Passages from Pinker

Posted on Friday 17 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

As a palette cleanser from my last post, here are some thoughts from my ongoing reading of Steven Pinker’s THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE, a history of the world with focus on violence, that summarizes that history through phases: the Civilizing Process; the Humanitarian Revolution, in concert with the Age of Reason and the European Enlightenment; the evidence of the Long Peace of the latter 20th century; and Rights Revolutions since the mid 20th century.

I’m working out of order here, since I haven’t yet summarized his chapter about the Humanitarian Revolution. But from the later chapters about the apparent “New Peace” of the past few decades, and the recent Rights Revolutions, some quotes.

“A world that is less invigorated by honor, glory, and ideology and more tempted by the pleasures of bourgeois life is a world in which fewer people are killed.” (p309.8)

“The mind’s habit of essentialism can lump people into categories; its moral emotions can be applied to them in their entirely. The combination can transform Hobbesian competition among individuals or armies into Hobbesian competition among peoples. But genocide has another fateful component. As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, to kill by the millions you need an ideology.” (p328)

“Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.” (p367) Echoing earlier comments; it’s just as well.

A long section about the ‘Rights Revolutions’ is about how, in the past 50 or 60 years, tolerance of violence has diminished toward “vulnerable classes of victims that in earlier eras fell outside the circle of protection, such as racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals.” p380.

Key insight: “The code of etiquette bequeathed by this and the other Rights Revolutions is pervasive enough to have acquired a name. We call it political correctness.”

You realize that those who rail against ‘political correctness’ are those who still wish to demean the various classes mentioned above.

Posted in Humanism, Social Progress, Steven Pinker | Comments Off on Passages from Pinker

Links and Comments: Roy Moore and Religious Hypocrisy

Posted on Friday 17 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

The Roy Moore scandal fascinates me for several reasons.

First, because Roy Moore has been a villain, a sort of comic-book villain, for years and years, among progressives who observe his brand of religious zealotry as a sign of the most regressive aspects of American society (especially in the South). He’s a Biblical fundamentalist; he insists on mounting monuments about the Ten Commandments in defiance of law (and regardless of the fact that our judicial system does not, in fact, endorse all of those commandments — the law does not insist on worshiping one god, closing on Sundays, etc. etc.) Again and again, I think religious zealots are just not too bright; they basically don’t understand, or refuse to understand, the American system of government.

And second, because the support for Moore reveals the deep hypocrisy of the religious right. Apparently, as far as I can gather, they’ll support Moore (and Trump) because the conservative agenda, especially the drive to repeal Row v. Wade [which, even if accomplished, would leave progressive blue states with laws that permit abortion], overrides any concern about the morality of elected officials.

Many items to link, of which here are just a few.

Right Wing Watch: Roy Moore: A History of Bigotry, Extremism and Contempt for the Rule of Law

A comprehensive catalog, that includes his contempt for gays, whom he would outlaw.

Slate: One Group That Thinks Grown Men “Courting” Teen Girls Is Natural? Fundamentalist Home-Schoolers.

No surprise here. Morality in the world has progressed over the past two millennia; those who adhere to Biblical morality have not. (Much evidence in Steven Pinker’s history of the world The Better Angels of Our Nature, which I’m still working my way through.)

Joe.My.God: Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks Stands By Moore: The Right Wing Agenda Is More Important Than Sex Charges

The hypocrisy of the right.

Slate: We’ve Always Known Roy Moore Is Lawless: “It’s why Alabama Republicans voted for him.”

Via Morning Heresy, Max Boot in USA Today says the Moore episode has to be the last straw for the Republican Party, which just needs to die now:

In the final analysis, no indictment of their candidate will convince the faithful. As Trump once said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Or, more to the point, Roy Moore could molest a 14-year-old girl and not lose votes. Because for Republican partisans, their opponents are “the forces of evil,” and anything is preferable to that. Even Donald Trump. Even Roy Moore. So in ostensibly fighting evil, Republicans have become complicit in it.

This is a party that does not deserve to survive.

More to the point– Valerie Tarico at Alternet: Alabama Conservatives Are Right: Roy Moore’s Behavior Is Perfectly Biblical—and That Is the Problem

Citing Biblical passages about the ownership of women, how rape is a violation not of the woman but of her male owner, and so on.

Another example of primitive morality, that has been overcome in the modern world.

The Bible contains fragments that are uplifting and beautiful—verses that contain timeless wisdom and elevate humanity’s shared moral core. But that’s not all it contains. When it comes to relationships between women and men, the contents of the Bible confront modern Jews and Christians with a difficult choice. Believers can treat the “good book” as the literal and perfect word of God or they can embrace an egalitarian view of men and women, one in which sexual intimacy is rooted in shared desire and consent. These two options are mutually exclusive, and people who say otherwise are engaged in a desperate attempt to protect the Bible from itself.

Roy Moore has made his choice. You can call him disgusting or vile or sexist, but don’t use the word hypocrite. Moore is living the script.

Posted in Bible, Religion | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Roy Moore and Religious Hypocrisy

Links and Comments: The Profound and the Pernicious

Posted on Monday 13 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

From NPR, The Answer To Life, The Universe — And Everything? It’s 63.

The headline is a riff on the famous episode in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Wikipedia) in which a vast computer called Deep Thought is assigned to calculate the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything” (Wikipedia), and responds with the answer, “42”. And then explains that the answer is incomprehensible because the question wasn’t properly formed…

Now we have a new book by Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe, which explores the magnitude of the universe, from the very large to the very small. An order of magnitude difference of… 63. He summarizes a key point of the book in this NPR piece.

It’s on our biological scales that the universe does something very, very funky. Billions of years of elemental and chemical brewing have produced structures capable of awareness, and capable of trying to decode the very thing out of which they’ve come. It’s the ultimate bootstrap, going from a near featureless primordial reality to something that deduces its own existence.

That’s what exploring 63 orders of magnitude leads us to. The nature of us.

\\

On a completely different matter, noting current political controversies, we have Valerie Tarico pointing out that Alabama Conservatives Are Right: Roy Moore’s Behavior Is Perfectly Biblical — and That Is the Problem.

Indeed, Biblical morality reflect the primitive tribalist past of our species, an era when, as the Bible explains, “females are created for the benefit of males”. Tarico cites many passages and examples.

Just another reason why the Bible, I think, is a fascinating historical document, providing keen insights into the childhood of our species, but is not just wrong-headed but actually pernicious as a guide for any kind of morality, let alone insight into the actual nature of the world and humanity’s place in it, in the modern world.

Roy Moore has made his choice. You can call him disgusting or vile or sexist, but don’t use the word hypocrite. Moore is living the script.

And, given the tribalistic loyalty of conservatives discussed in the previous post — despite any signs of contemporary morality — Alabama might yet elect him to the Senate anyway.

Posted in Cosmology, Morality, Politics, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: The Profound and the Pernicious

Links and Comments: Conservative Susceptibility to Lies; Contempt for Science; Existential Threats

Posted on Monday 13 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

» Slate: Why Are Conservatives More Susceptible to Believing Lies?. Subtitle: “An interplay between how all humans think and how conservatives tend to act might actually explain a lot about our current moment.”

Longish article about how conservatives are more given to believing “fake news” or alternative facts — that Obama is a Muslim, that Trump’s inauguration crowds were bigger than Obama even when looking right at comparative photos, that Hillary Clinton was involved in a pizza parlor sex trafficking ring — than liberals are. “The left is certainly not immune to credulity (most commonly about the safety of vaccines, GMO foods, and fracking), but the right seems to specialize in it.”

And then goes on to explore why. It’s not a matter of stupidity or education. It’s partly that the right specializes in manufacturing fake news, going back to how the business interests of the tobacco industry downplayed evidence of linkage to cancer. But ultimately it’s about psychology — and here we are deep into Haidt territory (my comment; the article doesn’t mention him):

But, the gullibility of many on the right seems to have deeper roots even than this. That may be because at the most basic level, conservatives and liberals seem to hold different beliefs about what constitutes “truth.” Finding facts and pursuing evidence and trusting science is part of liberal ideology itself. For many conservatives, faith and intuition and trust in revealed truth appear as equally valid sources of truth.

And

Psychologists have repeatedly reported that self-described conservatives tend to place a higher value than those to their left on deference to tradition and authority. They are more likely to value stability, conformity, and order, and have more difficulty tolerating novelty and ambiguity and uncertainty. They are more sensitive than liberals to information suggesting the possibility of danger than to information suggesting benefits. And they are more moralistic and more likely to repress unconscious drives towards unconventional sexuality.

Fairness and kindness place lower on the list of moral priorities for conservatives than for liberals. Conservatives show a stronger preference for higher status groups, are more accepting of inequality and injustice, and are less empathic (at least towards those outside their immediate family). As one Tea Party member told University of California sociologist Arlie Hochschild, “People think we are not good people if we don’t feel sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees. But I am a good person and I don’t feel sorry for them.”

“Conservatives’ greater acceptance of hierarchy and trust in authority may lead to greater faith that what the president says must be true.”

(You can fool some of the people all of the time, is my take.)

And so on. This issue blurs together with the latest example of our current president’s horrible choices for cabinet and other leadership positions — mostly people chosen to dismantle the institutions they are in charge of, as if our president is actually a clever foreign infiltrator bent on destroying our country.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump’s terrible NASA nominee and the GOP attack on science. Subtitle: Jim Bridenstine, Trump’s choice to head NASA, is only the latest symptom of Republican contempt for science.

He’s a climate-change denier with no science or engineering background at all; he was a business major and has an MBA, and held an administrative position at a Tulsa Planetarium.

This pattern strongly indicates that Trump holds science itself in contempt. (The fact that actual science requires education and expertise probably makes him feel stupid, which he notoriously dislikes.) Trump clearly sees these scientific positions as opportunities to reward his supporters with paychecks, titles and offices, not as jobs important to America’s future that need to be filled with qualified people.

\\

And there was a segment on today’s Science Friday radio program about the Paris Agreement about climate change deniers — their arguments are never about the science, but about supposed conspiracy theories and the unwillingness to sacrifice short-term advantages for long-term survival [another flaw in human cognition built into us by evolution, where long-term effects were out of anyone’s control] — or more simply, resentment at the idea the government can tell them what to do.

The US Will Be The Only Country Not In The Paris Agreement. Now What?

\\

All of this boils down to the varying ways individual humans perceive and understand the world. Per Haidt (review of his book here and in two later posts), I’d rather not designate traits of conservatives or liberals, but rather understand the range of human psychological attitudes, which can vary along five or six axes. They all exist for reasons of genetic diversity — in different situations throughout humanity’s evolutionary history, one or another attitude has been best at any one time for the species’ survival. The world would not be a better place if everyone were like me, or like you; it takes a range. That is, one understands that people who have certain attitudes along those five or six axes as exhibiting traits that Americans currently identify as conservative, and others as liberal. They are all equally valid ways of expressing human nature.

But they are not equally valid ways of dealing with the real world, or with long-term threats. Human nature has been refined by evolution for survival in a particular kind of world, and not as an accurate perception of reality. And now the world is changing, in ways that bring human nature into conflict with reality — the reality of a world undergoing a climate change that could spell the extinction of the species, in the worst case. The denial of that evidence could really have dire consequences. It’s fine to think as I have that everyone can believe whatever they want to believe, that in some sense it doesn’t matter, because they still perform the quotidian activities of living their lives and raising families and carrying on the next generation. But it does matter if those beliefs don’t take into account existential threats.

Over human history, in fact, many cultures have died before. There’s a Jared Diamond book about this — COLLAPSE, which Wikipedia summarizes here. I’ve browsed it but not read it thoroughly, but a glance at the detailed Table of Contents reveals themes all-too-familiar from discussions of conservative thinking, the values of the religious, and the activities of the current administration… “Failure to anticipate; Failure to perceive; Rational bad behavior; Disastrous values…”

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Species Reset | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Conservative Susceptibility to Lies; Contempt for Science; Existential Threats

A Very Short Book by A.C. Grayling

Posted on Thursday 9 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

A.C. Grayling, AGAINST ALL GODS (2007), subtitled “Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness”

I saw this referenced from Tim Crane’s book that I mentioned a couple posts ago, and ordered it without realizing that it’s very short, almost incidental, especially compared with Grayling’s later, much more substantial, book THE GOD ARGUMENT [terrible title] (reviewed here). But I wrote it up anyway. And it does have one striking idea, about the apparent resurgence of religious activity in the past couple decades, described in chapter 7 below. As usual, my personal comments are [in brackets]; otherwise I’m just summarizing the text.

– – –

These are very short chapters, the entire book comprising just 64 pages. The author alludes to the essays having been published as journalism, presumably columns in a newspaper or magazine, but doesn’t say where; and oddly, there are repetitious passages across several.

1, Intro summarizes the questions to be discussed. Admits discussions are brief, and refers to 2 other books and 5 collections of essays that expand on these ideas.

2, Are Religions Respectable?

Not any more so than any other special interest group. 16.0: “To believe something in the face of evidence and against reason – to believe something by faith – is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect.” He suggests religious beliefs be confined to the private sphere, like sexual proclivities.

3, Can an Atheist be a Fundamentalist?

Well, what would a non-fundamentalist atheist be? Someone who believed that gods exist only part of the time, etc? Christians forget how their religion has changed over time; it constantly reinvents itself, with examples p25, and how far from the teachings of Jesus many modern religions operate. Author charges religions with inculcating children in their ‘intellectual infancy’ in order to survive, and challenges them to wait for children to become adults, before presenting them with the many religious options.

Author doesn’t care for the term atheist (we don’t speak of a-fairyists for people who no longer believe in fairies, as many did in the 19th century, p28); he prefers naturalist, while religious people would be supernaturalists.

Nor is atheism a religion. It is not because it is not premised on belief in supernatural agencies. It is a philosophy or theory, in that “it proportions what it accepts to the evidence for accepting it, knows what would refute it, and stands ready to revise itself in light of new evidence.” P30. There have been no wars over rival theories of astrophysics, as there have between rival religious movements.

4, Re Secularist, Humanist, Atheist

Secular means desiring the separation of Church and State. Religious organizations should welcome the idea, lest one religion take over the state and suppress rival religions.

Humanism means that the best ethical system derives from an understanding of human nature and the human condition in the real world.

And atheism refers to people who do not share the supernatural beliefs of the religious.

Of course, everyone religious is also an atheist about other religions, though it’s not appreciated how arbitrary [or contingent on circumstances] it was for Christians to latch onto the tale of Jesus, rather than any of the many similar tales of that era, p35. Why not a religion around Spartacus? [with gospels written decades later to amplify dicey testimony of miraculous events surrounding his life…]

The issues are not about whether supernatural beliefs are true or false; it’s about whether one is rational or irrational. Example of rain, umbrellas, the world, and whether a deity is benevolent or not.

5, The Corrosion of Reason

About the 30% of people who believe in creationism or intelligent design (in the UK at the time). University standards have fallen as ‘polytechnics’ have been allowed to call themselves universities. [this is a UK thing, I assume]. To some extent ‘political correctness’ plays into this, as any manner of alternate beliefs and superstitions are accorded respect, leading to the detriment of valuing evidence and reason.

Example of, again, why the Jesus story is true and the similar stories of Zeus and his earthly paramours are myths.

Would an invented religion about gnomes be granted political recognition?

Nor do Stalinism and Nazism show that secular arrangements are worse; these are, like religions, ideologies, which are happy to oppress when given the chance. P46: “But give them the levers of power and they are the Taliban, the Inquisitions, the Stasi.”

6, Only Connect

Three items in the news: one about how evolution produces new systems by adapting existing structures to new purposes; one about the discovery of 375m year old fossils; a third about the discovery of an ancient ‘gospel of Judas.’

And how Michael Behe claims ‘irreducible complexity’, which author finds absurd; it explains one [not yet understood] mystery by introducing the existence of a far greater one. As Karl Popper said: a theory which explains everything explains nothing. [that is, God] A theory must specify what counter-evidence would refute it. [because God works in mysterious ways and thus no disaster or evil in the world can discredit the notion]

7, The Death Throes of Religion

Author considers three recent commentaries that claim a resurgence in religion; author differs. (He describes one of these about how the US has become a de facto theocracy: “the home of faith-based politics, faith-based science (creationism), faith-based medicine (‘pro-life’), faith-based foreign policy (conducting jihad for American/Baptist values) and faith-based attacks on civil liberties.”

On the contrary author sees religion waning, and the evidence cited by others as reactions to provocation. It began with the Muslim world becoming aware of the western world, which disdained its values, and then emboldened by the Afghan victory over Soviet Russia, to take up arms against the west; this in turn prompted other religious groups to demand their share of attention. And so they make gains here and there, even as surveys show devotion to traditional religions decreasing and eroding.

–example: p56, “Yes, over half the population claim vaguely to believe in Something, which includes feng shui and crystals, but they are functionally secularist and would be horrified if asked to live according to the letter of (say) Christian morality: giving all one’s possessions to the poor, taking no thought for the morrow, and so impracticably forth.”

8, The Alternative: Humanism

The alternative is humanism, a rich ethical tradition derived from the roots of Western philosophy. Humanists aspire to respect their fellow human beings, to give them the advantage of good light; to understand human nature and human circumstances through art and literature, history and philosophy, science, personal experience and reflection, and so on; but not superstition or ignorance. Humanists are humbler than the religious with their certainties of faith. “All the enquiries that human intelligence conducts into enlarging knowledge make progress always at the expense of generating new questions. Having the intellectual courage to live with this open-endedness and uncertainty, trusting to reason and experiment to gain us increments of understanding, having the absolute integrity to base one’s theories on rigorous and testable foundations, and being committed to changing one’s mind when shown to be wrong, are the marks of honest minds.” (p63)

Words I looked up:
Emetic, 17.1, causing vomiting
Votaries, 17.6, people who’ve made vows of dedication to religious service
Tu quoque, 31.7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque “an informal logical fallacy that intends to discredit the opponent’s argument by asserting the opponent’s failure to act consistently in accordance with its conclusion(s).”
Inspissate 31.7, thicken or congeal
Latitudinarian 32.5, showing no preference among religious creeds or forms of worship

Posted in Atheism, Religion | Comments Off on A Very Short Book by A.C. Grayling

Sfadb progress toward ultimate Top 100 Lists

Posted on Friday 3 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Over the past two weeks I’ve made much progress on the next stage of my sfadb.com site — the compiling of all awards references and citations references into overall scores and rankings. One product of this effort will be Top 100 lists of SF novels, and fantasy/horror novels: ultimate lists based on data crunching of thousands of awards records and citation records. (These aren’t actually my primary goals; I’m more interested in developing some cool timelines, of these top 100s spread across the decades, and more elaborated timelines of top ranked books and short fiction within each calendar year.)

These are concepts I’ve had in mind for nearly 20 years… though they began as ideas about short fiction, to expand the crude rankings of reprint statistics of stories in anthologies, with data about awards. (Bill Contento’s Locus Index on the one hand, and Aurel Guillemette’s 1993 book on the other hand.)

Almost two years ago, in January 2016 (http://www.markrkelly.com/Blog/2016/01/25/syllabuses-and-sfadb-com-rankings/), I described how my approach would be similar to the Open Syllabus Explorer project, that compiled the syllabuses of thousands of colleges to see which titles were most mentioned. As I’ve worked my own project, I’ve decided to dismiss the fourth step I described then: I will not adjust the highest rankings in my ranking to 100%, but will instead display the actual rankings, by percent, of actual scores (or points) against possible scores (or points), given the year any particular book was published — and, as it’s developed, the awards or citation sources that any particular book was actually eligible for.

And I’ll actually display a tickertape of abbreviated links, for each title, of all potential scorers and actual scorers. If some top ranked title, say, DUNE, gets only a combined percent score of 75%, then what were the 25% others who didn’t award or cite it? You will be able to see.

The process of developing these rankings has involved quite a bit of back and forth about the significance of ordering steps, about compiling points, adjusting them against potential points, and so on. One firm decision I’ve made is that the universe of books to be ranked must be divided by genre. Science Fiction vs. Fantasy/Horror. Mostly this is because the many awards and references for citations are heavily weighted to SF. To rank every book against all sources of awards and citations that I’ve compiled, would place very few fantasy/horror novels in any combined top 100. It makes much more sense to consider the genres as two separate realms. So far, I’ve worked steps for ranking SF titles first. I’m thinking perhaps that the F/H titles might be scaled in some sense so that a merge of all genres would make sense. And similarly, eventually, for short fiction. (I have in mind, eventually, producing pages of rankings for individual authors, that would merge book and short fictions rankings, to indicate for each author what are their truly best regarded works, of any length.)

Making much progress, as I’ve said, and this progress entails new insights about the process and what it means, almost daily. It helps to take long walks in the woods. Over the past two days I’ve developed steps for integrating ‘series’ titles into the overall rankings — most prominently, The Foundation Trilogy, and The Book of the New Sun. These are working out; examination of the results are intuitively correct — but I need to make sure they are statistacally correct, given the mass of data I am crunching.

As of today, the process for integrating the thousands of awards records and citation records I’ve compiled over the past 20 years, into a set of definitive top 100 lists, is as follows.

1 tallying raw counts of number of awards, number of citation sources
2 weighing total points from awards and sources, where points are weighted by significance of source
3 scoping separating sf and fantasy; not scoring many books against awards they’re not eligible for
4 scaling compute maximum possible points by genre and category
5 merging merging multiple book records into a single series record, and allocating actual and possible points appropriately
6 scoring calculate percentage of actual points to possible points
7 ranking sort records in descending order by score
8 tracking expanding records to examine which sources do and don’t contribute to every point total, for output onto the site

I think I can finish final rankings of SF and F/H books within another couple weeks, certainly by the end of this year. But doing the same for short fiction is a separate task, for next year.

Posted in science fiction, Website Issues | Comments Off on Sfadb progress toward ultimate Top 100 Lists

Pinker and Crane: Quotes and Comments about Faith and Religion

Posted on Monday 30 October 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Still working my way, slowly, through Steven Pinker’s THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE. In Chapter 4, The Humanitarian Revolution, he discusses various kinds of violence over human history, beginning with human sacrifice, and then to violence “against blasphemers, heretics, and apostates”. I found this paragraph striking and typed it out. (page 149)

People become wedded to their beliefs, because the validity of those beliefs reflects on their competence, commends them as authorities, and rationalizes their mandate to lead. Challenge a person’s beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the beliefs that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali was the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammed. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them – or worse, who credibly rebut then – they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.

“Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.”

\\

I just acquired a new book by Tim Crane, THE MEANING OF BELIEF, about which I blogged a week ago about a New York Times Book Review review. The book is petite, smaller than a standard hardcover, with under 200 pages of text. The prose is carefully worded, as written by a philosopher, careful to define his terms and qualify his claims. Crane’s stance is that he doesn’t dispute the issues discussed by the ‘New Atheists’ — Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, as well as A.C. Grayling — but wants to understand, even if the cosmological claims of religions are easily dismissed, why and how religion forms such a fundamental part of the human experience. So I am on his side; my discussions in this blog, about books by E.O. Wilson and Jonathan Haidt and many others, are more to try to understand the human experience, than to dismiss religious claims (which is easy). My theme is the disconnect between human nature, human perception of the universe, how those are understood as protocols for human survival, in a natural selection sense; and what is actually real about the universe, that vast universe we can barely perceive and which is so much more vast than anything imagined by the ancients.

So… here’s Tim Crane’s definition of religion. He waffles for a few pages before realizing he has to define his central term in some sense, before he can write a book about it. Page 6:

Religion, as I am using the word, is a systematic and practical attempt by human beings to find meaning in the world and their place in it, in terms of their relationship to something transcendent. This description has four essential elements: first, religion is systematic; second, it is practical; third, it is an attempt to find meaning; and fourth, it appeals to the transcendent.

He goes on to expand on each of these elements, in this first chapter, and in later chapters.

Posted in Book Notes, Quote at Length, Religion | Comments Off on Pinker and Crane: Quotes and Comments about Faith and Religion

Links and Comments: Fake News and the Narrative Bias

Posted on Wednesday 25 October 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Tuesday’s New York Times Science Section has an article by Benedict Carey called How Fiction Becomes Fact on Social Media (it was posted several days ago online). Among the endless stories about fake news and books about the human mental bias towards understanding everything as *narrative*, this one combines these themes with close examination about how (deliberately promoted) fake news on social media spreads so readily.

Yet the psychology behind social media platforms — the dynamics that make them such powerful vectors of misinformation in the first place — is at least as important, experts say, especially for those who think they’re immune to being duped. For all the suspicions about social media companies’ motives and ethics, it is the interaction of the technology with our common, often subconscious psychological biases that makes so many of us vulnerable to misinformation, and this has largely escaped notice.

and:

For one, the common wisdom that these rumors gain circulation because most people conduct their digital lives in echo chambers or “information cocoons” is exaggerated, Dr. Nyhan said.

In a forthcoming paper, Dr. Nyhan and colleagues review the relevant research, including analyses of partisan online news sites and Nielsen data, and find the opposite. Most people are more omnivorous than presumed; they are not confined in warm bubbles containing only agreeable outrage.

But they don’t have to be for fake news to spread fast, research also suggests. Social media algorithms function at one level like evolutionary selection: Most lies and false rumors go nowhere, but the rare ones with appealing urban-myth “mutations” find psychological traction, then go viral.

Psychological traction — that is, the appeal to the narrative bias, that there must be some hidden order to the world, that your side is right and that the other side is irredeemably evil, and so on. Thus the appeal of conspiracy theories; social media exacerbates them through repetition.

Over time, for many people, it is that false initial connection that stays the strongest, not the retractions or corrections: “Was Obama a Muslim? I seem to remember that….”

In a recent analysis of the biases that help spread misinformation, Dr. Seifert and co-authors named this and several other automatic cognitive connections that can buttress false information.

Another is repetition: Merely seeing a news headline multiple times in a news feed makes it seem more credible before it is ever read carefully, even if it’s a fake item being whipped around by friends as a joke.

Posted in Narrative | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Fake News and the Narrative Bias

Links and Comments: Philip Pullman meets Matthew Hutson

Posted on Wednesday 25 October 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

There was a big profile of Philip Pullman in the New York Times Magazine a couple weeks ago– Philip Pullman Returns to His Fantasy World — on the occasion of the first book in his new trilogy that parallels his acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy published from 1995 to 2000.

I was struck by this passage, not about by the discipline of writing three pages a day, but for the superstitious rituals Pullman indulges in — this from an author who’s an atheist and whose His Dark Materials trilogy was famously anti-religion…

Every day from roughly 10 until 1, Pullman sits at his desk in a monkish study at the top of the house and produces three pages, longhand. He has written three pages a day ever since he started writing. Habit, he is fond of saying, has written far more books than talent. The ritual is sacred. As is the space. “Nobody’s photographed this, and nobody will ever photograph this,” he told me, both fierce and faintly amused by the severity of his own rule. “I’m superstitious about that, very superstitious about that.”

Arranged on the desk are various objects of mystical significance. “I write more easily, more comfortably, with less anxiety if I’ve got my various magic bits on the table,” he said. The magic bits consist of a piece of scientific apparatus used in the search for dark matter, a magnifying glass and his “special pen.” Pullman has three special pens — Montblanc ballpoints — one in his study, one in his bag and one on the table downstairs for letter writing and signing books that people bring to his door (“which sometimes happens”). There is special paper, too: “I started ‘His Dark Materials’ on the sort of paper you could get 30 years ago, A4, narrow-lined, with two holes. Then they started making paper with four holes, and I discovered I couldn’t write on that.” He acknowledged with a brief apologetic glance the lunacy of this statement. “This is what I did that’s even more bonkers. I had to finish ‘The Amber Spyglass,’ and I could only get four-hole paper, so I got some four-hole paper and some of those little white stickers and solemnly put them over the holes.” Eventually, he found a Canadian supplier selling his preferred, two-holed paper. “I’ve got enough for 10,000 years, I think.”

Pullman likes to inhabit such contradictions: a man who doesn’t believe in God but does believe in magic. One of his favorite books is “The Secret Commonwealth,” by a 17th-century Scottish minister, Robert Kirk, that explores life beyond empirical reach. Fairies, witches, ghosts. Does he really believe in these things? “When I’m writing about them, yes,” he said. “It’s not naïve, but the sort of answer it requires is one of the Keats type. The negative-capability type. Both believing and not believing. Skeptical about everything but credulous about everything, too.” He gets the kind of kick out of unreality that could be dismissed as childlike if it hadn’t molded his imagination. “I like the irrational, I like ghosts,” he said. “They help me to write.”

This is a perfect example of the attitude captured by Matthew Hutson’s 2012 book The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking, subtitled “How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane.” Hutson’s thesis is that we can understand how the human mind is given to various beliefs that, with our emperical, logical hats on, we understand are irrational, i.e. not real — but how nevertheless if we indulge indirectly in some of those beliefs, they make us happier and more productive and less stressed. This works because our minds are not computers that can be entirely disciplined by logic; our minds have evolved over millennia to make us efficient at surviving in the natural world in which we need to get along with our fellow humans, and perceive that world in a way that encourages us to behave in ways that lead to reproductive success.

So: you are not a single mind. You can understand that, to take a trivial example, the piano that John Lennon composed “Imagine” on isn’t really different from any other piano — it doesn’t retain any kind of ‘essence’ of John Lennon from his having played it — but if it is awesome to you to go out of your way to be in its presence, go for it. You will be happier. (This is the first of dozens of examples in Hutson’s book.) Pullman’s mystical objects are another example. You are many minds. If your logical rational mind needs to assuage its magical-thinking counterpart of its doubts, that logical rational mind might well be more productive.

The chapter headings of Hutson’s book are an all-time hits list of categories of human mental biases, or ‘magical thinking’, about things that are objectively not true:

1, Objects Carry Essences: Cooties, Contagion, and Historicity
2, Symbols Have Power: Spells, Ceremonies, and the Law of Similarity
3, Actions Have Distant Consequences: Using Superstition to Make Luck Work for You
4, The Mind Knows No Bounds: Psychokinesis, ESP, and Transcendence
5, The Soul Lives On: Death is Not the End of Us
6, The World Is Alive: Animals, Objects, and Gods are People, Too
7, Everything Happens for a Reason: You’ve Got a Date with Destiny

Posted in Atheism, MInd | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Philip Pullman meets Matthew Hutson

Links and Comments: Reviews of Books about Religion and Science

Posted on Monday 23 October 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

NY Times: “Ivory Tower” column review of three university press books on religion: Unknown Unknowns: Three Inquiries Into Religion, by James Ryerson.

The most interesting of the three seems to be the first, Tim Crane’s THE MEANING OF BELIEF: Religion From an Atheist’s Point of View (Harvard University, $24.95).

Crane proposes to paint a more accurate picture of religion for his fellow unbelievers. Religion is an immense, sprawling and variegated affair. Any attempt to define it, however comprehensive, will omit some aspects, and most attempts to define it, however crude, will capture something. The name of the game is what you see as central. Crane resists the notion, common to combative atheists, that the core of religion is an archaic cosmology (beliefs about things like the origin of the universe and supernatural agents) grafted onto a moral code. If you conceive of religion this way, as bad science plus arbitrary injunctions, of course you will think it should be replaced by good science and rational ethics.

For Crane, the religious worldview is better understood as the combination of two attitudes. First: a sense of the transcendent, of an unseen moral order to the universe, often known as God. Second: an identification with a community that tries to “make sense of the world” by attempting to bring its members into alignment with this moral order through a tradition of narratives and rituals. Crane concedes there is a cosmology here; a belief in the transcendent is “a claim about the universe.” He also grants that religion, like science, is trying to explain things. But the kind of explanation and the kind of cosmology offered by religion, which does not “expect all aspects of the world to be intelligible,” are nothing like those of science, which strives to eliminate mystery.

Of course there are zealots who do take “archaic cosmology” seriously and cannot be swayed by modern evidence; they are in part suspect to the bias that ancient authorities (scripture writers, founding fathers) contained some kind of wisdom that can never be recaptured or challenged. (They are like children, or patriots, who forever believe their home town team, and their home town, are the bestest ever.) But I’m sympathetic to the view that, for some people at least, religious isn’t about archaic cosmology, but about that sense of community and shared values.

\\

From the week before, in the NY Times Book Review, Marilynne Robinson, a midwest novelist known for deeply felt family portraits saturated by religious sensibility (e.g. Gilead) reviews a nonfiction book by Stephen Greenblatt called The Rise and Fall of Adam and Even, a cultural history of that iconic couple. Online the review is called The Truth and Fiction of Adam and Eve; in print it was “Almost Paradise: A cultural history that traces the path of the first man and woman.”

I’ve glanced through Greenblatt’s book, and he admits he is not a believer in a literal Adam and Eve, and Robinson takes issue with this.

There is, however, a complicating factor here, having to do with the question of truth. Greenblatt, an English professor at Harvard University and author of the National Book Award-winning “The Swerve,” frames his inquiry in terms of truth or fiction. For him truth means plausibility, and by that measure the story of Adam and Eve is no more than a miracle of storytelling. But science tells us that Homo sapiens does indeed roughly share a single lineage, in some sense a common origin, just as ancient Genesis says it does. In the Hebrew Bible the word adam often means all humankind, mortals. Greenblatt never seems to consider why the myth might have felt so true to those who found their religious and humanist values affirmed by it — and their own deepest intuitions, which science has partly borne out. It is interesting that those who claim to defend the creation narrative from rationalist critiques ignore the fact that its deepest moral implications, a profound human bond and likeness, have been scientifically demonstrated.

Nonsense. This reminds me of the many Biblical apologists who perceive any scientific discovery that they can match to any passage in the Bible, no matter how brief or how weirdly interpreted, to claim that science proves the Bible. Robinson is a better writer than those apologists, but her reasoning is just as flawed.

\\

From NYTBR a month ago, a short review by Christopher Chabris of four books about decision making, including Andrew Shtulman’s SCIENCEBLIND: Why Our Intuitive Theories About the World Are So Often Wrong

You’ve probably heard that we only use 10 percent of our brains. You might also know that this is a famous or even infamous scientific myth — no more than a scientific urban legend. But why do so many people believe it when the experts don’t? It’s one of many instances in which people resist scientific understandings in favor of imprecise, inaccurate, or just plain wrong theories about how nature works.

The problem — as Shtulman, a developmental psychologist, cogently explains — is that new knowledge doesn’t erase old misconceptions the way a software upgrade deletes the previous code. Instead, different theories coexist within our minds, and compete to explain the world. We may have been taught about plate tectonics and biological evolution, but we still sometimes act as though the earth and its occupants have always been the way they are now, and thus will stay that way in the future.

This appeals to my whole notion of ‘intuitive science’ which in turn explains why scientific accuracy in most movies, and even some literary SF, is egregiously wrong. Because our sense of the how the world works is based on our experience, over our entire evolutionary history, which how that world works within one tiny slice of experience, and it doesn’t translate to, say, outer space.

Posted in Religion, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Reviews of Books about Religion and Science