on your laptops, nerd-bliss arrives.

This morning, Mr. Peter Ryer at Boeing nailed just that with his Desktop Tool Suite of flight model software. Want your engineers in the back of the plane to watch a model of the plane as it flies, feed in real time by thousands of sensors on the plane? Yep. They can even move the camera around the airplane as it maneuvers, see the instruments and the pilot’s view, etc.

Recently I’ve read reminders from Elissa and from Andy Crouch: don’t assume the model tells the full story.

When people ask what I do, my past response has been that I am a programmer for a law firm. This is not comprehended well, so I’ve been toying with different ways to describe what I do. A tougher-than-it-looks task. I have settled on the claim that “I write software that is used by a law firm.” This answer reels in more comprehending faces and lighter eyes. What is different between a “programmer” and “writing software”? Well, the latter describes an action while the former is a noun.

Further, there’s the idea that what I do is somewhat orthogonal to what a writer of novels, or short stories, or essays does. I plot, I outline, I adopt the most persuasive line of argument. I practice rhetoric on the computer. Seems like a good heuristic to hang my hat on for most people.

P.S. I dedicate this entry to all those googlers who are hitting this page from the searches for “barely legal”. You know who you are. Go read about sexy primes now.