When dealing with the possibility of ideology influencing results one needs to be careful that one isn’t engaging in projection based on one’s own ideology influencing results. Otherwise this can turn into a fully general counter-argument.
That is true. The easy case is when clear ideological rifts can be seen even in the disputes among credentialed experts, as in economics. The much more difficult case is when there is a mainstream consensus that looks suspiciously ideological.
To use one of the possibly more amusing examples, look at Conservapedia’s labeling of the complex numbers and the axiom of choice as products of liberal ideology.
This sounds like it’s probably a hoax by hostile editors. It reminds me of the famous joke from Sokal’s hoax paper in which he described the feminist implications of the axioms of equality and choice. Come to think of it, it might even be inspired directly by Sokal’s joke.
No, the comments have been made by the project’s founder Andrew Schlafly. He’s also claimed that the Fields Medal has a liberal bias (disclaimer: that’s a link to my own blog.) Andrew also has a page labeled Counterexamples to Relativity written almost exclusively by him that claims among other things that “The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.”
I will add to help prevent mind-killing that Conservapedia is not taken seriously by much of the American right-wing, and that this sort of extreme behavior is not limited to any specific end of the political spectrum.
1) It is plausible that an element of affirmative action could have crept into the awarding of the Fields Medal. It is not unreasonable to suspect that it has. Any number of biases might creep in to the awarding of a prize, however major it is. For example, it could well be that a disproportionate number of Norwegians or Swedes have won the Nobel relative to their accomplishments, because of location.
2) That the mathematics of relativity (either special or general) “allows no exceptions” is trivial but as far as I can see true, because it is true of any mathematical system that exceptions to the system are, pretty much by definition, not included inside the system. Anything inside the system itself is not an exception to it. So, trivial. But not false. What we really need to to do is to see why the point is brought up.
Looking further into the matter of “exceptions”, to see why he brought up the true but trivial point with respect to relativity, in the main article I found this:
The mathematics of relativity assume no exceptions, yet in the time period immediately following the origin of the universe the relativity equations could not possibly have been valid.
He appears to be saying that relativity breaks down at the Big Bang. He doesn’t appear to provide any ground for making this claim, but it seems likely. Wikipedia says something similar in its article on black holes:
Theoretically, this boundary is expected to lie around the Planck mass..., where quantum effects are expected to make the theory of general relativity break down completely.
The big bang is a singularity, and in that respect is similar to black holes, so if general relativity breaks down completely in a black hole then I would imagine it would also be likely to break down completely at the Big Bang.
3) That people have often speciously used Einstein’s relativity as a metaphor to promote all sorts of relativism is well known. People have similarly speciously used QM to promote all sorts of nonsense. So that particular point is hardly controversial, I think.
I have never relied on Conservapedia and don’t intend to start whereas I use Wikipedia several times a day, but these particular attacks on the Conservapedia seem weak.
I’m not particularly inclined towards a charitable interpretation of arguments written by Andrew Schafly. In my own short time frequenting the site, I found him rendering judgments on others’ work based on the premise that
“No facts conflict with conservative ideology
therefore, anything which conflicts with conservative ideology is not a fact.”
If you try to interpret his views in the most reasonable light you can, you probably haven’t understood him. He’s a living embodiment of Poe’s Law
Did you read the page in question or the entire quote I gave? The first sentence isn’t a big problem (although I think you aren’t parsing correctly what he’s trying to say). The second sentence I quoted was “It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.”
And yes, a small handful of his 33 “counterexamples” fall into genuine issues that we don’t understand and a handful (such as #33) are standard physics puzzles. Then you have things like #9 which claims that a problem with relativity is “The action-at-a-distance by Jesus, described in John 4:46-54. ” (I suppose you could argue that this is a good thing since he’s trying to make his beliefs pay rent.) And some of them are just deeply confusing such as #14 which claims that the changing mass of the standard kilogram is somehow a problem for relativity. I don’t know what exactly he’s getting at there.
But, the overarching point I was trying to make is somewhat besides the point: The problem I was illustrating was the danger in turning claims that others are being ideological into fully general counterarguments. Given the labeling of relativity as being promoted by “liberals” and the apparent conflation with moral relativism, this seems to be a fine example.
Incidentally, note that Conservapedia’s main article on relativity points out actual examples where some on the left have actually tried to make very poor analogies between general relativity and their politics, but they don’t seem to appreciate that just because someone claims that “Theory A supports my political belief B” doesn’t mean the proper response is to attack Theory A. This article also includes the interesting line “Despite censorship of dissent about relativity, evidence contrary to the theory is discussed outside of liberal universities.” This is consistent with the project’s apparent general approach, as with much in American politics, to make absolutely everything part of the great mindkilling.
I can see that he attacks relativity, devotes a disproportionate amount of space to attacks, and relatively little to an explanation, though comparing it to his article on quantum mechanics it’s not that small—his article on QM is the equivalent of a Wikipedia stub. But it’s not obvious to me that the liberalism of some of its supporters is the actual reason for the problems he has with it.
But it’s not obvious to me that the liberalism of some of its supporters is the actual reason for the problems he has with it.
It is in general difficult to tell what the “actual” motivations are for an individual’s beliefs. Often they are complicated. Regarding math and physics there’s a general pattern that Andrew doesn’t like things that are counterintuitive. I suspect that the dislike of special and general relativity comes in part from that.
It is plausible that an element of affirmative action could have crept into the awarding of the Fields Medal. It is not unreasonable to suspect that it has. Any number of biases might creep in to the awarding of a prize, however major it is. For example, it could well be that a disproportionate number of Norwegians or Swedes have won the Nobel relative to their accomplishments, because of location.
Sure. In the case of the Nobel prizes this claim has been made before. In particular, the claim is frequently made that the Nobel Prize in literature has favored northern Europeans and has had serious political overtones. There’s a strong argument that the committee has generally been unwilling to award the prize to people with extreme right-wing politics while being fine with rewarding them to those on the extreme left. Moreover, you have cases like Eyvind Johnson who got the prize despite being on the committee itself and being not well known outside Sweden. (I’m not sure if any of his major works had even been translated into English or French when he got the prize.) And every few years there’s a minor row when someone on the lit committee decides to bash US literature in general, connecting it to broad criticism of the US and its culture (see for example this).
There’s also no question that politics has played heavy roles in the awarding of the Peace Prize.
And in the sciences there has been serious allegations of sexism in the awarding of the prizes. The best source for this as far as I’m aware is “The Madame Curie Complex” by Julie Des Jardins (unfortunately it isn’t terribly well-written, at times exaggerates accomplishments of some individuals, sees patterns where they may not exist, and suffers from other problems.)
But, saying “it isn’t unreasonable to suspect X” is different from asserting X without any evidence.
But, saying “it isn’t unreasonable to suspect X” is different from asserting X without any evidence.
True, but this appears to be from a more free-wheeling, conservative-pundit blog-like section of the ’pedia, rather than from its articles. I think that once it’s understood that this section is a highly opinionated blog, the particular assertion seems to fit comfortably. For instance, right now, one of the entries reads:
Socialist England runs the 2012 Olympics, and an early warning about possible cost overruns and/or missed construction deadlines already appears
The “Socialist England” article is from the news section, and does not have an article on Conservapedia. It links to a Reuters article. It’s also nowhere near as dire as the Conservapedia headline makes it out to be.
The relativity article, and the other main articles linked on the main page, are clearly standard articles and not intended to be viewed as simple opinion blogs. It has no attribution, and lists eighteen references in the exact same manner as a Wikipedia article.
At best it is misguided, at worst it is intended to intentionally misinform people about the theory.
At the end of the article counterexamples to evolution, an old earth, and the Bible are linked to, with exactly the same format (and worse mischaracterizations than the Relativity article).
Random articles of more innocuous subjects (like book) have exactly the same format.
Again, it’s clearly the meat of the website, as more mundane articles do no more than go out of their way to add a mention of the Bible or Jesus in some way.
It is important to note here that Andrew Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia and author of most of these articles, has a degree in electrical engineering and worked as an engineer for several years before becoming a lawyer. He would not only be capable of understanding the mathematics, he would have used concepts from the theory in his professional work. At least most engineer cranks aren’t this bad.
It is important to note here that Andrew Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia and author of most of these articles, has a degree in electrical engineering and worked as an engineer for several years before becoming a lawyer. He would not only be capable of understanding the mathematics, he would have used concepts from the theory in his professional work.
In fairness to relativity crackpots, unless things have changed since my freshman days, the way special relativity is commonly taught in introductory physics courses is practically an invitation for the students to form crackpot ideas. Instead of immediately explaining the idea of the Minkowski spacetime, which reduces the whole theory almost trivially to some basic analytic geometry and calculus and makes all those so-called “paradoxes” disappear easily in a flash of insight, physics courses often take the godawful approach of grafting a mishmash of weird “effects” (like “length contraction” and “time dilatation”) onto a Newtonian intuition and then discussing the resulting “paradoxes” one by one. This approach is clearly great for pop-science writers trying to dazzle and amaze their lay audiences, but I’m at a loss to understand why it’s foisted onto students who are supposed to learn real physics.
As far as I can tell a lot of it is a hoax, though the founder may have a hard time telling which editors are creative trolls and which editors (if any) are serious.
It is periodically asserted by people claiming to be former contributors to Conservapedia that the founder simply endorses contributors who overtly support him and rejects those who overtly challenge him.
If that were true, I’d expect that editors who are willing to craft contributions that overtly support the main themes of the site get endorsed, even if their articles are absurd to the point of self-parody.
I haven’t made a study of CP, but that sounds awfully plausible to me.
You will be unsurprised to hear that CP has played out in precisely that manner: a parodist coming in, dancing on the edges of Poe and wreaking havoc by feeding Schlafly’s biases.
JoshuaZ:
That is true. The easy case is when clear ideological rifts can be seen even in the disputes among credentialed experts, as in economics. The much more difficult case is when there is a mainstream consensus that looks suspiciously ideological.
This sounds like it’s probably a hoax by hostile editors. It reminds me of the famous joke from Sokal’s hoax paper in which he described the feminist implications of the axioms of equality and choice. Come to think of it, it might even be inspired directly by Sokal’s joke.
No, the comments have been made by the project’s founder Andrew Schlafly. He’s also claimed that the Fields Medal has a liberal bias (disclaimer: that’s a link to my own blog.) Andrew also has a page labeled Counterexamples to Relativity written almost exclusively by him that claims among other things that “The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.”
I will add to help prevent mind-killing that Conservapedia is not taken seriously by much of the American right-wing, and that this sort of extreme behavior is not limited to any specific end of the political spectrum.
1) It is plausible that an element of affirmative action could have crept into the awarding of the Fields Medal. It is not unreasonable to suspect that it has. Any number of biases might creep in to the awarding of a prize, however major it is. For example, it could well be that a disproportionate number of Norwegians or Swedes have won the Nobel relative to their accomplishments, because of location.
2) That the mathematics of relativity (either special or general) “allows no exceptions” is trivial but as far as I can see true, because it is true of any mathematical system that exceptions to the system are, pretty much by definition, not included inside the system. Anything inside the system itself is not an exception to it. So, trivial. But not false. What we really need to to do is to see why the point is brought up.
Looking further into the matter of “exceptions”, to see why he brought up the true but trivial point with respect to relativity, in the main article I found this:
He appears to be saying that relativity breaks down at the Big Bang. He doesn’t appear to provide any ground for making this claim, but it seems likely. Wikipedia says something similar in its article on black holes:
The big bang is a singularity, and in that respect is similar to black holes, so if general relativity breaks down completely in a black hole then I would imagine it would also be likely to break down completely at the Big Bang.
3) That people have often speciously used Einstein’s relativity as a metaphor to promote all sorts of relativism is well known. People have similarly speciously used QM to promote all sorts of nonsense. So that particular point is hardly controversial, I think.
I have never relied on Conservapedia and don’t intend to start whereas I use Wikipedia several times a day, but these particular attacks on the Conservapedia seem weak.
I’m not particularly inclined towards a charitable interpretation of arguments written by Andrew Schafly. In my own short time frequenting the site, I found him rendering judgments on others’ work based on the premise that
“No facts conflict with conservative ideology
therefore, anything which conflicts with conservative ideology is not a fact.”
If you try to interpret his views in the most reasonable light you can, you probably haven’t understood him. He’s a living embodiment of Poe’s Law
Did you read the page in question or the entire quote I gave? The first sentence isn’t a big problem (although I think you aren’t parsing correctly what he’s trying to say). The second sentence I quoted was “It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.”
And yes, a small handful of his 33 “counterexamples” fall into genuine issues that we don’t understand and a handful (such as #33) are standard physics puzzles. Then you have things like #9 which claims that a problem with relativity is “The action-at-a-distance by Jesus, described in John 4:46-54. ” (I suppose you could argue that this is a good thing since he’s trying to make his beliefs pay rent.) And some of them are just deeply confusing such as #14 which claims that the changing mass of the standard kilogram is somehow a problem for relativity. I don’t know what exactly he’s getting at there.
But, the overarching point I was trying to make is somewhat besides the point: The problem I was illustrating was the danger in turning claims that others are being ideological into fully general counterarguments. Given the labeling of relativity as being promoted by “liberals” and the apparent conflation with moral relativism, this seems to be a fine example.
Incidentally, note that Conservapedia’s main article on relativity points out actual examples where some on the left have actually tried to make very poor analogies between general relativity and their politics, but they don’t seem to appreciate that just because someone claims that “Theory A supports my political belief B” doesn’t mean the proper response is to attack Theory A. This article also includes the interesting line “Despite censorship of dissent about relativity, evidence contrary to the theory is discussed outside of liberal universities.” This is consistent with the project’s apparent general approach, as with much in American politics, to make absolutely everything part of the great mindkilling.
I can see that he attacks relativity, devotes a disproportionate amount of space to attacks, and relatively little to an explanation, though comparing it to his article on quantum mechanics it’s not that small—his article on QM is the equivalent of a Wikipedia stub. But it’s not obvious to me that the liberalism of some of its supporters is the actual reason for the problems he has with it.
It is in general difficult to tell what the “actual” motivations are for an individual’s beliefs. Often they are complicated. Regarding math and physics there’s a general pattern that Andrew doesn’t like things that are counterintuitive. I suspect that the dislike of special and general relativity comes in part from that.
Sure. In the case of the Nobel prizes this claim has been made before. In particular, the claim is frequently made that the Nobel Prize in literature has favored northern Europeans and has had serious political overtones. There’s a strong argument that the committee has generally been unwilling to award the prize to people with extreme right-wing politics while being fine with rewarding them to those on the extreme left. Moreover, you have cases like Eyvind Johnson who got the prize despite being on the committee itself and being not well known outside Sweden. (I’m not sure if any of his major works had even been translated into English or French when he got the prize.) And every few years there’s a minor row when someone on the lit committee decides to bash US literature in general, connecting it to broad criticism of the US and its culture (see for example this).
There’s also no question that politics has played heavy roles in the awarding of the Peace Prize.
And in the sciences there has been serious allegations of sexism in the awarding of the prizes. The best source for this as far as I’m aware is “The Madame Curie Complex” by Julie Des Jardins (unfortunately it isn’t terribly well-written, at times exaggerates accomplishments of some individuals, sees patterns where they may not exist, and suffers from other problems.)
But, saying “it isn’t unreasonable to suspect X” is different from asserting X without any evidence.
Isn’t this a bit like saying “politics has played a heavy role in electing the President of the United States?” The Peace Prize is a political award.
True, but this appears to be from a more free-wheeling, conservative-pundit blog-like section of the ’pedia, rather than from its articles. I think that once it’s understood that this section is a highly opinionated blog, the particular assertion seems to fit comfortably. For instance, right now, one of the entries reads:
Socialist England! Not enough to say “England”.
The “Socialist England” article is from the news section, and does not have an article on Conservapedia. It links to a Reuters article. It’s also nowhere near as dire as the Conservapedia headline makes it out to be.
The relativity article, and the other main articles linked on the main page, are clearly standard articles and not intended to be viewed as simple opinion blogs. It has no attribution, and lists eighteen references in the exact same manner as a Wikipedia article.
At best it is misguided, at worst it is intended to intentionally misinform people about the theory.
At the end of the article counterexamples to evolution, an old earth, and the Bible are linked to, with exactly the same format (and worse mischaracterizations than the Relativity article).
Random articles of more innocuous subjects (like book) have exactly the same format.
Again, it’s clearly the meat of the website, as more mundane articles do no more than go out of their way to add a mention of the Bible or Jesus in some way.
Ouch. I’ve never read more than one or two Conservapedia articles before, and I didn’t know it was that bad.
Conservapedia is so gibberingly insane it inspired the creation of RationalWiki. (Which has its bouts of reversed stupidity.)
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia:Conservapedian_relativity came to some prominence last year when Prof Brian Cox discovered the Conservapedia article, then getting some blogosphere interest.
It is important to note here that Andrew Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia and author of most of these articles, has a degree in electrical engineering and worked as an engineer for several years before becoming a lawyer. He would not only be capable of understanding the mathematics, he would have used concepts from the theory in his professional work. At least most engineer cranks aren’t this bad.
David_Gerard:
In fairness to relativity crackpots, unless things have changed since my freshman days, the way special relativity is commonly taught in introductory physics courses is practically an invitation for the students to form crackpot ideas. Instead of immediately explaining the idea of the Minkowski spacetime, which reduces the whole theory almost trivially to some basic analytic geometry and calculus and makes all those so-called “paradoxes” disappear easily in a flash of insight, physics courses often take the godawful approach of grafting a mishmash of weird “effects” (like “length contraction” and “time dilatation”) onto a Newtonian intuition and then discussing the resulting “paradoxes” one by one. This approach is clearly great for pop-science writers trying to dazzle and amaze their lay audiences, but I’m at a loss to understand why it’s foisted onto students who are supposed to learn real physics.
I thought Conservapedia as a whole was a hoax. Poe’s law...
As far as I can tell a lot of it is a hoax, though the founder may have a hard time telling which editors are creative trolls and which editors (if any) are serious.
It is periodically asserted by people claiming to be former contributors to Conservapedia that the founder simply endorses contributors who overtly support him and rejects those who overtly challenge him.
If that were true, I’d expect that editors who are willing to craft contributions that overtly support the main themes of the site get endorsed, even if their articles are absurd to the point of self-parody.
I haven’t made a study of CP, but that sounds awfully plausible to me.
You will be unsurprised to hear that CP has played out in precisely that manner: a parodist coming in, dancing on the edges of Poe and wreaking havoc by feeding Schlafly’s biases.
I am hereby stealing the phrase “Dancing on the edge of Poe.”
I figured I should let you know.