They’re at it again. In a blog posting entitled, Surprise! Pinker smeared again by those who distort his words, atheist activist Jerry Coyne complains:
There is no end of the kind of cherry-picking people will go to if they want to smear New Atheists. This post gives a prime example, with the target being Steve Pinker. (It’s always either Pinker, Sam Harris, or Richard Dawkins.)
Oh, please. Distorting people’s words and cherry picking have been at the foundation of the New Atheist approach to handling religion from the start. You can’t successfully insist that “religion is evil” without distorting people’s words and relying on cherry picking. And if you think about it, cherry picking is the bread-and-butter of anti-religious blogs like The Friendly Atheist.
So I find it both amusing and fitting that Coyne is complaining about techniques that atheists have long been using to attack religion.
The specifics of this latest flare-up are even more amusing. For the person being accused of cherry picking is none other than PZ Myers himself. Coyne accuses Myers of being an “Authoritarian Leftist” who “deliberately ignores Pinker’s message in order to smear him.” Myers blocks Coyne on Twitter. Look, it’s not like Myers has learned a whole new way of arguing when attacking people like Pinker. He’s just using the same approach he knows, the same one that once get him cheers from fellow atheists when he focused on religious people.
Once again, two men who supposedly are led by reason and evidence, are at each other’s throats. Take away the common enemy and reason and evidence point in opposite directions.
Look, if Myer’s had relied on cherry picking and ignoring the message to smear some theist, Coyne would not have a problem. In fact, he’d probably be giving Myers the thumbs up. It only becomes a sin when his side is targeted.
The New Atheists hate the taste of their own medicine.
Shadow To Light 
All you need to do is read the comment section of an atheist blog when there are no theists present in the dialogue. They attack each other.
Another reason the atheist conferences are failing is that they don’t like each other. I believe you wrote about the necessity of the “common enemy”. You’re quite right about that.
Even if their whining accusation were true, it makes no sense if atheism is the truth about the nature of reality; for there is no right and wrong, no just and unjust, if atheism is true.
It’s not just Myers vs. Coyne and Coyne vs Myers; Sam Harris has joined in, re-Tweeting a Stephen Knight Tweet saying:
By coincidence I recently came across this strongly worded 2013 article:
Myers is not the only one accusing Hitchins of wanting something like genocide.
And in his 12 January 2018 blog post entitled “Steven Pinker and the New York Times are making us dumber” Myers is reasserting his original criticisms of Pinker were correct and fighting back, unabashed, against his critics:
And Myers thinks the “leetle too charitable” Thomas Smith:
I looked at one of those shitty arguments, namely “[Pinker] invoked the second law of thermodynamics to explain poverty”. Phew, really?
I followed the link to a previous post, linking onwards to Pinker’s 2017 Edge talk, “The Second Law of Thermodynamics”, which can be found at https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27023
By the look of it, Pinker thinks the 2nd Law the Ultimate Defeater; he quotes the great physicist Arthur Eddington as saying: “… if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.”
And as a clincher (presumably) he tells his audience, “the evolutionary psychologists John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and Clark Barrett entitled a recent paper on the foundations of the science of mind “The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the First Law of Psychology.””
Hmmm, I looked up that paper (http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/lacerra.html) and found they claim that “The behavioral intelligence systems of animals function primarily as predictive bioenergetic cost/benefit analysis systems so as to ensure that the energetic costs and risks of behavior do not, on average, exceed the adaptive benefits behavior confers.” (Looks like they consider the human brain evolved primarily as an energy management system.)
Where the 2nd Law comes into that is in the 101-level truism that for an organism to survive it needs to average taking in more energy than it expends; though I’m at a loss to see what relevance the 2nd Law actually has for that, I’m not sure why the authors should have thought it was relevant, and I’m not sure why Pinker should have thought it was relevant.
Perhaps evolutionary psychologists like to be pretentious about physics. Take a look at this:
Which is rather odd, because Pinker later tells us:
Well, which is it? the “ultimate purpose” in the first quote, or the “clockwork” purposelessness in the second?
Then we get to the bottom line, the conclusion towards which the talk has been leading, the bit which riled Myers:
Let’s see. The world is “governed [inexorably?, inescapably?] by entropy and evolution.” That “entropy and evolution” sounds scientific, but I suspect it stands for good old unscientific “resources and population.” You know, I have often been told by fellow Christians and by Humanists that if the world’s wealth were shared equally (or sufficiently equally) everyone would have enough to live on; that’s Pinker’s “entropy” voided. That well-off people have fewer children — Italy’s population is shrinking — seems to be reliable; that’s Pinker’s “evolution” voided. That first paragraph looks like pretentious nonsense.
I should no doubt “collapse in deepest humiliation”, as Pinker suggests anyone doubting his thesis of poverty being caused by “entropy and evolution” should. But his ‘2nd Law => poverty’ thesis is ignorant (or culpable) pseudoscientific bullshit.
As regards the bit about starting a “conflagration”, I’m British and haven’t a clue what this means in US politics. Mind you, it looks like over-the-top bullshit on any interpretation I can imagine.
I would be unfair to Pinker if I did not say that, having identified a ‘scientific’ cause of poverty, he says, in the second paragraph, we should figure out how to solve the problems caused (not by selfish people, but) by the “very nature of the universe.” Probably we can do little to fight the universe and its inexorable 2nd Law, but I suppose we can try!
I am astonished that Pinker thinks his bottom-line recommendation, that we should figure out solving poverty etc etc, is anything new and worthy of an Edge talk; Christians and Humanists have been doing that for centuries; and I’m certain Myers, too, will have beaten Pinker to that conclusion.
I am also astonished that Pinker claims that “an underappreciation of the Second Law lures people into seeing every unsolved social problem as a sign that their country is being driven off a cliff”. Translated, that becomes that everyone’s grossly over-the-top in their responses to unsolved social problems — though they wouldn’t be if only they understood and fully appreciated that:
Which inexorable law, a law of the universe, no less, causes those unsolved social problems such as poverty.
Yeah, yeah. What next? Social Darwinism?
Myers got it right: Pinker’s Edge talk is pretentious pseudoscience.
Ugh, this gobbledygook about the second law is a pet peeve of mine. Like when a pretentious high school kid (incorrectly) learns the word entropy as synonymous with “randomness” or “chaos” and starts writing poetry about the entropy of their tumultuous teenage relationships, or the entropy of T.S. Eliot.
Thermodynamics, including the second law, is like much of physics in that it allows us to formulate models that we can use to describe physical things using mathematics. Entropy and the second law is useful in describing aspects of life at a molecular level using mathematics, e.g. create a quantitative description of how organisms derive energy from cycling biochemical reactions. Even when the language of entropy gets adopted into something like information theory, it’s because the mathematics that were originally developed for describing physical systems are useful for performing a quantitative analysis about something more abstract or non-physical. However I would challenge anyone who believes that evolution, or organism-level behavior, or socioeconomic problems such as poverty come down to direct consequences of the second law, try to actually relate that phenomenon back to the mathematical framework of thermodynamics and the second law. Hint, there is no meaningful quantitative difference between the entropy of a house, and a pile of rubble containing all the components of that house. It’s no different than the high schooler colloquially equating “entropy” with “disorder”, and poverty with “disorder”, and thus, second law. As described in the previous comment, total pseudoscience.
P.S. Been following this blog for a while – I love the blog and the comments!
Heads up: devil’s advocacy and pop-science incoming.
Dhay said:
No it isn’t, because you have ignored the work necessary to create the wealth in the first place. The point of his argument was that wealth is not self-creating: “matter does not just arrange itself into shelter or clothing.” You point isn’t false: it would be mathematically possible for all the people who produce the wealth to act as providers to those who do not, in the manner of supporting one’s dependent children, but this has nothing to do with the entropy argument, so your rebuttal is a swing and a miss.
A swing and a miss again. To the extent that Pinker was reliant on evolution, it seems to be summarised in the phrase, “living things do everything they can not to become our food.” Evolution purports to offer an explanation for this, and evolutionists reflexively reach for evolutionary explanations, but the observation is broadly true (on a charitable interpretation) independently of whether evolution is even slightly true. If it were me, I would have dismissed his reference to evolution as “narrative gloss”, lacking any substantial contribution to the argument, as it does. Your rebuttal, however, not only misses the point, but is a non sequitur in and of itself: nobody (let alone Pinker) is claiming evolution implies that well-off people will reproduce more.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics (2LT), on the other hand, does have relevance to the discussion, when considered in its general case. Pinker has even appealed to it quite properly with his specific remarks about matter not just arranging itself into shelter or clothing. 2LT gets both over-applied and under-applied. The under-application is simply to insist that it relates to energy and only energy. The over-application is to reach for “order” and “disorder” without demonstrating that natural processes correspond to those terms as used.
In order to understand the general sense of 2LT, one need only understand the processes it describes in the special case of energy transfer. 2LT is what it is because energy can be exchanged between particles in a large number of ways, but given all those ways, the outcomes which produce a more even distribution of energy are more probable than those which do not. The net effect of this is that things tend towards equilibrium. If the opposite were true, then systems would tend towards having a “winner particle” with all the energy. We observe the former, and not the latter: we describe this as increasing entropy. The reverse processes are possible (so things like refrigerators are possible), but special guidance is required to ensure that the entropy-decreasing processes happen more often than the majority which skew 2LT towards increasing it, and thermal entropy always increases at the broader level, regardless.
This is where the distinction between “closed system” and “open system” becomes important. Entropy always increases in a closed system, but can decrease in an open system if the necessary source of low entropy can be directly imported from outside, or a mechanism exists to convert one form of entropy to another. If we considered a refrigerator a closed system in relation to heat, it would defeat 2LT, but a refrigerator requires an external power source (generally electricity) which suffers its own larger entropy increase in order to effect this change. Being an open system offers no free pass if the necessary raw low-entropy materials can not be imported, and no conversion mechanism exists for exchange of other entropy types, however. “Open system” is a possible loophole, not a defeater. In fact, if the outside system has greater entropy, it’s a potential entropy source of its own.
Now, some of you may still be sceptical that 2LT has valid application outside of energy. Let me give you a couple of brief examples which you can use to extrapolate a trend. First, imagine two glass spheres joined by a neck with a valve. In one, there is nitrogen gas at low pressure, and in the other there is nitrogen gas at high pressure. The systems are closed to each other and to the outside world. You can probably see immediately what will happen if the valve is opened, such that the systems become open to each other (forming a new closed system): the high pressure gas will overwhelmingly tend towards the low pressure zone, producing equilibrium as fast as the valve allows. The equalisation of pressure is covered by the general rule of 2LT: pressure is a form of energy to be equalised.
Now imagine the same apparatus, but with nitrogen gas in one sphere, and oxygen gas in the other, at equal temperature and pressure. The thermal properties of each are already at equilibrium, so there is no energy imbalance between them. Even so, when we open the valve, another form of equilibrium will eventually arise: oxygen/nitrogen equilibrium. The rate at which this equilibrium is reached is proportional to the overall energy of the system, rather than the energy imbalance: hotter gas simply moves around more. So here we see a case of special entropy: oxygen/nitrogen entropy. This is not a thermodynamic entropy, but it happens on exactly the same general principle as thermodynamic entropy: random exchange of particles between the spheres is possible; particles ultimately have an equal probability of being anywhere in the system; therefore, the equilibrium state (of maximum oxygen/nitrogen entropy) is reached when there is a perfectly even mix of the two gasses throughout the enclosure. In short, the system has a probabilistic tendency which we can extrapolate with confidence.
How far can we take this? A very long way if we are careful about it. Consider the world’s iPhone entropy. Given normal exposure to the world, it is far likelier that a (working) iPhone will transition away from that state than a non-working iPhone (or other collection of atoms) will transition into that state. We know what kind of process produces iPhones: an iPhone factory. We can say that an open system with respect to iPhones is one which has an outside source of iPhones which could be imported, or contains an iPhone factory which could receive the appropriate matter and energy to convert into iPhones (at the expense of increasing other kinds of entropy more). We know that if the iPhone factories stop producing iPhones for any reason, the world will tend towards a state of equilibrium in which there are no iPhones, and the only way to reverse the trend is to get the iPhone factories producing again (as even active repair and maintenance can only slow the trend, not reverse it).
The further away from raw physics we get with these parallels, the less precise we can be about it, mathematically. We are dealing with complex conglomerates, and we don’t have a sufficiently well-developed science to say what iPhone entropy means in relation to all the components which go into an iPhone and their respective entropies, including thermal entropy (and even information entropy in software). Consider this an area ripe for research.
Pinker is guilty, no doubt, of dressing up an argument with scientific terminology in order to (a) sound more rigorous than he is, and/or (b) prejudice his audience with language normally reserved for such rigour, but he’s not wrong about shelter entropy or clothing entropy. Someone has to invest special effort into making that stuff, and without that effort, the natural state of equilibrium to which clothing and shelter gravitate is fig leaves and limited cave space. Everything else requires a sufficiently intelligent agent to intervene and perform work.
The Myers vs Coyne clash is happening not only on a direct level but also on an indirect level. Both are tenured PhD qualified Professors of Biology with a keen interest in evolution (Coyne is now retired, “Emeritus”), both are Liberals and both are prominent New Atheists; you’d expect them to have a great deal else in common, such as views on social justice and the justice system.
Instead we have Jerry Coyne excusing horrible child molestors as blameless puppets of their environment and genes:
Whereas PZ Myers gets florid in blame of a Larry Nassar — and the Olympics Organisers as a body — and is quite clear that Nassar is getting what he deserves (and so should they, too):
Who would have though two people so similar could be so different. Coyne likes to imply that his deterministic ‘cannot blame the poor victim perpetrators’ opinion is relentlessly, inescapably scientific, it’s the only view backed by ‘Science, Evidence and Reason’. But someone very very similar to himself has diametrically opposite views.
Go figure.
On last Monday’s BBC1 Panorama investigative news documentary entitled “White Fright: Divided Britain” the reporters went back to Blackburn ten years after their first documentary to see what if anything had changed. And interviewed Martin Sculpher, North West Regional Organiser of the English Defence League:
Funny that, for I reckon Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne have also objected to being called racists, and have responded to the accusations with the same words (if not so briefly) and same ideas used by a leader of the EDL.
What is the EDL? It’s a far right group (as the BBC caption tells anyone who doesn’t get out a lot); a 2013 Express subtitle tells us that “SERVING soldiers have been warned that taking part in any English Defence League (EDL) activities could result in their dismissal” — yes, the EDL is that far right, that notorious.
And the EDL is a far-right group which organises provocative marches similar to the recent march in Charlottesville, a march attracting anti-protesters; in the US you would surely not hesitate to call the EDL alt-Right.
I’m not sure where you would slide a card between the publicly expressed defence against accusations of racism of views of Jerry Coyne and Sam Harris, and the publicly expressed defence against accusations of racism of the (far-right or alt-right, take your pick) EDL spokesman Martin Sculpher. So what’s the difference between the two New Atheists and the far-right spokesman?
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One might say it’s that Coyne and Harris do not organise anti-Muslim marches through predominantly Muslim areas, that Coyne and Harris are New Atheist moderates not EDL extremists.
But colour me unconvinced: Harris and Coyne are both strongly anti-moderate and blame the extremists on the periphery on the moderates part-way; Harris has blogged — “The Virus of Religious Moderation” — about moderation being (as I read him) an unacceptable evil; Coyne has raged long and consistently on his blog against against any moderates he comes across — he calls them “accommodationists™” — whether religious, agnostic or atheist. Harris and Coyne don’t seem to recognise moderation is valid or acceptable.
By their own reckoning, the likes of the self-designated moderates Harris and Coyne ‘enable’ the likes of the far-right EDL and other alt-Right neo-Fascists.
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One way in which moderation is unacceptable and invalid to both is the idea, most clearly expressed by Harris, that a religious moderate is someone who doesn’t understand their own texts, or chooses not to act on them, or willfully (or ‘Doesn’t Even Know It’s A Lie’ DENIAL) denies their plain and obvious meanings. Yeah yeah.
But let’s look at Harris and Coyne through that same lens: if Harris and Coyne understood their own ideology in full they would not be in moderate denial or DENIAL, they would be full-blown anti- Muslim racists like the EDL. Probably they would want to stop all immigration — of Muslims, at any rate — be socially and culturally coercive on those who are in the country already, or even seek encouraged or forceful repatriation.
Or an apartheid Islamistan, a reservation, with a high fence around it.
Jerry Coyne has recently taken an online quiz which claims to locate the testee on both the Authoritarian-Libertarian and Left-Right axes, and he has declared his credentials as a Libertarian Liberal slap bang in the middle (as near as dammit) of the Libertarian Left quadrant.
Gosh, he must be a moderate, then. Not the Hillary-criticising alt-right Trump-enabler some have apparently accused him of being. And not guilty of what he sees as the maladaptive excesses of the Left — perhaps Coyne is contrasting himself with PZ Myers here.
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2018/01/30/my-political-profile-how-leftist-am-i-or-are-you/
I’m not sure how valid the quiz results are, mind: Coyne tells us “I thought very hard before answering [each of the questions]”; the obvious observation is that some quizzes require the respondent to answer quickly and System-1 intuitively to get a gut-reaction, some require the respondent to think slowly like Coyne to get a System-2 carefully thought out response, but no sensible scientific quiz just lets the respondent pick their own System, it needs prescribing if the quiz is to achieve consistent and meaningful results.
If you’re not sure what I mean, try taking the test twice, rapidly the first time, slowly with deliberation the second, see how your choices change. (For myself, I despair of such a quiz — I find myself questioning the question.)
Did Coyne follow the instructions? There weren’t any. Go figure the test’s worth.
(Perhaps, as per time-honoured psychological testing methods, it’s a dummy quiz where the respondents think they are locating themselves on the twin axes, but the quiz designers are actually harvesting speed of response (hence use of Systems 1 or 2 or some mixture) versus position on political orientation axes for some future research paper.)
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Coyne suggested his readers take the quiz themselves and in a subsequent “Where our readers stand politically” blog post posted the results, which a reader had put into a scatter graph.
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2018/01/31/where-our-readers-stand-politically/
I note that Coyne’s results were obtained from a massive 1.1% (593 — “a lot more than usual”) of his followers, and those self-selected and self-reporting. To an experienced scientist like Coyne with a working lifetime’s experience of statistical analysis of results of vinegar fly experiments that 1.1% is somehow obviously a representative sample of his readers and presumably a pretty good representation — he shows no awareness it might be otherwise, or even could be otherwise — of where 100% of them stand politically. Hmmm.
Actually, the scatter graph shows only those who responded in the Comments of Coyne’s original blog post — that’s a mere 224 comments — and only the half or fewer gave their score) who revealed their scores there. (I counted a mere 89 who directly or indirectly (eg “same as you”) revealed their scores.)
Coyne was apparently proud that he falls slap bang in the middle of the revealed political spectrum of this huge crowd of the 0.17% of his followers who chose to take the test and were unafraid to reveal their scores in public view of Coyne and his other followers.
Of course, Coyne’s blog being an echo chamber notorious for talking cats and both silent banning and public-shaming banning — that has nothing whatsoever to do with the poor response to the poll and piss-poor response in the comments, the reticence of 85% ((593-89)/593) of poll responders to reveal their scores, and the closeness of those scores that were</em to Coyne’s own score. I rather think it has, very obviously so, and that Coyne’s failure to realise that reflects wishful thinking and a lack of basic rationality on Coyne’s part.
If Coyne thinks himself an exemplar of science, as demonstrated by his lousy grasp of statistics even after a working lifetime of use and an exemplar of reason, as demonstrated by his poor thinking skills regarding the graph showing his views being slap bang in the middle of his followers’ views, then this is very bad evidence for ‘Science and Reason’, Coyne-style at any rate, being worth taking notice of.
How do we square this Permissive Liberal result with his proclivity for banning people at the drop of a hat? Maybe his authoritarian reflex is closely bound to matters of science and religion which didn’t feature much in the question set.
I agree. I want an “I’m not sure” option for each question which increases the error margin of the final assessment (it doesn’t have an error margin). I want it primarily because some of the questions are so ambiguous that the answer is either yes or no depending which interpretation I choose.
Robert M’s reply above, concluding that Steven Pinker’s use of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to explain poverty is “total pseudoscience” is echoed in the A Trivial Knot blog post entitled “The Second Law and its misuses”, which targets Pinker’s misuse:
The post gives a longish explanation of what entropy is and why and how Pinker is bullshitting, and its bottom line is, “bringing in the Second Law is a pointless exercise in scientism.”
I’ve already commented on this thread (over a year ago), but I’ll reiterate a little since Dhay has introduced a new source. I’ve already offered Pinker a qualified defence in relation to his use of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (2LT), and I stand by it. Does Siggy of A Trivial Knot bring anything new to the table by way of counter-argument?
I think the answer to that is a fairly straightforward “no”. As discussions of 2LT go, Siggy’s is pedestrian and rests heavily on one of the most common fallacies used by sceptics: the “point at the sun” open system argument. This is a shoddy argument for two reasons.
The simpler problem is that it just shifts the problem back one step: the sun is just as subject to 2LT as anything else, so if you explain something in terms of the sun, then you need to explain the sun. The second problem is so much worse, however, that I’ll give the sun a free pass. It can be the free energy source for everything else, no explanation required.
The second problem is that an external source of energy is necessary but not sufficient to explain a reduction in entropy elsewhere. If the sun shines on your house, heating the exterior to a higher temperature than the interior, then the tendency will be for your house to get warmer on the inside (increasing entropy) rather than cooler (decreasing entropy). You need an air conditioner or similar to cool the interior, defeating the natural flow of heat into the cooler space. Certainly, that air conditioner requires a power source, and that power source can ultimately be the sun (possibly via fossil fuel derived from plant matter), but the energy source alone is no more sufficient than the air conditioner absent its power supply.
So point at the sun as dramatically as you like: unless you’re explaining how something exposed to sunlight warms up, you’ve still got a lot of work to do. Imagine explaining that you expect your house to be nice and cool in summer because (a) it’s an open system, and (b) points dramatically at the sun. It’s exactly as silly as it sounds: the emperor has no lab coat.
And this guy goes on about how wrong creationists are. Give me a break.
With that sort of opening, one shouldn’t expect much from the body of the article. He has five other headings under which he makes other points about 2LT. I’ll consider some of them as briefly as I can while doing them justice.
His first heading calls entropy a measure of ignorance. There is certainly some relationship between entropy and ignorance, but it’s not a measure of ignorance. For one thing, ignorance is a property of a mind, not of a system about which a mind may or may not know. That technicality aside, there are things we know and things we don’t know about systems in states of high entropy. If a system is in a state of maximum thermal entropy, for example, then we know that heat energy is uniform throughout the system. That can hardly be described as “ignorance”.
Beyond this, he mentions some things about microscopic and macroscopic states. I have no idea what he intends to convey with the claim, “entropy is the log of the number of possible microscopic states.” It is phrased in such a way as to sound mathematically precise, but it makes no sense if taken literally. Suppose a system has e^n possible microscopic states: by this definition, it has entropy equal to n. That can’t be so: the entropy depends on which of those possible states the system is actually in, among other things.
With this inscrutable definition of entropy to hand, he goes on to say that, “microscopic disorder is by far the largest source of entropy.” This is to say, apparently, that the number of ways in which the macroscopic objects on a desk can be arranged is small relative to the number of ways the molecules in a glass of water can be arranged. If his prior assertion about entropy being equal to “the log of the number of possible microscopic states” were true, then this would follow.
The argument takes a sharp turn in the closing paragraph of the section. He implies that the kinds of order and disorder we register at the human level are not rich in microscopic states, and therefore the 2LT has little to say about them. Then he says that to know the entropy of poverty, you’d need to know mass and temperature of poor people. What the what? If his prior argument were, “2LT only applies to heat”, this might make some kind of sense. As it stands, it’s a non sequitur.
There’s one other point he makes which I find interesting enough to address. This is where he talks about complexity. Consider the following quotation.
I’ll grant the measure of complexity as code: coding is my thing. The claim that this has nothing to do with entropy, however—that stands in direct contradiction of his own earlier claims! Code is rich in possible microscopic states, and that complexity grows exponentially with the quantity of code. By his own (strange) definition of entropy as the log of possible states, the entropy of code bears a linear relationship to the size of it, because each additional code symbol increases the number of possible states exponentially.
There’s more I could discuss about this article, but this is supposed to be a comment, not an essay. The summary is that I don’t accept his criticism of Pinker. He disparages Pinker and creationists for their alleged misapplication of 2LT, but his own analysis is so shoddy as to render that criticism worthless. In some sense I agree with his basic objection: the 2LT is not the right tool for talking about poverty and such like; it should be a simple argument from common sense that clothing and comfortable dwellings don’t occur naturally. Do we really need the imprimatur of science to make people accept such a simple and obvious claim?
As such, the charge of scientism is not without merit, but boy, does Siggy do a lousy job of prosecuting the case.
Re: TFBW “I have no idea what he intends to convey with the claim, “entropy is the log of the number of possible microscopic states.” It is phrased in such a way as to sound mathematically precise, but it makes no sense if taken literally. Suppose a system has e^n possible microscopic states: by this definition, it has entropy equal to n. That can’t be so: the entropy depends on which of those possible states the system is actually in, among other things.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann%27s_entropy_formula
“In short, the Boltzmann formula shows the relationship between entropy and the number of ways the atoms or molecules of a thermodynamic system can be arranged.”
The point basically is that there is no single one of those possible states that a system is actually in- in this view the system is in constant motion, constantly sampling among all possible states. More states = more entropy. The only condition under which there is exactly one state that the system is in is at absolute zero temperature, leading to the much less famous Third Law of Thermodynamics. Note (despite Wikepedia’s reference to atoms or molecules) this formulation predates modern atomic theory so it is independent of notions like the uncertainty principle or the detailed structure of what such states look like. However it does assume constant “motion” (or I like the notion of constant “sampling of an ensemble of states”) at some microscopic scale. That’s why there’s no difference in entropy between a neat desk, and the same desk with the same pile of papers all shifted around. The papers aren’t moving themselves around or rearranging themselves, but unless this desk is at absolute zero there is a whole lot of “motion” at the microscopic scale, and the two macroscopic configurations of the desk have pretty much the same ensembles of microscopic states to sample.
One of the interesting sidebars is that our intuition about entropy and “disorder” and “microstates” breaks down very quickly when the system gets much more complex (conceptually) than the pictures of a bunch of marbles bouncing around. For applications in condensed phase chemistry and biochemistry, with complex solutions and polymers and cells and so forth, which is where sometimes people like to go with hand-wavy second law arguments, it’s notoriously difficult to intuit whether certain types of changes in molecular structure result in an increase or decrease of entropy. For example maybe a protein folding into a certain structure, or lipids assembling into a membrane, sure seems like it’s created a lot of order, but it has also granted considerably more freedom to the solvent (water) around it, and the net change to the system can be an increase in entropy despite seemingly having “ordered” the protein or the lipid or whatever. So it’s really better to forget the intuitive notion of “disorder” and just consider entropy as a useful mathematical concept that describes equilibrium and reversibility of processes, that can be tied to experimental measurements and observations.
Anyway if I think back to my basic point of over a year ago, pulling the second law into service of arguments that are fundamentally not about physics & chemistry is just asking it to do something it’s not designed to do. Even this gobbledygook about drawing open systems to include the sun and on and on. Thermodynamics has ways to describe open systems mathematically, but here it’s just a way of stretching the argument. Hand waving upon hand waving, but it isn’t generally useful for formulating a model and making predictions. I remember myself in high school reading the sonnet “Ozymandias” and our textbook tried to tie the theme of that poem to “entropy” and it sounded all profound and mystical to connect the theme of Control and Order decaying into Waste to a Law of Nature. Now that I’m older- pshaw! I say. It may actually be true that “Everything Falls Apart” but the second law isn’t primarily why.
To conclude a very long-winded reply: this whole discussion of thermodynamics and the misapplication thereof reminds me of the following classic Calvin and Hobbes comic strip:
Oh, well, if Siggy had actually mentioned that he was basing his argument on Boltzmann’s entropy formula (which seems to be what he’s doing), rather than refer to it obliquely, then my criticism would be somewhat different. It would be more along the lines of, “yes, you are absolutely correct that it is inappropriate to measure the entropy of a system using Boltzmann’s entropy formula unless that system approximates an ideal gas and you are strictly interested in its thermal entropy.”
Of course, nobody else even mentioned that formula, let alone attempting to use it in that way, so I have to assume Siggy is implying, “if it isn’t described by Boltzmann, it isn’t entropy.” That would certainly explain the conclusion I said was a non sequitur. A clear claim like this would be a perfectly adequate premise on which to base it, although the conclusion would be better phrased as, “to know the entropy of poverty, poverty would need to approximate an ideal gas.”
All this is rather tedious and pedantic. Physicists were the first to discover entropy in the form of thermal entropy, and it’s a very important concept, but it has turned out to be a special case of a broader concept. Shannon entropy is a way of measuring entropy in an information system. It is also an extremely important concept, and its formula bears some striking similarity to Boltzmann’s (considering that they operate in entirely different domains), but even Shannon entropy is a special case of information entropy measurement.
Too much of this argument degenerates into a turf war over who gets to define what is and isn’t “entropy”. The politics of linguistic hegemony interfere with the quest for knowledge.
> They’re at it again. In a blog posting entitled, Surprise! Pinker smeared again by those who distort his words, atheist activist Jerry Coyne complains: …
Jerry Coyne’s at it again. In his 31 May 2019 blog post entitled “A disgusting hit piece on Pinker in Current Affairs” — “disgusting” just about sums up Coyne’s rationality level — Coyne provides a hit piece on Pinker’s critic, Nathan Robinson, and on Robinson’s critique of Pinker’s two recent books which both proclaim (paraphrased) ‘Gee whiz, isn’t everything wonderful.’
80%. That’s measured and moderate of Robinson. Coyne, on the other hand finds how much merit in Robinson’s critique? Ah yes, zero, not a single word of agreement, said or implied.
To me, Robinson’s article looks rational and reasonable, and some parts of his critique are argued in detail. But for Coyne it’s, well, all about envy; Coyne emphasises:
“[Robinson] doesn’t like Pinker getting all rich and famous peddling ideas that Robinson thinks are misguided.”
“The “rich and famous” stuff rankles him deeply.”
“Robinson seems mostly concerned with taking down Pinker’s status because he perceives that Pinker has a high status, but a status that is unwarranted. Robinson repeatedly mentions Pinker’s position as a Harvard professor and how, sequestered among the ivy, he cannot know about the travails of the common person, which of course Robinson, as a Harvard graduate student, knows a lot about.”
“Robinson’s repeated mentioning of Harvard, his denigrating tone, complete with profanity (see below), and the gratuitous mention of “millions of dollars in book sales,” makes me think there is something more to Robinson’s beef than mere facts.” — Gratuitous? It’s not gratuitous to point out that the man who lectures billions of poor people on how well off they really are nowadays — see discussion of Pinker’s graph based on dodgy statistics and dodgy assumptions, dodginess explained in detail by Robinson — is himself very wealthy. For Pinker to be Polyanna-ish about other peoples’ poverty is condescending indeed.
“I do think that some people dislike Pinker because he is famous, for they’re always mentioning his fame and his books (and often, like P.Z. Myers, their own lack thereof).”
“… the not-so-hidden resentment of Pinker’s fame …”
“Robinson has some psychological issues …”
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Pinker has answers, according to Coyne:
In those two links, to Pinker’s website and a pdf article, Pinker “replies” to criticisms of his The Better Angels of Our Nature only, not Enlightenment Now. Ironically, one of Robinson’s criticisms of Pinker is that Pinker frequently replies not to actual criticisms but to his own distorted paraphrases of the criticisms; Robinson puts it thus:
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I’ve done no justice to Robinson’s long, long (8,600+ word) critique of Pinker, nor included Coyne’s other highly intelligent comments (as he no doubt thinks) in his long hit piece on the critique. Necessarily I have had to quote very selectively, and just the bits that got my cynical attention; this Reply is a Reply, not an essay: for proper balance you’ll have to read both and judge for yourselves.
Further to Nathan Robinson’s criticism of Steven Pinker (see previous response) that Pinker …
… I note that in a recent (July 2019) e-mail of self-defence against what he terms “social-media snark” — an e-mail reproduced on the ever-sycophantic Jerry Coyne’s blog — Pinker fails to respond to the actual social-media allegations (“snark”), which were that he downplays sexual exploitation, replying instead at great length that he has a record of opposing rape, sexual assault and domestic violence.
So no, Pinker has not responded to the actual social-media allegations, he’s responded to a fantasy set of different allegations. Which Robinson tells us is par for the course.