DrBob

[DrBobParticipant]

Hi @davis…  OK, I didn’t really get that.   Who did Simon think I was?  I suppose I appreciate the condolences.  I’m sure I’ll need them some day.

Tell me, what happened to Unseen?   He seems to have been replaced by a Republican doppleganger.  Now he thinks that scientific debate happens on YouTube and Twitter (and Lord help us, Facebook!).

[DrBobParticipant]

I don’t think I’ve passed away… not quite yet anyway.   Happily fully vaccinated and boosted to try to keep it that way!

I do think that the COVID pandemic will be an abject lesson for the next 50 years on how not to do scientific communication with the public.  Sadly, part of that is because the public turns out to be far more ignorant than we thought.

[DrBobParticipant]

Hi @autumn,

The issue with agricultural methane is that it comes from renewables.  The cows eat plants; those plants got the carbon out of the air.   Left on the ground, bacteria would turn the same biomass into the same amount of methane.  In fact, that’s used for fuel in some 3rd world countries as “biogas”.  The problem with the cow farts thing is that it’s just looking at outputs without considering the source of the input carbon.   If you really care about the climate emergency, you have to ignore the silly noise and focus on the use of fossilized carbon inputs being dug up from the ground.

Now, it is true that for agriculture there are some second-order effects.  The fertilizers that enable us to grow the crops to feed the planet are often produced using fossilized carbon.   To the extent that protein production (in animals or artificially) requires more feed than simply feeding the grains to people, that matters in terms of excess fertilizer use and some added transport and production costs. Maybe.  It’s more true of swine production than beef, for example.   It’s just not anywhere near big enough to waste time and political capital trying to overcome enormous cultural hurdles (and resultant backlash).

When you read the statements on agriculture fossil carbon use, most is through power and machinery.  The U.S. categorizes it that way because of the way our federal departments are set up (they collect the data).  So the addressable part of the agricultural carbon gets back to decarbonizing auto and other machinery, and decarbonizing electrical production.

Worrying about plastic bags from a climate perspective isn’t a second-order effect.  It’s just ridiculous.   The concern with all plastics is the persistence and chemical nature of the waste.  That’s especially true of consumer plastics, where the odds of non-recycled disposal is highest.

[DrBobParticipant]

Aw, shucks, @Belle Rose.  Glad you’re still here and doing well.   And always glad to see the Fronkey Farmer!

 

[DrBobParticipant]

Hi @theencogitationer (that’s a mouthful!)!

Here in the U.S. we’ve seen Catholic Churches & youth programs, then Boy Scout programs, then other church youth programs, then college and university programs, then youth sports programs.   And always, everywhere, the foster care and K-12 systems here.  The story is always the same… years of serial abuse, sometimes hundreds of victims from just one predator.  Administrators who covered up, looked the other way, didn’t follow up adequately.  Sometimes they were advised by lawyers and insurers to do so, caught between uncertainty and PR risk and the threat of defamation suits.

Lots of those places, like public universities and K-12 schools are state-run entities, with the full power of the state and taxpayer dollars behind them.  Our foster care system has taken children away from parents at gunpoint and given them to predators.  And you’re worried about the Vatican City-State?   The average city police force in the U.S. is bigger than the Swiss Guard.

Now, here’s a challenge for you:  Having made your claim, can you site even one case where the Vatican asserted sovereign or diplomatic immunity to protect a pedophile?   I suspect it’s a bit like ranting about the Inquisition.  Texas kills more people on average per year than the Inquisition did.  It reflects a bias, rather than an objective assessment.

[DrBobParticipant]

Good heavens, @jakelafort!  That’s quite a Gish Gallop.   I fear I would take up 20+ pages of prose trying to address each accusation flung my way.

Suffice to say that both as a scientist and as a Catholic I’m all for the mass-education of “heathens” as you put it.  Education is a good thing.  Leaving behind indigenous health care in favor of scientific understandings and systems of public health is a good thing.  Lots less disease that way.  Subsuming tribal identities into more universal identities is a good thing.  Lots less war that way.  Yes, all of education requires a “conversion” of some sort, from one way of looking at the world to another.  That’s just what old academics like me call “learning.”  Yes, any sort of learning that someone doesn’t happen to like will be called “indoctrination” by those opposed to education.  Right now in the U.S. my university and others are being tarred with “indoctrination” by our far right wing, because we have the temerity to teach things like evolution and whatnot.  I make no apology for teaching.

One of the things that leads to a lot of evil and ill will in the world is when we thoughtlessly personify groups and institutions.  Modern atheism is quick to resist that – any effort to generalize atheist thought is met with vociferous objections and a mantra of “atheism is just not believing in god(s)!!”.  It’s curious therefore why you insist on trying to cast billions of Catholics throughout history into some monolithic, personified straw man.  Institutions and belief systems are not people.

Yes, Catholics now and throughout history have been murders and thieves and tyrants, full of greed and sexual perversions.  Church leaders in particular both now and in the past can often be arrogant, foolish, petty, and wicked.  We’ve had some popes who were just plain nuts.   We’ve never claimed otherwise.  Go read Dante’s Inferno and count up the number of bishops and popes he consigns to various circles of hell.

And yet… there have also been saints, and kind people, and leaders today and throughout history who have put their lives on the line trying to do good, and many now and in the past who have given up all they own and are.  We still run schools and hospitals in places where no one else will; we still inspire art and music and literature.

If you expect Catholics to be something better than human, then you are creating a myth that even we would not endorse.  The same, by the way, applies to science as well as any other human group or endeavor.  Science and scientists now and throughout the ages have our own cast of fools and villains and perverts, people we have killed or seriously harmed through malice and ignorance and arrogance.   None of that means that the enterprise of science is unworthy.

I suspect you have been harmed by someone religious in your past.  If that is the case, then on behalf of the rest of us, I apologize.

In kindness,

Dr. Bob

[DrBobParticipant]

@Reg, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether you take yourself seriously.

I once had a European friend who would come over for American football games.  After a few beers he would delight in tormenting the rest of us with questions like “Why do all the big guys in armor take orders from the little guys who look like Zebras?  Do the zebra guys have guns?”

One can play the deconstruction game with anything… football, religion, science, politics, art.  All human endeavor is at some level silly and sometimes it’s worth making fun of the lot.  Most of us outgrow that sort of thing as teenagers or at least undergraduates.  We come to understand that it doesn’t really show that we’re smart, but rather that we’re shallow.

So yes, I believe in the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist.  But no, that doesn’t mean I’m a cannibal or can’t be a vegetarian.  St. John Chrysostom, St. Anthony, St. Catherine and a bunch of others were all vegetarians.

Just like the rules and nuances of football, one needs to have an “insider’s view” to meaningfully critique.  Though commenting as an outsider on surface features is occasionally humorous (“Why does every guy on the altar wear a dress?  I thought Catholics weren’t into that…”).

[DrBobParticipant]

As a fellow Christian, Michael…

WTH?

 

[DrBobParticipant]

Oh, I don’t think we’re any more schizophrenic than anyone else.

For the record, Dia de Los Muertos is not a Catholic holiday or celebration, official or otherwise, and some practices are discouraged by the Church.   It’s a cultural celebration, much like the 4th of July or Memorial Day is in the U.S.  Priests may visit cemeteries with parishioners on Memorial Day; masses with prayers for the country are held on the 4th of July, but that doesn’t make either of those holidays Catholic.   God and Catholicism often embrace people where they’re at, and at times take cultural elements and make them holy.   After all, that’s what Jesus did with the bread and wine of the Jewish seder celebration, right?

It’s not just a developing world thing by any means.  German, and German-American, and now American Catholics have Christmas trees, after all.  My church had several over the Christmas season.

Not everyone, after all, is or should be a scientist.  God has to speak to each individual in the language he/she/whatever understands, and the Church in its own imperfect, sometimes stupid, often exasperating, but very human way follows suit.  For a curmudgeonly old physicist, it may be the endless fascination of the universe and the subtle laws by which it is constructed.  Even such old physicists also still appreciate the festive hopefulness of Christmas trees or the prayerful scent of incense, though.  We humans are nothing if not complex!

As to some of the other bits:

• Every youth-serving organization, from churches to schools to universities (and scouts, and sports programs, and social service agencies, and…)  “covered up abuse”.  To tar one but not the others is a measure of your prejudice, but not of anything else.
• No, it doesn’t take me 20 hours a week to practice my religion.  Where in the world did that notion come from?
• Copernicus was a Catholic.  The suppression of Galileo was political rather than scientific, because Galileo was often a plagiarizing ass.  At the time, the actual scientific evidence was against him; it was only many decades later that instrumentation improved to the point where heliocentrism became more viable.   That work, too, was mostly done by Catholics; in fact, the Vatican still funds a reasonable astronomy / astrophysics research group.
• I can see where someone might think that the Catholic Church “represents authoritarianism”, in that we do still have a lot of trappings from when the Church was struggling with various secular kings.  “You may be a king, but Christ is the King of kings; you may have a crown, but the pope has 3 crowns!” sort of thing.   That would be a pretty ill-informed notion, however, since Catholicism has also supported union movements and democracies and even today espouses an official doctrine of exercising a preferential option for the poor.

My favorite, though, are always @Reg’s quirky absurdities.   I am amused by them (“A vegetarian cannot be a Catholic!”).  I do worry, though, about the sort of intellectual bullying that lies at the heart of such approaches.  It’s way too much like “punching down” for my tastes.   One can beat up on anyone who isn’t well-informed on any subject, whether it’s their own Catholicism or their own country’s legal structure or just basic maths and geography.  That can be humorous, but it can also be mean.

Anyways, just some random thoughts.  It is true that we Catholics have no particular problem being scientists; indeed I learned experimental method first from a nun in the 2nd grade.

Dr. Bob

[DrBobParticipant]

Why do you think there is no explanation for quantum entanglement?  Seriously, quantum theory is older than I am, and I am an increasingly Old Fart.   What you are likely trying to say is that quantum entanglement doesn’t comport with our often naive views of the universe, and you’re therefore confused.  It happens to all of us!  The universe is bloody confusing (but at least it’s not boring)!

You are mixing up some ideas about the universe being a simulation, however.  Tegmark is making a narrow and highly mathematical claim based on the quantum nature of “reality”… essentially saying that the universe is a simulation because it’s like a computer monitor with limited resolution.  That’s quite a bit different from a cognition perspective where “reality” is constructed in each individual’s mind (or is socially constructed among people).  I haven’t read Dick so can’t comment on that, and who knows what Elon Musk is talking about.

[DrBobParticipant]

Good heavens.  I seem to have replied to Page 1 and missed this was on Page 7 (and now seems to be a debate about economic systems).  My apologies.

[DrBobParticipant]

Hmmm… yes, some group seems to be feeding the YouTube algorithm to make this nitwit show up in a lot of feeds.  I found it largely incoherent.

There is something to be said for criticizing the left for not really understanding the science and focusing on stupid stuff like cow farts or grocery bags when discussing the climate emergency.   The major consumption of fossilized carbon lies elsewhere.

Here in the U.S., it’s:

• 33% Transportation (mostly automotive, but includes shipping, rail, and air).  96% of this is petroleum.
• 28% Electricity generation.  45% of this is coal; the rest natural gas.
• 18% Industry
• 13% Residential and Commercial heating/cooking/etc. 82% of this is natural gas
• 8% Industrial, non-fuel (chemical industry, lubricants, etc.)

So if we want to genuinely address the problem, those are the areas (and rough priority) that need to be tackled in the most time- and cost- efficient ways possible.  Electrifying vehicles is therefore a big, high priority, along with eliminating coal-fired power plants and decarbonizing the rest of electricity generation.   Those things are largely do-able with existing and rapidly developing technologies, and cut emissions by half.   If you care about climate and you’re not laser-focused right now on these things, then you’re doing it wrong.

I appreciate the issues with the developing world, but honestly if the developed world builds and deploys solutions the developing world will come along.  They don’t have loads of capital already invested in carbon infrastructure and businesses, and will leapfrog into the newer technology in the same way they have with cell phones.  It’s the developed world that has the legacy infrastructure and special interests that oppose decarbonization.

[DrBobParticipant]

Wow, you guys have really degenerated quite a bit, eh?  And here I thought atheists were supposed to be rational sorts.

Kudos to @robert for trying, but trying to reason with anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-public health folks who’ve been sucking down Russian propaganda is just a never-ending Gish Gallop.   One is left trying to explain all of microbiology and population statistics in order to counter ever new barrages of highly emotive BS.

I can see where the whole conspiracy theory thing about being the Special People who are “in the know” might appeal to the anti-establishment/deconstructionist thing that goes on in Modern Atheism.  But sheesh!

Dr.Bob

[DrBobParticipant]

Actually, I think what the research actually showed was that a particular type of penetrating traumatic brain injury is associated with cognitive impairment.  No surprise there.

Being cognitively impaired is then associated with higher scores for fundamentalism on some instrument for this very small sample size.  That can be spurious, it can be the result of “openness” or non-fundamentalist questions using longer sentences or more complex words that are challenging to someone with a brain injury, or it can be that people in the local area who are fundamentalist are more susceptible to certain types of penetrating brain injury (like farmers working with heavy equipment).

It’s also worth noting that Neuropsychologia has quite a low impact factor for its field.

[DrBobParticipant]

Why would anyone assume that God had a physical brain?

That just shows limited imagination!

[Author]

Posts