Presumptuousness

It frustrates me when people are presumptuous with their opinions. The particular impetus is the financial bailout.  I was having a discussion about it after the last presidential debate (during which we talked about the candidates avoiding giving direct answers to questions), and a couple of people asked me if I supported the bailout or not.  I told them that I thought some sort of bailout was probably necessary, I didn't have the information to make a good judgment on the specific bailout proposal.  They accused me of avoiding the question.

But many people have very strong opinions about the bailout.  Some of them are justified; for example, libertarians are against government intervention on principle.  But most of them are based on ideas about what the bailout does and what effect it is intended to have.  That itself is a very complicated economic topic, but people go further.  They proclaim that it won't work because of one reason or another.

None of these people are qualified to make those kinds of judgments.  It's part of that "Joe Sixpack" mentality that Sarah Palin embodies: that average people are wise and qualified to take on complex topics, by golly.  This is patently false.  National issues, especially financial ones, are incredibly intricate and take years of study to understand.  This is why there are people who are paid to figure this stuff out.

Arm-chair quarterbacking in inappropriate ways is rampant.  Government is probably number one—the idea of a representative democracy is that you pay people to study the issues and decide because the factors are far too many for the average person to reasonably understand given their free time (not to mention the average level of intelligence).  But that doesn't stop people from asserting their ill-informed opinions strongly.

Is there an answer to this?  A culture of science, perhaps.  Presumptuousness stems from a love of certainty, and science is the antidote to certainty.

The arrogance of creationism

A lot of people don't realize how arrogant creationism is. It's like this: literally tens of thousands of very smart people have dedicated their entire lives to the subject, and have collectively come to the same conclusion. A person who is almost entirely uneducated in the subject to claim that they know better is extremely insolent.

People think they're smart, that they know everything—or even that they can know everything. And because of that, they think that their opinion on some subject matter should have weight. But it doesn't. The fact is that biology is far too complex for an uneducated person to truly understand it. The body of knowledge is so vast that only people whose careers are in the field have the time and capability to absorb it all. To criticize its findings without knowing the field is preposterous.

This is part of a bigger lack of integration of science in society. Science is about the method. If you trust in the method, you should trust in the results. You don't get to pick and choose. But people think they know better than the scientists. I had a conversation with a guy about global warming. He was saying, "See, they aren't taking into account the cycle of this or that." I asked him, "So you think you're smarter than the thousands of scientists who have all come to this conclusion?" And he said, "No." "But," I responded, "if you know about this certain aspect that either none of the scientists have thought of, or none have been able to get convincing data on, then you must surely be smarter than all of them!" And that's really the problem.

Accepting science is in large part about accepting one's own limitations. The point of peer review is that one person alone is not enough to ensure quality. The most committed scientists, when someone derails their work by pointing out a flaw, will thank that person. Science is about the wisdom of collective study—that though one person can only work in a very limited scope, they can use information from others, trusting that the process made the information reliable. Science is about admitting that there are people who know more than you, to whom you could never catch up. Science is about admitting that people, but more specifically that you yourself are biased, and that the only path to truth is trusting the data.

Scientific determinism

When I get into discussions of free will and intelligence and the nature of things, I often point out that the universe is deterministic. In its strictest form, determinism says that everything that will happen is as good as happened already, that everything is perfectly predictable. However, the type of determinism that I subscribe to is looser, and based on science. It is basically this:

Everything that occurs happens in accordance with strict rules.

Now, this doesn't say anything about predictability, and indeed we shall see that the predictability is far from perfect. However, I hold that my statement is a statement of determinism: everything is determined at a certain level of abstraction - nothing occurs that does not follow very definite patterns.

I will now proceed to throw three wrenches into the works and show how my statement defeats them.

1. Measurement problems
There are certain apparently nondeterministic processes, like the double pendulum. An arbitrarily small change in the initial conditions can cause a large change in the resulting motion. However, the process is actually deterministic - it is just that, to predict the motion, infinite precision of the initial conditions is needed, and this is physically impossible. It is a limitation in the measurement, not the process - the actual system follows very strict, deterministic rules. This applies to all related chaos theory-type problems.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle may appear to come under this category as well, but that is based on a misconception.

2. Quantum probabilities
At the microscopic level, quantum mechanics is not all deterministic in the traditional sense. However, it still follows strict rules. The probabilities involved in quantum mechanics are well-defined. When you have a probability curve, it means that not all choices are equally likely. This is a form of determinism - there are clear constraints on the future. These probabilities exist for repeatable processes, so that it can be shown the probabilities exist. This is because all of quantum mechanics is based on equations that are defined as probabilities. It is our natural, innate understanding that predisposes us to expect determinism in a low-level form like classical mechanics and to think of quantum uncertainty as nondeterministic. It's not that there's only one way for a process to unfold, but there's only one way for a process to operate. Nonuniform probability distributions are a form of (weak) determinism.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle falls under this category. It defines a limit not on measurement, but on state. For example, a particle constrained in position must have a certain uncertainty in its momentum, and this gives rise to higher lowest-energy states. Virtual particles are another example.

3. Stochastic processes
Stochastic processes, such as Brownian motion, are another source of randomness. They are truly random, as they are not based solely on initial conditions. However, they still do not weaken my statement of determinism, since all stochastic processes that exist are governed by equations describing the actions of its constituents that give rise to the random output. In general, they are also constrained by probability distributions, which as stated above is a form of determinism.

So the point is that the laws of physics constrain all that occurs in well-defined ways. This is the form of weak determinism I subscribe to, and from this many of my beliefs follow.

A short note: It could be argued, perhaps, that the probability inherent in so many physical processes is where god interacts with the world, or where the mind interacts with the brain. I would give this thought more weight if the output of the processes were uniformly random (that is, all values are equally likely), instead of having a distribution.