My Interactions on Reddit

"Ew. Why are you celebrating thirteen years on Reddit? What a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Aren't they all chauvinistic red-pillers that post weird Pepe the Frogs?"

Why, yes, Reddit is certainly home to a lot of people with bad ideas, but that's mostly because Reddit is home to a lot of people. I've had a lot of interactions on Reddit that I've found insightful and worthwhile. Here are just a few that I've personally participated in (I'm u/EricHerboso):

The Best Philosophy Podcasts from r/philosophy

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Deathwing Every Turn from r/hearthstone

Star Trek First Frontier (2020) Fan Film from r/startrek

Thirteen Years on Reddit

Ace cake by MJ Buell.

Today is my cake day. I joined reddit 13 years ago, only a few months after Conde Nast bought it from the original founders.

At the time, I was a webmaster and I joined reddit because I wanted to experiment with how marketing on reddit affected web traffic. I wrote a couple of trash articles that I knew would not be popular on my own and then posted links to them on reddit using a few different accounts. In one, I just posted a link that copied the bland title. In another, I posted the link alongside a catchy title. In the last, I posted the link with a fake (but catchy) title that had nothing to do with the blogpost. As you might expect, the second approach worked best, and I used this completely nonscientific experiment as the basis for chapter 4 in an ebook I wrote back then about Email & Social Marketing.

Although my purpose for joining reddit ended after only a month, I stayed and became a regular redditor, like everyone else. I only ever upvoted the stuff I really liked, so it’s been interesting going back in my own history to see what I liked throughout the years. I feel like I’ve changed as a person so very much in the past 13 years.

Thirteen years ago is a long time ago. 2007 was the year that the iPhone was introduced. Nancy Pelosi became the first female speaker of the house that year. Tumblr was launched. Mauritania became the last country on earth to officially criminalize slavery. Words like “hashtag”, “netbook”, “retweet”, “Latinx”, “coworking”, “crowdfunding”, and “colony collapse disorder” were added to the dictionary. Trump was on Wrestlemania.

Thirteen years is a long time to be doing anything. When I was 13, my first sister was born. For a long time afterward I still considered myself basically an only child because I never had a sibling my age. The group I most identify with, Effective Altruism, is not yet even 13 years old. Thirteen years is longer than most people spend in primary education. I’ve been on reddit for a very long time.

And yet, in all these thirteen years, this is the first time I’ve remembered to post on my cake day.

A Working Quantum Computer

The diamond in the center measures 1mm by 1mm.

If you've been following news on the quantum computing front, you'll know that a major stumbling block so far has been the issue of decoherence. Every time we get a proto-quantum computer to start computing, it quickly breaks down from an inability to store data for calculation.

This problem has now been resolved.

A paper just published in Nature claims that they have found a way to protect multiple qubits from decoherence over an extended period of time, and built a quantum computer into a diamond to prove it. Since I realize most of my readers don't keep up with this field as much as I do, I'll try my best to explain.

How it works.

Classical computers use bits (binary digits) to store information in memory. These are the binary digits (1s and 0s) that get stored in between calculation steps in any non-trivial program. If a 1 were to turn into 0 randomly in the middle of an operation, a program might still be able to recover if it has good error detection, but if huge numbers of bits were to switch from one to the other while a program was running, there's just no way it could continue to function as desired.

Quantum computers use qubits instead of bits. This is what makes quantum computing as a concept so very powerful. Rather than use 1s and 0s that are either one or the other, the qubits of quantum computing utilize a superposition of states where a single qubit might be partly a 1 and partly a 0. Yet this reliance upon qubits has been a fundamental problem in quantum computing so far. It is just too easy for qubits to decohere and lose whatever information you try to store in it.

It wasn't until 2008 that a group first figured out how to keep a qubit from losing its information for a grand total of 1.75 seconds. Not only is this amount of time too short to do anything with, but the process could not handle multiple qubits, making this type of quantum computer incapable of using more than one qubit at a time.

Today's news marks the first time anyone has figured out how to shield multiple qubits from decohering for an extended period of time. I won't get into details of how they accomplish this; you can read the paper yourself for that. (Suffice it to say that they used microwave pulses to delay decoherence continuously.) But the point is that they were able to construct a working quantum computer and run a simple program on it to verify the qubits are not decohering.

The fun part of the story.

Quantum circuit representation of Grover's algorithm.

In order to prove their method worked, they used the quantum computer to run through Grover's algorithm, a function-inverting quantum algorithm.

The usual explanation of Grover's algorithm starts by imagining a phone book organized in alphabetical order. (We'll need a new mental example soon; I can't remember the last time I actually saw a phone book in person.) If we have a specific phone number we're looking for, our only real recourse is to search through the book one entry at a time. We might get lucky and find it as soon as we open phone book, but we also might be unlucky and not find it until the very last entry. (Technically the second to last, since we assume the number exists in the book, but please ignore this sentence for clarity.) In general, it turns out that, on average, we will find the number we seek on our N/2nd try, where N is the total number of entries in the phone book. For a book with four entries, we'll find it on our second try on average; if the book has a hundred entries, we'll find it on the fiftieth try on average. A phone book listing everyone in New York City would have ~8,000,000 entries; we'd find a particular entry on the four millionth try on average.

Grover's algorithm, on the other hand, will find it, on average, on our O(N^1/2) try. For a book of four entries, we'll basically find it on the first try every time. With a hundred entries, we'll find it on the tenth try on average. With 8,000,000 entries, on average, we'll find it on the 2,829 try. That's not a typo; it really is less than three thousand tries for an eight million entry database. This speed increase is enormous. The applications for such sheer speed has drastic repercussions in the real world.

The team used Grover's algorithm on their quantum computer and found the correct entry on their first try 95% of the time. This puts the question of whether their computer works or not entirely to rest. Their quantum computer not only works, but works well enough to actually be capable of quantum calculation at a 5% error rate. Sure, that's not perfect, but it's already enough accuracy that, if one desired, error-correcting could be done. Just redo the calculation ten times; with a 95% accuracy rate, that is more than enough to determine the correct output. The insane speed increase quantum computers have over classical computers is enough to make it more than worthwhile to repeat the same calculation ten times in a row each time.

Of course, the quantum computer they built held only two qubits, and so can only store so much information at a time. Doing Grover's algorithm on an 8,000,000 entry database, for example, would require seven qubits. (In general, O(log(N)) qubits would be required for a database of N entries.) But there is nothing stopping someone from creating such a quantum computer in principle, so long as they have enough microwave pulses to keep them all from decohering. The future, it appears, is now.

So what does this all mean?

First of all, it means that somebody has a working two qubit quantum computer right now. Realistically, this is not enough to cause much of a ruckus. To put it in context, this is only enough storage to solve Grover's algorithm for databases of seven entries or less. (Although Grover's original paper points out that his algorithm requires only that the processing be done with qubits; the memory can be saved in a classical bits.) However, quantum computers do not scale linearly like classical computers do. As mentioned previously, a mere seven qubits would be enough memory to store steps for Grover's algorithm on a database of 8,000,000 entries. It takes very few qubits to handle very large problems.

Now that the conceptual hurdle has been passed, someone could, right this very moment, build a quantum computer with a dozen qubits. There is nothing preventing us from accomplishing such a feat now, save sheer expense. But if you can afford the dozen microwave lasers and have an appropriately flawed diamond to work with, it is certainly doable. What could one do with such a machine?

To put it bluntly, nearly everything.

All bounded error, quantum, polynomial time (BQP)
problems are efficiently solved by quantum computers.

Forget other programs. Let's just focus on Grover's algorithm, which has already been shown to work on this quantum computer. All symmetric-key algorithms could be broken by sheer brute force in half the time. This includes all Advanced Encyption Standard (AES) codes, the standard block cipher ratified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. All NP-complete problems could be solved with a quadratic speed-up over current brute force methods. Not to mention exponentially faster database search in general, which I already pointed out earlier in the article. And all this is just from Grover's algorithm alone. Other algorithms can reduce password cracking time on certain types of passwords from years of processing to mere seconds. These algorithms already exist; they just never had a quantum computer to run them before. Now they do.

This effectively breaks most commercial-grade encryption now in use on the internet. Some encryption does survive; notably lattice-based and McEliece cryptosystems.

Practicability.

Although the last section makes it seem like quantum computers have now arrived, there are still problems that need to be addresses. David DiVincenzo points out that a practical quantum computer must have:

• scalable physically to increase the number of qubits;
• qubits can be initialized to arbitrary values;
• quantum gates faster than decoherence time;
• universal gate set;
• easily read qubits.

This new discovery solves the first (albeit expensively) and third issues completely. The second issue is still problematic, but is something that can be programmed around. The fifth issue is a matter of convenience; expense and repeatability makes this solvable with money alone. This leaves only the fourth issue: a universal gate set. As this is not yet solved, we will not yet be able to program whatever we want on a quantum computer. But we can still run Grover's algorithm, and a few other programs to which we know the necessary gates, and I've already shown how this affects society directly.

A note on how the press is covering this.

As a skeptic, I was very disappointed in a quote by Daniel Lidar on their method of delaying decoherence. He told press "it’s a little like time travel", because the microwave pulses that made the electron qubit switch their direction of rotation did so in a way that makes the decoherence disappear by moving back in the direction it came from. But, quite frankly, this is bullshit. That has no more to do with time travel than moving left does when you want to take back a move to the right. However, now that the quote is out there in a story that headlines with the word "quantum", you can be sure lots of quacks will completely misunderstand, as they so often do.

A few credits.

Although credit for stuff like this gets cited in journals, blogs rarely take the time to actually link out to the individual scientists' blogs/social media in articles like this. So I thought I'd buck the trend by giving a shout out to the authors of the study, including Daniel Lidar, Zhihui Wang, Toeno van der Sar, Machiel Blok, Hannes Bernien, Tim Taminiau, David Toyli, David Awschalom, & Ronald Hanson. Well done.

Also, thanks to Wikipedia for its help in understanding basic principles and the University of South California for their press release summarizing the findings of the paper. And a tip of the hat to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe for letting me know about this recent development in the first place. Your podcast is awesome. (c:

The Fun Side of Web Design

One of my most recent projects has been the creation of a small business website for an old friend. I used to do this kind of thing as a living, churning out site after site for clients until I finally gave in and got a proper job doing web work, first at Omnistar Interactive, and then at Share Our Strength.

CSS3 is especially exciting because
I helped create it as part of the w3c team.

Doing one of these five-page sites reminds me of those old days, but in a way very different than one might expect. Back then, I did web creation because I needed money and had a skill others' didn't; but today, I am doing this five-page site for a friend, and, as a result, I seem to be enjoying the process much more than I used to.

I wonder if money is a part of the equation. In the past, I charged clients $500 for a site of this size, plus $200 for logo design and another $300 for copy. But today's project for my friend is being done gratis, and so has a completely different feeling associated with it.

The psychology of gifts is rather different from that of sold or bartered goods and services. It's in a completely separate magisterium, if you'll forgive me for borrowing a phrase from Gould. The rules of gift-giving trigger different parts of our brain than do the rules of trade. For example, studies show that when a person is paid to do a thing, they tend to think of it as a transaction, and are suitably disgusted if they find out they were paid too little. But if you ask someone to perform the same task for free, they do not think of it as a transaction at all, and are much less bothered when they see that the normal going rate is not free. (Also related: the penny gap.)

As an anarcho-syndicalist, I strongly believe in the power of gift economies. Mutual gain seems as though it would be a strictly better basis of economy than mutual strife, although I must admit that capitalism does a hell of a good job in trading fairness for astronomical growth. (Free, by the way, doesn't necessarily imply money isn't changing hands, but that's not the point I'm getting at here.) In any case, my point is that gifts mean a lot more to me than I think that they do for most people.

It especially feels good to do something I've done dozens of times before in a brand new way like this. I'm coding, but rather than slogging through it, I find myself having a lot of fun. I'm designing, but instead of dreading to hear the client's comments, I'm excited to show what I've come up with. It is almost like how I would expect to feel if I were designing my own site, but for some reason these feelings only arise when I am doing work as a gift for a friend. I can't even get up the motivation to work on my own site at all, as you might notice from the bland style of this blog.

It may also have something to do with the novelty of the situation. Although I've done a lot of charity that helped strangers, it has been rare to put so much work into a gift for a friend. Most gifts I've given have required only money, not time.

I wonder if I can concentrate this excitedness about coding and apply this effort to my own site as well. I doubt I'll be able to do such a thing, but you never know. I'm going to give it a try.

On The Universal Scientific Acceptance of Anthropogenic Global Climate Change

One of the drawbacks about discussions on Facebook is that not everybody allows their posts to be visible to the public. This can make some arguments hard to follow, such as when only one side's comments are visible, or even impossible to read when the whole debate appears under someone's private page.

Although I certainly am not in the habit of liberating the private content of others here on my blog, there are some occasions where it seems at least partly worthwhile. This is one such occasion.

Last week, I had a small back-and-forth with one of my old school friends on the issue of global climate change. Ordinarily, it would have consisted of little more than a single corrective comment, but he challenged my facts, forcing me to go out and actually look up the data that supports my side. It was only an hour or so of work, but it was nontrivial to verify, and some of my other facebook friends requested that I copy the discussion over to a public forum so that it is readable. What follows is the discussion in full.

(For reference, the original discussion was a post on my friend's wall, but unless you are friends with him, it will not be visible to you through that link.)

Danny Jackson:
‎31,000 Scientists Reject 'Global Warming' Agenda
http://www.wnd.com/2008/05/64734/

Eric Herboso:
Scientists are just people, like you and me. We are all easily deluded. What counts is not what a group of people think or say on a topic, but what EXPERTS say on the topic.


I will point out that the majority of scientists in this petition drive have only bachelor's degrees. Of those 9000 with doctorate degrees, the Petition Project refuses to say how many have their PhD in a relevant field. For example, they point out that 3000 have earth science degrees, and that 9000 have PhDs, but they do not bother mentioning how many of those 3000 people actually have a terminal degree in a relevant field with regard to this question. If the overlap were large, I'd have expected them to advertise it.


I find this petition project to be very misleading. It's one thing to debate the merits of a scientific theory, but it's quite another to actually claim that the science is not already settled on the global warming issue. Whether you think the science is correct or not is a point of debate; but to make it seem like scientists disagree on the issue is just ludicrous. From 1993 to 2003, not a single paper was published in the scientific literature that questioned the validity of global warming. Several surveys of actual climatologists working in the field right now consistently show that over 95% believe global warming exist, and most of the rest offer no opinion. The total number of relevant scientists that do not believe in global warming is 0%, and is limited to a half dozen responses in surveys of thousands. Confidence levels drop to ~85% when asking if that global warming is man-made, but the remaining respondents still offer no opinion. Even on the man-made question, 0% are willing to say that they believe it is not man-made.


Debating the merits of global warming science is one thing. But I think the Petition Project is being dishonest by making it seem like the debate is going on among climatologists. The debate ended in scientific circles years ago, and is limited to only nonscientists today. You really should not be using the Petition Project as evidence of anything at all.

Danny:
I have to admit that I haven't read the article yet, but I would say that the petition drive is a good way to show that not all scientists agree that anthropogenic global warming is happening. I can say that with the other side of the debate the majority of scientists don't know enough about the subject of climate change to be experts in the subject. I believe the main issue against the claims that anthropogenic climate change is happening is the fact that climate change figures line-up much more accurately with the changes of sunspot activity on the sun. When one looks at how temperatures have changed in comparison amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere, it doesn't agree. Now I'll have to point out that these figures were calculated by climatologists who do not have any stake in the climate change band wagon. The figures collected by the climate change proponents actually are not accurate in that the temperatures were taken over the years in areas where there is likely to be a lot of heat e.g. near airports, parking lots, factories, etc. The those Climate Gate emails are also very incriminating in that they show that the made proponents of anthropogenic climate change have been covering up the truth. And the truth is that global temperatures have been dropping for the past 7 to 10 years.

Eric:
As a non-climatologist, I don't feel entirely comfortable arguing the scientific merits without doing more research than I'm willing to undertake at the moment. Nevertheless, I think arguing about science is a good thing, and should be done far more often in today's society.


Yet what I was trying to get at before was not an argument about global warming, but about the specific tactic used by the Petition Project in the article you originally linked. Just now, you wrote "not all scientists agree that anthropogenic global warming is happening", and it is on this point in particular that I find so incredibly implausible.


It is one thing to debate the merits of the science, and I like seeing such debates occur in society. But when you misrepresent the relevant scientific community's views on a topic, that is just completely misleading. Yes, there are a lot of scientists that think global warming isn't real. But these scientists are dentists and chemists and psychologists. When you point out that those scientists disagree, you are putting "scientists" up on a pedestal, as though their opinion mattered. But it doesn't. The only scientists whose opinion matters are the climatologists that actually work on the issue. Among these people, nearly every single one believes in global warming (~95%), and the vast majority believe it to be caused by man (~85%).


I welcome debate on the issue of science. I think such debate is fun and interesting. (My second favorite field is philosophy of science, after all.) But I feel that groups like the Petition Project are not debating the science. They are just outright trying to mislead the public. Debate on the science is good, but making it seem like scientists disagree on the issue is downright fraudulent. If there were actual debate among relevant scientists on the global warming issue, then there would be published papers arguing against global warming by climatologists. But there aren't any. AT ALL. Not even one.


By all means, I approve of debating the science. But remember that the debate is among people who don't actually work in the field, like you and me, and the 31,000 scientists in the Petition Project that do not publish papers in that field. When the Petition Project acts as though there is debate on global warming among scientists in that field, they are just being facetious in misleading readers. That is the part I disapprove of; the science debate, on the other hand, is quite enjoyable for me.

Danny:
Really? Absolutely no published papers from climatologists showing problems with claims in favor of anthropogenic climate change? A simple Google search has brought me these articles:


www.drroyspencer.com/2011/09/editor-in-chief-of-remote-sensing-resigns-from-fallout-over-our-paper/


www.google.com/m?client=ms-opera-mobile&channel=new&q=%22larry+vardiman%22+%2B%22global+warming%22


www.google.com/m?q=%22michael+oard%22+%2B%22global+warming%22&client=ms-opera-mobile&channel=new


spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/a-critical-perspective-on-climategate/0

Eric:
‎(I know this is long, so if you don't feel like reading it all, please at least skip to the final paragraph. It holds a revised statement that should make this issue clear.)


The "no published articles" claim I made earlier originally came from my memory of a meta-study done by Oreskes (and a follow-up by Peter Norvig) that found zero articles published in the preceding decade. But since you have questioned me on it here, I decided to do a bit of research to defend my earlier claim.


The original metastudy by Oreskes (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5702/1686.full) was published in 2004 and showed not a single academic paper on global climate change in the preceding ten years argued against it. A follow-up by Norvig (http://norvig.com/oreskes.html) on the same data verifies the 0% claim.


Of course, this info is from 1993-2004. You might rightly complain that it is too old. What about the years since then? Specifically, what about the papers you cited in your reply?


Your first link refers to Spencer & Braswell's "On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth's Radiant Energy Balance". While it was indeed published in 2011, no one in the industry takes it seriously. The very fact that the editor of the publishing journal resigned over the whole thing is proof enough that this was an extreme minority view. I won't bother referring to the details of the paper other than to say that the authors neglected to understand that the null hypothesis is not the default position.


Your second link is to a list of Larry Vardiman's articles. I found 14 articles that mention "global warming" written by him, none of which have been published in a peer reviewed journal. Most are hosted at icr.org, with no reference to them even having been submitted for publication. (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=%22global+warming%22&as_sauthors=Larry+Vardiman)


Your third link is to a list of Michael Oard's articles. I found 11 that mention "global warming" by him, none of which have been published in a peer reviewed journal. Most are hosted at creation.com, and do not reference them ever having been submitted for publication. (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=%22global+warming%22&as_sauthors=Michael+Oard)


Your fourth link is a specific article by Michael Oard, which is one of the 11 from the third link. Again, this article has never been published in a peer-reviewed journal. The only publication note is from the "Journal of Creation", which does not use disinterested reviewers.


(I'm sure Vardiman and Oard publish plenty of peer reviewed articles. Hell, even I've been published in a peer reviewed journal. But it appears that their successful publications have been ones that did not have "global warming" written within them.)


Out of the four links you gave, only one involves a paper published in a peer reviewed journal, and the ensuing scandal caused the editor in chief to resign. So I decided to see if I could find any more examples on my own.


In an hour of scouring scholar.google.com, I could find only two in addition to your first link. Both agree with global warming, and argue only about its cause.


2005: Jan Veizer published in Geoscience Canada (http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/GC/article/view/2691/3113) agreeing that global warming occurs, but he argues that the cause is the sun.


2009: John Christy published in Energy and Environment (http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/papers/E&E%20douglass_christy-color.pdf) admitting that global warming occurs, but argues evidence of what causes it is so far inconclusive.


Of course, I did not do an exhaustive search. Maybe more could be found. But my point is that while I searched for these two examples, I passed tens of thousands of articles that agree on man-caused climate change. Sure, there's a lot of debate on forums and blogs, but when it comes to peer reviewed articles, there is no question: nearly every relevant scientist agrees on the issue, and debate ended long ago.


Just to make sure you understand what I mean by this, consider that EVERY single scientific body either concurs or is noncommittal on the issue of human-caused climate change. The last scientific group to hold out was the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, which retracted its dissent in 2007.


I will repeat this to ensure it is understood: As of 29 March 2012, there are zero scientific bodies that reject the idea of human-caused climate change. Every single scientific group in the entire world agrees with human-caused climate change. The only hold-outs are individuals, and they dissent only on tv and radio, not in peer-reviewed publications. Of course, human-caused global warming might still be untrue (the scientific consensus has been wrong before); but the fact is that the vast majority of scientists believe that it is true.

Danny:
You say none of the articles by Larry Vardiman or Michael Oard are peer reviewed, but they don't have to be published in main-stream sources to be peer-reviewed. None of the articles by Larry Vardiman and Michael Oard or any of the creationists scientists I trust are published without being properly peer-reviewed by scientists with knowledge in the subject the article speaks of, and about any biblical truths or arguments made in the articles. So your statement that they are not peer-reviewed is not correct. Btw AiG and CMI actually have their own peer-reviewed research journals-- the Answers Research Journal and the Journal of Creation respectively.

Danny:
Okay. I just did a quick google search and there are articles all over the web about scepticism from scientists about anthropogenic climate change.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=climate+change+sceptics+scientists&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=-Rx1T89Lk7a3B-LlmdEO&ved=0CC0QgQMwAA

Danny:
Btw consensus means nothing when it comes to what is true. If consensus had anything to do with what is true, then we would have to say that Islam is true because the majority of people in the world are Muslim. Geocentricism was once the consensus view of scientists. In Germany, it was the consensus view that Hitler and the Nazi Party were good for Germany.

Eric:
I don't mean to directly contradict you, but calling yourself "peer reviewed" does not make you peer reviewed. I am sure that many people published in Answers Research Journal and the Journal of Creation are respectable scientists and have been published in actual peer reviewed journals. But papers only published in ARJ or TJ are not really peer reviewed.


Peer review means you subject your submitted articles to people in the field from all over the place. They must be disinterested parties from across religious, political, and national spectrums. The ARJ and TJ do not do this. I'm not saying that articles in them are wrong; they very well may be correct. But they are definitely not peer reviewed. It's not peer review if you only get reviewed by people that already agree with you.


As for the link you posted, try clicking a few of those google results. Those are papers that are looking into why the public thinks global climate change isn't real despite consensus. The first google result you posted argues that is a political movement largely generated by nonscientists; the second google result is about how newspapers are misrepresenting scientists; the third is about how the media cites scientists opposed to global warming that don't seem to exist. Please verify what I've just said by clicking the links you posted on your own. I'm honestly not making any of this up.

Eric:
However, your point on consensus is well said. Consensus has often been wrong throughout history, even among scientists. I actually think that mistaken consensus in the history of science is one of the most fascinating fields I've ever studied. The philosophy of science is replete with examples of scientists agreeing on things they never really should have agreed to. In the field of quantum physics right now, for example, there is a huge group of physicists that believe in M-theory [sic], despite no proof having yet been submitted. It really and truly is a fascinating topic for me.

Danny:
Another thing, no magazine or journal is unbiased. Everyone is biased. E.g. You would likely never see a pro-creation article in Smithsonian Magazine, no matter how well backed-up by research. In fact, someone tried to publish a paper that leaned toward intelligent design. The writer of the article was not even an ID advocate. The guy who published the article was fired for it.

Eric:
All publications are indeed biased. On that we certainly agree.


Again, I am not commenting on the merits of the articles. I am only pointing out that such articles are not published in peer reviewed journals. Peer-reviewed journals are all inherently biased based on their field. Climate journals, for example, are biased toward the weight of evidence in climate science. That's just how science works. It is no wonder that papers on theories that directly contradict much of the currently published results have a terribly difficult time getting through peer review.


It may turn out that the scientists are wrong. But it cannot be denied that the scientists all agree on the position favoring human-caused climate change.

Eric:
You probably aren't interested, but as the subject of scientific consensus really and truly deeply interests me, I can't help but to encourage you to look up controversial theories on the philosophy of scientific consensus, such as Feyerabend's theory that all of science has no relation to truth and Kuhn's paradigm shift theory that hypothesizes that scientific consensus is NEVER based on pure logic and facts, but depends heavily on the personal opinions of scientists working in the field.


None of this has to do with climate change consensus, really, but deals with more basic scientific concepts like "what is heat?" or "why do we fall only down and never up?". It is more interesting when the science in question has reached such a level of consensus that almost every person on the planet agrees with the current paradigm; that way you can focus on the meaning behind that consensus more clearly.

The Insidiousness of Fat-Shaming Vegans

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) has once again decided to use a prejudicial and misleading advertisement to support their message.



Needless to say, vegans come in all shapes and sizes, and to suggest otherwise amounts to little more than an outright lie. Furthermore, the fat-shaming involved in this commercial is completely and utterly inappropriate. It is morally impermissible to treat a segment of society so cruelly when the majority of that population cannot help being the size that they are.

Yet what bothers me most about PCRM's attitude is that they are an organization dedicated to getting people to eat more healthily, and they strongly endorse a vegetarian lifestyle. It pisses me off to have a group so ignorant about why fat-shaming is bad actively support my position on ethical eating. Stuff like this really undermines the cause, much like Mike Daisey's recent This American Life fabrications which set back the cause of workers' rights in Apple's Foxconn factories.

If the ad focused instead on a $10 fee to allow you to sit next to a white, while others had the misfortune of sitting next to blacks, I'm sure that PCRM's advertising department would have realized how inappropriate the ad was. Unfortunately, the last bastions of prideful overt prejudice include fat prejudice, which society seems to not even notice. Contrary to popular belief, dieting does not work for most overweight individuals. This means that, for these people, being fat is no more attributable to their choices than being black is. (Of course, for a dedicated individual, dieting does work; but most dieters react to diets by gaining back more weight than they had before they started dieting.)

Further exacerbating the PCRM's ad is the fact that they did the same exact thing only three months earlier. Their "abs and thighs on cheese" ads were particularly vile, and sparked the ire of several fat-positive members of the vegan community. Yet somehow they managed to avoid learning how terrible such ads are and instead just repeated their mistake. Really, we all should have realized that they weren't going to learn a lesson back then; after all, they started their fat-shaming anti-cheese campaign immediately after Daiya, a vegan cheese brand, made a similar fat-shaming mistake just a couple of week earlier. (At least Daiya apologized for their mistake.)

At this point, I think I have just completely lost all respect for PCRM. They clearly are not going to stop this campaign of hatred, as evidenced in their most recent blog post. Although I expressed my dissatisfaction with them over this issue via twitter, facebook, and email, I don't believe it will do any good. Some people are just willing to throw other groups under the bus in order to get their issue heard by a wider audience.

But if you disagree, feel free to express your own opinion by tweeting @PCRM, posting on facebook.com/Doctors.Care, or calling/e-mailing their media contact, Vaishali Honawar, at 202-527-7339.

You can also read other bloggers' opinions on this issue, including Veggie Mightee!, The Thinking Vegan, and Vegansaurus, among others. [EDIT: The Vegan RD, a member of PCRM's board, has now resigned over this issue.]

(Note: Nofollow tags were used on all links pointing to PCRM's sites.)

Philosophy on Facebook & Twitter

If you're as interested in philosophy as I am, then you already follow a few philosophers on Twitter, and you probably subscribe to a few philosophers on Facebook as well. But sometimes you just want to see more.

Thankfully, such content is easily found. The Philosophy interest list on facebook is a one-click subscription to hundreds of academic philosophers, university philosophy departments, international philosophy conferences, and local philosophy clubs from across all of facebook. Although it sounds like it might be a noisy feed, it is actually a very readable rundown of what philosophers are talking about publicly on facebook in real time. Most clubs, departments, and conferences post very rarely, so even though hundreds of them are included in the list, it never gets overwhelming. Each day, I see discussion on philosophical ideas, a few calls for papers, announcements of talks around the world, and even a bit of philosophy humor from time to time.

The twitter version of this list is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a bit more noisy. Academic Philosophers on Twitter is a list consisting of hundreds of philosophy faculty twitter accounts. A good percentage of tweets are philosophically centered, but I've noticed that, unlike facebook updates, the tweets that philosophers publish on twitter are far more numerous, and tend to be about all kinds of non-philosophical things. It's still an interesting feed to browse, but it's much less significant than the facebook philosophy interest list, at least in my opinion. (For an even noisier experience that includes philosophy students and amateur philosophers, see @ranilillanjum's Philosophers on Twitter and More Philosophers lists. The lists are so full of people that she had to use two lists to keep track of all of them. Nevertheless, they're still worth checking out.)

I should point out that subscribing to any of these will not cause your everyday social media experience to suffer. Subscribing to the somewhat noisy twitter list doesn't clutter up your twitter feed at all; you have to manually click on the list in order to see tweets from it. Subscribing to the facebook interest list also results in very little clutter; although posts will show up in your regular facebook feed, they are clearly delineated and are grouped together so as not to interrupt the flow of updates from your friends and individually subscribed pages.

Every list I've linked to above is one that I personally subscribe to, though the only one I read with any regularity is the facebook one. I hope you'll find these links as useful as I have.

(Incidentally, if you know of a philosopher, philosophy department, or philosophy club on facebook that isn't already on the list, please let me know by sending me a message on facebook. I'll be glad to add them. Note that if you point me to a philosopher's facebook profile, they must allow subscribers in order to get successfully added to the list.)

(Edit: I'd like to append a link to this philosophical humor pinterest account, even though it doesn't really compile professional philosophers' accounts on pinterest in the same way the facebook and twitter lists cited above do. (Added November 2012.))

Professional Philosophers on Twitter

Twitter is a great place to find stuff you're specifically interested in. And since philosophy is one of my great loves, you can rest assured that my twitter feed is filled with philosophy-oriented tweets.

To aid in my search for great philosophic inspiration and discussion, I created a couple of twitter lists that make finding great content that much easier. The first is a list of people interested in philosophy — the list is large enough that it becomes a bit unwieldy to browse thoroughly, but you can definitely find a few gems in there from time to time.

The second list, however, is a bit more useful. My Academic Philosophers list has only those people actually working in the field, or those in grad school who are aiming at that profession. At first glance, such a list might be seen as elitist, but in actuality it is a good resource for reaching out to the academic philosophy community.

If you qualify for the list, but aren't yet on it, please feel free to @reply me with a request; I'm @EricHerboso.

Conference Of Leaders

Note: This article was originally published on Share Our Strength's No Kid Hungry website.

Share Our Strength’s annual Conference of Leaders is going on right now!

From November 7-9, hundreds of anti-hunger advocates from across the country are converging on Washington, DC to celebrate Share Our Strength’s 25th anniversary celebration.

Attendees at the conference will be tweeting with the hashtag #nkh, for “No Kid Hungry”. To follow along, head over to strength.org/conference, or scroll to the bottom of this page and you can see the tweets roll in in real time!

You can also see the photos as they come in on our Conference of Leaders flickr feed, and videos from the event on our youtube page.

Remember, if you’re at the conference, be sure to tweet with the hashtag #nkh and upload all your photos to the Share Our Strength Flickr group.

We hope you all enjoy the celebration!

We're Hiring!

Note: This article was originally published on Share Our Strength's No Kid Hungry website.

Throughout the recent recession, times have been tough all-around. Food banks have seen shortages even while demand for food assistance has risen substantially. Non-profits of all stripes have seen a decline in donations, and volunteers have been harder to come by.

But though these scary statistics hold true for many nonprofits, Share Our Strength has been able to rise above it all. Our fiscal outlook is rising with every forecast, and the funds we allocate to on-the-ground programs have been increasing, not decreasing. This is due to Share Our Strength’s unique experiences with cause marketing (earning us the 2009 Golden Halo Award Winner as Cause Marketer of the Year) and a deep relationship with its many volunteers and corporate sponsorships across the nation.

In fact, throughout this entire recession, Share Our Strength has continuously had a careers page up, because we’re actively looking for more talent to join our team.

Our Jobs page has a list of many positions that we need to fill in order to effectively focus on our efforts to end childhood hunger. I hesitate to list the positions we need in this blog entry, since available positions will of course differ over time, but in general, we always have a wide variety of positions that we need filled by people of various abilities. From Americorps volunteers to on-site local directors, design and web interns to managers in each of our program tracks, there is always something available for job-seekers to look through.

So if you’re looking for a new position and want to make a sincere difference with your day job, then please check out our careers section. You may just find exactly what you’re looking for.

Childhood Hunger Facts

Note: This article was originally published on Share Our Strength's No Kid Hungry website.

The Share Our Strength website is viewed by many different people for many different reasons. Some come because they see one of our Taste of the Nation events or happen across a Great American Bake Sale. Others come because they see us on Food Network or hear us mentioned on the radio. Most come to learn more about childhood hunger in America and what can be done to help alleviate the problem.

But there are a few who come for a much more exacting reason: Research.

Share Our Strength is the leading anti-childhood hunger organization in America. And while much of what we do aims at eliminating the problem, one part of this active approach requires us to be data-gatherers, so that we can effectively gauge the situation and find numbers that we can look to to see our progress.

But these facts are not just here for us alone; we ensure all of this information is made available to the public, for whatever use is needed. Whether you’re a student doing a report on child hunger or an activist preparing data to show to your congressman, you will find Share Our Strength’s Facts on Childhood Hunger page to be quite useful.

Once there, you can learn more about talking points on why childhood hunger is important; what food insecurity is, and why this term is used in reports rather than “hunger”; facts on poverty and food assistance programs & resources; and links to other sites that may help if you need additional research.

As always, our Hunger Facts section is always expanding, and is always kept as up to date as possible. For example, soon we will also have data put up on our Teacher Report, which highlights research Share Our Strength has done looking into hunger In America’s classrooms.

If you’ve never used our data before, then I welcome you to try grabbing a few stats to use in a blog entry or in your newest Facebook status update. It never hurts to have raw data on your side whenever you bring up the issue of childhood hunger in your daily life. With your help, we can make childhood hunger in America just a little less invisible, one tweet at a time.

Keeping Up With Share Our Strength

Note: This article was originally published on Share Our Strength's No Kid Hungry website.

If you're like me, then when you're into a nonprofit as dedicated as Share Our Strength, you just can't get enough content on it to satiate your thirst. But that's why we've made it as easy as possible for you to keep up to date with Share Our Strength in as many ways as you'd like.

The strength.org homepage is always the best place to go when you want to know what's up with Share Our Strength today. Not only do we have Hunger News stories, recent blog entries, and highlights up that let everyone know what's going on, we also have many other items that are updated on a regular basis for all to see. If you've only been checking out our homepage occasionally, then you may want to start stopping by a little more often. You never know what you might find there.

By far the easiest way to keep up with what's going on is by signing up for our monthly newsletter. Not only will you get monthly emails on Share Our Strength's efforts to end childhood hunger, but you can also opt in to receive reminders when Share Our Strength holds events in your area.

This blog is another great avenue for seeing new content. But rather than heading over tostrength.org/blog every time you want to see what's new, why not try subscribing to our No Kid Hungry Blog RSS feed? All you need is an RSS reader such as google.com/reader, and you can have our blog content delivered to you evey day!

While you're at it, subscribe to our Childhood Hunger News RSS feed. We post news items from across the web about childhood hunger quite often. If you want to know what's current in the field of childhood hunger, then you should definitely see our Childhood Hunger In The News section.

If you're up on social media, then you may also want to subscribe to our Twitter feed. Following the@ShareStrength account is a great way to have conversation directly with Jeff and myself on the Share Our Strength web team. You can also follow @Dine_Out for Great American Dine Out updates,@ofl_mass for Operation Frontline updates in the field from Boston, MA, and a number of our Taste of the Nation cities have twitter accounts as well; check out whichever is closest to you:

• @TONMpls in Minneapolis, MN
• @TOTNLA in Los Angeles, CA
• @TasteArizona in Scottsdale, AZ
• @OrlandoTaste in Orlando, FL
• @seattletaste in Seattle, WA

• @TOTNationDC in Washington, DC
• @TasteNationChi in Chicago, IL
• @TONHotlist in Minneapolis, MN
• @portlandtaste in Portland, OR

Becoming our fan on Facebook is also a great way to keep updated. Many items are just too small to warrant a new blog post, but a quick Facebook update will let everyone know what's going on regardless. And don't forget to join the Share Our Strength cause on facebook, nor our two program pages: Taste of the Nation and Operation Frontline.

If you really want a view behind the scenes, then I highly suggest friending us on Flickr and YouTube. Sometimes we post new videos and photos that don't always get the spotlight they deserve, and by friending us there, you can see all the rich content that may not make it onto strength.org.

Of course, Share Our Strength maintains a presence in many other places as well, so if I haven't mentioned your favorite, don't worry: we aren't going away anytime soon. But if any of you have ideas on how Share Our Strength can keep you updated with even more content, please don't hesitate to share by leaving a comment below — we'd love to know what you think!