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Ruth Howard asks Is Critical Thinking a Meme to Counter Memes? (in a post which came to my attention via #CritLit2010). And then she goes on to suggest that some skeptics become inflamed and hyper-sensitive when exposed to allergenic stimuli such as conspiracy theories (or at least that’s how I interpreted her juxtaposition of so many interesting analogies and ideas). I suspect that the biological metaphors are getting mixed here, but I get (and like) the idea that, in their hyper-enthusiasm for debunking some kinds of nonsense, people such as Brian Dunning in his “Here be Dragons” video go overboard to the extent of failing to apply critical thinking to their own position.

Ruth’s comments on Dunning’s video are apt. I was dismayed on seeing it myself at the manipulative presentation, including, for example, the frequent juxtaposition (to sinister sounding music yet!) of items representing real fraud or nonsense with others on which it is only fair to say that the jury is still out.

Discover Magazine is asking for readers to suggest their candidates for the Top Five Lies About Global Warming.

Here are my suggestions:

1. It has recently been proved
(False – it was “proved” in the 19th century by Svante Arrhenius. Yes there were gaps in the “proof”, and some imaginable mechanisms for the climate system to evade it, but they were always far fetched, and foolish to put a high stakes gamble on)
2. Evidence matters
(False – looking for evidentiary proof is like asking for such proof that you will eventually ht the ground after falling off a cliff and arguing about whether the fact that air resistance is reducing your acceleration means that you’ll actually be just fine)
3. We can all make a difference by changing our own lifestyle
(False – it will require universal collective action. So far, just 20% of the world have been “defectors” from abstinence and even with an 80% “participation” rate the strategy of living poor isn’t working)
4. Energy efficiency is the solution
(False – even with 100% efficiecy of all devices, with currently available of foreseeable energy sources there is no way we can continue to do what we do without causing more global warming)
5. Reducing our energy consumption is the solution
(False – Even compulsory mandated limits on travel and other forms of energy consumption would not suffice unless those limits were low enough to reduce us all to a “third world” standard of living. If we lower Western/Northern populations to any acceptable standard of living the effect would be more than offset by what would be necessary to raise all the rest to that same minimum standard.)

So what WILL bring AGW to an end?

Plan A is an immediate compulsory global one-child policy which will halve our population in about 50 years and cut it back to about 2.5 billion by the end of the century,
and if that is considered too draconian there’s always…

Stephen Downes and Jay Hathaway are upbeat about this, but I share the doubts expressed by ‘saltrix’ and ‘Alain’ on Jay’s posting, and by the critics quoted in the NYT’s more recent article. Namely “protecting the internet” won’t mean a damn once there’s a new “differentiated” network on which the anomaly of relatively cheap publication costs for small independent sources can be done away with. At present the internet is supported by the traffic of big and small transmitters, but if the big ones leave it may get squeezed – and if the big corporate entities find it more congenial to ‘competerate’ with one another rather than with the less predictable challenges afforded by upstarts, then squeeze they will.

For some time I have been looking forward to the arrival of WordPress v3 which, among other things, enables easily setting up a separate blog for the CMR website. But to install it I needed my host to run a more recent version of MySQL than I had currently available. It turns out that they could do that, but that the process of transferring my database would be no less complex than taking my hosting business to a new provider whose interface I find more compatible and whose price is a lot less also.

So, after a week or so of email exchanges with webnames.ca (where the staff were always polite and helpful but the interface repeatedly defeated me), interspersed with productive work on a new “free trial” site at dreamhost.com, I have decided to go with the latter. And after one last slight unexpected delay in getting the DNS change recorded it seems that everything is now being served from the new host – including the new blog-of-its-own for CMR and an up-to-date installation of Moodle (into which I have been able to upgrade the old work I was doing re inclusion of editable graphs and dynamic math in quizzes).

The rise of the new agnostics. – By Ron Rosenbaum – Slate Magazine. is a childish rant against the so-called “New Atheists” based on the canard that

Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)

Faced with the fundamental question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually.

I suspect that some people do believe this, but if such a faith has been expressed by even one of those targetted by Rosenbaum then I will be surprised.  So if anyone is still at the level of  “grade-school stuff” it is Rosenbaum rather than those he calls out – but what more can one expect of a “Templeton scholar”?

Commenter ‘Robert Barnes’ expresses this nicely:

Like many religious and philosophical arguments, Rosenbaum creates a straw-man argument by incorrectly claiming that athiests believe something self-evidently silly and then arguing that because they believe this, they are no better than religious fundamentalists.

Christians (and theists) believe that there is a God who is both the creator of the universe and who also takes a personal interest in us: listening to prayers, caring what we do, etc. I describe myself as an Athiest because I am certain that this is wrong. Agnostics are not sure about this.

This does NOT mean that I have blind faith that science will eventually uncover the answer to fundamental questions like “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I doubt that we’ll ever know the answer to these questions. It DOES mean that I don’t seek the answer to these questions in mysticism and supersitition.

Commenter ‘Decorum’ writes:

One final complaint: in a very short article, the author shamelessly claims for himself the characteristics of respectfulness, humility, troublesomeness (in the Thomas Becket sense), intellect and courage. The humility claim is comically false and I take issue with the fourth of these claims too. A little more agnosticism about your own talents would not be remiss, Mr R.

Much more intelligent than what Rosenbaum puts forward himself is what he quotes from Paul Kurtz, (former editor of  The Skeptical Inquirer) who criticized the  “true believer atheists,” whom he called “true unbelievers” for behaving just like religious zealots in Free Inquiry as follows :

Nonetheless, there still lingers among some true unbelievers an unflinching conviction toward atheism—God does not exist, period; they are convinced of that! This kind of dogmatic attitude holds that this and only this is true and that anyone who deviates from it is a fool. This insults a great number of reflective believers.

Commenter ‘Northcroft’ dismisses Rosnebaum’s nonsense as “hot air” and adds:

For what it is worth, I am a Christian atheist – an Anglican one. Anglican Christianity is my tradition, my mythology, but not my belief system.

This “review” by Alex Moskalyuk of Goldstein,  Martinand and Cialdini’s Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive is rather more of a summary athan a review – and by being so it demonstrates both why reading books isn’t necessarily all it’s cut out to be, and why including links in web pages is not a bad idea.

It may be that the book amplifies on how to implement each technique, and if so and if I was interested in actually going into sales then the book might be useful to me. But all I really care about is not getting tricked, and for that the brief summaries provided by Moskalyuk are in most cases all I need to “get the point”. (In fact much of what is published in books these days deserves little more than scanning so I don’t agree with those that complain about the web as encouraging that as opposed to “deeper” reading.)

But in some of the cases where I might be inclined to doubt the “research” quoted, a link to where I could check it out would have been most useful, and for that matter a well designed e-version of the book would probbaly better serve both my needs and those of the wannabe salespeople.

Stephen Downes and Rita Kop are running an online course on  Critical Literacies ( CritLit2010 ). This appears to be partly an experiment in the open-format self-defining student-driven connectivist type of course pioneered over the past couple of years by Downes and George Siemens.

The main focus of the curent course apears to be identifying and discussing a number of basic skills needed to be effective in the modern world. (I say “appears to be” only because I guess it’s in the nature of such a course that the emphasis evolves according to the needs and actions of the participants.)

In its first week the course focused on the topic of ‘Cognition’ and the readings dealt with some ideas related to ‘Critical Thinking’, including its history and struggle towards recognition as an actual independent discipline, as well as some items which should perhaps be included in any Critical Thinking program – namely a look at the process of peer review and various faulty but persistent patterns of mind that can confound our critical faculty (and which are promoted as tools of  “persuasion” in one of the readings – which I expect is being presented to us as a cautionary tale).

In this second week the theme is ‘Change’ – both how to describe it and how to deal with it.  Stephen’s introductory blog posting deals mainly with how we describe change and in fact it would (with some minor edits) be the basis of a good motivational piece for the introduction to a calculus course, and the other proposed readings deal with various skills needed to deal with change – such as the concept of ‘capacity building’

Stephen’s piece in particular makes me wonder about those who are inclined to regret the dominant role of calculus in the undergraduate mathematics curriculum.  For although there are undoubtedly many other important themes in mathematics I do believe that an understanding of the language and concepts of calculus is so important for anyone who wants to have anything useful to say about many of the issues that face us today to public life that it deserves to be listed as a Critical Literacy in its own right.

In fact I think this last point is important enough for me to say it again.

Nicholas Carr’s  ‘Experiments in delinkification’ includes (and depends for its rationale on) the following statement: “People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form”.

But this deserves (needs!) at least a footnote (and a hyperlink would have been much better!).

The phrase “studies show” always sets off alarm bells in my mind because it doesn’t take much cleverness to design a “study” which will “show” just about anything. Regarding the issue in question, it would be easy to make up a document in which links are obstructive, but it seems that Carr has just demonstrated by example that it is equally possible to make one in which the absence of links is even more so (since I will not have been able to “comprehend” his post until I have had a chance to look at the sample documents used in those “studies”).

And when Carr says “The link is . . . a more violent form of a footnote” I agree instead with Crawford Killian who says that ” I increasingly find footnotes in print text to be ‘more violent’: those tiny little superscript numbers tell me the real information is buried in the back of the book, but I’m too lazy to keep flipping back and forth. If I did flip to the back of the book, I’d find a reference to an unobtainable book or article—or to a URL that I would have to painstakingly type in to my computer.”

Killian concludes in the end that “-wherever the hell he wants to put his links. Nicholas Carr is a guy worth knowing”, and that may be true, but I stand by my earlier opinion on the value of this antiweb stuff.

An unfortunate link from Arts&Letters Daily led to this silly article by David B Hart in First Things. The article presents itself as a review of the recently published 50 Voices of Disbelief but after briefly dismissing a number of the contributions to that effort it goes on to become a general polemic against the so-called “New Atheists”. Not that I hold any brief for any of these worthies in particular (in fact I do often find them smug though I seldom agree with the common charge of outright brutish rudeness), but Hart’s article is full of derisive snorting about failings which he does not substantiate (and which I know are often unfairly ascribed).
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Stephen Downes endorses Hillary Clinton’s recent comments on internet freedom. I especially appreciate his reminder that the value of the internet arises from the participation of all of us, both individually as users and contributors of content, and collectively through the publicly funded research which made it all possible

From the MathForum newsletter:
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David Crockett Johnson was perhaps most famous for his children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon. From 1965 until his death in 1975, Crockett Johnson painted over 100 works relating to mathematics and mathematical physics. Of these paintings, eighty are found in the collections of the National Museum of American History. They are presented on this site, with related diagrams from the artist’s library and papers.
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Media Democracy Day Vancouver – November 7, 2009 | Media Democracy Day.

xkcd – A Webcomic – Locke and Demosthenes.

Copyright/ Fair Dealing | DOC | Documentary Organization of Canada

How to Find Your Facebook Status RSS Feed

Speak Out On Copyright is a new forum initiated by Michael Geist to encourage and support responses to the current Canadian consultation process re copyright law revisions.

Reason vs. Faith: the Battle Continues – ChronicleReview.com

Find broken links on your site with Xenu’s Link Sleuth TM
Links for further reading

• Wired article: Rotten
  Links Hamper Learning
• The study: Broken
  Links: Just How Rapidly Do Science Education Hyperlinks Go Extinct?
• Another study: Digital
  libraries and World Wide Web sites and page persistence

At course.downes.ca Stephen Downes is discussing and experimenting with delivery of on-line courses via Serialized RSS.
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