I mean c'mon.

I don't think I know any undecided voters, but if you do you should forward this picture to them. I imagine that this kid was thinking "I was getting worried about the direction our country was headed in for a while there, but now Barack is hugging me! Everything is going to be A-OK!"

Interlude

Before I get to part two of falsification and why my dissertation depresses me, let's have a brief intermission. While we're on the topic of the UFC, there was a news story a few weeks ago about a UFC fighter named Evan Tanner who died in the desert out in Brawley, CA, where he was camping by himself. He had run out of gas for his dirtbike and was about to run out of water, so he attempted to hike to a nearby spring, however when he reached the spring he found it dry; he died of heat exhaustion soon thereafter. The temperatures were near 118, too much even for someone in as good shape as he was. He apparently had a problem with alcoholism that had interfered with his career in the UFC, but was generally regarded as an incredibly nice guy who happened to beat people up for a living.

His death struck a chord with me partly because he was a fellow reddish-haired hipster woodsman type. However, it's mostly an issue of how he died: accidentally dying of exposure in the desert is an idea that tends to ricochet about in my mind for some reason. When Joan Didion wrote about the former Episcopal Bishop of California, James Pike, the only details of his life that stuck with me were the circumstances of his death. He and his new wife drove into the desert a few months after their marriage to see what the wilderness would have been like for Jesus. Their only supplies were two bottles of Coke. Their rental car broke down miles from civilization and they split up to find help - she made it, he died in a canyon. These details stuck with me long after I forgot about the other crazy aspects of his life - his rejection of the Trinity, his expulsion from the Episcopal church for heresy (I grew up listening to liberal Episcopal priests yammer on every schoolday, with their hippy McGovernite ways; you have really want it to be accused of heresy by Episcopalians), his experience of poltergeist phenomena at the hands of his drug addict son who committed suicide, there was all kinds of crazy shit that I forgot all about because it didn't play into my deepest fears.

I've been having recurring dreams about packing up my backpack for an expedition. I don't know what this signifies, as I'm sure as shit not about to go into the desert in my waking life. I dreamt that there was a medication that would protect me from the sun and I was trying to scam some before I headed out to parts unknown. I think there is, on the horizon, an actual medication that would help with this a bit - Melanotan II is in Phase II clinical trials at the moment. It's a peptide that stimulates the production of melatonin in the skin. It turned a dog with white skin into a dog with black skin. I would love, love to have that pill. Desert peoples such as my girlfriend don't understand what it's like to be in the sun for 15 minutes and realize that you need to beat a hasty retreat or face certain bodily injury. The sun! That motherfucker is relentless. He does not care for northern Europeans. My people spent generations learning to adapt to his absence, learning to create vitamin D when it was cold and misty and drizzling, and then like a dumbass I move to Los Angeles, where my kind is not wanted.

Anyways, if there was a pill that could make me swarthy with limited side effects, I would gobble that shit like it was Oxycontin and I was a family member of someone on the Republican ticket. It sounds like Melanotan II has some interesting side effects - the stage I trials showed that men who took it got tan, sleepy, yawny, and prone to unexplained but long-lasting erections. This drug sounds like it is racist against Matthew McConaughey. Also the drug companies are excited about it because it engendered concupiscence when administered to lady mice, and the drug companies are desparate for lady Viagra.

But I digress. One interesting thing about having a blog is that you learn about the themes that dominate your mental life. Mine are apparently disaster preparedness, being a fish out of water in L.A., Episcopal boys schools, and the UFC. Who knew?

Wittgenstein's poker vs. Popper's roundhouse kick

So, a while ago I mentioned that I would write about why I'm so discouraged about neuroimaging approaches to understanding neurocognitive deficits in psychopathology. It's a fancy way of describing the use of techniques that pick up on brain activity (like electroencephalography or functional magnetic resonance imaging) to understand why people with certain psychological disorders (like schizophrenia) have problems with basic cognitive abilities like attention and memory. This is what my dissertation is on, so it's a bit unfortunate that I'm so discouraged about it. It's a complicated enough subject that I think it's going to take two posts to do it justice: part one, on falsification and why I feel it is so important, and part two, on how I feel we've moved away from falsification in my field.

To start out, it would help to back up a bit, to my senior year of high school. I went to an all-boys school that required us to take about 2 hours of sports every day. That's a crazy amount of athletics for most people, and although initially I tried to tough it out and take "hard" sports like wrestling and track, by senior year I was just sick of it. My friend Pat and I discovered that our sister school had bullshit "non-team" sports that through some oversight we were actually allowed to take. One of these "sports" was Aikido. It was me, Pat, one other guy, and 3 girls. We were taught by a lady who, in retrospect, looked a lot like Aileen Wuornos, but did not hate dudes with a murderous passion. She was, however, very enthusiastic about Aikido, and told us all sorts of stories about the charming older Japanese gentleman who had founded Aikido, whom she called Osensei. She told stories of his demonstrations of how to handle being attacked from multiple angles, which involved him throwing brawny young men about every which way all at once. She mentioned that there were whispered stories of him having such fast reactions that he was able to dodge bullets in the war.

This last struck me as bullshit, but I was intriqued by the basic moral of these stories: if you spent years and years learning Aikido, eventually you would totally be able to kick anyone's ass. It seemed a little implausible, given that Aikido training mostly consisted of having people come at you very slowly with their arm out as if they were going to chop you in the forehead. Given that all-boys schools are a fair approximation of Lord of the Flies, I had seen my fair share of fights, and I'd never seen anybody chop anybody else in the forehead. Mostly dudes punched or tackled each other (my preferred move was the headlock, left over from my wrestling days), and with a rapidity that would seem to render ineffective most of the rather complicated maneuvers that we were learning. Still, I was an adolescent, and I was so open to new ideas that I was still reading Ayn Rand, so I wasn't about to call bullshit on this nice lady. But, as soon as the season ended, so did my interest in Aikido.

Flash forward to several years later when I read an article about this new-fangled thing called the Ultimate Fighting Championship; I believe the article was in Spin (ha! the nineties!). As I recall, the article was mostly about the dominance of the Gracie family in those early years, but it mentioned that the first few years of UFC had been more of a "death-match" atmosphere, where all different styles of martial arts went head to head against each other, with the winner advancing to the next round. You had Sumo wrestlers squaring off against boxers, kung-fu masters against tae-kwon-doe champions, even a few masters of the dark arts of nin-jitsu showed up (sans throwing stars). There was even, if memory serves, a hulking young man who was a black belt in Aikido. If you don't follow the UFC, the story ends badly for most of these styles of fighting. People with backgrounds in wrestling, kick-boxing, and most importantly Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu basically embarrassed all the black belts in the other domains. The poor Aikido guy got his ass handed to him. Turns out that slow-motion forehead chops did not figure heavily in the match, much to his chagrin.

So here's my thesis: pre-UFC, martial arts were akin to religion: each sect was able to claim whatever powers it wished, to assert its superiority over all other sects, to assuage the doubts of initiates by assuring them that many more years of study would answer all their questions, to schism endlessly over matters that might seem trivial to outsiders. Eighty-year-old dudes who weighed 120 pounds were allowed to claim that they could defeat virtually anyone in hand-to-hand combat. Why? Because nobody ever called bullshit. Nobody ever said: if what you are claiming is true, then it follows that you should be able to get in the ring with that enormous 22-year-old guy over there who is not one of your students, and you should be able to beat the shit out of him. No one ever attempted to falsify these claims that were made. Post-UFC, there was suddenly a very visible way to test any claim someone wanted to make about their particular brand of martial art. If Crane-style Kung Fu is so great, then go kick that guy's ass. Suddenly everyone was trying to falsify each other's claims.

Falsification. Looking not for confirmatory evidence, but for disconfirmatory evidence. As I mentioned previously, Karl Popper famously described falsification as the cornerstone of scientific progress. If you are interested in finding out the truth about something, it's what you have to do. You can see the dangers of what happens when you look only for confirmatory evidence in pseudo-sciences like phrenology - well-intentioned scholars who swore up and down that personality characteristics like conscientiousness were actually detectable in bumps on the skull. How did they come to believe something so crazy? Well, probably they started out by feeling the skull of some really conscientious fellow, found a bumpy part, and then looked for that part to be bumpy in any new person they met who was conscientious. If someone was missing that bump, probably they weren't all that conscientious, even if they said that they were. Nobody was ever a jerk to the phrenologists, nobody ever said "If what you're claiming is true, you should be able to take 100 men, 50 of whom are generally agreed to be conscientious and 50 of whom are total slackers, and you should be able to sort them correctly into two groups by feeling their heads. If you can't do that, then you're probably full of shit."

You can also see the perils of looking only for confirmatory evidence in the history of psychology. Irving Bieber is one figure that leaps immediately to my mind: he was a psychiatrist who wrote a very influential early study of homosexuality and its origins. He performed psychoanalysis with hundreds of gay men in the 40's and 50's, seeking to piece together the common thread that could lead a man to become "a person whose heterosexual function is crippled, like the legs of a polio victim." He found that homosexual men were created when their fathers were excessively cold or distant and did not protect them from the subtle seductive or "close-binding" attempts of their mother. Now, many people reading this in 2008 will immediately be able to spot the flaws in this chain of reasoning - first of all, of course gay men in the 40's and 50's had weird relationships with their dads. That proves fuck-all. Second of all, you're only looking at gay men who are in traditional 3x/week psychoanalysis, so that's not exactly a representative sample. Those guys probably had even weirder relationships with their dads than most gay men of the era. Finally, when he happened upon gay men who claimed to have good relationships with their dads, he would question them and undermine them and work on their "defenses" until he was satisfied that in fact the relationship had been terrible all along. It never occurred to Dr. Bieber, but he would never see anything except for confirmatory evidence of his theories, because that's all he ever looked for. Even in the 70's when people started calling bullshit, he stuck to his guns and never changed his mind.

Popper famously criticized Freudian psychoanalysis because so many of Freud's claims were inherently unfalsifiable - e.g. the claim that the human sexual system is structured around a scaffolding of an inherent desire to have sex with your parents (ick, right?). If you've ever had thoughts or dreams about having sex with your parents, that's just proof of what Freud was saying. If you have never had such thoughts or dreams, that's also proof of what Freud was saying, because you suppresssed your desires because they were so powerful and dangerous. Thus, both the presence and the absence of some phenomenon are taken as proof of the theorem, and as such it cannot be falsified. Now, I know that many of my peeps who are into psychodynamic therapy will have problems with this characterization, and I admit there is room for argument. I think that some (not all) psychoanalytic ideas are entirely falsifiable (I also would be willing to bet that a even a cursory effort at experimentation would, in fact, falsify them; but that's another story).

One point that is undeniable is that the history of psychoanalysis has been riddled with all the features that we discussed earlier: endless claims of amazing powers and superiority over other strains of therapy, terrible schisms among sects over seemingly trivial issues, assurances that even basic proficiency in psychoanalysis could come only after many years of dedicated study, etc. In contrast, academic psychology has never had a permanent schism. It has had fads, it has had crazy ideas that held sway for too long, but eventually everyone gets welcomed back into the fold or else they die of old age. People seldom get too big for their britches for long before some young whippersnapper brings them down a peg or two.

So how does academic psychology do it? Do we just have really great personalities and thinking skills? Absolutely not. We do it the same way that all sciences manage it: we have an agreed-upon method of settling arguments. When people disagree, we perform experiments. If you think someone else is full of shit, you design an experiment to prove it. If somebody thinks that something is true, they design an experiment in such a way that they are essentially trying to prove themselves wrong. That way, when that one jerk stands up in the back during your presentation and tells you that you're full of shit because you didn't consider such and such hypothesis, you can say "Actually, we did consider that, and we tested it, and even so we didn't manage to prove our hypothesis wrong". All experiments are supposed to be designed to satisfy that jerk who thinks that you're actually just full of shit. When two scientists disagree on whether a theory is true, they should be able to come up with an experiment that they can both agree beforehand is a good way of settling their disagreement. Just as two martial artists can agree that getting into a cage and trying to kill each other is probably a good way of figuring out whose method is better for trying to kill people.

For instance, if I was talking to Dr. Bieber back in the day, I'd present my concerns with the evidence that he had gathered for his theory. Then I'd say, well, if having a weird relationship with your dad makes you gay, then maybe we can find a group of people who are more likely to have weird relationships with their dads for unrelated reasons and see if more of them are gay. Like, we could look up men who were raised by their stepdads and not their real dads. And we could limit our sample to men whose stepdads were convicted of violent offenses prior to their birth, just to get a nastier group of stepdads. And we'll compare them to men who grew up with their real dads, dads who haven't ever been convicted of a crime. We'll double check to make sure our two groups actually differ in terms of how weird their relationship with their dad is, and then if you're right, there should be a few more gay dudes in the stepdad group. If there's no difference between the two groups, then you have to agree to stop with this stupid theory.

Does it actually work? Not always, some guys are just stubborn as hell, but eventually those guys die of old age and everyone else can see you did everything you could to take their criticism seriously. The ideas that stand up despite all your best efforts to falsify them are the ones that get transmitted to the next generation of scientists.

Quick political note

Okay, so I can define several different versions of the Bush doctrine, versions that would satisfy the entire political spectrum; fellows from the American Enterprise Foundation as well as the Center for American Progress would harrumph in agreement. Can I be vice president now? People who read the paper on a regular basis are asking themselves this question across America today. But I'm not going to get mad about the fact that I have at least 30 or 40 people who are more qualified to be vice president than Sarah Palin in my cell phone. Or the fact that I have at least 2 women who are way more qualified to be vice president than Sarah Palin in my immediate family. My mother graduated from Radcliffe, was second in her class at Columbia Law when there were like 3 women in the entire class, argued in front of the Supreme Court for the Solicitor General's office (once while pregnant with me!), fought crime and corruption for the Antitrust division of the Justice Department for 30 years, and she reads the fucking paper and knows what the Bush Doctrine is. But I'm not mad about that today. Because deep down, I'm just mad that Sarah Palin is winning. No, today I'm actually, seriously mad about the man behind the curtain.

Because if Sarah Palin is the A-Rod of this campaign (hated by those who hate her stupid fucking team because she is so good and she's going to make that stupid fucking team win another fucking time which is so fucking unfair), then Steve Schmidt is the Bill Belichick: hated because he is such an evil human being with a heart that is a small lump of rusty iron and with a brain that is a seething, wriggling mass of trickery and deception.

Just watch this ad, especially around 0:18, and tell me that they're not subtly accusing Barack Obama of whistling at a white woman.

Epistemology & Eschatology

So, Large Hadron Collider, right? I've been worrying a little bit about this thing for like a year now; Adrian procrastinated until the last minute and did all her worrying about it last night in one big dose. Little did we realize that apparently we have to wait until "late fall" for the first meaningful collisions to happen, which means a few months of endlessly pressing refresh on hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com. I'm not entirely clear on this, but it kind of sounds like the collisions that scientists say are definitely not going to create any black holes or strangelets, these totally-safe collisions might happen at any point during that "late fall, early-winterish" period. That's the type of scientific precision usually reserved for telling your advisor when that dissertation is going to get written. I have some more problems with the vagueness of the timing on this apocalypse, but I'll get to those later. Just in general, having scientists promise you that they thought really hard about it and they decided that their new Definitely-Not-A-Doomsday-Machine will absolutely, positively not destroy all human life is a bit like having your kid's school bus driver assure you that he's spent a lot of time thinking about it and he's definitely 100% positive that he's not going to rape your kids.

So like I said I've been worrying about this for a while now. I've come to some sort of peace with it, but my route to equanimity was a bit roundabout and I suspect that walking you through it will make you more nervous than you already are, if you're prone to that sort of thing. So you might want to skip this post.

So when I first knew that there were any "end of existence" concerns associated with the LHC, I read that a variety of theorists with very different perspectives and opinions had all looked at the issue and concluded that there was no reason to be concerned. But hold on, I said, think about the number of great scientific experiments, particularly in physics, where the results weren't in any way consistent with any prevalent theories of the way the world worked. Like not even that the results ran counter to existing theories, like the results were so far out there and unexpected that existing theories were left holding their dicks and scratching their heads. A paradigm shift, you might say, if you were a Kuhnian (which I'm definitely not, and even Kuhn himself may not have been). Leaving aside debates about how science progresses: just in general, how can we accurately measure the probability of unforeseen consequences? As Don Rumsfeld said, there are known unknowns, and then there are unknown unknowns. So this line of thinking got me a little worried.

So let's posit for a moment that the end of the world might be nigh. When Adrian got all worked up last night, I tried to calm her down by explaining my method for calming myself down when I'm on airplanes that are going through turbulence. I've found that reminding myself that turbulence almost never leads to planes having critical failures doesn't do much to relax me (again, your kid's bus driver "almost never" rapes children). Instead, I pretend that I am going to die, and I try to review my life so far to see if I'm okay with this fact. Did I accomplish as much as I could given my lack of intestinal fortitude? Did I treat people reasonably well given my general lack of moral fiber? The conclusions I draw are rarely very comforting in the existential sense, but for some reason I get very calm about the turbulence. So how did this self-soothing method go over with Adrian? Let's just say she found it wanting.

Why did she find this method so inadequate to the task at hand? It's worth considering the ideas of another Jewish apocalypticist in answering this. I'm talking, of course, about my main man: Jesus H. Christ. Credit for highlighting the fact that Jesus was neither a free-love hippy nor a free-market capitalist but instead a wild-eyed predictor of imminent doom goes to another all-around good guy, Albert Schweitzer (speaking of good guy, isn't there a line from some movie where the heroine is a little drunk and she's saying that all men are putzes, except maybe that Dr. Schweitzer, he seems nice? What movie was that?).

The idea here is that so much of what Jesus preached to his followers could actually be demonstrated to pretty wildly violate the categorical imperative. That is, if everyone started doing what Jesus told his followers to do - abandon their wives and kids, stop working, renounce all property, and travel the land spreading the gospel to others, etc., the world would pretty quickly fall apart and everyone would be utterly miserable. The deep dark secret of Christianity is that from a societal perspective, Jesus' actual commands are not exactly models of sustainability, and they sure as shit are not conducive to civic stability or "family values". Along with a lot of textual evidence that I'm not qualified to discuss, basically Schweitzer (and more recently Bart Ehrman) make a pretty convincing case that Jesus was actually, literally predicting that the world would end in his lifetime. Turns out he was wrong, but it was a ballsy call to make.

But given that his premise turned out to be wildly off-base, how did this crazy Jew's conclusions catch on like such wildfire? To bring it back to grad school, he (perhaps unwittingly) did a little trick that any advisor knows can work miracles in clarifying the minds of his students: he gave them a fake deadline. When someone tells you that your dissertation has to be done in 3 months, suddenly the scales fall from your eyes. You see what is truly important, and what is mere distraction. Suddenly your complacency over the years seems like a terrible mistake that you do not even have time to mourn, because right now you need to bust ass to make it right, before it's too late. Of course, your advisor can only make this trick work if he actually gives you a very specific date and time as your deadline, not if he's like "Oh, try to get it done at some point during the fall, or early winter. Late winter at the latest". THAT IS NOT HELPFUL AT ALL, LHC PEOPLE (and also my advisor).

In any event, the power of this kind of last-minute mental clarity can be seen in other phenomena such as the memento mori, or the Buddhist meditation on loathsomeness (speaking of which, when I read contemplations like the following: "but again, O priests, a priest, if perchance he sees in a cemetery a decaying body being eaten by crows, or being eaten by eagles, or being eaten by vultures, or being eaten by dogs, or being eaten by jackals, or being eaten by various kinds of insects, he compares his own body, saying, "Verily, my body also has this nature, this destiny, and is not exempt," am I alone in thinking of Kenny? Perhaps South Park has depths we're not aware of). These are obviously exercises aimed at provoking a more individualistic self-appraisal and sense of detachment from material things. To me, one of the interesting things about contemplating the apocalypse is that you're forced to consider not just the nubbles on your own soul but rather how we've all been doing (of course, if you're an atheist, a materialist, and a solipsist, then there's no functional difference between your own death and the end of all existence - I'm only 2 out those 3, though).

Of course, figuring out how we've all been doing, there's the rub: for Adrian, for Jesus, for everyone. Of course, the obvious answer is that we're doing terribly, and we've been doing terribly for a long time. I've always thought that if you wanted to start your own cult, or political movement, or whatever, all you have to do is approach people indiscriminately and, whatever argument you put to them, start out with the premise that something is terribly wrong with the world. People's bullshit detectors seem to malfunction as soon as you start with this premise. It also seems to help if you tell them that they're special for having noticed. "I know you've felt it, you've sensed it since you were young, although it wasn't always easy to put into words. This isn't the way things are supposed to be. Something's gone terribly wrong. You tried to ignore it, but it was always there, in the back of your mind. I'm sure you've noticed that there is something different about you, something that forced you to keep looking, even when it made things difficult for you. The others didn't always understand what you were looking for, did they? Well, I understand. I can help you find those answers. I'll just need 20% of your pre-tax income. And also sex."

Is it really true, though? Have things really gone so terribly with the world that it would be a tragedy if it ended now? Or have we actually had a pretty good run, like Seinfeld? Would any further millennia just end up being kind of a let-down? I'd certainly say that humans have had our moments. Of course, we've been pretty awful to each other a lot of the time, but, you know, we gave it a go. We had some laughs. I guess the flaw in the Seinfeld argument is that it presupposes an audience, which, if the world suddenly slips out of existence, there won't be one of. I think that's the saddest part for me, is that there will be no future observers to look at what we all did with a little objectivity and appreciate it or condemn it. When Jesus was predicting the end, he of course had in mind the ultimate audience: him and his Dad, judging your ass. When a secular humanist considers something terrible like a nuclear holocaust, at least you can take comfort that there will be some cockroaches afterward to think to themselves how delicious Twinkies are. And of couse, if I died from turbulence, there would presumably be a funeral at which I would expect people to gloss over my lack of moral fiber. But if our planet twinkles out of the space-time continuum, no dice.

So it turns out that thinking about the end-times and considering our collective moral failings, while good for the soul, is not so great for the anxiety level. Why am I so calm about this whole thing, then? Faith. Not in Jesus, but in scientific consensus. So much of what I do as a researcher depends upon information provided to me by researchers and theorists in other fields whose work I am not qualified to judge. Every time I run a filter on my data, I have faith that all the electrical engineers who have spent their lives studying the properties of filters haven't made some critical error that has somehow gone overlooked for decades. I need to have faith in them because I don't have the time or the mental capacity to check their work. I have faith that, contra Kuhn, there is scientific consensus which occasionally gets completely overturned, and then there is no joke we're positive about this it's really fine consensus. If you asked a schizophrenia researcher if there was some consensus on certain theories within the field, he might be able to offer you a few ideas that are very widely accepted. If you told him that the continued existence of the planet depended on these ideas being correct, he'd be like "NOOOO!!!!!". We (schizophrenia researchers) have consensus on a few points, but we're not really sure about anything. That's Kuhnian "overturned at any minute" consensus. In contrast, I have some sense of what "seriously, we're definitely sure about this" consensus looks like, and the people talking about the LHC seem to have it. So I'm not too worried.

Still, call your mother.

Briefly

A thing that is weird: the depth of people's desire to have someone take a picture of them and post it on the internets. I guess I'd sort of confronted this fact several years ago when I became old-person-aware of cobrasnake and misshapes (old-person-awareness is when you are old like me and you become vaguely aware that the kids are doing some new thing, but you do not fully grasp why they would do this thing, and you feel a sinking in the pit of your stomach that this is the future because it seems pretty fucking lame, but then maybe you're no longer able to accurately diagnose lameness because you are so old), but I confronted it up close and personal this weekend. We went to an event at LACMA called LA Flash, which was basically a cool exhibit of photography of street styles in 1973, but they were comparing it to street style today as well, so they were taking photos of the guest's street style. Here's the thing: you had to wait in line to have your photo taken, and people were all waiting in this crazy long line so that someone would take a picture of them and put it on the internet. Is it really that hard to get your picture on the internet? Have you run into so many roadblocks in this quest that you're forced to pay $10 admission and stand in an endless line? Apparently the answer is an enthusiastic yes (n.b. that we did not pay admission because I lied to a dude and said that we were looking for someone that we had lost, which I feel bad about but we got there super late and I did pay $8 for a Heineken). Adrian also blogged about this, so if you're into Rashomon-style dueling blogs, here you go. Adrian would probably also like me to mention that the most likely source of my bad attitude is that my street style is wack, whilst hers is fresh.

An ersatz Disneyland

So I was reading this very real news article from the Sioux-City Journal that has drawn attention for the unintentional Onionesqueness of its prose. For those of you too lazy to click through, it's a slightly breathless article about how the citizens of Sioux City, Iowa, are very excited that they finally (finally!) have an Olive Garden opening up in their fair city. First question: how the hell did it take this long for the Olive Garden to get around to opening a branch in Sioux City? Second question: how dare the commentariat make fun of the residents of Sioux City for being excited about an Olive Garden? Now, admittedly, the Olive Garden is a shitty restaurant with bland-ass food and commercials that make it seem as if non-self-hating-Italian-Americans would actually eat at an Olive Garden. But as someone who loves the equally ersatz but much more delicious Macaroni Grill, I say we have to take a stand. People who are all like "Oooh, I'm all fancy and I demand authenticity from my restaurants and I get all uncomfortable in places that share an enormous parking lot with the Ruby Tuesday and the Outback Steakhouse" are... well, actually, they're my parents, and they're very nice people in a lot of ways. They prefer that their food not be developed by the good folks at the Institute of Food Technologists, which is fine, if a bit quaint.

But, the problem is, if you live in Los Angeles and you're really going to insist on authenticity in all things, you're going to miss out on a lot of awesome stuff. You could still eat at burrito trucks, I guess, and you could drink at Del's (but not on fucking karaoke night! Related post for later: why I hate karaoke so much). But then someone is eventually going to be like "Hey, I need to go buy some mass-market casual clothing that projects a comfortable familiarity with clam bakes, G&T's, and playing with golden retrievers whilst ensconsed in weathered dinghys" and you're like, "That's fine, but for myself I need to ride a make-believe choo-choo train for approximately 50 feet!" and then you both look at each other, smile, and say "Of course, The Grove!". This happens to me and my girlfriend all the time. Actually, mostly it happens to my girlfriend, and then I am a person who hates fun, so I'm all "I haaaaaate The Grove, please don't maaaake me".

For non-Angelenos, The Grove is a "retail and entertainment complex", sort of like a cross between an upscale outdoor mall and a movie set, with false-fronts to each store that collectively are meant to suggest... I don't know, actually. I want to say Venetian villas, but that doesn't seem accurate? Regardless, it's a big fake"experience" that must have suggested "class, but at a discount!" to some focus group; it comes complete with cobble-stone streets and footbridges and fountains and piped-in Sinatra. Also it has a choo-choo train for reasons that escape me. It is the sort of thing that Jean Baudrillard would have had a lot to say about if he hadn't apparently died of typhoid several years ago (btw, typhoid? wtf? That's some Anne of Green Gables shit right there). In short, deep down I am my parent's son, and The Grove is not my favorite place.

But! On a recent excursion to The Grove with couple friends Tammy and David, we ate at a magical place called Morel's French Steakhouse and Bistro. We actually ate on the first floor, which I guess is the bistro part. Imagine, if you will, that the producers of Saved By The Bell decided to make a special "study abroad" episode in gay Paris, and at the very last minute they informed the set designer that they needed an "authentic Parisian bistro" for an important scene where Kelly Kapowski is seduced by a Frenchman in a beret, and the set-designer (I imagine her as a chain-smoking, mid-fifties, bleach-blond, overtanned badass) managed to knock one out at the last possible minute using only materials that she had on hand. You can almost hear her in the background quietly mumbling "shit ass motherfucker suck dick assholes" etc.

So the decor, not so much. Neither the wait-staff, who are authentically Parisian in that they are not terribly motivated to be good at their job (also they have white smocks on!). So what did I like so much? Well, their croque monsieur was fucking delicious, if not very authentic. It used chicken instead of ham, but apparently croque monsieur is like a classic cocktail: variations on a theme are expected and welcomed. All I know is, things with melted emmental and baked-on Bechamel sauce are fucking delicious.

And if you're still Quixotically looking for authenticity in this place, I can also recommend their selection of fine liqueurs. They have them all! Galliano, Benedictine, Tuaca, Chartreuse, just a whole bunch of liqueurs. If I remember correctly, I thought about getting a glass of Chartreuse but decided against for some reason. For those who've never had it, Chartreuse is delicious and about as authentic as something can get without being like a granite boulder or something. The color is named after it, that's how OG Chartreuse is. The Carthusian monks who make it in have been around for like 900 years. If you saw Into Great Silence, apparently those are the same dudes (I haven't seen it yet, that shit's been number two on my Netflix for like a year because the next disc of the Wire keeps getting bumped up).

My point, then, if I actually have one, is that even in the most false and derivative place in Los Angeles (The Grove beats out Universal CityWalk for this title by a slim margin - Universal CityWalk is the ersatz Disneyland of my title, a place my parents would just refuse to set foot in. My mother would describe it as too loud, both visually and auditorially. They have giant flaming guitars, shitty live bands, and a giant neon-rimmed King-Kong dressed up according to the season - currently I believe he's wearing board shorts and sunglasses. I imagine the message is "Hey, this gorilla likes to have a good time, and so do we! And we're betting you do too! We're not all snooty like that other retail-and-entertainment complex across town!" Actually, in between the cracks that place is pretty fucking real, we saw some straight-up hookers plying their trade by the Hard Rock Cafe last weekend (we were there for the IMAX - see what I mean about the awesomeness you'd miss out on if you insisted on authenticity?) Also the restaurants at CityWalk are pretty downscale - think Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, which, speaking of simulations, is a fucking restaurant named after two characters in a movie from the nineties - am I blowing your mind yet? How about this, then: the only time I have ever been on a real movie set (i.e. a true falsehood), it was a wrap party that they held on the fake New York street on the ABC lot. It was kind of a weird experience, having a block party on a fake block. You're all chilling, having a beer, standing in the middle of the street, thinking "Hey, it's kind of weird how I'm here in the middle of the street and I'm not worried about getting hit by a car!" like you usually do at a block party, but then you're like "Oh, wait a minute. Fake block." - so I was there courtesy of my roommate Amy for a wrap party of her show, but, get ready to have your mind blown, guess what band was playing that wrap party? The Lieutenant Dan Band, a band fronted by Gary Sinise and inexplicably named after the movie character that he played in that self-same 90's movie).

To start again: even in the most false and derivative place it is possible to find things which are not simulations of some other thing, which were not created so as to suggest some aspirational lifestyle to a focus group, but rather exist because some monk hundreds of years ago tried a strange liqueur recipe that had been given to him and found that the unusual mixture of herbs produced something quite wonderful. Sometimes I worry that eventually all of experience will become a simulation of some other, more distant experience, which will in turn eventually be lost. Chartreuse helps to remind me that there are limits.

Don't you fucking look at her!

There was a study a while ago that found that true "swing voters" or "independent independents" are the least likely to have even the most basic knowledge of politics - like they're seriously unclear on whether Al Gore or George Bush is the one who likes the environment. It's a bit weird for those of us who decided a long time ago to watch these conventions and try to put ourselves in the mindset of that smidgen of the electorate who really haven't nailed it down to a particular candidate yet. I believe the author of the study I'm thinking of (I can't seem to find it right now) mentioned that one plausible reason why extreme partisans such as myself tend to have a bit more political knowledge is that we are akin to the sports fanatic who knows the teams in his league inside and out - if you are rooting hard enough for one candidate, suddenly ag policy seems kind of interesting and worth reading about.

I think that this idea makes sense, this idea of the political junkie as a fanboy (or girl) for whom it is not enough that we should win, we must be entertained by that win. We don't want our team to run up the score against some bullshit expansion team, we want to beat the Yankees. I hope this idea makes sense, because it's the only explanation as to why I'm so happy about Sarah Palin. Of course, I will be deeply terrified if she becomes vice president, and I really hope that doesn't happen. But this bitch is pure gold. She fucking hates polar bears, and also science. Her husband is a goddamn Eskimo (not an Inuit, apparently). Her first major address on the national stage, and she just stepped up and bitch slapped Barack Obama like her babies weren't out there makin' babies. She fucking supports aerial wolf hunting! Anyone who read Julie of the Wolves as a kid knows that you have to be straight up evil to support aerial wolf hunting. She was surrounded by a crowd of Republicans yelling "Drill, baby, drill!!" like they were bad guys from Captain Planet. She is so much more badass than Mittens Romney will ever be. He was just a slimey dude with no principles who thought everyone would be cool with it if he changed his opinion on abortion suddenly in his fifties. Palin is like the bad guy from Blue Velvet. Frank Booth was scary as hell not because he was willing to cut people's ears off, but because he hated Heinekin and he loved PBR and he wanted you to call him Daddy and not fucking look at him. Sarah Palin feels the exact same way, except about library books.

Also see: Sarah Palin videos, I recommend number 1 and number 4.

Base rates

It occurs to me that my explanation of base rates may not have made a huge amount of sense to non-psychology people, and I'm not sure that wikipedia's explanation is that much better. The idea of Bayesian inference is that before you consider the probability of something given some evidence, you need to take into account what the probability would be if you had no evidence at all (i.e. the base rate). If you fail to do this, your intuition of probabilities will be way, way off. Especially when the base rate is very low.
So, as an example, say you are looking for something in the trunk of your boyfriend's car. You find a duffel bag in there that contains plastic sheeting, black kevlar gloves, a face mask, duct tape, rope, a knife and a crowbar. If you're anything like my lovely girlfriend, you will immediately conclude that your boyfriend is a serial killer (my girlfriend is also very alert to developing terrorist threats at IMAX screenings of The Dark Knight). But, before you leap to that conclusion, it's useful to consider what the good Rev. Bayes would say. First, what is the probability that a serial killer would have creepy tools in his trunk? Hard to say, but in the interests of being generous to the serial killer hypothesis let's say that 1/3 of all serial killers have creepy tools in the trunk of their car. This is called the conditional probability. Next we have to consider the probability of non-serial killers having these things in the trunk of their car. It would seem like this probability is pretty low, however all of these items were taken from a list of earthquake preparedness items that I was looking at earlier (I keep meaning to make an earthquake preparedness kit, but I probably won't get around to it until after the big one hits). So, let's say that 1% of Californians have an earthquake kit, and 10% of those Californians unwittingly create a creepy-seeming kit, so that's 1/1000 odds. Pretty low! But then, and this is key to Bayesian inference, we have to consider: what are the odds of any given person being a serial killer in the absence of any evidence? That is, what is the base rate of serial killers in the general population? I don't know if there's a good answer to this, but on Wikipedia it looked like there were about 100 known American serial killers (including terrifying ones like Zodiac whose acts are known but are not themselves identified; for completists this list also includes old-timey serial killers like the Bloody Benders). Again, for the sake of being generous to the serial killer hypothesis, let's say that for every one serial killer who is known to the world there are 9 that go undetected, so there's maybe like 1000 serial killers in the US. If there are 300 million Americans, then the base rate is 1/300000. If we plug these three numberrs into the formula from Bayes' theorem, we find that the chance your boyfriend is a serial killer is 0.00111, or a little more than a tenth of a percent. So pretty damn low.
We can use a totally different example, but with similar numbers, to illustrate what happens when you alter the base rate. Let's say you find a CD copy of "Now That's What I Call Deep House! Volume 10!" in the trunk of your boyfriend's car. What's the probability that your boyfriend is secretly gay? We'll keep the conditional probability (odds that a Gay American would have crappy house music in the trunk of his car) at 1/3 (an insult to the musical taste of the gays, I know, I'm sorry, but it's in service of explaining a complicated point. Also, I think it's fair to say that about 1/3 of the gays have SOME kind of terrible taste in music). We'll also keep the chances of a straight guy having this CD at 1/1000. But now, insteade of a base rate of 1/30000, we'll have a base rate of whatever percentage of American guys are gay - we'll pick 4% for the sake of argument. Now, all of a sudden, the odds that your boyfriend is gay is about 93%. Remember, the only thing that changed in this example was the base rate. Also the Deep House. Base rates are incredibly important, and nobody who is thinking "intuitively" is taking them into account, at all. So we end up with ladies who are terrified of their boyfriends for no reason and ladies who are not aware that their boyfriends are secretly gay. All because of ignorance of statistics!

My girlfriend's slow descent into 9/11 Truthiness

A thing that is both weird and a little upsetting: for a few days there, I thought my girlfriend was going to become a 9/11 Truther, but for Sarah Palin. When the interblogs started buzzing with rumors that Sarah Palin had never been pregnant and actually little Trig was actually daughter Bristol's baby etc., etc., my girlfriend was right there with them for like half a day. Fortunately for our relationship, she abandoned this line of thinking fairly quickly, and now of course we know that in fact Bristol was pregnant with her own damn baby, thank you very much, and also (and here I'm imagining Bristol's response to the interwebs), frankly, fuck you very much for saying she looked pregnant 8 months ago when she wasn't, that's kind of a fucked up thing to say about a 16 year old girl who just happens to be a little chunky around the midsection. But whatever.

If we could I'd like to take us back to those heady days of earlier this weekend when speculation about the maternity of little Trig was running rampant. My girlfriend was citing all sorts of facts that she learned from Tumblr that JUST DIDN'T ADD UP. Such as: the fact that Sarah didn't look like the Demi Moore Vanity Fair cover when she was 6 months pregnant, or that Bristol was taken out of school with "mono" at some time point that was deemed suspicious, or that baby Trig was not listed in the web-based birth announcements of the hospital where he was ostensibly (OSTENSIBLY!!!) born, or how weird it was for a woman to give a speech after her water broke and then fly for 9 hours to get back to Alaska and not tell the flight crew that she was in labor, etc. All of these unusual facts, or "problems" with the official account of Trig's birth, were cited as leading inexorably to one conclusion: Sarah Palin couldn't deal with the shame of her underage daughter making a baby, but also couldn't deal with the sin of anyone having any abortions, so she faked a pregnancy and then pretended Trig was her son instead of her grandson.

What I noticed when my girlfriend was on board with all of this theorizing was a series of classical cognitive mistakes happening in real-time. The first, and most relevant to actual 9/11 truthiness, was the failure to create a positive account. That is, at some point you have to stop pointing out things in the official account that you find hard to believe, and instead you have to put forward your own account of what happened. Matt Taibbi, in The Great Derangement, has rather brilliantly elaborated on how completely idiotic the 9/11 Truth movement is revealed to be if you simply create a positive account for them based on the ideas that they cling to. Similarly, with BristolGate, we can do something similar:

Bristol Palin: Hey mom, sorry to be calling right before your big speech in Texas, but my water just broke.
Sarah Palin: That's okay honey, in keeping with our vast conspiracy that we have going here, I'll tell everyone that my water broke, but then I'll insist on giving this speech anyways, and then I'll insist on flying 9 hours to get back to where you are.
Bristol Palin: Um, mom, wouldn't it make more sense for you not to tell anyone your water broke until you get back to Alaska? That way, nobody will freak out and it won't look as suspicious later on.
Sarah Palin: No, no, I think it's best that I pretend that my water broke at the exact same time as your water actually broke, just so everything lines up. I don't really know what that accomplishes, but there's a nice symmetry to it.

And so on. The second classic cognitive mistake that I see in BabyMamaGate is a failure to take base rates into account. See Bayesian Inference if you don't know what I'm talkin' bout. Yes, all of these "interesting facts" you are listing would be consistent with someone who is pretending that her grandson is her son. Just as a child in an emergency room who had taken aspirin and was vomiting, lethargic, and mentally confused, would be consistent with Reyes Syndrome. That doesn't change the fact that while all these interesting facts are anomalies, they are nowhere near as rare as the condition your are diagnosing based on them. That is, the base rate of mothers pretending their grandchildren are their children is incredibly low in the US. There is no doubt in my mind that the bloggers who are examining the evidence are failing to take that base rate into account, since doctors, scientists, and economists all have been found to fail to take them fully into account when making decisions (and I don't know if this research has been done, but I'd be willing to bet that psychologists who study base-rate errors also fail to fully take them into account when dealing with real-world problems).

The third major cognitive mistake that I see people making in this situation relates to Karl Popper and the falsification model of science. This blog post ended up way longer than I intended, so I'm going to leave this issue for another day, but suffice it to say that the batshit insane bloggers who were propogating these scurrilous rumors spent a lot of time looking for confirmatory evidence and very little time looking for disconfirmatory evidence. As do we all. Of course, that's the opposite of what you want to do if you're interested in finding out the truth about something. A related post for later: how I got to be so fucking discouraged about neuroimaging approaches to neurocognition in psychiatric disorders.