Of What Interest is Physics to a Psychologist?

 The Intersection of Science and Meaning

Jordan B Peterson, Oct 3, 2024 | Dr. Brian Greene | EP 486

Peterson talks to a physicist of string theory to ask him how physics might provide insight into ideas of psychology, philosophy and meaning. Here are some topics he gets into over the course of the hour and a half

1. The beginning of the universe – What does time mean at the beginning of time? (starting at 4:00)

2. (20:15) Green says something interesting about the second law of thermodynamics. Other physical laws, like the law of conservation of mass, are true. They can not be violated. The second law can be violated. It is just really unlikely.

Peterson asks a paradoxical question. The second law says the disordered states are more likely than ordered ones, but how do you define disordered? Isn’t one lottery ticket as unlikely as the next?

3. (37:42) How do you explain the double-slit experiment? If the stripe pattern happens because photons interfere with each other, how can you get the same pattern when you send one photon through at a time? This gets into some good questions about the limits of Einstein’s relativity. How does time work on a particle going so fast that time stops? What happens to a massless photon going so fast that mass becomes infinite? (Which leads into my favorite, how do we know that light goes the speed of light?)

4. (46:00)The quantum explanation, which says that you can’t ever know the location and speed of an object (The world you see is misleading about the fundamentals!), is not the only explanation that fits the data. De Broglie had a different interpretation that works.

5. (58:27) Greene talks about free will. He and Peterson lay out the usual positions. Particles behave in a deterministic way! Actions have predictable outcomes! Therefore everything is determined. So there is no free will. Peterson responds that at the quantum level there is no determinism, so Greene’s fixed chain of events is wrong. (Sounds like a first-year philosophy class. Then it takes a turn...)

Greene claims that the quantum world is not indeterminate. It is just too small to observe. All that probabilistic stuff of quantum mechanics is not real. It compensates for the fact that we can’t see the details of reactions. This seems to me relevant to a theological paradox. humans are free to act as we choose, to the point of following or not following God’s will. Yet God know the present, past and future, which depends on the choices that humans freely choose.

6. (1:07:00) Starts on string theory, which claims that it can combine general relativity (which works on big things) and quantum theory (which works on little things). String theory proponents say it is beautiful. Its detractors say it is not science. It has never made a testable prediction (I think they mean a novel testable prediction.) This looks to me like a very common choice between the scientific type (who makes a hypothesis, then waits for the results of the test) and the imaginative beauty-seeker.

Bonus idea: (50) tohu vabohu: Is it the state before the big bang (or, as its originator called it, the primeval atom)?

Avoiding the Oedipus Trap

 Megan McArdle was interviewed for EconTalk about The Oedipal Trap. She tells of Walter Freeman, the doctor who gave us the lobotomy. The interview has three major themes:

1. The options available for mental health treatments were poor and the outcomes without treatment were horrible. Condemnation of lobotomy in the early years was not such a clear case. (Also, due to positive press treatment, opposition was not just unclear, it was politically untenable.)
2. Freeman’s work method was admirable, maybe exemplary. He took detailed patient histories and did careful follow-up. He was active in his work: alert to the latest research and accumulated a vast body of  results on his own. He appears to be driven by a desire to be a great figure in medicine.
3. Somehow, Freeman could not see the emerging theme that his chosen treatment was destructive. (The good stuff starts at 35 min.)

“The first principle of science is not to fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

McArdle tells the story of Oedipus (36 min) and concludes that “there are some mistakes that no-one can live with, even if they were made innocently”. The trap is that if you have made such a mistake, it is better not to know that you have done so. If you have made a mistake this bad, you will do everything in your power to avoid recognizing that you have done it. Much of what you will do is psychological and unconscious.

Dangers of O traps shows up in cancer treatment and foreign policy. You must choose between options that will have horrible outcomes. You are likely to make a decision with a horrible outcome. If you are not careful and conscious, you will lock yourself into an Oedipus trap.

How to avoid O traps (1:06): 

1. If the stakes are really high, go in slowly. Do a little bit and follow-up with long term feedback. Don’t stake your reputation early on.
2. Pre-commit beforehand to check your results and be willing to be wrong.
3. Recognize that no matter how shattering it is to admit you are wrong, it is less shattering than continuing to make that mistake.

Technosignatures

When looking for life on other planets, we do not look for little green men, or cities, or canals. Telescopes are nowhere near powerful enough to see that kind of detail. Our best satellite-based telescopes hope to see a dot, if we are lucky, if we know where and when to look.

The way we look for life is to look at the color of that dot. The precise spectrum will indicate the chemicals that are present. Certain chemicals are a sign of life: molecular oxygen, for example. Oxygen bonds really well to very many chemicals. It is unlikely to see much of it unbonded. We only have unbonded oxygen on earth because we have plants that make it. Oxygen molecules are a sure sign of life. Methane is also a likely indicator. This makes oxygen molecules a biosignature: a sign of life.

Professor Adam Frank is looking for technosignatures: a light spectrum that indicate the presence of a technology-using society. Solar panels and pollutants are two types of technosignature.

First Flight

 This piece of cloth was part of the first powered flight on earth. 

...and on Mars.

Marshmallow is Not Soft

Buckets of ink have been spent on the “marshmallow study”. Walter Mischel started the test in the 1960s; finished it in the 1980s and people have been buzzing about it ever since.

The most famous version goes like this. A 4-5 yr-old child is placed in a room with a marshmallow. She is told that she is welcome to eat it now, but if she waits until the adult comes back, she will get two marshmallows. The wait was usually 15 minutes, all alone, in a bare room with a table, two chairs and a plate with a marshmallow. (You will find no shortage of (very cute) videos on this study.)

• The result: decades later, the kids who resisted were dramatically more successful.
• The moral: self-control is they key to success.

The study’s fame grew until it is now one the ten best-known stories in psychology, maybe the best. Then, in 2018, Watts published a study claiming Mischel’s conclusion was too simple.

Popular press articles exploded: the marshmallow study is wrong! Debunked! There were lots of takes. One says that it’s really about education: kids from poor families have less willpower. Another says it is about trust in adults: kids from un-trustworthy parents didn’t believe they were ever going to see that second marshmallow. Well, Watts never really thought his study “dubunked” the original, just that it told a more nuanced story.

Well, now a study from New Zealand, originating back in 1972, says...self-control is an excellent predictor of future success. We’re sorry, Walter Mischel.

Plastic Bags and the Throwaway Society

Despite widespread public favor , Public health officials demanded (and got) a ban on reusable plastic bags during the season of Covid-19. The hygiene cost is too high to even consider any of the benefits of reusable bags at this time. 

But what about other times? What is the benefit of banning plastics? What is the cost? 

John Tierney revisits the history of disposable paper and plastic: the rise of Dixie Cups to replace the “common cup” of the old west to the disposable garden party table settings of the space age through to the mandatory recycling programs of the 21st century. 

MyPlanet is thinking through the plastic bag problem. They find two conclusions. 

1. The overwhelming source of plastic bag litter comes from take-out restaurants and convenience stores. 
2. The least wasteful way to pack groceries is to use a disposable plastic bag and then re-use that bag.

Plans by the Many

Dr. Ioannidis, chair in disease prevention at Stanford, thinks that our public health planners lack perspective. They have been working very hard to optimize one small problem, slowing the spread of COVID-19. But have very little consideration for other problems, like preserving livelihoods, continuing medical care, mental health, quality of life or mass starvation.

Even on COVID-19, they are focused on slowing transmission but show no indication they have an end goal in mind. How do we bring this to a close?

FEE relates this to the big and recurring principle raised by Hayek: do we want one plan made by an expert or a thousand plans made by individuals and small groups?

There is a Reason These Are the Most Cited Scientists

Maybe a citation count doesn't have the resolution needed to judge academic success.

A new study has revealed an unsettling truth about the citation metrics that are commonly used to gauge scientists' level of impact and influence in their respective fields of research.

The Novel as Journalism

Tom Wolfe is the great American novelist of the past 50 years. He was a pioneer of the “nonfiction novel” but never one to follow the crowd blindly. His Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was the nonfiction novel of the hippie movement. The Right Stuff (“What is it, I wondered, that makes a man willing to sit on top of an enormous Roman candle...and wait for someone to light the fuse?) was a little more nonfiction and a little less novel.

He thought the world needed a nonfiction novel about New York City and tried to write one. Instead, a single scene expanded into Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. The great novel turned into fiction: The Bonfire of the Vanities. It proved to be prophetic in two key scenes (that is, the fiction became nonfiction after the writing). One of those became the iconic news story of 1980s NY, but had to be cut from the book, causing him to ruefully quote Malcolm Muggeridge,

We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.

Wolfe reflects on the desire for new, specialized novels and shows why novels can do journalism better than journalism can.

To the Moon!

Bob Zubrin, who wrote "The Case For Mars" is setting his sights a little lower.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/05/zubrin-moon-direct-plan.html

Bajau: The Undersea Hunters

The Bajau people of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Phillipines live their whole lives in and around the ocean. They can dive for 13 minutes at a time to depths of 200 feet and their bodies are different from the rest of us. In particular, they have larger spleens and eyes adapted to water.

In Malaysia, they are banned from the land, so they have made villages on stilts.

The people has a founding myth of a mission to escort a princess, possibly to a marriage. They fail in their duty to deliver her safely. Through shame or banishment, they never return home but wander the ocean for the generations since.

Visualizing Mortality

The Author is 34 and expecting to live to 90. If you are 17 expecting to live to 73, you have half as many X's and exactly the same number of winters. Your odds of living past 73 are pretty good but the shocking lack of infiniteness is unchanged.

Notably, the number of days you get to spend with your parents is probably already past the halfway mark. OTOH, the number of days you deliberately choose to spend with your parents may be much, much below halfway.

Spring 2018 Bridge: Lilliput

For years, I’ve been telling students that under my rules small bridges might have an advantage. For rules like this, it’s a pretty big advantage.

Usually, they all ignore me. Last time, a few didn’t ignore me. This year, six groups took my little advice to heart, and then some. 

Things got a teeny-bit ridiculous.

Wi-Fi Might Have Made Us Smarter

Instead it has spawned an industry with the largest research budgets in history and the smartest people in the world dedicated to making us addicted.

Almost all Americans own a smartphone or a computer.
Each device contains the library of Alexandria.
The sum total of all world knowledge.
You can learn anything. Why don't you?
Too busy tracking social status.
Too enthralled by imagery your evolution can't resist.

Millennials: The New Victorians

When I grew up, Victorian was a term of ridicule. It meant stuffy people who couldn't tolerate the least bit of earthy reality. Most emphatically in matters of romance, Victorians found the sight of a table leg too sensuous.* Exposing an ankle was the sign of a shameless flirt.

At best, it was said that the Victorians' inability to confront human sexuality was compensated by their ability to confront death. I came to expect that these were exaggerations by people who needed to feel better than their grandparents but the word Victorian stuck as a synonym for irrational prudery.

The twentieth century moved steadily away from that ideal. Matt Ridley says the twenty-first is moving back (minus the care for others, fortitude, courage and economic success.) Illiberality in ideas has taken over for years. Now it seems that illiberality in behavior is next.

*It's not true but it is a myth we commonly shared.

Foamectomy

How to give a Miata more headroom and a better view through the window.

SpaceX Launches to Mars

The Falcon Heavy rocket from SpaceX launched on Tuesday. That means that a private company is now the organization in the world most capable of taking large payloads into space; not NASA, not the Russians, European Space Agency, China, Japan nor India: SpaceX.

If the drama was hard to appreciate, consider this for context:

(2nd source for 2nd video: How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster)

A guide to the first video:

Dinosaurs: Dead Again

You've heard that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. 65 M years ago an asteroid hit Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, covered the earth in a layer of dust, including rare iridium, destroyed the plant life, then herbivores, then carnivores.

You may not have heard that it was the volcanoes. Starting 70 M years ago, near Mumbai in India, a collection of volcanoes called the Deccan Traps spewed sulphur and ash, including iridium, acidifying the oceans and blocking out the sun...etc. But could you have sworn that it mightn't be both?

NORAD's December 24 Watch

It all started when Sears misprinted a phone number. Instead of a kids' telephone line to Santa, it was a national security "red phone".

Fall 2017 Bridge Contest

This year the 98 lb weakling cleans up the beach.