January 22, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:Overcoming Bias definitely wins "Best New Blog" award in my book. This post on how deeply scientists understand their craft is no exception.
But this did make me wonder:
Suppose we have an apparently competent scientist, who knows how to design an experiment on N subjects; the N subjects will receive a randomized treatment; blinded judges will classify the subject outcomes; and then we'll run the results through a computer and see if the results are significant at the 0.05 confidence level. Now this is not just a ritualized tradition. This is not a point of arbitrary etiquette like using the correct fork for salad. It is a ritualized tradition for testing hypotheses experimentally. Why should you test your hypothesis experimentally? Because you know the journal will demand so before it publishes your paper? Because you were trained to do it in college? Because everyone else says in unison that it's important to do the experiment, and they'll look at you funny if you say otherwise?
Now, I come from a family with a fairish amount of Victorian detritus floating around, and I know how the machine age resulted in the invention of a whole lot of barely marginally useful crap, just because there were a lot of newly rich people and middle class people around, and a lot of new machines that could mass produce stuff for the newly rich people. One of the reasons that there is so much hideoeusly ornate late Victorian furniture is that the Victorians invented wood-turning machines, and started putting decorative spindles on everything.
Nowhere is the effect of new riches combined with mass production more evident, however, than in the matter of silverware. The Victorians liked to show off their new wealth with massive dinner parties, one of the objects of which was to show just how much silver you had. There was a fork, knife, or spoon for everything, and special tongs for asparagus besides. Many of these things were at best marginally more useful than an ordinary fork, knife or spoon, and some of them were actively less useful. Useless silver was their version of the Quesadilla maker or the $5,000 coffee machine.
The 1920's and 1930's winnowed the list of utensils quite a bit. My Burkean streak kind of presumes that the items remaining have been somehow tested for fitness, and that a salad fork is better at grabbing your salad than a dinner fork. Reader thoughts?
(Incidentally, the cultural horror of using the wrong fork is completely ridiculous. The Victorians made it dead easy: start outward and work in, unless a specialty item like a lobster pick is served with the course. Anything located at 12 o'clock is for dessert. If you get the wrong fork under this system, they have set the table wrong, entitling you to sneer.)
Posted by Jane Galt at January 22, 2007 11:09 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksSalad forks are decidely better for salads than dinner forks. Seafood forks are really only useful for eating snails; otherwise salad forks or dinner forks work better. Soup spoons are also better for soup than teaspoons. Iced tea spoons are better for stirring the bottoms of tall glasses than are regular spoons, but a dinner knife works fine too.
I think I'll stop at this point, but I can't help but wonder what sort of riff Alton Brown would put on all this?
I'm a big fan of chopsticks. If you need other utensils the chef didn't prepare the meal sufficiently.
Alton Brown would likely laugh. A lot.
Chopsticks are my default utensil (also work well for stirring iced tea!), but I think triticale is being a bit unfair -- sometimes you need both chopsticks and knife if, f'instance, you're having grilled ribeye steaks.
Although our definitions of "sufficiently" probably differ.
Also, in Eastern cultures it's quite acceptable to hold a bowl in hand, or even (gasp, horror) drink or eat directly from the bowl; not so much in Western, so of course the tools differ.
The other thing about massive collections of silver is that they're an investment, a hedge against possible hard times.
After all, you can sell the silverware (as silverware or, in a hurry, just as raw silver), unlike (to a great extent) the mondo espresso machine or quesadilla maker. (Which can be sold, but are unlikely to hold as much value, and are much less liquid.)
Much like expensive jewelry and wedding rings and the like, for that matter.
I'm with Jane on the Burkean point, too, though I don't know that the survivors are the fittest, but at very least the set of survivors is about as useful for normal dining tasks as any set is likely to be.
The added utility of a few specialised forks and spoons isn't worth the effort (the cost, these days, being very low, since steel silverware is cheap). Perhaps part of it is just the combination of laziness in setup and use, and not having someone to do the dishes for you, and put the silverware away? Even with a dishwasher, you still have to put it away, after all...
(Chopsticks are fine, but have you ever tried to eat mashed potatoes with them? Go on.)
The world's population can be divided into three roughly equal parts based on eating utensils:
- about one-third of the world eats using cutlery;
- about one-third of the world eats using chopsticks; and
- about one-third of the world eats with their hands.
Overcoming Bias definitely wins "Best New Blog" award in my book. This post on how deeply scientists understand their craft is no exception.
First, I'd describe that post as a long-winded, popmpous statement of what's a pretty simple proposition: If scientists don't treat religion with the same rigor they'd treat results in their field, that throws anything they do into question. Any irritating newly-atheist college student could have come up with that.
Second, my impression from a decade and a half as a scientist is that it simply isn't empirically true. Maybe it should be true, but people are really good at compartmentalizing and they're as inconsistent in carrying out their flaws as they are in anything else.
(Chopsticks are fine, but have you ever tried to eat mashed potatoes with them? Go on.)
Yes :)
The garlic parmesan mashed potatoes for which I got the recipe from this site, actually.
I'll stick with Seinfeld on the chopsticks...
Jerry: I'll tell you what I like about Chinese people. They're hanging in there with the chopsticks,aren't they? You know they've seen the fork. They're staying with the sticks. I don't know how they missed it. Chinese farmer gets up, works in the field with a shovel all day. Shovel. Spoon. Come on. You're not plowing 40 acres with a couple of pool cues!
Anyone who is using chopsticks is doing so because they think it's trendy, different, or out of tradition of their culture. It's certainly not more efficient or easier to learn how to do. Most likely just some white people who think some other aspect of a culture is "neat".
"Soup spoons are also better for soup than teaspoons."
Not if you have a moustache like John Bolton's.
Anyone who is using chopsticks is doing so because they think it's trendy, different, or out of tradition of their culture.
Sure, so what? I eat European food with ridiculous collections of forks, east asian food with chopsticks, and south asian food with my right hand.
Might as well have some fun with it.
On the scientists/spirit world, this seems to be a continuing theme around here. But why exactly would we apply exactly the same epistimology to religion as to the Higgs boson?* A scientist must rule out God in the laboratory or progress becomes impossible. There is no such necessity in daily life. If Martin Gardner found a belief in God comforting and emotionally satisfying, in what way is that a problem?
* (We don't, of course. Atheistic physicists are apparently more skeptical of God than the Higgs boson based on the same (lack of) evidence)
I'll be impressed with Overcoming Bias when he starts practicing some consistency and talks about the experiments necessary to verify that scientists always produce true results, or alternatively claims that scientists should always do every experiment and never trust each other.
Because really, what model does he propose whereby scientists tend to come to the truth? Surely he's a determinist, and if so, must believe that scientists' results are the result of purely random chance.
Or, to put this more succinctly, science as an unquestionable religion isn't very impressive, especially when it's not even self-consistent.
I know people who eat with chop sticks because it slows down their eating. Instead of getting 5000 calories at the Hong Kong Super China Buffet they are only getting 4000.
When I was first learning to use chopsticks I had a very hard time of it because I was trying to reconcile the limitations of chopsticks with the very strict (Western) table manners my mom inculcated me with. Therefore, eating noodles was a nightmare until I started watching Asian people eat them all hunched over the plate, slurping them up. If they can slurp, I can slurp!
Even though I find the knife and fork to be far superior for eating, when dining in an Asian restaurant I always use chopsticks because I don't want to look like the stupid round-eye.
Good tools can be used as symbols of conspicuous consumption, but do not have to be. The drawer full of silver eating tools may just be inherited from a grandmother, while the other drawer full of Craftsman/Snap-on tools may have cost quite a bit more.
Science as religion: string theory, it cannot be tested using any tool or method we humans have at this time but it appears to be essential to some cosmology. If it cannot be tested, is it really science?
Duly noted, I'll pick a better analogy than salad forks next time.
Anyone who is using chopsticks is doing so because they think it's trendy, different, or out of tradition of their culture.
Hmmm, I use chopsticks sometimes.
1. It is not a tradition of my culture.
2. I've been eating with chopsticks from time to time for twenty years now. While quite possibly it was trendy when I started, and it may even be trendy again now, I don't think it has been trendy for twenty years non-stop. Trendy things just aren't trendy for that long. Therefore there must have been times when I wasn't eating with chopsticks for reasons of trendiness.
3. Because it's different? How is this a reason? You could equally say that people don't eat with chopsticks because chopsticks are different.
So therefore at least one person doesn't eat with chopsticks for your three reasons.
I eat with chopsticks because:
1. I enjoy displaying the dexterity required and surprising Asian restauranteers who think Westerners can't eat with chopsticks.
2. It's easier if you can eat with chopsticks in really remote places in Asia, where finding a knife and fork may be a hassle.
3. For food that has been cut up for a stirfry, or otherwise comes in small chunks anyway, I find chopsticks as efficient as eating with a knife and fork using my own very rough-grained assessment of efficiency.
That's all very well, John, but why do you think it's good to use chopsticks when eating Japanese food? And what about when eating Vietnamese?
What's wrong and great about western culture in a nut shell. We have a superior invention...the fork, and we decide to use something inferior because we like the appeal of it being "foreign" and "different". I can't imagine another culture on this earth that would start using something inferior to what they already have just because they think its neat. China has done wonderful things...unfortunately they never did a good job of exploiting them and refining it (printing press is what I'm thinking here). But I don't imagine we saw the printing press technique they used and said, "gee, that's swell, but give me a feather and bottle of ink anyway"
When I was working in Beijing, a Chinese friend made fun of me when I requested a fork at restaurants my first month or two there. Lo and behold, I'm at a TGI Friday's with him half a year later, and the kid needed to borrow chopsticks and a knife to eat his steak because he couldn't use a fork! Good old karma.
That said, I usually use the native instruments when eating non-Western food. I think it's reasonable to believe that cultures develop menus around the available utensils: you wouldn't eat a steak if no one had knives and forks, and sticky rice is really meant to be eaten with chopsticks, isn't it?
"I can't imagine another culture on this earth that would start using something inferior to what they already have just because they think its neat."
You obviously have never seen all those natives in tropical countries wearing a suit when it's 45°C and so humid that you've a good chance of drowning. Or villages where the poor houses have cool open thatched construction while the rich houses are concrete and iron ovens that are twice the temperature inside.
Changing to something inferior just because it's trendy is a near universal trait.
To say that chopsticks are inferior... well that's technically true, but when you've reached the point where you can cut steak or eat soup with them (not as hard as it sounds: there's a trick to it) then it doesn't matter. The extra degree of difficulty in using chopsticks is only a tiny fraction of the total effort required to prepare and eat a meal, it's lost in the noise.
Getting back to eating with the wrong fork. I think the POINT is that you just start on the outside and work in. It's so simple, that if you get it wrong you must be a fool.
Wow, are you really going to suggest that it's preferrable to have a grass thatch hut than a concrete house? Has cultural relativism brought us that far (low)?
As far as the suit goes, I imagine if they are wearing one, they've found out through financial experience they are far better off for doing so.
I can understand eating with chopsticks in an Asian country as a part of business so you fit in with the culture. That's good business sense, and maybe good manners too. (ie, good manners not to request someone provide you with a specific utensil that maybe unavailable) But I would say it's just like the Chinese to stick with tradition rather than what is a better product. Of course, it's just like an American to point it out... :)
But now I am confused, why exactly scientists would want to eat with disposable chopsticks, since that makes it impossible to accurately repeat the experiment, especially if compact fluorescent lights are used...
Perhaps it's a good blog in general but that particular essay was horrible. It would get ripped apart in a Philosophy 101 final.
Thank God we don't require every scientist to be so thorough before getting their PhD. They'd never get started (what proof do I have that this technique works? what proof do I have that 1 + 1 = 2?).
To add: He seems to argue that instead of standing on the shoulders of greater men, each scientist must grow to be that tall on their own.
Growing tall is only the genes for some of us.
And here I always thought the wrong-fork thing was just a running joke about dinner parties. Then again, I've never really been to a place where anyone noticed what fork I was using at any given time, so maybe I'm just ignorant of the realities of snobbish dining.
As for chopsticks, I don't think it's a matter of pretentiousness - people who have the hang of them seem to be able to use them better for certain varieties of food than a knife and fork would be for the same food, without any of the annoying utensil-switching that knife and fork sometimes require. I'm just too lazy to learn them properly - I always give it a shot at Asian restaurants, but I look even more like an ignorant white boy that way than I would if I just asked for silverware. But then, what's the point of following friends to places where they barely speak English if I'm not even going to try?
Wow, are you really going to suggest that it's preferrable to have a grass thatch hut than a concrete house? Has cultural relativism brought us that far (low)?
We build the exact same thing in an always-warm environment where the structure will not have the anemity of air conditioning. It's called a "beach house" and it works very well. We have access to better materials than stick-walls and thatch, but the principle and design are comparable.
As far as the suit goes, I imagine if they are wearing one, they've found out through financial experience they are far better off for doing so.
And so we all wear a British high-colar military tunic, with the collar folded down into a lapel, because because people who are long since dead declared it was an appropriate formal fashion accessory? Cultural relativism my backside. This is an example of something the winners were wearing, and hence others emulate it; it's not better on its own intrinsic merits.
Anyone who is using chopsticks is doing so because they think it's trendy, different, or out of tradition of their culture. It's certainly not more efficient or easier to learn how to do. Most likely just some white people who think some other aspect of a culture is "neat".
Jealous, much?
Chopsticks work extraordinarily well for the type of menu that was designed around them, and for many other non-asian foods of similar physical structure. As a bonus, they also (as others have hinted) build your hand dexterity and enforce a moderated rate of food consumption.
That said, for some foods the fork is far superior, and I really don't mind up to three if they are offered -- some salad and dinner courses don't mix so well on the pallate, and matters can be even worse for desert. Separate forks help to keep the flavors separated. But if you need more than that, chances are good you're either showing off, or overeating.
You know, I once tried that idea of eating with chopsticks to slow myself down. It worked for about a week, then I got good enough working the things to go at full speed.
But there are definitely some Asian foods where chopsticks are clearly superior to forks. Soup buns and sushi come to mind.
I agree with zoopy, that particular essay was an extremely unflattering look at the sophomoric biases of Eliezer Yudkowsky. Basically most of Eliezer's posts to Overcoming Bias are justifications for why he is far too intelligent to listen to anything said by anyone who questions any of his fundamental assumptions, and how this arrogance is not actually bias at all, but instead the surest and straightest route to the truth. . .
To save money, I got a silver set consisting only of knives and sporks.
Njorl,
Doesn't that raise a tricky point of etiquitte, namely, where to put the spork? By the knife or on the other side?
If you don't know the answer, then frankly I have no choice but to doubt your competence as an atheist.
Rob--
Because most Japanese food is designed for chopsticks (or hands), and easier for me to eat that way. Of course the Japanese are not silly enough to eat curry rice on a plate with chopsticks, though, like some Japanophile Westerners might. Those people *are* trying to overuse chopsticks.
Different tools for different jobs.
I have to agree with others who have said that this essay isn't all that good. He sets an impossible standard for calling oneself a "scientist" and completely ignores the fact that humans are, well, human.
I have been looking for a good runcible spoon, which is basically a spork with a sharpened edge... who needs more than one utensil?
Like others, I have learned to eat with chopsticks well enough that I can shovel the food in as fast as I can chew and swallow. And they store more easily and are cheaper than forks. Being able to eat well with chopsticks was also very useful for impressing the parents of my Taiwanese girlfriend in high school...
EI
"I have been looking for a good runcible spoon, which is basically a spork with a sharpened edge... who needs more than one utensil?"
You need more than one!
I can't remember where I heard it, but it went something like this:
Old Guy: You want dinner? You know what a knife and fork are for?
Kid: Yeah.
Old Guy: Well?
Kid: One's for cuttin'.
Old Guy: And?
Kid: The other's for it don't move around.
So you need two things. One for cuttin' and one for it don't move around.
I have to agree with others who have said that this essay isn't all that good. He sets an impossible standard for calling oneself a "scientist" and completely ignores the fact that humans are, well, human.
Actually, that is a misreading of his essay and misses the basic point of consistency. The standard is no more (and no less!) than that "credibility" be sourced consistently. With science it comes from highly detailed and careful investigation and usually cross-checking by others before it gradually starts to slip into "settled fact". Without the same care, one should not ascribe the same credence. That's all. One problem -- "what to believe and what would it take me to convince others?". One pretty successful procedure for acquiring reliable opinions. Forks, toasters, demons, ghosts, goblins, and gods...all should be subject to similar rules.
For what it's worth the Higgs boson bit and even string theory critiques are off target/topic. The ways in which they "count" as science may be tricky hard to understand in the simplified popularizations and certainly may be missed in the motivations of the largely mathematician-type personalities doing the research and their poor ability to rationalize their research empirically. That isn't the same as a lack of rationalization, though.
The Higgs is quite likely given what else we know in the same way that the W & Z were likely but unobserved in the early 80s, and incidentally in the same way that "radio waves" were likely given Maxwell's unification of electricity and magnetism. Higgs parameters are up in the air the way, say, the Hubble constant was for 75 years until recently. And it could also still actually be wrong (as radio, W&Z, and all that could have been, though they turned out not to be wrong again and again in many ways which is why we talk of them) and push people totally back to the drawing board.
String theory may well be an unpromising theoretical take, one of several directions, but it doesn't arrive in a vacuum. There are deep foundational reasons to suggest we need some kind of quantum account for gravitational interactions since a) things fall, and b) they should fall in a way compatible with uncertainty, but unfortunately c) they fall so slowly that it's hard to measure quantum effects. I suggest anyone interested in a simple popular account the book "Three Roads to Quantum Gravity". It's by no means pro-string theory (or "anti" for that matter, no particle physics pun intended), but it is very accessible and lays bare the true empirical contact points of things like string theory. String theorists are bound by the same rules as other scientists, ultimately. They just happen to be starting with two highly detailed mathematical models that don't play well together. so it seems to both practitioners and chroniclers to be mostly math.
Well, thirty plus years ago you couldn't count on finding a fork in Japanese restaurants. The first time I tried chopsticks, well let's say my companion was amused but didn't laugh out loud. Imagine severe cramping and involuntary twitching of the muscles in your fingers. While you are trying to put food in your mouth...
My wife says I still hold them wrong, but not bad for a gaijin.
It would be difficult to eat Ramen or Udon without them.
The standard is no more (and no less!) than that "credibility" be sourced consistently. With science it comes from highly detailed and careful investigation and usually cross-checking by others before it gradually starts to slip into "settled fact". Without the same care, one should not ascribe the same credence. That's all.
Yes, I understood that and I think the rest of Yudkowsky's (non-fork) critics did, as well. My objections were:
1) The point could have been made (as you demonstrated) with considerably less length and pomposity.
2) That "standard" is not, in my experience, a meaningful predictor of one's productivity as a scientist. I agree that it's not theoretically implausible that it might be, but it isn't.
I use chopsticks because when I was little, I thought they were rather fun; two years in Japan cemented this notion...
For the guy who wanted to prove that 1+1=2 -- that's very easy to demonstrate, with a repeatable test. Such as: choose ten observers who have been taught how to count; five will be the control group. Put the test group in rooms, separately, and place first one apple then another apple in the room. Ask how many apples there are. For the control group, do not place any apples. Repeat with multiple objects, not always of the same origin, until you have a body of evidence from which to draw your paper.
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