Reasoning Logically, Being Rational and Thinking Scientifically

I stumbled across this short discussion between Neil de Grasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins - names which would usually would send me heading for a Scotty Kilmer car maintenance clip - and at one point Tyson says “[We] must have a great challenge before us to think rationally, logically, scientifically” as if the three were the same, or at least,very similar.



Except these are three very, very different things.

Reasoning logically has a narrow and a broad sense: the narrow meaning is using valid rules of inference to deduce one statement from others; the broader one is conducting an argument in which no two of your assertions contradict each other. The broad interpretation lets you use the full range of informal argument and rhetorical devices. The narrow one is for mathematicians and logicians constructing formal proofs. Most people reason logically in the second sense.

Being rational is not a way of arguing or thinking, but an attitude towards one’e beliefs. The dominant theory of rationality was confirmationism: my belief in something is rational if I have evidence for its truth. Of course fanatics can have evidence for their beliefs, and it really shifts the argument to what constitutes evidence. Try having a discussion with a religious fundamentalist who maintains that there is something called “spiritual evidence” for their bigoted beliefs. Or stand outside on a sunny day and tell me the sun is not moving across the sky: who you going to believe: Copernicus or your lying eyes? So in the 1930’s Karl Popper proposed a falsificationist account of rationality: my belief in something is rational if I am prepared to state the circumstances under which I would abandon that belief. Instant banishment of fanatics, ideologists, psycho-analysts, vulgar evolutionists and a classroom of others to the Naughty Step. The nice thing about this is that anyone putting forward a silly condition - such as an angel coming to the House of Commons and announcing that we should abandon our belief in abortion - tends to sound silly of their own accord.

Thinking scientifically is a process that aimed at finding explanations of empirical phenomena by using previously established explanations, deductive logical reasoning and mathematics, testing those explanations by experiment, and abandoning at least one of the inputs to the test if the experiment fails. (Notice that one of those inputs is: "the experimental result was calculated or measured correctly”. Experimenters can make mistakes as well.) What would non-scientific thinking look like? Usually it doesn’t refer to previous results. It has Gods that just do stuff with no explanation as to why they didn’t do something else. Or else it seems to be able to explain everything, no matter what happens. But above all, pseudo-science and myth are definitive and final. Science is never final and never definitive (except possibly in a grant proposal), it’s a process that aims to improve our understanding of the world, while recognising that at any time, something may come along that is inconsistent with what we think we know, yet gives better results.

Finally, how a scientist finds the explanations, or how a mathematician finds their proof, and where and how they get their ideas, is entirely up to them. They don’t have to follow rules or templates, though there are rules and templates to follow, they just have to be right.

A little later Tyson says that people who think irrationally “get along just fine in life, they live long lives…”. I get the point he’s making, but it applies as long as they don’t reason irrationally about buses, cholera, bullets, stepping out of fifth-floor windows, hungry tigers, drinking poison and other such stuff. Being dumb about the composition of the outer planets is fine, being dumb about running across busy roads is not.

But after that Tyson suggests that Van Gogh is “illogical” for painting Starry Night, and Dawkins suggests that the instincts humans allegedly developed on the savannah for surviving back in the day are also “illogical”. It’s at this point I leave them to it, because jeez! do people even still think like that?

Just because Van Gogh didn’t paint like a Victorian academician doesn’t make his art crazy, although you’re welcome to use words as you want, and if you think Starry Night is crazy, then I’d suggest to you that some good art is crazy. And as for tested survival instincts being “illogical”, well, same thing, if that’s how you want to use the words, then some “illogical” beliefs or behaviours are useful and prudent. As in all things, you do what works.

Crossing Kew Bridge

Really, I take photographs of the colour blue.

March 2017 Review

I finished the month with the Spring Cold. In the middle of these colds, I wonder if I will ever be well again. Will I be able to walk more than twenty yards without getting breathless? Will I be able to focus enough to do any work, even from home? Will I ever have an uninterrupted night's sleep again, and will that sleep ever be free of fever-driven obsessive imagery and stories? Intellectually I know it will all be over in a few days, that doesn't help me get through it now. I'm used to being clear-headed and physically on form, unlike the rest of you, who have hangovers, mysterious aches, low days caused by eating curries after too much lager, and dodgy sleep from having a row with your partner, or from the kids teething. None of that happens to me, so when anything breaks my serene routine, it's Literally. The. Worst.

I got in a training session in on the last Saturday of the month, and that was it.

I saw Personal Shopper at the Curzon Mayfair, and John Wick 2 at my local Cineworld. I went through half of Angel S4 at a clip, and then stopped. I will carry on, but I wasn’t in the mood.

I read James Salter’s The Hunters, Somerset Maugham’s The Merry-Go-Round, Wells Towers’ Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, David Szalay’s London and The South-East, and Svetlana Alpers’ The Vexations of Art. I can commend the first three, but Szalay's novel left me feeling like I needed a shower. Alpers' book on Velasquez is in that style of art commentary which mixes interesting history with that weird art theory that finds great epistemological significance in the fact that the painter stands in front of the canvas to paint.

Sis and I had her birthday supper at Picture, because we like it there, and I had an early supper at the Argentinian restaurant in Richmond with another friend of Bill and Bob. Between my teeth and the winter, this is the first time I've been eating out socially. I stopped by Gulu Gulu for their unique take on sushi the Thursday before The Cold.

I went to a delightfully arcane City ceremony called a "Wardmoot" in the Parish Hall of St Botolph's Without Bishopsgate. It's where the candidates for the Council of the Ward of Bishopsgate are elected and confirmed in their position. People who work in the City get to vote for Councilmen as well as the very few residents in the Ward. Most of the people there were officials and candidates, including a Beadle who shouted Oyez Oyez Oyez and called on us to attend, shut up and listen. I thought one of the people wandering about in fancy gowns looked familiar, to the point where I thought "That's Baroness Scotland", and then when I got the Agenda, there it was. Patricia "The Overspender" Scotland is the Alderman for the Bishopsgate Ward. The ceremony was full of people saying admiring things about each other, as often happens at these ceremonial events. There are six councilmen, and had been IIRC nine or ten candidates in February. Then four dropped out and there was no need for anyone to vote for anyone. That's democracy for you. The next one is in four years' time, when I might not be working, so I'm glad I had that little glimpse of City ceremonial arcana.

And was I the only person to spot a distant but important resemblence between Sir Tim Barrow

and Sir Thomas Beaufort as portrayed by the mighty Brian Blessed in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V?

(Sir Thomas is on the left)

 I know that Sir Tim was only delivering a letter to a guy he saw on a fairly regular basis, but though it looked like this when he handed it over

what was really going on was this


History. Lived through again.

Using Mylio Reviewing Photographs: A Replacement for iPhoto

Photographs are rarely taken at random. There's usually some common theme - a wedding, or a rainy evening in Soho - that was the reason we took the photographs and which remember independently of the photographs. Laying all the images where we can see them at once helps us compare the images with that independent memory.

(Rainy evening in Soho: that's how I remember it.)

Which images capture what we felt, that inspired us to take the pictures? The side-by-side, contact-sheet view lets the eye compare-and-contrast (the eye has a mind of its own) and lets us appreciate the good and bad features of each image. This simply doesn't happen when we can only look at one image at a time.

By mass acclaim, the best program in which to look at lots of your photos side by side at the same time was iPhoto. Then Apple replaced it with the space hog that is Photos, a program so egregiously designed to make you buy more outrageously-priced memory from Apple that it ought to be investigated by the EU.

The best image-file manipulator and viewer, by so far it's not even a competition, is IrfanView. That's for only Windows, and if you have a lot of image files it's so good it justifies having a mid-spec Windows machine just to make use of it when you need it. Because the alternative is the command-line. As a compare-and-contraster, it doesn't quite do it for me: the images don't jump out at me they way they did in iPhotos.

Anyway, I digress. Lacking iPhoto, what do we have? For something so fundamental to the process of photography, surprisingly little. Picasa isn't bad at it and shows individual photos kinda okay; Sequential makes my images look way better than Picasa does, but the film-strip view at the side doesn't quite do the same job as the contact sheet; Photos looks nice, but space; and I'm going to experiment with Mylio, especially since the low-end version is free. The one thing it seems to do best, synchronising image collections across devices, is the one thing I don't really need, but it's optional.

Mostly I take pictures, post or print the better ones and let the rest gather digital dust. I have a bunch of old 35mm film pictures from way back in the day that I should scan. I'm not really into categorising pictures or anything else. For the professional selling work through sites offering keyword search, tagging makes a lot of sense. I don't really do tagging and categorising. I might if I had 250,000 images in my catalogue, but I don't.

I got a cold at the weekend, and that disabled my doubt-and-caution mechanism, so I downloaded DxO Perspective and Mylio, and found out how to use Airdrop all in one session.

Mylio does generate “previews and thumbnails”, and it took about ten-fifteen minutes to do it for my collection of 3,000 or so files. It offers a white or black background, and I’m a fan of black backgrounds at the moment (it should be ISO 3664:2009 colour neutral grey N8, but, you know, I live in white rooms so it’s a wonder I’m able to see colours at all for all the dazzling reflections from the white paint). It does not create its own space-hogging database, but works from the files in your folder structure, and lets you see what’s in the folders you told it to import. It lets you create albums, which I have a limited use for, and it has a calendar view.

If there is one thing that will shame me into taking more photos it’s that calendar view. How can I have let entire months go by without taking any pictures? (Answer, by the way, was that it was too darn cold to hang around taking snapshots. And the weather was horrible and the skies were grey. Also, that I move in a rut, a pleasant rut, but a rut nonetheless.)

(Guilt-inducing calendar view: I have to do more than this!)

Mylio also has some basic cropping-colour-contrast-etc controls with a bunch of reasonable pre-sets. I spent a while playing with these - because that’s what Real Artists do when they get some new tech. So between Mylio + DxO on the Mac and Photos + SKRWT on iOS, I think I have what I want for the while.

And it's is available for Windows and iOS.

PS: So I thought I had more photos that this, and it turns out I do. Something must have gone awry when I thought I copied my collection from the NAS to my Air. A lot is missing. Mylio provides an option to catalogue but not import files on an external drive, but guess what? It doesn't treat NAS as "external", so it copies the files into a directory the Air's HDD. On the plus side, if you mess around with where you put that directory, it keeps track of the changes. Importing a bunch of missing folders, it identified duplicate files and only added the missing ones.

By the time I'd finished, I had 12GB of images, with a 3GB database of previews and thumbnails. As I understand it, that database, or a smaller version, is what lives on your other devices, and I'm not sure I want that on my 16GB iPhone SE. It's also making me think about how big I want those image files, and if I want what's on my Air to be a selection rather than the full warehouse.

None of these problems happened when we had film, prints and shoe-boxes. Technology solves one bunch of problems and creates others.

(I knew I hadn't been that lazy!)

Perspectve Correction, iPhone SE and DxO Perspective

I upgraded to an iPhone SE recently and I use it to take photographs. I take landscape / cityscape photographs, which means I’m doing so from odd angles and often with a tilted phone. The camera is an f2.2 with 29mm lens (which means: it has the same optics as a 29mm lens would on a 35mm film camera) and that gives horrible perspective distortion. This goes away if I zoom in on details, or take pictures of a scene which is “flat”, but shoot down a narrow road and it’s going to look awful. Like this:

Whereas I want it to look something like this

 

That takes software, and software costs money. Real Photographers^™ are used to paying hundreds or even thousands of pounds on lenses and camera bodies (the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV body alone is £3,000 and high-quality lenses go for £1,000). £120 a year for Lightroom and Photoshop, or £105 for the Lightroom 6 download is nothing. I'm not a Real Photographer: for me, software competes with books, movies and CDs. Which is how we consumers do price comparison, but sometimes we miss the point.

My iPhone SE will have cost me a few hundred pounds after the 24-month contract is over. To get the best out of my phone and hence that money, I need to spend a small-ish - compared to the cost of the phone - amount on perspective-correcting software. And I will take more pictures, which is the point of have a camera in my pocket all the time.

So now, look!, I've convinced myself to shell out. I am not tempted to do image-editing on my iPhone. Photos offers basic editing facilities already, and even a quick experiment convinces me that my eyes are no longer young enough to be reliable enough to make those kinds of adjustments. So I’m only going to do stuff on the Mac, or maybe the iPad.

For reasons that have to do with spontenaity, I have SKRWT on my iPad. SKRWT is as good as the reviews say it is. I can transfer pictures to it from my phone using Air Drop. Which is every bit as easy to use as it says it is. So I could do my picture editing on the iPad, and it gives me as large an image as I get from Picasa on the Mac Air. (Just pretend I never said Picasa.)

Now for the Mac Air. SKRWT is iOS-only, but there's something that looks very similar, from DxO Perspective. It gets good reviews, so I installed that to handle the images that are already on the Mac.

This is what DxO can do. Here’s an original…

and here’s a correction using the rectangle tool and some cropping

That was the photograph I wanted. To get that au naturel, I would have needed a medium-format camera, as even a 35mm full-frame / film would not have let me get the whole frontage in at that distance.

I’m sold.

Cakes at Ole and Steen

Female Privilege: It's Not About The Crazy, Not The Babies

I have read the following sentiment once too often:

the reality is that female privilege is the incessant undercurrent of culture, derived from the fundamental premise that governs all social organization and policy: women are more reproductively valuable than are men.

I’m not sure if Heartiste is saying only that, right or wrong, American society has that fundamental premise, or, that societies are rightly governed by that fundamental premise. So I will give two answers.

First, if American social organisation and policy is driven by “mo’ babies”, the USA is screwed. As screwed as any country importing warm bodies with no skills because population decline.

Second, here’s why. Reproduction is not the valuable activity: reproduction just gives you babies. Babies are raw material, not the finished product. The valuable finished product is a contributing, co-operative and considerate adult member of the society and the economy. Any idiot can produce babies, and most do, but it takes real skill, and both parents, to raise a decent young adult, especially in post-industrial societies where long periods of education are needed for the children to even begin to have the skills needed to be productive. Only warriors can train warriors, only hunters can train hunters, only fishermen can train fishermen. The last thing a small society needs is a large bunch of growing boy children without enough men to train them to be men. Fertility is like a lot of things: it’s only a good thing if it’s kept between limits. Unrestricted baby-making is a liability. Valuing women as baby-makers isn’t privileging them, it’s sensible resource-husbandry, along with keeping the cows watered.

Female privilege is a thing. However, it has nothing to do with babies. It has to do with there being a critical mass of psychiatrically damaged women and women who decide to act crazy to get their way. One feminist harridan in a lecture theatre can be stared down: five can wreck the whole proceeding. And once it becomes clear that crazy gets its way, deliberate displays of insincere crazy becomes one more weapon in the armoury.

I live in England, and while there’s a healthy tradition of, um, bawdy behaviour amongst English women that makes Saturday nights worth avoiding, not so many of them are actually crazy. Britain has its dysfunctionals, oestrogen-dominants, adventuresses, bitter girls, shrews, princesses, psychopaths and other misfits, who behave badly a lot of the time. There are so few of them that they can be dismissed as “weirdos and head-cases”, kept out of organisations where important work is done by sane people, and the average clueless man will have a low probability of meeting one.

Heartiste is in America.

America, land of obesity and medicalised psychiatry, has a proportion of hormone-imbalanced and damaged female souls that, to go by the obesity and DSM-V stats, and even allowing for extensive co-morbidity, may be as high as one in three. Crazies are going to be almost everywhere in employment, and almost everyone is going to have to deal with one at least once a day. The natural instinct to back off and placate the crazy woman is going to be kicking in on a daily basis. In fact, it may never kick out. In which case, American men are going to be tolerating all sorts of bad behaviour all the time. Crazies use feminism and liberal ideology because it suits their need to bully, confuse and browbeat. America is what happens when a society has a large number of crazy people with the vote. Someone is going to pander to them, and they will in return vote en bloc for anyone who gives them money and feeds their troubled souls. It looks like privilege, but it’s really just one giant freak show.

What Heartiste and many others call “female privilege” is a mixture of three things: a) a bunch of legal privileges in employment law, and some presumptions in Family Law which are designed to stop un-supported mothers and excess babies being a burden on the taxpayer; b) the instinct to back off and placate the crazy woman; c) men tolerating calculated crazy in their personal lives. Female privilege is mostly men putting up with behaviour from women that they would never accept from another man, and women exploiting that to the hilt and half-way up the handle as well.

Nothing to do with babies.