John Tierney writes in his New York Times column:

If I’m serious about keeping my New Year’s resolutions in 2009, should I add another one? Should the to-do list include, “Start going to church”?

This is an awkward question for a heathen to contemplate, but I felt obliged to raise it with Michael McCullough after reading his report in the upcoming issue of the Psychological Bulletin. He and a fellow psychologist at the University of Miami, Brian Willoughby, have reviewed eight decades of research and concluded that religious belief and piety promote self-control.

I doubt that Tierney is seriously considering church attendance as a means of supporting his New Year's resolutions, but it's interesting that he even throws the idea out there. We talked about memes in back-to-back editions of FastForward Radio (here and here) back in September. One of the most important things to remember about these self-reproducing ideas is that it is not their truth content that makes them successful. To give just one example, there is no scientific evidence to support the idea that childhood vaccinations cause autism, and yet look at how successfully that idea has been transmitted all over the world. But I wouldn't suggest that the folks spreading that meme actually believe it to be untrue. Spreading such an idea while knowing it to be false would be an awfully strange thing to do.

Or would it?

Green Santa brings joy to children and helps save the planet.
Does it matter whether he really exists?

After all, isn't buying into (what he believes to be) a false meme exactly what Tierney is suggesting doing, albeit in an offhand and humorous way? Someone taking Tierney's advice would adopt religious belief -- or at least religious practice -- not because he or she believes it to be true, but simply because he or she finds it to be useful. And, in fact, this is one of the great critiques leveled against religion over the centuries, the idea that it has succeeded not because it is true, but because it has (take your pick):

• Helped to keep the masses in line

• Provided meaning and stability to otherwise empty lives

• Served as a focus for organizing economic, social, and artistic activity

• ...and on and on

Tierney is suggesting doing on an individual level what these critics claim that we have done at a societal level -- buy into a set of ideas not because they are true, but because of the many side benefits they provide. The big difference is that it's hard to imagine society as a whole -- or even a large segment of society -- buying into something they know (or even strongly suspect) to be false. People don't necessarily believe in or spread memes because they are true, but by and large they have to believe in them in order to get behind them, right?

Well, maybe not.

Last week, a lot of us engaged in supporting the Santa Claus meme. Parents go out of their way to promote this idea to their children because it is a tradition, because it is meaningful, because it makes Christmas a more joyful time -- choose your reason -- but not because we believe it's true. I'm not criticizing the Santa meme; I enjoy it as much as the next dad. I'm just pointing out that it is, indeed, an example of a false meme spread by people who don't believe in it.

Are there others?

Consider this recent item on Digg Science:

Global Warming: Reasons Why It Might Not Actually Exist

telegraph.co.uk — 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved, according to the Telegraph's Christopher Booker. Sceptics have long argued that there are other explanations for climate change other than man-made CO2 and here we look at some of the arguments put forward by those who believe that global warming is all a hoax.

Okay, disclaimers: I don't think global warming is a hoax. The temperature figures are what they are. However, I'm not ready to put human-caused-climate-change-by-means-of-CO2-emissions right up there with gravity just yet. There are criticisms of the prevailing models and projections, and some of these come from scientists, and, no, not all of those scientists are in the thrall of Big Oil (or the Freemasons or the Trilateral commission, for that matter, but let's keep it on one set of memes at a time.)

Interestingly, climate-change "denialists" are accused of doing the very thing we're talking about, here -- knowingly spreading a false meme that they don't believe in. Are there scientists who are doing that? I kind of doubt it. I'm going to allow that the scientists on both sides are sincere, if tending to be swayed by non-scientific factors such as politics. But obviously scientists aren't the only ones engaged in this discussion. Consider these comments from the Digg item quoted above:

who cares if its real or not, leaving fossil fuels is a good thing.

Just because global warming is a SCAM doesn't mean we should pollute.

who gives a ***** if global warming is real or not..... isn't it extremely important to use green energy sources to keep our air cleaner.. our water cleaner.. and earth happier in general?

I'm not convinced man-made Global Warming is real. But it doesn't really matter. I'd like to live life without polution, where I don't have that ugly brown cloud over my city. I'm all for clean energy. Lets do our best to not pollute.

Personally I believe in Global Warming. But you know what? It DOESN'T MATTER THAT MUCH! With or without global warming the global environment is in a rough enough state that serious action is required global warming or no global warming.

I'm just so sick of these articles saying it's not real, 'nothing to see here.' Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I can't see a disadvantage to erring on the side of caution, and cleaning up our act. I can't see a problem with humans improving how we treat the planet, and this has been a good motivator. People, governments, and thusly corporations are not going to change unless there is motivation.

That last one is fairly close to my own views on the subject, but I have to admit that I'm a lot less comfortable with that position when I look at it in this light. Now, granted, Digg commenters can't be taken as representative of anything other than Digg commenters. And none of them (in the first few dozen, anyway) come right out and say "I believe this idea to be false, but I will support it anyway because of the environmental benefits it provides." Plus, anywhere that discourse gets politicized to this extent, there is another major driver behind both sides of the debate -- the need to have one's own side "win." Whether a proposition is true or false is apparently less important than whether it is useful or not, and even that fact is less important than the overarching consideration of whether it belongs to us or to them.

But still how different are the two following propositions?

X is false, but people should believe X because of the benefits it brings.

We don't know whether X is true or false, but people should believe X because of the benefits it brings.

Erring on the side of caution is all very well, but that is not what we do when we buy into a proposition irrespective of its truth content because belief in that proposition brings about certain benefits. This makes me wonder -- how much of what we believe as a society or as individuals are we bought into not because it is true, but because it is useful? And then how much of what we believe do we believe simply because it belongs to our side?

UPDATE: Just found the following via James Taranto and The Best of the Web Today:

As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God

That's about as straightforward as it gets, isn't it? "X is false," etc. Very interesting.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Dean's World has hosted a spontaneous blogwave over the past few days on the subject of whether the traditional recommended course of diet and exercise is an effective long-term cure for obesity. Like Battlestar Galactica and the question of whether "bible-thumpers" should be considered "true Protestants," this is one of those topics that comes up from time to time on DW: obviously a subject of interest to host Dean Esmay. In arguing that diet and exercise have not been shown to constitute an effective long-term cure for obesity, Dean is challenging mainstream thinking (something that regular readers of his blog know that he likes to do.) Whether I agree with him or not, anyone willing to take on the overwhelming consensus opinion in the face of a large body of established research gets a few points from me for chutzpah if for nothing else.

But here's the rub: in this case, the overwhelming consensus opinion and the body of established research are at odds with one another. Or as Dean likes to put it:

No study has ever shown that human beings can drop more than 5-40 pounds or so of excess weight through diet and exercise alone. Not long-term anyway. Those who can do so are so rare they barely qualify as statistical anomalies.

I added italics to the third sentence because it is an integral part of the argument. If you read the first two sentences on their own, you might take Dean to be saying that it is impossible for an obese person to lose more than 40 pounds of excess weight and keep it off for more than five years, or that no one has ever done so. And, in fact, several commenters and at least one of the co-bloggers at DW have read it that way, and have responded by linking to research that tracks the progress of obese people who have demonstrated that "impossible" level of success.

But Dean isn't arguing that it's impossible. Rather, after reading over the literature, he has found that -- in study after study over the course of the past century -- the number of clinical trial subjects who have kept more than 40 pounds off for a period of five or more years is vanishingly rare. The number that's thrown around on DW is 0.1%, although I haven't seen where Dean specifically raised this number, only where people arguing with him have. So if we can name people who have met the criteria -- Jared comes to mind -- we have only found an example of that 0.1% of the population for whom diet and exercise is an effective long-term obesity cure. Likewise, the participants in the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR) study (linked above) asked to participate if they had already achieved a certain level of long-term weight loss, is just another example of this same selection bias.

It's like "proving" that the lottery is a smart bet because somebody won!

But let's say that the 0.1% number is off by a factor of 10. Could be. In fact, let's say it's off by a factor of 100. I doubt that Dean has misread the literature that severely, but even if he has, diet and exercise has only been shown to be an effective long-term cure for obesity for about 10% of the population -- assuming that dozens of trials performed over many years have produced results representative of the population as a whole.

Just for a moment, set aside the question of why this approach doesn't work. Can we all agree that, for any other condition, a treatment with a 10% success rate would be considered a pretty crappy excuse for a cure?

Continue reading "The Future Is Thin" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Say, did you hear the one about the clever German kid who gave a hand to the hapless, math-challenged American scientists?

A 13-year-old German schoolboy corrected NASA's estimates on the chances of an asteroid colliding with Earth, a German newspaper reported Tuesday, after spotting the boffins had miscalculated.

Chances are you did. It's all over the web. I saw it on both GeekPress and InstaPundit this morning (although Glenn did provide some very important follow-up information) and I note that it was the number one story on Digg Science this morning (having moved down to number three as of this writing.) Rest assured that we will hear about this in the late-night monologues this evening, especially if Leno's staff is tracking the story. And those people, whoever they are, who compose the e-mails that get forwarded to a long line of people which eventually leads to your mother/cousin/former-coworker-who-for-some-reason-keeps-sending-you-stuff, and then finds its way on to you, are working feverishly on several different versions of the story, which you will see many times over the next 15 years or so.

And, hey -- why not? It's a great story. So what if it's wrong...

Widespread media reports claim that a German schoolboy has recalculated the likelihood of a deadly planet-smasher asteroid hitting the Earth, and found the catastrophe is enormously more likely than NASA thought. The boy's sums were said to have been checked by both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), and found to be correct.

There's only one problem with the story: the kid's sums are in fact wrong, NASA's are right, and the ESA swear blind they never said any different. An ESA spokesman in Germany told the Reg this morning: "A small boy did do these calculations, but he made a mistake... NASA's figures are correct."

So why does the original story get so much more attention than the retraction? For one thing, as Glenn points out in his follow-up, sometimes a dog really does bit a man. In fact, most of the time that's the way it happens. And it's just not that interesting. So NASA's math is better than this kid's. Big deal. I think their math was better than mine when I was 13, too.

But I think the difference in interest levels goes beyond the man-bites-dog angle. This story plays into a powerful and cherished meme shared by virtually all the peoples of the world: Americans are stupid*.

Since many of us know (or at least believe) that Americans are, in fact, stupid -- and since NASA has been plagued by some pretty significant gaffes in the past -- maybe this isn't a man-bites-dog story at all. Like any powerful meme, "Americans are stupid" seeks regular confirmation. Once it takes hold, its carriers are alert to any incoming information that might be relevant, and particularly that might add credence to the meme.

Typical Americans, doing their thing

Continue reading "The Meme that Continues to Unite the World" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Following up on Saturday's entry about the meme that united the world, I was struck by this piece (via InstaPundit) on how science plays into the debate over female genital mutilation. The gist of the piece is that some scientists may be fudging (or possibly just misunderstanding) research results to show that female genital mutilation is more likely to be harmful to reproduction than the evidence actually indicates. This "politically correct" interpretation of the data is brought forward in the service of the movement to abolish the practice altogether.

So now we have a new meme, much more serious than "Americans are stupid." We'll call this one "FGM harms reproduction." The linked piece suggests that this meme -- like "Americans are stupid" -- has proponents who are more concerned with its usefulness than its truthfulness. I certainly don't know enough about the research to venture an opinion. And while I'm pretty much in favor of any argument against what I consider to be a cruel and dehumanizing ritual, the notion of skewing scientific findings in the service of a greater cause -- even a really noble cause -- is pretty disturbing.

I noted in my earlier essay that passing memes on primarily because they are useful -- without regard to their truth content -- creates major questions about how much valid information is really making its way into blogs, Digg, Wikipedia, and other venues. Of course, everyone expects that a lot of that information will be subjective, partisan, slanted. But when scientific ideas get sticky because of their political expedience, the threshold of risk gets lowered considerably.

The major critique that has been raised against current research in climate change is that it is mostly political ideas wrapped in scientific language. Then again, maybe the critique is politics disguised as science. It's actually kind of hard to tell, and being socially or politically predisposed to see the issue a certain way only makes it harder.

Philip K. Dick wrote that reality is that which, when we stop believing in it, doesn't go away. We expect science to be one of those factors that helps us gauge reality as we go, and thus -- we hope -- avoid getting knocked on our butts by reality when it becomes unavoidable. Unfortunately, science can't serve two masters. The more we use it to produce expedient or otherwise politically useful findings, the less it will be able to tell us about how things really are.

And, you know, we really need to know how things are.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Why would a nine-year-old Gallup poll suddenly emerge on Digg Science earlier this week as if it were news? This happens on Digg sometimes -- it has happened on this site, too, I must confess -- where a news story is found to be so compelling and so in line with the kinds of things that a particular blogger (or Digger) wants to write about that the enthusiastic blogger (or Digger) goes at it without noticing the date. It then takes an astute commenter to point out the vintage of the news item in question.

The nine-year-old Gallup poll reveals that nearly 20% of Americans believe (or at least believed back then) that the Sun revolves around the Earth. So what makes the story so compelling is that it falls in line with a meme that is (almost) universally loved, to wit:

Americans are stupid.

Now you'll see a lot of variations on this, particularly from our brethren across the pond who are quick to point out that Americans are ignorant fundamentalists, racist louts, provincial rednecks, etc. But the underlying theme of stupidity is always there. However, what makes the "Americans are stupid" meme so effective is that it's beloved not just by Europeans (and to a lesser extent Asians, Africans, and others) but by many if not most Americans!

In fact, I daresay that the Digger who got all enthusiastic upon finding this piece is most likely an American, and certainly many of the frothy commenters who could barely restrain their glee upon reading this news are also Americans. Now these folks might not necessarily agree with the blanket statement that "Americans are stupid." They might prefer "Americans are stupid compared to Europeans," or better yet, "Red-State Americans are stupid," or something like that. But again, the underlying premise remains.

Nor would I suggest that buying into this meme is strictly a blue-state or left-of-center affair. Conservatives need this meme to argue for school choice, or -- if they are of a more paleo variety -- just to argue that the world (especially these here United States) is going to hell in a handbasket.

I have pointed out before that the press and popular media love this meme. It's always good for a provocative headline or a special three-part series during sweeps week. Jay Leno has practically made a sub-career out of exploiting it. And there can be no question that the advertising industry buys into it wholesale -- essentially willing it to be true.

Continue reading "The Meme that United the World" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)

I started writing a response to the spirited debate taking place between Karl and El Jefe in the comments section of my entry earlier this week on Memetic Viruses, when I realized that my own comments were growing into blog-post dimensions. Michael and Karl have gone a couple of rounds now over whether the officials in Boston overreacted to the perceived threat of the LED devices scattered around various locations in the city, or whether there was sufficient precedent to justify the response.

With respect, guys, I think you're both on the wrong track. Debating whether a new perceived threat is similar enough to prior circumstances to justify a particular response misses the point that the most effective terrorist attack to date reflected an instance of disruptive change in terrorist attack methods. Just consider that before 9/11, conventional wisdom had it that passengers and airline crew should cooperate with hijackers.

No, they don't look much like bombs. But then box-cutters don't look much like something you would use to destroy two skyscrapers and kill 3,000 people.

Karl, along with some others who chimed in, seems to be arguing that the authorities in Boston overreacted because they didn't know what they were dealing with. But what choice do they have, post 9/11, when faced with something that could be a threat, even if they don't immediately recognize it as falling into some prior category of defined threat?

As I noted in the earlier entry, there's a memetic aspect to terrorism. One of the memes of the post-9/11 era is that tremendous harm can be caused by seemingly small, almost innocuous objects (e.g., box cutters.) Another is that when we look at any new situation where such a threat may be involved, applying our old categories may not only prove unhelpful, it may expose us to considerably more danger.

I also think it's important to note that this all took place in Boston. I happened to be in the Boston area over the past three days. Catching a ride to the airport yesterday, I remarked to my cab driver that I was surprised by the reaction of the locals; people were considerably more freaked out by this whole thing than I would have expected. It seemed to be all that anybody was talking about around town. He said that, owing to the connection that the city has to the 9/11 attacks, it wasn't surprising at all. Most of us tend to think of 9/11 as something that "happened" in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. But the people of Boston are very much aware of the fact that the two flights that hit the World Trade Center both originated at Logan International Airport. They know that terrorist attacks can be carried out right in their own city; it has happened before.

So, no, I don't think there was a lot of overreacting going on. With the distance and perspective of a couple of days, overreacting would -- in my view -- involve doing something like what I originally suggested, punishing the perpetrators as though they were actual terrorists. That would be excessive, although I have no problem with a stinging punishment being handed out both to Cartoon Network and to the poor schmucks who were doing their bidding. Make examples of them, and discourage a recurrence of this sort of incident.

Would such a punishment curb free speech? I guess if one wants to get one's panties in a twist over the "right" to shout "fire" in a crowded theater, it would.

The irony, here, is that Cartoon Network was trying to do something disruptive and innovative in their marketing of Adult Swim. I'm all for that, and I hope my fellow marketing professionals continue to look for effective ways to get their message out. This isn't a moratorium on disruptive marketing. A message can be innovative, edgy, and even in-your-face without raising public safety concerns. Insisting that free speech not endanger the public is hardly an onerous burden for marketing professionals or for anyone else, nor is it a new one.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

People who play "jokes" such as this in the real world are the equivalent of hackers who unleash viruses in the cyber world:

BOSTON - At least seven suspicious devices planted near bridges and other spots around Boston forced the shutdown of major roads, a bridge and a stretch of the Charles River on Wednesday before authorities concluded the objects were not bombs.

"It's a hoax — and it's not funny," said Gov. Deval Patrick.

To say the least. I think the penalty for this kind of prank should be someting just slightly north of the penalty for actually carrying out a terrorist attack. People who do something like this lend aid to the sickos who would like to plant real bombs (assuming they aren't the same people to begin with). They further the agenda of terrorists by spreading fear. And if they pull enough stunts like this, they give cover to terrorists by making us less likely to take the next bomb threat as seriously as we took this one -- and the one after that even less so.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

InstaPundit gives me the idea that if the West really wants to get the upper hand in its meme war with radical Islam, we need to package our memes with a snappy catch-phrase. Glenn's borrowed tagline...

The one meme to have when you're having more than one

...might work, but here are some alternatives:

From the Land of Sky Blue Waters come the memes refreshing...

Western memes tast great. No, they're less filling. No, they tast great. No, less filling! No, taste great! (On second thought, the argumentative nature of this one might be problematic.)

Religious tolerance -- The King of Memes.

Here's to good friends; tonight is kind of special. The memes we pour must say something more, somehow. So tonight (tonight) let it be Western memes.

Give that meme a blue ribbon.

And we can back all this up by pointing out that Western memes are beechwood aged and made with pure rocky mountain spring and/or artesian well water. Plus, these are the memes that made Milwaukee famous. I mean come on, extremists...

WASSUP???

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Via Metafilter, could something like this work? (There's some potentially objectionable language in there for those who are sensitive to that kind of thing.)

I'm not sure how effective a video like this would really be, but I like where it's going. Increase your own good memes for a better, healthier, more productive you. A sensible idea. I wonder if we don't need something like this on a global scale.

I mean, isn't the War on Terror ultimately a memetic war? The self-replicating extremist Islamic ideas of worldwide Jihad and restoration of the Caliphate are up against the self-replicating Western ideas of political and religious liberty, equality of the sexes, etc. Or, depending on your ideological frame of mind (that is to say, your memes) the self-replicating Western ideas of hegemony and imperialism are up against the self-replicating developing-world ideas of cultural identity and independence.

Which ideas will win out? Those that are morally superior? Probably not. At least not because they're morally superior. Those that are most viable? That's more likely, but it depends on what you mean by "viable." Memetic theory tells us that memes (like the selfish genes of Richard Dawkins' book of the same name) win out based on their ability to reproduce themselves. From a meme standpoint, a typical chain-letter pyramid scam is more viable than, say, a marketing campaign to raise AIDs awareness. Celebrity gossip and urban legends have a lot more going for them memetically than boring (but useful) information about things like safety, nutrition, sound investment strategies, etc.

So from that standpoint, who's got the better memes (going back to that first dichotomy) -- the West with our individual liberty and separation of church and state, or the Islamic extremists with their certainty of glorious victory and paradise for the heroic martyrs? Both sets of ideas are pretty compelling and have an excellent record of reproducing themselves. A problem for the West is that some of our memes have evolved variations at odds with the original ideas. Tolerance of individuals -- which is essential to guaranteeing individual liberty and dignity -- has evolved into tolerance of cultures -- which perversely means not speaking out against societies that deny individual liberty and dignity to their citizens. This is how supporters of feminism, gay rights, and religious diversity can sometimes find themselves unable to criticize (or worse yet, effectively "on the same side" as) radical Islamists who want to create a society in which people who care about those issues would be permanently silenced (interesting reading here, here, and here).

From a memetic standpoint, this could be disastrous. If it isn't careful, the tolerance meme is going to reproduce
itself out of existence. Meanwhile, in the Islamic world, amongst the large majority of believers who are neither terrorists nor extremists, there are well-established self-replicating ideas in place about how Muslims ought to stick together and never oppose other Muslims. So while the Western meme-set is evolving antidotes to itself, the extremist Islamic meme-set is free to grow unhindered.

Ultimately, the fact that the West is militarily superior might not matter that much. Our memes can lose to their memes if theirs spread to us and we begin to reproduce them ourselves (which seems extremely unlikely on a large scale, although there have been fictional attempts to portray such a world) or if ours continue to evolve away from being in opposition to theirs, which is what has happened to some extent with the tolerance meme.

Of course, there are many different ways this conflict of memes could be resolved. The cultural tolerance meme is an active variation, but it isn't the only one out there, and it's in competition with other views. And the side with the best weapons could win out memetically simply by eliminating enough of the enemy to make sure that there are few if any left to reproduce their memes -- think of it as an apocalyptic version of Taranto's Roe Effect.

Another possible resolution to the meme war involves what Jerry Pournelle calls our cultural weapons of mass destruction. The thinking there is that Western popular culture contains even more potent memes than extremist ideology. We know that our popular culture contains more potent memes than our own ideologies, which is why more people tune into Desperate Housewives than read PowerLine and Daily KOS combined. In Pournelle's model, Western pop culture can act as a kind of Trojan horse, bringing less viscerally exciting ideas like individual liberty along for the ride with all the flash and sex.

Western television, movies, and pop music then become a sort of global version of the video we started with -- a tool for reprogramming its consumers with beneficial memes. Again, I don't know if it could work, but it sure sounds like a better choice than the alternatives.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)