Tweet This Post

One of my academic advisors used to say that any argument without numbers is a religious one. And we all know how productive they are.

Being a numbers jock and P-Chemist, that statement resonated with me. It still does.

But then I went into business, and for a while my job involved the quantitative prediction of consumer behavior. Entering into the social sciences like that, where there is no ideological bias, just a financial incentive to get the model right, was good for me. It trained me to look at the instrument that was used to derive the numbers. To ask if the questioner was asking the right questions.

So my brain perked up when I saw this article on the decline of newspapers:

Big whoop. After several statistical triple back-flips, we now know that 96 percent of newspaper reading is done in the printed product. That’s like talking about modern transportation by pointing out that 96 percent of buggy drivers use buggy whips. Hello? We switched to cars 100 years ago.

Writing on the Nieman Journalism Lab Web site, Martin Langveld made some valid statistical conclusions about newspaper readership. The problem is that he was asking the wrong questions. It isn’t about newspapers; it’s about news.

Seriously? Dissecting the habits of what pitiful few print readers are left? There’s a journalist that stupid?

Sadly, yes.

That article makes a number of points that have been made on this site, including the strength of the papers ought to be in local coverage, and that we bloggers still get much of our news for commentary from traditional sources.

But back to the numbers. Nothing makes Mark Loundy’s point better than these graphs.

The comments under the graphs are also somewhat interesting. First, the tool who pointed to an editorial shift to the right (the right ?!?!?!?) as a cause for the decline of print, and then pointed out the LA Times hiring of token conservative Jonah Goldberg as a watershed got his logical posterior handed to him when another commenter pointed out that the date of Goldberg’s hiring corresponded with the only uptick in readership in over 2 decades. Since the numbers promptly slid down again, I can only assume that the new conservative readers attracted by Jonah soon tired of the rest of the paper, and figured that they could read the G-man online.

Second, all the musing over why 2006 was such a significant year when the Internet had been around since the late ’90s was interesting. Huffington Post’s launch somewhere around 2005 was mentioned as a possible catalyst, but one site of marginal news utility does not accelerate a trend as large as the one shown in those graphs.

Long-time readers of this site have been talking about what I call the dog-leg phenomenon for quite a while.

The first things I thought of to drive the downturn were demographic and financial.

As for demographics, if one counts the Boomers as those born after WWII, then 2006 marked the year that the advance wave turned 60. With early retirement, a big chunk of old fogies wedded to dead trees canceled their subscriptions to the big coastal papers and moved to Florida or Arizona. I’d like to see subscription numbers for retirement havens for the same time period to see if there is a slight uptick in subscriptions in those areas.

Financially, I first heard of Craigslist around 2005 or so. Craiglist has done more to undermine the financial stability of newspapers than any other organ. Classified advertising was the backbone of the local paper’s revenue stream in the ’70s and ’80s, and a big part of even the bigger papers’ finances. That is pretty much gone, now.

Any other thoughts as to why 2006 was the “knee” in the curve?

Tweet This Post

My friend Janiece seems to attract the whackos. This time it is the alternative medicine crowd glomming on to an old post – what is it with these people? Neither they nor Wagner can stand having a piece of criticism out on the Net, even an old one. Do they spend all day vanity Googling? I had completely forgotten about Janiece’s post until the crazies showed up again months later.

One of the crazies showed up with “data” from the Gerson Institute, and being the truth seeker that she is, Janiece responded:

I’m not a doctor, but I do understand the scientific method, and this is not a clinical trial or a well constructed study. What I will concede is that the information was interesting enough to me as a layman that I think further study by qualified professionals wouldn’t be uncalled for.

Janiece is quite kind in her willingness to be open minded. This is not a character flaw*, because she also wanted to test the hypothesis provided – this is precisely what internalizing and living the scientific method as an heir of the Enlightenment and citizen of the modern world entails. But then, Janiece is my friend for many reasons, and this is one of them.

I do have a little bit of experience with clinical trial design, however, although (let me be very clear, here) I am not an MD. There are, however, methodological flaws in the study that negate even the glimmer of interest that Janiece detected – ones that do not require a statistician or an MD to find, though I will concede that the layman will need some specialized bits of information to parse the full impact on the claims made by the alt-med whackos.

There are so many red flags for quackery in that article it is hard to know where to begin.

The first problem is with the study design itself, which was a retrospective analysis with historical controls. The authors claim that:

The genesis of this inquiry occurred during a landmark study by the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment [Ref 2] to which one of us (G.H.) was an advisor. In its report, OTA put forward a protocol for best-case reviews based on the premise that, no matter how many patients failed, as few as 10 or 12 cases with objective evidence of tumor response would be enough to propel an investigation by the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

The Ns (number of people in the statistical groups of the study) in that Gerson paper certainly seem to meet this test, but is that really what the OTA meant? Well, no.

Fortunately for us Netizens, Quackwatch has the whole report (and it is a report, not a “landmark study”)on its website:

The basic elements of each case in a best case review would be: 1) documented diagnosis by an appropriate licensed professional, including pathology reports and microscope slides of the tumor; 2) history of prior treatments; 3) length of time between the most recent treatment and the treatment under evaluation; 4) x-ray studies from before and after the treatment under evaluation was administered; and 5) a statement from the physician and the patient saying that no other treatments were administered at the same time as the particular treatment under evaluation.

All of those elements are all missing from the Gerson paper. There is no information at all in the Gerson paper about any other treatments their patients tried before or after initiation of their beand of nutrition therapy. Without this information, the entire article is garbage.

The real scientists who authored the paper understood that their words were going to be twisted:

No doubt this report will be used selectively by individuals wishing to portray various points of view, in support of or in opposition to particular treatments. The reason this is possible is that, almost uniformly, the treatments have not been evaluated using methods appropriate for actually determining whether they are effective. Regrettably, there is no guidance for new patients wanting to know whether these treatments are likely to help them.

The actual design of the study that Janiece was pointed to was particularly singled out by the 1990 OTA report as a problematic design:

For the most part, evidence put forward by individuals identified strongly with particular treatments has been of a type not acceptable to the mainstream medical community, usually because the evidence cannot support the conclusions drawn. A common format is a series of individual case histories, described in narrative. The endpoints are more often than not “longer than expected” survival times, sometimes with claims of tumor regression. In mainstream research, case reports of unexpected outcomes have been useful and do have a place, but they almost never can provide definite evidence of a treatment’s effectiveness.

Why exactly, is this study design problematic?

Except in rare circumstances, because of the heterogeneity of cancer patients’ clinical courses, it is virtually impossible to predict what would have happened to a particular patient if he or she had had no treatment or a different treatment. Groups of patients who have chosen to take a particular treatment cannot be compared retrospectively with other groups of patients, even those with similar disease, to determine the effects of the treatment. The factors that set apart patients who take unconventional treatments from other cancer patients may be related to prognosis (these may be both physical and psychological factors), and the means do not exist currently to confidently “adjust” for these factors in analyses. Examples of retrospective evaluations that have turned out to be wrong are well documented (see, e.g., (146)) as are problems with attempting to evaluate the efficacy of treatment from registries of cancer patients (145), though the problems are not necessarily widely appreciated.

In Chapter 12 of the OTA report, the point is elaborated on at length:

It is tempting to use the records of patients already taking unconventional treatments to try to derive some type of “response rate” or “survival rate” that could be compared with a “standard” rate, thus providing a quantitative estimate of the comparative “efficacy” of a particular treatment. While this approach has some intuitive appeal, it fails because there are no “standard” rates with which to make the comparison. The reason for this is that there is tremendous heterogeneity among cancer patients, even among those who have nominally the same type of cancer. While for most cancers it is possible to identify several important variables, “prognostic factors” (e.g., age, sex, stage of cancer), that are predictive of the likelihood of survival for a group of patients, the heterogeneity reaches beyond easily identifiable factors.

Even more so than the particular patients who are treated at a given hospital, patients who opt for unconventional treatment are strongly self-selected, and as a group, may have very different characteristics from those of the total cancer patient population, some of which may be related to prognosis.

In other words, we know that mental state can affect outcomes, both becuase it increases resolve and perhaps innate cancer-fighting ability, and because really sick people get beaten down. People with enough fight in them to actively seek alternative therapies are probably different from the average pool of patients. As the authors of the OTA report put it in a previous paragraph:

Those of us who have worked over the years with cancer patients have come to respect the vagaries of human biology wherein there are cancer patients who for unclear reasons fare better than we would have expected.

What we have here, is failure to communicate. Proper medical studies have what are known as inclusion and exclusion criteria to ensure that the control and active groups are as closely matched as possible. A retrospective study against a historical control is not able to match those criteria in the reported study to the historical studies it is being compared against.

I surfed on over to clinicaltrials.gov and searched “Oncology” until I found the first drug trial that popped up.

It was this one.

Let’s look at the inclusion / exclusion criteria for that trial:

Eligibility

Ages Eligible for Study: 18 Years and older
Genders Eligible for Study: Both
Accepts Healthy Volunteers: No
Criteria

Inclusion Criteria:

• Histologic or cytologic diagnosis of breast cancer with evidence of metastatic disease. NOTE: Patients with Her-2 positive (3+ by IHC or gene amplification by FISH) are eligible only if they have had prior trastuzumab therapy.
• Must have measurable or non-measurable lesions as defined by the Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors (RECIST).
• Two or fewer prior chemotherapy regimens in any disease setting. NOTE: All adjuvant and neoadjuvant chemotherapy will be considered one regimen. NOTE: Prior hormonal therapy for metastatic disease is allowed.

NOTE: Prior radiation therapy is allowed as long as the irradiated area is not the only source of evaluable disease.
• Age > 18 years at the time of consent.
• Written informed consent and HIPAA authorization for release of personal health information.
• Females of childbearing potential and males must be willing to use an effective method of contraception (hormonal or barrier method of birth control; abstinence) from the time consent is signed until 8 weeks after treatment discontinuation.
• Females of childbearing potential must have a negative pregnancy test within 7 days prior to being registered for protocol therapy.
• Ability to comply with study and/or follow-up procedures.

Exclusion Criteria:

• No prior therapy with bevacizumab, sorafenib or any other known VEGF inhibitors.
• No known hypersensitivity to any component of the study drugs.
• No other forms of cancer therapy including radiation, chemotherapy and hormonal therapy within 21 days prior to being registered for protocol therapy.
• No history or radiologic evidence of CNS metastases including previously treated, resected, or asymptomatic brain lesions or leptominigeal involvement. A head CT or MRI must be obtained within 28 days prior to being registered for protocol therapy.
• No other participation in another clinical drug study within 28 days prior to being registered for protocol therapy.
• No known human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection or chronic Hepatitis B or C
• No major surgical procedure within 28 days prior to being registered for protocol therapy or anticipation of need for major surgical procedure during the course of the study. Placement of a vascular access device and breast biopsy will not be considered major surgery.
• No minor surgical procedure within 7 days prior to being registered for protocol therapy.
• No known history of cerebrovascular disease including TIA, stroke or subarachnoid hemorrhage.
• No known history of ischemic bowel.
• No known history of deep venous thrombosis or pulmonary embolism.
• No history of hypertensive crisis or hypertensive encephalopathy.
• No non-healing wound or fracture.
• No active infection requiring parenteral antibiotics.
• No other hemorrhage/bleeding event ≥ CTCAE grade 3 within 28 days prior to being registered for protocol therapy.

That’s quite a list. That, my friends, is what real science looks like in black and white. Proper studies show entry criteria.

If, for all the reasons I just noted, a retrospective study design is so problematic, and if the OTA recommended a best-case approach, why did the Gerson Institute abandon that technique?

Because we had proposed the original best-case review protocol to OTA, we were eager to construct a best-case review. However, we found OTA’s (and later NCI’s) protocol to have a serious shortcoming when used retrospectively: its focus on only tumor regression. Adequate documentation of tumor regression is unlikely to be collected in most alternative medical practices.

We abandoned the best-case review for the more informative retrospective review. In contrast to the best-case review, the retrospective review describes all patients, including non-responders, giving a more adequate impression of the outcomes of treatment.

Emphasis mine. Because that non-responder language hands the knowledgeable person an industrial sized-clue bat with which to whack that study.

More informative? Not according to the OTA report Hildenbrand was touting when it served his purposes. I think now the average layman can figure out why this dog of a study was published in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, and not in a serious Oncology journal.

But first, a few more questions are begging to be answered. If Gar Hildenbrand actually was the one who proposed the best-case review protocol to the OTA panel, why did he even propose it, given the arguments presented here? And even if those arguments are valid, if they were indeed “eager” to test the protocol on their own methods, the Gerson Institute is located in a Mexican hospital. Why didn’t they go ahead and conduct the best-case review? Are you telling me that they can’t measure tumor progression? Or that they don’t do so as a matter of course? That they don’t measure disease activity as well as survival (another glaring omission in the paper – the disease-free survival statistics)? If so, they’ve got some serious Hippocratic issues with locating a cancer clinic in that setting.

The OTA already addressed the issue of missing data, however:

Clearly, many patients who benefit from cancer treatment —mainstream or unconventional — could not be included in a best case review, because their records would not be sufficient to meet these demands. However, an adequate and convincing review could be based on as few as 10 or 20 successful cases. If a treatment is even moderately successful and has been used for many years, that number meeting the criteria should be available.

So I come to the conclusion that what tumor progression data they have is not very favorable. Why? Well, first of all, they could not come up with the requisite 10 ceases with adequate documentation, or they would have not resorted to the song-and-dance routine with the retrospective analysis.

In point of fact, the Gerson Institute actually committed to a best case review, as documented in the 1990 OTA report:

The Gerson Institute, major unconventional clinics treating U.S. patients in Tijuana, has embarked on such a best case review, however. Results have not been reported, but it could prove to be the first successfully-completed study of its type mounted by an unconventional treatment proponent.

Where is that study? It is not on the Gerson Institute website.

Unfortunately for the Gerson Institute, the MD Anderson Cancer Center has a careful review of their claims.

That best case review was published. In German. In the German journal Current Nutritional Medicine. Hiding much, guys? Why yes:

Lechner P, Kronberger J. Erfahrungen mit dem einsatz der diat-therapie in der chirurgischen onkologie. (Experience with the use of dietary therapy in surgical oncology) Akt.Ernahr-Med. 1990;15:72-78.
Purpose: Survival and disease response

Type of Study: Prospective cohort with matched controls

Methods & Results: Two studies were reported in this article:

Study #1: Patients who had carcinoma of the colon with liver metastasis (n=36) were selected from the General Surgery Department of the authors’ clinic in Austria. Patients were selected for the study if a matched control could be found. Controls were matched on age, sex, localization and stage of tumor. (Duration of diet not stated).

Results: In the diet group the mean survival was 28.6 months. For the control groups it was 16.2 months. (Statistical significance not reported.)

Study #2: Breast cancer. (n= 38) Patients were selected from the General Surgery Department of the authors’ clinic in Austria. Patients were selected for the study if a matched control could be found. Controls were matched on age, sex, localization of tumor, receptor status, menopausal status and type of adjuvant treatment (chemotherapy or radiation). (Duration of diet not stated).

Results: No significant differences were seen in terms of metastases and rates of survival between the two groups.

So, in the first study they do exactly what the OTA told them not to do:

This type of study cannot, except possibly in exceptional cases, provide definite proof of efficacy in terms of life extension, nor any estimate of rate of response to the treatment.

The primary endpoint was supposed to be a case-by-case analysis of tumor regression:

The objective of the best case review is to produce evidence of tumor shrinkage (or, in particular cancers, other accepted objective measures of lessening disease) in a group of selected patients (either current or former), with evidence documenting that the patients had the particular unconventional treatment under study and, as far as possible, that they did not have any other treatments during that time period.

This is not to mention that the statistics were not provided (one long-lived individual landing by random in the active group could skew the mean while the rest of the data indicate no difference between the treatment arms).

The second study in that paper was a flat-out failure.

No wonder this paper does not wind up on the Gerson Institute’s website, while the methodologically incorrect (not flawed, but actually wrong-headed analysis according to the OTA document cited by Hildenbrand) study with the misleading historical comparisons is included.

Finally, well, not finally, but I’m done digging through this particular piece of excrement, we have the issue of non-completers. In point of fact, this is the industrial-sized clue-bat I mentioned above.

The FDA requires companies promoting products with explicit health claims to provide a statistical treatment for drop-outs in their clinical studies. Many volunteer subjects drop out of active arms due to inefficacy. If one were to ignore them and only look at completers, one would get a very favorably skewed view of the efficacy of a treatment. The general methodology used to account for non-completers is called “Last Observation Carried Forward” and as noted in the link, it is seriously biased. Biased against the treatment being studied, in general, because people who drop out often don’t give the treatment a full chance to take effect, given that they are having side effect issues early on in the trial, so they are counted as non-responders**.

In general, clinical trial practice is to bias the design against the treatment in question, and if anything survives that, it meets the Hippocratic criteria for putting something new into a patient’s body.

One area where LOCF does not fulfill the function of raising a high hurdle for treatment effect is in survival studies, because patients lost to follow-up may have died. At the last observation in a survival study, most drop-outs were still alive, unless the treatment is actively and aggressively killing people.

The Gerson study uses 5-year survival as its primary endpoint.

Back to the horse’s mouth:

Over 15 years, from 1975 through July of 1990, 249 patients presented for treatment of melanoma. 53 (21%) are lost to follow-up.

Removing these patients from the failure statistics greatly biases any study in favor of the treatment being studied. Real scientists, real healthcare companies are (rightly) held to a higher standard.

The conservative approach is to treat these patients as dead within 5 years.

The Gerson Institute could obviate these objections by conducting a prospective double-blind clinical trial. They’ve been conducting trials since at least 1987 (assuming the trial published in 1990 took over two years to complete). MD Anderson’s review of the medical literature found:

A total of seven human studies have been identified in the literature as of January 31, 2006. Two were matched control studies15, one was a prospective cohort study16, two were retrospective reviews with historical controls17,18, one was a best case series19 and one was a set of case reports20.

15. Lechner P, Kronberger J. Erfahrungen mit dem einsatz der diat-therapie in der chirurgischen onkologie. Akt.Ernahr-Med 1990;15:72-8.
16. Austin S, Dale EB, DeKadt S. Long term follow-up of cancer patients using Contreras, Hoxsey and Gerson therapies. Journal of Naturopathic Medicine 1994;5(1):74-6.
17. Hildenbrand G, Hildenbrand L. Five year survival rates of melanoma patients treated by diet therapy after the manner of gerson: A retrospective review. Alternative Therapies 1995 Sep;Vol 1(4).
18. Hildenbrand G, Hildenbrand L. Defining the role of diet therapy in complementary cancer management: prevention of recurrence vs. regression of disease. Proceedings of the 1996 Alternative Therapies . Symposium: Creating Integrated Healthcare. January 18-21, 1996 Sandiego, CA.
19. Gerson M. Effects of combined dietary regimens on patients with malignant tumors. Exp Med Surg 1949;7:299-317.
20. Gerson M. Dietary considerations in malignant neoplastic disease. Rev Gastroent 1945;12:419-25.

Note that none of Hildenbrand’s studies have been published in even second tier journals, and two studies in that list date from the 1940s. Now, if you want to base your medical treatment on a study that was state of the art in 1949, go right ahead. As evidenced in the OTA report I (and Hildenbrand) cited, the medical community has bent over backwards to allow a back door into clinical testing for alternative therapies, and the best they can come up with is the crap posted on the Gerson website, which doesn’t even include their best (but still not up to standards) study.

As for me? I conclude that the mainstream medical community isn’t ignoring these studies because of a bias against alternative therapy.

The mainstream medical community is ignoring those studies because they are scientifically useless.

* Having a totally open mind is a character flaw, however, due to the tremendous amount of garbage one’s fellow human beings are willing to toss into the void.

** When proponents of alternative therapies point at low response rates in clinical trials, they forget (or deliberately obfuscate) this treatment of non-responders.

Cross Posted at Refugees From the City with slightly more profanity.

Tweet This Post

I’ll be in Chicago on Wednesday. I don’t entirely know what my schedule will be yet, but anyone interested in getting together for a few beers in the afternoon or evening please leave drop me a line at my gmail account: perestrelka91.

Tweet This Post

Western Europe is currently a shining example of Normalization of Deviance.

Why?

This is why.

In his book Riding Rockets, Astronaut Mike Mullane explained that NASA ignored known risks with the Shuttle because the craft had flown without those risks manifesting themselves in an incident. It is a common feature of humanity. Someone tells you that riding motorcycles without a helmet is dangerous. But you do it once and get away with it. You do it twice. A thousand times. But on the thousand-and-first, someone cuts you off, and you spray your brains all over the landscape, realizing, in your last, painful instants on this Earth, exactly why doctors call people like you “rolling organ stockpiles”.

You normalized the deviance, assuming the odds would never catch up with you.

I was studying Russian in college when a lot of the debate on the trustworthiness of Gorbachev with respect to the gas supply took place. And that was part of an older debate. I clearly remember the arguments against the pipeline:

French, West German and British Firms were largely supported by their respective governments in evading Washington’s demands for an embargo on the shipment of technology for a Soviet natural Gas Pipeline to the West. Nor did they pay much heed to American arguments on the danger of dependence on the USSR for energy supplies.

The problem with such warnings is that the negative consequences are many times removed in time from their cause. When Gorbachev, and then Yeltsin proved relatively benign, never seriously threatening Europe’s newly acquired energy supplies, the talk of threat was dismissed as American jingoism. Now, between the Russian cut offs over price and the Georgian incident, the threat is being re-evaluated. Perhaps too little, too late, as delayed feedback loops often have more severe consequences than immediate cause-and-effect chains.

Individual Russians, such as Gorbachev, may be friends of the West, but Russia herself is not, and will not be until the last vestiges of serfdom are thrown off of that society several generations hence. Russia sees life as a zero sum game because her society has never created much wealth, it has subsisted on selling natural resources. The wealth from those resources is bitterly fought over within Russian society, and the created wealth of the West is viewed with jealousy.

As far back as in 1991, during the coup that ousted Gorby, Europe should have been taking precautions to diversify its future supply. It did not:

The EU currently relies on Russia for a quarter of its total gas supplies. Of the bloc’s 27 member states, seven are almost totally dependent on Russian gas.

Even former Eastern Block countries, where people should have had memories of previous bad experiences with the Russians, fell prey to Normalization of Deviance and wishful thinking.

“It was a huge shock. We thought we had good relations with Russia and that we’d be supplied at all times regardless of what happened between Moscow and Ukraine,” he says.
 
“We thought Russia would protect us.”

How could a resident of country within the former Iron Curtain make such a spectacularly obtuse statement? Some of it has to do with the modern intellectual’s assumption that Europe has outlawed bad behavior, and that the Russians will play nicely in the sandbox because that is what is expected of them.

The other reason is the special history that Bulgaria enjoyed with the USSR.

There is a Soviet / Russian joke about elephants. The nations of Europe decide to celebrate a year of the elephant by publishing a book in each nation. The French, of course, publish a detailed account of the sex life of the elephant. The German book is a dry, but extremely detailed encyclopedia about elephants. The Soviet book proclaims the superiority of the Soviet elephant. The Bulgarian book merely proclaims that the Bulgarian elephant is the best friend of the Soviet elephant (see the middle of the posting here, I have heard the same joke made about Mongolia as well, reflecting their tough position between the Russians and the Chinese).

So one can perhaps forgive a modern Bulgarian intellectual for such a statement, suffering as he does from two major blind spots. But not the rest of the West. As can be seen from the examples of the Shuttle and the helmetless motorcyclist, when the bill for normalizing deviance comes due, the price is often exorbitant.

Tweet This Post

David Foster’s post on the Blatherification of America, specifically based on this post over at Joanne Jacob’s site by guest blogger Diana Senechal, reminded me of my own problems with the American educational system.

I have a daughter in first grade. Although Blatherification is evident in her classroom, it is probably the least of my concerns. I’m a physical chemist by primary training, but I make my living with my MBA in Marketing, so this is not a Snowian Two Cultures disconnect. The No Child Gets Ahead errr… No Child Left Behind standards have had a pernicious effect on education, and nowhere is this more evident than in the phenomenon of curriculum reorganization.

What I mean is that the order of presentation of topics in the curriculum have been changed around since I finished Elementary School in the late 70s. This is a parallel phenomenon to Blatherification in the educational system was recently and forcefully brought to my attention. The primary purpose of this seems to be Baffling Parents With BS. Educators talk about what higher level skills they are passing on to children. Educational charlatans are counting on the fact that parents’ memories of school are somewhat fuzzy in order to pass off topic order shuffling as an improvement in instruction over time. Teachers and administrators often use phrasing such as “we didn’t do this or that so early when I was in school”. Yes. Neither did I. And maybe there was a good reason for that.

Coinciding with this is an over-emphasis on some topics which do not need much repetition for the middle and upper tiers of students. The reason for this, at least in my state, is a total lack of “tracking” before 4th or 5th grade – each classroom has an equal mix of students with abilities running, at least at the beginning of first grade, from literate and numerate, to a bare ability to count and correlate letters with their primary sounds.* Behaviorally, the mix is just as varied.

I would like to illustrate how both of these problems came to a head the other night when I attended an after school meeting to describe the mathematics curriculum. First, a little about the demographics of my town. I live in an area that is not very economically attractive. My company and one other high science concern are the major employers in the region. Most of the highly educated people in the towns surrounding my worksite are from other parts of the country. In fact, many are not from the US altogether.

I noticed about half the audience in the math curriculum meeting were natives of the region from the lower economic strata. Their concern was that their kids were going to fall behind in math because they did not do well in school themselves, especially in math. They were happy for any bone the district was throwing in their direction. The other half were nearly all immigrants, and since I work with many of them, I counted at least 5 other Ph.D.s in science besides myself. The educators had a rough time of it. They were not prepared for this bifurcated distribution of abilities and interests, which pretty much throws into sharp relief my concerns about their lack of tracking of the kids of these very same parents.

Things started off badly from my perspective. The math coordinator for the district began his lecture by talking about how bad rote algorithms were, and how we were not taught when doing long division what each columns (the ones, 10s and hundreds columns) actually represented. Not so fast. I remember clearly writing the numbers 1, 10, and 100 over those columns when first learning long division. I also remember those silly function engine exercises with the drawing of a machine with a crank and a gear for getting across the concepts of simple operators such as the 10s and 100s columns in multiplication and division. I clearly recognized BPWB from the start of the program.

Unfortunately for the teachers at my daughter’s school, I’m the progeny of a 25 year veteran Elementary School teacher. I can spot BPWB a mile away. I remember what and how I was taught in school, in part because I wound up having my own mother as a teacher. We were a rural district without enough funding when we started getting an influx of professionals from DC into the area, swelling school enrolment. As a result, the top layers of classes in 3rd and 4th or 4th and 5th grade were combined into “split grade” classrooms. The administrators made sure that the kids in the split grades classrooms were smart and well-behaved enough so that while the teacher was instructing the other grade, the kids could be counted on to work independently. It was not an ideal situation, but the teachers made it work. My mom made it work. And because I had no choice but to be a good student, I was in my mother’s classroom. For three years straight, because she was also good, and always caught the split classes. Oh sure, we changed teachers for some subjects. But I didn’t catch a break then, because every teacher in the district knew who I was. The fortunate side effect of all this 30 some year later is that I have pretty vivid memories of the classroom.

So the math coordinator pretty much got on my bad side from the start, but I held back my bile for the sake of my daughter’s classroom placement in second grade. The immigrants were muttering about how the old style of teaching was being misrepresented. I leaned over and whispered to my Russian friend that the US wasn’t really that clueless 30 years ago. He said we could not have been in order to get a man on the moon.

The math coordinator was moving blithely on, getting questions about how to help kids study at home from the more educationally clueless in the room. We moved on to multiplication. The curriculum spends a lot of time on graphic representations or actual manupulatives to teach multiplication. You know, where you make a big square or rectangle out of little squares and then count the rows and columns to hammer home the idea of what you are actually doing when you multiply.

I have no problem with this – in fact my daughter and I already do this at home. In the first grade, not the third, though. I certainly remember similar exercises back in my day. However, the school spends half a year doing this kind of prep work. I remember perhaps 2 weeks of that before we got down to facts, times tables, and longer problems. Why spend so much time? NCLB and the State standards do not reward schools for pushing good kids. Once the kid can pass the test, the school is done with them. Any elevation in the school’s scores once the middle and advanced kids can do the basic subject material is determined by how many slower kids can be pushed over the line. Which is fine, as long as the good kids still get pushed. But they don’t. No, in the Responsive Classroom, how you learn is as important as what you learn, and the good kids are expected to go back and help the slow ones. From a societal ROI on educational investment point of view, this is insane. From the point of view of NCLB school grading, it is a perfectly rational strategy.

It does not stop there. They teach a modified method of the traditional multiplication and division algorithms, where each step and “times 10” or “times 100” is explicitly written, and only then does the curriculum go on to the standard algorithms adults use. The math coordinator actually had the gall to stand up there and claim that this promotes mathematical reasoning, and that having three ways to approach a problem type was a good thing. All I could foresee is kids getting confused about which approach to take, mixing the three, and either taking far too long to complete the problem or getting it wrong altogether. In practice, having the kids jump through three hoops lets the school look as if there is progress through the year, while staying on the exact same topic so that the slowest kids finally get it. And one should not worry about the wrong answer from a confused kid, either. Kids get partial credit for setting up the problem. On a third grade multiplication test. Accountability for correct answers has been blunted on these standardized tests. No wonder scores are rising.

By this time the immigrants had had enough and were peppering the coordinator with questions. They contrasted this system with the systems they had used which were good enough to get them a Ph.D. in America, operating in a foreign language. The Principal, who holds an Education Ph.D.** said “why don’t you let the professionals handle the education”. Now I had had enough. I exploded. “That was not an appropriate comment”, I said. Then I thought of my daughter and calmed down again. And we continued on to estimating.

Estimating. It’s on the test, they have to teach it. In my experience a good estimator is made by making someone solve exact problems over and over again until relative magnitudes become second nature. Then, with that knowledge firmly under one’s belt, a person may estimate with confidence. I see no reason why an 8 year old should even try to estimate what $1.95 plus $1.90 is in whole dollars, when the kid is shaky on three-digit addition because of the lack of drill on basic skills under this kind of curriculum.

It turns out my instinct was correct, when I went to peruse the literature these “professionals” should be reading themselves. Young children tend to think logarithmically rather than linearly. They outperform adults on fractional estimation exercises, but somewhere as they mature, due to nurture more than nature, their linear estimation skills get better, to the detriment of their logarithmic skills. So it makes sense not to put linear estimation into the curriculum until children have some practice at linear operations:

Lemaire et al. illustrate that the acquisition of numerical understanding is a long process. The 10-year-olds in their study were just beginning to use computational estimation on multi-digit numbers. To become successful estimators, children seem to require both some underlying computational arithmetic skills (LeFevre, Greenham, & Waheed, 1993) and large enough working memory capacities (Case & Sowder, 1990). Thus, the results of Klein and Bisanz and of Lemaire et al. converge on the conclusion that both experiential and developmental processes are important in children’s acquisition of numeracy skills.

And yet linear estimation is part of the standardized test in 3rd grade in my state. This is clearly a case where the juggling of the traditional order of topics is detrimental to children. But it was pointed out specifically as an advance that teaches higher order thinking skills by the math coordinator.

I left the meeting more convinced than ever that I was going to have to provide most of the opportunities for my kids to practice higher order thinking skills.

Aligned with the out-of-order phenomenon is the ADD teaching methods employed now that textbooks are largely a thing of the past in the lower grades. I watch in frustration as the textbookless classrooms jump from topic to topic in order to cover an impressive number of themes, which bolsters the attempt to appear more rigorous than the education the parents received. The topic jumping is horrible for the younger kids, and unless they receive additional instruction at home, as does my daughter, there is not enough repetition to make facts stick in those little brains.

The science curriculum for this year contained about 6 subjects, one of which I do not think will be covered. The unit on magnets lasted one week, with about 3 lessons on the topic. The students came home with two worksheets, one of which seemed somewhat above their level. At the parent-teacher conference, my daughter’s teacher commented on how well my daughter knew her magnet material.

Of course she did. I knew the topic was coming. We read the Magic School Bus book on magnets over the course of a week in preparation for the school activities. We made a compass from a needle, a cork, and a bowl of water. We made chains of paper clips with different magnets and observed how some magnets are stronger than others. We magnetized things and then demagnetized them by hitting them, discussing how we were making the domains random again. We looked at magnetic fields with iron filings. And we made an electromagnet and talked about how electricity and magnetism are related. I know my daughter retains the information on magnets she learned this year because she did things with them, she read things about them, and we did that over the course of a month. (We re-read the book, too, to catch things we missed the first time). I highly doubt most of her peers remember much, two months after that one-week unit.

I no longer count on the school to properly educate my kids, and I resent the huge amount of time they waste on morning meetings and other fluff. I have given up on the American public educational system. It’s only a matter of time before I seek alternatives.

* I do not buy the argument that kids need to mix with learners of varied abilities at the lower grade levels. I taught college classes with similar distributions of abilities as a TA, with kids who did not know what a logarithm was mixed with kids who had taken calculus in high school. It was an impossible task to give a lesson that served both groups. While it is certainly possible in first grade to teach to such a spread of abilities, it is certainly not an optimal learning environment.

** One of the most useless pieces of paper on the planet. That and $3.50 will get you a small Starbucks in my world. I have a real Ph.D.

Tweet This Post

I have stumbled across a couple of musings on the MSM from different perspectives that throw into sharp relief a lot of the problems with our present media that we regularly discuss on this site. First, from my friend Jim Wright comes an insider’s view of the biggest Alaska story to hit since Sarah Palin: “Alaskan Middle School Students Scare Moose to Death“.

A couple of kids threw rocks at a yearling moose that had wandered onto an Alaskan middle school campus, spooking the moose into running full tilt into a fence post, breaking its neck. Following the new tabloid business model, reportage has been sloppy, news feeds and recycled content from the likes of AP amplify mistakes, and as Jim put it:

As usual, both the so-called professional mainstream media, and the blogosphere are more interested in hyperbole, hysteria, headlines, outrage, self righteousness, and hype. With stories like these, and increasingly all stories, it’s getting harder and harder to tell mainstream reporting from the tabloids.

Of course, the sensationalist reporting got the wingnuts at PETA hall stirred up about this “tragedy”. Jim again:

First this is not a tragedy. A tragedy is when a child goes to sleep hungry because she’s too poor to get more than one decent meal a day. A tragedy is when a child dies from whooping cough or measles, or mumps, or some other easily preventable disease because his idiot parents are too ignorant to get him immunized. A tragedy is when children die because their parents are drug addicts or drunks or just too damned stupid to slow down on icy Alaskan roads. A dead moose isn’t a tragedy, it’s an unfortunate accident. Nothing more. Over 200 hundred moose related accidents happened in the Valley alone last year, most hit by cars. A number of those because drivers were going too fast, or talking on their phones, or daydreaming, or eating a cheese burger instead of paying attention. Strangely though, few call for those people to be tarred and feathered. Hypocrisy in action.

Sloppy and sensationalist reporting like this is slowly eroding the credibility of the MSM, though bloggers who do not fact check are not doing themselves any favors, either.

I strongly suggest that you compare Jim’s account (his child is a student at the school in question, and the moose in question may be the one he encountered in his yard this winter) of the incident with several online “news” sources and come to your own conclusions.

At some point, the only reason to read the big newspapers may be for their non-news content, such as their book reviews. That brings me to the second article on this theme I encountered recently, by Garth Hallberg at The Millions. Professional reviewers hired by the likes of the New York times do a much better job than on-line sites, don’t they? Well, some bloggers disagree, but the literary world stands behind the likes of the New York Times, right?

Not really:

Somewhere in mists of our pre-digital past, writers and editors worked to make the Paper of Record the first and last word on the U.S. book market (a favorable blurb from the Times, when available, will generally be the most prominent on a paperback jacket), but the enterprise has been coasting on its reputation ever since.

People have been noticing the naked Emperor for a long time, over 40 years, in this instance:

The origin story of The New York Review of Books, America’s preeminent literary-critical publication, dates back to the 1963 printers’ strike, when Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein realized that they didn’t miss one jot or tittle of the Times’ book coverage. They set out to create a literary supplement that would be missed were it ever to fold, and succeeded brilliantly.

Before the Internet, the start-up costs for publications such as The New York Review of Books or a novel news outlet were daunting – in terms of the Five Forces, barriers to entry were too high. With the advent of electronic publishing, those barriers came crashing down. Mainstream Media had a narrow window in which to adjust and adapt to the new reality. I think that in both hard news and cultural pieces, the momentum has been lost by the old guard.

The only mysteries left to solve are how long the Old Media will survive in its current incarnation (the viewing and reading habits of the Boomers will keep it afloat for at least some time until their relevance to advertisers is exhausted) and in what truncated form it will live on after being hacked to pieces by its own ineptitude.

Tweet This Post

You keep citing that paper. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

Another trap that laymen fall into when evaluating competing scientific claims is to uncritically accept scientific citations. When I first stumbled across Walter Wagner, I found in various places on the Internet the claim that he had discovered a magnetic monopole, and a citation on his website to this article. The citation was not in the normal format for scientific cites, and upon finding the publication, I figured out why. Wally was not even an author on that paper, he was the lab tech who looked at the stack of lexan sheets under a microscope for particle tracks that met the criteria outlined by the principal investigators – some of the lowest grunt work available in a physics lab. Wagner was, indeed listed in the acknowledgments of that paper, and has used that brief brush with fame to create a highly colorful, and highly fictional, scientific background for himself.

There is another object lesson in scientific citation for the layman here, as well. Science moves. It advances. The date on a cite is important. If someone is citing only older papers (and “old” in science means about 5 years), the layman needs to check for him or herself (or check with a trusted expert) that the argument presented has not been made obsolete by new evidence. Let’s look a little closer at the magnetic monopole, shall we?

Soon after publishing that paper claiming that the anomalous track might be evidence for a monopole, the authors got a slap on the wrist for jumping the gun. Three years later the group (minus one Walter Wagner) published a wonderful analysis of three possible origins of the anomalous track, one of which was still a magnetic monopole, but since a) it was the only such track ever observed and b) two other explanations fit the data, the experiment is regarded as a scientific curiosity rather than as evidence for Dirac’s monopole. Science moved on, the literature coughed up papers that better explain the data, and yet Walter Wagner continues to cite the original paper out of context.

Citations out of context among the anti-LHC crowd are most marked in the behavior of one James Blodgett, which, for your amusement, you can follow in this thread. His claim to be running a risk assessment program for MENSA only heightens the comedy.

But citations do make a post look more legitimate. I’ll give an example a la James Blodgett:

Under the right conditions, water itself can polymerize, or form chains of molecules. This little known fact was first discovered in Soviet Defense Department-funded labs in the Polytechnic Institute of the ancient town of Kostroma, in the Golden Circle of Old Russia. There a Russian Chemist named Nikolai Fedyakin discovered that he could make small quantities of a hyperviscous water with an elevated boiling point and a depressed freezing point.

Fedyakin was obviously a low-level guy in the Soviet hierarchy, so the Russians soon put their top surface chemist, B.V. Derjaguin, on the problem.(1) Derjaguin continued to work on the problem with his assistant Churaev until the Russians were sure that there were no military applications to this spectacular new discovery.(2) Then they published those discoveries in the West. (3,4)

From there, Western scientists took up the task of characterizing this new form of what’s probably the most commonly used substance on earth. (5,6,7,8) Human beings had been looking at water for millenia, and looking at it scientifically for centuries, without discovering this amazing property of the substance. In a similar vein, a soccer-ball shaped molecule of carbon was discovered in soot thirty years later, another case of something wonderful being hidden in a substance so common, no one bothered to look at it critically anymore.

Western scientists attempted to explain this amazing form of water with a variety of theories (9,10), the most promising being a form of p-electron delocalization. (11) No one was ever able to completely figure out just what was going on at the molecular level, however, because no one was able to synthesize large quantities of the substance.

Derjaguin himself (12) took a crack at providing an explanation a few years after the excitement in the West had died down. But it was not until recently that there was any hope of explaining the forces that bind this unique and possibly useful form of water together. With the recent advances in both experiment (13) and supercomputing (14,15), we are beginning to explore the forces behind the clustering of water molecules, we are beginning to understand the ways that water molecules can cluster together.

1. Derjaguin, B. V., Churaev, N. V., Fedjakin, N. N., et al., Izv. Akad. Nauk. S.S.S.R., ser. khimich., N10, 2178 (1967).
2. Derjaguin, B. V., and Churaev, N. V., New Properties of Liquids (in Russian) (Nauka, Moscow, 1971).
3. Derjaguin, B. V., and Churaev, N. V., J. Coll. Interface Sci., 36, 415 (1971).
4. Derjaguin, B. V., and Churaev, N. V., Nature Phys. Sci., 232, 131 (1971).
5. C. T. O’Konski “Covalent Polymers of Water.” Science 168, 1089-1091 (1970)
6. C. A. Angell and E. J. Sare “Vitreous Water: Identification and Characterization.” Science 168, 280-281 (1970)
7. S. W. Rabideau and A. E. Florin “Anomalous Water: Characterization by Physical Methods.” Science 169, 48-52 (1970)
8. G. A. Castellion, D. G. Grabar, J. Hession, and H. Burkhard “Polywater: Methods for Identifying Polywater Columns and Evidence for Ordered Growth.” Science 167, 865-868 (1970)
9. L. C. Allen and P. A. Kollman “A Theory of Anomalous Water” Science 167, 1443-1454 (1970)
10. J. W. Linnett “Structure of Polywater” Science 167, 1719-1720 (1970)
11. R. P. Messmer “Polywater: Possibility of p-Electron Delocalization.” Science 168, 479-480 (1970)
12. Derjaguin, B. V., and Churaev, N. V., “Nature of “Anomalous Water” Nature 244, 430 – 431 (1973)
13. C.J. Gruenloh, J.R. Carney, C.A. Arrington, T.S. Zwier, S.Y. Fredericks, K.D. Jordan
“Infrared Spectrum of a Molecular Ice Cube: The S4 and D2d Water Octamers in Benzene-(Water)8” Science 276 1678 – 1681 (1997)
14. C.J. Tsai and K.D. Jordan, “Theoretical Study of the (H20)6 Cluster,” Chemical Physics Letters 213, 181-88 (1993).
15. C.J. Tsai and K.D. Jordan, “Theoretical Study of Small Water Clusters: Low-Energy Fused Cubic Structures for (H2O)n, n=8, 12, 16 and 20,” Journal of Physical Chemistry 97, 5208-10 (1993)

I hope you enjoyed this nicely documented piece I just put together.

Because it is complete and utter horse crap.

Fedyakin was real. He, as far as I know, was a two bit polytechnic teacher not associated with the Soviet Defense forces in any way expect the way that every Academic was in that highly militarized society. And, by the way, in the Soviet Union it was “Ministry of Defense”, not “Defense Department”.

Derjaguin and Churaev did run with the discovery, and then tout their results in the West. Western scientists did try to reproduce the results and study the structure of the substance for about four years. However, and I skipped this part, there were plenty of problems reproducing the results. I selectively did not cite these skeptical article from the heyday of polywater research:

W. M. Madigosky “Polywater or Sodium Acetate?” Science 172, 264-265 (1971)

D. L. Rousseau “ ‘Polywater’ and Sweat: Similarities between the Infrared Spectra” Science 171, 170-172 (1971)

S. L. Kurtin, C. A. Mead, W. A. Mueller, B. C. Kurtin, and E. D. Wolf “‘Polywater’: A Hydrosol?” Science 167, 1720-1722 (1970)

By the early seventies, Western scientists had concluded that polywater, which had only ever been made in trace amounts, was actually water with a whole lot of impurities in it, which explained the change in viscosity and colligative properties.

In addition, unless you actually went to look up the last Derjaguin reference, you would not be aware that it was actually the publication where he finally recanted and admitted that the Western scientists were correct about the composition of polywater.

And what about the more recent papers I cited? Well, water can polymerize to a slight degree via various methods of attraction between the molecules. Small polymers, less than a few hundred repeating units long, are often referred to as oligomers, and small amounts of these in a water sample will not cause the viscosity or colligative property changes claimed for polywater. The polywater part of the above essay has NOTHING to do with the water cluster work I cited. I just wanted to make that clear because one of the authors of the legitimate papers is a very old and dear friend of mine.

Moving on to another area of pseudoscience that caught the eye of proponents surfing the web, anti-vaccine commenter Chris has another excellent example of false authority. He cites two sources that the scientist looks at with skepticism – a book and a patent. Patents are horrible sources of scientific information, as the patent office often prefers to take an agnostic stance on questionable science and simply process the legal paperwork.

The patent talks about cell wall deficient microorganisms in vaccines. The premise is that the FDA does not monitor for these bugs in the manufacturing process, and that is the causal link between autism and vaccines.

In fact there is no proven, or even speculative link between infection and autism onset.

The FDA in fact does monitor for mycoplasmas, and recently held a panel to discuss more rapid detection methods, fearing that, in a pandemic, the normal, careful screening would need to be circumvented in order to produce vaccine at a high enough rate to stem the infection’s spread.

The second citation was a book. With the quote “been in textbooks for some time”. What has? cell wall deficient organisms? You betcha. A connection between them and vaccine side effects? No way.

Aside from that bait and switch, scientific books are often out of date before they hit the press. Most journal articles cite one to two books, with papers updating the work to show that it is still valid. I used to cite P.J. Flory’s Principles of Polymer Chemistry, with some updated journal articles by contemporary physicists – but that was the only book I ever cited in my publications. Professor Dutch has some pithy comments on this particular indicator of pseudoscience:

The dead giveaway that a person doesn’t have a clue what really goes on in professional circles is the question “how many books have you read on ……?” Books are just not the principal way information flows among professionals. Almost all professional fields report new information in journals. If you’re in show biz, you don’t find out about new plays and movie projects from books; you read Variety. If you’re a doctor, you don’t find out about new ways to remove gall bladders from books; you read the New England Journal of Medicine. And in any case, it’s not quantity but quality. One paper in the Geological Society of America Bulletin with a reliable age date for a rock unit outweighs ten thousand books by creationists arguing for a young earth.

Beyond that, the book that was cited is by an author who was once a legitimate researcher, but who descended into quackery in her later years. Lida Mattman’s careeer very much resembles Linus Pauling’s in her fall into junk science, finally landing on outrageous claims such as:

Dr. Lida Mattman, who has been culturing cell wall deficient (CWD) organisms from blood for 40 years was contacted to culture specimens from 25 individuals diagnosed with Fibromyalgia Syndrome. She found every samplepositive for CWD Bb, the causative organism of Lyme disease.
_
Following this finding, 103 seriously ill subjects with a variety of diagnoses were tested and found to be positive for Bb based on Mattman’s Gold Standard Culture method. The conditions included: Fibromyalgia, Osteoarthritis, Mixed Connective Tissue Diseases, Polymyalgia Rheumatica, Ankylosing Spondylitis, Lupus Erythematosus, Palindromic Rheumatism, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Multiple Sclerosis, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

Uh huh. If I have to explain the red flags for junk science in that quote to you, you might as well stop reading right now. The book cited by the anti-vaccine crowd was first published in the 1970s, and has been updated, but is not a significant source of information today. In fact the reason that Mattman is mentioned (rather than more current researchers on CWD organisms) at all by the anti-vaccine crowd is that her quack notions about Lyme disease have led to speculation about a connection between Lyme and autism. I kid you not. (See the comments in that last link).

In the 1990s, Mattman claimed that the cell wall deficient organisms that were the subject of her legitimate research in the 50s, 60s and 70s were so hardy that:

Dr. Mattman believes that touching can spread Lyme disease. The Lyme spirochete can actually occur in tears, and therefore can be transmitted to hands, which contaminates doorknobs, pens, people shaking hands, etc. This appears to be consistent with the observation that whole families often culture positive for Lyme and present with symptoms.

Her name comes up often with the tag “Nobel Nominee in 1998″ – uh, news flash, anyone can be nominated for the Nobel, many cranks are by their followers, and a single year’s nomination is hardly a groundswell of recognition, in addition to sounding quite strange. As I mentioned in my previous posts, credential inflation is a bad, bad sign.

Mattman’s later 1990s-era research also comes up in connection with Rife Machines and the Marshall Protocol – known quackery. All red flags. For the layman trying to evaluate claims, Google should be the first resource. Unfortunately in the case of Mattman, there is not a lot of material on the Web about her more outlandish claims, but there is enough citation of her by known, clear quacks that the layman should suspect that either a) her work is easily taken out of context by junk scientists or b) she herself was a junk scientist. I tend to think both answers are correct.

So the next time someone comes citing scientific literature, remember this: always go back and READ THE ORIGINAL SOURCE when someone is citing papers in a scientific argument, or you may find that, like my Derjaguin paper, the citation actually comes to the opposite conclusion of that of the citing “authority”*. Also, when you see papers or especially books, that are more than a few years old being cited, go back and check to see if there are retractions, arguments, or alternative explanations proposed in the literature. Just because an argument cites scientific publications, it does not necessarily follow that the argument is scientifically valid.

*Specifically something such as this reference, which predicts black holes – in certain very unlikely scenarios of string theory – and also predicts their rapid decay. You can’t have one without the other, the theory predicts both events, but that title “Black Hole Factories” doesn’t give you a clue as to that conclusion, you need to go look up the paper for yourself to find it. Bad physicist, bad.

[UPDATE] – I was going to add the following as a comment, but it spiraled out of control, so I will add it here:

In answer to Phil’s request for a layman-friendly explanation, I highly recommend this September 2008 paper, and as it is the most up-to-date view on the issues, I’ll crib from it copiously here. The appendices are math-heavy for folks like Shannon who want to see the guts of the argument, while the body of the paper is remarkably well-suited for a lay audience.

The central argument of CERN (and by association my central argument, as I do not claim any special knowledge outside of my fields of expertise: while I am quite capable of evaluating arguments in Physics, while I would require many years of study to actually make those arguments on the graduate level) is not that black holes and hawking radiation are theoretically coupled. The central argument is that astronomical bodies have not been destroyed by collisions with cosmic rays, or as one physicist pithily put it: the central argument that the LHC is safe is that the moon continues to exist:

We estimate that the Universe is replicating the total number of collisions to be made by the LHC over 10^13 times per second, and has already done so some 10^31 times since the origin of the Universe. The fact that astronomical bodies withstand cosmic-ray bombardment imposes strong upper limits on many hypothetical sources of danger.

For those of you, like me, who think that an argument without numbers is a religious one:

The area of the Earth’s surface is about 5×1018 square centimeters, and the age of the Earth is about 4.5 billion years. Therefore, over 3×10^22 cosmic rays with energies of 10^17 eV or more, equal to or greater than the LHC energy, have struck the Earth’s surface since its formation. This means [6] that Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth already – and the planet still exists.

Now, in the tradition of true believers everywhere, the anti-LHC crowd started picking at that argument. First, they claim that Hawking Radiation has not been directly observed. True. Even the closest black holes would radiate far too weakly to be observed from Earth. However, Hawking radiation has a strong theoretical basis in the physics we already are pretty sure is true. Aside from that there are other quantum mechanical stability arguments no related to Hawking radiation that make stable microscopic black holes violate known laws of physics. To claim that microscopic black holes would be stable or is to cast doubt on same fundamental concepts of quantum mechanics (and not only ones associated with Dr. Hawking’s theory), and if that is wrong, then we should be equally worried, as one physicist put it, about about dragons being produced by the LHC.

The funniest line of attack I have seen on the internet was couched in terms of pool: two billiard balls of the same energy colliding head on will stop dead, so the analogy was that the black holes will stop dead in the LHC. For those of you who don’t see the problem with that analogy, I invite you to do the experiment yourself and try to collide 2 balls at any velocity more than a gentle roll to stop dead upon collision.

Eventually a few of the anti-LHC group got tired of being made fun of and came up with a slightly more plausible scenario (as in (10^-30)% more plausible), that the slow black holes that might be created according to some (yet unproven) theories in the LHC are just slow enough to stop inside the Earth, whereas the high velocity cosmic ray particles would not. Once again, the continued existence of known astronomical bodies comes to the rescue

In the extradimensional scenarios that motivate the existence of microscopic black holes (but not their stability), the rate at which absorption would take place would be so slow if there are seven or more dimensions that Earth would survive for billions of years before any harm befell it. The reason is that in such scenarios the size of the extra dimensions is very small, so small that the evolution driven by the strong extradimensional gravity forces terminates while the growing black hole is still of microscopic size. If there are only five or six dimensions of space-time relevant at the LHC scale, on the other hand, the gravitational interactions of black holes are strong enough that their impact, should they exist, would be detectable in the Universe.

Now, let’s look at the authors of the papers cited by our newly-resident anti-LHC gadfly. As I said, science moves on, and citing older papers is a sign that one ought to do a little digging before deciding which argument to believe.

First ask yourself, who was contacted by CERN to write the safety report?

Answer: Steven Giddings of UC Santa Barbara and Michelangelo Mangano of CERN.

Hmmmm. If those authors think there is no risk, then any use of their papers to justify belief in risk needs to be accompanied by some serious physics to explain why the conclusions and further investigations of the authors of the paper do not agree with the critic’s reading of said paper. Since I don’t see any of that anywhere, the obvious spurious references in Blodgett’s original comment below are #s 2,9 and 10. As Shannon noted, references 4, 9 and 10 are cited by Blodgett in a similar vein to they way I cited the last Derjaguin post about polywater – the papers are cited in an argument that comes to the opposite conclusion of the authors.

Furthermore, Dr. Mangano is the author of the new paper I cited at the beginning of this comment.

In the same vein, Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek has argued for the safety of the Brookhaven Collider, so citing the paper by him that argues that the RHIC was safe in an argument against collider safety is also spurious in the absence of a detailed, scientific argument as to why the older paper outlines a threat. In the same way, reference #4 argues for the safety of the LHC.

All that is left are references #3,6,7 and 8, all of which are older (5+ years) papers. All of which have been dealt with in later papers in the field, including the comprehensive safety reviews, most especially the paper I referenced at the top of this comment and the 97 page CERN safety report by Giddings and Mangano.

What’s most amusing is that there is a paper that, however slightly, bolsters their case (I might regret posting this, but as a practitioner of science as outlined by Feynman in “Cargo Cult Science, I have to): to wit this paper argues that black holes, under certain unproven theoretical conditions will last for seconds to minutes. The perfect opportunity for the anti-LHCers to yell “see, you guys don’t know what you are talking about”. Unfortunately for the potential new counter-argument, a three minute lifetime however is a far cry from the time it would take a black hole to eat the Earth, and the “moon continues to exist” argument still holds.

Tweet This Post

So, commenter Tatyana asked about how a layman can discern the signals that indicate that a discussion has left the realm of rigorous thought. I thought I’d set down some thoughts on that over the course of a couple of posts, starting from the extreme left tail of the distribution and working my way in to stuff that’s more mainstream, could possibly be true, but ought not to be pounced on because there’s a lot more work to be done before a conclusion is reached.

So, to start out with, I’ll tackle something that’s obvious to me as being in the looney science bin: the attacks on the Large Hadron Collider. As I mentioned before, my little online Science Fiction group ran afoul of the utter nutbars in the “LHC Will End the Woooorld” camp. I dug a little deeper into the “some scientists” whom the anti-LHCers cite. I uncovered that the most prestigious scientist whom they could quote was a German biochemist I’d never heard of named Otto Rössler.

So then I dug a little deeper into Professor Doctor Rössler’s record, and came up with quite a lot. Unfortunately, it was quite a lot of utter rubbish. I see that rubbish cited all over the Internet, so I tried to set the record straight. After the jump is the blog post I made, mostly for my SF group’s amusement, about how I was able to tell Rössler was a crank. Enjoy.

Scientists go off the rails as often as other people – perhaps more often. The difference between the macro behavior of the science community and the macro behavior of the general population is that the profession of science is supposed to have a built-in self-correcting mechanism – the scientific method – that subjects even famous practitioners of the scientific disciplines to the same third degree that one would put a complete novice claiming, for example, to have discovered a fundamentally new particle.

In practice, however, the self-correcting mechanism has a few bugs. Famous practitioners can get away with publishing things that would be more highly scrutinized in other people. Recent retractions in the field of cloning should have made that crystal-clear to everyone.

Below the layman’s radar, not-so-famous practitioners (and let’s be blunt, mediocre-to-poor scientists) can worm their way onto editorial boards of fourth-tier journals or into positions of prominence in professional societies (the scut work of which most of the best and most talented scientists do not want to sully their hands with) in order to pave the way for publishing results that would be rejected even by the bottom feeders of the scientific publishing world were their authors not on the editorial boards of said journals.

But eventually someone tries to repeat the experiment, or applies the theory to newly discovered facts. That’s where the rubber meets the road, and so far, even when temporarily distorted by asceintific considerations within the human institutions of science, the scientific method prevails – eventually (even in the USSR). The great and not-so-great people of science, if they are worth their salt, retract their claims if it turns out that those claims are not justified. Everyone, and I mean everyone, even Nobel Prize winners, need someone to tell them when they are full of shit.

For the layman trying to make sense of scientific, or pseudo-scientific arguments in the public arena, it is not sufficient to know that scientists can go off the rails. Kooks and crackpots generally use this argument very selectively to attack scientists who disagree with their pet theories, while ignoring the tendencies of their supporters to take the train airborne, as it were. The layman needs to know how scientists go off the rails in order to evaluate the legitimacy of claims in a public scientific argument.

A few good examples are probably in order to calibrate the layman’s ability to determine which camp has hired Casey Jones as their engineer, to take the analogy a bit too far. But bad writing aside, examples are the best way to learn. Let’s begin with what is perhaps the most spectacular train wreck in all of modern science:

Linus Pauling was the son of a druggist who, in the 1920s, when education was definitely not offered to all and sundry, worked his way from his home state of Oregon to a graduate degree in Chemistry with minors in Physics and Mathematics, and then a professorship, at CalTech. His book, The Nature of the Chemical Bond, and the Structure of Molecules and Crystals , took the explanatory power of the Quantum Mechanical Valence Bond Theory of Heitler and London from a simple explanation for the formation of diatomic Hydrogen, to a theory that could explain the bonds of much more complex molecules. This revolutionized Chemistry, and his further explorations into the structure of proteins looked at the forces that hold life itself together, opening up huge new vistas in Biology.

Pauling won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. He deserved it, make no mistake. But Linus then fell prey to the hubris that fellow Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman was warning about in Cargo Cult Science. Leaving the study of the chemical bond in his older years, Pauling somehow became aware of the activities of one “Doctor” Irwin Stone. Stone actually was a food chemistry technician with a 2 year degree in the pre-war years (when obtaining a responsible position with an Associates was much more common, since there was much less to know) who was one of the pioneers of the use of ascorbate as a food preservative. Stone’s later theories on evolutionary nutrition and vitamin intake were unorthodox, to say the least. Quackery, if you want to be blunt (and I do).

Pauling probably picked up on Stone’s work because it sounded intriguing and unorthodox (but plausible to Pauling as an outsider to biology). Nobel winners unusually get that prize because they tend to think outside the box. But 90% of what is “outside the box” is outside the box because it is junk. Finding the other 10% is evidence of genius, usually (or being a blind pig – science has more than its share of blind pigs). Within their field, good scientists have a highly developed Bozo filter that allows them to separate an unorthodox, but possibly fruitful, line of inquiry from the red herrings. Not to say that good scientists don’t ever get an idea that turns out to have fins and gills with a decidedly crimson tint, but the practiced scientist rapidly recognizes the fish, and wipes the smell of the sea off of their hands. Outside of their field, the Bozo filter has large holes that represent gaps in knowledge and experience.

Why did Pauling’s Bozo filter fail him in the case of Stone? Because, despite working on the chemical structure of proteins, Linus Pauling was no Biologist. It is possible to make a contribution to science that several branches of study can make use of, but that does not make the contributor a qualified practitioner of those various sciences. For example, the ideas of Vilfredo Pareto are used far beyond economics and business in endeavors as diverse as mollusc farming and paleontology. That, however, does not retroactively make Vilifred wither a Marine Biologist or a Paleontologist – he was an Economist, and one can assume that his study of molluscs was primarily confined to those he found on his plate. Analogously, working on the structure of proteins did not make Pauling an expert on the evolutionary biology of Vitamin C synthesis and consumption.

But Pauling ran with Stone’s ideas anyway, violating Feynman’s admonition, never trying to poke any holes in the theory. Pauling made unscientific claims, defended obvious quacks, and generally engaged in behavior that would have gotten his license to practice medicine revoked, had he possessed one. He also was one of the driving forces responsible for removing the oversight of the FDA on Nutraceuticals, opening up the unsuspecting public to attack from a variety of charlatans just skirting the letter of the law.

I’ve long wondered what led Pauling down the path to quackery. Was it the fact that his earlier contributions had been primarily theoretical, and in his older years, with everyone coming to kiss the ring of his Nobel, he dismissed experimental evidence that did not match with his theories because he’d lived in his own mind too long? Was it a cynical desire to make money or retain a fame that was receding? Was it early-onset Alzheimer’s or some form of selective senility related to Asperger’s Syndrome? Or was it that colleagues had in previous years kept his less sane tendencies in line, but the awarding of a Nobel increased their reluctance to criticize and allowed what was a heretofore unnoticed mental illness to come to the fore? I don’t know. What I do know is that he had a pernicious influence on both science and public health, and this was primarily because laymen saw the Nobel Prize and didn’t inquire about which branch of Chemistry it was awarded for (Physical).

This is a key point in exposing the soft underbelly of scientific credentials. Some laymen see the letters “Ph.D.” after someone’s name and assume near-omnipotence.* Some laymen see “Nobel Laureate” after someone’s name and assume complete omnipotence. But science abhors argumentum ad authoritarium for a good reason, and Linus Pauling is the poster child for that reason. Claims to polymathy are to be met with skepticism by everyone, lay and expert alike. It is possible, given a strong mind and enough time, for a human being to become a world-class expert in two to three fields. No more than that. There is simply too much to learn, too many details that are not common to the various disciplines of science that can set the inexperienced off on a wrong tangent. Good scientists and mathematicians remember that they are standing on a small island of their own competence in a vast ocean of their own ignorance.

So what’s the take home message from Linus’s story? Check every claim for its consistency with other messages from science. Modern science fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, and pieces that don’t fit are a big red flag if the claimant is coming out of left field. If there is an inconsistency, find out why, which is going to take some time and intellectual effort. And finally, one of the biggest warning flags about weakly defensible scientific sounding discourse, one of the softest spots in the underbelly of science, is when experts talk outside of their fields of expertise.

For example, when Carl Sagan used his simplistic models to predict “Nuclear Winter” and then mumble, mumble retracted his position to “Nuclear Autumn” , when he predicted huge, catastrophic ecological consequences from Gulf War I, then mumble, mumble retracted his statements when those consequences failed to materialize, the same dynamic was in play. Sagan was not an atmospheric modeler, and his political hysteria clouded his scientific judgment and caused him to ignore Feynman’s admonition:

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can — if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong — to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

It was easier for Sagan to ignore this in a field that was not his primary field of study. This psychological quirk of many scientists to ignore the importance of getting facts straight in a field other than their primary discipline (because deep down they harbor the irrational feeling that any field but their own can’t be as well developed or as important) on top of the higher likelihood of making mistakes in any but the primary field of expertise, justifies the sort of pseudo argumentum ad hominem behind the rule of thumb that the claims of experts talking outside their fields should be more critically examined than the claims of experts talking within their field of primary training.

Pontificating in areas of non-competence is not the sole province of someone who jumps to a single second field after achieving superstar status – the method by which Pauling or a Sagan went off the rails – however. There is another way to go off the rails, one I call the “Pseudo Polymath” route. The middle-of-the-road scientist who gets a tenured position and then fritters it away dabbling in this or that, never really contributing much to any one field of endeavor, but collecting a large swath of (very) minor publications in a wide variety of fields. A person possessed of a sort of scientific ADHD.

In my previous Graduate Advisor Taxonomy this kind of scientist usually become the Bitter, Fundless (but Tenured) Twit. In Europe, especially Germany, with their more hierarchical system and plenty of nooks and crannies to stuff deadwood, this person usually becomes a “minister without a portfolio” – someone kept on the rolls as a Docent, or lecturer, who has no graduate students, post-docs, nor indeed any research responsibility at all, but bears the title professor. The layman would do well to remember that in all things related to human beings, some people are more equal than others.

How does one become a piece of scientific deadwood? One popular piece of chemistry humor in the 70s featured a protagonist named Pudvin. Among the myriad ways that Pudvin appeared to work while goofing off was to listen intently for promising new avenues of investigation in his department. He’d then go sit in that lab for a few days, pick up just enough to design a minor experiment and execute it, then turn it in to the main authors as “just a little something I thought up’. It was never anything Earth-shattering (hah), or even particularly useful, but as he’d obviously done something in the area, he got himself listed as a third or fourth author an impressive number of times. Unfortunately this type of behavior is not confined to the frivolous humor pages in the back of chemistry publications.

In today’s world, with its emphasis on “interdisciplinary’ fields of study, it’s all too easy for Pudvins to slip through the cracks, as Metamanda noted some three years ago:

It’s too easy to make a successful career social-sciencing to computer scientists, and designing it up amongst the social scientists, and being technical amongst the designers, and looking good without knowing your shit very rigorously. I am constantly afraid that I am doing this. And I am constantly trying to avoid being like that. We are valuable bridges between disciplines and communities of practice, but I don’t think we can settle for being only that. We have to have rigor, and depth. We have to know the methods and theories used in these various disciplines… know them well and then be creative enough to understand where they can be applied that maybe no one thought to apply them before.

[Emphasis mine]. And this brings me to the actual point of this post, and that is a man who has managed to worm his way into the forefront of a recent scientific controversy via the Pseudo Polymath route. A man who has an impressively broad list of publications, until one digs a bit deeper. A real-life Pudvin as it were. A man whose papers are cited again and again by the anti-LHC crowd, the ones who think the collider is going to generate a black hole that will eat the world. The pseudo-scientific underpinning of that hysteria has been chiefly generated by this man. A man whose great breadth is constantly touted by those who want to believe in his arguments, while his overlooking his nanometer thin depth. And that man is Professor Doctor Otto Rössler.

Otto Rössler obtained his MD in 1966, choosing to study immunology for “ethical reasons”. That’s the first indication one gets when researching the man that one is dealing with someone who is prone to exaggeration. It’s an odd turn of phrase – all scientists like to think they are helping mankind, and that science, any branch of science, is by dint of decreasing the material poverty of the world, THE most ethical profession. Those words about ethics are likely not the quote of a science biographer. It is vague and vaguely supercilious turns of phrase like “ethical reasons” that tend to trigger the alarms in a real scientist’s Bozo filter. Normally, upon seeing this kind of phrase, I immediately relegate the writer to my “blowhard” file, and go on to find someone with more sense to read or talk to. Believe me, I’ve met more than my share of people like that, and so has every other scientist out there. Our tribe has some real idiots, yes it does.

Unfortunately for the good doctor’s sense of ethics, his contributions to the field of immunology appear to be minimal, consisting of one paper of minor importance. He himself admits that he was a lousy immunologist in his advisor’s opinion – the thesis for which he was granted a Ph.D. degree in pathology was only 24 pages! That’s about enough material for one paper in a decent scientific journal. This is clue number two that we are dealing with an odd duck.

I believe that Rössler was awarded his Ph.D. either as an act of pity, or just to get him the hell out of his advisor’s hair, or because they assumed he’d be using his MD degree instead of the Ph.D. so no blood no foul, or because he’d spent so much time and gotten so close that the powers in his institution thought it would affect the morale of new students to watch someone who’d been there so long walk away without a degree. I believe that one or more of those reasons came into play in his Ph.D. defense because 24 pages is not even enough for a Master’s thesis.

I probably need to explain some institutional mechanics to those of you who have never performed science at the graduate level. Ph.D. degrees ought to be awarded to someone who has done something publishable – and done it more than once! The rule of thumb in my advisor’s lab was 4 – 5 published papers would make an adequate Ph.D. thesis. That is a lot more than 24 typewritten pages.

Fresh from his Ph.D. debacle, Rössler bounced to Robert Rosen’s lab. Rosen is a controversial figure in biology, I’ll just leave it at that. A brilliant man, but one prone to flights of ascientific fancy.

Rössler went from there to a position as a professor of Biochemistry in 1969 at Tubingen, obtaining tenure in 1976. And there he stuck, dabbling in this, piddling in that (taking every chance to absent himself from Tubingen and the expectations of real work with a dizzying array of visiting professorships – that’s a big red flag to the professional scientist, as well), jumping on the new discipline of Chaos in its infancy when no one really knew what was going on and hitting upon a nifty system of differential equations that bear his name. He then spent the rest of his career mostly publishing minor extensions of that work in mathematics in minor journals and pissing his abilities away on asceintific speculation. He never acquired a research group as I can find no Ph.D.s who cite him as their advisor. He stuck around so long that someone Tubingen got embarrassed about having a a 54 year old associate professor around and made him a full Professor by decree, because he certainly didn’t contribute enough to his major field to earn the full professorship in the normal way. In fact it’s another red flag (of the Pudvin variety) to the professional scientist that someone calling himself a professor of Biochemistry publishes mostly in lower tier non-Biochemistry journals.

I actually went and looked all of his publications up. I pulled pretty much every scientific paper, published proceeding and book chapter this clown ever wrote. I searched the literature all the way back to 1949 in non-Google databases, because I took one look at this guy’s record and said “he’s scientific deadwood, but how do I explain how I know that to the layman?”. The above analogies were the best I could do. I hope they give you an idea of why the scientific community dismisses the man as a crank.

Now, at this point, I’ve got to come clean. Various people visiting my site have made me very angry, talking about the alleged safety issues with the Large Hadron Collider. The reason for my ire is not that they exhibit true believer syndrome, though they do. I can let that one roll off my back. The reason I’m upset is that these true believers quote Rössler’s paper on particle physics and his other public statements in their nonsense, and I’ve seen laymen all over the internet saying, in the face of some very scientific-looking citations from Rössler, “well, there must be something if this famous Ph.D. is raising alarm”. This line of thinking killed a girl in India.

Misuse of scientific standing upsets me in a very professional sense. Sagan and Pauling were two of my heroes growing up, but the above mentioned ascientific political hysteria Sagan engaged in and the above mentioned quackery Pauling engaged in certainly took the shine off of them as I grew into a mature scientist myself. I certainly don’t take kindly to that kind of behavior from people whose greatest scientific achievements don’t come within lightyears of those two giants – I cut them, I cut Rössler – no slack at all.

Let me be very clear. Rössler is someone talking far from his fields of competence when he’s talking about particle physics. He’s spent his entire career dabbling in this and that, and any claim to his polymathy by his supporters is glossing over the incredible lack of depth in any field of scientific endeavor. Most of his “polymathy” is in fact applications of his minor but – let me be fair here – very real contributions to chaos mathematics to various disciplines outside of Biochemistry (of which he is a professor). This is very analogous to the example of Pareto I cited above. The fact that the Rössler attractor can be applied to various disciplines outside his stated profession of Biochemistry manifestly does not make him an expert in those other disciplines – and the funny thing is that until this controversy even with his scattershot publication record, he had never published ANYTHING in particle physics and only once in a speculative article about macroscopic black holes – a vanity publication in a journal that has nothing to do with astrophysics. Chew on that for a while, true believers.

You can safely assume that Rössler is like the type of person whom I’m sure you’ve met at work or at school who gets on as many projects in a position with as little responsibility as possible, and then, when asked to do something substantial on any specific project, points to how busy he or she is with the rest of their workload. They don’t not do anything, but they do just enough on each project to claim some credit. Deep down everyone who works with them knows that their worthwhile contributions are minimal, though.

In the rest of this essay, I’m going to examine just how someone can turn himself into such a piece of scientific detritus, and how Rössler has squandered his potential. I’m also going to talk somewhat about other warning signs that the man is not a rational actor. For the newbie to the LHC controversy, or the person so distraught by the wild claims of the true believers, please take this as a scientist’s attempt to provide you with mental armaments so that when another scientific controversy arises, you can go into the fray a little better armed against the arguments of alarmists.

As I pointed out above, as the man admits himself, he was a bit useless in his chosen field of Immunology. Obviously he has some skill in Mathematics, so he jumped on a new field that was just emerging in the 70s – chaos and complex systems. From there he did very little in Biochemistry.

His adherents list an incredible array of absences in other disciplines as evidence of a genius of the highest caliber. Let’s look at that in a little more detail in the man’s own words, shall we?

1969 Visiting Appointment Award, Center for Theoretical Biology, State University of new York at Buffalo, New York State. Cooperation with Robert Rosen.

1995 Visiting Professor of Complexity Research, Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico.

All of these appointments have to do with his contributions to Chaos mathematics. However, when you see that kind of jumping around on a non-science resume, does it not raise red flags that the person is not serious, is hard to work with, or has some other professional problems? Then why do the true believers point to Rössler’s professional ADHD as a positive? From a scientist’s perspective, one expects to see perhaps one or two visiting appointments over a 20 or 30 year career – being absent from one’s own lab leaves one’s own graduate students adrift, not a nice thing for an advisor to do. Ah, but Rössler does not train graduate students. Another red flag, that is.

Finally, we come to the publications themselves. There are 272 of them in Google Scholar, an impressive publication list, even for someone professing in Academia for 39 years.

I’m going to have to digress again, I’m afraid. I have a scientist’s intuition about this man, and I’m trying to explain to laymen why my intuition is sending me alarm bells, so I hope you see the method in my madness. I’m trying to show what normal behavior is, then I’m trying to show how Rössler violates normal behavior in ways that send off my alarm bells.

The first odd publication behavior is the disconnect that I’ve noted before. Rössler does not publish in Biochemistry journals. I went through that rat’s maze of a publication list with a highlight pen and came up with 36 articles out of the 272 (that’s a whopping 13% for those of you keeping score at home) relate to either chemistry or biology only one of the 272 papers directly related to Biochemistry as I understand it. (This one.)The biology papers mostly have to do with chaos in evolutionary biology (for example this one), and the Chemistry papers have to do with reaction kinetics (where chaos shows up most noticeably in the fields of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and explains the Visiting Professorship of Chemical Engineering).

OK, says the layman, perhaps he branched out into physics, which is why he’s so concerned about black holes. Maybe he’s really respected outside of Biochemistry, which is why they put up with him not actually publishing anything in the discipline he’s a professor of.

So we come to another the second odd behavior and another digression. Rössler publishes mainly in journals most scientists don’t bother to read regularly, so this is a digression about the prestige of scientific publications and the peer-review process. Remember what I said waaaay back in the beginning about mediocre to-poor scientists working their way onto the editorial boards of fourth-tier journals? Perhaps I ought to define the term “fourth-tier journal”. We scientists acknowledge that not all scientific work is of equal value. We also acknowledge that peer-review is a necessary but odious and time-consuming task. So we set up a system where certain journals publish top-flight stuff of interest to all, or at least most, scientists and articles submitted there get rigorous peer review by a number of reviewers and the editor. This is the first tier. Certain other journals publish interesting stuff that gets a good working over, but is less interesting to people outside the field. This is the second tier. Other journals publish stuff that’s only interesting to people in the field, stuff so mundane it gets peer review, but is unlikely to generate controversy. This is the third tier. And finally, there’s the garbage cans, where you stuff things that have to be published because it’s publish or perish, or because the poor grad student you’re flushing out of the Ph.D. program with a Master’s as a consolation prize has to publish somewhere, poor bastard. This is the fourth tier.

Publishing in this kind of fourth-tier journal was exactly how the Intelligent Design camp finally got their first “peer reviewed” paper into the literature. So, you can see how much water papers in those kinds of publications hold with serious scientists.

Now, those tiers as I outlined them are not well-defined, in fact some people think there are three, four, or five tiers, but scientists within a field know what’s good and what’s not. However, it is publish or perish, and guys who put out one stellar paper a year got tired of being unfavorably compared to guys who put out 8 or 9 crappy papers a year, and thus the Impact Factor was born. If you really want an idea of how petty scientists can be, Google yourself some information about the various criticisms of the Impact Factor and the other proposed methods for ranking journal prestige.

So, where has Rössler published? I’m going to give credit where credit is due, then I’m going to deduct some interest. The highlight of his career is a paper he published in Nature – this one. A publication in Nature or Science is impressive, no doubt. Many scientists have distinguished careers without ever gracing their pages. Both publications are journals that are regularly read by scientists of pretty much all disciplines, so to get in there your work has to be of high import and be of interest to people outside your field.

So Rössler published in Nature. He a observed a newly described (at the time) form of Chaos in an oscillating reaction that had been known for about 10 years in the West, and about 20 years in Russia. Let’s give the man the props he is due – he was the first to observe this, and he was looking in the right direction for Chaos. And he discovered a system of differential equations that behaved in a different manner from the classical Chaotic example of the Lorenz system that anyone who’s read Gleick’s book on Chaos should recognize. But here is where I take the interest back out of the transaction. The question is, was this evidence of genius, or was it a case of the proverbial blind pig and his truffle?

You can either get into the pages of Nature or Science by dint of a major discovery or synthesis, or you can nose around in Nature and observe something that no one has ever observed before. When fields are new, that second type of major publication is most possible, it’s much more likely to be a discovery of the blind pig variety, it’s the time in a field that Dirac was talking about when he contrasted the Physics of the 1920s with the Physics of the 1970s:

The problems are more difficult now and there is not the same hope of making rapid progress which there was in those days. Excitement is usually combined with the hope of making rapid progress, when any second rate student can do really first-rate work.

That quote was kind of nasty in this context, wasn’t it? I’m fully aware that this is the Internet, and Rössler himself might read these words someday. Tough cookies. Normally I’d not tear into a fellow scientist this way, but this clown is fear mongering, pontificating on topics out of his specialty, and generally behaving badly. The gloves are off, here. So let’s get to examining the record, in Rossler’s own words:

Then this narrowing tunnel-like slinky got magically flattened in my mind into a spiral which strangely was expanding rather than contracting before being bent into a reinjection loop toward the neighborhood of its origin. (The opposite feat, reinjection inside-out, was later discovered by Normann Kleiner and Sebastian Fischer. This was much as Shilnikov had done topologically some ten years earlier in the other time direction, as I later learned.)

Later René Thomas saw much deeper into the topology of this feedback circuit.

I think it’s pretty clear that Rössler was the first to see something that was floating around in a lot of minds at the time, and did not do a whole lot of detailed analysis after the discovery. Starting to look, if not like a blind pig, at least like a one eyed porker.

So let’s examine the rest of the 271 publications. If I read his own words wrong, and there is something to Rössler’s genius, we ought to see a lot of publications in all kinds of journals with good Impact Factors that expand on his mathematical genius. Despite its flaws, I’m going to stick to Impact Factor when looking at Rössler’s output. When you publish in a field and have an ahem, impact on that field, you generally want to publish in a journal in that field with an impact factor of at least 3, or 2 at the very minimum. That means that most people in that field will read it, and it has a pretty good peer review process. If you just want the vanity of a publication, there are plenty of fourth-tier journals where the peer review consists of a trained monkey, a talking mouse, and a senile emeritus professor.

I’m going to list Rössler’s publications in journals with impact factors of 2 or higher:

An equation for continuous chaos
Rössler, O. E.
Physics Letters A, Volume 57, Issue 5, p. 397-398. 1976

Higher chaos in a four-variable chemical reaction model
Killory, H.; Rössler, O. E.; Hudson, J. L.
Physics Letters A, Volume 122, Issue 6-7, p. 341-345. 1987

That’s it. Six publications in really good journals over a 39 year career at Tubingen. That’s not to say that other journals with impact factors in the 1.5 to 2 range are not good (some are, some aren’t), but over a career that long, the career of someone trying to be taken as an expert in anything, one expects more publications in higher impact journals. Many more, by at least an order of magnitude, in a 272 item publication record. I bent over backwards, looked at all 272 entries, and looked up the impact factors of the journals I had never heard of. And if you look (I’m not wading though that list again to count exact numbers, you want to argue with me, do your own research) a good part of the rest of Rössler’s output is book chapters and the like, which are invited papers with little to no peer review, and really just amount to a review article of one’s own work, which in this case, isn’t much.

Aside from that, an awful lot of the other stuff Rössler publishes is not actually science. Wade through that list and you’ll find titles such as these:

A system theoretic model for biogenesis

Mirror competence implies person competence

And my favorites:

Endophysics: The World As an Interface

Ultraperspective and endophysics

Endophysics? You mean a re-hash of the Observer’s paradox?

Even in the absence of the crank notion of “endophysics”, titles such as these raise the red crank flag and wave it around like, well, a madman. We scientists like to do a bit of speculating and navel gazing once in a while, but it is imperative to remember that what is put forth in most science publications must be able to be tested. Anything else is high sounding speculative fiction with math. Grand old men of science can get away with the occasional speculative piece, but a publication record full of pieces like that is another red flag for crankhood. Science is testable. It’s a fundamental tenet. This was the gist of Michael Crichton’s diatribe against the Drake Equation:

This serious-looking equation gave SETI an serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses-just so we’re clear-are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be “informed guesses.” If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It’s simply prejudice.

As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion. Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The belief that the Koran is the word of God is a matter of faith. The belief that God created the universe in seven days is a matter of faith. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.

Those titles I just named from Rössler’s list of publications are religion in the same sense the Drake Equation is – untestable hypotheses at the current moment. Nonscientific speculations dressed up with math. And the red flag that they are not even serious speculative fiction, but more the type of stuff L. Ron Hubbard came up with, is that they are not published in journals that have anything to do with the subject matter content. That means both that the peer review did not consist of the best scientists in the field, and that very few people who actually work in the field that is the topic of the article will every read the arguments presented. It is scientific vanity publishing.

Let’s just take one. This one: “BSE Viewed Dynamically: A Possible Early Cure Based on Passive Immunization Against PrP Sc”. I almost had to break my self-imposed rule of no profanity in this post, right there. Did Rössler and his chemical engineering pals honestly think they had something worthwhile to say about BSE, only to bury it in a publication like that one? Come on, if you honestly thought you had a good method for treating Mad Cow Disease, wouldn’t you try to get that article into the best medical or pharmacology journal available? Articles like that in Podunk publications are the scientific equivalent of paying a vanity press to publish the novel that got rejected by every agent you submitted it to.

And finally, an awful lot of what Rössler has published in recent years looks just plain weird, even to the non scientist. I won’t go into too much detail, but I will quote the article that the anti-LHC crowd is so fond of, the one that the On Screen Scientist referred to when he took Rössler to school back in the heyday of the anti-LHC lawsuits:

There is one point left to mention even if this goes against the grain of scientific etiquette: the discreet charm of planet saving. A street ballad comes to mind as a conceptualbridge:

“Last time I tried to do something for the planet was thirteen years ago,
‘Lampsacus hometown of all persons on the Internet‘ [15] was the name,
by coincidence the police were ordered-in
to keep me out of my lecture hall for months in a row,
three times was I carried out in front of the students,
each time the plain-clothes officer in charge spontaneously
apologized afterwards which invisibly restored dignity, but the
requisite 10 billion dollar fund never materialized.”

Does inserting that into a scientific paper sound like the mental process of someone you want to be touting as an expert all over the web? I thought not.

Now that I’ve nearly finished beating on the man’s publication record, let me come back to that part of the record in journals with IFs of 3 or higher, because my above list is not entirely complete. The reason being that in recent years ol’ Otto has published a lot in the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, which claims an impact factor of just around 3. That surprised me, because I’d never heard of the journal, and I’ve heard of most of the physics / physical chemistry-related journals with impact factors of 1.5 or higher. If you didn’t read the link in my statement above about how petty scientists can be about journal prestige, now might be the time to go back and take a look, because it explains how low impact journals with editors lacking a good moral compass do things like requiring submitted papers to have a significant number of references to papers in that very same journal and other self-referential, circle-jerk, no ethics cons to artificially raise the Impact Factor. And lo and behold! What did I find on the Net? Why this (I left the mis-spellings intact to avoid charges of quote tampering):

IF only cannot refelct the atual level of journals even from the some field. For example, everyone in community knows that “Chaos, Solitons, & Fractals” is a journal with poor reputation but with a higher IF. Why does it happen? It is manmade totally. The Editor and AE of this journal usually negelect the strict review of each submitted paper, and order authors to cite articles in a list they provide as many as possible. The list always contains articles published in this or related journals. It is clear why this journal has a higher IF.

Oh, there we go. Thank you Wen Zhen.

That’s not the only thing that struck me as odd about many of the articles in this list of publications in CS&F . Rössler is obviously publishing stuff in CS&F that has nothing to do with Chaos, Solitons or Fractals. Even low quality journals don’t publish non-subject matter related articles with any regularity. Why would it be that CS&F makes an exception for Rössler? Could there be something else going on? Oh, wait, remember my comments about editorial boards? Ah bingo! Scroll down the page to find the members of the editorial board. Rössler obviously got tired of having to go through even the minimal peer requirements for originality of Zeitschrift Naturforschung Teil A (most of his stuff published there was a re-hash of other work) and the peer review of journals that, you know, actually have reviewers who understand the topic of the article, and decided to slide his cut-rate mathematical masturbation into the journal on whose editorial board he sits.

So it is no surprise that the one “peer-reviewed” Rössler paper about black holes was published in in CS&F. The paper so commonly touted by the anti-LHC crowd did not even pass that low hurdle – it is self-published. If the publication were worth the paper it was printed on, it should have been published in Nature Physics. But then, the complete shredding of the argument would have been done as private reviewer comments accompanying a rejection notice, instead of as this public humiliation. And we would have been spared both aggravation and unintentional comedy.

Where is the publication record showing that Rössler knows his own field of Biochemistry very deeply? Nowhere. Where is the record showing that, after his initial discovery, Rössler engaged in deep analysis of his secondary field of Chaos? It is contained in six papers, and six papers do not an expert make. Where is the record showing that Rössler’s brand of Chaos math is applicable to the LHC? Nowhere. Where is the publication record that shows that Rössler knows anything about particle physics? Nowhere. And where is the evidence, however circumstantial, that Rössler is not a serious scientist? Everywhere.

Rössler, sadly enough, is a guy who had some talent in science, but frittered it away staring at his navel. Sean Carrol just posted about Frank Tipler, another guy who had some talent and went off the deep end (though Tippler’s talent was an order of magnitude greater than Rössler’s), and Sean said something profound here:

In science, we tend to valorize (to the point of fetishizing) a certain kind of ability to abstractly manipulate symbols and concepts — related to, although not exactly the same as, the cult of genius. (It’s not just being smart that is valorized, but a certain kind of smart.) The truth is, such an ability is great, but tends to be completely uncorrelated with other useful qualities like intellectual honesty and good judgment. People don’t become crackpots because they’re stupid; they become crackpots because they turn their smarts to crazy purposes.

Rössler’s obviously come a little unglued in recent years. I really didn’t enjoy writing this after the first blush of anger wore off, but I’m tired of the anti-LHC crowd citing this guy as an “expert”. I hope that, if you are sitting on the fence about whether to take him seriously, that you understand why this scientist would not trust him to read his own weight off the display of a digital scale, let alone have anything intelligent to say about the safety of the largest physics experiment on earth.

Tweet This Post

“The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won’t sit upon a cold stove lid, either.” – Mark Twain

My friend, former Chief Warrant Officer Jim Wright, has made several interesting posts on information warfare.

Of all the words he’s written on the subject, the most important quote is this one:

When information arrives, how many folks ask themselves: How was this information acquired? Is it complete? Is it accurate? Is it biased. Is it relevant? Is there enough detail? Do I accept it because it reinforces what I think I know, or do I reject it for the same reason? How can I verify it? How can I test it? If I can’t test and verify the information, do I accept it anyway? If so, why?

_

Those who fail to ask themselves such questions place themselves and those who depend on them, at a significant disadvantage – they will always be at the mercy of those who can observe the universe critically, adjust their worldview appropriately, decide and act.

I have an affinity for that type of inquiry because I am an accredited professional in information warfare – I hold an MBA with a subspecialty in marketing. Some segment of society wages information warfare on the individual practically every day of his or her life. And the individual wages it right back.

I’ve lately been noticing one facet of human thought that is probably closely related to, in fact may be one of (before you nitpick, please remember I said one of) the underlying causes of, true believer syndrome.

Permit me to take a bit of an excursion of ascientific fancy.

When we humans walked the savannahs, death stalked us with pointy teeth and twitching tails. While the human herds relied on each other to look out for danger, each person also double-checked his peers.

Along with that danger came a certain doggedness and trust in one’s own instincts. If a primitive human thought the face of a predator had shown momentarily between the branches of a certain bush, he or she might be inclined to skirt that area even when others in the group see no danger. And, if that human were correct, his or her descendants would be a little more prolific, and a little more cautious, and a little more apt to stick ideas that they knew, or even just suspected, to be true (rather than new ideas that might be more fruitful, but also might be false) than the rest of the herd. Nature is a bit more harsh in punishing false negatives than false positives. We humans are wired to avoid Type II error, because it might eat us.

Mind you, the kind of mind that took the whole scenario apart and figured out that the predator only used those hiding places for certain times of the year when it was migrating and realized that in the other times of the year that tree was a good place to hide to do the human’s own hunting is the kind of mind that would be most useful in a highly technical environment. Unfortunately, that’s also the kind of mind that takes risks and gets eaten more often.

Now, the scenario I just outlined was something I pulled out of…thin air, yeah, that’s it. But I suspect that something very similar actually went into the natural selection of human beings. This is probably also related to our propensity to see patterns where no pattern exists, as my friend Eric said:

We innately despise the idea the universe is random and uncontrollable and grotesquely unfair. It’s contrary to our natures. The same litters of brain cells that help a lemur make it to the next branch or a chimp spot the leopard in the brush just happen, I think, to make it all-to-easy to see order reigning in strings of unrelated and meaningless coincidence.

Human beings tend to believe things long after they’re disproven. The more the belief is tied to pattern recognition, per Eric’s point, the harder it is to shake. I do believe that this is related to the fact that to ancient humans, the face they thought they saw in the acacia tree might just be a lion, whether or not anyone else in the tribe saw it, too.

Once a piece of stupidity gets internalized, it takes a lot of repetition of fact to shake it out of the heads of the majority of people. As Terry Pratchett said: “A lie can run around the world before the truth gets its boots on”.

I would add as a corollary that an old truth is like a barnacle. You have to scrape it off when it’s no longer true, it doesn’t fall off by itself. Received wisdom that has shown itself to be valid, even if only once, is very, very hard to shake. This is true even when that piece of information is manifestly out of date. There might be a lion under that tree after all.

There is, in marketing, a concept called the “first mover advantage”. If the first product to market is given enough lead time, and fills a need well enough, it is often impossible to dislodge for decades, even generations. Think Frisbee. Think Kleenex. The classic example, the classic practitioner of this, is Procter and Gamble.

When P&G launched the first liquid dish detergent, it was billed as the Dawn of a new era. Thousands of housewives gratefully used what was a revolutionary product. Have you ever tried to wash dishes with homemade soap? I have. My grandparents were poor and frugal, and my grandmother made her own pumice and other soaps used for everything from scrubbing tractor parts to dishes to removing the dirt and top layers of skin from a kid’s hands. Using soap to wash dishes sucks. Dawn was and is a great product.

Dawn is still, years after its launch, the leader in its class. Kids use what their moms used. I did. Mom used Dawn, and that’s the brand I bought when I left for college. There are families whose forebears were richer than my grandmother and they are on the fourth generation of Dawn loyalists.

But Dawn is on the expensive side of the category, as it can afford to be, with that kind of loyalty. P&G is also famous for offering several different products to fit various segments of the market. And so, Joy was born. Now, the next time you go to the Wal-Mart, pick up a bottle of Joy and a bottle of Dawn at the same time. Did you realize that they were both P&G products, or did you think they were competing companies? Even if you realized that they were both P&G entities, did you ever look at the patent numbers on the bottles?

Now, I’m not privy to P&G trade secrets, and maybe Joy has a slightly different blend of the surfactants covered in those identical patents, but the smart money is on a common blend with different colorants and perfumes added at the end of the manufacturing process. Perhaps there’s a dilution factor, but I dilute the stuff before using it anyway. I now use Joy, and have ever since I took my first marketing class that used P&G as a case study.

If you pay more for Dawn than for Joy, I believe that you’ve lost a skirmish in the information war, you haven’t scraped the barnacle off of your hull, directly because of what I was talking about: old wisdom is hard to shake and seldom challenged in what we in marketing call a “low involvement purchase”. If there were two identical cars at two different prices, a lot more people would pick up on that because a consumer’s conscious involvement in a purchase is directly proportional to the amount of money at stake – although the Mercury brand always struck me as a little odd in this respect.

But a lot of people who might read the two paragraphs above will still use Dawn.

Conmen, tricksters, marketers and intelligence agents realize that once an idea gets into someone’s head, even if it is disproven in a way that the rational brain realizes is legitimate there is an emotional residue akin to an aftertaste that colors perceptions. Unless the new idea totally dominates the old one, the old one tends to stick. This is at the core of the marketing adage that “perception is reality.

I hold advanced degrees in both marketing and science, so I’ve always been at war with that perception = reality bromide. Perception defines the reaction to reality. The scientific marketer asks “at what point does reality overcome perception in a human’s response to his or her environment”. The “high-involvement” decisions I talked about above give one clue. Even in low involvement decisions, at some level of superiority humans forget the aftertaste and go for a new flavor. Once again, from the P&G archives comes an example that shows that the first mover advantage can be overcome: the story of Tide laundry detergent.

In the 1920s, Americans, even those with washing machines, used soap flakes as detergent. Gray clothes, rings around the collar, and undissolved soap were common, especially in hard water. In 1933, P&G introduced Dreft, the first liquid laundry detergent. It was considerably better than soap flakes in hard water, but only marginally better at heavy soiling. But it was the first mover, and did reasonably well. During WWII, a P&G scientist defying orders from management to drop the problem (which had been classed as insoluble) came up with the formula for what was to become Tide. The new was orders of magnitude better than Dreft at removing heavy soil. However, it sat on the shelf until wartime restrictions lifted. The delay was probably fortunate for P&G, because, after the war, sales of washing machines skyrocketed, allowing for a spectacular product launch of Tide. Dreft was left in the dust because Tide’s superiority was so great even loyalists had to agree that Tide was better.*

Moving from the realm of commerce, the more insidious form of this phenomenon I call “mental aftertaste” is that on many topics, there is no way for the layman to perform a test such as directly comparing the washing efficacy of Dreft and Tide – a test that would once and for all change their perceptions. In most arenas, once the tone has been set by the first mover, it is extremely, extremely difficult to shake a perception. The evidence has to be overwhelming. You can prove to people that a particular astrologer is a fraud and they will continue to believe in astrology in general. You can show them the studies that have debunked the connection between aspartame and brain tumors, and there is still the fuzzy feeling that aspartame is just not natural, and that there is something wrong with it. Never mind that they can’t articulate exactly what the harmful effect is – it’s just bad. They fall back on the aphorism that artificial things are never good for you (give me azythromycin over mold-derived penicillin any day). And they never acknowledge, probably never realize, that their hostility is tied to the emotional response elicited by those poorly run and poorly reported-upon stories about aspartame and brain cancer. The rational argument has been disproven, but the emotional aftertaste remains.

Conspiracy theories rely on this habit of thought. So do medical myths. How many people still believe that cellphones might cause some form of harm, even if they concede the data show there’s no link to brain cancer? How about high voltage lines?

The sad thing is that people who don’t recognize and modulate (not eliminate, modulate) this tendency of human thought become sheep at best, conspiracy theorists at worst. For the last several years the anti-vaccinationists have been taking a beating on the logical front with several studies giving pretty good evidence that there is no link between the thimerosol preservative formerly used in vaccines and the incidence of autism.

At the beginning of this year, several very shocking revelations about the ethics of the lead author of the original study that should have demolished any credibility that the MMR / Gut / Measles Virus hypothesis ever had. Andrew Wakefield faked the data. He made inappropriate compensation to his subjects for their participation. He was paid by ambulance chasers to find a link between vaccines and autism. His work is totally discredited.

And yet, even when forced to acknowledge that there is no link between either the measles virus or thimerosol (now completely absent from vaccines) and autism, parents in the Autism community will still look at vaccines with suspicion. Any minor news item about adverse reactions to vaccines, no matter how rare, no matter how mild, will be freshly jumped upon with cries of “see, we were right!”. It’s sad, really, considering all the people this has harmed. The well has been poisoned, and even after the poison has been neutralized, everyone thinks they taste almonds in the water.

I’m willing to bet something similar will happen with the LHC. Even though the major doomsayers Wagner, Plaga, and Rössler have been exposed as cranks and frauds, people are still uneasy about the collider, not because of anything specific, but because the emotional aftertaste of the Wagner lawsuits has primed them to believing that there is something vaguely sinister about the experiment. When scientists, with very good reasons, laugh at their fears, it’s called arrogance. And yet, had Wagner and Rössler not come to the fore, would anyone think twice about the safety of the machine? Other than the very mundane, but very real concern of mechanical failure, that is?

The current, somewhat spurious parallels being drawn between today’s financial crisis and the Great Depression fit into this pattern as well. The aftertaste of the “Fear Itself” speech gives Rosevelt’s policies a sheen they don’t deserve. But given the long lead that pro-Rosevelt hagiography has in the school system, it’s unlikely that the vast majority of Americans are going to realize the harm that came with the New Deal and wash the taste out of their mouths. But people determined to learn from history take the view that, as as Greg Mankiw put it:

When evaluating political leaders, it is better to trust “the moot mathematics of economics” than “the impression of recovery.”

Our human habits of thought make us susceptible to certain weapons in the information warfare arsenal. This is a weakness. But not a totally harmful one. In fact, I think that it is likely that having this weakness also gives us the ability to experience hope. One reason I am such a fan of science, to the point where I actually became a professional in it, is the power of the scientific method to counteract human gullibility while preserving hope.

Scientists have a lot of personality quirks and annoying traits, but the one trait that is much more common in that tribe than in the general population, one the general population would do well to emulate, is the forced habit of washing one’s brain of previously held notions when evidence – tested evidence – proves those notions wrong.

*People with small children will probably immediately recognize that P&G made lemons out of lemonade by repositioning Dreft as a more gentle detergent suitable for infant clothes.

Tweet This Post

I belong to an internet group called the UCF, who started out as members of John Scalzi’s Wateveresque forum until an army of trolls came in and set up residence in that once-fine space. We gradually retreated to our own blogs and set up an online community for ourselves. Most of us are aspiring writers, all of us are science fiction fans, and we’re all a little goofy, but that’s about where the similarity ends. We run the political spectrum from socialist to me. There is a lawyer, a film and TV location manager, an administrative assistant at JPL, and editor for Linux Journal, several other IT professionals of various stripes, an architect, a marine biologist, and a former Navy Chief Warrant turned writer and woodworker, among others (oh yeah, and me, a chemist). Over time, I’ve come to regard all of them as friends, although I’ve only met two of them in meatspace.

We are the future of the internet: a self-selecting band spread over tremendous geography (from the UK to Pakistan) brought together by common interests, kept together by good will, who gradually developed our own bozo filter for the net. And we have one other quality in common: we don’t suffer fools gladly.

As evidence of this, one of our number has a regular feature on her blog called “’Tard of the Week”.  A while back, she brought my attention forcibly to the lawsuit against the Large Hadron Collider, the existence of which (the lawsuit not the collider) I had been blissfully ignorant. Her “’tard” was one “Dr.” Walter Wagner , and his idiocy upset me enough that I did a little digging into “Dr” Wagner. This resulted in a blog post called “Mixed Nuts”. I pointed out various irregularities in his claims of qualifications, and I suggest you read that piece before reading further in this one.

Wagner hisveryownself came by and dropped some snark. I dropped it right back, with the intent of “luring the tiger from the mountains” – getting him to make some outrageous claims about his background that I could point future defendants in his lawsuits to. I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. He made claims that upset a large number of my friends in the UCF, crossing from my area of expertise (academic and industrial science) into theirs: from radiation safety (Wagner claims a stint as the guy who checks the film badges at the X-ray department of a VA hospital makes him qualified to talk about LHC safety, and our Chief Warrant, also a military-qualified RSO, begs to differ) to law (our Public Defender differs quite forcefully with Wagner on whether holding a JD entitles one to call oneself “Dr.”). There are 102 comments on that post, but our resident marine biologist made a yeoman’s job of summarizing the sheer, incomprehensible stupid of it all. All I did was drop some more snark.

One thing even senior officers in the Navy fear to do is upset a Warrant. Wagner apparently does not have the sense of self-preservation that even echelons above reality do. Jim did a really nice job of looking at the psychology of “Dr.” Wagner, a beautiful piece that starts off with a naked guy running across a military airfield in Iceland and ends with questioning Wagner’s physics. Go on, go read it, I’ll still be here when you get back.

Eric, our Public Defender, however, was not one to rest on Jim’s laurels, and he kept digging. And digging. And eventually our friend Google brought the coup de grace. But there’s more. And Eric used it all to drop the hydrogen bomb on Wagner. If you haven’t read any other link in my post, go read Eric’s. Like Jim’s, that post is a thing of beauty. It shows just what a group of people with determination and complimentary skills can accomplish. It’s been linked by anti-crackpot sites, and Jim’s even been invited to write this whole mess up for a popular science publication. The UCF doesn’t suffer fools gladly, especially fools who waste our tax money and motivate death threats to Nobel laureates.

What floored us, though, is that, despite the extensive coverage over Wagner’s lawsuit in the press, no one had compiled all this information on Wagner. Where in the hell has investigative journalism gone, we wondered.

Now, when I Googled this mess after reading Janiece’s blog, it took me all of one search to come up with the actual court document that contains Wager’s claims about himself:

1.    I am a nuclear physicist with extensive training in the field.  I obtained my undergraduate degree in 1972 at Berkeley, California in the biological sciences with a physics minor, and graduate degree in 1978 in Sacramento, California in law.

He also claims to be a “Dr.” in every venue he can get on that won’t challenge him, such as Blogtalk Radio .

Does no one check sources anymore? Now I’m not going to beat on Jazz Shaw too badly for not verifying Wagner’s bona fides, but only because he is a subliterate moron who fulfills the MSM stereotype of the blogger who does not have the professional training to check his sources.

But surely the plethora of MSM stories did something to help deflate the ego of a man who claims to be a published scientist because he once wrote a letter to the editor to Scientific American. Right? Not really:

The exact same AP story was carried by both the USA Today and CNN:

One of the plaintiffs, Walter L. Wagner, a physicist and lawyer, said Wednesday CERN’s safety report, released June 20, “has several major flaws,” and his views on the risks of using the particle accelerator had not changed.

If you read Eric’s post, we’re not even sure he’s really a lawyer, and he sure as hell ain’t a physicist by any normal human being’s definition of the term.

But surely the Brits still do a better job at checking sources than those uncouth Americans:

Meanwhile Dr Walter Wagner, an American scientist who has been warning about the dangers of particle accelerators for 20 years, is awaiting a ruling on a lawsuit he filed a fortnight ago in his home state of Hawaii.

Nope. Daily Mail: epic fail.

Fox News? We report “facts” so loose you can’t decide:

That hasn’t stopped several people, including a former nuclear engineer from Hawaii and a German biochemist, from speaking out against the project.

Nuclear Engineer? Where the hell did that come from?

MSNBC?: another fail.

But the plaintiffs in the federal civil case – retired nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and Spanish science writer Luis Sancho – voiced fears that the machine could create black holes or bits of exotic matter capable of destroying the earth.

Using the word “nuclear” puts Wagner one step closer to claiming “nuclear” physics as a specialty. The proper title is “Radiation Safety Officer”.

But surely the Gray Lady gets it right? Right? Say it ain’t so, Joe:

Mr. Wagner, who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, studied physics and did cosmic ray research at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a doctorate in law from what is now known as the University of Northern California in Sacramento. He subsequently worked as a radiation safety officer for the Veterans Administration.

Every undergrad with a science degree “studied physics” at one point in their college career. A minor does not a physicist make.  The whole cosmic ray thing is another red herring – he was a lab tech (who was merely thanked in the acknowledgments of a paper, and manifestly never was an author of a paper, as one would expect someone who “did cosmic ray research” to be) in a lab that once found [1] an anomalous particle, which he insists was definitely determined to be a magnetic monopole despite the retraction[2] 3 years later. And a JD is not really a “doctorate” in law, the Ph.D. is. At least they get radiation safety officer right.

But this one, this one really chaps my rear end. National Freaking Geographic:

Luis Sancho and Walter L. Wagner, independent astrophysicists in Hawaii, petitioned the U.S. District Court in Honolulu, Hawaii last spring to stop the progress of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Pardon my French, but just WTF is an “independent astrophysicist”? Furthermore, just where did astrophysicist come from? Wagner’s gone from nuclear physics to astrophysics? This one gets me the most because of the byline. The author, one Anne Minard , claims to hold a Master’s in Biology.   I’d like to think that training in the sciences leads one to a) have a bit of a BS detector about science credentials, and b) makes you more apt than the average J-school grad to check sources. Sadly for Ms. Minard, no. I realize her editor may have had a hand in that, but she put her name on the byline. Both she and her editor owe society at large an apology and a retraction of that statement.

I have stated more than once that every single time I’ve been privy to information about a news story, the MSM has gotten some fundamental detail wrong. Now I have yet another datapoint. Long live the blogosphere, and long live my UCF, doing the job we pay the fourth estate to do.

[1] P. B. Price; E. K. Shirk; W. Z. Osborne; L. S. Pinsky (1975-08-25). “Evidence for Detection of a Moving Magnetic Monopole”. Physical Review Letters 35 (8): 487-490. American Physical Society.

[2] Price, P. B.; Shir, E. K.; Osborne, W. Z.; and Pinsky L. S. Further measurements and reassessment of the magnetic-monopole candidate Phys. Rev. D 18, 1382 – 1421 (1978)

Tweet This Post

The Chinese government have shown themselves to be bunch of peasants with dung on their boots when it comes to international propaganda. The term in Chinese is “tu bao tz” (土包子) – pork buns (bao tz) made out of dirt.

Forget Yang Pei Yi (楊沛宜) and Lin Miao Ke (林妙可) – well, mostly. Forget the CGI fireworks. Forget that the enormous number of people used in the opening ceremony were from PLA song and dance troupes.

The big scandal of this Olympics isn’t even that that China promised to clean up its act (and its air) when the games were awarded, and this is exactly not what we are getting.

The big scandal is that China is showing us just exactly why investment there is still risky; why the “golden opportunity” everyone seems to be thinking lurks in China’s market is as frail as a butterfly. The Chinese government still has its fingers in every aspect of society, and that makes the shift from stable to unstable business environment just a power struggle away.

The CCP wanted these games to showcase the “new” China. Instead, they’ve provided two wonderful examples of why the new China is the old China painted up like a Shanghai warlord’s aging mistress.

Take, for example, the fact that the decision maker for the Lin Miao Ke switcheroo was a member of the Politburo:

“The national interest requires that the girl should have good looks and a good grasp of the song and look good on screen,” Chen said. “Lin Miaoke was the best in this. And Yang Peiyi’s voice was the most outstanding.”

During a live rehearsal soon before the ceremony, the Politburo member said Miaoke’s voice “must change,” Chen said in the radio interview. He didn’t name the official.

Yah, I’ll bet he declined to name names. But Mr. Chen also let it be known that the decision was not his, keeping an eye on future political developments in case these Olympics are judged to be politically ineffective in a post-hoc analysis. That way of thinking is very, very Communist. I don’t see much evidence of a new China there, do you?

Imagine the press reaction if a government official had issued such an order in the West. Not to mention that the National OC would have told him to kiss off. Even in the more authoritarian democracies such as Japan or Korea, that kind of political meddling would not have flown. That is not to say that some art director would not have made the switch long before it came to rehearsal, it’s that the decision would not have been political. And sponsors in the West would have been keenly sensitive to criticism if a contest winner had been substituted at the last minute for a “cuter” version.

The other big scandal is that the Chinese gymnastics team likely has underage athletes. And the best proof that they can come up with that the girls are not underage is this:

However, for true backwards thinking, consider this statement by an unnamed Chinese official, according to Reuters: “(Yang’s age) is not an issue at all since the gymnastics team is already staying in the Olympic Village. That indicates all our gymnasts are eligible.” That is like saying because you’re sitting in a car, you have a drivers’ license.

That kind of silly “logic” is uncomfortably familiar to me. When I lived in the USSR, Russian textbooks were littered phrases such as “как известно” – as is (well) known. Phrases like that shut off debate. They squash questions such as “who knows, and how do they know it?”. Over 20 years of schooling in that atmosphere, the fuzzy logic, the avoidance of true questioning, the acceptance of blatant untruths results in bureaucrats who act as if they are brain dead, and treat their constituents as if they have the same disease. Underneath, the CCP is no different from the CPSU I dealt with in 1989 (I was employed by Komsomol for a brief period in the summers of 1989 and 1990).

So, now that the world press is digging, we begin to see some evidence that the athletes are underage. Sites such as Digg are full of indignant Chinese speakers surfing the web for evidence. The Chinese government is pulling the offending pages as fast as they find them, but the evidence is catching up with them. Unless there is another gymnast named He Ke Xin (何可欣) on the Chinese team, and this is extremely unlikely*, her birth year is truly 1994.

However, and this is the one bit of silver lining in the whole mess, the Chinese government is pretty backwards, and about as web-savvy as the idiots who click on spam hoping for free Viagra. Do you think someone ought to let Beijing know that there is such a thing as website caching?

Nah.

Long live the Revolution. Spit.

*Unlikely because while Chinese has certain characters that are often used in names, the list of possible characters is much wider than the standard set of English names, and in two character names the parents can mix and match – they don’t pick names that other people have had in the family, they pick names with special meaning to them because of the time of birth, their hopes for the kid, etc. For example the “Ke” character (可 : approve; can; may; need (doing); be worth (doing); fit; suit ) is part of the names of both Lin Miao Ke and He Ke Xin in different contexts. That is why, if you know Chinese people, you know very few of them with the same first name, if any.

Tweet This Post

So goes the Russian proverb about governing the Caucasus. The entire Caucasus region seems to be one of those areas hell-bent on proving right those of us who believe that not every culture and people is ready for prime-time democracy.

This area (and the proverb) first came to my attention in Russian class back in 1988, reading Pravda articles for second-year Russian reading comprehension tests on the deteriorating situation in Nagorno-Karabakh . This was the first strong indication to me that Soviet control over its own territory might be less iron curtain than rust curtain.

As events rolled on, I was a bit surprised at  Shevarnadze’s decision to leave the Russian government to return to his native land. I’m sure the prospect of losing the looming political battles in Moscow had some influence on the decision, but being a giant fish in a little pond probably appealed as well.

At its end, Shevardnadze’s career provided the backdrop for the first of the “color revolutions”, while showing that the Georgians were less inclined than many of their neighbors, including Russia, to accept political corruption. The Rose Revolution brought the young lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili to power on an anti-corruption campaign that has failed to live up to its promises in his second term.

In recent months the always-volatile Saakashvili has been adding anti-Russian vitriol to his campaign to enroll Georgia in NATO. The vitriol stems from a long-standing Russian use of Ossetia as an ally against the Ingusetians and Chechens in the region. In the 20s, North Ossetia was granted Autonomous Republic status, and a South Ossetian region was carved out of the Georgian Republic. Although the moves were probably for reasons of political expediency only, in a state of affairs that is depressingly familiar to historians of the Balkans and Caucasus, ethnic hatreds were stoked by rumors alleging that the Ossetians received favorable treatment due to the remote Ossetian ancestry of Stalin’s father.

Despite this alleged preferential treatment, Stalin was content to allow South Ossetia to stay under the control of the Georgians. However, in the post-USSR world, Russia has seen South Ossetia as an outpost into the increasingly unfriendly territory to its south, especially as a lever to keep Georgia from leaning farther West. In fact, Russia has issued Russian passports to a majority of the 70,000 people living in the republic, and its “peacekeeping” troops regularly supply intelligence and arms to Eduard Kokoity’s separatist regime.

Into this background comes the Russian maneuverings around Chechnya and the American hunger for airbases close enough to strike at Iran and Afghanistan. Saakashvili has been, with the backing of new member Estonia, petitioning for membership in NATO. NATO has wisely taken a slower approach than the Georgians would like.

Yesterday, August 7, Saakashvili sent his troops against Tskhinvali, capital of South Ossetia, in a move that brought Russian “peacekeepers” under fire as well. The response in the Russian press was predictable: “Georgia is de-facto waging war on Russian Peacekeepers”. Russian Ministry of Defense response was also predictable, and armored. Russian Tanks are now defending Russian interests in South Ossetia, and Russian planes have attacked Georgian targets.  The latest from Russia is that hundreds of “volunteers” from North Ossetia are pouring into the disputed territory, giving Moscow plausible deniability if her puppets push the conflict past any ceasefires brokered by the EU or NATO.

It is hard to pick sides, either from a moral or realpolitik standpoint. The Georgian leadership is a mess, the Russians are playing on ethnic hatreds to secure more influence in the region. If Saakashvili had counted on NATO or US support due to Georgia’s perceived status as an indispensable ally in the GWOT, he was sadly mistaken. Georgia is far too unstable an ally in which to pour resources. And even if Georgia wins, the territory of Ossetia holds few resources while administering the region will be an economic drain. I have no idea how long the fighting will continue, but this seems for certain to have scuttled Georgia’s bid for NATO membership. One wonders what hubris or miscalculation led Saakashvili to fire upon Tskhinvali yesterday.

One final note. As I pointed out in my post on Kosovo, the US jumping on the bandwagon of recognition was probably a bad idea:

The “Kosovo factor” also matters.

Even before the Serbian province unilaterally declared independence, there was a strong body of thought in the Russian political and diplomatic worlds, that believed Russian recognition of South Ossetian and Abkhaz independence would be morally and politically justified.

This has become much stronger since many Western countries ignored furious Russian objections and recognised Kosovo’s independence.

Update: Perhaps this is what Saakashvili was hoping for:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a telephone conversation today that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili “must go,” meaning he should be ousted from office, Khalilzad said.

This is unacceptable, and it makes Saakashvili a hero in Georgia, obviating some of his domestic troubles. I do not think that the US has any choice but to support him now. He needs to be tossed in the trash heap when this is all over, however.

Tweet This Post

My friend Nathan and I differ greatly in our perspective of how and when film crews ought to be allowed to close off parking in the maze that is Manhattan’s Chinatown. You can catch some of our debate here and here.

What it comes down to for me, as a libertarian, is that the film studios are using the coercive power of the state to force (see if the police won’t clear away any protests before you object to my use of the word “force”, especially if the protestor is a lone businessman) the neighborhood into accepting something that will benefit the private film company, and a minority of the businesses there. The difference from the Suzette Kelo case is only a matter of degree.

Something just occurred to me though, from a political perspective. When Nathan plans shoots in NY he has to get permits. There exists a Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting just for that purpose. What Nathan is upset about is that Chinatown was used so often as a location that the local businesses complained to their Councilman and got Chinatown placed on the off-limits-for film-trailer-parking list for at least 60 days.

My question is this: does the film office just hand out permits to anyone who asks without checking how many times other crews have filmed in the area? Don’t tell me they don’t keep those statistics [Update -as Nathan confirms in the comments, they do]. So, does the film office just keep issuing permits until the residents of an area complain? [Update  - yes, and no. They have an algorithm for declaring an area off-limits after so many days of filming, but obviously they don't talk to the local merchants to see if that is enough]. Sticking to algorithms is typical bureaucratic behavior, exactly why I’m not a socialist, but why can’t the film office actually use their authority to prevent this kind of thing from coming up in the first place – in the best way, by actually talking to the local merchants before they take things up with their local councilman?

Probably, the reason is because the bureaucrats who work there are rewarded based on the number of crews that get to film per year, and not on neighborhood satisfaction. No one pays much attention to bureaus like this until they make a mistake, so they get to set their own goals and standards for success. To the detriment of the citizens who pay their taxes.

As a small “L” libertarian, I believe that government control exists in large part to prevent the Tragedy of the Commons. After thinking about this case, I’d say that the mayor’s office has been derelict in their duties and allowed film crews to force a TOTC situation. As Nathan pointed out, the city is doing its utmost to attract film crews to the city, but then to put some of the most filmable areas off-limits is counterproductive.

One of the justifications for allowing film crews to inconvenience residents and deny access to businesses is the free publicity that brings revenue to the city. This I buy – to a point. One of the great debates in advertising is: “how often is often enough”? Advertising budgets are often driven as a percentage of sales, which is the wrong approach. Measuring “top of mind” recognition is difficult but necessary if the ROI on advertising is to be measured. For example, for those readers who were in the US in the 1970s and 1980s, please name me a major plumbing chain. If Roto Rooter didn’t spring to mind, I’d be surprised. That chain still gets calls based on the jingle “away go troubles down the drain”.  Yet I have not heard a RR commercial in probably 25 years. One concerted campaign was enough.

In a similar fashion, the NYC of the newly elected Giuliani needed all the good publicity it could get. Now? Not so much. A couple of big films or TV shows a year should be enough. Yet Nathan pointed out that permits for a minor Lifetime Channel cheese-fest are easier to get than for a major production. If advertising is truly one of the goals, the opposite ought to be true for in-demand areas such as Chinatown, and a lot of small units ought to hear “no, go to Flushing” from the film office in order to build up local tolerance for the big time shows. This recent moratorium put the kibosh on a Chinatown location for a Richard Gere vehicle that would probably have brought more notice to the city than a lot of the small operations that annoyed the Chinatown business owners to the point where they petitioned for a moratorium.

The Mayor’s office claims that a net economic benefit accrues to the city for filming. As I pointed out above, after a few big films per year, I’m  pretty sure the marginal benefit of small productions drops off sharply. But, if the bureaucrats in the mayor’ s office believe that the economic benefit is real and measurable, then they ought to be prepared to share a bit of that benefit with the businesses bearing the costs. Something as simple as giving affected businesses some city parking garage vouchers to hand out to customers who are forced to park far away due to filming might go a very long way towards buying goodwill.

Actually, I think that a reasonable compromise could be reached, if only the bureaucrats in the film office had a rational reward system in place to regulate their behavior. But that’s not going to happen in our lifetimes. I’m sorry Nathan’s industry is taking a hit, but I’m really glad those damned orange “No Parking” signs will be absent from the legal parking spaces of Chinatown for the next two months.

Tweet This Post

As an amateur historian, I am given to musing about the flow and processing of information. People make mental models of the past, but those models are usually highly skewed. As both Napoleon and George Orwell are alleged to have observed, it is the winners who write history. Beyond that, most historians rely primarily on written sources, which further skews our perspective to the prejudices of a given time’s literati, as well as limiting our perspective by that self-same “intelligentsia’s” intellectual shortcomings. The uptake curve of any new trend is difficult to perceive at its inception. Important events often show up as important only well after the fact. Of all the news stories of today, how many human beings can predict what story will actually shape the world of 50 years from now? Even experts fail at this. And often, the true import of events is obscured until the generation who experienced those events has passed away, along with their distorted perceptions.

Take a look at the early 1960s, for example. If one is to go by the Boomer nostalgia for the period, the assassination of Kennedy is the watershed event for the period. In fact, the most likely (and I do not presume to have the final world on this) candidate for the seminal event of 1960 – 1964 is Kennedy’s commitment of troops to Vietnam. From this flowed a tremendous amount of history, and not just the further commitments of LBJ and the subsequent social upheaval in the US. If the officers I talked to in the late Soviet period are correct, the Vietnam War bankrupted the Soviet Union. The Soviets spent approximately $1 billion per year in a war it truly could not afford:

“The Soviet Union poured billions of rubles into Vietnam. . . During 1965-1975 military aid was central, and economic aid was geared entirely to the war effort. By the 1970s Soviet aid amounted to $1 billion or more annually, without which the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) could not have continued the war.”

The adventure in Vietnam and the attendant arms race crippled the economy of the USSR. It severely curtailed their foreign policy adventures. And when Reagan came along and proposed Star Wars, Gorbachev threw in the towel. Not because he thought that the American missile shield would achieve 100% coverage against missile attacks. The Russians were not stupid. And not because they thought we’d even get 75% coverage. It was because even 30% coverage was considerably better than the 0% the Soviets could muster in the near term. And because it would have sapped a couple of percent of our GDP, while even attempting to match it would have cost a significantly grater fraction of their GDP (some officers I talked to estimated as much as 50%). And the US technology would have gotten better with time and experience, which would have sapped even more Russian resources. In this respect, the events of 1989 and 1991 were a direct result of Kennedy’s decision to commit to Vietnam and Reagan’s willingness to capitalize on the advantage gained by bankrupting the USSR and sending it into the period the Russians call “The Stagnation”.

But at the time, what were the great news stories, which still to a large extent dominate the thinking of historians about the period of 1960 – 1964? The assassination. The Bay of Pigs. Camelot. Useless drivel and a distraction to the serious study of history.

It’s probably a truism that a serious futurist needs to look well beyond the headlines to get a sense of the most important trends that will influence the future of the world. The introduction to one of my favorite history books contains another rather forceful reminder of this dynamic:

“I remember well how, in the spring and summer of 1939, my curiosity was gripped by short newspaper accounts of an undeclared war that was raging between the Japanese and Soviet armies on a desolate stretch of disputed frontier lying between the client states of Manchukuo and Outer Mongolia.”

– Alvin D. Cox, Nomonhan

That battle, Nomonhan or Khalkhin Gol, depending on your perspective , was a watershed in the global conflict that rivaled its contemporary event, the invasion of Poland, in its significance:

“It is generally agreed that, despite IJA silence on the subject, the Japanese decision in 1941 to transfer strategic emphasis to the south, involving war with the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands, stemmed in part from the Kwantung Army’s failure against the Russians in 1939.”

– Ibid

In large part. Had the Japanese succeeded against Zhukov and joined the Nazis in a two front war against the Russians, the Second Front would have been a disaster for Stalin. Had the Japanese not moved against Pearl Harbor in 1941, war with the US would have been at least delayed, and Roosevelt would have needed some other pretext to come to beleaguered Britain’s aid in its darkest and finest hour.

Failure to understand that conflict and the lessons it taught about the IJA by people who should have taken a much more professional interest led to much needless bloodshed on the part of the British and American military in the Pacific War. The defeat of the Kwantung army by Zhukov (a name that should have been well noted by Americans and Germans alike in 1939), was the primary event that turned the Japanese on a collision course with the US.

Yet where is Nomonhan in the list of vital battles we teach our high school and college students about WWII? Pretty much nowhere. Apropos another conversation on this blog, it seems that the professional military historians outside academia take the study of this battle a little more seriously.

Much of the overemphasis on side issues is driven by contemporary press coverage. Occasionally I’ve wondered why people in the past ignored some sign of events to come that seems so obvious in hindsight. Then I look at the mass of frivolous and useless news coverage today and realize how hard it is to pick useful signals from the vast background of noise that bombards us daily.

If the media were properly doing their jobs, the OODA loop would be on the lips of anyone who has anything to say in public about the War on Terror in general, and the War in Iraq in particular. Instead even many people who think of themselves as educated (and perhaps an even greater fraction of those people who consider themselves intellectuals) have no idea who John Boyd was, or why he is an important figure. In my opinion no one who has not read his theories has any business at all opining on current foreign policy.

Probably the most important (and under-reported) historical trend in the current decade is directly related to Boyd’s theories, and can be summed up under the category of “fourth generation warfare” . I view this trend much the same way I view the Internet’s penetration into what was once the purview of Mainstream Media. Production in the past was concentrated in the hands of a few, be that access to the accoutrements of mass media such as television networks, or access to modern weapons. As the world has gotten richer, distribution networks have become more democratized, and excess capacity brought about by globalization has increased access to many types of goods, high quality video cameras, computers and weapons included.

In the past, insurgencies that we now class as fourth generation non-state actors needed a third generation patron to maintain the flow of arms and supplies that is required to damage a modern nation state. Mao and Tito had Stalin, Ho Chi Minh had Krushchev and Brezhnev, the IRA had idiotic Irish-Americans, etc. The fall of the Soviet Union has deprived a number of manufacturers of a market in the former Warsaw Pact, and this excess capacity is now aimed less at furthering the foreign policy of the Russians than it is aimed at supporting the economy of the smaller nations in the former Eastern block. This is exactly analogous to the fact that, with the excess capacity generated by business telecommunications networks, the network that formerly had the primary function of linking DARPA with its university research clients is now, on a volume basis, mostly used to support the global porn and counterfeit erectile dysfunction pharmaceuticals markets.

What does this mean for fourth-generation warfare? The guerrilla may swim in the peasantry as a fish swims in the sea, but peasants don’t supply him with Semtex and anti-tank missiles. Third generation economies do. Small arms are readily available in the third world and will keep small-scale conflict smoldering with or without international arms sales. The occasional IED or bomb on a plane may spark a small reaction, but in order to prolong a campaign and threaten governments, the guerrilla must procure sophisticated weapons or plan for years for a single strike, as with Al Q’aeda’s long campaign to bring down the WTC, from at least 1992 to 2001. While the attack on the WTC seemed like a spectacular success, when viewed though the lens of history, any campaign that required at least 9 years of planning to kill 4000 people and miss several of its major objectives would be viewed as a Pyrrhic victory at best, a total waste of resources at worst*. Such victories can never be truly prevented, but the odds of success can be further stacked against the barbarians.

However, the real goal of most fourth generation actors (e.g. FARC) is to become master of a state and play in the third generation game. This is where third generation states can score big wins, by limiting the flow of sophisticated weaponry. And this is where, until recently, the US was losing badly.

That failure should have been the top news story of the last five years, if the media reported on what was truly historically significant. Future historians will be able to point to a few good news stories and wonder why so many people missed the signals. The answer lies in the signal to noise ratio in the mainstream press, as epitomized by the low-key coverage of a crucial arrest, which is the topic of Part II of this post.

* The failure to pick up on and eliminate the threat after the first warning in 1993 is another topic for another day.

—-
More:
The MSM Misses the Bout: Part II
The MSM Misses the Bout: Part III

Tweet This Post

If “fourth generation warfare” is, as I suspect it is, the leading edge of one of the greatest historical trends of our generation, then the mechanisms of that trend should be the subject of serious academic and journalistic study. The trend may be part of a larger trend that encompasses the gradual weakening of the modern state’s attempt to monopolize violence that was heralded by the Treaty of Westphalia and celebrated by Max Weber.

As I mentioned in Part I, small scale conflict is largely a police action if one or both combatants are restricted to small arms. Sophisticated weapons, especially anti-aircraft systems, are crucial for fourth generation actors to rise beyond the street gang level when operating against states that have not yet collapsed internally.

Fourth generation expert Lind often states that no third-generation actors have not successfully repulsed fourth generation challenges. Not true. For example, the Uyghur uprising in China’s Xinjiang Province has made little traction in the absence of major third generation state support (this may change if the Saudis ever decide to intervene). After Kim Philby deprived the Forest Brothers of an Allied weapons supply line, that uprising faded to impotence by the mid-1950s.

If sophisticated weaponry is a pre-requisite for major carnage perpetrated by non-state actors, then one rational response to fourth generation threats is for large third generation states not to attempt to engage on the ground with small arms. Stopping the supply of small arms is a task just as futile as attempting to stop the supply of drugs. The third generation states can, however, interdict and control the supply of aircraft, anti-aircraft, artillery and major explosives to non-state actors.

The most important information for voters looking to elect officials that will provide appropriate security into the future is a look at the international arms trade. The MSM is woefully inadequate for this task. The best example is the minimal coverage of the arrest of one Виктор Анатольевич Бут.

Viktor Bout (pronounced “boot”, with the Russian vowel “oo” being raised and sent backwards in the mouth to the soft palate, not the English “oo”, which is produced at the front of the mouth on the hard palate) was arrested in Thailand on March 6th. Bout was captured in a sting operation led by US DEA agents posing as buyers for the terrorist / guerrilla organization FARC. Bout contracted with the undercover agents to deliver Surface to Air Missiles and helicopters to the guerrillas cum drug smugglers.

So who is Viktor Bout? My blog partner CW can answer that better than I can, since he had a whole series of posts regarding the missing 727 and the networks of Bout on his old blog. In the absence of that archive, or purchasing Braun and Farah’s book The Merchant of Death, the best places to start are here and here. Other treasure troves of information include TheYorkshire Ranter and Ruud Leeuw.

Bout is the Quartermaster to the Barbarians. The most important function in a modern army, no matter what its generation, is logistics, and Bout’s supply network has played a role in almost every major conflict since the end of the Cold War, up to and including the present. When Hezbollah suddenly displayed Fagot and Kornet anti-tank missiles that caused so many casualties in the IDF during their recent confrontation, it was no surprise that Bout was seen in Lebanon around the same time.

The Bozo-filterless Internet is a misleading place to search for facts about someone as shadowy as Bout, however. He was a Lieutenant in the Russian Air Force. No, he was a Major in the KGB. No he was a military interpreter in the Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU). He was born in Dushanbe – no wait, on the Caspian.

What is known is that he was in the Soviet Armed Forces in the late 80-s and early 90s, and at some point and attended military language school. He speaks six languages (he beats me, the bastard). He learned to fly somewhere, possibly the Soviet Air Force, possibly not. After the collapse of the Soviet Union he found some powerful financial backers and bought up significant numbers of Soviet military transport planes.

His recent past is obscured in shadows. He operates under a variety of aliases, including the moniker preferred by his US pursuers, Viktor Butt. Photographs of him were rare to nonexistent until he granted an interview to Peter Landesman. He looks, probably by design, like a portly Russian Joe Stalin.

In the early nineties, he developed a reputation for having a vertically integrated network of weapons smuggling – he could supply weapons, transport, and covering paperwork in a one stop shop of death. He would go anywhere, anytime, with any cargo, including the legitimate cargo that provided cover for his businesses and contraband such as narcotics. The most troubling aspect of Bout’s operations is that his organization was and is one of the few suppliers that can deliver major weapons systems such as the SAMs he is accused of procuring for FARC.

One of Bout’s strengths has been his ability to run shell organizations that evade the scrutiny of Western governments. He inherited the old KGB supply networks and has expanded and adapted them to the post-Cold War world. Despite Bush’s order to freeze his assets and cease dealings with his companies, sub contractors in Iraq have used Bout’s planes to fly supplies and mail into Iraq. Bout’s shell companies such as Irbis have run contracts for the US military. These legitimate contracts help provide cover and financial backing for his gun and drug running. He has also transported UN troops and relief aid into the very combat zones he helped make so dangerous with prior arms shipments, since there are few chartered air services that specialize in flying into hot zones.

As Farah and Austin noted in this article:

American officials tracking Bout tell us that many military officials feel they do not have the resources or the time to check aircraft records when a flight may contain badly needed ammunition or materiel. “They don’t check because they don’t care,” says a civilian official who helped trace Bout’s Iraq contracts with the U.S. military. “On the ground, what they care about is getting what they need. Unfortunately, this short-term mentality means that they may, in fact, be breaking the law.”

But Bout’s flights for the U.S. government–and other legitimate clients like NATO and the United Nations–do more than merely break the letter of international law. They provide Bout with cash that helps fund his gunrunning to conflict zones like the DRC, where the steady supply of weapons helps sustain a conflict that is destabilizing much of Africa. U.S. and European intelligence sources tell us they are also investigating whether Bout’s network is behind the thousands of new weapons surfacing in the hands of brutal militias in the Niger Delta region. Those militias pose a growing threat to stability in an area that provides around 10 percent of U.S. oil.

The Russians have been happy to use Bout and his companies as a force multiplier as their regular military has declined. The KGB has obviously bankrolled him, and Bout is somewhat unique in the world of international arms dealers in that he grabbed market share at a time of transition. Through murder and intimidation he has pushed out competition. This made him a highly wanted man.

Bout has been used repeatedly by the Russians as a convenient contractor with built-in plausible deniability for his Kremlin financiers. A military contractor, perhaps. However, it is by no means clear to what degree Bout is simply a Russian Blackwater. He has supplied many non-state actors that are not directly under Russian influence, although in a broad sense any non-state actor acting against Western interests is an ally of Russia. The evidence is that Bout’s network was only partially under the control of the Russians, although the Russian government often used him as a foreign policy tool. As this article intimates, but curiously does not plainly state, Russian Military officials may suspect Bout of arming the Chechens:

Сам Бут всячески дает понять в уже цитировавшемся интервью: его не трогают потому, что за ним стоят правительства, и не только России, но и стран, которые делают вид, что охотятся на него, а он, в свою очередь, умеет держать язык за зубами. Не исключено. Сегодня есть сведения об участии в нелегальных оружейных поставках Ираку президента Украины Леонида Кучмы, о расхищении приднестровских арсеналов, о продажах белорусского оружия зачастую обеим сторонам одного конфликта. О сомнительных оружейных сделках Казахстана и Киргизии. Вопреки заверениям генерала Фоменко о том, что переносные зенитно-ракетные комплексы находятся под полным контролем российского правительства, чеченские боевики не испытывают недостатка в «Иглах», которыми сбит уже не один вертолет федеральных сил.

Откуда они у чеченцев? В Москве убеждены, что из бывших советских республик. Министр обороны Сергей Иванов уже не раз призывал коллег из ближнего зарубежья провести инвентаризацию имеющихся у них в наличии ПЗРК. Министр намеревался сличить заводские номера на корпусах захваченных в Чечне ракет с номерами тех, что остались за пределами России после распада СССР. Видимо, инвентаризация так и не состоялась. В июне этого года на очередном заседании Совета министров обороны СНГ в Щучинске Казахстан) Сергей Иванов внес предложение ужесточить контроль за экспортом ПЗРК, однако делегации Азербайджана, Грузии, Узбекистана и Украины не поддержали его.

Bout himself clearly stated in the above cited interview that he is not molested [in his Moscow hideout – JJ] because behind him stands not only the government of Russia, but the governments of countries that are pretending to hunt for him; and he in turn knows how to keep silent. But that is not entirely true. Currently there is news of illegal shipments of weapons being sent to Iraq with the involvement of Ukranian President Leonid Kuchma, of the plundering of Pridnestovsk’s arsenals, of the sale of Byelorussian arms to two sides of the same conflict. Of suspected weapons deals in Kazhakhstan and Kirgizia. Despite the assurances of General Fomenko that mobile anti-aircraft batteries are all under the full control of the Russian government, Chechen fighters have experienced no shortage of “Needles”, which have brought down more than one Federal helicopter.

How did the Chechens acquire them? In Moscow they assure us that they are from former Soviet Republics. Minister of Defense Sergei Ivanov requested on more than one occasion that his counterparts in the neighboring republics to inventory their stores of rockets. The Minister intended to compare the serial numbers on the rocket casings seized in the Chechen Republic against numbers of that known to have remained outside Russia after the disintegration of the USSR. Evidently that this inventory did not take place. In June of this year at the next session of the CIS Ministerial Council of Defense in Shchuchinsk (Kazakhstan) Sergey Ivanov has proposed tougher controls over the export of mobile rocket launchers. However delegations of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Ukraine have not agreed. [translation mine]

Obviously, Putin’s regime has shielded Bout from Interpol, for various reasons. Bout’s wife, who claims he is a poet rather than an arms smuggler, is reputed to be the daughter of a high ranking KGB officer named “Zuiguin”. However, with this arrest and the subsequent refusal of Moscow to “extradite” their national, it seems that Bout’s patronage has weakened somewhat.

It could be that Russians opposed to his activities have finally grabbed the ear of incoming president Medvedev. That is doubtful. The Russians have made great use of Bout’s fleet for plausible deniability in supplying terrorist entities that oppose the West. Bout’s aircraft are just too useful to toss away for running the occasional gun shipment against national interests. In addition, if the above-mentioned rumor is true that his father-in-law is a former high official in the KGB, he has several layers of protection in Russia.

Although his patrons in Russia have been protecting him from arrest, his freedom to travel and earn a “living” has been severely curtailed. It is less than certain what the impact of asset seizures have been on his personal fortune.

Parts of the US government have been pursuing Bout since the early nineties, even as other parts were hiring his companies to run supplies, FedEx mail shipments, and arms into Iraq. Belgium (one of his companies was headquartered in Ostend Airport) pressed Interpol to issue a warrant for his arrest, and the Bush Administration has frozen his known assets.

In a meeting last autumn, one European intelligence official who had worked on a long-running investigation into Bout’s activities in Africa was openly cynical that he would ever be caught. ‘Arrest Bout? Nobody wants to. Even my own government eventually shut us down. There’s been a decision to hassle him with sanctions to keep him in line but everyone needs him at some point, or might [need him]. Plus he’d just be replaced by someone else and they could be worse,’ the official said. ‘As long as he stays quiet and remains useful, he can do this indefinitely.’

…

The strong suspicion that elements in US and other Western intelligence services supposed to be pursuing Bout were occasionally protecting him – no evidence suggests an official policy to protect Bout – is supported by an American diplomat who had tracked Bout as part of investigations into the trade in Russia’s post-Cold War arms stockpiles.

The diplomat described how efforts to track or harass Bout in the late 1990s and early 2000 by small-arms control experts at the State Department would eventually draw the ire of certain CIA officials, resulting in angry phone calls to the diplomat’s superiors demanding that they back off. But the diplomat was emphatic that he did not believe the agency actively or officially worked alongside Bout, but rather traded information with him, making him a useful, if unappealing, occasional asset.

So how did Viktor get bagged?

There is some speculation that one reason Bout has evaded capture is the complicit help of certain highly placed parties in the US and EU who would be embarrassed by revelations from Bout concerning their dealings with him.

This may be true. It is certainly curious that Bout was not arrested on money laundering, arms smuggling, or tax evasion charges that are outstanding against him, despite the fact that Bout’s company pulled a fast one on its American employers and made off with over 200,000 Kalashnikovs that had been paid for by the US in Bosnia for shipment to Iraqi militias.

In fact, the sting that brought him down was an entirely de novo operation of the DEA:

In the end it was an agency of one of those states suspected of turning a blind eye to Bout’s activities that was the engine behind his capture. According to a source with close ties to the DEA, the operation was so sensitive it was kept secret from other members of the US intelligence community, including high-ranking members of the Justice Department, precisely because of the fear that Bout might be tipped off by elements that the DEA agents feared had protected him in the past. A special unit was set up to run the operation due to ‘war on drugs’ legislation and guidelines, allowed to operate outside the normal protocols that require US government-wide notification.

This is probably the first positive dividend I’ve seen coming out of the War on Drugs.

For those people who supported a unified intelligence command in the wake of 9/11, there is some further food for thought in this sordid tale:

Few people, even in the closed world of US intelligence, knew the DEA was tracking Bout, let alone setting him up for an arrest. ‘[The DEA] was laughing at the CIA in their offices,’ because they had arrested someone that was perceived to be working for the agency, said one witness.

The question remains – why did this sting succeed where so many others failed? Why did Viktor wind up in Thailand? Bout allegedly has a penchant for signing deals face to face, which may have led to his downfall. Only a few countries are safe for the fugitive, and a previous meeting in Bulgaria was scratched due to international pressure. Thailand apparently remained a safe haven.

According to the Mother Jones report, Bout agreed to meet the DEA agents despite the fact that their photographs did not appear in his intelligence report on FARC commanders. This appears to be a bit sloppy on the part of the usually ultra-paranoid Bout, but may indicate that the financial pressure brought on by asset seizure is beginning to strain Bout’s finances.

Despite his the evident conspiracy-mongering in some of the articles of former Polish Intelligence officer Daytsh, I tend to agree with his assessment that Viktor has been betrayed in a power struggle in Moscow, in the FSB in particular, and his arrest would have been accomplished even in the absence of doubts surrounding his loyalty to the Russian state. Medvedev wants to clear the slate of Putin’s cronies, and if he can simultaneously win a few PR points in the West, so much the better.

The major piece of evidence supporting Daytsh’s claims that Bout was betrayed is the back and forth in the press concerning Russia’s intent to extradite. In the first days after his arrest, the Russian Foreign Ministry. intimated that Russia would extradite Bout. As of today, it seems the Russians are not willing to extradite him despite his direct plea for help. This, to me, indicates that the early overtures in that direction were the remnants of Putin’s network acting in a knee-jerk fashion, and that Medvedev’s new cronies are gradually cutting ties to Bout. More evidence in that regard is the recent arrest of Bout crony and Arbat Prestige Mafia Godfather Semyon Mogilevich in Moscow.

Bout may also have traveled to Thailand under the assumption that his patrons in Moscow would help extricate him from any problems he might encounter. In this he appears to have been mistaken. For now. But I highly doubt that the Russians have begun to put the long term interests of civilization ahead of the short term interests of the kleptocracy in Moscow.

I hope that the US manages to extradite and prosecute Bout, but the real question for me is what becomes of his empire? His older brother Sergei is nowhere near the logistics expert that Viktor has shown himself to be. Hopefully Bout’s network will fall into far less competent hands and slowly rust away. However, I can not help but suspect that Medvedev has someone else in mind to take the title of World’s Greatest Merchant of Death. If so, the threat to civilization from fourth generation warfare will continue to grow.

Where to from here? I still have a significant number of questions which I would like to see tackled by the press. Those will be outlined in Part III.

—-
Previous post: The MSM Misses the Bout: Part I
Next post: The MSM Misses the Bout: Part III

Tweet This Post

The press coverage on the arrest of Viktor Bout has been sporadic. It is a sad commentary on the MSM that one of the best reports I’ve been able to find is from Mother Jones. Given Bout’s importance, a fourth estate that is actually fulfilling its part of the social contract should be blasting the story of Bout’s arrest from every headline.

Reading through this mound of background material for these posts, I still have some very nagging questions that cry out for some decent investigative reporting, the most prominent of which are:

1. Why Thailand? Despite the massive amounts of US funneled to Bangkok over the years since the Vietnam War (in some quarters earning Bangkok the moniker “Langley, East), why did Bout feel safe to travel there? With all the insurgencies in that part of the world, including one in Thailand itself, just how incompetent are the Thais as allies anyway? There’s a huge failure of US foreign policy angle for a story here, from the Philippines to Thailand to Pakistan.

Fortunately for us living in the internet age, there are journalists somewhere in the world asking these questions:

Bangkok is a logistics centre and air hub, there is widespread corruption, there are many ways to get out of the country, and it is a centre for counterfeit currency and fake passports,” an analyst familiar with security issues and intelligence circles told The Straits Times in Singapore.

“Thailand is a laissez faire country with many land and sea borders. For a price, you can do a deal, so long as you don’t touch the locals or harm the country. It’s a haven.”

Knowledgeable bloggers, once again also shed some light:

“Easy to blend in (the large Bangkok population helps), easy access to transferring money and finding accommodation, cheap cost of living and good transit hub,” reasoned Bangkok Pundit, an anonymous blogger who comments on Thai politics and the insurgency in southern Thailand.

“People base themselves in Bangkok for its friendly local environment (more importantly, questions are not asked) and access to others in their local community,” explained the blogger in an email.

On his own site, Bangkok Pundit also notes that Thailand is a big center for passport forgery.

Draconian security measures that restrict the freedom of people in the first world are not going to close these loopholes. Leaning on Thailand and Romania to shut off operators such as Bout will do more for world security than having semi-trained Homeland Security flunkies scrutinizing people’s junk in specialized X-ray machines in US airports.

2. Related to the previous question, just what game is Thailand playing, anyway? Why did they drop charges against Bout? Once again, bloggers seem to answer questions better than the MSM:

during the post-arrest/interrogation stage where I imagine his extradition could be processed and the court will dismiss the charges allowing his extradition to the US

If Thai law does not allow extradition of a criminal who is being charged by the Thais, this is probably not too bad an idea, given the record of the Thais in keeping track of their prisoners:

In 2002, Indian underworld don Chhota Rajan was shot in his Bangkok apartment. And in a scene that could be inspired by a Bollywood movie, the wounded gangster, held in a Bangkok private hospital, escaped by climbing out the window using knotted bed sheets.

On Sept 10, 2007, Kumaran – or KP, the chief procurer of arms of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam – was believed by many, including the Sri Lankan government, to have been arrested in Bangkok.

However, while in Thai custody KP allegedly “disappeared”.

I’m not as optimistic as the Counter-Terrorism Blog that the Thais are now good allies. It would seem to me that, if the Russians successfully block extradition to the US, having a backup set of charges to detain Bout with in Thailand would be a good idea. Placing all the eggs in the US basket may not be a good idea, but no one in the press is asking questions. Given Bout’s connections, if this chance slips though the fingers of the Justice Department, it is unlikely there will ever be another chance to catch the man.

3. How deeply are US intelligence agencies involved with Bout, and were they protecting him or actively discouraging his prosecution? This should be classic MSM “US as the bad guy” material. Where is the expose?

This is precisely the kind of idiocy that the British Foreign Service engaged in after WWI. British encouragement of both Zionist and Arab Nationalism, with Arabists forming their own clique in the Foreign Service, led to the modern mess in the Middle East – does the US not learn from history? Do journalists know enough history to even ask that question? (More on that below.)

4. Why did the Bush Administration allow the momentum that had built up against Bout at the end of the Clinton Administration to dissipate? This is clear failure of vision, of leadership, and evidence of a lack of ability to identify clearly the weak points in the OODA loop of the enemy we face. Once again, this ought to be red meat to the MSM.

5. To what degree is Bout a tool of Russian foreign policy? I’ve often said that I like Russians, but don’t think too much of Russia. One of the reasons is the serf-like tendency of Russian society to view life as a zero-sum game. The classic Russian attitude is that if someone has more than someone else, that wealth must have been stolen. The concept of creating wealth is foreign to Russia, understandably so. But this means that in Russia mobsters such as Mogilevich and Bout style themselves as “businessmen” with a straight face. There is a clear angle for a story on Russian internal politics their influence on foreign policy. Certainly, Bout is seen as a hero by certain ultra-nationalists

«Виктор Бут по сути является идеальным образцом российского бизнесмена» -считает эксперт портала «Евразия» Владимир Никитин – «Зарабатывая приличные деньги, он умудряется поддерживать антиамериканские режимы оружием, работая таким образом на интересы российской геополитики. Если российское посольство не сможет вытащить Бута из этой передряги, то его сотрудников следует уволить с позором. Речь идет не о каком-то заблудшем туристе, а о стратегическом вопросе, от которого зависит в дальнейшем судьба России. А держится она именно на таких людях, как Виктор Бут. Все обвинения, представленные американской стороной для России абсолютно нелегитимны».

As a matter of fact, Viktor Bout is the ideal Russian businessman, in the opinion of Eurasia portal’s expert Vladimir Nikitin: “He gets wealthy, he manages to supply anti-American regimes with weapons, at the same time working in the interest of Russian geopolitics. If the Russian embassy staff can not extricate Bout from this situation, then they need to be dismissed in disgrace. This is not about some stray tourist, but a strategic question, on which depends the future fate of Russia. That fate is in the hands of precisely such people as Viktor Bout. All the charges that the Americans have brought forward are, from the Russian point of view, totally illegitimate. [translation mine]

6. It is somewhat disturbing that Bout thought that Romania was the perfect place to store heavy anti-aircraft weapons, and indicates that US presence in Eastern Europe ought to be a little more forceful, as well. According to the Justice Department, Romanian Police were involved in the sting, but small pockets of uncorrupted officials do not a solid ally make.

Why is the US not concentrating on shoring up the rule of law in semi-failed states such as Romania that allow terrorists to run free on their territory? As I stated in the beginning, excess capacity leads to people finding new uses for items that were once scarce or expensive. This leads to innovation, and is one reason why a rising economic tide floats all boats. The internet is a positive example of this dynamic. Fourth generation warfare is a negative one. But fortunately, not every Podunk country can manufacture sophisticated weapons. The US is doing a horrible job of cutting of the known supply points, and this is probably the biggest news story of the decade. Where IS the MSM?

7. I am deeply troubled by the actions of the Russian State that point to the kind of behavior that is anti-civilization. After Beslan, any support of Radical Islam should have been anathema to Moscow, but they continue to cut off the Russian nose to spite the face of the US. This is the only area where I have some common ground of the “win friends and influence people” school of leftist diplomacy. The US needs ties into all aspects of Russian society in order to influence Russia to be to a rational actor when the interests of both countries are aligned. Once again, the MSM ought to be criticizing this failure of the current administration.

Finally, a philosophical musing on the ability of the fourth estate to fulfill the function that it so vociferously claims for itself: I am reminded of L’Engele’s criticism of the Harry Potter books: there is nothing underneath. All great literature and journalism has to have a motivating ethos and philosophy. In order to have this, journalists must be well educated. From what I observed as a TA and in my subsequent interactions with the press in my professional life, (and obviously other Chicago Boyz have observed as well)journalism students don’t learn much of anything substantive in their college curricula, and their lack of knowledge shows in the stories they cover and the ones they don’t.

Heinlein was fond of saying that:

The three-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.

I tend to agree. I’ve complained about journalistic innumeracy before. Obviously, I used multiple language sources to write these posts, and I have my doubts that many American journalists could do the same. I realize I’m a unique case in being highly educated in both language and math, so before I venture too far off into Mary Sue-ism, I’ll cover the third area that journalists have no excuse for being ill-educated in: history.

There is a direct historical allegory to contractors such as Blackwater and Bout’s airlines serving national interests. The use of semi-piratical (or outright piratical) naval squadrons by Elizabeth I to combat the Spanish (due to the relatively weak temporal and financial power of the Crown) continued until the British Crown accrued enough power and taxation authority to secure a national military. The deprivations of the free captains on the high seas are a stark example of the danger of recruiting men of violence and giving them state sanction without placing them under strict military controls.

If the MSM truly fulfilled its claimed function, that connection should have been made in a major expose long ago. Why has there not been a MSM story pasting Bout’s picture atop the Golden Hind? Where is the historical curiosity and ability to spot trends and fashion stories from such knowledge? Enquiring minds want to know.

—-
Previous:
The MSM Misses the Bout: Part I
The MSM Misses the Bout: Part II

Tweet This Post

The former Yugoslavia is a mess. It has been so since before the Ottomans ruled that part of the world, and judging from recent events, it will continue to be so long into the future. My blog partner CW is fond on quoting from Dame West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon”, because the pre-war Balkan region she describes in that book is remarkably similar to the situation today.

In “What Went Wrong”, Bernard Lewis noted the stark cultural difference between Turkey and the rest of the Muslim world in the period from roughly 1880 to 1922. When confronted with the reality of European dominance and success, the Turks asked themselves “What did we do wrong?”. The Arabs asked themselves: “What did they just do to us?” Turkey flourished, relatively speaking, and the Middle East today would be right where it was in 1922 if it were not for oil. In fact, it is pretty much where it was in 1922, just with more automobiles and guns.

The culture of the Balkans blames everyone else for their troubles: their neighbors, the UN, the EU, and most of all the US. After nearly 3 decades of murdering each other, here’s what the Serbs have to say:

“The whole nation is angry,” said Sinisa Tasic, one of the organizers. “We are furious with the Americans. Wherever they go they create problems.”

As intellectual rationalizations for bad behavior go, blaming the US is a pretty convenient one, but the leaders of the Balkans have always been pretty good at rationalizing their actions in the absence of foreign interference. P.J. O’Rourke noted that same thing when writing about the Bosnian situation in All the Trouble in the World:

Yugoslavia’s ethnic wounds are also, unfortunately, infected with idealism. There’s a surplus of intellectuals in the regions. Yugoslavia, like the rest of Eastern Europe, has more artists, writers and teachers than it has art, literature, or schools. In the resultant mental unemployment, idealism flourishes.

What puzzles me about the current situation is the sheer ineptitude of the Bush Administration. Over 90% of the troops on the ground in Kosovo are European nationals, not US. I’m pretty sure that nothing happens to or in Kosovo that is not vetted by Brussels. The Economist has a pretty good review of the situation here:

Besides, the “independent” Kosovo will for a long while in effect become a protectorate of the European Union, which is sending a large mission to take over from the UN.

The three big dogs of the EU are thrilled to confront Russia here, on a battleground no one really cares about. Once again the Balkans are the setting for a proxy fight between the great powers. Many of the new member states or candidates for membership to the EU were long under the thumb of the USSR, and many have ties to Russian as part of a vague but very real larger Slavic culture. In order to prevent Russia from influencing EU affairs and to preserve their dominance, France, Germany and the UK are delighted to have a current example of old Russian habits to remind the new member states why they turned to the West in the first place. A regional power play explains why the French and German contingents in KFOR outnumber the US by a factor of 2:1 each.

Forcing the Russian eminence grise out into the open in fact stabilizes the rest of Western and Central Europe at the expense of the Balkans. Since the Balkans are already torn by war and occupied by foreign troops, destabilization there will not significantly affect the rest of Europe. In time, Kosovo will become Europe’s Afghanistan, a forgotten conflict uncovered by the press save for a few pathetic casualty reports.

American interests probably receive a few collateral boosts as well. The major effect, and the only real reason I can see for the US rush to recognize Kosovo, is to focus the attention of the “Stans” on Russian activities there. As a great power, Russia can keep its eye on many problems simultaneously, but it can not run multiple strategies at once. The Russian military has been leaning on the Stans to roll back their cooperation with the US. Freedom to operate in the Stans will be vital if the situation in Pakistan goes South, so this is an excellent opportunity to show Russian chauvinism in a pro-Slavic, pro-Orthodox, and anti-Muslim situation. I’m sure the Uzbekhs and Kazakhs are watching closely.

However, by putting the US at the forefront of recognition and by ignoring International Law, the Bush Administration has once again taken a correct strategy and so mishandled the tactical execution that the objectives that would have been served by the strategy are completely lost. I find it supremely ironic that the US is supporting the construction of a Muslim state in a region whose religion-tainted wars in the 1990s trained many of the Al Qaeda operatives our forces have faced in Iraq.

The Russians are of course concerned about contested regions such as Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Pridnestrov. As one Russian headline proclaims: “The Americans Have not Yet Realized the Full “Uniqueness” of Kosovo”. The Bush Administration claims the action does not legitimize self-rule movements in places such as Chechnya, but the Russians are rightfully suspicious of the precedent.

The best course of action would have been to let the EU take the lead in recognition and follow with official notice from Washington once EU troops were firmly manning the barricades. If the US is taking one for the team by focusing ire on Americans so that EU troops in Kosovo are not unduly targeted, the risk to American interests is far too great in proportion to the level of support the EU provides to the US efforts in the Middle East (with the obvious exception of the UK). Whatever small gains the US takes away, the dominant powers in the EU gain more, and should take a more proportionate share of the risk.

The Russian press in fact recognizes the game. (All translations below are mine, but I am including the Russian text, for reasons that will become clear below, so that Tatyana or other commenters who speak Russian can confirm if I’m playing fast and loose with Russian remarks as I claim the MSM has done ).

Представители косовских сербов неоднократно высказывались против присутствия новой миссии европейцев в крае. Такого же мнения придерживается и Белград. Несмотря на эти возражения, Евросоюз в минувшую субботу дал зеленый свет развертыванию EULEX. В нее войдут около 2 тыс. человек, в том числе 1500 полицейских. В декабре прошлого года отправку миссии одобрили лидеры ЕС. Сейчас в Косове присутствуют гражданская миссия ООН (UNMIK) и силы миротворцев KFOR.
 
На первом этапе существование самопровозглашенной республики будет контролировать EULEX. Миссия ООН UNMIK не может в полной мере взять на себя эту функцию, так как решение по косовскому вопросу было заблокировано в Совбезе ООН.

My translation:

The representatives of the Kosovo Serbs repeatedly registered their opposition to a new EU mission to the region. Belgrade shares their views. Disregarding these protests, last Saturday the EU gave the green light to the organization of EU-LEX. Nearly 2000  members, including 1500 police officers, will be sent [These troops are not part of the existing EU mission in the region and include 700 SWAT team members- JJ] . The addition was approved by the leaders of the EU last December. Currently, both a humanitarian mission from the UN (UNMIK) and the KFOR peacekeepers are operating in Kosovo.
 
Initially, the existence of the self-proclaimed republic will be controlled by EULEX. The UN mission UNMIK could fully not take on that mission upon itself, as a decision about the Kosovo situation was blocked in the Security Council of the UN.

Russia is of course protesting the move to recognize Kosovo. The EU and US have been making Russia out to be the bad guys. In many senses, the Russians are behaving reasonably, although it is obvious that Moscow would like to pull the Serbs firmly into Russian orbit.

The MSM seems to be rushing to judgment as well. I’m not sure if the distortions are intentional or due to ineptitude, but the Russians position is not well represented in the Western press. Take, for example, this CNN quote:

“If the EU works out a single position or if NATO steps beyond its mandate in Kosovo, these organizations will be in conflict with the U.N., and then I think we will also begin operating under the assumption that in order to be respected, one needs to use force,” Moscow’s ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin said, in comments carried by Russia’s Interfax news agency.

I went to the Interfax files and pulled up the original Russian story. The actual text is:

Москва. 22 февраля. ИНТЕРФАКС – Постпред РФ в НАТО Дмитрий Рогозин не исключает, что после косовского прецедента государственные интересы в мире можно будет защитить только с помощью военной силы.
 
“В случае если Европейский Союз и Организация Североатлантического договора выйдут за пределы мандата, который определен им Организацией Объединенных Наций, то это означает, что они вступают в каком-то смысле в конфликт с самой ООН. Это будет означать, что мир в будущем будет строиться не на международном праве, а на грубой силе – читай вооруженной силе”, -подчеркнул он в пятницу в ходе телемоста Москва – Брюссель.

My translation:

Russian Federation Emissary to NATO Dmitri Rogozin does not discount that after the Kosovo precedent that in the future national interests may be defensible only with the aid of military force.
 
“If the EU and NATO overstep the bounds of the mandate that has been given to them by the UN, then that means that they are heading in some sense into conflict with the UN. That means that peace in the future will be constructed out of International Law, but by the basest of pressure – military force” – he emphasized on Friday in a teleconference between Moscow and Brussels.

The original text contains no reference to “respect”, and it’s inclusion is a clear bias in the CNN reports attitude towards Russian loss of influence in the post-Soviet era. The Russian text is much less threatening, and clearly, in my mind, aimed at maintaining the Russian moral authority to use force in Chechnya and other break-away regions within its territory.

The original mis-quote was used to support a headline of “Russia does not rule out force in Kosovo”. It’s interesting to note that the original article title was taken down and replaced with another, with fresh content added.

Unfortunately, in the brief time that misinformed headline graced the Web, it was picked up by other clueless Western reporters.

From what I’ve read in the Russian press, the concern about Kosovo is mainly over the violation of UN resolutions and what that may mean for Russia in the future. Take, for example, the Argumenty and Fakty opinion poll on Kosovo:

Парламент Косова проголосовал за принятие декларации о независимости края. Как вы относитесь к образованию нового государства?
 
39% Отрицательно. США и Европа не посчитались с мнением Сербии
 
44% Отрицательно. Теперь любая спорная территория может провозгласить себя отдельным государством
 
10% Положительно. Этнические меньшинства получат самостоятельность и свободу
 
4% Мне все равно
 
3% Другое

Translation:

The Kosovar Parliament voted in favor of a declaration of independence for the region. How do you feel about this new country?
 
39% Negative. The US and EU did not consult the Serbs.
 
44% Negative. Now every contested region may vote to make itself a separate country.
 
10% Positive. Ethnic minorities are achieving self-rule and freedom.
 
4% Don’t care.
 
3% Other

The Russians in fact do seem to be somewhat reasonable in this instance*.

Возможен фактический раздел Косово на две части, считают в МИД РФ Москва. 22 февраля. ИНТЕРФАКС – В Москве не исключают раздела Косово на сербскую и албанскую части.
 
“Складывается ситуация, имеющая перспективы к самоизоляции косовских сербов, не согласных или не принимающих одностороннее провозглашение Приштиной независимости Косово”, – сказал “Интерфаксу” в пятницу заместитель директора четвертого европейского департамента МИД РФ, курирующего Балканы, Александр Боцан-Харченко.
 
“Это вполне может привести к фактическому разделу Косово”, – сказал собеседник агентства.

My translation:

It is in fact possible to divide Kosovo into two partitions, claims the Foreign Ministry of the Russian Federation.
 
Moscow does not exclude the possibility of dividing Kosovo into Serbian and Albaninan regions.
 
“This situation may lead to the self-segregation of the Kosovo Serbs who do not agree to or do not accept the one-sided declaration of independence for Kosovo by Pristina” –Deputy Director of the 4th European Department of the FM of the RF with responsibility for the Balkans Aleksander Botsan-Kharchenko told Interfax. “This indeed could lead to the de facto partition of Kosovo”, – he told the agency.

So, fears of a new cold war are quite unfounded. The Russian understand the game they are playing in the EU. They will, of course, jockey for as much position as they can by taking Serbia’s side in the forced succession of a large chunk of formerly Serbian territory, for which Serbs protests are not without merit. However, P.J. O’Rourke also once again summarizes my attitude towards everyone who is squabbling in the region:

The Serbs, of course, have as many excuses and grievances as anybody does in Yugoslavia, which is to say a lot. And they are just as much in the right as everybody else, which is to say they’re shits.

* Interfax apparently does not believe in public archives that last for more than a week, so I was forced to link to Russian sources that quoted the agency. When I started this article, I could pull the original stories directly from Interfax.

Tweet This Post

Lately I’ve been struggling with the concept of “educated beyond one’s intelligence”. Testing and education is supposed to separate the meritorious from the masses. Unfortunately, education serves only to cut off the very bottom, obviously inept cohort, but seems to have less ability to separate truly good people from mediocre intellects and fakers. This has direct implications beyond Academia, as David Foster pointed out when he noted the reliance of businesses on paper trail rather than accomplishments as a means of filtering potential new hires.

I’m now starting to construct a mental model for why education seems to be failing at this central task, and a few terms spring immediately to mind.

Term One: Education as Trade Unionism

My mother spent all of her working life as a worker bee – a schoolteacher. She had absolutely no desire to go into school administration. It therefore amuses me greatly that immediately upon retirement she took a job as a librarian that promoted her into management within a year. She started as the children’s librarian, and was extremely good at it. When she was promoted to branch chief, a new children’s librarian was provided for her by the system, and she became a manager.

This new person was eminently qualified – on paper. She had a degrees in library science and teaching, and she interviewed well. But the new employee was lazy – failing to catalog and shelve books, failing to provide adequate enrichment activities during storytime, and failing to get requests from patrons for new children’s books to the central library. This person left the system in a huff when passed over for a promotion in another branch.

A new children’s librarian was found. She works hard, she always has an interesting activity for the pre-schoolers’ story time, and she is liked by the patrons. Mom was telling me that if these two were to compete head-to-head for a job, the first person would win every time. The poor employee is more articulate in an interview, and she has the sheepskin that impresses today’s bureaucrat.

Later in the conversation, we were discussing some children’s books that I had recommended, and why the library system (not just her branch) was doing such a poor job in obtaining good books for young adults. Once again, the man responsible for purchasing children’s books has the sheepskin, but no drive or discernment.

Now that it is well known that education is valued more as a signaling mechanism than for any intrinsic knowledge that is imparted over the course of fours years of listening to over-educated fools blather on about Foucalt and Derrida, the rent-seekers of marginal intelligence and even lower work ethic are pushing to look for a “soft place” as the rent-seekers in the USSR used to call a position of low responsibility and reasonable remuneration. A sheepskin provides the cover for this kind of subterfuge.

So one answer to the question of why so many “experts” are not creative thinkers is that they are simply rent-seekers who have done the minimum to get by for their degree, and sink further into sloth afterwards.

However, a second kind of less-than-useful expert is a hard-working mechanic – he or she learns algorithms – studies hard to learn algorithms, but has no true understanding of many critical subjects in the field. The abundance of those kind of experts is explained by flaws in the process of testing and educating.

Term Two: Measurement of Intelligence and Aptitude

When I sat back and thought a little harder about rent-seeking behavior, I began to wonder why the battery after battery of tests that I had undergone in my academic career, in addition to the educational processes of matriculation and degree granting, do not separate the wheat from the chaff. That led me back to a couple of older posts from Zen and Dan, which I have been meaning to post on for a while. Those posts touched on the Flynn effect, which is a recognition that IQs have been slowly rising with time.

There is something, if not broken, then insufficient, in the way we measure both intelligence and aptitude. Let’s start with aptitude. I received my B.Sc. from a small but prestigious engineering and science institute. I have serious doubts that anyone there scored less than the 95th percentile on the SAT Math test. Most of us scored in the 99th. As a point of fact, I scored in the 99th percentile. And I am telling you now that I can rattle off dozens of names of schoolmates who were better at math than I.

One might make the argument that the SAT does not cover much advanced math, and that differentiation for advanced students should take place on the GRE. Except that the GRE math is no more difficult than the SAT math. Same story for me: 99th percentile, lots of folks in grad school better than I am. Why does neither the GRE nor the SAT differentiate in that critical cohort of people who are going on to graduate school in science and engineering? Well, the easy answer is that there are subject matter GRE tests to do that. The GRE is a general test.

The deeper answer is that the very problems that would differentiate in the top cohorts a) don’t lend themselves to the multiple-guess format and b) take much too long for a timed test. Differentiation has been sacrificed for reproducibility in the SAT and GRE. Most of us who have taken more advanced math classes can tell you about worrying a single problem to death for hours, days, or weeks. Those are the problems that separate the girls from the women, and by their very nature are not good standardized test fodder. What standardized tests measure best are mastery of algorithms, which any fool can, and many fools do, master.

The fact that we test primarily for algorithmic mastery opens a huge back door for the rent-seekers. It explains exactly why there are so many Mitt Romneys out there- process jocks who cling to the process – even when it’s obvious that the process is broken – because process and algorithm are the only tools in their kit.

As more and more schools and parents become aware of the algorithms that are tested on the exams that mean access to wealth and power, those skills are emphasized, and we see the Flynn Effect in IQ scores as described by Zenpundit:

One of the well-documented aspects regarding IQ testing on which you can safely make broad generalizations, is that aggregate mean IQ scores have been rising. Not just here in America or in advanced countries but everywhere (though at different rates), rich or poor, free or unfree, north or south. Moreover, to the extent to which we can assemble reliable and valid psychometric records, this societal increase in mean IQ, known as “The Flynn Effect” after researcher James Flynn, has been going on for about a century.

At the same time that mean IQ has increased, the results of standardized testing of k-12 students at the national level has not reflected this improvement, at least not proportionately; seniors and some parents are also prone to make the anecdotal observation that children today simply aren’t as proficient at many practical kinds of problem solving as they were many decades ago. How can these phenomena be reconciled ?
Flynn now argues the change is due to the increasing complexity and stimulation of the modern social environment – children are getting better at certain kinds of thinking (which impacts IQ scores) demanded by their environment but other kinds of cognitive skills are falling into disuse.

As Dan of tdaxp pointed out, if the IQ test itself can be gamed, there are probably other measures that might better get at a measure of core intelligence, either instead of or in conjunction with IQ:

A good example is the Test Necessary Arithmetic Operations. This test was devised by Guilford to measure a specific cell in his Structure of the Intellect Model. Each item presents a short word problem. The examinee’s task is not to solve the problem, but to say which two operations she would use, and in what order. There are four operations: add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Thus, problems do not require advanced mathematics. Yet in the sample of over 100 Stanford undergraduates who were administered most of the tests in Figure 2, Necessary Arithmetic Operations had one of the highest loadings on the [fluid intelligence] factor (Marshalek, Lohman, & Snow, 1983).

Just as a layman’s observation, I expect a genius to have insights I don’t. When I see genii as defined by IQ such as Maryln Vos Savant, my first reaction is “if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” Where is her Nobel, her solution to one of the great unsolved problems in mathematics, her economic model that reshapes the way we see society – or even her Great American Novel? I’m not terribly impressed with any of her writings. I’ve personally come in contact with other people whom I know have tested as a genius and have also been less than impressed. Not all of that lack of living up to “potential” can be laid at the feet of low EQ, either. Maybe it’s that IQ, like the SAT, is useless at the top end of the scale. It is likely that there are other things that need to be measured than what those tests can quantify.

Term Three: Our Education System Does Not Encourage Deep Understanding

Assuming the intelligence and aptitude tests are flawed, couldn’t we use then as a first pass filter and then differentiate the mechanics from the creatives in our higher education? Ostensibly, that’s what grading at the University level should do. But many of the same problems with a timed test apply to testing in a college classroom. In a two hour test one can’t put all that many truly differentiating problems on the exam, and even if one did, some kids would come up with better answers given more time. And in the real world, new stuff comes from someone spending a lot of time worrying a problem to death.*

The mechanics often do very well in school if they have a good work ethic. When I was in undergrad, my O-Chem teacher commented that P-Chemists tended to do poorly in O-chem because they were always wondering why some reaction worked the way it did, rather than just memorizing it and going on to the next reaction. Electron pushing is voodoo, and I never really felt I understood O-Chem until I took graduate classes in Frontier Orbital Theory. The mechanical O-chemists who got As in undergrad O-chem hated FO theory, however, because it required understanding, not memorization. Well, understanding and math. But they got through it, via the same process that mediocre engineers survive: the process that the super bright engineers derisively call “plug-and-chug” – memorize all the applicable formulas and when to use them, and every problem likely to appear on a test becomes an exercise in finding the right algorithm.

This isn’t new, either. Feynman wrote about mechanical learnings in “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman”:

I often liked to play tricks on people when I was at MIT. One time, in a mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a piece of plastic for drawing smooth curves–a curly, funny-looking thing) and said, “I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?”

I thought for a moment and said, “Sure they do. The curves are very special curves. Lemme show ya,” and I picked up my French curve and began to turn it slowly. “The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal.”

All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is horizontal. They were all excited by this “discovery”–even though they had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already “learned” that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any curve is zero (horizontal). They didn’t put two and two together. They didn’t even know what they “knew.”

Those folks in his technical drawing class were largely educated beyond their intelligence.

This is why mediocre people get degrees from prestigious schools. The people in Feynman’s book were students at MIT fer cryin’ out loud. Many of them probably had decent, even great GPAs. These people go on to play politics because they have little to offer content-wise in their jobs, so they concentrate on the political aspects, and unfortunately tend to rise to middle management. These same people are threatened by those of greater ability, and tend to hire subordinates of even lower ability, and thus we come to the tendency of large organizations to ossify.

I’m not sure how to get around the problem of ranking graduates at the educational level. Requiring some sort of internship for most degrees might help, but managers of interns are loath to give poor recommendations even when they are deserved, so in the programs I’ve seen you get a regression to the mean on the internship scores. I was in charge of a largely useless intern on one of my assignments, but we really didn’t torch the evaluations we should have at the end of the internship. I’m not proud to say that my lack of criticism I probably contributed to the eventual hiring of that intern as a field manager at another company. I’m not saying we gave a glowing review, but I also didn’t go into the details of the hand-holding I had to do in order to not have the intern’s project come out as a disaster. As my boss at the time said: can you imagine the attitudes of the former intern’s subordinates, who are successful entrepreneurs running franchises that are basically semi-independent businesses, having to listen to that intern’s blatherings? No. I can’t. I’m truly sorry guys.

It is difficult for a large business to let an underperformer go, which leads to the over-reliance on pieces of paper that hardly tell even one third of the story of a person’s competence. This in turn explains some of the huge inefficiencies that I see around me in big business and government. Another corrective mechanism might be to make it easier to dismiss employees and harder for them to sue unless clear wrongdoing is evident. That will make my job much less secure, but also much less frustrating. I’m willing to take the chance.

Tweet This Post

This.