Category Archives: Science

Science makes his head hurt

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Once upon a time, I was very fond of the Blogs for Bush blog. I believed it was important for America that Bush was re-elected, as I had no trust in John Kerry’s ability to hold a thought long enough to act on it, any thought, any action. And if I had it to do all over again, I would still vote for Bush over Kerry. But that’s because we live in an imperfect world with a political system that gives us poor choices. If I had my way, we’d have presidential candidates like Rudy Giuliani and Bob Kerry. But we don’t, and there we are.

The chief honcho of Blogs for Bush, Mark Noonan (no relation to Peggy) has shown his colors and branded himself a fool with this idiotic attack on science:

Not too long ago the blogosphere was rocking with the great debate of Intelligent Design vs Darwinism. It was an interesting debate, though I doubt much that anyone had the mind changed. Be that as it may, the whole thing got me thinking, and today ii occured to me: science is dead. We have reached the end of the Age of Science – what will come after, I don’t know, but I don’t think that we’ll ever again have a time when Science is enshrined as some sort of god-like arbiter of right and wrong. The question now: what killed science?

It’s a nice little rip-off. Nietzsche (and others) said God died in the 19th century, a victim of the enlightenment, global exploration, rational inquiry, and yes, science. But Mark’s having none of that high-falutin’ science that gives us hoaxes like Piltdown man (and then exposes them), the old-time religion is good enough for him, so he stands Nietzsche on his head.

This nonsense is not worth refuting in detail. We’ll simply note that church attendance is in decline, especially in Western Europe. In another fifty to a hundred years, science-deniers will be an even smaller and more marginal group than they are now, and this sort of thing will be taught in the history books as the last throes of a doctrine that couldn’t adapt itself to the information age.

There doesn’t really need to be a war between religion and science, and if there is one, religion will lose every time. That’s because science can feed people, heal their diseases, extend their lives and enable them to fulfill their wishes.

Science can’t answer all of our metaphysical questions about meaning and purpose, so religion can still have a role, as long as it doesn’t get too uppity. In the hands of fanatics like Noonan, it does and is therefore firmly in the ash bin of history.

Certainly, there are wackos at the margins of science who insist on a war with religion, people who insist that descent with modification proves there is no God. And there are wackos who insist that science can instruct us in morality, but they don’t represent the spirit of rational inquiry.

Noonan wants school children to be taught that the pseudo-scientific Intelligent Design construct is on the same footing as the entire apparatus of evolutionary biology, invoking the Ann Coulter arguments. This is simply nonsense. The evidentiary basis for DWM is enormous, and you can certainly find this out in a few minutes of honest research on the web.

Net Neutrality is Intelligent Design for the Left

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Traditional values are under attack. The old ways are in decline, people insist on more freedom of choice than their grandparents had. The received wisdom about the very structure and organization of our world has been taken apart by science, and the only way to put it back together is to use the language of science to prop it up. So obscure terms and concepts enter public discourse with new meanings, and a alternative history is created. Fear runs rampant, men of science are assaulted for their moral bankruptcy, and an alternative science is injected into the schools.

While this paragraph clearly fits the “intelligent design” attack on the biological sciences in general and evolution by natural selection in particular, it also applies to “network neutrality”, the idea that only the government can be trusted to dictate policies embedded in Internet access networks. One of the most stark presentations of this viewpoint was written by Jeff Chester for the left’s holiest organ, The Nation magazine:

Absent net neutrality and other safeguards…[b]roadband connections would be governed by ever-vigilant network software engaged in “traffic policing” to insure each user couldn’t exceed the “granted resources” supervised by “admission control” technologies. Mechanisms are being put in place so our monopoly providers can “differentiate charging in real time for a wide range of applications and events.” Among the services that can form the basis of new revenues, notes Alcatel, is online content related to “community, forums, Internet access, information, news, find your way (navigation), marketing push, and health monitoring.”

Missing from the current legislative debate on communications is how the plans of cable and phone companies threaten civic participation, the free flow of information and meaningful competition. (ed: emphasis added)

Note the use of the terms in scare quotes, traffic policing, granted resources, and admission control. These are technical terms that come from the world of network engineering, and we can sure Chester doesn’t use them because he wishes to illuminate their importance in the engineering context. He doesn’t bother to define or explain, but takes it as given that any such words can only be destructive to “civic participation.”

The juxtaposition of network engineering language with social policy language is deceptive and inane. It’s like arguing that an electrical grid that provides alternating current to the home is responsible for politicians who flip-flop between positions depending on what audience they’re addressing. There’s a superficial similarity, indeed, but that’s where the connection ends.

We use admission control and policing on WiFi networks with something called WiFi multi-media (WMM) so that telephone calls and live video streams can happily coexist with web surfing on the same wireless network. Wireless networks don’t have unlimited bandwidth, so we have to use some finesse to provide a satisfactory experience to as many people as possible over a common network channel. Network engineering doesn’t do this in order to stifle democracy and curb “the free flow of information;” on the contrary, enabling as many people as possible to use the network as they wish to use it has the effect of enhancing free information flow. When we use “admission control” and its related priority system on a WiFi network, we can handle four times as many phone conversations as could without them. Doesn’t a phone call to a politician count as “civic participation” any more?

Have we now come to a state where the aesthetics of engineering language guide public policy more than the effects of engineering practice? I hope not, but we’re getting closer.

Chester admits that he wants to government to own Internet access networks, or failing that, that it should control them:

That means we would become owners of the “last mile” of fiber wire, the key link to the emerging broadband world. For about $17 a month, over ten years, the high-speed connections coming to our homes would be ours–not in perpetual hock to phone or cable monopolists.

Chester says, in essence, that the government is more likely to control the Internet in such a way that the public can engage in criticism of government actions and policies than anyone else. I see no empirical evidence that would encourage me to accept this article of faith, and plenty that argue for its rejection.

In our recent experience, we got to see head-to-head competition between a highly-regulated DSL service and a minimally-regulated Internet access system using cable TV systems, and the less-regulated option emerged as the clear technical winner.

Chester uses the language of science to urge us to ignore experimental data, and that’s as fundamentally unscientific and irrational as it gets.

For extra bonus points, his Center for Democracy and Technology minion Mike Godwin urges network neutrality regulation on the premise that the New York city taxi system is a transportation utopia. That’s just silly, and Matt Sherman explains why.