Greece, Civil Unions in Hawaii and the Huffington Post:: Ethical Dilemmas about GPFM

My twin has a piece up at the Huffington Post arguing that the veto of Hawaii's civil union bill by its Governor Lingle was not motivated by the reasons that Lingle gave. I'm having some qualms about linking to the Huffington Post. The website has had a long history of pushing anti-science and fringe medical beliefs, including homeopathy and claims that vaccines cause autism. Most recently, they've branched out into anti-evolution propaganda with a piece by David Klinghoffer of the Discovery Institute claiming that evolution was the root cause of Nazism. These issues with the Huffington Post are discussed in detail in this Salon piece and this statistical analysis. I'm concerned about driving traffic to a website which has such attitudes towards science and the scientific consensus. Moreover, it raises serious questions about their otherwise apparently good political coverage. In particular, if they cannot deal with empirical issues well, why should one think that they can deal with issues involving politics where far more cognitive biases come into play? I'm curious what readers think about this issue.

Meanwhile, I can without any concerns link to my father's recent piece at the Oxford University Press blog which discusses what lessons that the United States should take away from the Greek financial crisis. The piece gives a balanced view about the economic and demographic issues that face the United States today and how they compared to Greece.

Dan DeLong, Animal Sexuality and High School English

Mike Dunford has drawn my attention to a situation in Piasa, Illinois where high school English teacher Dan DeLong assigned extra-credit reading about gay animals. The situation seems to be a bit complicated. The assigned article discusses how homosexuality is common in the animal kingdom. DeLong has been suspended from his job and faces a disciplinary hearing.

If a teacher simply assigned reading from areas of study outside the teacher's area that would be a legitimate concern. However, it appears that the assignment was to read the essay and examine the essay's structure and argumentative form. Therefore, this is simply a normal high school assignment. Teachers assign all sorts of different reading about different subjects. That's part of the normal school curriculum. One might be able to describe a problem if one had evidence that DeLong had assigned the essay to make some sort of political, moral, theological or other point. However, I haven't seen any claim that that was the case. The objection simply seems to be that some parents were uncomfortable with the reading.

Unless the school had some sort of blanket policy about the teaching sexual material requiring parental permission I don't see anything that DeLong has done. While news reports are still sparse with details it seems like this is more about fear of gays and homosexuality extended to such a point that even discussing gay sex in animals triggers a backlash. That's stupid. There's simply no other way to describe it. DeLong should be restored to his position as soon as possible.

Update: DeLong has been reinstated.

Alan Turing, Apologies, and Cthulhu

The British Government has finally apologized for its treatment of Alan Turing. Turing was one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century. He was responsible for founding computer science and he lead the effort to crack the Enigma encryption used by the Germans during World War II. This work saved many Allied lives and according to some historians proved crucial to the victory over the Axis forces. Without Turing's work, our world would look very different. However, Turing was gay. In 1952, Turing was convicted for engaging in homosexual acts. He was forced to undergo hormone therapy which lead to weight gain and other problems. Turing's security clearance was revoked. At the time, homosexuals were considered a security risk because of the potential of blackmail. The fact that the entire risk of blackmail was because they were considered a security risk apparently did not matter. Nor did it matter that since Turing was publicly gay, there was no possible risk of blackmail. Turing's ongoing consulting work with the government was terminated. Turing's life took a steady downhill side. In 1954, he committed suicide.

I am ambivalent about this apology. On the one hand, it is good to acknowledge how horribly Britain treated one of the saviors of civilization. On the other hand, apologies to the long dead always strike me as hollow. The living always face more than enough issues that are of far more practical importance than assuaging the feelings of the long-deceased.

Rather than discuss the pros and cons of such apologies, I am instead going to suggest three pieces of further reading.

First, Wikipedia has an excellent biography of Turing which explains his accomplishments and his mistreatment in far more detail than one can easily do in a short blog entry.

Second, Greg Egan, an excellent science fiction writer, has written a short story imagining a world in which Turing's life went slightly differently. In this case, "slightly differently" means had the assistance of a time-traveling robot. The story is more serious than one might think from that summary. The story looks at Turing's interactions with C.S. Lewis. I'm not sure the story is completely fair to Lewis overall, but it is very well-written and is an amusing what-if. Like most of Egan's writing, there's just enough plausibly correct mathematics to make it interesting.

Third, Charles Stross has written an amusing novel The Atrocity Archives in which Turing figures in the background. The essential premise is that Turing did not commit suicide but was assassinated by the British government to cover up far scarier discoveries he made (so presumably the Brits still owe Turing an apology in that universe). In that novel, mathematics is deeply connected to magic and thinking about certain theorems can accidentally lead to summonings of Cthulhu and other eldritch horrors. Turing was killed for discovering a series of powerful theorems including a proof that P=NP which if invoked improperly could destroy our universe. Unlike the Egan story, this is not a story I can claim has much in the way of serious merit. But it is very fun. By most accounts, Turing was a man with a sense of humor about things. I'd like to think that he'd smile to know that fifty years after he was dead, Great Britain would be apologizing to him at the same time that people were reading novels which linked him to Lovecraftian horrors.