Caused Will?

From an interesting post by the social psychologist John Bargh, on the subject of free will:

So what, then, if one's will is not ‘free' of internal causation? It is still your will and my will and each is unique: a confluence of genetic heritage, early absorption of local cultural norms and values, and particular individual life experiences. After all, one can claim personal ownership of one's will just as much as one claims ownership of one's name, eye color, and birthday, and be as proud of one's will and its products as one is proud of the exploits of great-great-Grandma the pioneer, even though one's ‘free will' played no role in any of these.

Bargh, and many other social psychologists, believe that free will is a "positive illusion" our minds create, in support of "human striving." In reality, Bargh and others argue (relying on some interesting, though I would say hardly conclusive, empirical data), what we perceive as "free will" is actually the result of many unconscious processes that we have little or no conscious control over.

The linked post has links to some interesting discussion and alternative points of view.

"Schrödinger’s Rapist"

I just read an excellent post with that title by Phaedra Starling (via). The post's subtitle is, "a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced." An excerpt:

Now, you want to become acquainted with a woman you see in public. The first thing you need to understand is that women are dealing with a set of challenges and concerns that are strange to you, a man. To begin with, we would rather not be killed or otherwise violently assaulted.

“But wait! I don’t want that, either!”

Well, no. But do you think about it all the time? Is preventing violent assault or murder part of your daily routine, rather than merely something you do when you venture into war zones? Because, for women, it is.

I am continually shocked and horrified by what women go through on a daily, and more often, nightly basis simply to navigate the world without being raped, abducted, or otherwise assaulted simply because they're women. Most of my friends are female, and I've had countless phone conversations during which, as a friend walked down some street at night, was sitting at a bus stop, or was just sitting in a cafe reading a book, she was approached either on foot or by a man in a car and asked if she wants a ride, where she lives (seriously, do they expect someone, male or female, to just tell a strange man where they live?), what her name is, if she lives alone(!), if she wants to go out on a date (usually meaning right then), or if she wants to have sex. Then there are the times when I get calls late at night because a friend is being followed by a strange man, or a strange man won't leave her alone as she walks by herself. One time, I was on the phone with a friend as she walked through a grocery store parking lot when a man walked up to her and asked, "Do you like to get freaky?" I mean, what the hell? Does this ever work for guys? Does a woman ever say to them, "Yes, I would like to have freaky, funky sex with you right now. I live right over here, by myself. Let's go there and get it on?" I can't imagine that ever happens. Or that women ever say yes when a man in a van pulls up to them on a dark street and asks them if they want a ride.

But then, I don't think these men are really looking for women to say yes to any of those queries. More often than not, I suspect, they're scoping out the woman and the situation, looking for vulnerabilities and opportunities for sexual assault and rape. The "yes" is irrelevant.

We will not live in a truly free society until women feel as safe walking down the street alone at night as I do. This would require men learning not only to respect women as human beings, but also understanding the unique difficulties and dangers that women face because so many men are likely to treat them as mere objects. And honestly, I don't have a lot of hope that this will happen anytime soon.

UPDATE: From the comments to the original ""Schrödinger’s Rapist" post:

Interestingly, I’ve been getting more and more comments from men about how these threads prove that if women just talked back and were confident more, instead of being “polite”, the problem would go away.

While I'm not a woman, and therefore can't speak for them, my second hand experience is consistent with this. One of my friends always responds to men who approach her in the ways I described above with a very forceful, "Get out of my fucking face!" or something to that effect. And the men seem to respond to this, usually leaving her space post haste. Sure, they'll occasionally mutter "bitch" under their breath, but better to be called a bitch than to be physically assaulted, right? She does the same thing with men who follow her. She will stop, look at them so that they know that she knows they're there, and if they continue to follow her, she will say something like, "What's your fucking problem?" or "What the hell do you want?" In almost every case they stop following her after that.

My theory is, this wakes the men up to the fact that she is a person, and not simply a moving object, and while I don't think this causes them to respect her in any meaningful sense of the word, it does cause them to respect the fact that she's capable of doing them harm too, with either a swift kick or by letting everyone in the general vicinity know what they're up to. In fact, I've seen her do this in person, and she does it so loudly that everyone within ear shot turns around to see what all the fuss is about. The men often become visibly embarrassed, which seems to disarm them.

My Favorite New Blog

OK, it's not a new blog at all, but I just discovered it, so it's new to me: Old Picture of the Day by PJM. Each day there's a new old picture, as the blog's title suggests. The photos are from the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, and PJM posts pictures from his own collection as well as those that his readers send in. He also has name the mystery person contests, which look fun.

The only negative I've seen is the PJM's and many of his commenters' insistence on calling themselves "southern sympathizers," meaning that they were sympathetic to the "states' rights" cause of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. This pops up in the discussion of many of the Civil War photographs posted on the blog (the post linked in the image above is one example of this). Being from the south, I've met many "southern sympathizers" in my day. They're the sort who insist that slavery was just an unfortunate, small part of the case for southern secession, though it's difficult to tell whether they think it's unfortunate because slavery was morally evil or because it made the Confederacy look like the bad guy of the Civil War. Of course, slavery was the cause of secession. Without slavery, there would have been no Confederate States of America, and no American Civil War. Historical research is pretty much unequivocal on this issue. And as a result of the role of slavery in the Civil War, "states' rights" has become a sort of code word for racism in the south. I don't mean to imply that the blog's author or its commenters are racist, as I know nothing about them personally. I do want to note, however, that they're trading in historical revisionism, and that by calling themselves southern sympathizers, they are associating themselves with the worst sort of southern racists, both in history and today.

Retail Graveyard and the Road From Nowhere

At least twice a month, I take a bus from downtown Austin to Kyle, about 20 miles south of downtown. The bus drops me off at a taqueria with some of the best breakfast tacos I've ever had. I then have to walk about 2 miles to my ultimate destination. I could walk along the frontage road of IH35, but I'm not suicidal, so I cross the interstate and then walk down a hill next to a Dairy Queen and then walk through what can only be described as a retail graveyard. It was once a large shopping center, but all of the stores closed at least a decade ago, and the buildings were torn down. The area is now completely overgrown, except for the streets that went through the shopping center, and is home to all manner of wildlife. In the last three months, I've spotted at least 10 different species of song birds, buzzards, red tailed hawks and another raptor that I don't recognize, mice, feral cats, a rat snake, and one fat western diamondback rattle snake. Here's a picture of a part of the retail graveyard (looking southeast):

In the spring, that entire area was filled with small bushes, each with dozens of little yellow flowers. It was striking.

There's one feature of the graveyard that strikes me as downright surreal. At the south end is a road that appears, seemingly ex nihilo, out of the woods. It is a road from nowhere:


Here is an aerial view, so that you can see that the street really does come from nowhere (the building just south of the bridge is the Dairy Queen). My favorite part is the left turn only lane, which will be useful to the cars that materialize out of the woods and drive down this street. If you can't tell, this second picture (taken looking east) was taken in winter. The woods at the far end are now quite green. I like to walk back there, down a small hill at the end of the road, and sit under the trees while reading. I just have to remember to brush the ants, rollie pollies, and wolf spiders off my legs now and then.

Philosophy of Science, Who Needs It?

This post at Siris, and the post it links to at Pharyngula, reminded me of my first methods course, lo these many years ago. The first week or two of the course were spent on the "philosophy of science" and the "scientific method," including a lot of definitions of important concepts like "fact," "theory," "law," "hypothesis," and "model." After those first two weeks, the only concept we actually used in discussing research methods was "hypothesis," and we used that concept in both a very loose and very specific sense: what you start with when designing an experiment. A hypothesis, which in the beginning of the course had a very exact meaning in relation to those other concepts of the scientific method, suddenly became just a position statement of one sort or another, of some level of exactness, that you then tested with whatever study you were conducting.

Later, when I took a philosophy of science course, we spent a lot of time talking about falsification. This was a word I had heard often in the methods courses I had taken (by this time, I'd taken 2 or 3). First, I learned all about Popper's concept of falsification, and then I learned that falsification had some serious theoretical problems, as the Quine-Duhem thesis had shown. Apparently individual hypotheses couldn't be falsified. This would seemingly pose a problem for all those scientists using the methods I'd learned in my methods course, because those methods were all about falsifying individual hypotheses. That's what those methods do. This was disconcerting to say the least.

Finally, I started working in a lab as an undergraduate research assistant, and talking to the researchers, grad students and faculty, about all of this confusing stuff I had been learning in my methods and philosophy of science courses. From them I learned that actual practicing scientists, by and large, don't know much about philosophy of science (several had never heard of the Quine-Duhem thesis, though they all knew who Popper was). It was at this point that I had an epiphany: scientists just care about doing science, and since it turns out that doing science doesn't require knowing much, if anything, about the philosophy of science, most scientists don't really care about philosophy of science. "So you say we can't falsify individual hypotheses?" a scientist might ask, and when the philosopher of science replies affirmatively, the scientist will say, "Well, acting as though we're trying to falsify individual hypotheses has gotten us pretty far, scientifically, so phooey on you!" The scientist will then conduct his or her next experiment designed to falsify an individual hypothesis.

Which brings me to the question, who needs philosophy of science? Now, I will admit having read some very interesting papers on the philosophy and history of science. They've often helped me to place certain scientific ideas and findings in their historical and theoretical context, particularly when those ideas and findings are in sciences far removed from my own knowledge base (e.g., physics or microbiology). What's more, I've read some interesting papers by philosophers attempting to apply approaches from one science to another. For example, a couple years back I read a paper about the role of causation in physics, and the implications for the role of causation in the social sciences. It was really interesting stuff. I've yet to hear of anyone applying it, in any way whatsoever, to their work in the social sciences, but it was still a fascinating read. But finding something interesting, or learning something about another science (that I probably could have learned by reading a book about that science, but I'm lazy), isn't quite the same as actually being relevant to science or scientists and their work. So I wonder, aside from a few exceptions (Popper's falsification being the obvious one), to what extent does the vast majority of philosophy of science matter to the doing of science? I doubt it matters very much. And if it doesn't really matter to scientists, to whom does it matter?

Austin's Other Bats

Austin is famous for its "Bat Bridge," the Congress Street Bridge over Lady Bird Lake that houses the largest urban bat colony in the world. On any given evening in the summer, you can find hundreds, even thousands of people standing on and around the bridge to watch the nearly 1 million Mexican free-tailed bats leave their roost in a great bat cloud. It's an impressive sight.

But few people are aware that downtown Austin is home to several other, smaller bat colonies. I recently discovered one by complete accident. I was walking at dusk, west on 15th Street between Trinity and San Jacinto (we were coming from Waterloo Park), on the south side of 15th along the 1401 San Jacinto parking garage, when I noticed a bat flying surprisingly low along the side of the garage. Then I saw another bat, and another, both flying really low (I'm 5'10", and they were at about my head level). I took a few more steps, when I suddenly realized that there was a steady stream of bats coming from the parking garage, all flying directly at my head and only swerving away at the last moment. This was initially disorienting, as everywhere I turned I saw another bat or group of bats flying right towards or around my head. So it took me a few seconds to realize that I was standing next to a small bat colony, housed in a one-inch gap between the parking garage's main wall and its façade. The bats had begun leaving for the evening at the very moment I was walking by, and I was just feet away from their exit. After a minute or two I got up the courage to run through the now steady stream of bats, and then watched them flow out for a few more minutes before continuing on.

I've now passed that spot several times just before dusk, and each time I've stopped to listen to the bats chirping. If you look closely, you can even see a few of the bats hanging behind the façade. It's really pretty cool. And in hindsight, I should have known that there were bats living in that spot. I had walked past it dozens of times during the winter (when the bats are in Mexico), and either earlier or later in the day during the summer (when they're sleeping, so I should have noticed the bat guano covering the parking garage's wall, or the smell of guano, familiar to most Austinites, that permeates the entire block.

So if you live in Austin, or are visiting, and you want to see bats up close, head on over to 15th St between Trinity and San Jacinton, on the south side of the street. Below is a picture of the guano covering the wall (you can also see the small gap where the bats exit). If you see this, you'll know you're in the right spot.

Photographic Appeals to Emotion

If you've spent any time around the University of Texas at Austin campus over the last several years, chances are you've seen 18-foot tall photos of aborted fetuses on more than one occasion. These photos are part of an exhibit by anti-abortion groups that periodically pops up at various spots on campus (sometimes off the East Mall, sometimes near the Student Union). It's a very effective exhibit, too. Not in convincing anyone, though it may do that, but in disturbing people. Disgust and horror is often visible on the faces of many of the passers by.

This tactic -- disgusting people with images -- is the purest form of manipulation. Any first year philosophy student taking a logic course will recognize it as an example of the informal fallacy "appeal to emotion," with the argument going something like this: abortion is disgusting, therefore abortion is morally wrong. The fallaciousness of this argument should be obvious, but if it's not, take another example from medicine: open heart surgery is disgusting, therefore open heart surgery is morally wrong.

I bring this up because I find this tactic even more disturbing when people who should know better use it. Anyone who does use photographic appeals to emotion to strengthen their argument should be ashamed of themselves. And they might want to take a closer look at the position they're taking, as well. If you feel the need to resort to manipulation to make your case, chances are you couldn't make it very well without it.