Argumentation in public health policy

Published by peter on 2009-08-03 in Argumentation, Consumer Behaviour, Culture, Decision theory, Game theory, Intelligence and Espionage and Science. 0 Comments

While on the subject of public health policy making under conditions of ignorance, linguist Louise Cummings has recently published an interesting article about the logical fallacies used in the UK debate about possible human variants of mad-cow disease just over a decade ago (Cummings 2009).   Two fallacies were common in the scientific and public debates of the time (italics in orginal):
An Argument from Ignorance:

FROM: There is no evidence that BSE in cattle causes CJD in humans.
CONCLUDE:  BSE in cattle does not cause CJD in humans.

An Argument from Analogy:

FROM:  BSE is similar to scrapie in certain respects.
AND: Scrapie has not transmitted to humans.
CONCLUDE:   BSE will not transmit to humans.

Cummings argues that such arguments were justified for science policy, since the two presumptive conclusions adopted acted to guide the direction and prioritisation of subsequent scientific research efforts.  These presumptive conclusions did so despite both being defeasible, and despite, in fact, both being subsequently defeated by the scientific research they invoked.   This is a very interesting viewpoint, with much to commend it as a way to construe (and to reconstrue) the dynamics of scientific epistemology using argumentation.  It would be nice to combine such an approach with Marcello Pera’s 3-person model of scientific progress (Pera 1994), the persons being:  the Investigator, the Scientific Community, and Nature.
Some might be tempted to also believe that these arguments were justified in public health policy terms – for example,  in calming a nervous public over fears regarding possible BSE in humans.   However, because British public policy makers did in fact do just this and because the presumptive conclusions were subsequently defeated (ie, shown to be false), the long-term effect has been to make the great British public extremely suspicious of any similar official pronouncements.   The rise in parents refusing the triple MMR vaccine for their children is a direct consequence of the false assurances we were given by British health ministers about the safety of eating beef.   An argumentation-based  theory of dynamic epistemology in public policy would therefore need to include some game theory.   There’s also a close connection to be made to the analysis of the effects of propaganda and counter-propaganda (as in George 1959), and of intelligence and counter-intelligence.
References:
Louise Cummings [2009]: Emerging infectious diseases: coping with uncertainty.  Argumentation, 23 (2): 171-188.
Alexander L. George [1959]: Propaganda Analysis:  A Study of Inferences Made from Nazi Propaganda in World War II.  (Evanston, IL, USA: Row, Peterson and Company).
Marcello Pera [1994]: The Discourses of Science. (Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press).

Computers in conflict

Published by peter on 2009-08-03 in AI, Argumentation, Books, Computer technology, Decision theory and Rhetoric. 0 Comments

ArgAIBook
Academic publishers Springer have just released a new book on Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence.  From the blurb:

This volume is a systematic, expansive presentation of the major achievements in the intersection between two fields of inquiry: Argumentation Theory and Artificial Intelligence. Contributions from international researchers who have helped shape this dynamic area offer a progressive development of intuitions, ideas and techniques, from philosophical backgrounds, to abstract argument systems, to computing arguments, to the appearance of applications producing innovative results. Each chapter features extensive examples to ensure that readers develop the right intuitions before they move from one topic to another.
In particular, the book exhibits an overview of key concepts in Argumentation Theory and of formal models of Argumentation in AI. After laying a strong foundation by covering the fundamentals of argumentation and formal argument modeling, the book expands its focus to more specialized topics, such as algorithmic issues, argumentation in multi-agent systems, and strategic aspects of argumentation. Finally, as a coda, the book explores some practical applications of argumentation in AI and applications of AI in argumentation.”

References:
Previous posts on argumentation can be found here.
Iyad Rahwan and Guillermo R. Simari (Editors) [2009]:  Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence.  Berlin, Germa ny Springer.

Smoking and obesity – the illogical case

Published by peter on 2009-08-02 in Culture. 0 Comments

The usually sensible James Fallows joins the debate about obesity in America with some arguments of, ahem, dubious logical value:

If you’ve been around the US as long as I have (ie, if you’re as old), you have seen very significant aspects of public-health behavior change in your own lifetime. When my dad went to medical conventions in the 1950s and 1960s, most of his fellow doctors smoked. By the time he retired in the 1990s, very few of them did. For better and worse, smoking has become a class-bound phenomenon in America: better for the people who don’t smoke any more, worse as one more disadvantage of being poorer and less educated. The difference is startling and obvious if you spend time in, let’s say, China, where many more people of all classes smoke. As individuals, Americans have the same human nature as they did 40 years ago, and the same nature as people in China. Will power, compulsions, addition-seeking instincts, etc. But their overall behavior about smoking has changed. Some individuals did not or could not change their behavior. (One of my grandmothers, who had started smoking as a flapper in the 1920s, died of a horrible case of emphysema, sneaking cigarettes on her last conscious days.) But average behavior changed dramatically. In my view, no sane person can deny that public anti-smoking campaigns have made a huge difference.

Well, certainly over the last 50 years, the proportion of Americans (as in other western nations) who smoke has declined significantly.   Some of this decline may even have been due to smokers quitting, and some of those quitters may have done so in response to government anti-smoking campaigns.  But the overwhelming reason for the decline in proportions is the death of the smokers and the failure of the newly-born to take-up smoking.   “Will power, compulsions, addition-seeking instincts, etc” (does he mean “attention-seeking instincts”?) has little to do with this. Average behaviour certainly changed, but so did the people who comprise the averaged population.  It is NOT the case that there are fewer smokers now than in 1959 in the USA simply because lots of smokers just exercised some will-power.
A second logical flaw Fallows makes is in the very analogy between smoking and obesity.  Unlike the use of nicotine, eating is necessary to live.   Unlike smoking, it is not possible to give up eating by complete withdrawal (ie, going cold-turkey).  It is even not possible to give up eating less quickly than complete withdrawal without usually suffering serious adverse health effects.   Moreover, it is not even certain that eating less food will lead a person to lose weight.   The human body is a complex adaptive system with many non-linear relationships between its components.   Decreasing food intake, for example, may lead the body to storing proportionately MORE of the nutrients in the consumed food than previously, so that total body weight does not necessarily decline in proportion to the fall in consumption.  Whatever it is, the relationship between food consumption and human body weight is certainly not linear, as the scientific evidence makes clear.
The main problem here for public health policy is that we do not yet know the ultimate causes of the obesity epidemic now seen in parts of the West.   It surely is not lack of exercise (since what little scientific evidence there is says that regular exercise seems to INCREASE weight, by stimulating appetite and adding to muscle mass); and the cause is surely not over-eating, since the epidemic has arisen faster than the major changes in people’s eating habits (20 years versus 60 years).  The ultimate cause could be a virus; it could be a consequence of particular food-additives (eg, the increased use of sucrose, or trans-fats, etc) or some particular adverse combination of these additives; or it could be a consequence of the particular combination of proteins, carbohydrates and nutrients in our diets; or indeed any number of other causes – medical, nutritional, lifestyle, and/or sociological.
The medical profession has such a shameful historical record of wrongly blaming the victim of an illness for the sickness before discovering the real cause (eg, cholera, stomach ulcers, RSI, CFS, ADD) that it ill-behooves anyone, in the current state of medical ignorance, to lecture people that the cure for their obesity is just to eat less.

Lecture styles

Published by peter on 2009-08-02 in History and Rhetoric. 0 Comments

In response to Timothy Burke’s guidance notes for academic lecturers, I recalled Henry Adams writing in 1905 of his time as a student at the University of Berlin in 1858:

 . . . but in the Civil Law he found only the lecture-system in its deadliest form as it flourished in the thirteenth century. The Professor mumbled his comments; the students made, or seemed to make, notes; they could have learned from books or discussion in a day more than they could learn from him in a month, but they must pay his fees, follow his course, and be his scholars, if they wanted a Degree.  To an American the result was worthless.

Reference:
Henry Adams [1905]: The Education of Henry Adams. (The Library of America, 1983, p. 789)

The wisdom of Merlyn

Published by peter on 2009-08-01 in Culture. 0 Comments

Merlyn to Wart in T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone:

‘The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.’

A salute to Thomas Harriott

Published by peter on 2009-07-27 in Anthropology, Heroes, History, Mathematics and Matherati. 0 Comments

Thomas Harriott (c. 1560-1621) was an English mathematician, navigator, explorer, linguist, writer, and astronomer.  As was the case at that time, he worked in various branches of physics and chemistry, and he was probably the first modern European to learn a native American language.  (As far as I have been able to discover, this language was Pamlico (Carolinian Algonquian), a member of the Eastern Algonquian sub-family, now sadly extinct.)  He was among those brave sailors and scientists who traversed the Atlantic, in at least one journey in 1585-1586, during the early days of the modern European settlement of North America.  Because of his mathematical and navigational skills, he was employed variously by Sir Walter Raleigh and by Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, both of whom were rumoured to have interests in the occult and in the hermetic sciences.   Harriott was the first person to use a symbol to represent the less-than relationship (“<“), a feat which may seem trivial, until you realize this was not something that Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Islamic, Indian, or Chinese mathematicians ever did; none of these cultures were slouches, mathematically.
Yesterday, 26 July 2009, was the 400th anniversary of Harriott’s drawing of the moon using a telescope, the first such drawing known.  In doing this, he beat Galileo Galilei by a year.   The Observer newspaper yesterday honoured him with a brief editorial.
Interestingly, Harriott was born about the same year as the poet Robert Southwell, although I don’t know if they ever met.     Southwell spent most of his teenage years and early adulthood abroad, and upon his return to England was either living in hiding or in prison.  So a meeting between the two was probably unlikely.  But they would have each known of each other.
Previous posts  in this series are here.   An index to posts about the Matherati is here.

Poem: Auf Flügeln des Gesanges

Published by peter on 2009-07-14 in Poetry. 0 Comments

Today, an orientalist poem by German romantic, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), Auf Flügeln des Gesanges, famously set to music by Felix Mendelssohn (published as Opus 34, #3, in 1834-6).

Auf Flügeln des Gesanges
Upon wings of song,
my dearest one, I’ll transport you
to the Ganges plains,
Where I know the most lovely spot.
There is a garden of red blooms,
and in the solemn moonlight,
the lotus flowers await
Their devoted little sister.
The violets giggle and cuddle,
and stare up at the stars above,
Secretly the roses recite
Their fragant fairy tales.
The pious, smart gazelles,
Leap up and listen;
and in the distance whisper
The waves of a holy stream.
There we will lie down,
under the palm-tree,
and drink of love and peace
And dream our sacred dream.

Reference:
Heinrich Heine [1827]: Buch der Lieder: Lyrisches Intermezzo (Translation by SH.)
Mendelssohn’s fascination with Oriental ideas was expressed in an 1840 letter to his brother Paul, urging him to read Friedrich Ruckert’s book of sufist and hindu translations, Erlaubiches and Beschauliches aus dem Morgenlaude (Establishments and Contemplations from the Orient, 1836-1838), which provided Mendelssohn with “delight beyond measure”.   He was also a close friend of the first Professor of Oriental Literature at the University of London (the institution later called University College, London), Friedrich August Rosen (1805 – 1837).  More on Mendelssohn’s orientalism here.
Previous poetry posts can be found here.

On knowing

Published by peter on 2009-07-13 in Argumentation, Religion and Science. 0 Comments

I have long thought the many of the members of the cult of militant anti-religionists — people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens — have been assailing a straw-man.   Their target is religious belief of a particularly narrow, fundamentalist kind, and as Terry Eagleton among others have noted, this target is a gross caricature of most of the people who practice or believe religious ideas.   The main argument of the anti-God cult is usually that religious beliefs are held without evidence.
First, as the writer Karen Armstrong discusses today, for most people, religion is about doing, not about knowing.   It’s really only philosophers and their street-brawling imitators who obsess over beliefs.   Indeed, because doubt and scepticism are integral parts of most of the world’s religions, religious practice may not necessarily start with belief, but in fact end with it:  Belief can be what comes after you practice spiritual exercises long enough, not necessarily what causes you to practice them. People do zazen or yoga not because they are already enlightened, but to achieve enlightenment.
Second, the issue of evidence is problematic in these diatribes against religion.   It is simply not the case that there is no evidence for religious or spiritual ideas, or that such ideas are only supported by the irrational or the feeble-minded.   Most people who proclaim any adherence to religious or spiritual ideas will assert they have evidence for a realm beyond or outside the material world.   This evidence is usually of the form of direct personal contact with a spirit world or with spiritual entities, as for example, in the experience of Janet Soskice or the physicist Oliver Lodge.  Anyone who has spent any extended period in Africa or in East Asia will know people — sober, rational, and intelligent — who have had, and continue to have, what they experience as direct contact and interaction with spiritual entities.
Of course, such direct, personal evidence is usually not replicable at will, nor observable to others.  That makes it invalid as the basis of science, which is a shared undertaking, but does not make it invalid as evidence for personal beliefs or actions.   Knowledge of the existence of things unseen can be obtained by merely being in the presence of such entities, as the Sufi philosopher and founder of Illuminationism, Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi (1155-1191) argued in the 12th century. Knowledge-from-being-in-the-presence-of is a valid form of knowing, just as knowledge-from-tasting is.  Our subjective personal tastes in food and drink, say, or our subjective experience of being in love, are also not observable to others, but that does not invalidate them as evidence for our beliefs or as a rational basis for our actions.    When I say I prefer coffee to tea, this is an inference based (usually) on my personal, subjective reactions to the tastes of the two different liquids.  Only I know whether this inference is based on true reactions or not; if I am a sufficiently-clever actor, no one will ever be able to conclude anything about my reactions to the respective tastes other than what I claim.
It may be that experiences understood subjectively as contact with spiritual entities can be replicated in the laboratory by stimulating particular parts of the brain, as recent experiments appear to show.  But it does not follow from such research that all religious experiences are due to similar mental stimulation, just as using implanted electrodes to create the subjective experience of the taste of coffee would not thus imply the non-existence of coffee.
In closing then, I wonder which is more rational:  to commit to certain religious beliefs (or undertake a spiritual practice) based on one’s personal subjective experiences with the divine OR to devote one’s career to studying mathematical models of additional space-time dimensions, dimensions for which  there is as yet no evidence whatsoever, not even any subjective personal experience?  If Dawkings and Hitchens were really worried about irrational beliefs, they should be attacking the practitioners of String Theory and M-Theory.
References:
Mehdi Amin Razavi [1996]: Suhrawardi and the School of Illumination.  London, UK:  Routledge.
POSTSCRIPT (2017-06-04): In a New Yorker profile of business author Clayton Christensen, he is quoted regarding his daily reading of The Book of Mormon:

One evening in October, 1975, as I sat in the chair and opened the book following my prayer, I felt a marvelous spirit come into the room and envelop my body. I had never before felt such an intense feeling of peace and love. I started to cry, and did not want to stop. I knew then, from a source of understanding more powerful than anything I had ever felt in my life, that the book I was holding in my hands was true.” (Page 90)

Larissa MacFarquhar [2012]: When Giants Fail. The New Yorker. 14 May 2012, pp.84-95.