There are obviously many discussion points here and I would like to dwell on them in length, but I am not going to do that. Instead, I want to highlight two patterns:

ONE:  In both videos there are snippets suggesting the “end of the world” as we know of it and a vague Neo-Marxist resurrection of the human civilization.

TWO: Žižek was wearing, believe it or not, the same Bogazici University t-shirt in both videos.  Ironically, an institution that was founded as an American Missionary school in 19th Century Istanbul.

Disclaimer: Bogazici happens to be my alma-mater.

The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned. Why concern, why not joy that freedom is given a chance? Today, more than ever, Mao Zedong’s old motto is pertinent: “There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent.

via Why fear the Arab revolutionary spirit? | Slavoj Žižek | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

I wish I could say I remember the fall of the Berlin wall, but I don’t; what I do remember is hearing the news that in Timișoara, the people were on the streets, demanding an end to the dictatorship. You could feel it getting closer every day. But everyone was concerned about the number of protesters and what the Western powers would do. Fear is the hardest thing to overcome in such times. The protests were big enough for the West to notice, grandpa would say, but were they big enough to inspire confidence of success? Had they really occupied a whole square? The police quarters? Would the Americans and the British and the French accept the changes, or would there be a new Yalta agreement? Our information, even coming from the alternate media, was patchy, and even today many of my Western friends have a much more linear narrative of our revolution than we do, who lived through it.

In the end, we all know the fairy-tale ending as well as the not-so-fairy-tale aftermath of the 1989 revolutions of Eastern Europe. And it’s always been speculated that the media played a huge role in mobilizing the citizens to come out on the streets – especially to give them the confidence that it could be done. But what now of the contemporary movements? Many Westerners have told me that it was surreal to watch our revolution on TV. Many told me we should be proud of having had the first televised revolution. I didn’t quite get that then, but now, as I’m one of the Westerners at the end of a computer screen searching the internet for news on Egypt, I’m starting to see it: the revolution from without – the human drama of the fight for freedom, on the big stage, the world stage. Sit back and, whatever you do, don’t switch your mobile device off.

We first got excited about Iran’s so-called Twitter Revolution earlier in 2010, but, despite all the hype, it’s not at all clear what the new information technology does for protesters. What’s certain, as Malcolm Gladwell just gets it in his brilliant New Yorker article, is that Facebook and Twitter aren’t how the revolutions get started. You need guts to be a hero, and the last thing Facebook gives you is guts. But new media may accelerate the process of spreading the news – what Radio Free Europe used to be for us, the whole of the internet probably does for these guys in Cairo or Teheran. Revolutions are successful only when everybody joins in, not just the brave few who risk their lives to get the spark going. And that means all those ordinary, normal people, who have much to lose, and who sit at home in front of their gold-knobbed radios/smartphones, chewing their nails in anticipation of the moment when it will be relatively safe to come out and join the protests. For these people, a support network from outside, nurturing the hope that the rebels will not be squashed, and encouragement by what they perceive to be their human brothers and sisters – these are essential for the movements to finally gain momentum. And when they don’t – well, then, the heroes die.

And what is the voice of America now? What does the Free World think about the Arab revolutions? The West, so eager to chastise and condemn, so ready to proclaim and to scold, and so meddlesome in other people’s business, only manages to squirt a few cautious commonplaces about what the aftermath might be and how it will affect the price of oil or holidays (in the case of Tunisia). Take, for instance, out of the Guardian’s Q&A on Egypt’s protests:

And for the west?

As reflected in the mild comments from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on Friday, western politicians need to achieve the right balance between backing the people’s legitimate demands and protecting their own interests. It is not good for western powers to lend their support to autocratic regimes. But it is in no one’s interest to have a political vacuum in countries where extremism and violence can flourish and where much of the world’s oil reserves are managed.

I’m not naive enough to take Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize seriously (or the Nobel committee for Peace in general; after all, Gorbachev got the prize as well, several months after refusing Lithuania its independence and followed his prize acceptance with sending troops to storm Vilnius). But sending such cynically vague messages of support (if that’s what they’re trying to be) must not do much for those protesters. Even worse are the commentators who worry that these Arab countries will turn to Islamism, or that revolutions result in power vacuums or turnovers that are too fast, leading to chaos and instability, concluding that it’s best if the people just ‘wait till the dictator dies’…

If we in the West are so pleased with ourselves and our cultural achievements, especially in the domain of portable technology and social networking on the internet (for what, other than a justification of our procrastinatory and alienating, increasingly trifling level of communication in the form of barely grammatical bursts of brain activity, is the whole fuss about the Twitter Revolution?), let’s at least show some [safe internet] solidarity with those men with sticks on the streets of Cairo, and give them the benefit of the doubt that they’ll enjoy their newly-won freedoms with at least as much responsibility (or lack thereof) as the Eastern Europeans…

It seems that genomics (and -omics, in general) is here to stay.

We should all sharpen our intellectual tools to deal with the surge of data and its implications to sciences and humanities, alike.

China spurs quest for human variome : Nature News.

A new look at the emerging discourse of the “New Atheists” by Stephen Asma. I want to highlight two new discussion points introduced by this assay:

First is the argument that even if God does not exist, belief in a supernatural power (to explain unpredictable chaos around us) is intrinsic.  Quoting Asma:

…[M]y ar­gu­ment—that re­li­gion soothes emo­tion­al vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty—can’t be “conde­scend­ing” if I’m also ap­ply­ing it to my­self. Like Sam Har­ris, I know a fair share of neu­ro­sci­ence, but that didn’t al­le­vi­ate my an­guish and des­per­a­tion in the emer­gen­cy room with my son. The old saw “there are no athe­ists in fox­holes” ob­vi­ous­ly doesn’t prove that there is a God. It just proves that high­ly emo­tion­al be­ings (i.e., hu­mans) are also high­ly vul­ner­a­ble be­ings. Our emotional limbic system seeks homeostasis—it tries to reset to calmer functional defaults when it’s been riled up. I suspect there are aspects of religion (and art) that go straight into the limbic system and quell the adrenalin-based metabolic overdrive of stress.

This statement immediately leads to the conclusion that religion (or belief in the supernatural) is here to stay.  So, the issue, Asma would argue, is to promote the “right” kind of religion.

The second issue is about “class”. Asma argues:

…most friends and even en­e­mies of the new athe­ism have not yet no­ticed the pro­vin­cial­ism of the cur­rent de­bate. If the horse­men left their world of books, con­fer­ences, classrooms, and com­put­ers to trav­el more in the de­vel­op­ing world for a year, they would find some un­fa­mil­iar religious arenas.

Asma hints, throughout his assay, that animistic and Budhist traditions are in a way, better, more inclusive, more liberal, etc. than the forms of Christianity and Islam that the new atheists have been criticizing. This is, I believe is a stretch. At the same time, he is pointing out an important limitation of the new atheism. Not necessarily because their core-argument is wrong, but their science may be biased and not well-contextualized to catch the nuances hidden in the lives, beliefs and behavior of myriad of different cultures and populations scattered across the world.

via The New Athe­ists Nar­row Worldview – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

[Thanks to Yase, who brought it to my attention.]

The article is about the “decline effect” in scientific findings.  In short, the article talks about a phenomenon that is defined as the decline of statistical significance of results/conclusions in consecutive replications of the same (or similar) studies.  I am not going to go into details of why this is happening, as Jonah Lehrer, arguably one of the most interesting scientific writers out there (see his blog Frontal Cortex if you do not believe me), did a fantastic job of describing and interpreting the phenomenon. He is also citing several very interesting papers, and these primary sources for his arguments can be found in the his article.

I want to make two inter-related points, regarding the arguments presented Lehrer’s writing.  Hence, if you want to read on, it would be great if you can have a look at the original article.

The first point I want to make is that critiques of the scientific method are mostly inadequate and flawed.

I can make this claim with some authority as, on the one hand, I had to deal with intense criticism for my anthropological research, and on the other hand, I have experienced first-hand the lack of a powerful and meaningful critique of biomedical research.  Unfortunately, it seems to me,  criticism leveled at the scientific method (and its product) in the United States is trapped between an anti-intellectual witch-hunt from the political right (e.g., the creationist movement) and the relativistic/ethical critiques (from Adorno to Merchant and, more relevant to my work, Duster).  Especially the latter is relevant and raises important questions. However, what they fail to do is to treat science as what it is: a very dynamic and complicated system of institutions, ideas and processes that are mostly hold together by well-trained people (with all the flaws and inadequacies of humans) with intense devotion to the value of the scientific method.

Scientific discourse, like any other specialized discourse, is not immediately accessible to non-scientists. Hence, the finances and public support of science are only kept alive by constant reminders – by scientists, mostly – that scientific work is relevant. As such, scientists are in an odd dilemma: They have to present their work as generalistic, high-impact truth claims (i.e., as powerful predictors of the future, cures to diseases, answers to big questions of the universe, etc.) to secure funding and public acceptance.  This goes completely against the way science works – think of Thomas Kuhn’s interpretation, which clearly defines good science as falsifiable – as most of the scientists build their careers refuting older scientific claims and that skepticism is one of the most favored traits among scientists. As such, scientists have to live in this schizophrenic intellectual niche: on the one hand presenting their work within the context of short-term, high-impact benefits to society, and on the other hand, dealing with the unpredictable, competitive, and mostly non-translational (read no foreseeable public good) world of the scientific process.

It seems to me that this discordance between the conduct and reporting of the scientific process is at the core of the contemporary criticism of science.  The creationists (or any other anti-science discourse) pick on the fact that there is constant debate about scientific claims among scientists (e.g., how did the eye evolve or how the genome affects the phenotype), implying that science is actually not a powerful tool for understanding anything, since no one can agree on the ‘truth’. On the other side of the spectrum, many academic critiques (mostly from humanities) accuse scientists to be deterministic in their work (i.e., they produce powerful truth claims that have had negative public consequences, such as racism). Even though both of these issues are important to think about, neither type of critique adequately addresses the scientific process itself and its relations with the greater economic, social, and cultural dynamics.

Lehrer’s account of the “decline effect” serves as a great example of why a more sophisticated critique of scientific progress is both relevant and interesting. Lehrer’s conclusion is a fascinating one as he summarized in one of the concluding sentences:

We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

This statement regarding the scientific process seems to resonate with some of the post-modern, relativistic critiques of scientific discourse. However, there is a fundamental distinction.  The former depends on studies conducted by researchers actively questioning their own findings. As such, science is still brave enough to constantly question itself and face its own demons.

That makes me proud to be part of the process.

YouTube – RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms.

http://www.youtube.com/v/zDZFcDGpL4U

Also, note that, in a twist of irony, he, the shadow scholar, writes really well, feels responsible, thinks through the problem at hand.  He, as such, is a good scholar.

http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125329/

Edge: Consensus Document — The New Science of Morality.