my response to Massimo Pigliucci's essay "Chess, psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology and the nature of pseudoscience"

Essay is here: Chess, psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology and the nature of pseudoscience

my response:

I think it's disingenuous to lump sociobiologists in the same boat with Freudian psychologists. Sociobiology is grounded in the natural sciences--in biology, genetics, chemistry and physics. Freudian psychology is not. Just because you are unable to imagine an easy way to gather experimental evidence for a given scientific theory does not disqualify it as a valid hypothesis. I personally cannot imagine experiments that could be used to validate theories of General Relativity, but that doesn't discredit the fundamental scientific nature of the theory. Scientists are still working on devising new experiements to test Relativity half-a-century after this theory was proposed.

You've used this line of argument before. In your essay, "Do you believe in human nature?", you wrote:

"Our genetic makeup certainly poses limits to what we can and cannot do, but how ample those limits are is currently largely beyond the scope of human biology, partly because we cannot do the right experiments that would settle the matter (it is both impractical and unethical to breed human beings and raise them under controlled environmental conditions, which is what we do with other animals and with plants when we wish to study gene-environment interactions)."

But you inability to imagine ethical experiments only reflects on your own limits of imagination, not on the scientific validity of these lines of inquiry. I have more confidence in mankind's collective resourcefulness in devising fruitful experiments than in one philosopher's doubt.

FRONTLINE Special - Bush's War

Two part Frontline special “Bush’s War”

absolutely remarkable in it’s grasp of the entire picture of how and why we are in Iraq. This special will undoubtedly be viewed as the definitive account of the Iraq War.

(crooksandliars)

Regulating Japanese Internets

The Japanese government thinks they can regulate content on the internet--yet can't keep cigarettes and porn away from children at the local 7/11.

The Japanese government made major moves [recently] toward legislating extensive regulation over online communication and information exchange within its national borders. In a series of little-publicized meetings attracting minimal mainstream coverage, two distinct government ministries, that of Internal Affairs and Communications (Somusho) and that of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Monbukagakusho), pushed ahead with regulation in three major areas of online communication: web content, mobile phone access, and file sharing...

Regulating the Japanese cyberspace continues here.

BoingBoing let's us know how well China's storied and expensive Great Firewall holding up.

PBS Frontline discussion on censorship and web filtering/blocking in China.