A New Blog!

My first post at my new blog is up at http://blog.shealevy.com/2010/05/25/a-new-start/ ! I will be migrating some of the content here over to that site and all future updates will be posted over there.

The Best Tolkien Fanfiction Ever

I'm going to separate myself from my nerdly kin by saying: I hate Tolkien. The books were boring, the movies were boring, the fans are obnoxious, and the constant comparison of all science fiction to the Tolkien "gold standard" is infuriating. That being said, I've recently read some fan-fiction from the LOTR universe that I really enjoyed.

Without further ado, from 9-year-old Alyssa's journal:

Entry 1:

Hobbit Billdo,

To this day I will remember you in that funny sort of way. I regret it very much that I have to Die today or maybey not.

Love
Thorin Oakenshield

Entry 2:

Dear Thorin,

if you don't wish to die then don't. Thorin, son of Thrain son of Thror my name is spelled B-i-l-b-o not B-i-l-l-d-o! not that thats an insult

love,
Bilbo Baggins

Entry 3:

Dear Billboo,

We are going to die any minet now. We will miss you.

Love,
Fili + Kili

Entry 4:

Dear Fili + Kili, Don't Die if you Don't want to! (By the way my name is spelled B-i-l-b-o)

love,
Bilbo Baggins

Entry 5:

Dear B-i-l-b-o

I got your letter and I have recovered thanks to it.

Love,
Thorin Oakenshield

Entry 6:

Dear B-i-l-b-o

We got your letter yester-month and won't die thanks to it!

love
Fili + Kili

Why I Will Never Attend A Brit Milah

Given the prevalence of religion in today's society (combined with the proto-philosophical role religion plays), it's not surprising that most life event celebrations (birth, coming of age, marriage, funerals, etc.) have explicit religious aspects. Despite my conviction that religion is a deadly poison to whatever extent it is believed and practiced, I am glad to attend these events in most cases when the celebrants are friends/loved ones. Typically (especially for the kinds of people I consider loved ones), the legitimate value being celebrated far outweighs the religious aspect of the ceremony. So even though I'll wince at mentions of God and wish you'd leave the mindless platitudes out of it, I'll be at your church wedding, baptism, bar mitzvah, or priest-run funeral. There is one life-celebration event, however, which I will never attend again (I've unfortunately been to my own): The Brit Milah.

For those of you who don't know and don't like clicking links, the Brit Milah (often simply called a "briss") is the Jewish celebration of male birth during which the new baby is circumcised. While there certainly are Jews out there whose sons I will want to celebrate, I find circumcision so barbaric, cruel, and unjustified that I refuse to lend my sanction to the practice. Indeed, given the historical roots and mal effects of the procedure, the ceremony is less of a celebration of the child than a partial (and occasionally total) sacrifice of the child.

To understand why I find this practice so abhorrent, let's first examine the typical justifications people (whether Jewish or not) give for circumcision. The easiest one to address, applicable only to Jews and Moslems, is religious justification. Guess what? There is no god. Guess what else? Your 8-day old baby doesn't believe in god. Ready for more? No being that could be considered "just" would punish a baby for something his parents failed to do when he was 8 days old. Still not convinced? Even if there were a god, all the scientific evidence (which he presumably allowed to exist) suggests that not only was the Bible written by man, it was written by at least four distinct groups of men over a fairly long period of time. The commandment to circumcise your babies was inserted into the Abraham story by the last of the groups, P (the priestly text), at a time when the priests wanted to institute mandatory circumcision as a marker of racial belongingness and as an explicit sacrifice by the parent. If, after all that, you still want to circumcise your kids for religious reasons, I kindly request that you get the hell out of my life.

So much for the religious justification. What about cultural ones? These fall into two categories, both boiling down to "but everyone else does it!". The first: "I want my son to look like/have a connection to/be a part of his family/race/society!" This is ridiculous. First of all, your child will have many links to each of these groups: Genetically inherited traits, spoken language, accent, food tastes, musical tastes, shared traditions, and more. Second, and more important, when was the last time you were thinking of your connection to your family/race/culture in association with your genitalia? When I'm urinating, showering, masturbating, having sex, or doing any of the other limited things that involve my penis, I never think "wow, it's so cool that everyone else in my family has anatomy similar to mine!"Do you really think your child will? Do you really want him to? The second category goes something like "but I don't want him to be made fun of and not fit in!" Do you live in a nudist colony? If so, then he already won't fit in, as unfortunate as that may be. If not, then only two groups of people will have opportunity to see if his penis is circumcised are his friends when he's very young, if he's the type to shun clothes, or his sexual partners when he's older. Young kids don't really know or care what your son's penis looks like, and I sure hope you expect his sexual partners to be mature enough not to find extra foreskin significant enough to make any difference. Moreover, if he's feeling really left out by the time he's having sex, he can choose to get himself circumcised!

Ok, now on to the only justification actually worthy of rational discussion: health. Over the past several decades, a body of research has been forming that seems to suggest that there are significant preventative health benefits to circumcision. Circumcision appears to be an amazing tool to prevent diseases from urinary tract infections to penile cancer to AIDS and other STIs. All of these claims suffer from two significant problems, however: They are probably based on shoddy science, and even if they are completely true they're not enough to medically justify circumcision.

Let me first address the shoddy science aspect. Let me be up front and say that I've not even come close to a comprehensive review of the relevant literature, but what I've seen so far matches very well with what other anti-circumcision activists have said. I want to delve into a single paper about HPV in particular, but before I do I want to talk about AIDS: All of the AIDS claims seem to be based on a study or series of studies correlating circumcision in adult African men and lower AIDS rates. This research does not seem to address the question of WHY the circumcised men got circumcised (possible reason: perhaps there are cultural influences which correlate with healthier sexual practices. At the very least, it seems reasonable to expect that those who undergo circumcision as a medical procedure are more likely to be aware of medical science/advice and therefore to practice safer sex practices). Moreover, the research is based solely on correlation and doesn't explain why the US, which has fairly high rates of circumcision, has high rates of AIDS as well. To my knowledge, no one has put forth and defended a causal explanation as to why circumcision is relevant to AIDS transmission.

Ok, now HPV. I'm going to get a bit technical here, but I think this paper is indicative of wider trends in the pro-circumcision literature. Last night, I tweeted that I was working on this post, and my brother sent me a journal article claiming that HPV resolves quicker in uncircumcised men (EDIT 5/1/10 1:00 PM EST: Thanks to @Qwertz0 on Twitter for catching the typo). Here's the abstract:

The relationship between circumcision and the acquisition and clearance of human papillomavirus (HPV) infection was examined in a cohort of 357 men followed up at 2‐month intervals for an average of 431 days. There were no differences in HPV acquisition by circumcision status. . Clearance of HPV infection, including infection with oncogenic types, was slower in the glans/coronal sulcus of the penis of uncircumcised men than circumcised men. The median duration of HPV infection of the glans/coronal sulcus was significantly longer in uncircumcised men (154 days) than circumcised men (91 days) (P=0.04). Circumcision may protect against HPV‐associated disease by enhancing the resolution of infection.

Just the abstract alone raises a few red flags. 1: "There were no differences in HPV acquisition by circumcision status". So being circumcised doesn't change your risk of infection. 2. The statistic compared between the groups was the median duration, not the mean. Now it's possible that this branch of medical science has different standard tests, but in my experience the tests for statistical difference between groups always depends on the mean. Unless this type of research typically uses medians, the fact that the mean was not used raises the possibility that the desired result was not achieved when the mean was used. 3. The P value was 0.04. Even putting my general misgivings about statistical hypothesis testing aside, this result is only statistically significant at the .05 level, not the stricter .01 level usually used for work with medical implications. But the problems get worse once you look at the actual paper (you'll probably need a university subscription to access the full text):

The duration of infection did not vary by circumcision status for the penile shaft, scrotum, or all genital sites combined... For the glans/coronal sulcus, the median duration of HPV infection was greater among uncircumcised men (154 days) than circumcised men (91 days), although the 95% CIs overlapped.

Read that again. If you didn't get it, I'll try to make it clear: If you consider only HPV on the penile shaft, only HPV on the scrotum, OR HPV across ALL GENITAL SITES, the duration of infection does not depend on circumcision status. It is only if you consider the glans alone that a longer infection duration is found (and the fact that the 95% confidence intervals overlapped just adds to the ridiculousness). One more time: When all genital sites are considered, the duration of infection does not depend on circumcision status. So being circumcised does not decrease your overall chance of infection, nor does it decrease the duration of an HPV infection at an arbitrary site. But wait, weren't we told differently in the abstract?

Circumcision may protect against HPV‐associated disease by enhancing the resolution of infection.

This is straight up intellectual dishonesty, and smacks of fitting the data to a pre-determined conclusion. The abstract claims the research to be a study about "the relationship between circumcision and the acquisition and clearance of human papillomavirus (HPV) infection" with no specification of where the HPV is located, and indeed HPV incidence and clearance was studied across all locations, and yet the only clearance-related result mentioned in the abstract pertains to a subset of the data, the glans/coronal sulcus data. If they really wanted to report the truth about the relationship, isn't the most important result the fact that, when all sites are considered, circumcision showed no effect on either infection or clearance? This sort of scientific finagling is reported by most anti-circumcision activists who have studied the literature claiming various diseases to be prevented by circumcision, to the extent that many facetiously consider circumcision "the cure in search of a disease."

If you're still with me here, you may be thinking "Ok Shea, maybe those particular studies were flawed, but you haven't read all or even most of the literature, and there may be real evidence out there!" True enough. For the purposes of the rest of this discussion, I'll grant that all of the health risk claims are true. In fact, let's assume that remaining uncircumcised triples your risk of UTI, and quintiples your risk of every STI (except AIDS, it septuples the risk for AIDS). Even given this obviously ridiculous stacking of the deck in favour of circumcision, I would still claim that circumcision is unjustified. To see why, I'll need to describe some of the definite and possible problems that result from circumcision (after all, if circumcision came with no downsides then it would make sense if there was even the slightest increased risk).

First, the definite problems, which occur even if everything goes right: the foreskin is jam-packed with nerves just like the rest of the penis, so cutting it off is both excruciatingly painful for the child (the one time I was shown a video of my Brit Milah, I winced when I heard my ear-piercing scream) and results in a less sensitive penis, lowering the amount of physical pleasure possible from sexual activity. The glans, the most sensitive part of the penis, is permanently exposed for circumcised men, leading to increased chafing and irritation and possibly decreasing the sensitivity of the glans, further reducing physical pleasure from sex (As an aside, it is reported that the original secular justifications for circumcision in the 19th century revolved around limiting masturbation. I feel no need to say anything to those who view sex or masturbation as an evil needing deterrence). And what if things don't go right? While circumcision is a fairly routine operation today, it is still a surgery and does carry risks. An improper cut may result in deformation or loss of the penis, the child may have difficulty urinating, hemorrhage may occur, infection may develop, and in rare cases (~100/year) death may result.

Given these effects (both the certain and the possible), is circumcision for preventative purposes justified? My answer is a resounding NO! All of the diseases which are supposedly more likely for uncircumcised men have either much less drastic prevention methods, much less drastic treatment methods, or both. Worried about UTIs? Rather than slicing off the flesh of your newborn, why not wait and see if UTIs develop (a fairly small risk in any case) and use the normal, non-surgical treatment: antibiotics. AIDS concerns? Rather than hobbling his sexual organ, teach your child safe sex practices and discrimination when it comes to sexual partners (condom usage and regular testing go orders of magnitude farther to prevent HIV spread than even the wildest claims of circumcision benefits, and anyone relying on the fact that he's circumcised as an HIV preventative is a fool.) In the context of the rest of our medical practice, culture-wide preventative surgery involving removing part of the body is completely unprecedented. Doctors don't remove the appendices or gall bladders of newborns, even though these are prone to medical problems and, in the case of the appendix, may not even do anything at all. In fact, due to the risks we typically try to avoid surgery at all costs, even when a body part is ALREADY causing problems: you certainly don't see doctors advocating removal of extremities that suffer from loss of blood flow unless it's absolutely impossible to avoid gangrene. Given the risks and damage involved in circumcision, scientists would have to find very STRONG proof that lack of circumcision SIGNIFICANTLY increases the risk of a disease that has effects FAR worse than those of circumcision, has no other known prevention methods, and has no cure or a cure FAR worse than circumcision. Of course, such a disease has not yet been identified, nor is it likely that it will ever be found.

As a closing point, I want to ask a question that doesn't apply to every concern above, but does apply to many: Why do you need to make this choice for your son? Why can't he decide by the time he expects to be showing his penis to others whether or not he wants to risk ridicule or take the surgical route? Why can't he decide by the time he's old enough to choose his religious views whether he wants to obey god's commandment to be mutilated? Why can't he decide by the time he's old enough to have sex whether he wants to slice off his skin to reduce the risks? Why is it so important to do it at birth?

A Truly Worthy Cause

I'm not typically a fan of charity. For the most part (though there are definite exceptions, like the ARI or certain charities involving children), I think businesses and individuals should stand or fall on their own merits. Sometimes, though, extremely good people face terrible circumstances through no fault of their own, and these people deserve our help, not as charity for their suffering, but as payment for what they add to our lives. Such is the case with Jennifer Iannolo.

Through her tweets at @foodphilosophy, her blog posts at Food Philosophy, her work with the Culinary Media Network, and her efforts to make Sex On a Plate revolutionize the way we experience food, Jennifer is an inspiration and an amazing example of a woman who loves life on a visceral, emotional, and intellectual level and who works to make life even better. Unfortunately, her apartment was broken into recently and, among other things, her laptop was stolen. If ever there was a person who deserved assistance in facing a crisis that occurred through no fault of her own, it's Jenn. Whether you want to consider it a payment for her past work or an investment to allow her to continue producing amazing things, please consider donating to the fund I've set up to help her replace her laptop. The donation is through Paypal, and you can get to the donation page by clicking this link, clicking the button below, or clicking the button on the sidebar.

Edit 4/23: We raised enough money for Jenn to get her new laptop, so the paypal fund is now closed.

Erosophia Crosses a Line

In a recent post, Qwertz discusses the question of whether those in gay marriages should take the title of "husband" or "wife". For now, I don't want to address the question raised in the post, though I think it's an interesting one and that Qwertz makes some very good points. The purpose of this post is to respond to an attack on Qwertz by Jason over at Erosophia. While I think there are legitimate grounds on which to disagree with Qwertz's thesis, I think Jason's response was a vitriolic, unfounded attack on Qwertz's character that had the added advantage of completely missing his point. I posted a comment on Jason's post, but since he moderates his comments and may not approve mine I wanted to post it here for posterity. Please read the original posts first!

Jason,

I think you're way off the mark here in your criticism of Qwertz. Nearly every paragraph of yours misrepresents what he said in his post.


From the second paragraph:

"Thus, his reason to think that it is inappropriate for a gay man to use the word “husband” to refer to his spouse is because it makes him feel uncomfortable"

This is untrue. He is not saying "I have this emotional response, therefore gay men shouldn't use the word 'husband'". He is saying (I'm extrapolating a bit here, but this is clear from the context of the post) "I have this emotional response, and it is consistent in its occurrence. I know that my emotions are a result of subconsciously held value judgments, so there are two possibilities: either I have inadvertently automatized some error, or there is a legitimate issue here that I should try to put into conscious terms." In other words, he is using his emotions as a cue to start an intellectual process, not as an argument. Nowhere does he say "X makes me feel bad, therefore X is wrong", and there's no way to get that from what he says.


From your third paragraph:

"I think he is right that there are two possibilities for this: 1. that he does not accept same-sex marriage or 2. that same-sex marriages should not use “husband” or “wife."

This is a complete misrepresentation of what Qwertz is said. Now, you may think that the possibilities are either "he doesn't accept same-sex marriage" or "same-sex marriage should not use 'husband' or 'wife'", but the possibilities Qwertz outlines are either, to quote him directly, "either I subconsciously do not accept a man in a same-sex marriage as a proper unit of the concept “husband”; or such a person is not properly a unit of the concept." Note that "I do not accept a man in a same-sex marriage as a unit of the concept 'husband'" is not at all the same as "I do not accept same-sex marriage". Again, you may think that such a position is the only alternative possible given Qwertz's statements, but it is wrong to say that this was the alternative Qwertz himself accepted.


From the fifth paragraph:

"The concept wife just denotes that a woman is in a marital relationship: but it does not specify with whom"

This is precisely the point that Qwertz questions. In particular, he notes that "spouse" is the purely relational concept (a person who is in a marriage), and that "husband" or "wife" specify at least the fact that the spouse is a man/woman, and maybe more. That "maybe more" is the question up for debate, and I'm not sure I agree with Qwertz, but it's far from obvious that "husband" ONLY includes the fact that the spouse is male. This is a discussion which must revolve around the cognitive utility of the concepts involved, not just the dictionary definition, as a definition does NOT encompass the totality of the concept. To dismiss Qwertz's position by simply stating that the concept 'wife' "does not specify with whom" the person is married is not an argument, it is an assertion. It may be true, but to answer that question you need to argue on the basis of the principles of concept formation.


From your sixth paragraph:

"All of this is ironic, as Qwertz asserts that he’s using Rand’s Razor... It’s ironic because his addition of unnecessary information would require that we create a whole host of concepts, like his “gay husbands.”"

You've missed his point here. Qwertz is claiming that having a concept like "husband" which only means "male spouse" would be a violation of Rand's Razor, because there is not enough information in it to warrant the new concept. Again, you may disagree here, but his whole point is that if husband just meant "male spouse" then it would be multiplying concepts beyond necessity to have a whole new concept there instead of saying "male spouse". Notice that as men and women have become seen as equals, the terms for the professions have dropped their gender-specific suffixes: steward and stewardess gave way to flight attendant, for example. Male lawyers and female lawyers are both lawyers. Male doctors and female doctors are both doctors. I'm not sure about this, but it might be that Qwertz is saying that if husband and wife don't encapsulate anything more than "male spouse" and "female spouse", then maybe they should go the way of steward and stewardess. Regardless of whether you think he's correct, it's far from obvious without a real argument that Qwertz is completely erroneous in invoking Rand's Razor. (As an aside, the concept of a "razor" preceeds Occam: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_(philosophy) ).


From your seventh paragraph:

"1: Qwertz does not accept same-sex marriage as legitimate. Frankly, that’s a personal problem and, Qwertz, you need to just get over it. Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable does not mean that you should attack same-sex marriage: that is the modus operandi of the christians."

Again, Qwertz has said nothing about the legitimacy of same-sex marriage, he is simply discussing the propriety of using particular terms. He admits in the opening of his discussion that it's possible he is wrong here, but to dismiss what you see as an error as a "personal problem" that he should "just get over" is insulting to the intelligence of an author you claim to like. The last sentence I quoted is just vile: nowhere did Qwertz attack same-sex marriage, and nowhere did he do anything "just because it makes [him] feel uncomfortable", and his statements do not even come close to justifying comparison to religious methodology.


Your last paragraph, in full:

"How about this: let’s just all accept that some people are gay and they deserve to be happy. They deserve to have relationships, to be in love, and to have their love recognized by others and the state. There is no danger in this to heterosexual marriage or children or the nature of society. The only danger it has is to our unchallenged beliefs that we will be forced to confront–and that’s the real fear isn’t it? That we’ll all have to look inside ourselves and actually think about homosexuality."

Out of context, this paragraph is an appropriate attack on some who attack gay marriage. But given the rest of your post, this is clearly directed at Qwertz, and is extremely unjust. Qwertz does not deny that people are gay, nor does he claim that they shouldn't be. Qwertz does not claim that gay people do not deserve happiness. Qwertz does not claim that they don't deserve relationships, to be in love, to have their relationships recognized by others. He explicitly defers his views on state recognition of gay relationships to a later post, but you can bet based on his past work that his position will be far more nuanced than "gays can't marry because it makes me feel bad" (I suspect that, IF he does take issue with gay marriage, the issue stems more from the fact that the state recognizes marriage at all, not from the fact that the people are gay). He does not claim that there is a danger to heterosexuals, to children, or to society. He is not hiding away from "unchallenged beliefs": indeed, the whole purpose of this post was to make fully explicit the beliefs which underly his emotional response and to determine if the response is valid. He certainly doesn't fear "looking inside himself", as that is the whole nature of this post, and he has no problem with "thinking about homosexuality". This paragraph is an undeserved hash of insults that have absolutely no basis in anything Qwertz has ever said anywhere, let alone in this post.


Overall, I really think you should re-read Qwertz's post, and not just jump down his throat. Qwertz is making one, and only one, claim: The term "husband" should not apply to men in a gay marriage. He does NOT claim that gay men shouldn't be allowed to marry, be in love, etc. etc. Moreover, he presents reasons for his position. You may disagree with his reasons, but he does NOT say "I feel weird when they say husband, so they shouldn't", and his position is NOT obviously invalid.

SEE: Concrete-Boundedness and Second Hand Knowledge

This week, I discuss a common problem I see in my classmates' approach to learning science, and contrast it with my own. I then throw around some ideas about the proper standards for evaluating second-hand knowledge, whether as a layman or as a professional in the field.




Download this episode (right click and save)

SEE: Why start an Objectivist Campus Club, and Precision in Language

Here's the second episode of SEE! I hope you enjoy:



Download this episode (right click and save)



For those who are interested in my process, I start by writing a simple outline, like the one below (don't spoil the ending, listen first!):

Why start a club?

• Activism
• Discussion
• Social Interaction

Progress so far

• Meeting with club peopleguys
• Email to UR Philosophy club
• Possibility of heavy participation in RIT club instead

Clarity in Language.

• Common view: Language primarily for communication
• Descriptivists: The rules are set by whatever people actually use in order to communicate
• Prescriptivists: The rules are set out, typically by an "established authority", and Must Be Followed.
• Minor aside: Parallel between intrinsicists and subjectivists?
• Difficult to decide between the two
• On the one hand, it seems like the descriptivists might be right that a common understanding is all that's necessary for communication, yet the results range from difficult to understand to unintelligible to outright offensive
• On the other hand, it seems like the prescriptivists might be right that communication needs solid rules, yet typically no basis for the rules is given besides tradition
• The Objectivist view, or the way out: Language primarily for cognition
• Man has a specific kind of consciousness that behaves a certain way
• Precision in language necessary because language shapes thought: sloppy definitions/usages will lead to packaging things that should be separate, or separating things that should be together, even if one knows that such packaging is wrong (Eg: "proselytizing" in Objectivism, "paleo" in diet, "knowledge" in computation)
• The purpose of concepts (unit-economy) rules out unnecessary neologisms (Rand's Razor), but requires new terms be formed when appropriate (psychoepistemology)
• The communication view as meaningless on its own: what happens when one communicates?
• Descriptivists: What do you mean by common understanding, by the other person "getting it"? Some sort of emotional agreement, or what?
• Prescriptivists: Why do your rules matter if language is merely a vessel for spreading thought, which is held in some undefined form in a given individual?
• Possible parallel to ethics: the discussion of moral systems before it is determined what morality is for, defining good as "good for others"

When I actually sit down to do the podcast, I have this in front of me, and for each major section I record in one go. Over time, I'm sure this method will be changed, but that's what I do for now! The outlining for this podcast took me about an hour, and the recording and putting in of transitions another hour.