Thinking as a Hobby

On Our Way to 7 Billion

djames@gmail.com — Sat, 10 May 08 08:21:00 UT

Via Slashdot, the world population was just estimated to have passed 6,666,666,666. 80 years ago, the world population was about 2 billion.

Not bad, Homo sapien. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Hillary as Hitler

djames@gmail.com — Fri, 9 May 08 08:25:00 UT

This is about as politically incorrect as it gets, but it's pretty damned funny. It's the scene from Der Untergang (The Downfall), a movie about Hitler's final days in the bunker, with subtitles from the point of view of Hillary and her advisors:

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Fitna the Movie

djames@gmail.com — Tue, 6 May 08 10:06:00 UT

Sam Harris writes about the short film Fitna made by Dutch politician Geert Wilders which juxtaposes verses of the Koran with interviews and speeches by Muslims and horrible acts of violence committed in the name of Islam in the last few years (such as the beheading of Eugene Armstrong and the hanging of gays). It's about 12 minutes long, and hopefully this link will hold up on Google Video (it's been removed from other places):

Harris notes that the Dutch government wanted the film banned and Wilders' website was shut down after he expressed the intention of releasing it. Of course, one sure way to make sure everybody sees something in the internet age is to try to ban it.

It may not be a masterpiece, but its criticism of the abuses of Islam are not wildly off the mark. And as Harris says in closing:

The lesson we should draw from the Fitna controversy is that we need more criticism of Islam, not less. Let it come down in such torrents that not even the most deluded Islamist could conceive of containing it.

Does Science Make Belief In God Obsolete?

djames@gmail.com — Tue, 6 May 08 08:43:00 UT

Via Andrew Sullivan, short essays from various scientists, philosophers, theologians, etc. on the question. I like Stephen Pinker's answer the best:

Yes, if by "science" we mean the entire enterprise of secular reason and knowledge (including history and philosophy), not just people with test tubes and white lab coats.

Traditionally, a belief in God was attractive because it promised to explain the deepest puzzles about origins. Where did the world come from? What is the basis of life? How can the mind arise from the body? Why should anyone be moral?

Yet over the millennia, there has been an inexorable trend: the deeper we probe these questions, and the more we learn about the world in which we live, the less reason there is to believe in God.

Start with the origin of the world. Today no honest and informed person can maintain that the universe came into being a few thousand years ago and assumed its current form in six days (to say nothing of absurdities like day and night existing before the sun was created). Nor is there a more abstract role for God to play as the ultimate first cause. This trick simply replaces the puzzle of "Where did the universe come from?" with the equivalent puzzle "Where did God come from?"

What about the fantastic diversity of life and its ubiquitous signs of design? At one time it was understandable to appeal to a divine designer to explain it all. No longer. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace showed how the complexity of life could arise from the physical process of natural selection among replicators, and then Watson and Crick showed how replication itself could be understood in physical terms. Notwithstanding creationist propaganda, the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, including our DNA, the fossil record, the distribution of life on earth, and our own anatomy and physiology (such as the goose bumps that try to fluff up long-vanished fur).

For many people the human soul feels like a divine spark within us. But neuroscience has shown that our intelligence and emotions consist of intricate patterns of activity in the trillions of connections in our brain. True, scholars disagree on how to explain the existence of inner experienceâsome say it's a pseudo-problem, others believe it's just an open scientific problem, while still others think that it shows a limitation of human cognition (like our inability to visualize four-dimensional space-time). But even here, relabeling the problem with the word "soul" adds nothing to our understanding.

People used to think that biology could not explain why we have a conscience. But the human moral sense can be studied like any other mental faculty, such as thirst, color vision, or fear of heights. Evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience are showing how our moral intuitions work, why they evolved, and how they are implemented within the brain.

This leaves morality itselfâthe benchmarks that allow us to criticize and improve our moral intuitions. It is true that science in the narrow sense cannot show what is right or wrong. But neither can appeals to God. It's not just that the traditional Judeo-Christian God endorsed genocide, slavery, rape, and the death penalty for trivial insults. It's that morality cannot be grounded in divine decree, not even in principle. Why did God deem some acts moral and others immoral? If he had no reason but divine whim, why should we take his commandments seriously? If he did have reasons, then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

Those reasons are not to be found in empirical science, but they are to be found in the nature of rationality as it is exercised by any intelligent social species. The essence of morality is the interchangeability of perspectives: the fact that as soon as I appeal to you to treat me in a certain way (to help me when I am in need, or not to hurt me for no reason), I have to be willing to apply the same standards to how I treat you, if I want you to take me seriously. That is the only policy that is logically consistent and leaves both of us better off. And God plays no role in it.

For all these reasons, it's no coincidence that Western democracies have experienced three sweeping trends during the past few centuries: barbaric practices (such as slavery, sadistic criminal punishment, and the mistreatment of children) have decreased significantly; scientific and scholarly understanding has increased exponentially; and belief in God has waned. Science, in the broadest sense, is making belief in God obsolete, and we are the better for it.

In Which I Rant About My University E-mail Account

djames@gmail.com — Mon, 5 May 08 16:39:00 UT

Actually, it's a pretty short rant.

I rarely use my university e-mail account, mostly because it sucks. Still, I get nearly as much spam in it as I do in my Gmail account, which has far more traffic.

But the real piece of idiocy is my storage limit. I've got 10MB of storage. By comparison, my free Gmail account gives me 6693MB of storage. One of my professors decided to disseminate our readings via email, using our university email accounts (because that's what he has on file), and the attachments are usually 1-2MB, so of course some of them bounced back.

Did I mention that in a time when hard drive space is ridiculously cheap, this is utterly moronic?

Bobby Jindal for VP?

djames@gmail.com — Mon, 5 May 08 09:22:00 UT

Bill Kristol is hinting that McCain may pick Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal as his running mate, after mentioning his polling numbers:

Maybe that's why, in separate conversations last week, no fewer than four McCain staffers and advisers mentioned as a possible vice-presidential pick the 36-year-old Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal. Theyâre tempted by the idea of picking someone so young, with real accomplishments and a strong reformist streak.

It might also be a way to confront the issue of McCain's age (71), which private polls and focus groups suggest could be a real problem. A Jindal pick would implicitly acknowledge the questions and raise the ante. The message would be: "You want generational change? You can get it with McCain-Jindal â without risking a liberal and inexperienced Obama as commander in chief." I would add that it was after McCain spent considerable time with Jindal in New Orleans recently, and reportedly found him, as he has before, personally engaging and intellectually impressive, that the campaign's informal name-dropping of Jindal began.

I don't see it happening, but it would be an interesting choice. Jindal just got elected, and he served a few years as a US Representative, so I don't think he's really had time to really accomplish anything.

And they made fun of Dan Quayle's youth and inexperience, though he was at least in his 40's when he became VP. I think people might be a bit nervous about being a heartbeat away from a President in his 30's.

Iron Man

djames@gmail.com — Fri, 2 May 08 22:12:00 UT

I saw it today. It wasn't nearly as good as I thought it would be, but it was all right.

I can't completely knock a movie that features an engineer and roboticist as a hero. Also, the character arc is well-meaning, if predictable.

I guess my main problem with it was that Tony Stark seemed near invincible, even without the damn suit. He plummets from the sky and lands without a scratch. He smashes into brick walls (without a suit on) and doesn't get a scratch. The bad guy also plummets from the stratosphere and (unexplicably) lands without a scratch. Third world bit actors can be killed by normal means, but apparently the only way to kill white people in this movie is by infusing them with 3 million gigawatts of electricity.

So even though some of the action sequences were technically pretty good (although there weren't nearly enough of them, and the last one was too dark to follow the action well), there was very little tension. When Spider-Man fought the Green Goblin or Doc Octopus, I felt like he was actually taking punches and that his life was in danger. I never worried for Tony Stark because he pretty much seemed invincible.

So...it was okay. Maybe a 3.5 out of 5, but not nearly as good as the reviews are making out.

How Much Can We Learn Without Feedback From the Environment?

djames@gmail.com — Thu, 1 May 08 11:42:00 UT

I'm planning on defending my dissertation proposal in the Fall, and the focus of my research has shifted mostly to learning. My thinking is going in a particular direction, and I thought I'd talk it out here.

In machine learning, types of learning are usually divided into categories such as:

Supervised learning describes approaches where there is an external signal from the environment regarding what the correct output of the system should be. There are degrees of supervision. For example:

Teacher: Say "cat".
Child: Cad.
Teacher: No, "cat".
Child: Cat.

An example of a higher degree of supervision might be a case where a teacher is teaching a child how to draw a circle. In one case they might verbally guide the child, "No, go up, then over." To increase the level of feedback and make it more explicit, the teacher might actually hold the child's hand and move the pencil so that it draws the circle.

Reinforcement learning refers to learning where the agent receives feedback from the environment in a less direct way, in the form of either a reward or punishment. Using the examples above, instead of correcting the child, the teacher might give the child a cookie if the behavior is correct, or hit them if it is incorrect.

Finally, unsupervised learning includes those models where there is not explicit feedback from the environment, either in the form of supervision or a reward/punishment signal.

But how in the heck do you learn anything without any kind of explicit signal from the environment?

My thinking is beginning to shift to the idea that the bulk of what we learn, we learn in this way.

Here are some examples...

How did you learn that when one pool ball hits another on a pool table that it causes it to move in a particular way? Did you learn this in school? Were you given a cookie every time you saw a similar interaction in the world? I don't think so. What happened was, you saw very similar interactions in the world, over and over, with no reinforcement signal or supervision, and your neural circuitry was able to encode the statistical regularity of the events you witnessed.

Basically, if you see the same thing over and over again, you learn that things work that way, so you expect them to in the future.

Another more contentious area is language. In both children and second language learners comprehension outstrips production. Unless we want to believe that there is little to no language learning occurring before the child starts speaking, or even extensively interacting with the environment, the logical conclusion is that language learning is occurring in the child without explicit reinforcement or supervision. Basically, for learning the foundations of language, the child is learning the statistical regularities of speech, that certain sounds tend to follow one another more than others (e.g. "th" is followed a lot more often by "uh" than by "ch").

How do these things get learned? By close temporal proximity of the inputs. In other words, time is the teacher. And in the case of visual learning, things that tend to be grouped together in space tend to be closely related. So really space and time are the teachers.

Who you are and what you know is a result of your synapses and how much the firing of one neuron will influence the firing of another. The phenomenon of long-term potentiation is an empircally-verified process whereby when one neuron fires just before another one that it is connected to, helping that neuron to fire, then that synapse will strengthen, so that the next time the first neuron fires, it will have an even bigger influence on causing the second one to fire.

So when you see or hear or feel input A, and it's closely followed by input B, your A -> B link will strengthen. The more you see A followed by B, the more it will strengthen.

Now neurotransmitters like dopamine can facilitate and modulate this kind of learning, acting as a reward signal. But it is not necessary for the learning to occur.

So I think the bedrock of the rest of our cognition rests on this type of learning, the statistical clustering of related elements in space and time without any explicit feedback from the environment.

Atheists in Foxholes

djames@gmail.com — Thu, 1 May 08 10:43:00 UT

Well, there are atheists in foxholes, but maybe the reason there aren't that many is because many military commanders are hostile toward them.

The NY Times reports on the case of Specialist Jeremy Hall:

When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.

But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. "People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!" Major Welborn said, according to the statement.

Major Welborn told the soldiers he might bar them from re-enlistment and bring charges against them, according to the statement.

...

At the July meeting, Major Welborn told the soldiers they had disgraced those who had died for the Constitution, Specialist Hall said. When he finished, Major Welborn said, according to the statement: "I love you guys; I just want the best for you. One day you will see the truth and know what I mean."

So Jeremy Hall decided to sue, which I think any reasonable minded Christian would have done if they'd tried to form a Bible study group during their private time and a superior officer had crashed the meeting and told them they were a disgrace and that he would bring charges against them.

After filing the lawsuit, he started receiving threats, so he was transferred out of Iraq, back to the US to Fort Riley.

Nice, huh? I wonder if any of these dickheads who threatened him have ever actually read the First Amendment.

Visual Pattern Fluid Intelligence Test

djames@gmail.com — Tue, 29 Apr 08 09:51:00 UT

Holy crap this test was hard. 15 questions in 20 minutes, the kind of find-the-common-elements or find-the-sequence problems that can drive you nuts.

I think the person doing it is actually using the data for an experiment, so please don't discuss specific attributes of questions in the comments. But I think it's all right to post your score (which is apparently only given as a percentile rank). I'm interested to know what other people score on this.

Oh, and I found it via Ed Yong, who mentioned it in an entry about how a memory task can help improve fluid intelligence.

Orangutan and Chimps with Spears

djames@gmail.com — Tue, 29 Apr 08 07:59:00 UT

There are some photos that have just been posted on-line showing an orangutan holding a fisherman's spear that he found and apparently thrusting it into the water.

Links are here and here.

You've got to be careful with how you interpret such things. I've been taking a class on the evolution of primate cognition this semester, and it's an easy trap to confer all sorts of subjective emotional and mental states onto non-human primates that may or may not be there. The best route is to be conservative, and try to explain the phenomenon with the simplest explanation that you have evidence for.

In this case, we have no idea of the orangutan has any idea about what it's doing. The individual could just be mimicking a human fisherman as a form of play, without even realizing the causal link between spearing the water and catching a fish. There may not even be any fish present when the orangutan thrusts it into the water!

Some evidence that might support the "fishing" hypothesis would be data on when the orangutan last ate, coupled with some feeding habit information on orangutans. If you could establish that the behavior took place at a time when the orangutan hadn't recently eaten, that would be some support. Actually documenting that a fish was present at the time when the behavior occurred would go a long way to supporting the hypothesis as well. But just based on what we have, you can't call this "fishing" or "hunting" behavior. It's an orangutan sticking a spear in water.

I previously wrote about a study suggesting that chimpanzees use "spears" to hunt. Mary Roach wrote a piece on the research for National Geographic magazine, which is on-line here.

Roach describes the "hunting" behavior this way:

Things like sharpening sticks to spear bush babies. It is a different kind of hunting than the organized colobus monkey raids documented at other sites. A chimp who comes across a dead, hollow tree limbâpromising real estate for day-sleeping bush babiesâwill sometimes break off a branch from a nearby tree, remove the leaves and the flimsy ends, and then use its teeth to whittle one end to a point. This tool is then stabbed into an opening in the tree limb until the animal inside is out of commission. Whereupon it is eaten, head first, Pruetz says, "like a Popsicle."

What she fails to mention, and what you would see if you read the actual paper, is that there was only one recorded incident of a chimpanzee using such a tool in a tree hollow and then retrieving an inert bushbaby from the hollow and eating it. One instance.

Tools were seen being constructed 26 times, and were seen being stuck in tree hollows 22 times as of the writing of the published paper, but there was only one instance of any food source being removed from a probed tree hollow.

Roach makes it sound like there's a male-dominated conspiracy against Pruetz for her heretical findings:

The media ruckus spurred by Pruetz's report of spear-wielding chimps made her absence as a speaker at last year's Mind of the Chimpanzee conference perplexing. She was in the audience but wasn't invited to present a paper. On top of that, Pruetz's post-doc adviser, Cambridge University primatologist William McGrew, made a passing reference to the Fongoli hunting behaviors but did not credit her with the work. He credited her co-author and former student Paco Bertolani, now a student of McGrew's. Bertolani witnessed the firstâof now 40âobserved instances of the behavior, but scientific etiquette would call for the principal investigator to be mentioned. McGrew apologized afterward. Some primatologists took Pruetz to task for overstating the bush-baby-spearing behavior. When your prey is smaller than your hand, are you really hunting? Male primatologists tend to make the distinction along gender lines: The traditional view has been that chimpanzee huntingâalong with aggression and murderâis the domain of the male. "Small mammals that females and juveniles obtain are 'gathered,' " Pruetz says, "while males 'hunt.' "

This is really an instance of horribly sloppy science writing. Roach says that as of this her writing there have been 40 observed instances of "the behavior", without really saying what the behavior is. The implication is that the behavior was clearly hunting. The issue is not the size of the prey, or the chauvinism of her colleagues, but the fact that she's extrapolating all sorts of intentionality from one observed instance.

Here's a highly relevant passage from Pruetz and Bertolani's paper Savanna Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes verus, Hunt with Tools (no hedging or ambiguity in that title, eh?):

Chimpanzees forcibly "jabbed" tools into hollow trunks or branches multiple times and smelled and/or licked them upon extraction. In only two of the 22 cases was the tool use playful (in the case of an infant male) or exploratory in nature ("investigatory probe"). In all other cases, chimpanzees were judged to use such force in inserting the tool that prey within the cavity could have been injured. In all observed cases, chimpanzees used on hand in a "power grip" to jab the tool downward multiple times into the cavity. In the single instance in which a chimpanzee was observed to extract a bushbaby, it was unknown whether the prey was alive or dead after the use of the tool, but it made no attempts to escape, nor did it utter any vocalization.

Several things to note here. First, it was also unknown whether or not the bushbaby was dead or alive before the chimp even used the tool. They say that in only 2 of 22 cases was the use of the tool "playful" or "investigatory", but as far as I know there is no photo or video of any chimpanzee engaged in the behavior she describes.

There is some video footage that accompanies the research that shows the aftermath of such an episode, but none showing the actual "hunting" behavior at question. The only photo of anything resembling this behavior is one that accompanies the National Geographic story. Here's the photo gallery. Check out the fourth photo.

Does that look like the behavior that Pruetz describes? Does that look like a power grip to you? Or is this one of those rare cases of investigatory behavior?

Now, she may be right about the hypothesis that chimps are hunting. But the evidence is weak right now. Some actual photographic evidence of a chimpanzee carrying out the power grip-jamming behavior she describes would bolster her claims. As would additional instances of chimpanzees pulling bushbabies out of tree hollows following such behavior.

But one possibility we discussed in class was that this behavior is an extension of the termite fishing behavior chimps engage in, stripping a stick and using it to fish for termites. With the evidence that's presented in her paper, I'm willing to call the tools "probes", but not go further than that without additional evidence.

And I think Roach does a disservice to science when she invokes some sort of good ol' boy conspiracy for explaining the skeptical reaction of the scientific community to the claims that these chimps are hunting with spears. The simple fact is that Pruetz is overstating the case.

Cornel West and Gobbledygook

djames@gmail.com — Sun, 27 Apr 08 15:13:00 UT

I know I swore never to watch Real Time with Bill Maher again, after his finding out his lunatic positions on health care, but sometimes I just can't help myself. Besides, his guests on April 18th included Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and I'm a big fan of hers.

Anyway, the first question had to do with the latest Democratic debate. Check out this exchange between Cornel West and Bill Maher:

MAHER: Right. And this stuff about Barack Obama being elitist. Let me ask you this, Doctor. Do you think a black man in America can be elitist? Can you be a black elitist in America?

WEST: Oh, certainly, certainly. But we have to define what we mean by "elitism." See, "elitism" could mean just someone who knows more in the face of relative ignorance. [applause] Or, "elitism" could mean being arrogant, condescending and being haughty toward everyday people, or those Sly Stone called "everyday people." And the question becomes, what kind of elitism are we talking about, you see.

If, in fact â I mean, for me, the fundamental question has to do what are the lens [sic] through which we actually view, or the criteria we evaluate the remarks made by the candidates? The media elitism is so true. But, what are the real standards that we have? If weâre concerned about unarmed truth, and understand the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak, and unconditional love, understanding justice is what love looks like in public, then the question is what suffering voices did we hear in the debate, and what kinds of concerns about justice were manifest in the debate, including the questions, but also the answers. [applause] [cheers]

MAHER: Thank God, they just pay me to ask the questions. [laughter] And not â not to understand them.

I don't know about elitism, but spouting nonsensical bullshit knows no racial boundaries.

Building Gods

djames@gmail.com — Sun, 27 Apr 08 11:13:00 UT

I just came across the rough cut of a new documentary called Building Gods, which explores the ethical issues surrounding the engineering of intelligent (or "super-intelligent") machines, while mostly ignoring the feasibility of doing so. The movie consists mostly of interviews with four people related to the field of AI: Kevin Warwick (a cybernetics professor who has implanted chips in himself), Hugo de Garis (a computer science professor who has vocally warned about the eventual war between machine and humans), Anne Foerst (a theology professor who served as a "theological advisor" on projects in MIT's AI lab), and Nick Bostrom (a philosopher who helped co-found the World Transhumanist Association).

There's lots of stuff to talk about in this film, but mostly I found the comments of Hugo de Garis the most interesting. He doesn't come across as a wild-eyed, hysterical lunatic ranting about the end of the world. And I'd agree with some of what he says. I do think it is inevitable that artifacts will be engineered that rival or exceed the human capacity to learn and usefully apply that learning to difficult cognitive tasks. I also agree that it will be almost impossible to hard-wire such devices with something like Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. Something with greater-than-human intelligence is going to have to have a very flexible and powerful ability to learn. That means it will be able to unlearn as well. Such a machine will need to be trained extensively, and that training is when humans will be able to habituate it to certain tendencies (such as treating humans nicely), but I'm extremely skeptical about software implementations of behavioral safeguards. To a certain extent, there might be hardware solutions (e.g. implanting a tiny bomb in each robot's brain that disables it remotely if the robot starts acting in antisocial ways), but if robots really began to exceed human intelligence, they'd find workarounds to such safeguards themselves.

Hugo de Garis starts sounding a bit flakier when he begins to talk about human factions in the future war. He actually wrote a book on this called The Artilect War:Cosmists Vs. Terrans: A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines. "Terrans" are supposedly the humans that will be against building such machines. There's already a decent general word for this, and that's Luddite. "Cosmists" are the people who will support building super-intelligent machines.

Honestly, at the point in time before such machines are developed, it won't matter much if there's a split opinion. There will always be a financial incentive to create machines and algorithms that move toward human-competitiveness. It won't matter if people opposed to such technology protest, unless such people are in charge of dictatorships who mandate technological backpeddling. But I don't see that happening.

And once intelligent machines are developed, I think the squabbling between human factions will be irrelevant. What will matter is what the machines want to do, and whether or not they split into varying factions. And that's just too out there to even speculate about.

The film compares the creation of such machines to the development of the nuclear bomb. I think there's a horrible disconnect with that analogy. For one, the development of strong AI is about the creation of something, potentially a new form of sentience. Nuclear weapon is purely destructive. In some sense there is no way to predict what will happen when machines exceed human intelligence. They may decide to wipe us out, to live and cooperate in harmony with us, or maybe even migrate to another planet and set up their own independent society. Who knows? I think researchers who contribute to the development of such machines should be aware of the possibilities, but shouldn't let the possible negative consequences of understanding some aspect of the universe necessarily stop them from doing so.

Talking to Babies

djames@gmail.com — Sat, 26 Apr 08 08:14:00 UT

Cognition and Language Lab has a video from ABC news about "new research" that says you should say something like 20,000 words to your baby every day if you want them to be intelligent and do well in school.

I have no problem believing that the amount of speech an infant hears correlates with overall cognitive development, but I'd take everything this video says with a grain of salt. They spend a good portion of time shilling for a product called the LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis) System, which you can buy for $400. You stick it in your kid's pocket, and it records and tracks audio input for up to 16 hours. Supposedly it keeps track of how many words your child has heard all day. But the news piece says you can't just plop your kid down in front of a TV, that the device can discriminate "natural" speech. I smell bullshit.

How in the hell could they possibly discriminate between speech from a TV set or radio, and why wouldn't you necessarily want to count that as word exposure anyway?

I'm wondering if Diane Sawyer owns stock in LENA...

Slinging Crap is Slinging Crap

djames@gmail.com — Mon, 21 Apr 08 22:00:00 UT

It doesn't matter what you're selling.

Via Andrew Sullivan, this excellent post at Done With Mirrors sums up exactly how I feel about propaganda, no matter the cause and no matter who is slinging it, Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11 or Ben Stein in Expelled.

If it's wrong in case A, it's wrong in case B. Perhaps, you will say, my accidental convergence of opposition to both Moore's self-serving America-skeptic pseudo-pacifist showmanship and "Expelled's" shabby special pleading for anti-scientific Trojan horses allows me to appear to take a higher ground than the "Times." I have spent the day trying to think of a single cause I advocate, however earnestly, that I would wish to see promoted by such tactics as these filmmakers use. One undeniable good that I think would be advanced by propaganda and deception and lies.

I cannot think of one. If I were framed for murder and on death row, I would not want Michael Moore to try to win sympathy for me.

Exactly. He specifically looks at two reviews from the NY Times, one that goes for the throat against Expelled for its shameless propagandizing, but gives Moore a pass with a wink and a nudge. "Aw, that's just his shtick," they seem to say about Moore.

Which is crap.