DNA, over at mindbleed, points to a conversation between Chomsky and Trivers about (self-)deception, politics, and sociology. Here is a video of that conversation:

I love the fact that one can do experiments to test such ideas. Trivers talks about a few such experiments (towards the end of the conversation.) How I didn’t go into sociology, I don’t know.

(My) transcript of K.C.Cole’s latest perspective:

How do we know what we know? In science, that’s always a central question, which is why it surprises me that there isn’t more of “how do we know?” in the so called debate over evolution. Human evolution is pretty disturbing, of course; embarrasing parents are hard enough to deal with — who wants fish, fungi, and slime-molds stinking up the family tree. It doesn’t help that our whole existence seems to be an accident — the end result of a long chain of small changes, brought about purely by chance. Stray cosmic rays tweaking the DNA of ancient critters, in ways that made them better at hiding, or eating, or getting about, and therefore having more offspring. This process even produced the big brains and loud mouths that let us argue -incessantly, it seems- over how it all came to be. “A likely story,” some of you were saying, how do I know it’s true? In the same way I know, the person sitting next to me on the bus isn’t a giant banana — not just because he doesn’t look like a banana, but because he doesn’t smell like a banana, or sound like a banana, or act like a banana; and no one else on the bus thinks he’s a banana either. In other words, I have multiple lines of evidence, and all of them agree. The other people on the bus are conducting the same experiment, and they agree too. It’s the same reason I believe an even more unlikely creation saga, the big bang; no one was around to see the universe explode into being some 13 billion years ago, yet the theory is widely accepted, because so many different lines of evidence clearly point in the same direction; the shape of the universe, the motions of the galaxies, the composition of matter. And so it is with evolution: it’s not just the story of ever-increasing complexity written in the fossil record; it’s the way wings and eyes have evolved in different places, over and over again; the way devevloping embryos of rabbits and humans look virtually the same; we grow tails and gill-slits for heaven’sakes; the way our genes match-up; more than 99% the same with chimps, 50% with fungi; we even see evolution in action right infront of our noses, if we didn’t , we wouldn’t be worried about drug-resistant strains of bacteria, not to mention bird-flu. That’s why even the most devoutly religious scientist takes evolution on evidence, not on faith. Ignoring evidence can get you into trouble; you just might find yoruself sitting on the bus, someday, chatting up a banana.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.

This is the opening paragraph of an essay titled “On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt; Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University, which was written back in 1985, and most recently (Jan 2005) published by Princeton Press as a book.

If you want to know more, check out Prof Frankfurt’s appearance on the daily show, where I -incidently- first heard about the book; or his Princeton Press interview. (A quick google search will link to other videos including lectures on love and ethics.)

The book is a quick and fascinating read, and rings appropriate and true. Mostly, it is about the distinguishing charactersitics of bullshit, and how it’s different from humbug and lying. It also touches upon the dangers of bullshit, before ending with an attempt to answer the question: “Why is there so much bullshit?” (– almost every word in it is worth quoting, but let me only quote this last part:)

The contemporary peoliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These “antirealistic” doctorines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.
But it is proposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at alll without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgement that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not perculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial — notoriously less stable and less inherent than the nature of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

This digs deep, and potentially renders most of my words and deeds under the umbrella of bullshit — not that otherwise was ever implied. Now that that’s recognized, I have no desire to say anymore, so expect this silence to last for sometime, maybe ever — even this implication of concern for the truth might be labelled as bullshit.

Yes, Marcus, this confirms it; it’s all bullshit anyways.

Update:
Ok, so maybe that was more than a tad overly melodramatic. What can I say, it was late at night, and I had had a difficult day, which amplified the resonance of certain ideas from the book with certain feelings I’ve been toying with. Plus, you have to remember that (if we have learned anything from Cosmo Kramer is that) 94% of our communication is nonverbal; i.e. I’m only using 6% of my skills here. See.

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don’t have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions”
— Seth Lloyd; Nature 430, 971 (26 August 2004)

Much have been written about the second law of thermodynamics in the last hundred and fifty some years; from its relation to the arrow of time, to the expansion of the universe, gravity, entropy, order and disorder, quantum mechanics, chemical reactions and lots more — not the least controversial of which is the recent rhetoric about its connection to biological evolution and creationism. Some people even went as far as dubbing it: “The … most powerful, most general idea in all of science.” (I am not going to treat any of these connections in this post, but feel free to ask for references. It should be relatively easy to find information about any of the aforementioned topics — a good place to start is the Wikipedia entry, which, incidently, is where I found the opening quote.)

What I want to argue in this post however, as the title suggests, is that the second law is ingrained in everyone’s perception of everyday experience — notwithstanding some people’s heedlessness of the labelling and the underlying concepts. Let me illustrate with an example.

Examine this photograph (taken in my kitchen, i.e. on Earth) for a minute:

If you feel that this doesn’t look right, not only would you be correct, but you would also be (maybe unknowingly) invoking two fundamental principles of physics: One, your recognition that this configuration is not a stable configuration of this particular system demonstrates your familiarity with the influence of gravity; and Two, your thinking that this system, left to itself, should’ve evolved to a stable configuration, is an invokation of the second law of thermodynamics — in fact, this is precisely one way to state the second law.

If this doesn’t convince you, think of those videos of broken pots assembling off the floor and then rising in the air, or smoke collecting from a room into a smoker’s mouth, or any video run backwards — how do you recognize that the video is going back in time? My argument is: We are all familiar with The Second Law of Thermodynamics.

(Now, concerning the photo; since there are a bunch of ways this trick could’ve been performed, I left two clues in the photograph as to which trick was used.)

This is what we need to expose our kids to.

(photo from reuters, via photos.yahoo, via mostafa)