The headline effect

In Canadian print journalism, probably the single most important real estate is the front page of the Saturday Globe and Mail. Today's lead article was about the plight of Pakistani women fleeing the Swat valley. In the print issue, the headline was "Between Fear and Freedom", with a secondary headline stating that "The Taliban have driven almost a million women and children out of their homes in the Swat valley." The article itself, by Stephanie Nolen, describes it differently: "Nearly a million Pakistani women have had to flee ... as the government intensifies a military operation against Islamist militants."

No doubt the agonizing decision to leave behind one's home is made for various reasons. Nolen writes: "The women arrive here with their families, running from Taliban aggression or aerial and ground attacks from the Pakistani military – or both." So why does the headline mention only the Taliban?

In a journal article titled How Bias Shapes the News [pdf], Barbie Zelizer and co-authors noted that "Headlines highlight the main point of the coverage, privileging certain interpretations of an event over others." The importance of headlines has been studied empirically. In a study by Percy Tannenbaum published in 1953 ("The Effects of Headlines on the Interpretation of News Stories", Journalism Quarterly, vol 30: 189-97), students were given a fictitious newspaper story about a homicide trial with different headlines. The slant of the headline was significantly associated with whether students believed the accused to be guilty or not. F. T. Marquez argued (The Journal of Communication, 1980, vol 30: 30-36.) that "Many newspaper readers may read only headlines and thus may form their opinions of the day’s events based on those headlines alone."

As I understand it, newspaper headlines are typically not written by the journalists who write the articles. Jazzed-up headlines may serve to excite interest and sell more newspapers. But they may distort the content of the articles, and—whether consciously or unconsciously—inject ideological bias.

Photos from Banff

Just got back from a trip to Banff, Alberta. Foolishly, I didn't pack a camera! Well, except for my cell phone. So here, in glorious low resolution, are some snaps:

Is everything that can be imagined real?

A couple of days ago, I went to see the Mythic Beasts special exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. It's a fascinating collection of artifacts and stories from around the world.

Now, I have previously written about beasts like unicorns that (probably) don't exist. What about the unicorn's cousin, Pegasus?

How can we talk about Pegasus? To what does the word 'Pegasus' refer? If our answer is, 'Something,' then we seem to believe in mystical entities; if our answer is, 'nothing', then we seem to talk about nothing and what sense can be made of this? Certainly when we said that Pegasus was a mythological winged horse we make sense, and moreover we speak the truth! If we speak the truth, this must be truth about something. So we cannot be speaking of nothing.

The quote—or perhaps it's a paraphrase—is from the Wikipedia entry for philosopher W.V. Quine. In the philosophy of language, this is known as the problem of empty names, and I stumbled on it yesterday by chance. But it reminded me of a curious quote I'd seen at the entrance to the exhibition:

Open-mindedness

Following from my previous post on supernatural explanations for unexplained events, I was delighted to find this entertaining video on the topic of open-mindedness. Seems it's been making the rounds, but if you haven't seen it, it's definitely worth checking out. (For a précis, see the blog mental indigestion.)

Not only is it visually clever, the content is quite good. What's more, the author, who goes by the intriguing moniker Qualia Soup, has produced a bunch of other good videos.

Think it's unthinkable to explain the unexplainable?

Recent years have seen a remarkable rise in the popularity of atheism in the English-speaking world. For example, the proportion of respondents to the U.S. General Social Survey who indicate "no religion" as their religious preference (the green line in the figure to the left) has been steadily climbing for about 15 years.

Along with this rise has come a spate of Does-God-Exist debates. These debates raise plenty of interesting questions, but I wonder if there is more heat than light. Taking an adversarial approach to an omnibus question is a good way to bring up issues, but perhaps a poor way to clarify them.

One thing that does come up in most of these debates is the issue of divine intervention. In a 1995 debate with William Lane Craig, Massimo Pigliucci mentions the kind of God

... that doesn't interfere with the regular everyday life of the world. He may have created the world, but then after that he retired. That kind of God is completely unfalsifiable; science doesn't have anything to do with it, and rationalism doesn't have anything to do with it. There is no way to deny that kind of God.

But, he continues,

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that not many people here actually believe in that kind of God because it's not particularly satisfying. It doesn't do anything for us.

And he moves on to the idea of a God who does intervene in the world.

Early religions provided explanations of mysterious natural phenomena. While those explanations provided meaning as part of a mythic framework, they lacked predictive power. As science gradually developed, the older religious explanations were displaced. As Pigliucci put it,

The more we understand, the less room there seems to be for God to exist. Now if you extrapolate just a little bit, you'll see that you have no reason for God.

William Lane Craig responded:

... even if it were true that God doesn't often intervene in the universe in miraculous ways, that's not incompatible with Christianity. After all, miracles by their nature are relatively rare, and I don't think that God does frequently go around intervening in the universe in miraculous ways.

Which got me wondering about miracles (from the Latin mirari, to wonder) ...

Mirabile dictu!


Glass painting by Faroese artist, Tróndur Patursson, from The Catholic Church, Tórshavn, Føroyar.

It turns out that it's not so easy to define a miracle. According to an article by Jakub Pawlikowski on The history of thinking about miracles in the West,

... the most general characterization of a miracle is an event that causes wonder. As such, it must also be in some way unusual, extraordinary, or contrary to our expectations.

That seems to fit with the "casual usage" referred to by Wikipedia:

... any statistically unlikely but beneficial event, (such as the survival of a natural disaster) or even which regarded as "wonderful" regardless of its likelihood, such as birth. Other miracles might be: survival of a terminal illness, escaping a life threatening situation or 'beating the odds.'

But Pigliucci and Craig were talking about physical miracles, or as Wikipedia puts it, "a perceptible interruption of the laws of nature, such that can be explained by divine intervention".

Now, as I previously discussed, I'm not too keen on the term "the laws of nature". For one thing, I think it obscures the distinction between the way the physical universe really is and the way we model it scientifically. Our models (sometimes called "laws") are just approximations. But suppose the physical universe really is as depicted below:

The vertical axis represents the three spatial dimensions and the horizontal axis represents time. The light colour filling the box represents the way the universe ordinarily works. The bright coloured areas represent miracles, wherein the universe works differently. The blue miracle is quick and localized (Jesus turning water into wine?). The green miracle takes more time and is also localized. The yellow miracle is fairly spread out in both time and space. Finally, the red miracle is quick but has a wide spatial extent (The parting of the Red Sea?).

For the purposes of illustration, I have depicted several miracles, and together they occupy a substantial part of the diagram. But miracles are generally seen as quite exceptional. For example, in the debate, William Lane Craig stated that

... miracles by their nature are relatively rare, and I don't think that God does frequently go around intervening in the universe in miraculous ways.

Note also that I have shown each miracle in a different colour to represent their uniqueness. As far back as Aristotle, it has been recognized that

there is no science of the individual as such (hê d' epistêmê tôn katholou)
History of Philosophy by William Turner.

where (the Wikipedia page on reproducibility notes):

... the word used for individual in Greek had the connotation of the idiosyncratic, or wholly isolated occurrence.

So if a miracle were to repeat, there could be a pattern, rendering it subject to scientific investigation, i.e. not a miracle at all. Bearing this in mind, the definition I shall use is:

A miracle is a physical event that cannot ever be explained in terms of physical patterns.

Scientists generally assume that the universe has certain uniformity properties. Indeed the validity of inductive inference depends on such properties. A universe with miracles is not credible—as Einstein put it, "the Lord is subtle but not malicious". Furthermore, simplicity is prized in science, and affirmed in the principle of Occam's razor. Many scientists see beauty in the simplicity of scientific models, but as I've noted, these models are just approximations. It is conceivable that the universe does feature intractable complexity—such as miracles would entail—and it's just our models that are simple.

Now in a universe like the one in the diagram, people would report miraculous events from time to time. Many of them would simply be unexplained observations from the light-coloured part of the diagram, i.e. where the universe is working as it ordinarily does, but we don't understand it. (As Goethe put it, "Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.") But a very few of them would be observations from the bright-coloured parts of the diagram, i.e. the true miracles. Science would likely progress as in our world, with developing scientific knowledge of the ordinary functioning of the universe. Scientists would treat reports of miraculous events as unexplained anecdotal observations, as they do in our world. The faithful would treat some of the reports of miraculous events as true miracles. Of course they might fail to identify some miracles and falsely identify some ordinary events as miracles.

Consider, however, a case of apparent divine intervention: solar eclipses. The book of Amos (8:9) apparently refers to one:

And on that day,' says the Lord God, `I will make the Sun go down at noon, and darken the Earth in broad daylight.'

This is suspected to be the near-total Assyrian eclipse, dated to 763 BCE. But between 600 and 200 BCE, Babylonian astronomers discovered that these mysterious events could be predicted. Eclipses began to move from the realm of miracles to that of natural patterns.

So the eclipse of Amos may have been a misidentified miracle. But is there a good way to identify miracles? William Lane Craig provides a method for retrospectively identifying a miracle:

You should believe in a miracle, I think, when (1) No naturalistic explanation of the facts is available that plausibly explains the facts, and (2) There is a supernatural explanation suggested in the religio-historical context in which the event occurred.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that by Craig's criteria the eclipse of Amos was not a genuine miracle. However, with reference to the miraculous event at the heart of Christianity, Craig states:

... I certainly think a Christian is within his rights to say, "You know, it looks to me like those men were telling the truth," that the best explanation is that Jesus did rise from the dead. So you can remain agnostic if you want to, but it seems to me that as a historian I'm certainly within my rational rights to say the best explanation is that Jesus rose from the dead.

Reasons to believe in miracles

It seems to me that there are two main reasons to believe in physical miracles. The first is that one's religious faith leads one to do so. The second is that one believes that the evidence is overwhelming that a given event is not just unexplained but unexplainable. Here one would need to have complete trust in any eyewitness reports, and be sure that the eyewitnesses were not deluding themselves, or halucinating.

Reasons not to believe in miracles

I think that there are also two main reasons to not believe in miracles. The first is that science has been tremendously successful. Ancient peoples were surrounded by mysterious natural phenomena whose patterns were difficult to discern. It is not surprising that divine intervention seemed ubiquitous. Today we understand and have learned to manipulate many aspects of our world. Paraphrasing Pigliucci, "The more we understand, the less room there seems to be for miracles."

The second reason to not believe in miracles is the belief that the universe is fundamentally simple. Einstein wrote that "Nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas." Indeed the successes of science—based as it is on inductive inference and principles like Occam's razor—seem to support this. Miracles seem neither simple nor elegant, but more like a kludge.

Regardless of those reasons not to believe in miracles, I believe that we're evolutionarily programmed to look for patterns. In a world full of physical patterns, the capacity for sophisticated pattern recognition is highly adaptive. It's a no-brainer (as it were).

More meaningful miracles?

While the idea of physical miracles poses some challenges to a scientific view of the world, I think that in the end there may be more meaningful miracles to consider. English writer Margaret Storm Jameson wrote that

The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is: a miracle and unrepeatable.

I'd be very interested in other thoughts on the subject of miracles.

The urge to infer

A news item on cbc.ca this week had the following headline: "Need 8 hours of shuteye? Even 6 can cut diabetes danger, study suggests". The first line of the article informs us that:

People who sleep less than six hours a night are nearly five times more likely than longer sleepers to develop a blood-sugar condition that could lead to diabetes, new U.S. research suggests.

A longer Reuters article fills in some details:

Using data from a large, six-year study, they identified 91 people whose blood sugar rose during the study period and compared them to 273 people whose glucose levels remained in the normal range.

They found the short sleepers were far more likely to develop impaired fasting glucose -- a condition that can lead to type 2 diabetes -- during the study period than those who slept six to eight hours.

One might ask any number of questions—for example, how did they measure the number of hours slept—but I want to focus on the interpretation.

The Reuters article accurately stated what was observed:

people in [the] study who slept less than six hours were 4.5 times more likely to develop abnormal blood sugar readings in six years compared with those who slept longer.

This is an example of descriptive statistics: it simply describes what happened.

In contrast, the CBC article refers not to what did happen, but to what will happen (at least as "new U.S. research suggests"). This is a jump from the sample to the population, and into the realm of inferential statistics. Presumably the authors applied valid statistical methodology in making their inferences. Unfortunately, we can't check because their results are not yet published. They were presented this past Wednesday at the American Heart Association's 49th Annual Conference in Florida. I will not comment here on whether it is appropriate for the media to report on results that have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

There is, however, a second inferential leap here. The CBC article suggested that inadequate sleep is "a culprit" in diabetes. Causal inferences like this are notoriously slippery. Could it not be that the development of diabetes can lead to sleep difficulties? Or perhaps there is some unidentified factor that causes both impaired glucose function and sleep difficulties? Reuters reports that the authors adjusted for age, obesity, heart rate, high blood pressure, family history of diabetes and symptoms of depression. But one can imagine any number of other possible factors. Causal inferences are extremely difficult, and at the very least they deserve cautious interpretation.

I believe that inference comes naturally to human beings; indeed this is perhaps our most distinctive evolutionary adaptation. We are programmed to infer. But like other aspects of our evolutionary inheritance, this can sometimes be maladaptive in the modern world. Consider for example the drive to consume calorie-laden goodies, which for most of human history was highly adaptive. Today, the causal chain between such behaviour, obesity, and diabetes is all too evident.

Reason is not enough

I just finished reading Chris Hedges' 2008 book, I Don't Believe in Atheists. The image on the left is from a YouTube video of an interview Hedges gave on CBC's The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos, which gives a pretty good overview his argument. One side point: while the book is a great read, its title is oddly misleading, so pay that no heed.

Hedges argues that both poles of the debate about reason and religion are occupied by fundamentalists, but at one end they are religious while at the other they are atheist. He argues persuasively, but I have some doubts ...

Thesis

Hedges, a distinguished foreign correspondent for various newspapers including the New York Times, wrote the book after debates he had in May 2007 with Sam Harris (author of The End of Faith) and Christopher Hitchens (author of God is Not Great). Hedges terms these two writers "New Atheists" along with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. But what particularly distinguishes Harris and Hitchens is that their political views with respect to the Islamic world are curiously compatible with those of the Christian right. Harris: "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death." (The End of Faith). Hitchens: "But the plain fact is that the believable threat of violence undergirds the Muslim demand for 'respect.'" (Slate)

Hedges' thesis is that the new atheists and religious fundamentalists make the same mistake. They have a utopian belief in the perfectibility of humanity. The difference between them is that atheists hitch their wagons to reason and science while religious fundamentalists rely on faith. But Hedges argues the key point is that they both externalize evil:

Evil, for the Christian fundamentalists and the atheists, is not something within them but an external force to be vanquished. It must be conquered and defeated. This may take violence, even massive acts of violence, but if it leads to a better world, this violence is justified. They have been anointed by reason or God to do battle with this terrible evil. But once evil is seen as being only external, once some human beings are proclaimed more moral than others, repression and murder becomes a regrettable necessity to improve the world. Those infected with the "vice" of evil have to be controlled or exterminated.

On the contrary, asserts Hedges, inside each of us lies what Joseph Conrad called the "heart of darkness":

Human beings are frequently irrational. They are governed by unconscious forces, many of them self-destructive. ... We are bound by our animal natures.

Finally, Hedges argues that "We discard the wisdom of sin at our peril.":

This understanding of innate human corruptibility and human limitations, whether explained by the theologian Augustine or the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, has been humankind's most potent check on utopian visions. It has forced human beings to accept their own myopia and irrationality, to acknowledge that no act, even one defined as moral or virtuous, is free from the taint of self-interest and corruption.

Hence, "We have nothing to fear from those who do or do not believe in God; we have much to fear from those who do not believe in sin."

Now, I'm well disposed towards a lot of what Hedges says. I find the islamophobia of Hitchens and Harris to be repugnant. The same goes for Hitchens' promotion of the Iraq war and Harris' equivocation on the legitimacy of torture. They have both helped to prop up the Orwellian "war on terror". I dislike their combative, insulting, condescending styles of debate. And they both seem to lack insight into the meaning of religious belief.

Hedges' thesis has a lot going for it, and for the most part he presents his argument in a cogent way. Above all, I agree with him that absolute certainty is extremely dangerous. But some of his arguments don't sit right with me.

Antithesis

Hedges writes that many atheists believe that

... reason and science, rather than religion, will regulate human conflicts and bring about a paradise. This vision draws its inspiration from the Enlightenment, the European intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that taught that reason and scientific method could be applied to all aspects of human life. This application would lead to progress, human enlightenment and a better world.

Indeed,

The human species, elevated above animals because it possessed the capacity to reason, could break free of its animal nature and, through reason, understand itself and the world. It could make wise and informed decisions for the betterment of humanity.

Hedges seems to agree with Enlightenment thinkers that our "animal nature" is a threat, but does not believe we can "break free" of it. We are "bound by our animal natures", "frequently irrational", and "governed by unconscious forces, many of them self-destructive". He sides with Freud who "warned that our instinctual lusts were stronger than our reasonable interests." Thus reason can be overwhelmed by our animal urges.

Is instinct really so unreasonable?

Like fear, for example? Is it unreasonable to flee from danger? Is it irrational to go out of your way to pursue a romantic possibility? Our basic needs, many of which we share with animals, are not irrational per se, but are instead the starting point of reasoning. Given that I'd like to go on a date with this man or woman, what's my best strategy? If I smell a gas leak, what should I do? Sometimes our instincts lead us to do things which might be labeled irrational, like running into a burning building to save a child. But that hardly seems contemptible.

Reason can lead to many different conclusions, depending on where you start. Deep-seated psychological factors can colour a person's reasoning. For example, strong biases can blind one to contradictory evidence. Perhaps more problematically, even when the evidence one uses has not been selected in a biased fashion, one's moral premises may be distorted. In particular, most of us are constrained (to put it mildly) by personal history and cultural assumptions.

What most worries Hedges, is our aggressive instinct and its connection with war and barbarism. We can understand aggression in the animal world. For example, when a mother Bear feels her cub is threatened, her aggressive response makes sense to us. Human aggression is another matter. Hedges, who has seen the brutality of war first hand—in Central America, Palestine, Bosnia, and elsewhere—is not optimistic. He is again swayed by Freud's argument that, as Hedges understands it,

The lusts for death and destruction are not external. They lurk in all human beings. They cannot be eradicated.

This dark view leads Hedges to some remarkable conclusions:

Pacifists, although they do not fuel the lust for violence, keep alive the myth that the human species can attain a state of moral perfection. This myth feeds the aggressiveness and cruelty of those who demand the use of violence to cleanse the world, to borrow a phrase from George W. Bush, of "the evildoers." The danger is not pacifism or militarism. It is the poisonous belief in human perfectibility, and the failure to accept our own sinfulness, our own limitations and moral corruption. This belief in our innate goodness becomes dangerous in a crisis, a moment when human beings feel threatened. It enlarges our capacity for aggression, violence and mass slaughter.

So pacifists do not "fuel the lust for violence", but they indirectly "feed the aggressiveness and cruelty" of others. Huh? And militarism isn't dangerous?

What I think this reveals is that Hedges is extremely pessimistic about attempts to address structural causes of the world's problems. I do not disagree with him that each of us is morally imperfect. And I share his distrust for utopian projects—though I would strongly argue that pacifism need not be construed as utopian. But I think he's been reading a bit too much Ecclesiastes.

Knowledge about wisdom / wisdom about knowledge

Hedges writes that "We drift toward disaster with the comforting thought that the god of science will intervene on our behalf." I agree that this naive faith in science is misplaced. Indeed I fully agree when Hedges writes:

Knowledge is not wisdom. Knowledge is the domain of scientific and intellectual inquiry. Wisdom goes beyond self-awareness. It permits us to interpret the rational and the nonrational. It is both intellectual and intuitive.

The equation of knowledge and virtue goes back at least to Socrates. And though I have long recognized it as an error, I have trouble shaking it—much to my chagrin. Perhaps it is because I think knowledge and virtue ought to be united. And perhaps it is just this sort of utopian thinking that Hedges is warning us about.