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In this sports roundtable at The Atlantic, Patrick Hruby, Jake Simpson, and Hampton Stevens discuss their reactions to the prospect of Lance Armstrong’s upcoming interview with Oprah Winfrey, and I must say I’m most closely aligned with Hruby.

The best outcome would be for this to open a real debate about the whole idea of “fair competition” in any arena, and the essential silliness of organized sport of any kind.

Back in the day, it would have been considered ungentlemanly in some circles for a real amateur to even practice his sport before the event, and now we have some individuals selected at a young age and intensively trained with healthy stipends from advertising sponsors so as to enable total devotion to the sport and access to the best available equipment. The silly “rules” about what equipment is “fair” and what is not (eg ruling out certain “unfair” fabrics for swimsuits) only level the playing field among those who can afford the best of what is “legal” and still leave those who can’t at a significant disadvantage.

When it comes to drugs and doping, the “rule” really is simply “don’t get caught”. There is no pretense that the use of substances not yet declared out of bounds is “cheating”; it is considered perfectly acceptable to take drugs which enhance performance by combating a particular medical condition so long as they don’t produce the same test results at performance time as drugs which improve the performance of everyone. There is at present no censure of drugs and doping outside of some arbitrary time frame and the definition of an excluded substance is essentially that it shows up in whatever tests are being applied (even if those tests show positive because of something that would normally be considered a necessary medical intervention).

According to present rules, it would be “fair” to feed a child hormones to enhance future athletic ability so long as there would be no detectable evidence of that treatment at the time of actual performance.

Is it “fair” to subject some children to a distorted life of single-minded pursuit of an athletic (or academic or artistic) objective? or is it unfair to permit the child to choose such a life? even for Mozart, if the lack of such experience would have held him back from reaching his full potential? (But what about one who has the same motivation and apparent early talent but turns out to never reach the same level of mature brilliance?)

So what should Lance Armstrong say? It depends on whether or not he actually lied about what he did and/or about the contents of various test samples he supplied.
If he did lie then he is a liar. But if he did not and if he either had positive results or failed to attend required test sessions (perhaps out of fear that they would show against him) then the worst he is guilty of is a miscalculation. If the rules require attendance which he missed or if he attended and showed positive then it doesn’t matter whether he took a banned substance or something else which produces the same test results. If he broke the rules he loses the trophy but is no more blameworthy than a player who gets a goal disallowed for being offside. There may have once been a world where the player who had scored the offside goal would halt the game and forego the goal on his own initiative if the linesman failed to call it. And if so that would have been a better world than this one. But in the disgusting world of modern organized sport such nobility would only be considered a weakness.

update:Apparently a bunch of slimy hypocritical baseball sportswriters who all looked the other way when it was happening have decided to punish the drug enhanced players of the 90s (but didn’t have the gumption to actually award any of those they claim did not partake!)

See also this, and this

And here’s another comment on the hypocrisy of it all.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ writing at The Atlantic often hits the nail for me (thank you Izabella).

Here he discusses the fact that (contra Django) the sentiment of ex-slaves appears to have been significantly less vengeful than that of those who now feel on their behalf, and this leads me to wonder if there is a general pattern. (This thought may also be motivated to some extent by observing some of my own reaction to the recent Indian bus rape case.)

The righteous indignation that many of us so easily bring up on behalf of wrongs done to others (and the joy we feel in bringing or imagining horrible punishment down on those who have not harmed us directly) may be just the masterbatory exercise of an important component of the brain chemistry that underlies our capacity for altruism, but I wonder how much it shows up in other species which are also on the evolutionary path towards non-selfish morality. Do the monkeys which show anger when shortchanged in the sharing of treats also react on behalf of third parties? and to what extent might a tendency toward such reactions (even at a cost to the individual who has them) serve as an evolutionary advantage to the gene complex which drives it?

It’s no insult to Obama to say that TIME’s “Runner-Up”, Malala Yousafzai would have been a better choice than the boring predictability of giving a second nod to a re-elected president.

Actually if Obama has a second year to own it may be one of the next two if he can actually complete some of his program, and especially if that leads to control of congress in 2014.
But Malala’s introduction as a focus for a moement that could really change the world may well turn out to be the most important individual-related event for a long time.

The Guardian has  jumped on one particular response from Peter Higgs during an interview with a Spanish newspaper in which Higgs criticises Richard Dawkins over anti-religious ‘fundamentalism’

“And exactly what kind of ‘fundamentalism’ is that?” asks Jerry Coyne.

Well actually there are at least three kinds that it could be.

It might be the claim that religion and science are fundamentally incompatible, and/or that all religion is fundamentally in error, and/or that religion is fundamentally evil.

Higgs, like any sane person, can see that some religious positions are incompatible with science; but he can also see that many intellectually respectable people (eg Dyson) claim to have a religious position that is compatible with science, and he is not so dim as to be unable to imagine what such a position might be.

Ironically, the claim that religion and science are fundamentally incompatible often arises from an apparent inability to comprehend any but the most fundamentalist forms of religion, so one might say that a fundamentalist about incompatibility is also a fundamentalist about religion. Those of us who are neither sometimes find this amusing, but more often it is just annoying.

The claim that all religions are fundamentally in error implies either having a definition of religion which involves having to have false beliefs or to have understood all of them well enough to have found false beliefs in all of them.  This kind of fundamentalism again depends on having what I would regard as an unreasonably restrictive  idea of what constitutes religion.

The last kind of anti-religious fundamentalism strikes me as much more plausible than the other two. It is hard to find a real generally acceptable definition of religion, but I think a case could be made that any such definition includes some aspect of delegation of moral authority and it is conceivable that the net effect of such delegation always turns out to be harmful. I could perhaps be an anti-religious fundamentalist myself in this sense, but most of the time without either much conviction or passion. (Dawkins’ objection to the label ‘fundamentalist’ applied to himself correctly distinguishes fundamentalism from passion, but still confuses it with unshakeable belief when in fact it is neither. Fundamentalism actually refers to *what* one thinks, not to how strongly one believes it or how passionately one feels about  it.)

In a recent article in The New Atlantis,  Austin L Hughes addresses a number of instances of scientific hubris, tags them with the popular label “scientism”, and asks:

Is scientism defensible? Is it really true that natural science provides a satisfying and reasonably complete account of everything we see, experience, and seek to understand — of every phenomenon in the universe? And is it true that science is more capable, even singularly capable, of answering the questions that once were addressed by philosophy? This subject is too large to tackle all at once. But by looking briefly at the modern understandings of science and philosophy on which scientism rests, and examining a few case studies of the attempt to supplant philosophy entirely with science, we might get a sense of how the reach of scientism exceeds its grasp.

I actually share Hughes’ view that the claims by some people (including Hawking and Mlodinow) that current cosmological theories theories answer the “why” question are preposterous – but on different grounds, as I see no evidence that the question has any meaning in the first place.

On ethical questions, Hughes correctly distinguishes scientific study of how ethics arose from the inappropriate application of not-properly-established scientific speculation to social engineering and from the silly efforts of Sam Harris to identify the goal of predicting moral decisions with the act of making them. But these are completely different sins, and so the adoption of a common label is inappropriate.

In fact I have always been offended by the term “scientism” ever since it was introduced in the 1960’s, because it seemed designed to sound like the typical position of a scientist (and so, despite pious disclaimers, to taint the latter in the public mind).

If some scientists are sometimes unjustifiably arrogant about the scope of what they have achieved or the potential power of their methods, then that is worth pointing out, but to define science as the search for all discoverable testable truths is not the same as falsely claiming to have found them. 

This story by Joshua Foer about John Quijada, his invented language, Ithkuil, and it’s adoption by a cult-like group in Russia is fascinating on many levels.  Quijada seems much more realistic and modest regarding the significance of his work than others who work at the fringes of “academic respectability” and is charmingly torn between pride and puzzlement at its achieving a devoted following half a world away.

Watch this and sign the petition.

It has been obvious for decades (and given the history of alcohol prohibition it was obvious before the whole thing started) that the insane war on drugs was causing more harm than the use of those drugs ever could.

But while Nixon and Reagan were clearly the primary villains it’s also clear that there is something sick in the culture of the USA that wants to keep this thing going and is so strong as to have rolled back the legalization progress of the 70s.

I don’t know if it’s some kind of informal conspiracy between those who benefit from it, like the cartels, the goverment or even the rehab centers like Alcohol treatment Ohio (which by the way is a good one because of the amenities they have and their prices); the drug cartels whose income depends on artificial restriction of supply and the law enforcers whose jobs and sense of self worth are based on maintaining that restriction, or just some kind of punitive element of the national character (the malicious smile on the face of Bush I declaring his will to build enough prisons to house everyone turned my stomach), but there’s definitely some powerful forces behind it.

So I’m not getting my hopes up too much on the basis of just two states thinking decriminalization now when there were more before.

But it’s definitely worth a try, so sign the petition and let’s hope that this time the tide will really turn.

For once I find myself agreeing with Briggs!

His post on the debate between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig (neither of whom I really cared to hear more from) prompted me to actually watch it – and I did find it more interesting than I had expected.

The debate question was: Are the foundations of moral values natural or supernatural?
Craig went first and identified two main questions paraphrased by Briggs as follows:

1. Accepting classical God of theism exists, is morality objective (i.e. absolute)?
2. Accepting classical God of theism does not exist, is morality objective (i.e. absolute)?

Craig then asserted that the answer to #1 is yes and to #2 is no and that this means that if moral values exist they must come from his “God”.

Harris, of course focused on #2 with his claim that maximizing “total well-being of conscious entities” provides a non-supernatural definition of what is good. But, aside from being so ill-defined as to be almost useless, this begs the question by declaring what is good rather than saying what makes it good (which in my opinion is just the fact that most humans feel right about it). Science may “determine” values in same sense of finding what they are that is meant when we talk of determining the orbit of Mercury, but it doesn’t serve to determine them in the sense of making them what they are any more than our study of gravity causes the orbit to precess in the way it apparently does.

Craig (and Briggs) excoriate Harris for not addressing #1, but that is silly. Of course the answer to #1 is ‘Yes’, but that is not interesting because the definition of the classical God of theism includes being the unique source of absolute objective morality which makes the ‘yes’ answer no more than a tautology. So I can’t blame Harris for not “answering” that question.

It is only #2 that is at all interesting because it raises a substantive question – namely “is there any *other* possible source of absolute objective morality than the classical God of theism?” Here, I see no logical reason why not. Perhaps some other god *does* exist with different values for example, and I am not convinced that there is no possible atheistic alternative. But I think Harris does a poor job of undermining Hume and I do agree with Craig that in the absence of *any* god there is as yet no convincingly argued case for absolute objective morality.

It is ironic, though, to see Craig accuse Harris of distorting the question into a tautology by defining values in terms of well-being of conscious entities when he himself makes so much of the tautological half of his own argument and also is guilty of distorting the question by inserting the words “absolute” and “objective” into the wording of the resolution. I stand with Briggs’ commenter Luis Diaz that it is possible to make forceful and effective moral judgements without any need to label them as absolute and objective and I generally see such claims as demonstrating the insecurity of one who “doth protest too much”.

And at the risk of distorting the question myself, let me add that the resolution can easily be resolved in favour of the “natural” if one takes (as I do) the definition of nature as including everything that exists.

Dying Federal Prisoners Rarely Granted ‘Compassionate Release,’ Study Finds | ThinkProgress.

The overall statistics may or may not be justified and in any case may not be attributable to one person, but to overrule both the regional director and the plea of the sentencing judge in that Mahoney case was beyond the pale.

Life’s real value « The Philosophical Primate.

Since I see no external source of value in the world, I do have to consider value as something assigned by humans rather than existing independent of human opinions. And I see its purpose as to provide a lever for influencing the behaviour of humans (including myself) in such a way as to contributes to a state of affairs that all appropriately enlightened humans consider “good”.
But since I am unable to find a well defined concept of overall benefit to maximize over all possible options according to the utilitarian prescription, I have to assign value on some other less computable basis. (And I also have to accept that others may assign value differently and that my own assignments of even relative value may not be consistent over time.)
Assuming (as I do) that the “value” of something is due to the extent to which expecting people to protect it contributes to a state of affairs that all appropriately enlightened humans consider “good”, it seems to me that there may be some value in a mindless human life because having a knee-jerk protective reaction on the basis of life itself may be useful in contexts where an attempt to compute some kind of aggregate utility would either cause undue delay and/or might even end up in a some kind of infinite loop.

By this I mean that encouraging a respect for all human life – even the mindless kind – may lead to better action in situations of uncertainty (such as when the mindfulness of an individual is not apparent and we have every reason short of absolute certainty to believe that there is no mind involved). Yes, it amounts to relying on ethical “gut reactions” as a heuristic short-cut in moral thought, but I don’t really believe that we have any other option.

Of course even the utilitarian might also see value in protecting mindless human life in order to avoid the distress that abandoning it might cause to mindful beings who have an emotional attachment to that mindless one. My child’s doll may feel no pain itself but it’s preservation has value to the extent that its destruction would cause her pain. Similarly, a fetus whose existence has been advertised may have value as a result of the emotional attachment of complete strangers even if that attachment has no rational basis. We may well judge that value to be negligible in comparison with that of respecting the mother’s wishes but it exists nonetheless.

Robert Reich is right about this and if Obama screws it up I’ll move to Canada and never vote for him again.

Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic has what seems at first like a good idea. But what percentage of UN reps would endorse the principle that every person has the right to voting citizenship in some state?

As a number of people have pointed out, the US’s fiscal “cliff” is no such thing. The ending of the Bush tax cuts on Dec 31 might perhaps slow down the recovery a bit and require budget rollbacks in a number of areas, but only until a suitable alternative plan is put in place. It might be preferable to have that plan in place ahead of time, but the impact of not doing so would only be proportional to the length of time between Dec 31 and the establishment of a revised system of tax cuts.

Is anything more important than this?

Robert Wright has a thoughtful response to those who refuse to support the “lesser evil” in an election.

An election is not the same as an opinion poll. It is where an actual decision gets made, and failure to select the least offensive winnable option is completely foolish unless it substantially increases the chances of a better option becoming electable in the near future. Opinion polls do provide a way of gauging the electability of various candidates and it may be important not to hide disapproval of actions and positions that we find offensive both to “send a message” and to show support for the preferred candidate in the hope that seeing such support will encourage others. But using the election itself to “send a message” of non-support to the lesser evil just has the cost of ceding the victory to an even worse alternative and so doing real (and possibly irreversible) harm for the duration of the upcoming mandate.

Links are provided in a NYTimes article by Nicholas Kristof.

Nothing is more important for global security and general decency at this time than to increase the education and financial independence of girls and women.

‘In VP Debate:Ryan Told 24 Myths In 40 Minutes’ (cf ThinkProgress).

But it did become apparent in that debate that there is just one clear issue that separates the slates in this election – namely whether to slash the future retirement and medical benefits of the young in order to avoid making the rich now pay their fair share of taxes. Ryan repeatedly alluded to protecting the SocialSecurity and Medicare benefits of those now over 50 by imposing progressively deeper cuts on the future benefits of those now in their 40’s and younger. If this doesn’t bring out the youth vote I don’t know what will!!!

(Well I suppose there is one thing. The cavalier attitude of Romney/Ryan towards threats of war might be taken seriously by some of those who would be put in harm’s way – even if they are too disinterested or noble to object to their old age comfort being sacrificed to protect the richest of their parents generation.)

A couple of Calgary Math Ed students have announced on LinkedIn that they are starting a Concept Study of Fractions.

This is a good idea as the topic is often challenging for students and I suspect that one reason lies in its language.
“A fraction is part of a whole” is consistent with the use in chemistry and with the concept of “proper fraction” sometimes introduced in math classes. Some would interpret “fraction” as equivalent to “ratio” (including ratios of irrationals) but others restrict to ratios of integers and some of these would include 3/2 as a fraction but not 6/3 (with the idea that a fraction is a rational number that is not an integer). And yet others would deny that a fraction is a number at all – with the word “fraction” referring to a way of naming a number rather than the number itself.

The difficulty of a not insignificant jump in the understanding of quantity is compounded by seeing all these various usages at the same time.

(and not even just from different sources – many teachers are themselves confused enough to keep switching from one to another in the course of essentially the same discussion)

On the other hand the desire for precision can lead to an apparent arbitrariness which is also off-putting to students. So I suspect that another major problem is the fact that some teachers, in their justified zeal to emphasize the need for precise definitions, often fail to emphasize the equally important issue of *scope* of a definition.

Transcript looks good except for one unfortunate adjective. It’s a pity that the president of a nation founded on the principle of separation of church and state cannot name the state of Israel without identifying its established religion.