Snails that harpoon fish

Cone snails can be much more dangerous than they look. NOAA.

Some cone snails are armed with deadly projectiles that resemble harpoons, which they use to catch fish and other prey, and also for defense.

These snails are slow moving somewhat shy creatures that tend to hide in holes and crevices, emerging at dawn and dusk to hunt. As they creep along searching for a meal, their siphon can pick up the scent of prey and their eyes on stalks can see it, so they extend their tube-like proboscis, which can reach more than twice the length of their body, towards its potential victim.

When close enough, they use their proboscis like a blowgun, shooting out a venom-loaded harpoon at about four-hundred-miles per hour (650 km/h)—more than half the speed of sound and a whole lot faster than a Lamborghini at maximum speed. The venom paralyzes the fish, while the snail reloads another harpoon from its cache. The cone snail then reels in a cord attached to the harpoon and pulls the fish into its mouth where its radula scrapes away at it. Sometimes the prey is too large for the snail to pull into its shell, so it scrapes away outside its shell. Several hours later it spits out the bones and scales.

There are many different kinds of cone snails and they tend to specialize in one specific prey, such as worms, clams, or other snails. In some, the tip of their proboscis has many tiny tentacles for sensing prey and tiny teeth for boring through the shells of bivalves.

Cone snails can sneak up on fish. Baldomero Olivera, NIH.

Some cone snails that don’t have harpoons will sedate fish by blowing wafts of toxin into the water, or they will sneak up on sleeping fish and envelop it with their tentacle-lined net-like proboscis and smother it. Occasionally they can catch a group of small fish all at once. If the snail has harpoons, it will then shoot one into each of the fish so they can’t escape.

These poisons can vary from species to species and from individual to individual. Sometimes each individual mixes its own poisons for various uses as needed. Their harpoons are filled with venom ahead of time and stored. Each is only used once. They are less than half-an-inch long, but the poisons can be extremely toxic—some of the deadliest in the world—and some can kill you with hours, but their shells are highly valued by collectors.

 

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Fish smarts

A pufferfish. harum.koh, CC BY-SA 2.0 (adjusted, cropped).

Recently scientists have discovered that fish are actually very smart and can be favorably compared to some non-human primates. The problem in the past was that there was a dearth of information about their behavior and social lives, so many of our ideas about fish came more from intuition than evidence.

So if fish are not chowderheaded automatons operating solely on instinct, then how smart are they?

Comparing intelligence between different types of animals is difficult because they are different. Their environments, priorities, and abilities can vary significantly. Normally we measure human intelligence by asking questions about common knowledge mixed with some specialized knowledge and perhaps some algebra. This doesn’t work well with other cultures and especially not with other animals. With animals we have to look at the basics, like their ability to solve puzzles, and then we compare that with other animals. Doing this with fish has prompted a number of researchers to say that fish compare favorably in some tasks with primates, such as monkeys, which is quite surprising.

Most of the tests have so far only been done with specific species, so our assessments are limited and don’t apply to all fish. There’s bound to be considerable variation between the many different species, just as each species’ abilities will vary between the types of tests. For example, some freshwater fish—galaxias and wild rainbow trout—can learn certain tasks faster than rats. So are they more comparable to rats or monkeys? Well, it depends on what you ask them to do. Pigeons are better than people at spotting someone lost in the open ocean while searching from a helicopter, and at recognizing the shadows of cancer on an X-ray, even though their brains are only the size of a marble. It also depends on what species you’re comparing, and on the animals’ individual personalities, since some individuals in a species will be better at some things than others.

When Israeli researchers studying navigation in fish taught six goldfish to drive a fishmobile—a fish tank on wheels—using their orientation and movements. Two of the goldfish learned faster than others, but all of them soon became particularly good at avoiding obstacles to reach their target, and when allowed to roam freely, one of them took off down a corridor exploring the building.

It’s the differences between individuals that, in fact, define an individual’s personality. Whether they’re shy or bold, aggressive or passive, these are personality traits, and such differences can even be found in bacteria. Personalities do have an effect on intelligence and some individuals are smarter than others within their species and some species are more intelligent than others.

Many people think fish have poor memories or no memory at all, but this is completely wrong. We know that all creatures have some form of memory, including plants and microbes.

An international group of scientists in Texas found that bacteria not only remember things, they’re able to pass this information on to their offspring and then on to theirs for a minimum of four generations. This information tells their descendants whether they should remain in their environment or try to find someplace better to live, which is important since the one they studied splits in half every half hour or so. Even round worms remember things for at least a couple of hours.

But if we find memory in the tiniest of organisms, then it would be a huge surprise if we didn’t find it in fish. And, not to worry, fish do have very good memories.

Fish can remember things for at least a year—the amount of time studied, and for some fish their normal lifespan—and likely much longer depending on the type of fish. A shark, no doubt remembers things far longer than a minnow simply because they live a lot longer. The false idea that fish have a three-second memory stems from long-discredited hypothesis that a fish’s attention span is just a few seconds—that they live totally in the present—but we now know they do remember the past and anticipate the future, just like we do. It’s actually very easy to train fish. Unfortunately people still accept this falsehood without giving it any thought, and they’ve used that lie to justify things that are very harmful to fish.

Their long-term memories can be as good as most other animals, including some people. Here’s one rather impressive example.

Fish that live in tide pools are confined to small pools at low tide. If they discover there’s a predator, like an octopus, hiding in there with them, they need a way to make a rapid escape, so what gobies and other tide pool fish do is, when the tide is high, they memorize a three-dimensional map of the rocky shore’s topography, taking into account where the waterline will be at low tide.

Then when they find themselves in a difficult situation, they blindly leap into the air to land in the next pool, which they’re no longer able to see. They go solely by memory. If they miss, they might be able to flop around until they get in the pool without a hungry bird or crab noticing them, or they might dry up in the sun. A mistake can easily kill them. It’s a dangerous maneuver, but one that could save their life under dire circumstances.

We can make similar cognitive maps, as do many other animals. In the case of fish, it requires planning for the future, while also predicting the water levels at various times and places, but they are very good at it. Fish that were tested were successful ninety-seven percent of the time, while fish who weren’t given a chance to study the terrain made it only fifteen percent of the time. And interestingly, forty days later the knowledgeable fish still recalled their terrain maps and made successful escapes without a refresher course.

There are several types of memory and a number of ways memories can form and be retained, from iron levels in bacteria to RNA in slugs to neuron synapse connections in us, not to suggest that we don’t use all three and many others.

Fish learn from their experiences, of course, but they are very social, so much of their knowledge is gained by watching others or even from watching videos of other fish. They can also use this third-party perspective of watching others to quickly figure out their own place in the hierarchy. In addition, they’re very conscious of who’s watching them. For some fish, if two males are fighting, they’re more aggressive if other males are looking on, since it will increase their status, but they’re less aggressive when females are around when the females see aggression as less desirable in a potential mate.

Here’s a simple experiment involving time, observation, attention, and memory. When presented with a red and a blue plate of identical food, if you start eating from the red plate, the blue one is taken away. If you start with the blue plate, the red one remains there for you to eat later. With no instructions, we’d probably figure out what’s going on after just a few trials, since we’re familiar with tests and experiments, but animals wouldn’t expect such deviousness so it takes them longer.

Cleaner wrasses establish cleaning stations to groom other fish. Here black-and-white-stripped cleaner wrasses tend to two yellow-saddle goatfish. Which of these two species do you think might be smarter: the big one or the smaller one? Silke Baron, CC BY 2.0 (adjusted).

Scientists ran this experiment on orangutans, chimpanzees, capuchin monkeys, and cleaner wrasses. Unfortunately they didn’t include high-school students. All of the cleaner wrasses figured it out the fastest. Two of the chimps caught on soon after, but the rest didn’t. After modifying the test to make it easier, the rest eventually figured it out, except for the other two chimps who never got it. We don’t know how well the high-school students would have done, but one researcher tested his four-year-old daughter and she never caught on.

The researchers then swapped the plate colors so if you start with the blue plate, the red one is taken away, but only the fish and capuchins sussed the change within a hundred trials. On the other hand, while it’s not obvious, the test was designed to fit the sorts of decisions cleaner fish have to make on a regular basis, since they have to judge whether a client fish will hang around or swim away. Their regulars will be patient and more likely to wait their turn, while newbies might just take off.

Of course, primates are smart and inventive problem solvers, but they seemed to get frustrated with this task and may have just given up on it until the key suddenly occurred to them.

 

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Extremely Far Down the Rabbit Hole (What is Real? 25)

 

These posts make more sense when read in order.

Please click here for the first article in this series to enter the rabbit hole.

 

“When you say ‘hill,’ ” the [Red] Queen interrupted, “I could show you hills, in comparison with which you’d call that a valley.”

“No, I shouldn’t,” said Alice, surprised into contradicting her at last: “a hill ca’n’t be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense—”

The Red Queen shook her head. “You may call it ‘nonsense’ if you like,” she said, “but I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!”

—Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, 1871.

It’s sometimes said that if it’s green and wiggly, it’s biology. If it’s bubbly and stinky, it’s chemistry. And if it doesn’t make any sense at all, then it’s physics. Well, I’m going to attempt to make some sense out of physics.

Actually, it’s not that it doesn’t make sense. It’s that it goes against common sense. We think we know how things work, but physics shows us just how wrong we are. Most people don’t like that. They’d rather hang on to their delusions. And it’s hard for us to remember things that seem wrong.

In science, you have to be able to admit that you’re wrong and be open to alternative ideas—even when they’re weird and go against everything you thought you knew. This is especially true for physics. Physics is the most fundamental of the sciences. It deals with the building blocks of the universe and how everything interacts on the smallest and grandest scales—from the subatomic to the expansion of the universe. It is also the most peculiar of the sciences. Gravity is not a force that pulls things toward the ground—it’s a curvature of spacetime. Time does not pass at the same rate throughout the universe, but can even pass slightly faster for your head than it does for your feet. And sometimes it stops altogether. Etcetera.

We’ll get into that in a bit.

When it comes to the subatomic—the bits reality is made of—things get really bizarre and we have to cast aside common sense. Once again, science shows us that much of what we think about our world is wrong, but here it goes in the opposite direction than what I’ve already presented. As Baba Ram Dass (a.k.a. Richard Alpert)—who once worked at Harvard with Timothy Leary—pointed out, science brings us out of the void, but physics takes us back into it again. And while much of what I’m about to tell you will seem like nonsense, the evidence from solid experiments repeatedly shows us that it’s much of our normal thoughts and beliefs about reality really are nonsense.

Earlier I wrote about how most scientists assume there’s a base reality that can be tested with consistent results, while lawyers see reality as relative, and that it varies depending on one’s point of view. This changes when we enter the realm of physics. Here physicists become more like lawyers. Here things become relative and the idea of a base reality becomes shaky.

Most scientists operate under two assumptions—realism and locality. Realism says there is a fundamental reality that everyone can test and get the same results, and that doesn’t evaporate when we’re not looking. This seems to hold most of the time at the level of reality that we experience, but it all changes at the quantum level. There, there is no solid reality—things get hazy and reality does seem to evaporate. Locality says nothing is faster than the speed of light. If something happens here, it can’t instantly affect something on the other side of the universe, but somehow it seems it can, somehow violating Einstein’s speed limit for light.

In addition, there’s counterintuitive oddities, such as in one experiment at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, where engineers took a sheet of metal film that was perforated with rows of 60 nanometer holes—about the size of a virus—and they plugged these holes with caps made of gold. Then when they shined a light at the film, they obviously expected that no light would get through, but this turned out to be wrong. The plugged holes let 70% more light through than when the holes were open. The surprised engineers figured the gold caps must somehow act as an antenna for the light. My point here is that in the quantum realm, things often do not work the way you’d expect.[1]

In the quantum world, you can also get something from nothing—things appear from nowhere and disappear again; they can suddenly transport themselves to the other side of a barrier faster than if the barrier wasn’t there and apparently without passing through it; they can be two opposite things at once; time runs at different speeds and it might not even exist at all; there is no here and there; a particle or event can be in the past and future at the same time; we can and can’t know what is real; there is no empty space and yet, everything is almost nothing.

If you don’t like any of this, you can blame much of it on Einstein. But then, he didn’t like it either. I will explain...

 

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Stepping Way Outside the Box

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[1] Princeton University, Engineering School, “Blocked holes can enhance rather than stop light going through”, ScienceDaily, November 22, 2011, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111122133326.htm, citing Wen-Di Li, Jonathan Hu, and Stephen Y. Chou, “Extraordinary light transmission through opaque thin metal film with subwavelength holes blocked by metal disks”, Optics Express, 2011; 19 (21): 21098, https://dx.doi.org/10.1364/OE.19.021098.

So What’s Real? (What is Real? 24)

 

These posts make more sense when read in order.

Please click here for the first article in this series to enter the rabbit hole.

 

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

—Philip K. Dick

Okay. So everything you have ever experienced of the external world has passed through your senses, been converted into electrochemical signals, and fed into your brain, but your brain isn’t perfect and has some flaws. It messes with your perception and memories, it’s not good at keeping track of how much you had to eat, it makes you think you have more time to do things than you actually do, and it’s very good at seeing faces where there are none and conspiracies where there aren’t any. You have two blindspots about the size of bullfrogs held at arm’s length that it fills in, your retina is inside out, blocking parts of your view, your peripheral vision is blurry and lacks color, and your blinking blacks everything out, yet you’d never know it because your brain fills it all in with guesstimates. When the brain’s predictions stray too far, we call them hallucinations.

Our perceptions of the world are influenced by the variations in our senses, neuroanatomy, and experiences, so that no two people see things in quite the same way. Our perceptions are also colored by false beliefs, we believe impossible and contradictory things, and we have trouble distinguishing purpose from random chance. In addition, we make decisions and form opinions without getting the facts, preferring to rely on educated guesses, while ignoring evidence we don’t like. We create rationalizations and justifications without knowing why.

Our brains also deceive us by pumping up or deflating our self-esteem, they distort our memories, create false ones, and bury some we’d rather not be reminded of, and they subconsciously allow our biases, beliefs, and ideas to influence our decisions, even those we know to be false. Scientists call all of these, non-sensory illusions, illusions of logic, and/or cognitive illusions.

What we think of as reality is our brains’ interpretation of our world, as can be seen in optical illusions, politics, and insanity.

As theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli put it, “It takes only a few grams of mushrooms for the whole of reality to dissolve before our eyes, before reorganizing itself into a surprisingly different form. It only takes the experience of spending time with a friend who has suffered a serious schizophrenic episode, a few weeks with her struggling to communicate, to realize that delirium is a vast theatrical equipment with the capacity to stage the world, and that it is difficult to find arguments to distinguish it from those great collective deliriums of ours that are the foundations of our social and spiritual life, and of our understanding of the world.”[1]

At the beginning of my posts I mentioned that cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman believes that what we perceive is not even close to reality because reality is just too complicated—an idea that you may have dismissed out of hand when you read it, although you might see that a bit differently now. Other estimates of how much of our vision is altered or created vary depending on who you talk to, with ranges from 20% to 90% of our vision being an illusion. Perhaps it varies depending on the person, situation, and circumstances.

So what’s real? We may never know since we’re a prisoner of our senses. In the movie The Matrix, Morpheus asks Neo, “What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”

Neuroscientist Beau Lotto explains, “The photons entering our eyes, the vibrations through the air that enter our ears, the breaking of the bonds of molecules that creates friction across our skin, the chemicals that land on our tongues, and the compounds that enter our noses—all are just electrochemical energy of one kind or another. These are the elements that emanate from our physical world—real reality, as it were. Yet we don’t have direct access to those sources of energy, only to the waves of energy and gradients of chemicals that they produce. We sense the changes in stuff, not the stuff itself. It would be useless to have direct access to the ‘stuff’’ because in isolation it would mean absolutely nothing...much in the same way that a single water molecule doesn’t tell us about whirlpools.”[2]

Still, underneath it all there seems to be something we can call reality. We’re able to send spaceships to other planets with great precision, we can take pictures of individual atoms, we can alter our genes—the instructions for life—and some people can hit an erratic knuckleball flying at them at 55 miles per hour. In spite of our flaws, we can do some amazing things.

It’s probably fair to say that most scientists are scientific realists, believing, as physicist Roger Penrose put it, that reality consists of all the objects we perceive—buildings, cars, furniture, food, animals, plants, bacteria, molecules, stars, nebula; things that are physically made out of matter—in addition to some more abstract concepts such as spacetime and mathematics; that it essentially includes everything in the universe;[3] that this reality is independent of our beliefs and knowledge; and that it can be explored using the scientific method. Scientists devote their lives to exploring reality.

This is different from social reality, which makes up much of our lives. Social reality has been constructed by humans over thousands of years and is the result of consensus—it’s aspects of society that people agree on. This is somewhat flexible and varies from culture to culture. These are things in human culture that animals don’t encounter, unless they have their own social constructions. They are things like myths, money, gods, politics, laws, mortgages, personal relationships, and much of social media. Categorizations—like species, races, and stereotypes—are created. They are all products of human minds. Even your country is a social construct, no matter how patriotic you are. Nations exist because of people’s belief in them and the police and military forces that ensure their survival.

Occasionally someone comes along who insists they don’t believe in one or more of these things. They might insist that certain laws don’t apply to them, but law enforcement usually catches up with them in the end. Where I live, one business owner got away with not paying taxes for about eight years before the IRS shutdown his restaurant and took everything away from him. You don’t have to believe in social reality, but you can still suffer the consequences. This is particularly true when social reality becomes untethered from physical reality, such as with the anti-vaxxers who endanger their own children, as well as those of others.

But let’s take a quick look at some of the philosophies related to reality.

Realism is the idea that there is something that’s independent of us and it remains there when we’re not looking. It’s a world that existed before we were born and will continue after we’re dead. It continues on its merry way when we’re asleep or in a coma, and it doesn’t go all weird when we’re tripping out on hallucinogens, even though it seems like it to does.

Just as there are several type of realism—scientific realism being one of them—there are also several types of antirealism. Metaphysical anti-realism, for example, argues that nothing exists outside our minds, or that if something is there, we have no way of knowing about it. Since everything is an illusion, when you take psychedelic drugs, you are just replacing one illusion with another.

This brings us back to the question of whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if there’s no one around to hear it. According to the subjectivist view, since everything we know and experience comes through our senses, reality is a construct of our brains, therefore everything outside of our awareness either doesn’t exist or is well beyond our comprehension, which means sound depends on our awareness of it. This is the philosophy subscribed to by Deepak Chopra and others in the New Age Movement. Carrying this a bit further, some believe that everything is actually created from our thoughts.

Then there’s the social constructionists who believe truth and reality are created by society’s collective beliefs. There are those who believe that if we believe in something hard enough, it will become true, as in using imagination and visualization to alter reality and achieve your goals. This was the basis of the self-help book The Secret. And there are solipsists who feel they are the only ones who actually exist. I imagine this is how some psychopaths feel, perhaps because they lack empathy and see others as automatons for them to play with.

In between realism and antirealism is instrumentalism, which is common among physicists. They feel that it doesn’t really matter whether there’s a reality or not. That’s a matter for philosophers. As long as science can predict the results of experiments, everything is good and we can get on with our work. This is the shut-up-and-calculate school of thought.

While most scientists side with scientific realism, there’s no complete agreement yet. Scientists are still hashing it out, sometimes coming at the problem from different directions. Science writer Amanda Gefter points out that “while neuroscientists struggle to understand how there can be such a thing as a first-person reality, quantum physicists have to grapple with the mystery of how there can be anything but a first-person reality.”[4]

Even though no two people see the world the same way, humans do perceive the world in a generally similar way because we all evolved to perceive what is important to our survival. Other animals see things differently, according to what’s vital to them. As Michael Shermer put it, “Yes, a dolphin’s icon for ‘shark’ no doubt looks different than a human’s [especially since dolphins can see inside sharks], but there really are sharks, and they really do have powerful tails on one end and a mouthful of teeth on the other end, and that is true no matter how your sensory system works.”[5]

There are many different ways of seeing the world, but there appears to be an underlying reality...that is, at the level of our experience, but this becomes questionable at subatomic levels. That is our next area of exploration and it will take us further down the rabbit hole.

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Extremely Far Down the Rabbit Hole

 

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[1] Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, New York: Riverhead Books, 2018.

[2] Beau Lotto, Deviate, New York: Hachette Book Group, 2017.

[3] Roger Penrose, “The Big Questions: What is reality?”, New Scientist, no. 2578, November 18, 2006, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19225780-069-the-big-questions-what-is-reality/.

[4] Amanda Gefter, “The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality” (interview with Donald Hoffman), Quanta Magazine, April 21, 2016, https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/.

[5] Michael Shermer, “Perception Deception”, Scientific American, vol. 313, no. 5, November 2015, p. 75, and as “Did Humans Evolve to See Things as They Really Are?”, November 1, 2015, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-humans-evolve-to-see-things-as-they-really-are/.

Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right...but Three Lefts Do (What is Real? 23)

 

These posts make more sense when read in order.

Please click here for the first article in this series to enter the rabbit hole.

 

© John Richard Stephens, 2024.

If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying “End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH”, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.

—Terry Pratchett in his book, Thief of Time

A survey of more than 2,200 Americans found that one out of four didn’t know the earth revolves around the sun, which is a surprising amount.[1] Then there are those who, during the pandemic, insisted bacteria and viruses don’t exist, some of whom were killed by the Covid virus. These false beliefs did not arise from a lack of information. While part of it is from ignorance, oddly many intelligent people reject science. One research paper identified four basic reasons for this: 1) these people think scientific sources lack credibility, 2) they identify with groups that are anti-science, 3) scientific ideas or evidence conflicts with their beliefs, and 4) a person’s style of thinking doesn’t match how a scientific message is presented to them.[2]

While you’d think most people agree on common-sense questions, a rather extensive study from the University of Pennsylvania found that what people consider common sense varies considerably and that age, politics, and education don’t factor into it, with intelligence only having a very minor effect. There’s even little variance across different types of people, but overall it varies quite a bit. They concluded, “With regard to people, we find much less variation in individual commonsensicality, but still find little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people. In the extreme, the totality of what appears common sense to any individual person may be unique to them alone.”

While most people would agree that it’s not a good idea to poke your friend in the eye with a stick or to leap out of a moving vehicle unless you really have to, common sense quickly frays when you get to other important questions, such as when you’re in quarantine, should you remain in isolation or is it fine to go on vacation with a group of careful friends. Or perhaps even to go to some parties, as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson apparently did.[3]

Even though science is vital to economic growth and dealing with threats like climate change, many politicians are anti-science. In 2022, of 536 members of U.S. Congress, only three were scientists, while 194 were lawyers.[4]

While understanding the law is probably very useful in politics, lawyers are taught that issues have sides and disagreements are something to win—a net-zero game, when it rarely is.

Courts are designed to be adversarial. Each side fights to prevail over their opponent. Ideas like truth and reality, or even actual innocence and guilt, don’t factor in. They’re considered relative and dependent on one’s point of view. The defense has to presume innocence and the prosecution has to presume guilt. They each present evidence and testimony that conflicts with the other’s, along with experts that give alternate explanations. It’s not really a quest for truth, it’s more like a debate or a game. In fact, the lawyers aren’t required to tell the truth—only witnesses are. Lawyers can, and do, lie to the jury. They’re not supposed to withhold evidence, but sometimes they do when it would hurt their case. The judge then takes something that’s hazy and turns it into black and white.

A person is innocent until the court decides they’re guilt, and once the court finds someone guilty, then they are considered guilty, whether they committed the crime or not. It’s one reason why judges are often hesitant to reopen cases where new DNA testing can prove a prisoner didn’t commit the crime. To them it’s like giving the losing side a second chance to win the championship. And when everything is considered to be relative, nothing can be proven anyway. Also, saying a prisoner was wrongly convicted can affect the careers of prosecutors and judges, along with opening the government up to multi-million dollar lawsuits.

Science takes a very different approach. Most scientists assume there’s a reality out there and we can learn about it through tests and experiments. Some people wrongly think of science as a belief system, but it’s not. It’s based on evidence that can be verified and its ideas and interpretations follow the evidence. Knowing something is true because of evidence is very different from believing something is true. Belief implies a lack of evidence, even though people attempt to gather evidence that supports their beliefs. When there is evidence, it becomes science.

While scientists do have beliefs that are usually based on or inspired by the evidence and a large group of them promoting their belief can sometimes come to dominate a field, all it takes is one Einstein to come along with a rebellious new idea, and if the evidence backs him up, the group is eventually forced to give in to the evidence. While such revolutions are rare on the large scale, they do happen and they’re exciting, interesting, and revelatory. But once the new idea dominates, another Einstein might come along with something better. This is not a flaw in science—it’s how it improves and becomes more accurate.

When you view things as relative and your doctor tells you you have a fatal disease, you might feel your fate has caught up with you. Scientists, on the other hand, focus on cause and effect. They will conduct experiments to discover what it is, how you got it, where it came from, how it works, and how to combat it. Most don’t believe in fate, although we will look at some alternate ideas to this later. In ancient times people believed diseases were caused by the gods. In the past couple centuries science has discovered it’s usually microbes or genetics and this has enabled us to develop cures for many of them.

Scientists do make mistakes and experimental results sometimes turn out to be wrong. Probability guarantees it. This is why replicating experiments is so important. If results can’t be replicated, then something is wrong and it needs to be reexamined. That’s part of the verification process. Eventually errors come to light and we make corrections. In other words, science is self-correcting.

But this leads to a peculiar way scientists view the world that most people don’t understand and can cause problems when scientific results reach the general public through the media. In science, a hypothesis cannot be proven. No matter how much evidence there is, you can’t verify a hypothesis, because no matter how unlikely, there’s always the extremely remote possibility that a single observation will arise that shows the hypothesis to be false. Since science is very good at disproving hypotheses, scientists like to be extra cautious.

When writing for the general public, this doesn’t come across well, so you often see things presented in more absolute terms. That applies to parts of these posts as well, although I’ve tried to restrict it to those bits that have the most evidence.

But it is why scientists don’t normally talk in absolutes, as most people are used to. People like information that is definite. They want yes or no answers—not probably or most likely answers. Even with such a thoroughly tested idea as evolution where there’s mountains of evidence and no viable alternative, scientists still prefer to leave a little wiggle room. It’s remotely possible that someday someone might discover a fossil that’s not in the proper timeline, such as finding a chicken before the age of the dinosaurs. Since chickens evolved from a dinosaur, finding a chicken older than the dinosaurs would be hair-raising. Even though the possibility of that happening is so vanishingly small as to be nearly non-existent, scientists leave their options open as a general policy. That should definitely not be taken as a lack of knowledge or uncertainty.

We need to remember that science is behind most of our most amazing accomplishments in medicine, exploring the solar system and out to the furthermost visible galaxies, understanding microbes and subatomic particles, and technology, from our computers to our smart cars to our smart phones. You can even find it to a lesser degree in the arts. You can find it behind almost every aspect of our modern lives.

It’s very important to understand science. As Carl Sagan put it in his book, The Demon-Haunted World:

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements—transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting—profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.[...]

Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.[...]

Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves. I worry that[...] pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us—then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

“The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”

 

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So What's Real?

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[1] Agence France Presse, “One in four Americans unaware that Earth circles Sun”, Phys Org, February 14, 2014, https://phys.org/news/2014-02-americans-unaware-earth-circles-sun.html.

[2] Ohio State University. “The four bases of anti-science beliefs—and what to do about them: Politics have potent effects on attitudes, researchers say,” ScienceDaily, July 11, 2022, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220711163156.htm, citing Aviva Philipp-Muller, Spike W. S. Lee, Richard E. Petty, “Why are people antiscience, and what can we do about it?”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022; 119 (30), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2120755119.

[3] “Partygate: A timeline of the lockdown parties”, BBC, March 21, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-59952395.

[4] “Membership of the 117th Congress: A Profile”, Congressional Research Service, September 30, 2022, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46705.

Life’s a Variable-Sum Game (What is Real? 22)

 

These posts make more sense when read in order.

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Down for the count in a zero-sum contest.

Now let’s take a quick look at game theory. In general there are two types of games—zero-sum games and variable-sum games. In zero-sum games, when you win, someone else loses. These are games like chess, tennis, polo, basketball, and demolition derbies. The problem is that many people make the error of applying this to other areas of their lives. Actually, zero-sum games were created to be the way they are and you will rarely find them in other areas of your life.

In zero-sum situations, everyone can win. We just have to focus on what benefits the most people, regardless of their group affiliations.

Variable-sum games are much more common and considerably more complex. Here players can have opposing interests, but they can also have common interests. In certain circumstances, all players can win to some degree, although usually a player will win in some ways and lose in others. Countries usually try to design treaties to be win-win for each other, although one might gain more than the other. An increase in trade should benefit everyone, yet the people who benefit often see it as negative, thinking that since the other country benefits, that means their country will suffer. That’s not so in general. Both countries can benefit, such as when their GDPs get larger, but on an individual level it can be a zero-sum game if they close down your factory so they can open one in another country. While a treaty can benefit most of the people, there are some who might be hurt.[1]

A more insidious way people mistakenly apply zero-sum ideas to a variable-sum game is when it comes to immigration. People tend to think immigrants are taking away from them, often saying “they are taking our jobs”. That’s zero-sum thinking. First off, most immigrants do jobs that no one else wants to do or help fill labor shortages.[2]

Have you ever tried harvesting grapes? I did for a couple of hours and it wiped me out. Not only were my back and legs killing me, in spite of wearing gloves, my hands had blisters that took a couple of days to heal. I also recall encountering many spiders. It gave me a great appreciation for those who do that work. Most people couldn’t do it even if they wanted to.

What also happens is that immigrants expand the local economy, creating new jobs where there were none before. These people don’t just take. They are going to spend money on food and clothes and all the other things we need to live. Some of them are also going to start businesses, from landscaping to nail salons to corner shops. This benefits not just their community, but those around it. While this can place a greater demand on services, those services are normally able to expand or adjust to meet the demand. People assume they are getting free services and government benefits. Surprise! It’s the large companies and corporations who are getting literally billions of dollars in corporate welfare from taxpayer money, and in spite of their huge profits, most of them don’t pay taxes. I have a large file on this. While it is regularly reported, people don’t seem to notice. What immigrants get is less than a drop in a bucket compared to that.

Even though the government takes money from immigrant’s pay checks for these services, immigrants are much less likely to apply for them—particularly illegal immigrants.

Overall, the evidence shows that immigrants take out much less than they put into the economy.[3] In places where the economy is shrinking, immigrants are needed in order to maintain that area’s level of services and to maintain the quality of life the community is used to. Otherwise, businesses close and the residents are forced to move away to greener pastures.

This has been happening in Japan since the 1990s. As the population continues to shrink, the value of yen keeps falling, but now the U.S. population is also beginning to shrink. One way to expand the economy is to accept more immigrants. Japan currently is resisting doing this and their people are suffering because just about everything costs a lot more. The bottom line is that immigrants are good for the economy.

Then there’s the criminal immigrants myth. Statistics show that between 1980 and 2016 the immigrant population increased while crime stayed the same or dropped in 136 American cities, including the 10 areas with the largest increase in immigrants, such as New York City and Miami which had large decreases in crime. While immigrant populations increased everywhere between those years, only 54 cities had an increase in crime.[4] The two things are clearly unrelated.

Out of any sizable population, there are going some people who commit crimes. If you focus on those, you are emphasizing exceptions, which provides a distorted view.

Sports and games condition people to think in zero-sum terms, making it very difficult to distinguish conditions that are variable sum.

Finally there’s our negativity bias. This is very apparent in the news media where the focus is on the negative news, not the positive. The positive just doesn’t grab our attention like the negative does. We focus on atrocities, disasters, corruption, crime, and what outrages us. That’s what brings in and holds viewers, so that’s what the media gives us. And it’s not just the news and social media, you also find it in fiction and movies. The downside is that it distorts our views of the world. We end up seeing things with a negative distortion and fail to notice the positive. We start to believe the negative aspects are much more widely distributed than they are. This also distorts our perception of risks.

At the extremes of negativity bias are those who are convinced we’re on the verge of an apocalypse. In the 1950s and 1960s people were building backyard fallout shelters far away from likely nuclear targets. In the 1980s they began building survivalist retreats in remote areas to avoid society’s collapse. This isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s been going on for more than three thousand years. You can find instances of people claiming the world was coming to an end at least that far back. Negativity bias appears to have a hand in all of this. Those who aren’t at the extremes can still become very cynical or depressed, or both.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t real threats. The threat of nuclear war is very real. And there’s overwhelming objective scientific evidence that our destruction of the environment is increasing extinctions and altering the climate, both of which could very well lead to our own extinction.

As I mentioned, negativity bias also affects our ability to assess risk. We do face many threats, but most of them are unlikely to affect you. People still fear Islamic terrorists, while ignoring the greater threat from other extremist groups. In the United States in 2017, Islamic terrorists killed nine people, while white supremacists killed twice that and anti-government extremists murdered an additional seven. In other words, almost three times as many people in the United States were killed by American terrorists.

Annually in the United States, sharks, bears, and alligators kill about one person each, while around 22 are killed by cows, or by toddlers with guns. You have a 1 in 46,044 chance of dying in a cataclysmic storm, a 1 in 148,756 chance that you’ll be killed in an earthquake or earth movement, and a 1 in 175,803 chance that a flood will get you, but your chance that heart disease will kill you is 1 in 6.

Because we’re bad at assessing risk, we tend to focus on sharks and terrorists, instead of the threats of nuclear war, climate change, and heart disease.

 

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Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right...but Three Lefts Do

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[1] Graham Lawton, “Zero Sum”, New Scientist, no. 3156, December 16, 2017, pp. 28-30, and as “Effortless thinking: Why life is more than a zero-sum game”, December 13, 2017, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23631560-400-effortless-thinking-why-life-is-more-than-a-zero-sum-game/.

[2] Krystal D’Costa, “What Are the Jobs That Immigrants Do?”, Scientific American, August 9, 2018, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/what-are-the-jobs-that-immigrants-do/.

But they don’t all stay in low-paying jobs. Christopher Brito, “She came to the U.S. with only $300 and worked housekeeping jobs to pay for school. Now she’s a flight director for NASA’s Mars Perseverance”, CBS News, March 1, 2021, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/diana-trujillo-nasa-mars-rover-perseverance/.

[3] Amy Maxmen, “Migrants and refugees are good for economies”, Nature, June 20, 2018, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05507-0, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05507-0.

And Debora Mackenzie, “The truth about migration: How it will reshape our world”, New Scientist, April 6, 2016, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23030680-700-the-truth-about-migration-how-it-will-reshape-our-world/.

[4] Anna Flagg, “The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant”, The New York Times, March 30, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/30/upshot/crime-immigration-myth.html.

Roll of the Dice (What is Real? 21)

 

These posts make more sense when read in order.

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If I were to have a monkey flip a coin 50 times and I make a list of whether it came up heads or tails, and then if I have you create a random list of 50 heads and tails, by comparing the two lists it will be easy to tell which is actually random because that one will have sequences of five or more times that heads or tails came up in a row. Normally we wouldn’t put that in a random list because it doesn’t seem random to us, but probability tells us that it is possible to have all 50 flips turn out to be heads. To us, that doesn’t seem random. If we’re watching coin tosses and every one is heads, we’re going to be convinced something funny is going on, when actually it could be chance.

If you spin a roulette wheel and it comes up black 26 times in a row, the chances of that happening is 1 in 136,823,184. One is almost 137 million. That seems astronomical, but it can happen. Actually black did come up 26 times in 1913 at Monte Carlo. Perhaps it’s happened elsewhere, but was attributed to a faulty wheel, when it was actually just probability.

Those of us who are unfamiliar with probability have difficulty telling random patterns from non-random because it’s easy to find patterns in random data. Mathematician George Spencer-Brown wrote that if you have a random series of 101000007 digits of zeros and ones, you should find somewhere in there a grouping of a million consecutive zeros—and not just one group, but ten of these groups.[1]

That’s the problem we have with probability. We tend to think that when something is random, it won’t have patterns. This is wrong. Patterns do appear by coincidence. And coincidences—no matter how striking or rare—do not indicate something isn’t random. Coincidences happen all the time and it’s our nature to try to link them together—to give them meaning. Chance and randomness do play a role in our lives, but we prefer to subscribe meaning or intention to such events. Once you subscribe imagined meaning in something it’s hard to switch back to seeing its randomness. Some people prefer to believe it’s ghosts, extraterrestrials, or a conspiracy.

If your child is walking down the street and is killed by a golf ball, even though there isn’t a golf course for miles around, you’re going to think chances of this happening are a billion to one so someone must have done it on purpose. Well, it still could be completely random. Probability predicts that strange things will happen, even if the chance is one in a billion.

One expert on statistics found that even she has to be cautious when it comes to probabilities. Dutch mathematician Ionica Smeets said, “It’s easy to get confused with probabilities. I’ve learned not to trust my intuition.”[2]

One of the things that distort our intuition is that we’re interested in exceptions, rather than what’s common. If you often cross a particular street at a particular spot and one time you almost get hit by a truck, you’re going to remember that incident. Even though that spot might be safer than other spots, you’ll likely be more cautious there after that.

The same thing happens on a much larger scale with the news media. As they say, if a dog bites a man, that’s probably not news, but if a man bites a dog... The news largely deals with exceptions and extremes. This can make situations and events seem much larger and more dangerous than they are.

When the volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island erupts, people start contacting me to see whether I’m alright. They may see lava moving down the mountainside or even spouts of lava on the news. Of course the volcano can be very dangerous for those nearby. It can shoot lava bombs for thousands of yards (or meters) and the pouring lava—which moves at the rate of about a mile a day—will destroy almost everything in its path. Still, it wouldn’t affect me as I live about a hundred miles away on Maui, the next island over. Not that we can’t have an eruption here, but the last one was about 600 years ago.

Terrorists rely on this effect in order to terrorize people. After the September 11, 2001 attacks on Twin Towers and the Pentagon, people were afraid to fly, opting to drive instead because of this single incident. Over the next five years 5,500 additional people died from driving than in the previous five years. The fear that terrorists were everywhere spread across the entire country. The news of the attack was so shocking and became so personal to people that many of them truly believed that they or their families were about to become the terrorists’ next victims.

Shortly after the attack I was in Morro Bay, California—a rural area on the other side of the country—standing on a small hill photographing a horse in its corral, when a truck pulled up nearby and the driver started yelling at me that he was going to call the police and have me arrested as a terrorist, adding that I couldn’t be out photographing the power lines. Now, this is the type of hysteria the terrorists are trying to create, and the news reporting unintentionally enhances it.

On a smaller scale this effect distorts our perception of risks and probabilities. Many people are afraid to fly, yet, even with terrorist attacks, air travel is much safer than driving. For every 50 billion miles traveled, 750 people die on the roads, while only one person dies from flying.[3] With those odds, everyone should opt for flying. And we drive kids to school to prevent them from being abducted, not realizing it puts them at higher risk of harm. People are afraid of sharks, when mosquitoes kill far more people because of the diseases they spread. Even cows kill more people each year than sharks do. Cigarettes do too.

Vaccinations date back to the 1400s and have saved millions of lives in the past century alone. They protect against the horrible ravages of diseases and help hinder their spread, yet despite the fact that the chance of side effects is slim and the severity of the side effects are usually minor, some people choose to focus on that, rather than the devastating and often fatal diseases they prevent.

Unfortunately we tend to make decisions based on intuition, impressions, and emotions, rather than statistics and scientific facts. We fail to take into account that the news is usually based on anecdotes and not science. Once again, our perceptions of reality are distorted.

I could go on about this for a long time, but I’m short on space and want to move on to other things. Before I do, I feel I should mention a few more common thinking errors related to probability that get people into a lot of trouble.

The first is

the hot-hand fallacy. Probability dictates that everyone is going to have hot and cold streaks. This applies to investing, gambling, sports performance, and to business. The fallacy is when we ascribe talent or incompetence to what is actually random chance. In business, chance streaks have built reputations and brought promotions for some, while chance failures have ruined the careers of others who are just as talented, or perhaps even more so.

While talent does play a role, much of success or failure depends on randomness, like the toss of a coin. Theoretical physicist Leonard Mlodinow, in his book Drunkard’s Walk, explained that “in all aspects of our lives we encounter streaks and other peculiar patterns of success and failure. Sometimes success predominates, sometimes failure. Either way it is important in our own lives to take the long view and understand that streaks and other patterns that don’t appear random can indeed happen by pure chance. It is also important, when assessing others, to recognize that among a large group of people it would be very odd if one of them didn’t experience a long streak of successes or failures.”[4]

The gambler’s fallacy is the mistaken belief that, in a game with a fixed probability, the odds of something happening will increase or decrease based on recent results. In other words, just because a slot machine hasn’t hit the jackpot in the past month doesn’t mean that it’s due to strike. And just because it paid out doesn’t mean it’s not going to strike again for a while.

This error is part of our natural tendency to see meaning in things. We expect the past to influence the future and we search for patterns, but with fixed probabilities, the likelihood of something happening is reset to zero every time. The odds are exactly the same with each play. It’s the same as if every play is on a brand new slot machine, no matter how long you play on it. Probability can explain what a lot of people call jinxing or luck. Good streaks and bad streaks are a feature of chance and only apply to the past. They have absolutely no effect on the future because the odds always remain the same. There’s no way around it without cheating. If it’s a fair game, it’s impossible to beat the system, unless you can count cards. If it’s not a fair game, then you aren’t going to win anyway...that is, unless you’re the one doing the cheating.

When it comes to gambling, the odds are always set slightly in favor of the house. This means that while you might win in the short run, you’re almost always going to lose in the long run. Just stand in a casino and look around. You can easily see who the winner is. It’s the casinos that are raking in the dough. The odds will throw out cookies once in a while. On rare occasions they throw out really big cookies, but it’s still peanuts compared to the casino’s take. But most people don’t really notice. They have their eyes on the prize. They also have a tendency to forget their losses and remember their winnings. This can make them feel like a winner, even when they’re actually losing.

Professional gamblers don’t play against the house, avoiding slots, roulette, dice, and blackjack. They seek out better odds, usually playing games like poker where they can win against less experienced gamblers.

Still, for most people, when black comes up seven times in a row on the roulette wheel, it’s hard not to think that red is due to come up, but that’s the gambler’s fallacy.

What can make gambling, video games, and surfing the internet addictive is the sporadic nature of the rewards. You never know when you’ll get one. And the more time you invest in getting the prize, the harder it is to leave. If the rewards are regular, like your paycheck, it doesn’t become addictive. It’s the uncertainty and the expectations that make each reward more highly prized when they come. This effect is seen in rats and mice, as well as humans. And the rewards can range from money to finding a humorous cat video.

 

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Life's a Variable-Sum Game

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[1] George Spencer-Brown, Probability and Scientific Inference, London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1957, p. 55.

[2] Manon Bischoff, “Statistics Are Being Abused, but Mathematicians Are Fighting Back”, Scientific American, September 30, 2022, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/statistics-are-being-abused-but-mathematicians-are-fighting-back/.

[3] Pradeep Mutalik, “When Probability Meets Real Life”, Quanta Magazine, February 8, 2018, www.quantamagazine.org/the-bayesian-probability-puzzle-20180208/.

[4] Leonard Mlodinow, Drunkard’s Walk, New York: Pantheon Books, 2008.