Collapse: The Blog

Masturbation, Prostrate Cancer, Stats, and Science

Remember that famous study according to which men who masturbate more frequent are less likely to develop prostate cancer, the one that has since been used as evidence that everyone everywhere simply must masturbate and if you disagree then you want people to get cancer? You know the one. (The idea, supposedly, is that routine masturbation flushes out the carcinogens that build up in the prostate without exposing the masturbator to the risks of STD transmission). I recently came across a study ("Sexual activity and prostate cancer risk in men diagnosed at a younger age," BJU International, 2009) which refines that finding -- specifically, finding that it only applies to men in their 50's. Masturbation exposes younger men to greater risk of prostate cancer. Who would've thought drowning your body in steroidal hormones would be bad for you?!

That got my gears turning in light of my recent pondering about statistics and the scientific enterprise, so I sought out a copy of that original study. I couldn't find one, but every newspaper report I found about it strongly suggests the original study was merely correlational. That stands to reason since it was probably intended to be exploratory, i.e., hypothesis-generating, the first in a longer line of research that, for whatever reason, seems not to have materialized.

Look at it this way. Suppose this study had not simply been compromised by type I error, measurement error, improper sampling, or any of the other problems that bedevil modern methodological research. Suppose, in other words, that men who masturbate really are at lower risk for prostate cancer later in life. Is the only possible interpretation available to understand this that nonmasturbation causes cancer? Is it completely impossible that anything else at all could relate these two things to one another? Isn't it possible that, say, the antecedents of prostate cancer inhibit sex drive? Problems with the prostate are, after all, associated with all kinds of sexual dysfunction, including anorgasmia and erectile dysfunction. Or that the kinds of healthy behaviors that reduce risk of prostate cancer (such as regular exercise) also boost sex drive (by improving cardiovascular health)?

So what we have is what is probably a perfectly reasonable statistical analysis which lends itself to a very, very narrow, exploratory interpretation -- within an arbitrary range of certainty probably inflated by the failure to meet methodological assumptions to violations of which those tests are not very robust. Which scientistic leftists (who, bear in mind, are so much smarter than you!) have, for whatever reason, misapprehended, falling for what ought to have been a very humiliating mistake warned against on the first or second day of every statistics 101 course.

Is the deception intentional, born of dishonesty in service to an evil agenda of utilitarianism and sexual subversion? Or is it born of ignorance, scientific illiteracy, and functional retardation from a group of people who insist (with the silent collusion of the researchers who never correct their errors) that science alone is the authoritative ground of all knowledge despite their inability to distinguish correlation from causation?

On Statistics and Science in the Modern Age

I think there is no greater example of how the modern mind works than modern statistics-based research.

The worst example of this is null hypothesis significance testing. This consists in mechanistically comparing results to an arbitrary p-value to make a dichotomous decision, a process that more or less eliminates autonomous human analysis without introducing anything like methodological rigor. (Scientifically-minded readers may be interested in reading, or rereading, the savage attack on p-value fetishism by Jacob Cohen, one of the fathers of modern statistical analysis). One may as well let well-designed robots write the results sections of scientific reports.

And as is typical of the modern mode of thinking, which always seeks to abstract away complex phenomena, its use sometimes leads to absurdity. A group of researchers demonstrated this by using perfectly legitimate statistical analyses and questionable-but-technically-licit methodological protocols to produce an obviously very strange finding: that participants were a year-and-a-half younger after listening to the Beatles' "When I'm Sixty-Four."

Whenever I do a literature review, I'm sometimes surprised and shocked at how few people seem to understand statistics. They do exploratory factor analyses with absurdly low participant-to-item ratios (some on the order of 2:1 -- or worse) or using questionable rotation or extraction methods. They rarely ever test the assumptions on which first-order statistical tests are based, such as equality of variances. I constantly see mean-centering used in multiple regression to correct for multicollinearity even though such a method has been mathematically discredited. I have never read a properly-conducted meta-analysis.

(Yet we are, evidently, to turn over the operation of all of society to these people!)

A single study is almost always taken as proof that something needs to be done about X -- even though the odds are good, anecdotally and probably even empirically, that the study was simply not done right, that its results are not being interpreted correctly, and that, of course, no replication exists or is forthcoming -- since virtually no journals publish replication studies and those that do virtually never publish studies supporting the null hypothesis. (I'm given to understand hard-science journals are better in this regard, but in the social sciences, where the most social mischief is wrought, published replications are practically nonexistent). In other words, a single study (which has at least a 5% chance, and probably greater than that, of being just stupidly wrong) without the benefit of replication and most likely consisting of data improperly collected, wrongly analyzed, and foolishly interpreted, is very likely to fuel demands for sweeping changes to our social life. The psychoticism and demonically energetic activism of modernity in a nutshell.

Biology, Teleology, and the Modern

Why aren't there more reactionaries among biologists? Despite the nominalist presuppositions that are prevail among them (stemming more from simple philosophical ignorance and general leftist idiocy than anything about their field inducing them to believe it), biology is among the most rigidly teleological of all the sciences.

Take the heart, for instance. It is really quite impossible to be taken seriously by denying that the heart serves the end of pumping blood. This is a normative feature of hearts, arising from nature itself. Even small deviations from that norm (which we call disorders for a reason) produce ludicrous amounts of suffering; larger deviations tend to produce death. There is simply no sense saying that hearts have no normative nature and that to speak of "heart disorders" is a linguistic convention that in no way corresponds to objective reality. Tell someone with atherosclerosis that she should accept her heart for what it is and not try to conform herself to society's oppressive narrative that anyone with thicker arterial walls is unhealthy and see if her brothers don't come over to your house and stomp your face into blood pudding.

I'd go further and say that, in a healthy society, biologists would be among the most well-respected people. They study the natural order of being where sociologists study the social and theologians the divine; philosophers join them at all three levels. Of course, modern society is deeply unhealthy (and one need look no further than its historically alarming fertility rates), and so instead, we get silly garbage like the demented burbling of this ignorant asshole. So I guess, in retrospect, it's not that surprising there are few (if any) reactionaries who are professional biologists. There are few reactionaries anywhere.

Should Rightists Study Leftists?

My background is in experimental psychology, so I'm naturally familiar with the widespread efforts of leftist hacks to pathologize their opponents. Adorno's work is the most famous example of this, but it's pretty widespread today; the most common narrative is that conservatism is a conglomerate of fear, aggression, dogmatism, inflexibility, intolerance of ambiguity, need for cognitive closure and certainty, and fear of death. Probably a lot of this is true, although most of these things can be recast more positively; conservatives are more aggressive because they're generally men, are dogmatic because they actually have principles and aren't spineless, fashion-obsessed sissies, are intolerant of ambiguity because they believe in truth and reality, are afraid of death because they recognize it as an evil and not as a release, and so on.

One thing I've wondered is whether or not rightists in the field (like myself) ought to return the favor. Shouldn't we study leftists? I mean really study them and their worldview, not just make up bullshit to unfairly tar-and-feather them. Many of the diagnoses of Voegelin and Dr. Charlton regarding the essential leftist belief in the irrationality of the universe and their consequent alienation from it are empirically assessible, although some psychometric measures would probably have to be devised and this always introduces a degree of uncertainty into analysis.

The advantage to such a plan of study would be that of endowing our metaphysical speculations with scientific rigor, essentially taking the battle against leftism to its own turf. Leftists can always dispute metaphysical speculation by simply denying their validity; sound statistical analysis, on the other hand, is harder to rationally dispute.

The disadvantage is that such would play into the hands of the enemy: fighting on their turf also means, to some extent, fighting on their terms. It would mean conceding valuable ground to leftist positivist epistemology. On the other hand, the epistemic discourse of the present age, whether we like it or not, is largely academic and scientific, not (entirely) metaphysical and philosophical, and so if we hope to fight the leftist menace, we have to do so in an academic and scientific manner.

Thoughts?

Are They Even Trying to Make Sense?: Abortion Edition

I confess to being quite baffled regarding the pro-choice take on whether or not the unborn (embryonic or fetal) constitutes a human person. In fact I'm inclined to regard it as typically irrational leftist bullshit, but I'm sufficiently ignorant enough about their position (having not participated in an abortion debate in some time) that this may just be me projecting my prejudices uncharitably.

Now, a sizable swath of pro-abortioners simply aren't interested in the question, approaching the issue instead strictly from a "right to choose" perspective that in no way hinges on the question of the unborn's qualities (that is to say, "a sizable swath of pro-abortioners are mad degenerates"). I'm not interested in those people. But some attempt to justify the claim that such a "right" exists by saying that the fetus is not in fact a distinct human being at all.* And this interests me very much.

But surely they don't really believe this.

There are only three ways to object to the phrase "distinct human being": by questioning its distinctness, its humanity, and its being.

Clearly the argument is not that the fetus doesn't exist, or there'd be no basis for discussion.

But otherwise, is the argument that it is not distinct or that it is not human?

Clearly, it is human: people get abortions because they don't want human children, not because they don't want -- well, whatever the alternative would be. And "humanity" in the strictly biological sense is not acquired at some later point in development, it is a fact of the fetus' existence. Indeed, it is this fact which directs its development from a human embryo into a human fetus into a human infant into a human child, toddler, teenager, and adult. So its humanity is clearly inseparable from its being.

So the argument must be that it is not a distinct being, that the fetus exists in a person the way their kidney does -- that it is one part of a whole which remains unified even after that part is removed. In other words, the fetus is of a human being but is not, in itself, a human being. This, I think, is what is being alluded to when someone says the fetus is a mere "clump of cells" (note the usual reductionism common to leftists).

But this is also obviously silly: people get abortions because they don't want human children, not because they don't want dependent clumps of cells.

At any rate, even if it were true that the fetus existed in this way, it still wouldn't lend any credence to the pro-abortion argument. Anyone who declared a right to have healthy, functioning organs removed (at taxpayer expense, in some states) just because they damn well feel like it, would rightly be regarded as a lunatic. (Well, maybe not in the depths of degeneracy to which the modern age has descended).

And, of course, the "clump of cells" argument is solipsistically vague, anyway: at what point does a "clump of cells" become objectively a distinct human person? Aren't we all, always, just clumps of cells at a strictly nonmetaphysical level?

This argument seems to rest on a conflation of distinctiveness with dependency. A thing need not cease being dependent to achieve distinctiveness; that's why we're able to talk about the fetus as a distinct entity in more than just metaphorical terms. Really, no one ever shakes dependency, nor should they. So conflating the two would lead to a "right to life" that constantly fades in and out over life, waxing when healthy (when it's least in danger) and waning when ill or injured (when it's needed most).

I guess I'm giving leftists the benefit of the doubt here by assuming there may be a rational component to these arguments that I've missed. The logical conclusion to be reached is that they don't think there's a right to life at all, at any stage of life; that they don't think there are rights, either, only conventions; that, really, they think life itself is just an illusion; and all of this because they are pretty much crazy people. They probably don't even recognize that they're incoherent, like the average crazy person.

This is generally the safest bet to assume when talking politics in the modern age.

 

*Bear in mind, of course, that this euphemism: they don't believe in rights at all.

Is Science Necessarily Modern?

We on the right tend to see scientific progress as a modern innovation, a tendency confirmed by the Enlightenment narrative of clear-headed scientists upsetting and overthrowing the irrational Christian order of the Middle Ages. Bonald, who is right to note that science has on the whole been a boon for mankind, calls science "modernity's one definite worthwhile endeavor" and is proud to be a part of it. But is it necessarily the case that science is an explicitly modern endeavor?

First, let's refute a key component of that Enlightenment narrative according to which God was the sword used by the Middle Ages to cut all the mystical Gordian knots of creation that they couldn't untangle with their bare hands. Science was not slow to progress in the Middle Ages because they were ignorant, stupid, and foolish but because their philosophical and social priorities were ordered elsewhere. The premoderns didn't look to nature with an eye toward conquering it because they didn't care about conquering nature; they reflected on nature as a means of coming to know, understand, and love God.

In part because of this pervasive narrative, we tend to forget that the scientific method was itself born from theological movements. Michael Allen Gillespie, in The Theological Origins of Modernity, suggests that science was a necessary byproduct of the nominalist revolution that had laid waste to medieval scholasticism, because it was necessary for the nominalists to assert a clear and coherent vision of the world to contrast that of their opponents.

(But curiously enough, science itself is still dependent on a realist conception of universals. There is no sense talking, for instance, about psychopathology or birth defects without presuming that there is such a thing as a norm from which they deviate. Even evolution can be said to possess a teleology of survival, hence why some evolutionary traits can be meaningfully said to be "maladaptive." That science proceeded from nominalism is really only indicative of the fact that most people don't fully grasp the logical implications of their beliefs and therefore don't act on them consistently.)

I think we also tend to associate science with modernity because of positivism, a foolish and self-refuting bit of nonsense that is alien to science itself. Positivism is simply a modern perversion of science; science itself does not make the claims that positivists make, nor could it.

In light of all this, is it possible that a society successfully governed by an antimodern philosophical movement would embrace science? I think it would, but I also think that science would occupy a diminished place in it. Government funding for research programs and tuition-subsidized bloating of academic departments would naturally give way to the social priorities of the antimodern zeitgeist, probably being redirected toward communities and churches. Scientists wouldn't be persecuted or anything of the sort, but they would be expected to accept their reduced social status and to adjust their budgets and plans accordingly.

The Problem with Positivism

How do you know that scientific knowledge is the only valid kind of knowledge?

Well, you don't. That is a value judgment (an irrational one, at that) for which no one scientific evidence exists.

One can, of course, formulate positivism differently: "scientific knowledge is the best kind of knowledge." The abovementioned problem remains, but it's less fatal. But that raises the question of how "best" is to be understood.

There are plenty of things we know to be true for which no scientific evidence does (or even can) exist. Scientific evidence is, in some ways, based on them. Mathematical axioms are a good example. You can't prove that for every two points in space there is exactly one straight line connecting them. You just accept the self-evident truth of it.

But once you do that, you're moving away from positivism. You acknowledge that scientific knowledge is, ultimately, only useful for those phenomena which science is intended to study: naturalistic and materialistic phenomena. And when you grant that, it's a short leap to assert that science necessarily has nothing to say about non-naturalistic and non-materialistic phenomena: the substance of miracles and the existence of the divine.

None of this is new, of course. But I sometimes wonder that it has to be said. I have a cold and I'm sleep-deprived, yet typing out this criticism took me all of five minutes and I engaged, like, four neurons.

Toward a Psychological Theory of Alienation

As someone with a background in social psychology, I always wondered why my field didn't take more of an interest in pretty much the defining condition of modernity: alienation. I suppose it's possible that we simply can't see the forest for the trees, and wind up focusing on comparatively little things like drug abuse. Perhaps most psychologists (being poorly educated) are simply too ignorant of philosophy and history to conjure up a useful understanding of it. It's also very possible that psychology, being in some ways the prototypical descendent of the modern philosophical project, can't bring itself to recognize alienation without acknowledging that project as a failure. Thus, what little work has been done on alienation in the field has, unsurprisingly, been done by monstrous pricks like Slavos Žižek in the context of Marxist, left-Hegelian, and Lacanian philosophical horse crap.

Can alienation be assessed as a personality trait? That is, are some people more predisposed to feel alienated, or otherwise more keenly aware of their alienation? I certainly don't see why not. Doing so would require a fairly simple operationalization of alienation, as it's a feeling that probably only vaguely registers with most people, and even that, probably only at specific times. The advantage to this is that alienation could be quantified and its interactions with various other personality traits and attitude sets studied.

Current psychometric theory suggests that, for any given personality trait, there is something like a universal score that can be assessed perfectly by a potentially infinite number of questions, and that we approximate this score by drawing from that infinite number of questions a representative random sample. The better the sample of questions, the better the approximation of the score, as measured by metrics like item-total correlation (how well each individual item predicts the overall score), internal consistency (how little the items deviate from one another in general), and factor loading (how items covary to reveal specific patterns). Factor analysis could reveal the extent to which there are different "types" of alienation (religious, social, economic, etc.), and cluster analysis could in turn reveal how different types of alienation relate to individuals' attitudes and personality traits.

There's plenty of questions to which a measure of individual alienation could yield answers to. First, are there different types of alienation: spiritual, social, and economic, for instance? If so, how closely related are they to one another? How is alienation related to political attitudes (and in what direction goes the causal relationship: does alienation drive attitudes or do attitudes drive alienation)? Are men more prone to it than women? High IQ individuals than low IQ ones? Catholics moreso than Protestants? Than atheists? Is anyone really immune to it? Does it predict psychopathology, drug abuse, and other things?

I grant that modern psychology, which has screwed up pretty much everything, probably can't do this right, either. It almost feels absurd and sacrilegeous to think of studying this problem using some of the methods that caused it to exist in the first place, by stripping the world of its mystery and reducing man to nothing more than a bundle of mechanistic impulses. Conversely, it seems like the kind of problem which psychology ought to be addressing; historically, alienation has been addressed a social phenomenon, but what is it but the aggregate of a million individuals' problems? What is psychology if not the application of scientific methods to philosophical suppositions?

I'm almost tempted to take this on myself some days, but again, that vague feeling of sacrilege is holding me back. Man's alienation is his last refuge from the remorseless, determinizing gaze of scientific progress. Why not let him have it?

Biological Determinism and You

I see the theme of biological determinism popping up in my life a lot lately. First, there was the post from Roissy on one liberal's dawning horror at the realization that much of what we do and who we are is programmed. Then, while trolling the virtual libraries for self-control-based research for a literature review I've been preparing at work, I come across some fascinating recent brain science. It turns out self-control hinges largely on people's ability to metabolize glucose.

More critically, it appears self-control can be traced to the operations of a specific area of the brain, called the dorsolateral prefrontral cortext (DLPFC). The DLPFC works by modulating the valuation signals that originate in another area of the brain, the ventrimedial prefrontal cortext (vmPFC), which tells you what you like and what you don't like. If we listened only to our vmPFCs, civilization would grind to a halt as people lose the ability to engage in goal-oriented behavior, opting instead to satisfy their immediate sexual, emotional, and appetite-based desires. The DLPFC allows you to take higher-order abstractions, such as justice, fair play, truth, or personal well-being, into consideration, modulating those valuation signals and enabling you to look at the bigger picture.

Troublingly enough, when glucose is too low or unable to be mobilized, people do, in fact, descend into degenerate barbarism, as witnessed by at least one study that found that localized glucose mobilization deficiencies in the DLPFC in murderers.

So much of this makes sense in the context of much of the alternative right's despair over, say, the war between the sexes. Women know that men with neck tattoos and sideways hats and so on are bad news, that they'll impregnate them and probably beat and rape them and that, if they acknowledge and behave like fathers at all, they'll live out the rest of their lives in homes suspended on wheels (or cinder blocks). But the part of their brain that would allow them to actually make decisions on the basis of this information is simply not interfacing with them. And so they act on immediate urges, immediate impulses, immediate wants and needs, even at the expense of their long-term prosperity. Or their children's well-being. Or their own lives.

Is this it, then? Is man merely a machine -- with parts made of protein, rather than platinum -- strung along by nervous impulses and dietary quirks? Are we all genes and metabolic processes and electrical signals flitting along neural pathways? It's a wonder some days that more philosophers haven't gone mad or killed themselves.