Bad Scholarship: Fatal Misconception by Matthew Connelly

Fatal Misconception by Matthew Connelly:

Page 2 gives a Malthus quote which it cites to a secondary source instead of a primary source. This is bad. The following footnote, also about Malthus, cites a primary source -- the same one that first quote came from. So why doesn't the first quote cite the primary source he had access to? That makes no sense; I guess he just doesn't consider giving primary source citations a priority to care about...

Moving on we've got something really bad, page 2:
The tone of unremitting gloom [of Malthus in his essay] never lifted. "Misery and the fear of misery", were, for Malthus, "the necessary and inevitable results of the laws of nature in the present stage of man's existence." [2]
The cite directs us to the exact paragraph in an online primary source which is very nice. It is:
I am sufficiently aware that the redundant millions which I have mentioned could never have existed. It is a perfectly just observation of Mr. Godwin, that "there is a principle in human society by which population is perpetually kept down to the level of the means of subsistence." The sole question is, what is this principle? Is it some obscure and occult cause? Is it some mysterious interference of Heaven, which at a certain period strikes the men with impotence, and the women with barrenness? Or is it a cause open to our researches, within our view; a cause which has constantly been observed to operate, though with varied force, in every state in which man has been placed? Is it not misery and the fear of misery, the necessary and inevitable results of the laws of nature in the present stage of man's existence, which human institutions, so far from aggravating, have tended considerably to mitigate, though they can never remove?
The quote text is accurate but the meaning for it which Connelly conveys is wrong. If you look at the rest of the sentence which Connelly cut off without elipsis, Malthus is saying something positive: that human institutions do not aggravate misery but considerably mitigate (significantly reduce) it.

The topic of the paragraph -- the context -- is discussing the issue of what keeps the population down. Malthus proposes misery and fear of misery as the answer to the question: what keeps the population level low?

Malthus is not saying life is miserable. This isn't gloom. He's saying that this is an issue which is "open to our researches" -- we can figure out what's going on and do something about it. Then he further says how human institions reduce misery. So this isn't gloom, Connelly has simply taken the quote out of context and misread it.

This is rather bad considering the full paragraph (even the full rest of the sentence Connelly cut off with no indication) is enough context to see that Connelly has it wrong.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (2)

Bad Scholarship: Population Control by Steven W. Mosher

Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits by Steven W. Mosher, p 32
Such a fate [population catastrophe], Malthus argued, could only be avoided by stern, even pitiless, measures. [...] [Things got better in the Industrial Revolution e.g. lower death rate.] Malthus proposed to undo all this:

[blockquote] All children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to a desired level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the deaths of grown persons.... Therefore ... we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate [I.e. reject -- this is from Mosher] specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.

[Back to Mosher writing] These were strange, almost diabolical, views for a member of the Christian clergy to hold.
This is completely wrong. Details to follow:

The source it gives is a secondary source, a 1977 book. Why would you quote a secondary source for a very well known and easily available Malthus book? The full text is even free online now. This Mosher book came out in 2008 so I'm pretty sure it was already free online then too.

Quoting secondary sources, instead of primary, is bad practice for any kind of scholarly book. You should always use primary sources when they are available. Mosher wants to be a scholar; he gives lots of sources and notes for his book; but he's doing it wrong.

If you trust secondary sources some of them are going to be wrong. Like Mosher himself if someone trusted him on Malthus. Or like Zubrin or like the secondary source Mosher quoted.

Another problem with citing a secondary source is I can't tell what edition of Malthus' book he's quoting from without getting the secondary source book. Either he's quoting from an edition other than the 6th, or some words have been changed.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPlong30.html#Bk.IV,Ch.V

The 6th edition says "All the children born" instead of "All children born" and "keep up the population to this level" instead of "keep up the population to a desired level". Other than that it's the same.

Now on to the important part: this quote is taken out of context. The chapter title is this:

"Of the Consequences of pursuing the opposite Mode."

It is the "opposite mode" that Malthus is describing in the quote. He's not advocating it. It's the opposite of what he advocates. He's saying the consequences of not doing what he advocates (which is moral restraint) will be all these horrible things.

So basically Malthus said, "Do what I suggest (moral restraint), or all this horrible stuff is going to happen." Then Mosher quotes the horrible stuff and says Malthus wanted that horrible stuff.

By moral restraint, Malthus means people shouldn't marry and have children irresponsibily. They should have enough wealth to support a child before having that child. That's his favored solution to population problems. But Mosher claims Malthus' favored solution is plague and disease, and then calls Malthus a villain. This is just plain wrong and terrible research.

Zubrin did the same thing with almost the same quote. All of Zubrin's other Malthus quotes were wrong. And it's the same for Mosher. He provides one big out of context quote then moves on, considering the issue settled. When you're going to rely on a single quote or just a couple quotes, you need to get it right! This is so bad. People want to attack "Malthusians" in their book, so they include a section on Malthus, but they don't do any reasonable research and don't understand him at all and misquote him.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (2)

Bad Scholarship: Merchants of Despair by Robert Zubrin

After reading Merchants of Despair, I decided to do some fact checking and to learn about some of the topics in more detail. I started in chapter 1 about Malthus. I found serious scholarly errors. Next I skipped to material about population control and President Lyndon Johnson. Again I found serious scholarly errors. I have not fact checked the rest of the book; I did not fact check any other part and find it was OK. Topics I already knew something about (DDT, nuclear power, Julian Simon's bet about resource prices) seemed correct when I first read them. I think the book is approximately correct in general claims and has some good philosophical ideas, but it gets a lot of details wrong. Do not trust its specifics. Educate yourself by reading further books on the topics that interest you.

Below I detail some scholarly errors I found. I only checked a small amount of material to find these. If we assume the rate of errors is representative of the rest of the book, then that's really quite bad.

Malthus

Zubrin does Malthus fast and hard, and then talks about what is "Malthusian" throughout the rest of the book, relying on the early presentation of Malthus in chapter 1. In chapter 1, he provides only two Malthus quotes. After that he moves on to quoting people he identifies as Malthusians. Both Malthus quotes are misquotes. He also provides a very clear and direct paraphrase of Malthus, which he cites to two Malthus chapters. But Zubrin's story is a fantasy not backed up by his cites. This is very poor and unacceptable level of scholarly research.

First Malthus Misquote

Malthus prescribed specific policies to keep population down by raising the death rate:

[blockquote] We are bound in justice and honour to disclaim the right of the poor to support. . . . [W]e should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.[3]

Zubrin, Robert (2012-03-20). Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (New Atlantis Books) (Kindle Locations 128-136). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.
Malthus' view as presented is despicable. But it's both misquoted and taken out of context.

The actual quote can be found here:

Principle of Population Bk.IV Ch.V

Principle of Population Bk.IV Ch.VIII

This is the same edition Zubrin cites, see here:

Principle of Population, Card Catalog Information

Why can it be found in two different chapters? Because Zubrin took two different Malthus quotes and combined them into one quote for his book. Then he cited it as if it was just one quote from book 4 chapter 5.

The first part of what Zubrin quotes, before the ellipsis, is actually from three chapters later. And it's edited. The bulk of the quote, starting at "[W]e should facilitate" is a correct quote in the literal sense but completely out of context and misleading. But besides being out of context, Zubrin doctored it by adding an initial sentence, from elsewhere in the book, which he also changed the wording of. This is an unacceptable distortion of the facts.

Besides moving a Malthus sentence out of context, Zubrin edited it. It actually reads (from 4.8):
As a previous step even to any considerable alteration in the present system, which would contract or stop the increase of the relief to be given, it appears to me that we are bound in justice and honour formally to disclaim the right of the poor to support.
Zubrin made the following changes:

He started mid-sentence while giving no indication of doing so.

He changed "we" to "We". This is especially misleading because immediately afterwards he uses "[W]e" to indicate the same type of change. Since he indicates it the other time, you would expect him to indicate it other times. This sort of inconsistency in quoting practices is extra misleading to the reader.

He deleted the word "formally".

He un-italicized the word "right".

These things make it a serious misquote. Plus he moved it three chapters earlier out of context. When he cited the quote, he did not cite the chapter this actually comes from, only the chapter the other part of his supposed-quote is from. This is very unscholarly.

But it gets worse. Did Malthus really want plague? No. His argument is structured like this: (I haven't read the whole book but I read enough to get the basic idea and see that Zubrin had this part wrong, you can get a lot of context from the two chapters prior to the one Zubrin quotes. 4.3 and 4.4)

What we need is moral restraint. Do not marry and have kids if you can't afford them. The poor laws are bad because they subsidize having kids you can't afford and they make promises they can't keep. What are the alternatives to moral restraint? Nothing good because of limited resources. Too big a population will lead to famine. Or if we don't want big nasty famines, then the logical consequence is we should keep people dying off regularly from plague, disease, dirtiness, crowding, malaria, etc... But Malthus is not advocating that, he's saying it's the consequences of lack of moral restraint. What he's advocating is moral restraint.

So Malthus was saying, "If we don't do what I'm suggesting, then what happens? All this bad stuff." And Zubrin has quoted that bad stuff out of context and said it's what Malthus was proposing. That's utterly wrong.

Second Malthus Misquote

In a letter to economist David Ricardo, Malthus laid out the basis for this policy: “The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.”[12]

Zubrin, Robert (2012-03-20). Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (New Atlantis Books) (Kindle Locations 189-191). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.
This is commonly misquoted. Maybe Zubrin didn't know any better. He cited a secondary source for this which I haven't checked. Regardless, he's guilty of bad scholarship. He should have checked a primary source whenever he could instead of relying on secondary sources. If I can find out the truth of this one just with Google, he ought to have been able to find out too using Google, book writing skills, libraries, and his swarm of interns:
I wish to acknowledge my debt to New Atlantis interns A. Barrett Bowdre, Elias Brockman, Nathaniel J. Cochran, Jonathan Coppage, Brendan Foht, and Edward A. Rubin, who put in many weeks at the Library of Congress verifying, and where necessary correcting, every fact, quote, and footnote in this book.

Zubrin, Robert (2012-03-20). Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (New Atlantis Books) (Kindle Locations 3693-3695). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.
Many weeks of work verifying "every fact, quote, and footnote"? Well, I believe they tried, but it was shoddy work that, sadly, overall, failed at its task.

This Malthus quote is edited, truncated, and taken out of context. This gives the false impression that Malthus wanted lots of people dead. "Swept from the soil" sounds like killed or at least gone. He didn't want them to live and exist anymore. Except that isn't what Malthus actually said or meant. The full quote, in context, is completely different and is part of a dry, economics discussion. It has nothing to do with genocide. But Zubrin falsely presents Malthus as genocidal using this fake quote (twice).

The full quote can easily be found with Google by any researcher (no doubt libraries have it too! e.g. the Library of Congress which Zubrin sent a bunch of interns to). I found it on these four webpages: one, two, three, four.

The most informative one actually explains the issue of this passage being misquoted:
An examination of the full text of this letter finds Malthus's intent to be far different that [sic] the one implied by the truncated wording commonly used by Mokyr and others. As a reading of the whole letter makes clear, in this correspondence Malthus was conveying his surprise that the Irish economy was not as bad as he had been led to expect. He commented earlier in the letter that "[t]hough the distress was certainly great, it was I think on the whole less than I expected." Referring particularly to the south, where he had toured through Tipperary, Waterford, Kerry, and Limerick, Malthus noted that "great marks of improvement were observable." It is in this context that Malthus undertook his observation on the Irish population that Mokyr cites. In this section of the letter, Malthus was reflection not on overpopulation and hunger, but rather on employment and wages. He noted that Ireland possesses "a population greatly in excess above the demand for labor." In this context, Malthus went on to make an economic argument concerning the distribution of labor "[t]he Land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the this population should be swept from the soil into large manufacturing and commercial Towns."[11] In examining the unedited quotation, it is clearer why Malthus emphasized the word Land in his letter, to very explicitly contrast it to the towns mentioned in the frequently elided ending phrase. The central issue here for Malthus was not the absolute scale of the population of Ireland, but rather its concentration in agriculture rather than industry. As this example well illustrates, the tendency to misread Malthus as a Malthusian is strong, especially in the wake of the Great Hunger.[12]
I'm not sure what he means about misreading "Malthus as a Malthusian". But in any case, Zubrin lowercased the word "Land" (I'm unsure what is italicized in the original which I don't have a copy of), Zubrin omitted the context, and Zubrin incorrectly presented the quote as ending on the word "soil" without revealing that Malthus wanted to sweep them off the Land into Towns for economic reasons, rather than wanting genocide as Zubrin falsely implies. Overall, it means one thing and Zubrin misquoted it to mean something else very different.

Malthus False Summary

In short, Malthus argued that we should do whatever we can to encourage disease, and we should condemn doctors who try to find cures. In addition, everything should be done to keep the wages of working people as low as possible.[4]

Zubrin, Robert (2012-03-20). Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (New Atlantis Books) (Kindle Locations 137-138). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.
And the source on that:
3 Thomas Malthus, Essay on Population, 6th ed. (London: John Murray, 1826), bk. IV, chap. 5,300–301.
4 Ibid., bk. iii, chap.7, especially 371–375; ibid., bk. iv, chap. 1.

Zubrin, Robert (2012-03-20). Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (New Atlantis Books) (Kindle Locations 3716-3718). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.
So, to see if Zubrin's summary was accurate, I read those chapters (3.7 and 4.1), in the 6th edition from 1826. They are available here:

Principle of Population Bk.III Ch.VII

Principle of Population Bk.IV Ch.I

One of the problems here is it's hard to tell which text the citation is intended to cover. At first I thought it was covering both sentences. But what Zubrin says here about disease and doctors isn't in the cited chapters (3.7 and 4.1). I've now figured out the disease sentence is referring to the previous misquote (in which Malthus suggests we "court the return of the plague"). Whereas the wages sentence, which looks like it goes with the disease sentence, is actually separate and refers to a different part of the book, found in the footnote.

So far this is confusing but not actually a very big deal (though bear in mind that his summary about Malthus wanting to "encourage disease" is just as completely false as the implications of out of context quote. This is a summary only of Zubrin's total misreading of his misquote). But it gets worse. Zubrin summarized Malthus, "In addition, everything should be done to keep the wages of working people as low as possible." That is absolutely not what Malthus says in the cited chapters (3.7 and 4.1), which I read through specifically to check for this.

Zubrin provides primary source citations to give the superficial appearance of having done proper research. But he hasn't; he is misleading his reader. Books should not be traps to fool their readers!

I'd like to show you this with quotes but how do I quote Malthus to demonstrate that his text lacks the statements Zubrin says it has? Click the links and search them yourself on words like "wages", "low" or "possible". I did that in addition to reading the full chapters. Zubrin's claim about keeping wages as low as possible is just not there; Zubrin made it up and then falsely represented it as a summary of Malthus.

The closest Malthus comes is some economic arguments about how you can't make the poor rich with minimum wage laws. These bear no resemblance to Zubrin's supposed summary, but maybe Zubrin (who does not understand economics and praised minimum wage laws twice in the book) confused Malthus discussing facts of economics for Malthus trying to keep wages for the poor low. That's my best guess at what happened but there is really no excuse.

I'll try to give you a sense of what Malthus actually said when he talked about wages in 3.7 (I don't know why 4.1 was cited, it doesn't even mention wages and is irrelevant):
What I have really proposed is a very different measure. It is the gradual and very gradual abolition of the poor-laws. And the reason why I have ventured to suggest a proposition of this kind for consideration is my firm conviction, that they have lowered very decidedly the wages of the labouring classes, and made their general condition essentially worse than it would have been if these laws had never existed. [...]

To remedy the effects of this competition from the country, the artificers and manufacturers in towns have been apt to combine, with a view to keep up the price of labour, and to prevent persons from working below a certain rate. But such combinations are not only illegal, but irrational and ineffectual; and if the supply of workmen in any particular branch of trade be such as would naturally lower wages, the keeping them up forcibly must have the effect of throwing so many out of employment, as to make the expense of their support fully equal to the gain acquired by the higher wages, and thus render these higher wages in reference to the whole body perfectly futile.

It may be distinctly stated to be an absolute impossibility that all the different classes of society should be both well paid and fully employed, if the supply of labour on the whole exceed the demand; and as the poor-laws tend in the most marked manner to make the supply of labour exceed the demand for it, their effect must be, either to lower universally all wages, or, if some are kept up artificially, to throw great numbers of workmen out of employment, and thus constantly to increase the poverty and distress of the labouring classes of society.
Malthus wants to very gradually abolish the poor-laws, which he says have lowered the wages of the labouring classes and made their lives worse. His plan is to improve the lives of the workers and raise their wages by this reform! Zubrin said pretty much the opposite, that Malthus wants wages to be low; actually Malthus wants to improve wages. More generally, Malthus wasn't trying to make the poor miserable or kill them, and actually he wanted to improve their lives (by explaining moral restraint and reforming bad laws. Also by understanding resource limit, population growth and crop yield issues, about which Malthus was mistaken but not evil).

Malthus further discusses minimum wage laws, which he says are illegal, irrational and ineffectual. He tries to explain why they won't help the labourers. He basically says that if you force wages above the market rate, this causes unemployment and doesn't provide more wealth to the poor people overall as a group.

Zubrin's scholarship here was very bad and he misstated what Malthus was saying.

To clear things up about Malthus a bit more, in general, he meant well, at least according to his book (first edition preface):
If he [the author, Malthus himself] should succeed in drawing the attention of more able men, to what he conceives to be the principal difficulty in the way to the improvement of society, and should, in consequence, see this difficulty removed, even in theory, he will gladly retract his present opinions and rejoice in a conviction of his error.

Indira Gandhi

Indira Gandhi arrived in Washington in late March and met first with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who handed her a memo requiring “a massive effort to control population growth” as a condition for food aid. Then on March 28, 1966, she met privately with the president. There is no record of their conversation, but it is evident that she capitulated completely.

Zubrin, Robert (2012-03-20). Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (New Atlantis Books) (Kindle Locations 2508-2510). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.
False. Indira Gandhi was already in favor of population control before meeting with Lyndon Johnson. She did not "capitulate". Zubrin presents a false, anti-American picture in which the US pressures Indira Gandhi into semi-betraying her country accepting unwanted population control, in return for food aid (India was having a famine at this time).

Zubrin's anti-American story is based on his imagination, not historical facts. I learned this reading books which Zubrin himself cites, so you might expect him to have read them too. They clearly tell a different story, but Zubrin changed the story to make USA look worse and bias his book to have more of a "USA and other first world countries screw over the third world" slant (which is a theme throughout, with some truth to it, but apparently Zubrin is so committed to this cause that it matters to him more than facts do.)

Here's the real story:

The Coming Population Crash And Out Planet's Surprising Future, by Fred Pearce, p 60 (this is a book Zubrin cites and therefore ought to have read):
Johnson found an unexpected ally: the newly elected Indian prime minister, Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi. As minister of information, she had run aggressive family planning propaganda for her father. Now she wanted to do more than exhort. After the two leaders met in March 1966, Johnson reported back to Congress... [that they agreed about the population control agenda]
Since I discovered Fred Pearce is himself a poor scholar, I didn't know what to believe yet. So I checked Zubrin's source for this specific passage. It's Fatal Misconception by Matthew Connelly, p 222. Connelly backs up Pearce (and then some), while contradicting Zubrin.

Connelly says nothing about Indira Gandhi capitulating. Instead he says, p 222, "Johnson did not have to insist." Why not? Because of stuff like this, "the local USAID administrator noted that, under Gandhi and Mehta's leadership, 'more punch in very recent weeks is being added tot he Central Government's family planning program.'" Indira Gandhi was already in favor of population control without Johnson having to make her capitulate. The US didn't need to pressure her into it, she already wanted to do it to her own people.

There are more details in Connelly, p 221.
[Indira Gandhi] had wanted to donate her family's ancestral home in Allahabad so that it could become an Institute for Family Planning. As information minister, she had pressed a plan to distribute hundreds of thousands of radios across rural India to transmit family planning information. And Gandhi together with Rama Rau was also among those who had been pressuring Nayar to pay women to accept IUD insertion. [70]
After being elected, "Gandhi's interest in family planning was apparent in her first meeting with Ambassador Bowles. So too was her evident need for American help." Bowles said good relationships would require three things: 1) "peace with Pakistan" 2) "genuine and positive neutrality in the Cold War" 3) Connelly quotes his own source for this one, which says, "pragmatic economic policies ... giving high priority to agriculture, education and population planning." Connelly continues:
Gandhi replied that managing relations on this basis would be any "easy matter," promising to
"press hard on such programs as family planning." On January 25, 1966, the day after she was formally sworn into office, the Ministry of Health was renamed the Ministry of Health and Family Planning, including a separate department with its own permanent secretary and minister of state. [71]
Indira Gandhi did not implement population control measures under US pressure. She didn't capitulate. She was eager to do these things and got started right away, months prior to meeting Johnson. Zubrin misleads us in a way that contradicts his own sources.

Lyndon Johnson

Zubrin tells a story in which Johnson gets in office and then population control advocates want to get him on board with population control and have to persuade him.
To get President Johnson on board, [people showed Johnson a fraudulent study]

Zubrin, Robert (2012-03-20). Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (New Atlantis Books) (Kindle Location 2281). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.
In passing the study on to Bundy, Komer commented: “Here’s a little flank attack that I think might just penetrate LBJ’s defenses . . . . It might score.”[9]

It did. Johnson bought the claptrap, including the phony mathematical results. Two months later, he declared to the United Nations that “five dollars invested in population control is worth a hundred dollars invested in economic growth.” Having succeeded in this policy coup, “Blowtorch” Komer was promoted...

Zubrin, Robert (2012-03-20). Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (New Atlantis Books) (Kindle Locations 2287-2290). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.
With the Johnson administration now backing population control, Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act in 1966...

Zubrin, Robert (2012-03-20). Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (New Atlantis Books) (Kindle Locations 2292-2293). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.
Notice the date of 1966. The thing is, Johnson was already in favor of population control before this. I learned this, again, from a book Zubrin himself cites and presumably read.

The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years by Joseph A. Califano, Jr. is a primary source book. California worked in the Johnson administration and tells about it firsthand. It says, p 154:
Previous presidents had either opposed mounting government birth-control programs, finessed the issue, or gingerly approved a little research on population control. Johnson himself had waited until he was elected in his own right to unveil his position. Then, in his January 4, 1965, State of the Union message, Johnson had said, "I will seek new ways to use our knowledge to help deal with the explosion in world population and the growing scarcity in world resources."
So who needs to trick Johnson with a "flank attack" and fraudulent study? He already agreed with their basic agenda enough to advocate it in major public speeches since since at least January 1965. Zubrin presents it as a "policy coup" to trick Johnson into believing a position he'd already been advocating. That's bad historical research, apparently including not paying much attention to Zubrin's own sources.

Conclusion

As we've seen, Zubrin has multiple misquotes and factual inaccuracies in the areas I checked. I fear the rest of the book may have a similar densities of serious errors. It strains credibility that I just happened to choose the only two poorly researched parts to investigate.



UPDATE: I sent this post to Robert Zubrin, author of Merchants of Despair. This is the full text of his reply:
So you are fine with the deaths of millions of Irish and Indians, under the
administration of British Malthusians, the murder of millions of Jews and
Slavs by German Malthusians, and the myriad ongoing worldwide crimes of
other Malthusians ever since.
I guess they were all misquoted too.
Incredible.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (16)

Bad Scholarship: The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet's Surprising Future by Fred Pearce

I found numerous serious scholarship problems in the first 3 pages.
It led him [Malthus] to oppose the English Poor Laws, which had for two hundred years offered the destitute meager protection inside workhouses.
That's not a good statement of how the English Poor Laws worked. Workhouses became a larger part of the English Poor Laws later in 1834.
Their daughter [of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft] had eloped at sixteen with the poet shelley and wrote the far-from-utopian gothic horror novel Frankenstein.
The implication here is that her book disagree with her father's, which Pearce called utopian, and Pearce offers this in the context of Godwin's life getting "off track". Godwin wrote a utopian book, his daughter wrote a far-from-utopian book, says Pearce. This picture of father and daughter in conflict is completely wrong. Well, they did have some conflict but not about this. Frankenstein is very much in line with Godwin's views and advocates a lot of his important ideas. Focussing on the setting/genre of Frankenstein is superficial and misses the point. It also ignores the mood of William Godwin's own novels, which wasn't necessarily positive. In both Caleb Williams and St. Leon, Godwin tells a pretty grim and sad story, while still advocating his principles. Frankenstein does the same and has a lot in common with her father's novels.
Just as Godwin had earlier caught the wave of revolutionary optimism [during the early days of the French Revolution], so Malthus now rode the backlash [when the French Revolution was unpopular].
This is hard to comment on because "caught the wave" is a vague metaphor. I first read it as meaning that Godwin was a revolutionary who said and believe pro-French-Revolution things and was caught up in the cause at the time. But it could merely mean that his popularity was due to other people doing that, even though he didn't. Either is false, though the second much less false. There was something that could be called French Revolutionary optimism, and while Godwin himself refused to take part, it may have helped provide a portion of Godwin's popularity. Not very much though because Godwin's book did attack the principles of the French Revolution, and he himself alienated many French Revolution supporters by disagreeing with them. (During the French Revolution, people complained that Godwin wasn't favorable enough to reason and reform. Later, after many of them had changed their minds, they complained he was too favorable to that kind of thing. Godwin's position stayed constant while other people flip-flopped. Overall Godwin -- not to mention the whole world -- would have been much better off with no French Revolution, but maybe one could credit a little of Godwin's early popularity to revolutionary optimism.)
... the world-famous Norfolk revolutionary Thomas Paine had published his liberation manifesto, The Rights of Man. Freedom was in the air.
Actually Thomas Paine was an enemy of freedom and friend of violence. His book was more of a libel against Edmund Burke (who was, somewhat alone, doing his utmost to save the world from violent destruction -- and he succeeded!) than a liberation manifesto. It was irresponsible and dangerous. Worse, the statement "Freedom was in the air" implies the French Revolution itself -- which had already started and was in the air -- has a connection to freedom (other than the destruction of freedom...)

You might call this one a political disagreement rather than a scholarship issue but I don't think it does nearly enough to openly present itself as mere political opinion. If you want to advocate your politics, go ahead, but don't disguise it as factual-historical statements.

The other things I criticize in this post are worse, but I wanted to include this one too because Pearce is basically pretending to quickly catch us up on some history, but actually he's providing a heavily biased version that is more propaganda than history. He's disguising his agenda as historical summary.

Also, as far as historical summary goes, considering the book focussed so much on attacking Burke, to pretend the topic was liberation, without mentioning Burke anywhere in the discussion, is pretty wrong. And also, the way this is presented basically puts Paine and Godwin in the same category which is totally wrong. Just to take one example, Paine was very anti-Burke and Godwin very pro-Burke.

I think when I say Burke was trying to save the world from violent destruction, everyone knows I am taking sides (I think correctly and objectively, but you may disagree). But when Pearce speaks about Paine, it looks more like mere historical description, even though it isn't.
... English journalist William Godwin, who in 1793 published a popular manifesto for an anarchist utopia called Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.

Malthus ... was having none of this libertarian babble.
Godwin was not a journalist. He was primarily an author of serious books.

Political Justice was not a manifesto. It was, as the title says, an enquiry into the truth.

Godwin was not a utopian.

Godwin was not a libertarian. Political Justice says a lot of things which libertarians would disagree with. We can see this just within what Pearce quotes Godwin saying, "Every man will seek, with ineffable ardour, the good of all." That is not a libertarian sentiment.

Godwin is misquoted with no footnote. There is no mention of edition but 1793 is mentioned so we might assume the first edition. But the quote given does not match the first or third edition (the third is the last and most common).

Pearce quotes Godwin:
"a people of men and not children. Generation will not succeed generation. There will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice, and no government. Every man will seek, with ineffable ardour, the good of all."
This is simply wrong. Godwin never wrote it. Here's what he actually wrote, first (1793) edition:

http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=236&layout=html
The men therefore who exist when the earth shall refuse itself to a more extended population, will cease to propagate, for they will no longer have any motive, either of error or duty, to induce them. In addition to this they will perhaps be immortal. The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have in a certain degree to recommence her career at the end of every thirty years. There will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice as it is called, and no government. These latter articles are at no great distance; and it is not impossible that some of the present race of men may live to see them in part accomplished. But beside this, there will be no disease, no anguish, no melancholy and no resentment. Every man will seek with ineffable ardour the good of all.
That's misquoted. Now here's the third edition from 1798 which is most common.

http://www.efm.bris.ac.uk/het/godwin/pj8.htm

(And I also checked my paper copy and another online version. No help for Pearce there.)
The men therefore whom we are supposing to exist, when the earth shall refuse itself to a more extended population, will probably cease to propagate. The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have, in a certain degree, to recommence her career every thirty years. Other improvements may be expected to keep pace with those of health and longevity. There will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice, as it is called, and no government. Beside this, there will be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment. Every man will seek, with ineffable ardour, the good of all.
That's still misquoted. Pearce just plain edited the text without any indication that he was changing it, and stuck it in quote marks anyway.

What is wrong with people to just doctor quotes and publish them as quotes? That's totally unacceptable.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Merchants of Despair

Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism is a book about antihumanism — philosophical ideas that are opposed to human life.

The most covered topic is eugenics and population control (still having a large impact today, and being funded by US tax dollars) and also how that relates to the Nazi Holocaust. It also covers attacks on life-giving technologies like nuclear power, DDT and genetically engineered crops. And it covers the attack on economic development and "fire" (combustion) from global warming rhetoric and the anti-human plans for dealing with global warming by destroying modern industrial progress.

The book is strong and shocking. The brutality of some of these things, and callous destruction of human life, can be hard to take. But it's stuff everyone should be informed about. This book is pretty easy to read. I think it's a good start on the topic. It's badly researched, but the better books are less appealing in other ways. I'd suggesting reading Merchants without trusting any specifics and then reading other books to learn more detail. Merchants covers a lot of ground quickly and enjoyably and can serve as a good introduction to make you aware of its topics. I think most of what Merchants says is approximately, mostly true, besides the Malthus stuff.

It's a philosophical book. The overall theme is the ideas of antihumanism, which it traces back to Malthus and Darwin ("social darwinism" is a mistake and not implied by the theory of evolution, but it was Charles Darwin's open intention), and then to the Nazis and the modern population control and green movements.

Population control is the new name for eugenics. It claims that we have limited resources and too many people. Does that remind you of today's green sustainability agenda? It's evil but it's popular. Actually people use their minds to create resources, and there's plenty of raw material to turn into resources. We're better off with more people, not fewer; human life is a good thing. But because of this nonsense, US money (and other) is going to sterilize vast numbers of people, often without consent and in unsanitary ways. It's especially affecting poor people and frequently targeting ethnic minorities around the globe. The extreme brutality of China's one child policy is only a small fraction of it.

Don't understand what I'm talking about? Don't worry. Read the book and it will explain it all in gory detail. It's pretty short and easy to read. The stakes are huge. Anyone who cares about humanitarian issues must inform themselves about these problems. Start here or elsewhere, but do start!

Read a sample about population control.

More information.

Buy the book.

EDIT: I have edited this post after finding multiple scholarship errors (e.g. misquotes, incorrect historical facts) in Merchants of Despair. For more information on the scholarship mistakes, see my blog post about it.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Autism and Murder

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2111728/Murder-suicide-mother-shoots-dead-autistic-son-turning-gun-herself.html
Sullivan described Mrs Hodgins [who murder-suicided her son and herself] as someone who 'adored her son. They were very close.'

She added that however parents with autistic children are 'very close to that line of going over the edge.'
So, all parents who consider their children autistic are near-murderers, and that excuses this murder?

Did she really adore her son? Were they close? Or is that a blatant lie to save face for the murderer?

In comments we see further defenses of the murderess (no need to skim, these are simply consecutive comments, from the start, skipping one snarky anti-US comment about gun control):
Society should stop forcing and guilt tripping women to keep disabled feotuses.
i have two beautiful autistic boys and it is hard looking after them and you can some times feel like you are on your own in this. i have also had to go on medication to cope and had crisis out to check on me as i have been so ill from looking after my boys and got to a point i could not cope.
Walk a mile in any mothers (or fathers) shoes before judging on a case like this.
I have an autistic child with moderate learning disabilities. She will never be independent. I've had to take anti-depressants to cope.
An absolute tragedy, I have two autistic sons - and life is not easy.
I can see why parents cant take it anymore.
Very sad. I wish she had gotten help.
the human suffering are just left to fend for themselves. So Sad.
The school which he attended should have provided the parents with a complete list of things that they can do to help ease their mind and try and gain some independence for their son. There are group homes that would have been available to him
This is not the only story like this.

http://www.10news.com/news/30820120/detail.html
San Diego police sources told 10News Corby [who murdered her son] was a stay-at-home mother pushed to the edge handling a difficult child with autism.
Pushed to the edge? Who did that? The police themselves are blaming the child for pushing the mother to murder him.

On this one we get comments like
This is a tragic loss of life. However, I must say that until you have an autistic child you have no idea of how difficult it is to raise an autistic child.
Either parent could have reached out to someone is all that I'm trying to say.
Definitely. There is no shame in asking for help when the meltdowns cause so much stress.
When my son was at his meltdown-iest as a young toddler, I would usually put him in a secure location (like the crib when he was younger, or in his bedroom with his toys) and walk away from the situation until he calmed down and we could start again. This way, I did not feel overwhelmed and he was able to learn self-soothing skills. It is such a shame that this mother apparently snapped and did something this drastic instead of just walking away for a little bit.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/may/09/mother-killed-autistic-son-trial
A mother strangled her severely autistic son with her coat belt before trying to take her own life, a court has heard.
The prior one also reportedly tried to kill herself after the murder ... but apparently didn't try very hard.

The article is filled with statements excusing, defending and justifying the murderess, like this:
"He was not toilet trained even by the age of 11 and still wore nappies."
But it's lacking condemnation of the murderess.
The court heard Freaney and her husband Richard, a 48-year-old former RAF officer, had been having marital problems. She had moved out of the family home and had been living in hotels for about a month before Glen was killed.
"before Glen was killed"? Before she murdered him! And what do marital problems have to do with anything?

You might expect marital problems to be used to demonstrate she was a bad person who mismanaged her interactions with other people, which fits the fact that she is a murderess. But instead the article uses it to defend her.

No comments on that article. So next (and FYI I'm not being selective here, I just googled and clicked a few and then started pasting awful quotes, which are extremely easy to find):

http://www.thefastertimes.com/specialneeds/2010/02/26/thoughts-on-an-autistic-child’s-murder/
In his press conference, the stunned and shattered father, estranged from his ex-wife and son for the last two years, said he had no idea what provoked his ex-wife to kill their child. “To be honest, she was the most wonderful mother I’ve ever seen.
So, mother murders child. Father defends her as a "the most wonderful mother" to the press. The mothers in that newsroom, who he is saying are worse than murderers, failed to object enough to be noticed by the article.
Her oldest friend, Dr. Marcus Conant said, “She went to clinics all over the country looking for new treatments, grasping at straws
He consider it hopeless because the kid was just too bad. Nothing was going to work. This is excusing murder.
I [as a parent of an autistic child] suspect the whole story evokes an image we recognize at least a little: a mother utterly alone with a child she can’t save.
This blames the child.
Jordan [the murderess] made one message clear: “He was in so much pain. I had to stop it.”
This blames the child too, and even claims he was murdered for his own good. She mixes up her suffering with his own. This is common in psychiatry: parents/relatives/etc are unhappy but everyone refers to this as the child/patient suffering.
Eight is the time you stop putting your energy into fighting the autism that stole your child and start learning to enjoy the child autism has left you with.
This is excusing a murderess by reinterpreting fighting with her child as "fighting the autism", for the child's benefit, even though she made it clear how much she was willing to fight her child literally to death.
This might be what Gigi Jordan never found and what parents of newly diagnosed children should remember. Number One: Don’t go it alone. ... Number Two: ... there will be happy moments.
Shouldn't number one be "don't murder anyone" and number two be "or break any other laws"? Then number three, stop hating and blaming your child, and stop fighting him.

This story has 12 comments. The first 11 are positive -- glowing. The final comment, by an autistic child, says she should have dumped him on other people to take a break instead of murdering him, which implicitly sympathizes with the murderess.

What kind of thinking is behind all this sympathy for murderers of autistic children? Perhaps it's similar to the sympathy for murderers like Jack Kevorkian who kill unwanted persons whom many people, apparently, think ought to be dead.

http://lifewithoutrad.blogspot.com/2009/01/fits.html
When I have a RAD fit I feel MAD. I fake cry and scream. WHEN MY MOM LEAVES THE ROOM I PLAY BUT I AM SCREAMING SO SHE THINKS I'M UPSET. I hurt my Mom's feelings. I want to STOP throwing fits. They are not fun anymore.
This is disturbing because it's dehumanizing a child in the child's own voice, and it's spreading very nasty claims about the child, e.g. that he is a faker who is trying to torture his parents and who hates his own actions and wants to be stopped (implicitly: by force, anything that works to make him stop).

When you think a child is intentionally torturing her mother and plotting against her, and the child hates her actions and wants to stop, but a disease makes her unable to, doesn't that paint a picture of a child who shouldn't exist in the world? Wouldn't it be a mercy if she stopped throwing her fits because she died? Who would cry over that? She'd be glad to stop -- it's what she supposedly asked for -- and her mother would be glad not to be tortured anymore. Right?

But the commenters on his blog see it differently. They don't recognize is as the same kind of thinking behind the murders of autistic children, and the sympathy those murderesses get. They, too, are the kind of people to sympathize with murdering unwanted/disliked/deviant children. So they just say things like:
Oohh! I love naps, too!
I am so impressed
And that's all the comments so I clicked on another post at random and found:

http://lifewithoutrad.blogspot.com/2009/01/being-normal-little-kid.html
I love that you are going to use a lot of tools today.
These sound like great tools to use today, J!
I play time4learning like you do and I have heard you are doing great on it keep up the good work.
I LIKE the pinnk suit idea! Almost as much as the grumpy black balloon idea.
Keep up the good work.
This is deeply wrong and disturbing. And it's directly connected to the murders of autistic children and the sympathy those murderesses get.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Message (1)

The Myth of the Closed Mind, 6

The Myth of the Closed Mind is a book by Ray Scott Percival.

The fourth and final part of the book discusses immunizing strategies (ways of changing ideas to protect them against criticism to try to avoid refutation). The book says these strategies are costly. I agree.

In general, changing ideas, by adding exceptions, or any other ways, ruins the explanation. So the ideas lose their appeal and the new ones are actually really easy to criticize for lacking a good explanation, even if they're hard to criticize empirically. David Deutsch covers this in his books, especially the dialog about induction which is chapter 7 in The Fabric of Reality.

So I consider this topic already covered and not terribly interesting because it's easy to see the answer from more general principles.

Another way to look at it is that if you can easily vary an idea in the face of criticism, then your idea is easy to vary. You may hope this will protect it against criticism, but being easy to vary is itself an important criticism (as Deutsch explains at length in The Beginning of Infinity). So this kind of thing doesn't work.

I think the problem situation which is concerned that people will try to avoid criticism is wrong. What do you care what they do? People can live badly and there is nothing you can do to stop them, other than violence or persuasion. And if they don't want to be persuaded by you, they won't be, at least not directly. They don't have to listen to you at all, they don't have to read your books or arguments, they can turn off the TV or radio when you come on, etc... People have to use some of their own initiative to learn things. It's a choice.

I think the problem situation which is overly concerned with immunizing strategies, and big general principles like "is human nature rational enough that persuasion will always work?" is too concerned with proof, with formal argument, with having some sort of rules of the game under which progress can be made that people cannot resist. It's concerned that if people have free will they may use it badly. It wants guarantees for reason, progress, etc...

But I don't mind if people can make choices, even bad ones. I'm happy to tolerate diversity. I know that will include irrationality and other mistakes, but so what? I draw the line at violence but that's it. I recognize my philosophy is fallible and conflicts need to be worked out by reason, to the extent people want to, and if they would rather do something else for now that is part of freedom. There are plenty of people interested in learning things who might want to read my writing or have discussions or improve society, and that's good enough. We don't have to make every single person pursue our vision of progress or find some way to prevent them from choosing to ignore us; we shouldn't want that, it's anti-liberty.

Let people do whatever they want, don't worry about it too much. Offer them value and some people will come around because they are motivated by their problems to seek some solutions and they find value in what you have to say. Some of them will tell their friends, persuasion can happen and can spread. We don't have to worry about people shutting out our criticism because reality provides criticism too -- problems are inevitable and motivate people to try to improve. People who don't have bad lives and in the extreme it becomes obvious their lifestyles are worse when they have a thousandth the wealth we do or that kind of thing. People notice that, even bad people, and make get jealous or angry, but the point is they don't completely ignore all their problems and do care to improve, so there's nothing to worry about. I think this sort of perspective is a better problem situation than trying to figure out what to do about people who don't want our help -- the proper answer to that is to leave them alone.

Live your own life, make it awesome, cooperate on a voluntary basis with the best people you can find, offer up value with mass appeal if you want. The book tries to solve a problem that this sort of good attitude to life doesn't have. And the more you start worrying about trying to find ways to stop people living irrationally in your view, the closer you may get to intolerance, tyranny, anti-freedom.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

The Myth of the Closed Mind, 5

The Myth of the Closed Mind is a book by Ray Scott Percival.

p 81 begins chapter 2 by saying "Darwinian evolution has made us rational." A bit later:
Cognitive psychology has shown that children already have an intuitive grasp of the world.
This is an appeal to authority. Worse, it's also unsourced. The purpose of appeals to authority is to justify ideas; they are a justificationist error. They do not serve as good criticisms or explanations, which are the tools of learning.

One of the propositions it's used to support/justify is:
[Children] also have the capability of forming hypotheses
There's no reason to appeal to authority for this claim. It can be argued for in a short, Popperian way. Children learn things. We know this because if you wait a while you'll find they know a bunch of stuff they didn't know before. And how does learning work? By conjecture and refutation. So the implication is that children can conjecture (aka form hypotheses). And, by the way, they can also think of criticisms.

This argument could be evaluated by the reader instead of just irrationally accepted (how are you supposed to correct errors in the propositions you accept without knowing the reasoning for them?). I think this argument is an important part of child psychology and more generally that using epistemology is crucial to understanding how people think, but the discussion in the book has a different approach.

p 81
If a child sees a cow give birth to a live calf, the child will be surprised if told the next one will lay eggs. Children are born with a categorizing disposition that places animals into natural exclusive classes, all the members of which are assumed to have the same characteristics. This is their intuitive natural history.
This is pretty much advocacy of induction and non-general-purpose thinking (Popperian conjecture and refutation is general purpose, this is something else). It claims children observe stuff and generalize it and then are surprised if their (inductive) generalizations turn out false. And the stuff about categorizing sounds like induction too, it doesn't say anything about conjecturing what categories will solve problems and criticizing one's categories until they are useful, or other Popperian stuff.

Next, in a book about how everyone is rational, we're told about how children will "automatically assume" things which is the epitome of irrationality (since automatic assumptions is a method of thinking that doesn't involve error correction or criticism, or even any opportunity for choice or thinking).

p 85 tells us:
This approach [denial of universality of human thinking; modular approach] fits well with what psychologists have found. Our reasoning abilities are domain-specific and have their own biases and limitations.
This contradictions Popper's general purpose explanation of how we create knowledge (by conjectures and refutations). And it's an appeal to the authority of unnamed psychologists. And it's unsourced.

I get that the modular approach is required for evolutionary psychology (because different variants of genes could make the modules be built in different ways, with different biases), but this stuff is all false.

p 85
Jerry Fodor (1983) was the first to conjecture that the mind has a collection of special-purpose machines.
I have a very hard time believing no one ever thought of that idea before 1983. No argument that he was the first is provided, apparently I'm just supposed to accept it on authority.

The book does have some arguments. Like an example: people who open their eyes "can't help but see a stable three-dimensional environment". I don't think that's actually true -- sometimes I tune out and don't look at the world around me even though my eyes are open. Further, the test subjects are all adults or at least people who know how to communicate, so assuming it applies to all people is unwarranted. Nor do I think if everyone had this experience would that prove it was built into our brains -- we could all learn this approach, much like basically all Americans learn to spell "cat" the same way. Arguing something is common is not a proof that it isn't learned. I don't see anything surprising about convergence on some truths about vision and knowledge about how to see the world being widespread in our culture and reliably passed on to children, so this example fails to impress me.

Backing up, the arguments for the modular approach do not address my arguments against it. They don't address the clash with the Popperian conjectures-and-refutations approach, nor the arguments in David Deutsch's universality arguments in his book The Beginning of Infinity. And more generally, I don't think the book shows any understanding of what it would take to imply specialized brain modules as the only explanation and rule out all alternatives, so it never provides successful arguments that can actually refute all the rival ideas. Since the arguments I find compelling are not addressed, Percival fails to persuade me. Consequently I'm skipping the rest of chapter 2.

Chapter 3 (p 169) is titled "Does Emotion Cloud Our Reason?" and will presumably argue for "no", which I agree with. This sounds more interesting.

But the first sentence of the chapter treats "irrational" as being "insulated against all criticism". But irrationally is normally (perhaps always) partial. It's not all or nothing. We can be better or worse at correcting errors (more or less rational). No one is perfect. Percival also then immediately asks if emotion-based irrationality would make ideologies spread better. This topic comes from chapter 1.

p 169 says
I grant that intense emotion engendered by an ideology may impair the appreciation of critical argument, but I insist that argument is always relevant because our emotions are under the control of our theory of the world and our place in it.
I agree. Good point.

I would add William Godwin's argument: even when people are in the most emotional, passionate situations, such as in the middle of intense sex, or whatever other scenario you want to bring up -- at a moving Church service, immensely enjoying getting married, mourning at a funeral, excited by a sports game, extremely angry, etc -- they will promptly snap out of it and put the emotion aside if presented with something more important (in their own judgment) than what they are doing. Like if a terrorist shows up and points a gun at them, they will forget about the wedding or prayer or football game or whatever, and pay attention to the threat to their life. Emotions can be abruptly dismissed when people want strongly enough to focus on something else. And actually emotional states are pretty fragile which is why people having sex will seek privacy and put lots of effort into preventing anything from "ruining the mood".

Really angry people have also been observed to abruptly change to apologetic when they are told some simple fact they hadn't known before and it puts them in the wrong. This refutes the concept that we are slaves to emotion. Certainly sometimes you correct an angry person and he stays angry, but the point is people *can* resist their anger, not that they have to. They can choose to live badly. That people do both things shows that they have the choice.

p 170-171 presents an argument by Pareto which blatantly assumes justificationism as a premise and thus goes wrong. It's really a non-sequitur. And then there is an assertion that that irrational faith can only be based on feelings, which is given as the conclusion of an argument but is actually just a premise written at the end and isn't argued for in any way previously. Percival doesn't point these things out though, I don't know why.

p 179
Psychological research, on non-human animals at least, shows that the range of conditioned responses that can be established depends on the specifies of animal.
More unsourced appeal to authority. This also assumes without argument that animals have psychology, a proposition I reject on primarily philosophical grounds (so even if I were impressed by appeals to scientific authority, that would miss the point!).

This style is common throughout, e.g. p 180
Experimental research into emotion suggests that...
Worse, we're then told, p 180
Everyone agrees that...
Then, p 180
Now research seems to show that...
There is a section heading, p 180, which reads, "Evidence From Psychology". Then we are told things like "research ... suggests that [stuff]". But evidence does not suggest anything, it is used in criticism, not to establish any positive ideas. So this is non-Popperian.

Then we get, p 180
More recently, Schachter and Singer tested the theory that both cognition and physiological arousal were necessary for a genuine experience of emotion.
This is scientism. It is the purported application of scientific method to reach conclusions outside the domain of science. Supposedly they are research scientists doing scientific tests to figure stuff out. But that isn't what's going on. The meaning and proper way to think about "genuine experience of emotion" is a philosophical issue. Genuineness is not an issue open to scientific research, except perhaps after having some philosophical ideas about it, which, depending on what they say, could then be open to some kind of scientific investigation.

You also cannot establish what is necessary for emotion from a handful of examples that you test. A single example could refute that X is necessary by observing emotion in the presence of Y but no X. But how can any finite number of tests establish that X is required for genuine emotional experience? Just because you invoke emotions 500 different ways, all with X, and you try to invoke them 50,000 other ways without X and fail every time, simply does not logically imply that X is necessary to emotion. So the project is utterly incapable of reaching the conclusion it purports to reach. And it has failed -- like bad science often does -- due to philosophical issues.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)