Blessed by the Potato

A weird, weird day in the markets today, as on basically no new news there was a huge negative spike at about 2:45pm. The markets are still down considerably as I write this (a few minutes before the close), but if you check there are a lot of companies with a big spike right at that time, some down 30% or more.

My day started off weird too, as I tried to put a bid in for SPB just to have it cancelled instantly by TD; the stock went down to $8.40 at one point with no bids (and that was when I really wanted to be the only low-ball bid!) before trading was halted. When it resumed it came back to the $13 range. Again, a weird computer issue at the exchange?

Update: it looks like they are indeed blaming a computer glitch, and are reversing some trades.

Seriously, centipedes: WTF?

PS: I need to start springing for blank paper instead of doodling on the backs of other things.

PPS: Fun with Texting

If you send a text message from your cell phone to a landline (which obviously can’t properly receive text messages), instead of bouncing it, the phone company will have a robot read out your text message.

Sometimes, I like to text people’s landlines, and have the robot say “death to humans” in the middle of the message.

Back in November, Steven Novella at Neurologica blog had this clever turn of phrase: “Nice straw man. I can see Maher wants to hit as many logical fallacies in one post as possible. Maybe he thinks it’s like shooting the moon in hearts – if you get them all, you win.”

As a scientist, I recognize that debate is an important part of life. Ideas are fire-hardened when tested and defended against (constructive) criticism. Anyone can be wrong, and it’s important to arrive at the truth (even if you are wrong). After all, being wrong can cost you money, or lead to poor treatment, while the truth, as the saying goes, will set us free. You need to test your assumptions, methods, and facts to make sure that you’re not fooling yourself, or that others are not fooling you.

Indeed, this is what the whole idea of peer review is all about: if 3 experts in the field can look at your work and not find anything so wrong with it as to prevent it from being published, it’s probably worth other people’s time to read. The criticisms they do come up with can be used to improve the work.

However, while intelligent debate can be useful and productive and enlightening, there are a number of people out there that have no intention of engaging in constructive debate. They want to argue. They believe they are right and just want to bully other people into thinking they are right too. The truth matters little to them, and you cannot change their mind. They will often use the following logical fallacies to try to win* their case.

* – and note that winning is not the same as finding/proving the truth.

You’ll notice a theme in many of the logical fallacies: rather than dealing with the idea or the data directly, people will instead focus on issues surrounding the core debate, such as the person making the assertion.

ad hominem: Attacking the person delivering the point, rather than the point itself. For example, “Garth Turner is an arrogant blowhard who was totally wrong about Nortel and has been wrong about everything. Therefore the real estate market in Canada will not crash.” Well, all the rest of it may be true (and in partial defense to Garth, only by degrees), but that doesn’t dispute the fact that the housing market in Canada may very well crash. Shooting the messenger doesn’t make the message any less true. Granted, as humans we have evolved some sophisticated neural mechanisms telling us to not trust what untrustworthy people say, which is why ad hominem attacks can be effective in a war for the hearts (though not necessarily the minds) of the common people. However, saying something bad about a person expressing an idea is not countering the idea, so you have to watch for that. If the best an opponent can come up with is attacking the messenger, the idea may have merit. However:

Bias is also something to watch out for. As they say, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.” Bias, on its own, is not necessarily a reason to give an idea up for dead. However, you’ve got to be especially careful with biased sources, and perhaps demand stronger proof from them. Your scepticism should be on full tilt when reviewing data and arguments from biased sources. It will change the balance of probabilities and how you weight evidence. Contrarily, when people speak against their biases it may be a reason to perk up and pay attention, even if you don’t have much faith in the idea to begin with. Where things get particularly tricky is when pointing out biases blurs the line with ad hominem attacks. For instance, global warming sceptics like to say that atmospheric scientists are biased because their funding agencies support the notion of global warming. But that’s a little specious since there are a great many scientists out there with funding support from a wide variety of organizations: they can’t all have their livelihoods depend on toeing the line, and pretty much all of the government funding is not contingent on finding certain results.

Argument from authority is often made. Again, this works because we can’t all be experts on everything, and we’re brought up to respect the hierarchy. So when an authority figure says something is so, we may believe them — especially when that person is an expert in a field that we are not an expert in. Indeed, when we look to probabilities and weighting of evidence, we may — rightly so in most cases — rely more on evidence that comes from those with authority or respect in the related field. However, it’s not guaranteed that what an authority figure says is true; it’s not true just because an authority figure is saying it. So if that’s all you have to go on, it’s a little weak. This logical fallacy is sometimes twisted by those who are speaking against authority by turning it into an ad hominem: “of course you’d say that, it’s what the man wants you to believe. You’re not going to believe in science just because a bunch of scientists tell you to, are you? They’re really just making arguments from authority.” It’s also manipulated by using a non-relevant authority figure: cf. all of the physicians and engineers that have signed the petitions against global weirding, for instance.

We talk often about the “weight of evidence” — in an imperfect world you often only have a reasonable certainty of what the truth is, but can’t know it absolutely. Some, however, take this phrase to mean “he who shovels the most bullshit wins”. So you have to watch for irrelevancies thrown out just to make the pile look larger. This is especially useful in drawing someone down the rabbit hole: start with something true, even if it’s not relevant, and then continue with more specious arguments. Red herrings like this can also serve to distract from the real issue. One favourite distraction of global warming deniers is to throw out irrelevant facts such as “the Earth has had warming periods before” and “the amount of carbon dioxide released by humans is dwarfed by the amount released by natural processes each year.” It’s true that there have been warm periods in the distant past — considerably warmer than where we are now. There was also a period where the Earth was ruled by dinosaurs, and a time when no surface plant life existed. The Earth will be just fine whether or not global weirding occurs. The problem is that now we have humans and civilization and all our stuff, and we care very much about what happens to all of that — what happens if Hawaii is swallowed by the rising sea and we never find out what happens on Lost? Yes, life (even humans and cats) will probably survive if the current breadbaskets of the world turn to deserts and we have to start farming or hunt squirrel in what is now boreal forest… but the upheaval would be devastating. Likewise, natural processes release orders of magnitude more CO2 every year than we burn in fossil fuels, but they also reabsorb that CO2. It’s part of a carbon cycle, whereas our emissions are partly one-way. Same with personal finance: your $60/month coffee habit may be dwarfed by your $2000/mo rent cheque, but if your rent is in balance with your salary, it’s the additional small net expenditures that will lead you into debt trouble…

Changing the scale. This is a problem I’ve seen several times, but I don’t think it’s in the formal list of logical fallacies. There is noise in the real world. You can have a theory that’s great at explaining a lot of things, such as Newtonian physics. However, it has a limited scope or scale where it applies: it does a poor job when dealing with atomic-scale phenomenon, or those close to the speed of light. That doesn’t mean it isn’t correct or useful within the range of everyday experience. Likewise, people criticize global warming, exclaiming “how can we predict what will happen to the climate decades from now if we can’t even predict tomorrow’s weather!” — of course, the global warming models aren’t designed to predict weather. That’s just noise to those models. The fact that the models that are designed to predict weather on the several-day timescale aren’t good isn’t necessarily evidence that the climate models are junk. Likewise, people may question how an investor can know that over a 40-year timeframe they have a very good chance of making money if that same investor has no idea what the market will do the next day, year, or even decade. It can cut both ways: a theory or datum can be so narrow in its application, or require such astonishing rare conditions to apply that it is not really useful to the real world, and thus is not really worth arguing over. This can happen with, for example, paranormal or psychic phenomenon that proponents claim are real, but which do not operate in the presence of skeptic’s negative energy. More generally, these tend to fall under the category of:

Non-falsifiable. In science, we generally do not consider explanations which are not falsifiable. “You can’t prove that it’s not true” may be considered by schoolyard braggarts and preachers to be a reason to believe something, but a theory that can’t be tested is not much of a theory (and if it can’t be tested, how much explanatory power does it have?). Note that there is a difference between theories that are difficult to falsify (for example, to really falsify the theory of global warming we’d just continue on our current path and see what happens — not really practical) and those that cannot be falsified (the many-tentacled and all-powerful flying spaghetti monster an the ur-god Potato (from Whom we have been Blessed) does not like to be tested and alters the results of your experiments so it is impossible to prove or disprove His existence).

Straw man: a popular method of shooting down an opponents’ point is to over-simplify it, and then discredit that superficially similar, over-simplified version instead, without really getting to the core of the actual theory. This is the straw-man attack, and the etymology should be obvious. Creationists like to use this to make evolution seem absurd, by saying that evolution implies dinosaurs having chickens come out of their eggs, or a monkey giving birth to a human. The Neurologica blog entry I linked earlier includes a straw man from the anti-vaccination side.

Common sense is, unfortunately, anything but common. There are many cases where our common sense betrays us: for example, before you learn about how gravity works (and if you’re not a scientifically-inclined person, after you leave school and forget), you’d think that a feather and a bowling ball would drop at different rates if dropped on the moon, since they obviously do so in everyday experience (with air resistance). Of course, that appeal to common sense would lead you astray. Likewise, in the long comment on global weirding at Netbug’s site, I debunked the common sense appeal of the deniers that “the sun is behind it all.” After all, they say, “the sun is the engine of the system”. It’s where all the heat energy comes from, and it’s many, many times bigger than the earth. Unfortunately, the effects on our climate of changes in the energy coming from the sun are swamped by local effects due to some large amplification factors. After all, Victoria, BC, and St. John’s, NL, are at nearly the same latitude and get roughly the same amount of energy from the sun, but their climates are vastly different. The common sense notion that the engine of the system makes all the difference doesn’t make sense!

One that is not among the lists of formal logical fallacies I’ve looked up, but which I find myself beating my head against constantly, is the issue of only looking at one side of the equation. This happens a lot when you’re looking at a risk vs benefit decisions, whether it’s getting a flu shot or buying a hybrid car. Some people will focus solely on the risks or costs, but not the overall balance (or the context). This gets especially entertaining when you add unknown risks in to the mix, because people become irrational about avoiding risks that are not completely known, especially if they also don’t have control over those risks. Yet the absolute level of risk is not an issue to them, since they willingly partake in demonstrably riskier behaviours regularly (such as crossing the street, driving a car, etc.).

Democracy is a fine way to get people to come to moderately agreeable compromises when interacting with each other. It is not, however, a way to arrive at the truth, especially since common sense isn’t so common. So appeals to popularity should not sway you: just because an idea is popular does not mean it is true. Again, just because an appeal to popularity is made does not make the idea not true, either — the fact that a great many atmospheric scientists agree on the basics of global warming does not in and of itself serve as proof of global warming (but pointing out the appeal to popularity there is not a disproof, either).

Begging the question is a turn of phrase I never quite got my head around. However, I am quite familiar with tautologies and circular arguments, which is what this logical fallacy comes down to.

False Dichotomy: A rhetorical device often used is to create a false dichotomy: you’re with us or you’re against us. Except, we all know that only a Sith deals in absolutes; there are usually compromise solutions, and positions of the middle ground.

While this list is not exhaustive of the many ways humans can abuse logic and debate, I will end with my very favourite: denying the antecedent. That’s fancy-talk for getting your assumptions wrong. I love looking at rules-of-thumb, since they can be so useful for everyday life. They all tend to come from somewhere though, and they are only valid for certain sets of initial assumptions. For example, one rule of thumb is that it’s better to own your house than rent it since your landlord is making a profit off of you. And for the most part, that’s true; but it’s not always true. If the housing market gets out of control (and I have argued many times before that it has in Toronto) then your landlord, if he were to buy today, might not make a profit off of your rent. In which case, it would be better for you to rent. It’s very important to identify your assumptions, I can’t tell you how often that has been critical in science, especially when shortcuts and methods of estimating come into play (which are, after all, just fancy rules of thumb). Perhaps a more universal example would be the “rule of 72” for doubling-times. It’s a rule of thumb that works fairly well over a range of annual returns, but if you a) can’t compound those returns (e.g., if you lucked into a bond with a high coupon one year, or bought stock at a market low, but in subsequent years couldn’t reinvest for the same rate of return) or b) are outside of a certain range, then it’s going to give you poor results.

In the spirit of shooting the moon, here is a checklist of all 13 logical fallacies listed here. If someone you’re debating with gets them all, then they “win”!

• Ad hominem
• Bias
• Authority
• True but not relevant/red herring
• Non-falsifiable
• Changing the scale/lost in the noise
• Straw man
• Common sense
• One side of the equation/losing context
• Appeals to popularity
• Denying the antecedent/ignoring your assumptions
• Begging the question/tautology
• False dichotomy

I want to start by expressing just how very, very difficult it is to try to take a picture of a fine scratch on a clean, shiny, dark car. The camera keeps trying to focus on the reflected image, and even when you can get it to focus on the car, the scratch doesn’t appear nearly as noticeable as it is in real life.

In the first two months of ownership, I’ve managed to do quite a nasty bit of work on the paint of my Prius. It only took a few weeks to get some totally not my fault scratches and dings:

But then I parked under a tree that hates me, and it rained down bird shit and sap all over the hood of my car. I had heard that if you leave bird crap on too long, it can damage the paint, so I wanted to get it off right away. I grabbed a paper towel and some windshield washer fluid, and gave it a few quick wipes. That, unfortunately, was all it took to put some fine spiderweb/swirl scratches into the clear coat. What was far worse, however, was when I tried to get the tree sap off. It wouldn’t come off with washer fluid. It wouldn’t come off with hand soap. It wouldn’t even come off with dish soap, so I tried scrubbing a little bit with dish soap and paper towel, and all I managed to do was put some not-quite-so fine scratches in around the tree sap.

Ooops. These marks were quite noticeable, though that may just be because I did it and feel stupid about it, and nearly every time I walked by the car in the driveway they caught my eye. So I decided to try some Nu Finish Scratch Doctor to see if I could fix my mistake (this time, with detailing microfibre cloths — no more paper towel on the car!).

Some of these scratch removers work by having very fine grit polishers that you use to buff out the top layer of clear coat until it’s smooth and shiny again. I expected the Nu Finish to be the same, but it’s not. I don’t know how it works exactly, but my best guess is that it must somehow fill in the scratches in the clear coat because there’s no polishing needed: just wipe on, wait, and wipe off. The end result is that the scratches are still there, but they are less noticeable. Perhaps the sharp edge in the clearcoat that was catching the light has been rounded out to make it somewhat better, but the scratches are by no means gone:

After that I put on a coat of Nu Finish. There’s a lot of hate out there from serious detailers for Nu Finish, but I’ve used it for many years with decent results. Yes, a multi-stage cleaner, clay-bar, protector, shiner, sealant, and surface wax will give better results, but the one-step Nu Finish still takes over an hour of my time and I’m pretty tired of polishing at the end of that. No way I’m going to invest in the full detailing kit, which in many cases doesn’t last as long, either!

Even though everything is still in the break-in phase and I haven’t gotten around to changing my driving techniques, I’ve been getting pretty decent mileage in the Prius. Around town I’ve averaged 6 L/100 km for the most part, which doesn’t sound very impressive at first blush since the car is rated for 4, but you have to bear in mind that these have been short trips, just to the grocery store or the curling club. I know that in the Accord I was getting 10-12 L/100 km on the same sort of trips. As the weather has been warming up this has been getting better: the car won’t shut the gas engine off until after it’s fully warmed up (for emissions control reasons). In February, I’d get about halfway to the grocery store before I got to that point, now it happens in about 3 blocks. The consumption in town after that first few minutes of warming up has been fantastic: I drove out to Baskin Robbins yesterday for their cheap ice cream day (plus a Canadian Tire trip), and averaged 3.7 L/100 km for the trip (and my first block on the mileage display was again around 6, so the other three blocks were really efficient to make up for it!). The car simply loves London driving: cruising around 65 km/h and only stopping every 2 km or so for a light (and again to compare, I’d estimate that the Accord would get about 8 L/100 km in this kind of driving).

On the highway, I got 3.8 L/100 km driving up to the cottage one weekend, but otherwise have been around 4.5 L/100 km (driving about 110 km/h on the 401) which is quite respectable, and compares to about 7-7.5 L/100 km in the Accord.

Overall, my average has been 5.2 L/100 km in nearly 2000 km of driving. That’s as measured by the amount of gas I’ve put in and the number of km on the odometer. Oddly enough, the car’s computer/display is slightly more optimistic (and this phenomenon is well known on PriusChat).

Unfortunately, the paint is thin. I told you about the first scratch already. Since then there’s been a small rock chip taken out of the front quarterpanel, and then a tree dripped sap on the hood. Sadly, I made that situation worse with my own stupidity by trying to clean it with paper towel, which is apparently too abrasive for the hood, so now there are swirly/spiderweb marks in the clearcoat — and it never touched the sap! Finally some Goo Gone took the sap right off, but the sap looks to have taken some of the clear coat with it (the finish looks kind of dull on that line).

I’m going to try putting on a coat of Nu Finish on the weekend to see if that improves matters at all.

Prius cool fact for this post: the throttle behaviour on the Prius can be changed in different ways. Many cars on the road have a gas pedal that gives you ~80% of your available power within the first 25-50% of your pedal range. That is, you just lightly touch the pedal and you take off to a screaming start. This is often done to give cars a sporty feel, and in part to get around the reluctance many drivers have to put the pedal to the floor when they do actually want full acceleration, but can sometimes lead to jerky acceleration if you don’t have a deft foot (which, sadly, my mother doesn’t). The Prius’ default is to have a linear pedal: 50% depression gives you 50% of your available power. Combined with the fact that there are no gears, this can make it feel sluggish on a test drive since it doesn’t take off with light pedal pressure like you’d expect it do. However, if you put the pedal down like you mean it, the car will go. If you want, you can put the car in “power mode”, which changes the pedal behaviour to give more power in the first part of the depression, to act more like a normal car. Alternately, in “eco mode” things are reversed so that the non-linearity gives you less than 50% of your power in the first half of pedal travel. That gives you more fine control over the lower end of your throttle so you can drive more efficiently with a deft touch.

These driving modes do affect other systems (for example, eco mode will let the air conditioning run lower when the engine is off to try to save energy).