QOTD

“George R.R. Martin is like Jesus Christ, in the sense that I admire the man and having met him I find him very likable. HowevAH, a large number of his fans alternately creep me out or piss me off.” — mazianni

On theism, gnosticism and agnosticism

Through a chain of thought that started out with the FDA rejecting an artificial blood substitute because it had a higher chance of adverse effects than real blood (an issue which I shall discuss separately), cymru and I ended up talking about mental rigidity and knowledge.

From that discussion came the insight that part of my problem with accepting organized religion relates to knowledge. The way I see it, knowledge and the ability to learn are vital. The universe contains many questions, and enlightenment comes through finding the best answers to them (and in particular, ferreting out the more interesting questions and finding the answers to them). At the same time, though, it’s OK to say “We don’t know yet”, or just “I don’t know.”

But many people, particularly many Americans, have a strange and irrational aversion to ever saying “I don’t know”. It’s as though they think saying you don’t know something is an admission that somehow makes you a lesser person.

Plato, I believe, talked about this. (Or it might have been Aristotle; I don’t have the original quotation handy. I need to make a note of it if I can ever find it again.) He said something like this:

“He that knows, and knows that he knows, is a wise man. He that knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool. But he that knows not, and knows that he knows not, is a scholar.”

There’s a similar quote here, variously attributed to Confucius or to some unknown Persian. There’s also a related Japanese proverb: “Kiku wa ittoki no haji, kikanu wa matsudai no haji.” Perhaps the best semantic translation into English is, “While asking others something that you don’t know is a temporary shame, not asking at all causes a lifetime of shame.” Or, more pithily, “If you ask a stupid question, you look stupid; but if you don’t ask, you remain stupid.” The key point in all the forms is constant: There is no shame in being able to say “I don’t know”. You can never learn something until you first acknowledge, at least to yourself, that you don’t know it, because you can’t learn something that you believe you already know.

And that’s a big problem with the majority of organized religion. Because organized religions tend to have a bad habit of deciding that there is only one possible version of the truth, and it is exactly as set down here and beyond any further question — even when it contradicts logical sense, and worse, even when it contradicts itself. Any question whose answer is not set down in the Official Truth then becomes one to be answered with “God did it” or “Because Allah said so”. Let’s generalize that to “A Wizard Did It.”

The reason this is a problem is because once you’ve declared that A Wizard Did It, instead of acknowledging that We Don’t Know Yet, you have halted inquiry into the question. You’re presented an answer that isn’t really an answer at all, and written off the question as answered. Instead of answering the question, you’ve passed the buck, pushed the question off to a higher level of abstraction and, by implication, forbidden pursuing it there. That proscription can fall anywhere from “That answer should be good enough for you, just accept it”, to “It’s impious and presumptuous to continue pursing that question”, to branding the questioner as outright heretical.

That’s the big problem with declaring that A Wizard Did It. Not only have you not answered the question, you’ve now actively discouraged any further attempts to answer it — and often solely because you were too vain, too arrogant, too insecure, or simply too doctrinally rigid to be able to say “We don’t know.”

There are many ways to answer a question, particularly a philosophical question, to which you don’t know the answer. “A Wizard Did It” is among the worst of all possible answers.

Possibly the best is, “We don’t know the answer to that question yet. Why don’t you see if you can find out?”

Not Just Microsoft

The EU has just hit Intel with a $1.45 billion fine for “engaging in illegal anticompetitive practices to exclude competitors from the market”, referring specifically to dirty tricks targeting AMD.

Between October 2002 and December 2007, Intel held more than 70 percent of the worldwide x86 CPU market. The Commission found that during the period in question, Intel engaged in two illegal practices. The first was that it gave wholly or partially hidden rebates to computer manufacturers on the condition that they buy all or almost all of their x86 CPUs from Intel. This illegal practice also included Intel’s making direct payments to a major retailer so that it would stock only computers with Intel x86 CPUs.

The second illegal practice was that Intel made direct payments to computer manufacturers to halt or delay the launch of specific products containing competitors’ x86 CPUs and to limit the sales channels available to these products.

The computer manufacturers named by the Commission as being involved in the rebates and payments included Acer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and NEC. The retailer was Media Saturn Holding, the parent company of the MediaMarkt chain.

You know, I’d probably feel better about buying Intel products if Intel apparently believed it could compete fairly with AMD on a level playing field. Every time I hear about another case of Intel playing below-the-belt like this, it makes me feel more strongly that if Intel is this afraid of AMD — and this dishonest — I should be continuing to buy AMD products, not Intel.

Naturally, Intel doesn’t think it did anything wrong:

Intel said in a statement Wednesday that it did not believe its practices had violated European law and that it would appeal the fine.

“Intel takes strong exception to this decision,” the chipmaker’s chief executive, Paul Otellini, said in the statement. “We believe the decision is wrong and ignores the reality of a highly competitive microprocessor marketplace — characterized by constant innovation, improved product performance and lower prices. There has been absolutely zero harm to consumers. Intel will appeal.”

Oh, really? This is all fair and above-board? I suppose that’s why Intel tried to conceal what it was doing it, is it? Just suppose for one moment that AMD, not Intel, had been doing this, and imagine the resulting howls of outrage we would be hearing from Intel.

Intel has three months to pay the €1.06 billion fine, the largest ever assessed by the EU. If they don’t, they’ll likely be hit with additional penalties — like the €899 million penalty the EU hit Microsoft with in February 2008, after Microsoft failed to pay the €497 million fine assessed against it by the EU in 2004, the previous largest-ever EU antitrust fine.

New research both proves and disproves ... wait, what?

Here’s an interesting one for the books.  In the continuing debate over the widely-accepted cold-dark-matter theory, a new study of the dwarf galazies surrounding the Milky Way has found that their arrangement appears to simultaneously require and refute the presence of dark matter.

More exactly, the orbital dynamics of the dwarf galaxies are consistent with what would be predicted by the cold-dark-matter theory ... but their arrangement indicates that they were formed by collision with other galaxies, a mechanism that — according to dark matter theory’s predictions of the properties of dark matter — precludes them containing any dark matter.

“The fragments produced by such an event can form rotating dwarf galaxies,” Metz said.  But there is an interesting catch to this crash theory, “theoretical calculations tell us that the satellites created cannot contain any dark matter.”  This assumption, however, stands in contradiction to another observation.  “The stars in the satellites we have observed are moving much faster than predicted by the Gravitational Law.  If classical physics holds this can only be attributed to the presence of dark matter.”

Doubt has been shed on the cold dark matter theory before.  This is the first time, however, that an observation has been found for which assuming dark matter creates a paradox.  If the dark matter theory is assumed to be correct, then dark matter is the only explanation for their orbital dynamics, yet their arrangement precludes the possibility of dark matter being responsible for their orbital dynamics.

How to resolve this?

Or one must assume that some basic fundamental principles of physics have hitherto been incorrectly understood.  “The only solution would be to reject Newton’s classical theory of gravitation,” adds Kroupa.  “We probably live in a non-Newton universe.  If this is true, then our observations could be explained without dark matter.”  Such approaches are finding support amongst other research teams in Europe, too.

Mordechai Milgrom’s MOND — Modified Newtonian Dynamics — theory has long been proposed as an alternate explanation for the observations used as evidence for cold dark matter.  But there are hard scientific reasons why MOND cannot be correct if the rest of our understanding of the Universe is correct — specifically, MOND is not consistent, and cannot be made consistent, with relativity.  A greatly more complex approach to the problem is Jacob Bekenstein’s TeVeS, tensor-vector-scalar gravity.  TeVeS, unlike MOND, is consistent with relativity; but it has been argued that TeVeS cannot simultaneously account for both galactic dynamics and gravitational lensing.  Both TeVeS and dark-matter theory are also unable to completely explain the Bullet Cluster observations without postulating additional factors; TeVeS requires the presence of dark matter as well to fully explain the observations, while dark matter theorists have found it necessary to invoke not only both dark matter and dark energy but a possible fifth basic force in order to fully explain them.  A related theory, STVG (scalar-tensor-vector gravity), takes a slightly different approach from TeVeS, and is able to successfully explain galaxy rotation curves, galaxy cluster mass profiles, gravitational lensing, the Bullet Cluster observations, and the accelerating expansion of the Universe without requiring the presence of either dark matter or dark energy.  Another very recent theory (to which I’m unable to find a reference right now), based on M-theory, posits that gravitons are weakly bound to the brane and can drift off of it and diffuse away into the bulk, resulting in a net gravitational force that follows the Newtonian inverse-square law at “normal” distances, is slightly stronger at huge distances as required by MOND and TeVeS to produce the effects which CDM theory explains via dark matter, and on truly vast scales becomes weaker than inverse-square again, in order to explain universal expansion without dark energy.

We don’t know yet which, if any, of these theories may be correct, and new theories are being proposed all the time.  However, with this finding, particularly if it can be confirmed, the holes in cold dark matter theory are beginning to become larger and more evident.