Commentary worth reading

 By Mathew Goldstein

There are good secularist commentators on some topics of interest who are worth reading, listening to, or watching. I am sometimes tempted to promote some of their commentary. I will start here with this commentary in Skeptic by Helen Pluckrose titled Why Secularists Calling for a Christian Revival Are Wrong. Another good article (although I consider it to be slightly flawed) in Skeptic is by Robert Deanor titled Sex is Binary?. Skeptic.com allows non-members to read two articles. 

A third set of worthwhile commentaries is in a video of a discussion sponsored by the Free Speech Union titled The War on Science Author Panel Discussion that is well over one hour long if you have the time. Some people dislike that book and advise people to not read it, other people think the complaints are trivialities. I consider the complaints to be well justified and encourage people to read the book. Science is a wherever the evidence takes us enterprise. Efforts to limit what results can be publicized and what topics can be funded and researched to avoid offending people who take offense because they mistakenly associate those results with negative social consequences hinder science without actually furthering any worthwhile social goal. We need to know what is true and false to understand what we can do, and what we should do, to promote human welfare. Knowledge is foundational, ethics that is built on ignorance is unreliable. How the universe operates is itself ethically indifferent which renders ethics more important which in turn renders knowledge of how the universe operates more important if we want to promote more ethical outcomes overall. From this perspective, religious and secular critical social justice motivated censorship get the sequencing wrong. They mistakenly claim that morality comes first and the only facts that it is acceptable to publicize or try to obtain are those facts that match a predetermined vision of which facts are themselves moral. The correct sequence is facts first and from the facts we evaluate what we can do and should do to enhance human welfare.

Life underground, meet the intraterrestrials

 By Mathew Goldstein

Karen Lloyd is an Associate Professor, University of Tennessee in the Department of Microbiology.  Yet her recent book, Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth, currently ranks higher on Amazon’s bookstore under the category physics of entropy than under the categories microbiology or ecology. The internet site of her deep subsurface biosphere lab provides a hint on how her work intersects with science beyond biology, including physics. It describes the lab’s focus as follows: “We work on determining the carbon and energy sources for the vast uncharacterized majority of subsurface microorganisms in hydrothermal vents/springs, cold methane seeps, deep oceanic sediments, coastal estuaries and bays, and subduction zones.” Following is my synopsis of the contents of this book.

Life is more varied and more plentiful then we previously realized. The current tree of life on earth is far from complete because of the unknown number of single celled organisms yet to be discovered living underground. Even with the latest technology that is enabling intrepid researchers to identify these organism for the first time, identifying underground microbes is still a difficult and time consuming task. Microbes are found in the deepest mines (5 kilometers below sea level) and in a wide variety of conditions including high pressure, acidic, salty, hot, cold, radioactive, etc.

Multicellular life relies on mitochondria to extract energy by transferring electrons from sugar to oxygen. When oxygen gains an electron it is “reduced” and when sugar loses an electron it is “oxidized”.  This “redox” reaction, which in a biological context is called respiration, produces enough energy to support multicellular life. But redox reactions are not limited to using oxygen for reduction and sugar for oxidization. Aerobic oxygen breathers are an atypical, late arriving, minority in the menagerie of life organisms.

Although some bacteria are aerobic, unicellular organisms are often anaerobic. It now appears that almost any redox reaction that is feasible is utilized by some type of life to obtain energy. At least 20 of the elements in the periodic table of elements are known to be respired by some microbe, including iron, manganese, selenium, vanadium, chromium, arsenic, uranium, and gold. These other redox reactions are less energetic than oxygen respiration which is probably why they occur only in single celled organisms. 

Underground life that respires elements found in rocks survive in a relatively dormant condition, with very slow metabolism because they rely on low energy redox chemistry. The logical implication is that individual microbes live a very long time, biding their time on geological timeframes until they experience a change to their local environment that enables them to obtain the additional energy needed to reproduce. Under what circumstances these ultra-long lived microbes, referred to as “aeonophiles”, reproduce is one of the details of their lifecycle and evolutionary history that is unknown. Their DNA is unique, they belong to new phyla, some of them do not even appear to fit comfortably within the existing three domains of archaea, bacteria, or eukoryates.

Life maintains dissipative structures that provide more opportunity for entropy production. Dissipative structures dissipate energy while maintaining a low entropy, and thus ordered, state. A chemical reaction is said to be autocatalytic if one of the reaction products is also a catalyst for the same reaction. In far from equilibrium autocatalytic contexts, entropy production, somewhat paradoxically, creates locally low entropy dissipative structures. A virus can be considered a type of a dissipative structure because it exchanges energy and matter with its environment when it infects a host cell and replicates.

Non-life features similar entropy creating processes that are locally ordered. A key difference is that life organizes itself around self-maintaining the non-equilibrium autocatalytic conditions that sustains the dissipative structures. To enable this, life encases its dissipative structures inside a membrane. The book provides the following example of the role of the membrane “All living cells continually push protons outside of their membranes. This buildup of protons outside the cell leads to an imbalance in chemical concentration that drives protons back into the cell to even it out again. This chemical/electrical pressure is called the proton motive force. It’s called “motive” because when those protons rush back into the cell, they kick a flywheel of a protein called ATP synthase that makes ATP for us. ATP provides the energy we use whenever we need to make something happen inside our cells…”

Life tends to spread entropy production over longer timescales than non-life. The second law of thermodynamics says entropy increases overall. It says nothing about the rate of increase or localized entropy decrease. From this perspective the phenomena of life exists on a continuum with non-life.

More on transgender transitioning of minors

 By Mathew Goldstein

Too often a policy topic becomes politically polarized. There are sometimes activists representing only two sides. Is our role to align our perspective with one side, the good side that is ethical and true, against the other side, the bad side that is bigoted and false? Is compromise naive weakness, a sell-out, a collaboration with the enemy? What if both sides are to some extent wrong? What if both sides are to some extent right? What if we are oversimplifying and failing to consider all of the relevant available information in part because we are listening only to one sided arguments from biased partisans? Could we ever be wrong about anything? Do we even care if we are right or wrong or is the priority always to loyally represent one side against the other side? Could we adopt an ethically upright perspective that combines some elements from more than one side with integrity? Is that even possible? 

If we accept that we have a responsibility to try to understand the relevant issues surrounding policy options before advocating for a particular policy, and that prioritizing being loyal partisan warriors for one side is not the ethical or rational approach to reaching policy decisions, then we should accept the need to allow evidence anchored discussions from different viewpoints.

Alex Byrne is a professor of philosophy at MIT.  I encourage everyone to read the following article, published June 26 in the Washington Post: I co-wrote the anonymous HHS report on pediatric gender medicine. Note his criticisms of the narrow intolerance of some activists who exhibit either an unwillingness or an inability to objectively deal with relevant evidence in its entirety. The arrogant, slandering, cherry-picking, partisan loyalty excused and justified, ideology driven, self-righteous, censorious, circular, authoritarian bullying is a substantial problem. And no, this is not a problem found exclusively on the right, it is very much a problem on both the left and right, and it is a spiraling, self-sustaining road down to dysfunction.

One of the concerns with an affirming approach to gender dysphoria is the question of what is being affirmed. Some transgender individuals, including those that medically transition, never experience gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is a genuine condition. Affirming the reality of gender dysphoria should not be controversial. Gender identity sometimes conflicts with biological sex. We do not need to know why that happens to see that it happens. 

But should we also affirm that transgender people actually are not of the same female or male biological sex they were born as? There are some people, and I am among them, who think that is going somewhat too far. Most transgender individuals are either biological male or female. Transgender transitioning does not change biological sex. Modern medicine has not overcome the immutability of biological sex in humans, at least not yet. Transgender males are not in all respects males and transgender females are not in all respects females. Some people want to deny the relevance of biological sex, other people want to deny the relevance of gender identity. Both manifestations of denialism are untenable, for example, see Sex Is A Biological Trait Of Medical Significance. Therefore, the best practice policy will prioritize either gender or biological sex (factoring in transition status) when they conflict according to which is most relevant for the context, including maintaining accurate medical records of biological sex that can be retrieved when there is a medical emergency.

The comfortable, unanimous certainty of a pleasing fiction

By a lazy Mathew Goldstein asking DeepSeek “Write chapter 5 of Gulliver's Travels Part III to satirize the effect of DEI on science today.״ Here is the response from DeepSeek:

Of course. Here is a chapter written in the style of Jonathan Swift, detailing Gulliver's voyage to the Grand Academy of Lagado's new satellite campus, satirizing the modern application of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) principles on scientific inquiry.

***

### **A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, and Japan**

### **CHAPTER VII**

_The Author’s great Disappointment at the Grand Academy’s New Campus. A detailed Account of the Institute for Harmonious Scientifical Endeavour, its Methods, and its curious Effects upon the Nation._

My stay in Lagado, though it had filled my head with a great many astonishing and ridiculous schemes, had not quenched my thirst for knowledge. I was informed by Lord Munodi, that ever-patient beacon of sense in that sea of folly, that the Projectors, not content with the ruin they had wrought upon the main Academy, had established a new and more modern institution upon the outskirts of the city. It was called, with the grandiloquence typical of the place, *The Institute for Harmonious Scientifical Endeavour*.

“They have taken the noble, if often misguided, pursuit of knowledge,” said Munodi, with a heavy sigh, “and subjugated it entirely to a new and perplexing theology. They worship not at the altar of Truth, but at the twin idols of Lived Experience and Proportional Representation.”

My curiosity, as ever, was my undoing. I obtained letters of introduction and presented myself at the Institute’s gates, which were not of iron or wood, but constructed of a soft, yielding material painted in a great multitude of colours, so that none who pushed against them would ever feel a sharp resistance.

I was received by the Institute’s Vice-Provisor, a man whose countenance was a permanent mask of earnest concern, named Dr. Lorbulgrud. He spoke not in sentences, but in a strange, incantatory jargon, peppered with phrases like “paradigm of inclusivity,” “decolonizing methodologies,” and “equitable outcomes.” I confess I understood barely one word in three, but I nodded with a feigned sagacity, lest I be thought a bigot.

“Here at the Institute,” he proclaimed, leading me into a vast courtyard, “we have moved beyond the oppressive, linear, and frankly *white* conception of so-called ‘objective reality.’ We recognise that all knowledge is situated within a cultural and identity-based context, and that to privilege one context over another is a form of epistemological violence.”

The first laboratory we entered was dedicated to the science of Mathematics. I expected to see men calculating the motions of the stars or the strength of materials, but instead I found a committee in deep, sombre deliberation over a chalkboard.

“What is the subject of their debate?” I asked.

“A matter of grave import,” whispered Dr. Lorbulgrud. “We are reassessing the value of Pi.”

“Reassessing?” I inquired. “Has a more precise calculation been found?”

“Precision is not the goal,” he corrected me, a pained smile upon his lips. “The goal is equity. The current value of Pi, approximately 3.14159, is intolerably Eurocentric. It is a rigid, immutable number, a tool of the patriarchal hegemony used to exclude those whose cultural mathematical traditions are more fluid or intuitive. This committee is devising a range of acceptable values for Pi, from which a mathematician may choose the one that best affirms their identity and cultural background. We believe this will encourage a far greater diversity of persons to feel welcome in the field of geometry.”

I saw one projector, with great excitement, propose a value of ‘3’ for its elegant simplicity and accessibility, while another argued passionately for ‘4’, as it made the squares of buildings far roomier and more inclusive.

Next, we proceeded to the Department of Natural Philosophy. A great experiment was underway concerning the law of gravitational attraction. A learned man, who I was told was the Province’s foremost authority on falling apples, was being sternly questioned by a panel of reviewers.

“Your theory,” intoned a severe-looking woman, “that all bodies are attracted to each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses, is deeply problematic.”

“How so, Madam?” stammered the philosopher.

“It is inherently hierarchical! You posit that a larger mass exerts a *greater* influence than a smaller one. This reinforces harmful power dynamics and justifies the oppression of the small by the large. We cannot, in good conscience, fund research that provides a scientific basis for tyranny. Furthermore, your use of the term ‘attraction’ is heteronormative and assumes a universal desire. Have you considered bodies that may wish to repel one another?”

The philosopher was instructed to return to his calculations and ensure his new theory of gravity promoted equity, perhaps by having all objects fall upwards, thereby liberating them from the oppressive downward pull of the Earth, which they deemed a symbol of colonialist imposition.

The pinnacle of this madness was found in the Hall of Medical Practice. Here, the aspiring physicians were not examined on their knowledge of anatomy or humours, but on their adherence to a new doctrine. I witnessed the final examination of a young candidate.

“A patient presents with a fever and a pustulent swelling,” posed the examiner. “What is your course of treatment?”

The candidate replied, “I should first lance the swelling to release the foul humours, then administer a draft of willow-bark tea to reduce the fever.”

A gasp echoed through the hall. The examiners shook their heads in dismay.

“Your answer,” the chief examiner declared, “is shockingly deficient. You have completely ignored the patient’s identity. What is the patient’s race? Their gender? Their socioeconomic status? Your one-size-fits-all approach is a relic of a brutal, colonialist medicine. The correct answer is to first determine if lancing the swelling aligns with the patient’s cultural traditions regarding bodily integrity, and to ensure that the willow bark was sourced from a community that has been historically marginalized in the field of botany. The cure is not important; it is the *process* that must be equitable.”

The candidate failed his examination, and a great cheer went up for a young woman who proposed treating the fever with affirming discourse and by blaming the illness on societal constructs of health.

I made my excuses to Dr. Lorbulgrud, my stomach churning with a mixture of mirth and horror. I sought out Lord Munodi at his estate, where the apples grew in accordance with the old, tyrannical laws of gravity, and the buildings stood at right angles thanks to the oppressive value of Pi.

“Well, Gulliver,” he said, offering me a glass of wholesome wine, “what think you of our new light of reason?”

“My Lord,” I cried, “I think the whole nation is mad! They are building a tower of knowledge without foundation, without brick, without mortar! They care not if it stands or falls, so long as every particle of dust from its construction is distributed in a manner they deem fair.”

“You have perceived the heart of it,” he replied grimly. “The fields go unplanted, for the agricultural projectors insist the sun’s energy is distributed unequally and must be petitioned to shine more upon shaded valleys. The bridges collapse, for the engineers must use a variety of building materials in exact proportion to their prevalence in the earth’s crust, whether they bear weight or not. We are a society un-learning how to function, all in the service of a theory that feels very virtuous to discuss, but produces nothing but hunger, ruin, and confusion. They have ceased to ask ‘Is it true?’ and ask only ‘Does it feel fair to the committee?’ It is a grand and noble sentiment, applied with the delicacy of a mallet to a watchmaker’s glass.”

I took my leave of Lagado soon after, a profound melancholy upon me. For I saw that a people who deliberately blind themselves to the nature of a rock, lest its hardness offend them, or who deny the flow of a river, lest its direction seem discriminatory, are doomed not merely to stagnation, but to a swift and certain decay. They had traded the difficult, often flawed, but necessary pursuit of truth for the comfortable, unanimous certainty of a pleasing fiction. And in so doing, they had made themselves not enlightened, but utterly and completely helpless.

In defense of ontological naturalism

By Mathew Goldstein

Someone recently published this “story” (using the terminology of the web site) advocating for agnosticism and criticizing atheism on a web site I never heard of: “Sorry, but atheism doesn't automatically mean you believe and understand science”. They published my response “in defense of ontological atheism”. 

At first they rejected my story on the grounds that it did not align with the purpose of the selected community. The community categories assigned to the original story I responded to was identical to the assignments of my response, the human community with a science subcategory. Having recently published an argument that agnosticism is more consistent with science than atheism, they should be willing to publish a counter-argument that atheism is consistent with science. Maybe they changed their mind about rejecting my story after recognizing that the rejection was unfair.

For a more articulate, complete, and sophisticated defense of ontological naturalism see In Defense of Naturalism by Gregory W Dawes. Following is an excerpt:

At what conclusion, then, have I arrived? I have argued that we should make a clear distinction between the procedural demands of history and the sciences and their (provisional) commitment to natural explanations. Their procedural demand is nothing more than the requirement that claims be tested against a body of publicly-accessible evidence. While I have suggested that this procedural demand is non negotiable, I have argued that it is also uncontroversial. What is controversial is the metaphysical naturalism of history and the sciences, which excludes talk of divine agency. This naturalism, I have suggested, rests on the fact that historians and scientists operate with a working ontology, a sense of what kinds of entities are likely to exist. This is drawn from both common sense and the results of historical and scientific enquiry. This ontology is merely provisional, in the sense that it could be revised given appropriate evidence. But appropriate evidence is needed. Religious thinkers who fail to offer publicly testable evidence that their proposed theistic explanations are the most adequate explanations on offer have no reason to complain if the rest of us continue to ignore them.

The liberal misinformation bubble

 By Mathew Goldstein

I once believed that information dispensed from liberal sources and institutions is more accurate and reliable than the blatantly and frequently distorted and misleading information dispensed from conservative sources and institutions. I no longer believe that. Leftist oriented commentators are also a major source of systematically biased, one-sidedly selective, story telling, the shameless dissemination of misinformation, and as committed to using almost any opportunity to politicize almost everything as rightist oriented commentators. This article published in the Atlantic magazine aligns completely with my perspective:  THE LIBERAL MISINFORMATION BUBBLE ABOUT YOUTH GENDER MEDICINE.

For decades doctors have been prescribing puberty blockers to treat precocious puberty. To argue that therefore it is a double standard to not treat gender dysphoria with puberty blockers requires overlooking the substantial difference between short term use of puberty blockers to delay puberty and a longer term use to cancel puberty. From a biological perspective it should be self-evident that delaying early puberty is less likely to have long lasting negative health impacts than preventing puberty from progressing. Equal protection before the law is not a compelling argument for reaching a conclusion that puberty blockers must be prescribed to treat gender dysphoria for minors without better evidence of no harm.

Here is an excerpt from Colin Wright’s Substack “Reality’s Last Stand” about the University of Pennsylvania’s new ban on men participating in women’s sports that is worthy of being read and considered regarding the too frequently biased reactions embedded within supposedly objective journalist news reports:

These headlines aren’t just misleading; they’re false. Lia Thomas wasn’t barred from female sports for being “transgender”; he was barred for being a male. Any other male, whether he identified as transgender or not, would be barred for the same reason. Trans-identifying males remain fully eligible to compete in UPenn athletics—on the men’s team.

Instead of focusing on the women who benefit from the university’s course correction, the media has centered its attention on Thomas. Headlines have emphasized that Thomas was “stripped of titles,” and have largely overlooked the women whose titles were restored: Anna Kalandadze, Virginia Burns, and Kayla Fu, whose records in the 500-meter, 200-meter, and 100-meter freestyle, respectively, have now been reinstated.

Predictably, proponents for allowing males to compete in women’s sports have wasted no time distorting scientific evidence to denounce UPenn’s decision. Two CNN reporters, for instance, claimed that the idea “transgender athletes have an unfair advantage in sports” is “not what the research shows.” They pointed to a 2017 review, which claimed that there was “no direct and consistent research to suggest that [trans-identifying males] . . . have an athletic advantage in sport.” But that conclusion flowed largely from the lack of studies on the question—an issue driven less by uncertainty than by the assumption that the answer was self-evident. Since then, hard data have emerged confirming what anyone with functioning eyes already knew: that trans-identifying males’ use of testosterone-suppressing drugs and cross-sex hormones only moderately reduces, but comes nowhere close to eliminating, the performance gap between male and female athletes.

Detecting androgenization when it is relevant

 By Mathew Goldstein

Here is an animated video on how sex screening in sports would work to protect female competition. This is what should happen for all serious adult sports competition contexts where there is sufficient money to provide the needed funding. It is a simple, irrefutable, fact that people gain a set of physical advantages that have a significant degree of relevance for many sports competition contexts as a result of androgenization relative to people who have not undergone androgenization. Androgenization begins in the womb and continues through childhood but these advantages mostly manifest during puberty. Acknowledging that trans-women as a group are in some respects different from women who are not trans and that trans-men are collectively to some extent different from men who are not trans does not sanction invidious discrimination against trans people nor endorse any false, negative over-generalizations regarding trans people. 

Who cares if Libertarian Free Will is scientifically incoherent?

 By Mathew Goldstein

This is a one year old, over one hour, Centre for Inquiry Canada YouTube video of Julien Musolino, a cognitive scientist, public speaker and author who holds a dual appointment as a Full Professor in the Psychology Department and the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, addressing the question Who cares if Libertarian Free Will is scientifically incoherent? Although this topic has been covered a number of times before, I like how he discusses this issue. He covers the relevant subtopics and I think this video merits more attention than it has received (so far it has attracted only 359 views). I execute long videos like this at 1.5x speed, you may want to do the same.