signal boost on anti-science and animal rights radicals
this is important, and both the article and the bloggers commentary speak for themselves:

http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2007/11/animal_rights_extremists_wreck.php

Tip of the hat to jokermage for posting about this in the first place, although, as is my wont, I've digressed a whole lot...

In addition to its direct merits, this article also caused me to see some links that make the ALF/PETA stuff come across as a great example of something I've been blathering about lately: the oversimplification and misrepresentation of "facts" and "common sense" and "morality" in the media, in political platforms, and so forth.



I'm not a big fan of animal rights groups, largely because of this sort of thing, despite the fact that I'm basically on the same page as they are in a lot of regards.

I really don't like killing, maiming, torturing, or otherwise abusing animals, particularly when they have personalities (but I try not to be mean to plants and jellyfish, either. I felt bad scraping limpets and sea squirts off of the bottom of a kayak last week, too.) I don't hunt. As much as I respect my friends who think it's more ethical to kill their own livestock for food to get a more realistic perspective on things, I don't feel obligated to follow suit. I've done a lot of dissections but no vivisections and no dissections where I actually killed the animal. If someone harmed my pet, I'd have the same kind of response as if someone harmed a human I care deeply about. I don't believe the mythology that humans are distinct from other animals in having souls, whatever that means. I don't like mousetraps. I try to shoo insects out of the house instead of killing them. I worry about habitat destruction, biodiversity, and treatment of captive animals. I'm concerned that striking but hard to keep animals like wunderpus and nautilus may be overcollected in the wild for home aquariums, or, in the case of nautilus, to sell their shells (on the sea shore?) to yuppies. I don't like whaling, I don't like overfishing, I don't like "bush meat hunters" (despite, as posted yesterday, looking rather like Ted Nugent.) I tend to think that most hunters are not very sportsmanlike (although, to be fair to Ted, bow hunting is considerably more of a level playing field that going out in the woods with a 30-06 or a 12 gauge.) I favor a great deal of ethical oversight on animal research. I even think that there's a need for better activist and watchdog groups, and I think that a lot of the megafarming practices used for livestock are bad for all sorts of reasons, both ethical and purely practical for sustainability, public health, and environmentalism.

One might think I'd be rather sympathetic to animal rights causes.

However, the "animal rights movement" is, in my view, a bunch of, well, idealistic, irrational, unrealistic, hypocritical, delusional lunatics. There are some groups (the Audubon Society and the Humane Society, for example) who seem to be positive, progressive, and reasonable, so I don't mean to include them in this complaint. It's also worth noting that I'm basing my opinion largely on my impressions through outreach and the mainstream media, so it's possible that my impressions of the "animal rights movement" is filtered through some heavy biases, but really, most groups that complain that "the man is putting them down with the media" are using that as an excuse to, at the very least, avoid asking themselves the honest question "how is our group coming across to people who aren't part of it," if not "are we a cult-like mob mentality tribal group held together by an unrealistic worldview?"

PETA and ALF, to me, show all the signs of insane tribalism and a mob mentality. I don't really think that they are unique; but they're a great case study because I have both unwavering appreciation for their stated purpose (avoiding causing animal suffering) and unwavering opposition to their platform, their truisms, their worldview, their tactics, their delusions, and pretty much all aspects of their beliefs and actions. I'm also fairly confident that most people who are likely to read this don't consider this position to be unreasonable (feel free to surprise me, though.) Most of the most hippie/dippy home agriculture organic food eating vegetarian ultra-radical-neo-luddite-idealists on my friends list (you know who you are!) are on friendly terms with people who kill animals and slice up their brains as part of their job descriptions (you know who you are, too. Hint: these people look less like Ted Nugent than I do. Another hint: the two sets may not be disjoint.)

If you believe I'm being too harsh on PETA and ALF, in addition to the link above, I've also been somewhat influenced by an episode of Penn and Teller's Bullshit(NSFW language) and, as just a hyperbolic (and really NSFW) example, an official PETA video using a stripper instead of intelligent arguments to, er, argue their position (a side note on the implications of this for feminism, particular the concern that women don't have sufficient good role models in science, intellectual debate, and politics: as much as I think women expressing their sexuality can be empowering, this seems to epitomize the worldview that the best way for a woman's opinion to be taken seriously is via her T&A rather than, say, her mind, her education, her work, or her experience. I appreciate Pr0n as much as the next guy, but it doesn't have a place in public policy debates for real and important reasons.) I'd also love to find a bad pun to replace "argue their position" above, but I really can't think of anything that's more ridiculous than just letting the video speak for itself.

(another note: I sometimes find Penn & Teller to be a bit unfair in putting down large groups of people on the basis of a few of their most kooky members, but in this episode and many others, they appear to not have had to stretch or cherry-pick the facts and examples to make a realistic criticism of PETA and ALF. I wish LJ had good footnote capabilities so I didn't have to clutter up my prose with all these parenthetical notes.)

Having set the stage, I posit this:

PETA, and by extension ALF, is an organization that cares more about their tribal identity of advocating their beliefs than they do about any goal other than reinforcing their own tribal identity. PETA actively does things that, in any realistic worldview, are at odds with the goal of causing humans to treat animals better. But they (either consciously or implicitly) don't actually care... they're more interested in the showboating about how they can come across as participating in a cause that's a fetish for them than in actually using that passion to benefit the world, even on their flagship issues.

And the corollary is: this is natural human behavior for people when they find a unifying cause with a bunch of other people. And modern technology is providing a way to both google and facebook your way into finding like-minded groups and communicating with them easily over great distances and diversities; people are now de-coupled from locality, nationality, ethnicity, culture, background, education, and isolation in terms of finding tribes to join, and consequently people are becoming more able to pick and choose their "like-minded people" identities.

I don't really know if this is a good, bad, or just different thing, but it's interesting to observe. The diversity of idealist groups is going up in a "long tail" sort of way, since I can identify more with obscure groups like "people who are obsessively interested in cephalopods" rather than "the republicrat party" or "the church of the One True Faith(tm)." There are also, of course, a whole gamut of tribes, groups, organizations, clubs, parties, fraternal orders, cults, religions, movements, and so forth, and there's a sort of "observer effect" where a lot of them appear differently based on whether one is an outsider, a participant-observer, or a full-scale participant. Some are good, some are bad, some are hard to judge. Many take on lives of their own, often in ways that are completely unanticipated by the people who started them in the first place. From what I've read, it sounds like Charles Manson's crazy homicidal "family" was built up primarily because he was interested in having followers he could demand to do more and more extreme things to prove their loyalty, and the escalation to murder was more done in service of that end than as an end in itself. It's easy to write off killers and terrorists in the form of leaders and followers as "these people are crazy, and beyond my comprehension," and just assume that they have some fundamental brain damage that makes them different from "us normal people," but I'm inclined to think that that attitude is more of a protective measure against the disturbing fact that there is a lot of evidence that "normal human behavior" is separated from various forms of insanity by a blurry and permeable line. I bet PETA leaders get ego satisfaction from convincing gullible girls to strip on the internet, and I bet the gullible girls get ego satisfaction for using attention-getting for something they can rationalize as contributing to a cause rather than pure narcissism. Much as I suspect Osama Bin Laden doesn't give a rat's ass about Islam, and just gets his ego off on being able to order fanatical loyal followers into suicide-murder acts as a power trip.

Which brings me to a realization about why I've been getting increasingly irritated at groups that recite their ideologies, misapply science and rhetoric to "prove" that their positions are "absolutely right," and push their tribal groupthink into influencing public policy:

I believe that the traditions of science, law, philosophy, artistic expression, and honest intellectual debate are the best tools we have for working around the intrinsic tendencies of human beings to be irrational and counterproductive. Even the smartest, best educated human beings in the world are biologically flawed in terms of their abilities to comprehend important aspects of reality innately, and need academic and intellectual tools to model, understand, and discuss the complexities of the real world. Therefore, I believe that if we are, as a species, going to survive long-term, we need to be honest about how we use these tools to obtain and apply an understanding of the universe and our collective place in it in such a way that we can move past the limitations of our evolutionary baggage and make wise decisions for our long-term survival and prosperity.

I see the behavior that I call out in the radical animal rights groups as endemic in most of our activist tribes, whether I agree with their stated goals (as I actually do with PETA for a very loose interpretation, at least) or not, but I think the truism that "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions" applies here. I am not willing to "fudge" scientific integrity to make oversimplifications even to argue for causes I believe in. I am not willing to buy into the idea that blind, inflexible ideologies are the same as general principles for prudent public policy decisions. I do not believe that it's OK to convince people with simple but wrong explanations because it's impossible to educate them with the real explanations. I don't believe it's OK for some Greenpeace guy standing outside the Apple store to make claims about "exponential growth" of renewable energy when he doesn't even know what "exponential" means, as much as I want to see renewable energy usage replace fossil fuels at as high a rate as possible (although I'd hope that the function approaches a Heaviside step function in the limit rather than an exponential, since I really don't want 100% of the surface of the earth covered in windmills and solar panels.)

I recognize that I'm swimming against the current here: there are many who argue that it's unrealistic and hopeless to incorporate above-average intelligence and integrity in a world where the average intellect is average, inattentive, and overwhelmed by propaganda and manipulation. But to me, it's a short and commonly-traversed path from dumbing down the valid argument to convince the masses to agree with leadership about reality to forgetting that the dumbed-down argument is no longer connected to reality at all, and is not by any means a reliable way to make decisions that will lead to a desired outcome.

I'll close with this observation: I heard on NPR yesterday that in the month of October, violence in Iraq has dropped by approximately 70% since the high month (May? March?) against civilians, Iraqi forces, and U.S. troops. There may be plenty of reasons for this, which may or may not have anything to do with the "surge" but I recall that I heard a lot of idealistic claims about the "surge" when it was being proposed, and found almost all of them, pro and con, to be on very poor foundations. As much as my personal tribal response emotionally thinks the Bush administration is frequently unwise,so I like to see them turn out to be wrong as much as I hate the consequences, I didn't think it was clear that the "surge" idea was bad, but it was vilified by the democrats and lauded by the republicans, both based on ideology. And here is where the oversimplified model fails: there is this plausible evidence that the republicans' hot air on the topic turned out to be "right," and that the democrats' hot air turned out to be "wrong." I think a troop surge was a valid thing to consider for the goals of either party to have us improve the situation in Iraq, and it appears that it may have been a wise decision. I have little faith that intelligent analysis and debate played much of a role in the republican advocacy or the democratic opposition to the plan, and really not even much faith that things will, in the big picture, work out in Iraq, but I find the representation of the decision making process (with the admission that I don't know what goes on behind closed doors) is irrational idealism and blind platform loyalty rather than commitment to doing what's best for the world, the U.S. people, the U.S. troops, the Iraqis, or even the politicians themselves.

(another note: I've decided that democrats, republicans, and other political parties don't deserve to be capitalized in my blogging, so this is an intentional typographical statement, in case anyone was wondering.)

(yet another note: I'm breaking in my "no reductionists" icon, even though I didn't actually mention reductionism in this rambling rant, but oversimplification is a major theme.)

(and one last note that I'll leave to _octopod to discuss the implications for rights for non-human intelligences)