Sam Harris's Blog, page 26

Fundamental Science and the Big Machine

Lisa Randall is one of today’s most influential theoretical physicists and a Professor of Physics at Harvard University. Her work has been featured in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Vogue, the Economist, Scientific American, Discover, New Scientist, Science, Nature, and elsewhere. Randall is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Physical Society, and is the recipient of several honorary degrees.  When not solving the problems of the universe, she can be found rock climbing, skiing, or contributing to art-science connections. Hypermusic Prologue, a small opera for which she wrote the libretto, premiered in the Pompidou Center in 2009, and Measure for Measure, an art exhibit she co-curated, opened in Los Angeles in 2010.

Annaka Harris is a freelance editor of nonfiction books and a Co-founder of Project Reason.

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In Knocking On Heaven’s Door, you have interwoven two projects: describing the awe-inspiring details of the Large Hadron Collider, while simultaneously leading a conversation about the importance of science. Why did you decide to write about these two topics together?

My motivation in writing this book was not only to describe the importance of science but also to explain how scientific research really works in practice.  We live in an age where scientific and technical advances are more critical than ever, yet many people distrust science, scientific thinking, and scientists.  I tried to explain the elements of a scientific way of thinking that can be useful when approaching the major problems of the world, as well as in scientific progress.

Creativity, for example, is essential to particle physics, cosmology, mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries – the arts and humanities. Scientists, writers, artists and musicians might seem very different on the surface, but the nature of skills, talents, and temperaments is not always as distinctive as you might expect.  It is important to understand the interplay between experiments, concepts, and creative thinking when we consider scientific advances.

I thought it made sense to anchor a more abstract discussion of the role of scale, risk, uncertainty, and creativity with some more concrete physics. It doesn’t hurt that it’s an exciting time for physicists like myself, with the Large Hadron Collider running extremely well and testing some of our hypotheses, as well as inspiring my colleagues and me to come up with new ideas and new ways of analyzing the enormous amount of data the LHC will produce.

I admire the courage you display throughout your book, breaking taboos and putting to rest some pervasive misconceptions about science. One misconception I encounter often is the claim that science is “unreliable” – discoveries are made one year, only to be overturned the next. You resolve this misunderstanding using the concepts of scale and effective theory. Can you explain why these concepts are so important?

It’s funny. In some respects the concept of an “effective theory” is one of the most intuitive ones you can imagine. If something is too small to matter, you can operate quite well. You can turn on a radio without knowing all its inner workings.  The “effective theory” concentrates on the particles and forces that have “effects” at the distances in question. Rather than delineating particles and interactions that describe more fundamental behavior, we formulate our theories, equations, and observations in terms of the things that are actually relevant to the scales we might detect.

You can predict where a ball will land when you throw it based on Newton’s Laws. You don’t need to use quantum mechanics. Even if you did, the difference in prediction would be far too minuscule to matter. And as a practical matter, the calculation would be far too complex. So you can use the effective theory, because it works sufficiently well.

The reason this concept is so important is that it helps us better understand how science advances, at least once it has developed to the state of contemporary physics. Newton’s Laws aren’t wrong – they are an approximation. Similarly, if and when we find new underlying structure at the LHC, it won’t invalidate the so-called Standard Model of particle physics that describes matter’s most basic elements and their interactions as we understand it today. It will improve on what we know.

Science proceeds with uncertainty at the edges, but it is advancing methodically overall. The wisdom and methods we acquired in the past survive. But theories evolve as we better understand a larger range of distances and energies.

In your book, you compare the LHC to a microscope – a new tool for looking even closer at the fabric of the universe – which really helped me connect to what is intrinsically fascinating about it. I think there’s something about the term “particle collider” that the general public has a hard time relating to – the term points to the very complicated process by which it probes matter (which most people don’t understand), rather than to its purpose, which is to see things that were previously invisible to us. One of the joys of reading your book is experiencing your excitement about the Large Hadron Collider. Will you discuss some of its awe-inspiring qualities here?

To describe the machine and technology, I end up using far more superlatives than I conventionally do, but this exception is warranted in the case of the LHC. The LHC is not merely large: it is the biggest machine ever built. It is not merely cold: it is the coldest extended region that we know of in the universe—colder than outer space.  The vacuum inside the proton-containing tubes, a 10 trillionth of an atmosphere, is the most complete vacuum over the largest region ever produced. The energy of the collisions are the highest ever generated on Earth, allowing us to study the interactions that occurred in the early universe the furthest back in time. Each LHC dipole (the magnets responsible for keeping the protons running in their tracks) contains coils of niobium-titanium superconducting cables, each of which contains stranded filaments a mere six microns thick – much smaller than a human hair. If you unwrapped all of these filaments, they would be long enough to encircle the orbit of Mars. And the last superlative that I’ll mention: the LHC’s $9 billion price tag also makes it the most expensive machine ever built.

Experiments at the LHC are designed to study substructure and interactions with a range a hundred thousand trillion times smaller than a centimeter – about a factor of ten smaller in size than anything any experiment has ever looked at before. And they are designed to produce rates for collisions—and hence potentially interesting events—that will be fifty times greater than any collider achieved before.

I still find it difficult to visualize how events get recorded in the LHC. Is it possible to describe the recording process through an analogy to something at human scale?

The recording process is in some ways straightforward, although the actual techniques and electronics are rather more technical.  Particles emanate outward from a collision. Detectors are built concentrically around the collision region so that they can record different particle properties. Charged particles ionize material to leave tracks. Particles that interact via the strong interactions dump energy in the detector element called the hadron calorimeter. Each of these layers records what goes through and the pieces get put together to determine what passed through—that is what is its charge and mass—and what is its energy and momentum.

The collisions themselves are somewhat subtle, however, because protons are not fundamental objects. They are made up of constituents known as quarks and gluons. When protons collide at LHC energies, it is really the individual constituents that collide together. It is as if you had beanbags that you throw really hard at each other. The individual beans might collide rather than the entire floppy bag. Those individual collisions of “hard” constituents are what can give rise to the potentially interesting events that make new particles.

What about particles that can’t be detected by the LHC? Aren’t there particles that will simply pass through all the detectors, unseen?

The detectors are built to capture all the energy that they can with almost complete angular coverage. So all the particles that have charge or interactions with the material of the detectors should get recorded by these hermetic detectors. Hermetic measurements ensure that even noninteracting or very weakly interacting particles can be discovered. The reason is that if “missing” transverse momentum is observed—that is, the energy doesn’t add up to the initial energy – one or more particles carry that off energy but have no directly detectable interactions must have been produced. Such particles carry energy and momentum. Even if not detected, the momentum they take away makes experimenters aware of their existence.

One particular particle that might be discovered in this way is the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). Supersymmetry is an extension of the symmetries of space and time into the quantum regime that pairs all known particles with supersymmetric partners. The lightest of the supersymmetric particles is expected to be very weakly interacting, so it won’t interact with any elements of the detector. This means that whenever a supersymmetric particle is produced and decays, momentum and energy will appear to be lost. The LSP will disappear from the detector and carry away momentum and energy to where it can’t be recorded, leaving as its signature missing energy.

When particles are created or “decay into” other particles, does this mean they exist inside the initial particle(s), or do they actually get created? I’m assuming it’s the latter, but what exactly does this mean?

Generally the particles we are interested in are not already present. Collisions happen that turn matter into energy. And that energy can in turn become new elementary particles as Einstein’s relation E=mc2 tells us. The same thing happens in a sense when particles decay. The original particle is destroyed, but the energy it contained is then carried off by the decay products—the new particles that are created in the decay process.

In chapter 20 you discuss dark matter and dark energy. Are you saying it’s possible that the energy we can’t account for in the universe is coming from “something” that exists in another spatial dimension but still influences 3D space? That dark energy and dark matter are dark because they’re not actually “here”?

I’d say that dark matter and dark energy are on very different footing in the sense that we can reasonably imagine a number of different candidates for dark matter. That is, with more or less conventional particle physics in three spatial dimensions, we can devise many possible models that lead to the measured amount of dark matter with no overly peculiar assumptions. So it’s possible that the explanation of dark matter will involve an additional dimension. But it certainly doesn’t seem to be required.

Dark energy, on the other hand – energy that isn’t carried by matter but just exists and permeates the universe—is much harder to understand. We aren’t even sure there will be a conventional explanation either in three dimensions or with more. It would be exciting if we were to find an answer in any number of dimensions but so far, we just don’t understand it. That is to say, we don’t understand the actual amount of dark energy that exists. In principle, we would have expected it to have been much larger—120 orders of magnitude larger in fact. Understanding dark energy remains a formidable challenge.

How many years do you think it will be before the LHC and other technologies make discoveries that fundamentally change our understanding of the structure of the universe?

In addition to the experiments at the LHC that I describe in my book, many more cosmological investigations are in store. Gravity wave detectors will look for gravitational radiation from merging black holes and other exciting phenomena involving large amounts of mass and energy. Cosmic microwave experiments will tell us more about inflation. Cosmic ray searches will tell us new details about the content of the universe. And infrared radiation detectors could find new exotic objects in the sky. Regardless of the results, the interplay between theory and data will lead us to loftier interpretations of the universe around us and expand out knowledge into currently inaccessible domains.

At the LHC, we don’t know how long it will be before we start getting answers since we don’t know what is there or what the masses and interactions might be. Some discoveries may happen within a year or two. Others could take more than a decade. Some might even require higher energies than the LHC will ever achieve. The wait is a little anxiety provoking, but the results will be mind-blowing. That should make the nail-biting worth it. They could change our view of the underlying nature of reality, or at least the matter of which we are composed. When the results are in, whole new worlds could emerge. Within our lifetimes, we just might see the universe very differently.

Death and the Present Moment

Q&A: Sam Harris

By David Samuels

The Christian right, radical Islamists, and secular leftists agree: this atheist is America’s most dangerous man

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Free Will Review

Harris explores the notion that free will is an illusion in this nimble book (which, at 83 pages, can be read in one sitting or a couple of Metro rides), amiably and conversationally jumping from point to point. The book’s length is one of its charms: He never belabors any one topic or idea, sticking around exactly as long as he needs to in order to lay out his argument (and tackle the rebuttals that it will inevitably provoke) and not a page longer.

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The Illusion of the Self

Bruce Hood is currently the Director of the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre at the University of Bristol. He has been a research fellow at Cambridge University and University College London, a visiting scientist at MIT, and a faculty professor at Harvard. He has been awarded an Alfred Sloan Fellowship in neuroscience, the Young Investigator Award from the International Society of Infancy Researchers, the Robert Fantz Memorial Award and voted a Fellow by the Association for Psychological Science. He is the author of several books, including SuperSense: Why We Believe the Unbelievable. This year he was selected as the 2011 Royal Institution Christmas Lecturer—to give three lectures broadcast by the BBC—the most prestigious appointment for the public engagement of science in the UK. Bruce was kind enough to answer a few questions about his new book,The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity.

* * *

In what sense is the self an illusion?

For me, an illusion is a subjective experience that is not what it seems. Illusions are experiences in the mind, but they are not out there in nature. Rather, they are events generated by the brain. Most of us have an experience of a self. I certainly have one, and I do not doubt that others do as well – an autonomous individual with a coherent identity and sense of free will. But that experience is an illusion – it does not exist independently of the person having the experience, and it is certainly not what it seems. That’s not to say that the illusion is pointless. Experiencing a self illusion may have tangible functional benefits in the way we think and act, but that does not mean that it exists as an entity. 

If the self is not what it seems, then what is it?

For most of us, the sense of our self is as an integrated individual inhabiting a body. I think it is helpful to distinguish between the two ways of thinking about the self that William James talked about. There is conscious awareness of the present moment that he called the “I,” but there is also a self that reflects upon who we are in terms of our history, our current activities and our future plans. James called this aspect of the self, “me” which most of us would recognize as our personal identity—who we think we are. However, I think that both the “I” and the “me” are actually ever-changing narratives generated by our brain to provide a coherent framework to organize the output of all the factors that contribute to our thoughts and behaviors.

I think it helps to compare the experience of self to subjective contours – illusions such as the Kanizsa pattern where you see an invisible shape that is really defined entirely by the surrounding context. People understand that it is a trick of the mind but what they may not appreciate is that the brain is actually generating the neural activation as if the illusory shape was really there. In other words, the brain is hallucinating the experience. There are now many studies revealing that illusions generate brain activity as if they existed. They are not real but the brain treats them as if they were.

Now that line of reasoning could be applied to all perception except that not all perception is an illusion. There are real shapes out there in the world and other physical regularities that generate reliable states in the minds of others. The reason that the status of reality cannot be applied to the self, is that it does not exist independently of my brain alone that is having the experience. It may appear to have a consistency of regularity and stability that makes it seem real, but those properties alone do not make it so.

Similar ideas about the self can be found in Buddhism and the writings of Hume and Spinoza. The difference is that there is now good psychological and physiological evidence to support these ideas that I cover in the book in a way that I hope is accessible for the general reader.

Many readers might wonder where these narratives come from, and who interprets them, if not a self?

I do not think there are many cognitive scientists who would doubt that the experience of I is constructed from a multitude of unconscious mechanisms and processes. Me is similarly constructed, though we may be more aware of the events that have shaped it over our lifetime. But neither is cast in stone and both are open to all manner of reinterpretation. As artists, illusionists, movie makers, and more recently experimental psychologists have repeatedly shown, conscious experience is highly manipulatable and context dependent. Our memories are also largely abstracted reinterpretations of events – we all hold distorted memories of past experiences.

In the book, I emphasize the developmental processes that shape our brains from infancy onwards to create our identities as well as the systematic biases that distort the content of our identity to form a consistent narrative. I believe much of that distortion and bias is socially relevant in terms of how we would like to be seen by others. We all think we would act and behave in a certain way, but the reality is that we are often mistaken.

Answering the question of who is experiencing the illusion or interpreting the story is much more problematic. This is partly a conceptual problem and partly a problem of dualism. It is almost impossible to discuss the self without a referent in the same way that is difficult to think about a play without any players. Second, as the philosopher Gilbert Ryle pointed out, in searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted, and I think that is a dualistic problem if we think we can objectively examine our own minds independently, because our mind and self are both generated by the brain. So while the self illusion suggests an illogical tautology, I think this is only a superficial problem.

What role do you think childhood plays in shaping the self?

Just about everything we value in life has something to do with other people. Much of that influence occurs early in our development, which is one reason why human childhoods are so prolonged in comparison to other species. We invest so much effort and time into our children to pass on as much knowledge and experience as possible. It is worth noting that other species that have long periods of rearing also tend to be more social and intelligent in terms of flexible, adaptive behaviors. Babies are born social from the start but they develop their sense of self throughout childhood as they move to become independent adults that eventually reproduce. I would contend that the self continues to develop throughout a lifetime, especially as our roles change to accommodate others.

You talk about the role of social networking in the way we portray our self. Do you believe this technology is going to have a significant effect on us?

Honestly, I don’t know, and I spend a whole chapter speculating on this. We are increasingly spending more time on social networking sites, and I believe this will continue to become an integral part of the way we interact. These are still early days, and it is not clear how these new technologies are going to shape the social landscape, but we now have the capability to interact and be influenced by others in ways never before imagined.

There are some interesting phenomena emerging. There is evidence of homophily – the grouping together of individuals who share a common perspective, which is not too surprising. More interesting is evidence of polarization. Rather than opening up and exposing us to different perspectives, social networking on the Internet can foster more radicalization as we seek out others who share our positions. The more others validate our opinions, the more extreme we become. I don’t think we need to be fearful, and I am less concerned than the prophets of doom who predict the downfall of human civilization, but I believe it is true that the way we create the narrative of the self is changing.

If the self is an illusion, what is your position on free will?”

Free will is certainly a major component of the self illusion, but it is not synonymous. Both are illusions, but the self illusion extends beyond the issues of choice and culpability to other realms of human experience. From what I understand, I think you and I share the same basic position about the logical impossibility of free will. I also think that compatibilism (that determinism and free will can co-exist) is incoherent. We certainly have more choices today to do things that are not in accord with our biology, and it may be true that we should talk about free will in a meaningful way, as Dennett has argued, but that seems irrelevant to the central problem of positing an entity that can make choices independently of the multitude of factors that control a decision. To me, the problem of free will is a logical impasse – we cannot choose the factors that ultimately influence what we do and think. That does not mean that we throw away the social, moral, and legal rulebooks, but we need to be vigilant about the way our attitudes about individuals will be challenged as we come to understand the factors (both material and psychological) that control our behaviors when it comes to attributing praise and blame. I believe this is somewhat akin to your position.

Many people may find your conclusion about the self somewhat depressing. What benefit, if any, can a reader expect to gain from your book?

That was the same reaction I got from most publishers when we sent the book proposal out for consideration. I think they failed to appreciate that the self illusion explains so many aspects of human behavior as well as our attitudes toward others. When we judge others, we consider them responsible for their actions. But was Mary Bale, the bank worker from Coventry who was caught on video dropping a cat into a garbage can, being true to her self? Or was Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic rant being himself or under the influence of someone else? What motivated Senator Weiner to text naked pictures of himself to women he did not know? In the book, I consider some of the extremes of human behavior from mass murderers with brain tumors that may have made them kill, to rising politicians who self-destruct. By rejecting the notion of a core self and considering how we are a multitude of competing urges and impulses, I think it is easier to understand why we suddenly go off the rails. It explains why we act, often unconsciously, in a way that is inconsistent with our self image – or the image of our self as we believe others see us.

That said, the self illusion is probably an inescapable experience we need for interacting with others and the world, and indeed we cannot readily abandon or ignore its influence, but we should be skeptical that each of us is the coherent, integrated entity we assume we are.

 

The Trouble with Profiling

(Photo by JD Hancock)

Bruce Schneier is a highly-respected expert on security who has written for The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Forbes, Wired, Nature, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and other major publications. His most recent book is Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive.

At the suggestion of many readers, I invited Bruce to set me straight about airline security on this page. The following is his response to my controversial article, “In Defense of Profiling.” Bruce and I will discuss these issues in greater depth in a subsequent post.—SH

* * *

Why do otherwise rational people think it’s a good idea to profile people at airports? Recently, neuroscientist and best-selling author Sam Harris related a story of an elderly couple being given the twice-over by the TSA, pointed out how these two were obviously not a threat, and recommended that the TSA focus on the actual threat: “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim.”

This is a bad idea. It doesn’t make us any safer—and it actually puts us all at risk.

The right way to look at security is in terms of cost-benefit trade-offs. If adding profiling to airport checkpoints allowed us to detect more threats at a lower cost, then we should implement it. If it didn’t, we’d be foolish to do so. Sometimes profiling works. Consider a sheep in a meadow, happily munching on grass. When he spies a wolf, he’s going to judge that individual wolf based on a bunch of assumptions related to the past behavior of its species. In short, that sheep is going to profile…and then run away. This makes perfect sense, and is why evolution produced sheep—and other animals—that react this way. But this sort of profiling doesn’t work with humans at airports, for several reasons.

First, in the sheep’s case the profile is accurate, in that all wolves are out to eat sheep. Maybe a particular wolf isn’t hungry at the moment, but enough wolves are hungry enough of the time to justify the occasional false alarm. However, it isn’t true that almost all Muslims are out to blow up airplanes. In fact, almost none of them are. Post 9/11, we’ve had 2 Muslim terrorists on U.S airplanes: the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber. If you assume 0.8% (that’s one estimate of the percentage of Muslim Americans) of the 630 million annual airplane fliers are Muslim and triple it to account for others who look Semitic, then the chances any profiled flier will be a Muslim terrorist is 1 in 80 million. Add the 19 9/11 terrorists—arguably a singular event—that number drops to 1 in 8 million. Either way, because the number of actual terrorists is so low, almost everyone selected by the profile will be innocent.  This is called the “base rate fallacy,” and dooms any type of broad terrorist profiling, including the TSA’s behavioral profiling.

Second, sheep can safely ignore animals that don’t look like the few predators they know. On the other hand, to assume that only Arab-appearing people are terrorists is dangerously naive. Muslims are black, white, Asian, and everything else—most Muslims are not Arab. Recent terrorists have been European, Asian, African, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern; male and female; young and old. Underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab was Nigerian. Shoe bomber Richard Reid was British with a Jamaican father. One of the London subway bombers, Germaine Lindsay, was Afro-Caribbean. Dirty bomb suspect Jose Padilla was Hispanic-American. The 2002 Bali terrorists were Indonesian. Both Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber were white Americans. The Chechen terrorists who blew up two Russian planes in 2004 were female. Focusing on a profile increases the risk that TSA agents will miss those who don’t match it.

Third, wolves can’t deliberately try to evade the profile. A wolf in sheep’s clothing is just a story, but humans are smart and adaptable enough to put the concept into practice. Once the TSA establishes a profile, terrorists will take steps to avoid it. The Chechens deliberately chose female suicide bombers because Russian security was less thorough with women. Al Qaeda has tried to recruit non-Muslims. And terrorists have given bombs to innocent—and innocent-looking—travelers. Randomized secondary screening is more effective, especially since the goal isn’t to catch every plot but to create enough uncertainty that terrorists don’t even try.

And fourth, sheep don’t care if they offend innocent wolves; the two species are never going to be friends. At airports, though, there is an enormous social and political cost to the millions of false alarms. Beyond the societal harms of deliberately harassing a minority group, singling out Muslims alienates the very people who are in the best position to discover and alert authorities about Muslim plots before the terrorists even get to the airport. This alone is reason enough not to profile.

I too am incensed—but not surprised—when the TSA manhandles four-year old girls, children with cerebral palsy, pretty women, the elderly, and wheelchair users for humiliation, abuse, and sometimes theft. Any bureaucracy that processes 630 million people per year will generate stories like this. When people propose profiling, they are really asking for a security system that can apply judgment. Unfortunately, that’s really hard. Rules are easier to explain and train. Zero tolerance is easier to justify and defend. Judgment requires better-educated, more expert, and much-higher-paid screeners. And the personal career risks to a TSA agent of being wrong when exercising judgment far outweigh any benefits from being sensible.

The proper reaction to screening horror stories isn’t to subject only “those people” to it; it’s to subject no one to it. (Can anyone even explain what hypothetical terrorist plot could successfully evade normal security, but would be discovered during secondary screening?) Invasive TSA screening is nothing more than security theater. It doesn’t make us safer, and it’s not worth the cost. Even more strongly, security isn’t our society’s only value. Do we really want the full power of government to act out our stereotypes and prejudices? Have we Americans ever done something like this and not been ashamed later? This is what we have a Constitution for: to help us live up to our values and not down to our fears.

 

On Knowing Your Enemy

(Photo by Slagheap)

I recently wrote a short essay about airline security (“In Defense of Profiling”) that provoked a ferocious backlash from readers. In publishing this piece, I’m afraid that I broke one of my cardinal rules of time (and sanity) management: Not everything worth saying is worth saying oneself. I learned this the hard way once before, in discussing the ethics of torture and collateral damage, but this time the backlash has been even more unpleasant and less rational.

One idea that seems to unite many of my critics is that I am shamefully ignorant about how airline security actually works and about the means that terrorists can use to circumvent it. Many who were eager to educate me on these matters, or to find another way of declaring me an imbecile, recommended that I consult the work of Bruce Schneier. Whether well-intentioned or not, this was a useful piece of advice.

Bruce is an expert on security who has testified before Congress and has written and debated these issues for many major publications, including The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Forbes, Wired, Nature, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post. He has repeatedly argued against profiling.

I invited Bruce to set me straight about airline security on this page, and he very generously accepted. He is writing a direct response to my article, which I will publish tomorrow. We will then discuss our differences in a subsequent post.

One line in my article raised a tsunami of contempt for me in liberal and secular circles:

We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.

Once again, I included myself in this profile—but that did almost nothing to stem the accusations of racism.

Imagine that you work for the TSA and are executing a hand search of a traveler’s bag. He is a young man in his twenties and seems nervous. You notice that he is carrying a hardcover copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. You pick up the book and ask him if he likes it. He now appears even more nervous than before. You notice something odd about the book—the dust jacket doesn’t seem to fit. You remove it and find a different book underneath. How do you feel about this traveler’s demeanor, and the likelihood of his being a terrorist, if the book is:

A. The Qur’an (in Arabic)

B. The Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide

C. Overcoming Impotence: A Leading Urologist Tells You Everything You Need to Know



D. Dianetics

If you care more about A than B, C, or D, as I think you should, you are guilty of religious profiling (and calling it “behavioral profiling” doesn’t change this fact).

The funny thing about my “racism” is that I would probably be more concerned if the young man in this example were light-skinned, like me, than Middle Eastern. Why? Because he would have had to make a great effort to learn Arabic. Is there anything intrinsically sinister about learning Arabic? No. I wish I knew Arabic. But it is one more detail that fits the profile of someone who is deeply committed to the worldview of Islam and disposed to conceal that fact. Are all such people terrorists? Of course not. But every person who attempts to blow himself up on an airplane, now or in the foreseeable future, is likely to come from this group. Of course, if that changes, we should alter our view of security accordingly. If the Ku Klux Klan were to declare a broader war on civilization and begin a campaign of suicide bombings, we would have to keep an eye on that profile too (and being nonwhite or Jewish would help smooth your path through security).

In trying to understand the reaction to my essay, I think I have uncovered most of the assumptions at work in the minds of my critics. I believe that every one of these assumptions is false. To my surprise, a few people who have a reputation for being very intelligent, such as the biologist-blogger PZ Myers, appear to believe all of them:

1. Terrorism is just terrorism—there is nothing special about jihadists as a group, or suicide bombing as a tactic. When thinking about airline security, therefore, it makes perfect sense to put forward Timothy McVeigh (a non-Muslim terrorist) as an example of why any focus on Muslims is wrongheaded.

2. Furthermore, there is no link between Islam and suicidal terrorism.

3. Thus, any focus on the Muslim community is a sign of prejudice against dark-skinned people, Arabs, foreigners, or some other beleaguered minority.

4. And, in any case, it is impossible to tell whether someone is likely to be Muslim in the first place—there is no such thing as “looking Muslim” or “not looking Muslim.”

5. Focusing on people who could conceivably be Muslim would require ugly infringements of civil liberties—separate lines for dark-skinned people at the airport, for instance.

6. It would also allow terrorists to find another path through security—such as recruiting 80-year-old women from Okinawa to do their suicidal dirty work (though #4 tells us that there is no such thing as “looking Muslim,” so 80-year-old women from Okinawa look no less Muslim than anyone else). Random searches are actually more prudent than targeted ones because terrorists cannot game a random system.

7. And focusing on Muslims would prove so offensive to the Muslim community worldwide that it could increase Muslim support for terrorism (though #2 assures us that nothing about Islam makes this more likely than it would otherwise be; any group could be expected to support suicidal terrorism in response to being profiled).

8. If we had the resources, we would follow the Israeli approach to airline security, wherein no one is profiled on the basis of religion, race, ethnicity, nationality, age, or gender. Rather, the Israelis attend only to a person’s behavior at the airport. “Behavioral profiling” is logically and empirically distinct from other sorts of profiling, and we should practice it alone.

The only assumptions on this list that stand a chance of being true are #6 and #7. Bruce Schneier appears to be very fond of #6, and I trust we will hear more from him about how terrorists can successfully game any system that profiles. But I don’t buy this argument, at least not yet, for reasons that we will probably discuss.

Assumption #7 does strike me as possible, though not likely. But this is just a statement about how terrifying Muslims have become worldwide: Don’t draw cartoons of their Prophet, or they’ll kill you. Don’t write a novel that could be considered blasphemous, or they’ll kill you. Don’t criticize their treatment of women, or they’ll kill you. Don’t leave the religion and publicly disavow it, or they’ll kill you. Don’t burn a Qur’an, or they’ll kill you. And if their vicious intolerance of civil discourse causes you to profile them at the airport, well, some who would not have otherwise thought to kill you will grow more insular and radicalized and, in the end, they will kill you too. I agree that a concern about alienating the Muslim community isn’t absurd—we desperately need Muslims to cooperate with law enforcement (i.e., to help profile within their own community)—but I’m not worried about creating more jihadists by simply taking intelligent steps to keep them off airplanes.

The Israelis have had a spotless record of airline security since 1972. It is widely imagined that they would never be so stupid as to profile people on the basis of race, ethnicity, or nationality. But this is just a pious fantasy. The Israelis have well-trained screeners who use all the information they can possibly glean to mitigate the risk of terrorism. Racial and ethnic profiling appears to be central to their process. I agree with many of my critics that we should emulate the Israeli approach insofar as it is possible. That would require smart, well-trained screeners who are empowered to use their discretion (i.e., to profile).

I have discovered that most secular liberals are quite unwilling to think in any detail about the threat we face in our “war on terror.” For instance, why should we be especially concerned about suicide bombing? Because it is much harder to prevent and tends to be much more destructive than ordinary bombing. People who want to get safely home after committing an act of terrorism are significantly restricted in what they can do, and they can be deterred in ways that aspiring martyrs cannot. Anyone determined to board an airplane and destroy it in flight is, by definition, a suicide bomber.

In my previous article, I linked to videos of young children being searched by the TSA (like this one). Ask yourself, What are TSA screeners doing when they search a toddler in this way? They are wondering whether the adults accompanying this child have decided to murder him along with everyone else in sight. Who would do such a thing? As it turns out, such people exist. Ask yourself, What percentage of these people are Muslim?

Some readers might think that this question would be difficult or impossible to answer. Let’s try another, then: What percentage of porn stars are also theoretical physicists? Is this a hard question for which to give a ballpark answer? No. In fact, I would be willing to bet my life that I could get within 10 percentage points of the exact figure without doing any research—and the same holds for the question about using children as bombs on airplanes in the year 2012. It is possible to make educated guesses of this kind with a high degree of confidence. In the context of airport security, this is “profiling” by another name.

The most pernicious and uncharitable way of parsing my remarks about Islam is to say that I believe that most (or all) Muslims are evil. The truth is, I don’t necessarily believe that any Muslims are evil—even jihadists. And this is what I find so troubling about the doctrine of Islam. Are most jihadists psychopaths devoid of empathy? I see no reason to think so. If you believe that the creator of the universe wants you to wage jihad against infidels, I think you can be perfectly healthy in psychological terms while becoming a suicide bomber. Secularists who doubt this seem to be the ones devoid of empathy, in fact: They are unwilling or unable to see the world through the eyes of our enemies—even when our enemies tell us, ad nauseam, exactly how they see the world. The most dangerous failing of secularism (and of moderate religion) is that its adherents cannot seem to grasp that some people really believe martyrdom is a path to Paradise.

Within a few hours of publishing “In Defense of Profiling,” I had lunch with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of my favorite people on earth. (Of course, I told her that I thought she should be profiled at the airport, and we had a good laugh about my “racism.”) What defenders of Islam refuse to acknowledge is that critics of this religion—especially those, like Ayaan, who were once Muslim and are now guilty of apostasy—have security concerns of a sort that critics of Judaism or Christianity haven’t had for centuries. Charges of “Islamophobia” in this context are nothing more than liberal masochism and denial. And the most ominous sign coming from the moderate Muslim community at this moment is that the majority of its members continue to deny that Islam warrants any special concern.

To see how the denial of the obvious has become a new article of faith for secular liberals, consider the response I received from Chris Stedman. In an article published in The Huffington Post, Stedman urged me to visit a mosque with him. This invitation was much celebrated online. Many people appear to believe that the remedy for my bigotry is for me to meet real Muslims—as though I have never met Muslims or doubted for a moment that most Muslims living in America are really nice people. This misses the point entirely.

Stedman’s article is worth reading. It is well written and earnest, and it reveals just how confused my fellow liberals are about Islam. Stedman is a gay, atheist, interfaith activist. As one person wrote on Twitter (@GadSaad)—“Wear a t-shirt stating ‘There is no God and I am Gay’ in Islamic countries and report back on your experiences.” This may seem like a cheap shot. It isn’t.

Consider the following challenge Stedman leveled at me:

An argument I frequently hear from atheists is that if moderate Muslims really exist, they need to speak out more. The problem is that Muslims are speaking out against extremists who cite Islam as their inspiration. Need some examples? There. Are. So. Many. That. I. Can’t. Link. To. Them. All. (But those eleven are a good start.)”

This is a clever way to make the point—just hammer me with links and your readers will conclude that there is abundant evidence for Muslim moderation that I’ve ignored. Well, I clicked the first link and found the following within (I’m not kidding) 45 seconds:

In a section titled “Fatwas & Formal Statements by Muslim Scholars and by Muslim Organizations,” we find Abdullah, Sh. M. Nur, FCNA (U.S.) illuminating the fine points of “minority rights & apostasy” under Islam. After some genuinely misleading commentary on the general message of the Qur’an regarding freedom of belief, we find the following statement about apostasy (which, again, applies to my close friend Ayaan):

There are scholars who distinguish between apostasy on a personal level, which is not punishable by death, and apostasy that is accompanied by what we call today high treason, in which case the punishment is for high treason, not for apostasy.

However, some scholars do not distinguish between the two types. The issue pertains to the way of interpreting texts in the Qur’an and the Hadith that deal with that subject. A detailed answer to this question requires many more pages and Allah willing it will be made available in the future…. [A]nyone has the right to choose to convert to Islam or keep practicing his faith. But once a person converts to Islam, he should practice his faith and never change it. If he changes it, it is a major sin. Whether it is punishable by Islamic law is a debatable matter among Muslim scholars. Some believe he should be punished because they count this crime as betrayal, while others say that if someone changes his faith and does not challenge the Islamic society, they consider it a private matter between him and Allah and it is not punishable by the Islamic faith according to their view. However, both opinions agree that it is a sin punishable by Allah and that it is the worst form of sin.

On a website whose purpose is to bear witness to Muslim moderation, we learn that it is a matter of consensus that an apostate should be killed if he or she speaks publicly against the faith. I’m afraid I knew that already. Do I really need to follow the other 10 links?

Finally, most of my critics seem unable to imagine that the Muslim community in the West could ever be honest about the reality of airport security. For a glimpse of what such honesty might look like, consider the following email I received in response to my last blog post:

Sam,

I’m an attorney in a very large firm here in the U.S. I’ve spent a good deal of my time over the past three years traveling for various cases and the airport has become a second home to me. I’m also constantly profiled. But not just at the airports, in multiple other locations and in various different ways.

When I travel, however, especially by plane, I want to feel safe. I do not want to be treated poorly, but if I absolutely had to choose, I’d opt for poor treatment over death-by-suicide-bomber. Thankfully, I haven’t had to choose and I’ve actually received neither (though there is one incident at the Philly airport I could have done without). The TSA does not harass me, but they do their job properly. To properly do their job, they need to keep an eye out and screen those who represent the most urgent, or at least the most obvious, threats. Because of my name, and my family background if I’m honest, I stand out as a likely candidate. Upon seeing me and placing a face with my name (Aamir Abbasi), my appearance does not scream “terrorist,” but it does not put your concerns to rest—I’m physically capable of being a threat and do not have the demeanor to assure one that I am not a threat.

However, I’m not a threat and I know this perfectly well, as do all my friends and co-workers. But if the authorities don’t take a closer look at me than the elderly woman you have pictured on your blog, they are surely not doing their job well. Based on the few minutes the TSA has to scrutinize me, there really is no way to determine that I am not a terrorist, and as you correctly point out, most terrorists we need to concern ourselves with in the U.S. at this particular time in history are Muslim terrorists.

Profiling is just common sense put into practice. To say otherwise demonstrates nothing more than a deluded view of political correctness. I’m sure your article has not helped with your popularity, but these difficult-to-swallow truths need [to be] advocated by someone. So, thanks.

Aamir Abbasi

I must say, receiving emails like this comes as a relief when my fellow secularists are falling all over themselves for a chance to put their feet in my mouth.

 

Training the Emotional Brain

(Photo by Jeff Miller)

Richard J. Davidson is the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, Director of the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior and the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, and Founder and Chair of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, at the Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Psychology and has published more than 275 scientific papers, many chapters and reviews, and edited 13 books. He is the author of the new book (with Sharon Begley) The Emotional Life of Your Brain. Richie (as he is known to his friends) has done more to bring the study of mental well-being into the 21st century than anyone I can think of. He was kind enough to answer a few questions about his work.

***

Can you briefly summarize your work up to this point?

The research I summarize in my book The Emotional Life of Your Brain is about emotional styles—differences among people in how they respond to emotional challenges.  From quite early on in my career, there were two critical observations that came to form the core of my subsequent life’s work.  The first observation is that the most salient characteristic of emotion in people is the fact that each person responds differently to life’s slings and arrows.  Each of us is unique in our emotional make-up and this individuality determines why some people are resilient and others vulnerable, why some have high levels of well-being despite objective adversity while others decompensate rapidly in the response to the slightest setback.

The second observation came from the great fortune I had early in my career to be around some remarkable people.  They were remarkable not because of their academic or professional achievements, but rather because of their demeanor, really because of their emotional style.  These were extremely kind and generous people.  They were very attentive, and when I was in their presence I felt as if I was the sole and complete focus of all of their attention.  They were people that I found myself wishing to be around more.  And I learned that one thing all of these people had in common was a regular practice of meditation.  And I asked them if they were like that all of their lives and they assured me they were not, but rather that these qualities had been nurtured and cultivated by their meditative practices.



It wasn’t until many years later that I encountered neuroplasticity and recognized that the mechanisms of neuroplasticity were an organizing framework for understanding how emotional styles could be transformed.  While they were quite stable over time in most adults, they could still be changed through systematic practice of specific mental exercises.  In a very real and concrete sense, we could change our brains by transforming our minds.  And there was no realm more important for that to occur than emotion.  For it is so that our emotional styles play an incredibly important role in determining who will be vulnerable to psychopathology and who will not be.  Emotional styles are also critical in our physical health.  Mental and physical well-being are inextricably linked. 

What is the focus of your new book?

In the book I describe 6 emotional styles that are rooted in basic neuroscientific research.  The 6 styles are:

1. Resilience: How rapidly or slowly do you recover from adversity?

2. Outlook: How long does positive emotion persist following a joyful event?

3. Social Intuition: How accurate are you in detecting the non-verbal social cues of others?

4. Context: Do you regulate your emotion in a context-sensitive fashion?

5. Self-Awareness: How aware are you of your own bodily signals that constitute emotion?

6. Attention: How focused or scattered in your attention?

I did not decide one day to figure out how many emotional styles there were or to postulate which styles would make sense for humans to have. Rather, each of these styles has arisen inductively from the large corpus of research my colleagues and I have conducted using rigorous neuroscientific methods over the past 30 years.  They are not the obvious styles that correspond to well-known personality types such as introversion and extraversion.  But, as I explain in my book, they can explain the constituents of commonly found personality types. 

The fact that they are grounded in neural systems provides important clues as to how each style affects our emotional behavior and how the styles can also impact downstream bodily systems important for physical health.

How much of a person’s emotional style is conscious?

Many aspects of emotional style are not conscious.  They constitute emotional habits that largely proceed in the absence of awareness.  For example, most of us are rarely aware of how long negative emotion persists following a stressful event.  The self-awareness style underscores the fact that there are many bodily processes that contribute to emotion of which we may be unaware.  One important motivation for me in writing this book is to bring into awareness habits of mind that previously were not conscious.  By describing the nature of emotional styles and their underlying brain bases, it is my fervent aspiration that it will help others to recognize emotional patterns in themselves and such awareness is the first, and often most important, step in producing change.  So if there are aspects of your emotional style that you wish to change, first becoming aware of these components of your mind is a key ingredient to change.  In the book, I offer simple questionnaires you can take for each of the 6 emotional styles to give you an idea of where you fall on each of the 6 dimensions.  And I also offer simple strategies to change your emotional styles should you wish to do so.  These strategies are derived from ancient meditation practices and modern scientific approaches.  Together, they constitute what I’ve called “neurally-inspired behavioral interventions”: Interventions that are derived from some understanding of the brain and utilize simple behavioral or mental strategies that offer the prospect of transforming your mind and thereby changing your brain.  In the book I show that we can all take more responsibility for our own brains and intentionally shape our brains in a more positive way.

In my experience, the topic of meditation still provokes skepticism among scientists and secularists. Can you describe what you mean by “meditation” and then tell us why you think this practice is relevant to our understanding of the human mind?



One definition of the word “meditation’ in Sanskrit is “familiarization.”  And in a key sense the family of mental practices that constitute meditation can be thought of as strategies to familiarize a person with her own mind.  Meditation in this sense can help to cleanse the interior lenses of perception so that we can see our own minds with greater clarity.  Particularly for those who are students of the mind, this practice can be enormously informative in providing an inner or phenomenological view that is different from that provided by the objective methods of science.  In other senses, meditation refers to mental practices that can be used to cultivate attention and emotion regulation.  For example, some practices involve focusing attention on breathing and returning the attention to breathing each time a person notices that her mind has wandered.  In this way, gradually over time, selective attention can be improved.  The term “mindfulness meditation” refers to a form of meditation during which practitioners are instructed to pay attention, on purpose and non-judgmentally.  The process of learning to attend nonjudgmentally can gradually transform one’s emotional response to stimuli such that we can learn to simply observe our minds in response to stimuli that might provoke either negative or positive emotion without being swept up in these emotions.  This does not mean that our emotional intensity diminishes.  It simply means that our emotions do not perseverate.  If we encounter an unpleasant situation, we might experience a transient increase in negative emotions but they do not persist beyond the situation. 

Scientific research has now established that certain forms of meditation have the types of effects described and underscore their relevance for understanding the human mind.  Such work establishes that the mind is more “plastic” than we had assumed in scientific research.  By plastic we mean that it is capable of transformation.  These findings invite the view that many qualities that we regarded as relatively fixed, such as one’s levels of happiness and well-being, are best regarded as the product of skills that can be enhanced through training. 

 

 

 

In Defense of Profiling

Much has been written about how insulting and depressing it is, more than a decade after the events of 9/11, to be met by “security theater” at our nation’s airports. The current system appears so inane that one hopes it really is a sham, concealing more-ingenious intrusions into our privacy. The spirit of political correctness hangs over the whole enterprise like the Angel of Death—indeed, more closely than death, or than the actual fear of terrorism. And political correctness requires that TSA employees direct the spotlight of their attention at random—or appear to do so—while making rote use of irrational procedures and dubious technology.

Although I don’t think I look like a jihadi, or like a man pretending not to be one, I do not mean to suggest that a person like me should be exempt from scrutiny. But other travelers fit the profile far less than I do. One glance at these innocents reveals that they are no more likely to be terrorists than walruses in disguise. I make it a point to notice such people while queuing for security at the airport, just to see what sort of treatment they receive at the hands of the TSA.

While leaving JFK last week, I found myself standing in line behind an elderly couple who couldn’t have been less threatening had they been already dead and boarding in their coffins. I would have bet my life that they were not waging jihad. Both appeared to be in their mid-eighties and infirm. The woman rode in a wheelchair attended by an airport employee as her husband struggled to comply with TSA regulations—removing various items from their luggage, arranging them in separate bins, and loading the bins and bags onto the conveyor belt bound for x-ray.

After much preparation, the couple proceeded toward the body scanner, only to encounter resistance. It seems that they had neglected to take off their shoes. A pair of TSA screeners stepped forward to prevent this dangerous breach of security—removing what appeared to be orthopedic footwear from both the woman in the wheelchair and the man now staggering at her side. This imposed obvious stress on two harmless and bewildered people and caused considerable delay for everyone in my line. I turned to see if anyone else was amazed by such a perversion of vigilance. The man behind me, who could have played the villain in a Bollywood film, looked unconcerned.

I have noticed such incongruities before. In fact, my wife and I once accidentally used a bag for carry-on in which I had once stored a handgun—and passed through three airport checkpoints with nearly 75 rounds of 9 mm ammunition. While we were inadvertently smuggling bullets, one TSA screener had the presence of mind to escort a terrified three-year-old away from her parents so that he could remove her sandals (sandals!). Presumably, a scanner that had just missed 2.5 pounds of ammunition would determine whether these objects were the most clever bombs ever wrought. Needless to say, a glance at the girl’s family was all one needed to know that they hadn’t rigged her to explode. (The infuriating scene played out very much like this one.)

Is there nothing we can do to stop this tyranny of fairness? Some semblance of fairness makes sense—and, needless to say, everyone’s bags should be screened, if only because it is possible to put a bomb in someone else’s luggage. But the TSA has a finite amount of attention: Every moment spent frisking the Mormon Tabernacle Choir subtracts from the scrutiny paid to more likely threats. Who could fail to understand this?

Imagine how fatuous it would be to fight a war against the IRA and yet refuse to profile the Irish? And yet this is how we seem to be fighting our war against Islamic terrorism.

Granted, I haven’t had to endure the experience of being continually profiled. No doubt it would be frustrating. But if someone who looked vaguely like Ben Stiller were wanted for crimes against humanity, I would understand if I turned a few heads at the airport. However, if I were forced to wait in line behind a sham search of everyone else, I would surely resent this additional theft of my time.

We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it. And, again, I wouldn’t put someone who looks like me entirely outside the bull’s-eye (after all, what would Adam Gadahn look like if he cleaned himself up?) But there are people who do not stand a chance of being jihadists, and TSA screeners can know this at a glance.

Needless to say, a devout Muslim should be free to show up at the airport dressed like Osama bin Laden, and his wives should be free to wear burqas. But if their goal is simply to travel safely and efficiently, wouldn’t they, too, want a system that notices people like themselves? At a minimum, wouldn’t they want a system that anti-profiles—applying the minimum of attention to people who obviously pose no threat? 

Watch some of the TSA screening videos on YouTube—like this one—and then imagine how this infernal stupidity will appear if we ever suffer another terrorist incident involving an airplane.

Learning to Respect Religion

By Nicholas Kristof

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