Ben Carson and the range of human psychology; Michael Shermer and the perception of the real world

Posted on Saturday 7 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

This New Republic piece, The Truth About Ben Carson: Smart People Can Believe Crazy Things, addresses what I find most interesting about this Republican candidate who, though evidently a brilliant neurosurgeon, seems to have surrendered his intelligence in so many other matters to an amalgam of Bible stories, conspiracy theories, and self-enhancing fantasies about past events. (Brian Williams comes to mind.) (And, via Gawker, see this revealing photospread of Ben Carson’s house.)

The New Republic article explains how Carson is an example of how even intelligent people can believe weird things, as explored in Michael Shermer’s 1997 book Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Times (cited in the article, and which I read years ago), and summarized here:

First, great intelligence doesn’t immunize a person from indulging in magical thinking or pseudo-science. Second, even very smart and accomplished people can be fantasists.

Citing Shermer:

The smarter and better-educated you are, the more powerful you are at coming up with arguments to justify your positions. In effect, intelligence and education give you the skills at becoming entrenched in motivated reasonings. In Shermer’s words, “smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending belief they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” This explains the engineers who become 9/11 truthers, the Supreme Court justices who think the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays, the distinguished mathematicians who think HIV is not the cause of AIDS. It also explains Ben Carson.

This afternoon I was glancing through a couple books on my to-read shelf (by Chris Mooney and Jonathan Haidt) that explore the psychological issues behind the deep political divide that currently characterizes American politics, and was triggered to write the following:

The rise of the reality-challenged right-wing is partly an effect of the internet (enabling like-minded people to form virtual coalitions and insulate themselves from rival opinions and challenging facts), but to a larger degree an effect of the very change, the increasing rate of change over the past century, that has given rise to science fiction. Given the range of human personalities and characters, the groups that clings to past certainties and resisting any evidence that would affect their worldview, are increasingly, as change happens ever more swiftly, doubling down, shutting out challenging evidence.

Yet the interesting question underlying this behavior is — *why* does this range of human personalities exist in the first place? Presumably, because it must have some evolutionary advantage. Not a simple one – it must be about the overall evolutionary advantage of the particular *range* of human personality types that exist.

Beware the naturalistic fallacy -– just because something exists (for example, that something exists because it has over millennia had an evolutionary advantage) does not mean it *ought* to exist, or to put it a couple other ways, it doesn’t mean it’s *right* in the sense that human society should acknowledge and promote it, and it doesn’t mean that it’s *right* in the sense of corresponding to reality. Here’s where we circle back to a central premise: the human mind has evolved to facilitate survival – not to be an accurate perception of the real world. Which means, we can still rightly examine the evidence, using reason and evidence to overcome the biases of the human mind, and conclude that some human personality types are, in fact, more accurate perceptions of the real world than others.

Note that this is not about there being one correct psychology and perception of the world and variations which are to one degree or another incorrect. Nor is it even about a spectrum of variations, with two extremes (liberals vs conservatives, or whatever other terms might apply). It’s about a variety of psychological tendencies that are mixed and matched in any one person, and greatly affected by family, community, and culture. The entire range presumably exists because it enables psychological flexibility in the different environments and situations that have existed over the past millennia, just as a wide ‘genetic pool’ of physical characteristics within an individual species, the presence of diversity, is critical to avoiding single-point failures that might doom too specific a species that would not survive a particular kind of environmental change.

This range of psychological tendencies is about the optimization of the human mind for human survival – not, as I’ve said, about accurate perception of the real world. (This assumes there is a ‘reality’ independent of human perception and understanding, but numerous lines of evidence suggest that there is. This way lies epistemology.) But this *does not mean* that some tendencies of human psychology don’t result in more accurate perception of reality than others.

The issue is more whether that matters.

Clearly there are ways of living every day life and promoting the well-being of one’s descendants that do not depend on conscious understanding of how human biology works, or whether the earth goes around the sun or vice versa, or whether authority figures can be trusted, and so on and so on. Every person develops a sense, as they grow up especially, about how to decide what’s probably true and which things matter: generally, a heuristic for getting through life. Some people are more comfortable with certainties, with polar identification of right and wrong; others are comfortable with ambiguity, of tolerating disorder, of being open to new experiences. Any of these attitudes can work, and obviously do.

But surely there are issues where accurate perception of reality matters, especially issues of long-term threats to survival that thwarts most people’s near-term perception of danger. The current most obvious example: Is climate change real? If it is and too many people put off doing anything about it for too long, its effects will not treat humanity kindly. (My prediction: nothing will be done about climate change until it is too late. That is: within the next century, coastal cities will be flooded, and millions of people will be displaced or die. It is not in the nature of the human species to perceive and react in time to long-term threats to survival.)

Coincidentally, this theme dovetails with this Michael Shermer essay at Scientific American: Did Humans Evolve to See Things as They Really Are?. My bold.

One of the deepest problems in epistemology is how we know the nature of reality. Over the millennia philosophers have offered many theories, from solipsism (only one’s mind is known to exist) to the theory that natural selection shaped our senses to give us an accurate, or verdical, model of the world. Now a new theory by University of California, Irvine, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman is garnering attention. (Google his scholarly papers and TED talk with more than 1.4 million views.) Grounded in evolutionary psychology, it is called the interface theory of perception (ITP) and argues that percepts act as a species-specific user interface that directs behavior toward survival and reproduction, not truth.

Well, of course! This is one of my theses – provisional conclusions – and seems an obvious conclusion based on any amount of data and experience. Of course, second-hand intuitive conclusions are not the same as rigorous scientific studies, like the one Shermer describes. Shermer, oddly, seems a bit skeptical. Yes, human perception has to be accurate to a degree – but he is not acknowledging the vast scope of the universe, which exhibits qualities that humans do not perceive accurately at all. Sure, in the range of human experience, human perception is more or less accurate – but only to the degree that it enhances survival.

P.S. I have these fantasies about writing an actual book, but with worries about how I could ever write enough to fill an entire book. And then I write posts like this, (and the previous one), which once I’m done I see go on paragraph after paragraph, to such length I figure no one will ever actually read it: TL;DR. I think if I ever gather my thoughts together into a cohesive book, I will need a really good editor.

Tonight’s music: Philip Glass, The Hours

Posted in Psychology, Science | Comments Off on Ben Carson and the range of human psychology; Michael Shermer and the perception of the real world

Rereading Early Heinlein, part 2

Posted on Friday 6 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Heinlein burst upon the SF scene in 1939, the same year Asimov did, but much more forcefully. He published 28 stories, including four long enough to require serialization over multiple magazine issues, from 1939 to 1942, of which all but five were published in John W. Campbell’s Astounding and Unkown magazines (the former science fiction, the latter fantasy). Of the four serialized long stories, three were later published as individual books: Sixth Column, Methuselah’s Children, and Beyond This Horizon. The first serial, “If This Goes On–“, was published in the early ’50s collection Revolt in 2100, taking about 2/3 of the book.

Heinlein went into service in World War II, and didn’t publish again until 1947, when he cracked Saturday Evening Post, a general interest magazine that paid much higher rates for short stories than the genre magazines [a bit like how The New Yorker pays a lot more than Asimov’s, these days], and in the same year began publishing ‘juvenile’ (what we would today called young adult) novels for Scribner’s, beginning with Rocket Ship Galileo in 1947 and running one per year for over a decade up until Starship Troopers, rejected by Scribner’s and published instead by Putnam in 1959.

It’s the earlier work that I’m addressing here. In the early ’50s, a fan press, Shasta, published three hardcover books collecting many of Heinlein’s early SF stories, including a “Future History” chart that had been published by Campbell in a 1941 issue of Astounding: The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950), The Green Hills of Earth (1951), and Revolt in 2011 (1953). Many of Heinlein’s earlier works from ’39-’42 obviously fit into this framework, and the later Saturday Evening Post stories, that ended up mostly in the second book, might have been retrospective attempts to fill in gaps in that history. (I haven’t researched Heinlein sufficiently to know if he planned it that way all along, or…)

For now, I’m discussing the second and third books of that trio. I’d remembered the stories in The Green Hills of Earth as being sorta incidental, slice-of-life incidents for a general audience, in contrast to the dramatic speculations of the other stories (“The Roads Must Roll”, “Universe”, etc.). But as I reread them these past few weeks, I gained a new respect for them, for several in particular.

Heinlein’s “Future History” became a template for the timeline of mankind’s expansion into space, relatively short-term compared to the timeline of Asimov’s future history, the one that Donald A. Wollheim captured in his nonfiction book (discussed here) — compared to that one, Heinlein’s is contained in the first of those eight items.

A key feature of Heinlein’s future history, though, was that exploration of the solar system, building settlements on the moon and other planets, was rudely interrupted by a conservative/religious rebellion on Earth — in the United States — that took decades, nearly a century to overcome.

The stories in The Green Hills of Earth are roughly arranged around the settlement of space stations above Earth, establishing colonies on the Moon, and then the other planets. The first story, “Delilah and the Space-Rigger”, concerns the head of construction on a space station who is alarmed when a new radio tech assigned from Earth turns out to be — a woman! (There’s a reference to a “Fair Employment Commission”; this story was published in 1949.) The construction head goes to great lengths to marginalize and finally dismiss her, fearing that her presence will distract the men of the station, before he realizes, on the contrary, her presence has quite an opposite effect… and he changes his mind, dramatically. The story exhibits both retrograde sexual politics, and a relatively enlightened insight into how human relations actually work.

The best story in the book might be “Space Jockey” (published 1947), which follows a spaceship pilot on the Earth to Luna run, as he is summoned on an emergency call [the same way an airline pilot today might get a call to make a flight when no other pilot is available], to the disappointment of his patient wife; they were about to leave for a show. The story explains in clear technical detail the mechanics of the trip: why it takes three ships to get from Earth to Moon (one to get into Earth orbit, a second for the transit, a third for the descent to Luna — in contrast to the naive notion, fueled by Hollywood movies even in that era, that a single rocket would achieve the entire journey by taking off and landing at both ends); how the pilot navigates the ship by aligning it to three bright stars; what happens if the transit ship goes off course [an unruly kid in the cockpit hits the wrong button!] and the pilot has to recalculate their ‘groove’, with the threat of having to dump cargo in order not to miss the lunar target.

It’s very clear and matter-of-factual, in a direct, elegant way that presages the Earth-orbit to Luna scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which illustrated, without spelling anything out in dialogue, the matter of fact precision that goes into such a trip.

— And, the story also explores the internal narrative of the tension between the pilot and his wife. During his trip, the pilot imagines several letters he would write to his impatient wife, alternately defending his line of work and why she must put up with his schedule, with some deference about how maybe their differences won’t support a continued relationship. (This debate might seem a tad dated, since it assumes the wife could not possibly have any job of her own.) And then the technical arc of the story resolves as the emotional one does, once the pilot finally calls his wife when he has landed on Luna.

Other stories in the book are relatively incidental. “The Long Watch” (1949) involves an attempted coup by a Lunar officer to take control of Earth (where matters are “too important to be left in control of politicians”) with nuclear bombs stored on Luna, and a hero, later venerated, who takes it upon himself to foil his plan. “Gentlemen, Be Seated” involves a lunar quake that seals a journalist and two others in an underground tunnel with an air leak, which is patched by one of them literally pulling down his pants and using his bare butt to plug the leak, until help arrives. “The Black Pits of Luna” involves a family taking a tour on Luna, with a young kid who goes missing; this plot point echoes the unruly kid in “Space Jockey”. “Ordeal in Space” involves a crewman suffering acrophobia as a result of a repair effort outside a spinning ship (i.e., spinning for the effect of artificial gravity inside) — and frankly, the incident in which he’s on the outside of that spinning ship, in which every way is down and he struggles to hold on for hours — is as harrowing as any spaceship emergency I can recall — is resolved by his having to rescue a cat on a balcony. And “The Green Hills of Earth”, iconic for its depiction of the blind poet Rhysling (an award for SF/F poetry is named after this character) and his sacrifice to repair an irradiated ship, even as he composes his iconic song, struck me most of all for the notion that, in those heady days of space travel throughout the solar system — half the ships that went out never came back.

Three others however are striking. “It’s Great to Be Back” concerns a couple living in Luna City who decide to return to Earth, tired of the insularity of Luna, missing the sky and open air. They return to Earth and check in to a New York City hotel, and are struck by the increased gravity, how cold the outside air is, how the old friends they meet harbor so many misconceptions about life “on” the Moon (they say “in” the Moon). And it’s dirty! They settle into a country home, where the toilet clogs and can’t be fixed until spring. They want to go home! Coincidentally on my part, this story reminds me of a couple by Shirley Jackson, whom I read some of a few months ago (one described here), but especially in this case “The Summer People”, in which rifts between city folks and country folks appear. The title of this Heinlein story, of course, becomes applied twice.

“We Also Walk Dogs” is an early, 1941, story, somewhat shoe-horned into the Future History template. It concerns General Services, a high-end establishment that does anything — short of murder — for a price, and in all confidentiality. The character focal is Grace Cormet, a senior receptionist at General Services; after a couple example episodes, the story focuses on her handling of a visit from a government official whose request is to help the government host a delegation of the other intelligent races in the solar system, here on Earth. (This is the first time, in the ‘future history’, that we’ve heard about other intelligent races in the solar system.) She concludes that the task is relatively easy except for the gravity part — delegates from lower-gravity planets might not tolerate the gravity of Earth — and suggests that the government contact a brilliant physicist though uncooperative recluse, a Dr. Krathwohl, for help. His requirement for services is a rare, exquisite, Chinese bowl called the “Flower of Forgetfulness”. [A Wikipedia search on this name leads you to the entry for this story: —We Also Walk Dogs.]

The final, longest story in The Green Hills of Earth is “Logic of Empire”, the most overt political story in the book. In the opening, two friends, Sam Houston Jones and Humphrey Wingate, argue over dinner about whether the system of ‘contractual servitude’ on Venus is equivalent to slavery. (The premise here, that Venus is inhabitable and has an indigenous species, follows from the previous story.) On the second page of this story, Wingate wakes up on a ship that he gathers is headed for Venus, without remembering how he got there. Has he been ‘shanghaied’? He ends up, sold into servitude, on a plantation on Venus, where he does grudge work alongside native amphibians. He eventually escapes and makes it back to Earth, where he tries to tell his story, and finds that no one cares. Here is where Heinlein expresses political conclusions. His would-be publisher says,

I would say that you have fallen into the commonest fallacy of all in dealing with social and economic subjects – the ‘devil theory’ … You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity. Colonial slavery is nothing new; it is the inevitable result of imperial expansion…

And when he reunites with his old friend:

I’ve been wondering how long it would take you to get your eyes opened. What is your case? It’s nothing new; it happened in the Old South, it happened again in California, in Mexico, in Australia, in South Africa. Why? Because in any expanding free-enterprise economy which does not have a money system designed to fit its requirements, the use of mother-country capital to develop the colony inevitably results in subsistence-level wages at home and slave labor in the colonies. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer…

Next time: “If This Goes On.”

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Narrative vs Reality

Posted on Tuesday 3 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Another post about Republican politics — because, cf. Heinlein, this is currently the greatest threat to the advancement of American society. Trump is a buffoon; Carson a mild-mannered religious zealot; Cruz an megalomaniac, evangelical religious zealot; Christie a political clown; Fiorina an unrepentant liar; Jindal and Huckabee religious zealots. Is anyone left? Perhaps Marco Rubio? Well, no.

Slate: Rubio Is Lying About Hillary Lying.

He accuses Hillary Clinton of lying about the Benghazi attacks. But “The Republican candidate’s claims about Hillary Clinton and Benghazi fall apart under scrutiny.”

Narrative over reality:

On right-wing websites, you’ll find plenty of affirmation for this myth. National Review, Red State, Townhall.com, the Daily Caller, and other outlets agree that Clinton “blamed the ‘awful Internet video’ for the massacre,” told “the American public that the anti-Islam video was what caused the attack,” and “was the author of the lie about what caused the attack.” But when you click their links and study their evidence, the case falls apart.

And conviction over honesty, as the writer William Saletan concludes:

Clinton avoided saying what she didn’t believe to be true. She’s careful with her words. Rubio isn’t. His butchery of the Benghazi story—the intelligence, the context, the public record—betrays a disregard for evidence that doesn’t fit his agenda. He delivers his falsehoods with absolute self-assurance. What unites Rubio with Cruz, and distinguishes him from Bush, isn’t that Rubio sometimes says things that aren’t true. It’s that he does it without compunction.

My bold: What unites Rubio with Cruz, and distinguishes him from Bush, isn’t that Rubio sometimes says things that aren’t true. It’s that he does it without compunction.

Politics. Narratives. Social groups. And the realization that the history of the world, acknowledged to be written by winners, must be affected by this same kind thinking, in which powerful speakers say things that aren’t truth, but which their audiences want to believe.

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The 2015 Republican Clown Circus

Posted on Tuesday 3 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I can’t help but thinking that the entire world, or at least the rational world of the advanced countries in Europe and Asia, are rolling their eyes at the current US Republican candidates for president. Perhaps they understand that history shows that extremist Republican candidates often rank high in early polling, while relative moderates eventually win the nomination, and as often as not, lose the general election.

As a progressive liberal, I think it’s wonderful that the current Republican race is so splintered, among so many obviously non-electable candidates (can you imagine Trump negotiating with world leaders? “You’re a loser!” Or Carson? “God has provided me with the blessings to be confidant I am right”), because that just increases the likelihood that a Democrat, mostly likely Hillary Clinton, will win the presidency in 2016. (As always, this doesn’t mean I completely approve of Hillary, or any Democratic candidate — but I’ve never voted Republican in my entire life. Republicans are always on the wrong side of science, on progress of increased civil rights, on economics that actually works and is not beholden to wealthy donors.)

And so a few of many links and comments from this past week.

Salon: Put gay people to death? Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal and Mike Huckabee to speak at Iowa “religious liberty” conference led by noxious right-wing radio host

Amanda Marcotte:

The conference is called the National Religious Liberties Conference, and it’s based on the premise that Christians are somehow having their religious liberties stripped from them because they can’t impose their views on others.

In the topsy-turvy world of Christiandom, being unable to oppress others amounts to oppression of Christians.

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Alternet: 5 worst right-wing moments of the week — Ben Carson welcomes the apocalypse

Including a delusional quote from Ted Cruz, who clearly does not actually understand science. This is what happens when your brain is on religion, or conservative ideology:

“Look at the language where they call you a ‘denier,’” he said. “Denier is not the language of science. Look, I’m the child of two scientists … The essence of the scientific method is to start with a hypothesis, then look to the evidence to disprove the hypothesis; you’re not trying to prove it, you’re trying to disprove it. Any good scientist is a skeptic; if he’s not, he or she should not be a scientist. But yet the language of the global warming alarmists, ‘denier’ is the language of religion, it’s heretic, you are a blasphemer. The response from the Sierra Club, ‘We have decreed this is the answer, you must accept it.’ And so he didn’t know his facts because he just knew his religion.”

Guffaw.

And then Ben Carson’s plan to deal with global warming is… build an Ark.

The GOP presidential frontrunner, who unlike his peers is a man of science, never lets that extensive medical education stand in the way of the fantasy world he lives in. He has previously gone on record questioning the Big Bang, evolution and gravity, and compared women who get abortions to slave-owners. This week, he unveiled his plan to deal with the watery effect of climate change.

The good doctor tweeted:

“It is important to remember that amateurs built the Ark and it was the professionals that built the Titanic.”

Yeupp, arks. Arks are the solution to the coming flood. It’s right there in the Bible. Don’t worry. God will show you how to build them. Just as god has shown us the best tax system, tithing.

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Conservatives demonize the ‘media’ as being liberal, and I think there’s a bit of truth in that, as I’ve said here before — but this is because journalists (like academics) are exposed to a variety of viewpoints, and are dedicated to truth and reality, not ideology, and so identify issues and solutions that more often than not are contrary to the ideological positions on the right. But the right, curiously, ignores the capitalist motive of the media: to make money, to serve their audience. Again from Salon, The wingnut myth that refuses to die: The one simple reason why there’s no “liberal media conspiracy”.

It should be noted that the real world tends to have a liberal bias — at least what Cruz considers a liberal bias. Take climate change, for example. The fact that the climate is warming because of human activity is a completely uncontroversial notion; it is happening, and the vast majority of scientists agree that it will be catastrophic for humanity if nothing is done very soon. That the mainstream media does not contest the issue of climate change, or claim that it is some giant left-wing conspiracy, does not prove it is liberal, but that it is operating in reality. Cruz does not operate in reality, and believes climate change (i.e. science) is a “religion.” But just because Cruz believes this, or his deranged father, Rafael, believes that evolution is a communist lie, does not mean that evolutionary biologists are communists or that climate scientists are religious fanatics — it means that Rafael Cruz and his son are delusional.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on The 2015 Republican Clown Circus

The Bay Area and the California Dream

Posted on Sunday 1 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

It’s been especially lovely here in the Bay Area all this past week, with mild temperatures around 68 or 70 F (though a bit warmer in the Oakland Hills where we are), and sunny warm skies decorated with big fluffy white clouds, a kind of atmosphere rarely seen in SoCal, where I’ve lived virtually my entire life until 9 months ago.

I’ve also noticed the effect of living farther north, and farther west in the same time zone, as Los Angeles: the daylight is shorter, and in particular the sun rises later in the mornings. Yeong and I are up weekdays at 5:30, and in recent weeks it’s still pitch dark at even 7 a.m. This will change now that we’re off Daylight Savings Time, as of today.

These days I listen to KQED weekday mornings, in particular Michael Krasny’s 2-hour “Forum” program, which gets nation-wide exposure, judging from the callers they get from across the country. Last Tuesday there was an hour about how a Bay Area Writer Laments His Fading California Dream, about Daniel Duane, who had published an opinion piece in the New York Times, My Dark California Dream, the weekend before, on October 24th. Duane lives in ‘the city’, San Francisco, and was writing about the excessive real estate prices not just in the city but around the Bay Area, and about his perception of the how the drought in California, and the effect of climate change, has affected his annual visits to Yosemite and the Sierras, where the meadows have dried up and the wildflowers have vanished.

Since Duane lives in the city and loves it, he was not condemning the city, or California; he was just addressing issues that have made this area less than the ideal he grew up with. But what was remarkable about the callers in to that show on Tuesday was how so many of them repeated the theme: yes, there are problems, but this is still the greatest city and environment to live in, anywhere in the US, and they would not live anywhere else. The landscape, the culture, the diversity, the weather.

Yeong and I had difficulties finding a reasonable place to live, given real estate prices and commuting issues. But especially after hearing this feedback — and other programs on this same radio show about real estate issues in ‘the city’ — I think we were very lucky to have ended up where we are.

Yesterday we shopped, at the ethnic Asian shops north of Berkeley, and Costco, and the AT&T store, and a stop at BMW for motor oil — everything so close — with dinner later at Bourban and Beef on College Street, with bourban flights and my favorite cocktail, the Aviation. Today, a hike into a previously unexplored corner of Joaquin Miller Park, around Sequoia Arena, among the deep dark woods, only a couple miles from our house.

And just now: another gorgeous sunset.

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Infrastructure: New Pages

Posted on Sunday 1 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Have initialized pages under ‘Provisional Conclusions’ for Links and Comments and Science Fictional Illustrations and Examples. Mostly outlines for now, to be filled in over coming weeks and months.

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Links and Comments: Zuckerman on religion and violence; Islamic intolerance

Posted on Sunday 1 November 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

From today’s Los Angeles Times, an op-ed by Phil Zuckerman, Think religion makes society less violent? Think again.

This echoes his book of last year, Living the Secular Life, which I blogged about here. The point in this essay is relevant to current politics — again, how the right wing, especially the religious zealots like Huckabee and Fox host Bill O’Reilly, imply that mass shootings in America are the result of increasing secularism. The evidence is otherwise — but again, as discussed in my previous post, the right-wing adheres to ideology and actively ignores and resists evidence. Zuckerman:

If it were true that when belief in God weakens, societal well-being diminishes, then we should see abundant evidence for this. But we don’t. In fact, we find just the opposite: Those societies today that are the most religious — where faith in God is strong and religious participation is high — tend to have the highest violent crime rates, while those societies in which faith and church attendance are the weakest — the most secular societies — tend to have the lowest.

With examples about countries around the world, and states within the US, that show increased religiosity aligns with increased crime-rates and matters like child-abuse, and vice versa.

What about within the United States? According to the latest study from the Pew Research Center, the 10 states that report the highest levels of belief in God are Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Oklahoma (tied with Utah). The 10 states with the lowest levels of belief in God are Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Alaska, Oregon and California. And as is the case in the rest of the world, when it comes to nearly all standard measures of societal health, including homicide rates, the least theistic states generally fare much better than the most theistic. Consider child-abuse fatality rates: Highly religious Mississippi’s is twice that of highly secular New Hampshire’s, and highly religious Kentucky’s is four times higher than highly secular Oregon’s.

Of course, you can debate correlation vs. causation. But which ever way it works, how can you conclude anything positive about religious belief..? Whether effect or cause, it’s a bad sign, one humanity will, hopefully, outgrow.

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And in other news: New York Times: 2 Men Who Published Writings Critical of Extremism Are Stabbed in Bangladesh.

Religious (Islamic) extremists murdered two publishers for publishing work by a writer earlier murdered, all for accusing religious extremists of being intolerant religious extremists.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Religion | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Zuckerman on religion and violence; Islamic intolerance

Links and Comments: This Week’s American Politics; … Heinlein

Posted on Friday 30 October 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

This has been a bizarre week, what with the third debate among Republican presidential candidates, and the reactions from the red-meat base and, on the other side, the intelligentsia who rolled their eyes about all the lies and distortion those candidates get away with — to the approval of the crowd.

I’ll echo, without being able to provide a link, a characterization of Ben Carson: he is single-handedly destroying the world’s ability to use “brain surgeon” as shorthand for “smart person”.

Among many of his remarks: Holy Crap: Ben Carson thinks our tax system should be based on the Bible. He clearly hasn’t read it very closely.

The events this week demonstrate this premise: For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. — H.L. Mencken. The conservative, Republican, base seems to like simple solutions to complex problems — cut taxes! reduce the deficit! deport the immigrants! — despite the analyses from patient experts (e.g. Paul Krugman) who again and again keep explaining why these simple solutions are wrong, will backfire if implemented, and provide evidence — e.g. about the austerity policies of Greece, and Kansas, to take just one example.

As always in this blog, I don’t mean to make this simply about politics; my interest is about general principles. What is it about conservative vs liberal politics, that reflects general perceptions of human beings of the world? How is it that variant perceptions of reality reach such different conclusions? Is it because (as I suspect in some circumstances) mass delusions actually promote cohesion and survival of large groups, and understanding of the reality behind the delusions is irrelevant?

Yet for now, some links and comments from this past week.

Slate: Reality Sucks: Leading GOP candidates aren’t at war with the press. They just have a problem with the truth.

What happened in this debate wasn’t an attack by the press on the candidates. It was an attack by the candidates on the press. Harwood, Quick, and the other CNBC panelists were no harsher to the Republicans on Wednesday than CNN’s Anderson Cooper was to Clinton and other Democrats in their debate two weeks ago. What was different this time was the reaction. Presented with facts and figures that didn’t fit their story, the leading Republican candidates accused the moderators of malice and deceit.

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Slate: Scary Politics: Americans are scared about a lot of things—especially the government itself.

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Salon: Their lips are moving. They’re lying: Ben Carson, Rand Paul and the right-wing’s truthiness problem

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A general theme is that conservative politicians play to their base by denying any kind of science that would offend religious sensibilities (i.e. evolution) or business priorities… because they are playing to their base, and because they are financed by billionaires who deny any science that would threaten their profits. (That is, obviously, anyone who is invested in drilling for oil, or natural gas, or fracking.)

Slate: Neil deGrasse Tyson identifies this problem in which political candidates pander to voters — and says the voters themselves are the problem; without them the candidates would not need to pander to them.

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And part of all this, perhaps a more significant part than I’d thought, is, at Salon: The GOP primary’s theocratic X-factor: Inside the twisted worldview and junk history of David Barton.

Barton’s “history” has been repeatedly rebutted by academics and even conservative Christian scholars. His publisher withdrew his book on Jefferson when it was revealed to be made up from whole cloth. But none of that matters to the right wing true believers. His founding myth is much more comfortable for them than all that crazy Enlightenment stuff about reason and progress and rational inquisition that informed the real American revolution.

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There is no doubt that Mike Huckabee admires him greatly, that Glenn Beck promotes him constantly, that he is the source of much of Ben Carson’s wild misinformation (whether directly or though Beck and other sources), and that he is very intimately involved with Ted Cruz’s campaign. If you wonder where these presidential candidates, and a good number of GOP politicians at all levels, have come up with this surreal alternative history that bears no relationship to reality, look no further than David Barton. He is the most influential right wing crackpot in American politics today. And that’s saying something.

Again: His founding myth is much more comfortable for them than all that crazy Enlightenment stuff about reason and progress and rational inquisition that informed the real American revolution. My latest provisional conclusion, not quite captured in my posted list, is that human culture is mostly about tribes, and allegiance to tribes. It’s not about perception or acceptance of reality. But allegiance to tribes is, ironically, what keeps the race going.

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Bottom line: Jeffrey Tayler at Salon: They really want a theocracy: The GOP candidates who want to make you bow to their lord.

Carson, Cruz, Huckabee. Scary.

And, almost incidentally, given my recent reading, this is where current American politics echo the stories of Robert A. Heinlein, who fully *75 years ago* wrote stories about a theological revolution that took over the US — reflected in his early short novel “If This Goes On–” — with the implication that this tendency in American culture toward religious fundamentalism has been here all along. I’ll have another post about Heinlein in particular, shortly.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Heinlein, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off on Links and Comments: This Week’s American Politics; … Heinlein

Rereading Early Heinlein, part 1

Posted on Monday 26 October 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I reread three early Heinlein volumes in the past few weeks, and as with my Asimov rereads, these were revisits to stories I first read some 30 or 40 years ago, and mostly have not read since. Both Asimov’s and Heinlein’s stories had implicit “future history” over-arching narratives, which greatly influenced or at least informed later SF, as Donald A. Wollheim explained about Asimov in his book The Universe Makers, which I summarized here.

I was triggered to explore Heinlein again because of his early story “Universe”. (Asimov’s robot stories => Harlan Ellison’s “I, Robot” script => Harlan Ellison’s other scripts, including “Phoenix without Ashes” => other stories about the idea of a “generation ship” in which its inhabitants do not realize they are living in an isolated world => the daddy of all such stories, Heinlein’s “Universe”.) And its theme’s relevance to my current thinking.

I reread the volume The Man Who Sold the Moon about 3 years ago — but before I had formulated my “Provisional Conclusions”, which are now channeling and informing my thinking, providing perspectives about what older stories mean today and might have meant then — and just reread volumes Orphans in the Sky, The Green Hills of Earth, and Revolt in 2011 in recent weeks. (I do not own first editions of those volumes; my collection consists of a set of a full dozen Heinlein titles published by Signet in the late ’60s and early ’70s, with very cool, abstract, cover paintings by Gene Szafran, as shown here.)

First of all, it’s extraordinary to look back at the bibliographic history of Heinlein’s and Asimov’s early stories. They both began publishing in 1939, as did other writers who became associated with John W. Campbell’s Astounding magazine, and they are principle reasons why in retrospect 1939 is identified as the beginning of the “Golden Age” of science fiction, when standards were raised in the field as it moved beyond its pulpish past. Asimov published a couple stories elsewhere before he cracked Astounding in July 1939 with “Trends”; Heinlein’s first published story, “Life-Line”, appeared there in August 1939.

I think it’s fair to say that Heinlein was by far the more mature writer, from the very beginning. As I’ve said, Asimov’s were often simply puzzle stories. Heinlein’s stories, in contrast, exhibited a familiarity with the real world, an understanding of politics and psychology, that surpassed Asimov’s perception.

Heinlein struck swiftly, producing some two dozen stories from 1939 to 1942, including many eventual classics, from “The Roads Must Roll” and “And He Built a Crooked House” to “Universe” and “By His Bootstraps” and “Waldo” and “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”, before he was distracted by service in World War II and published nothing for the subsequent five years. While there have been similar blazing debut streaks by authors over succeeding decades – Larry Niven in the late 1960s, John Varley in the mid-1970s, William Gibson in the mid-1980s – I doubt that anyone’s record has matched Heinlein’s for quality and scope in so short a time.

Orphans of the Sky is the book form of two novellas from that early period, “Universe” and “Common Sense”, published five months apart, in May and October 1941; they weren’t published as installments of a serial, though they might as well have been. The book version wasn’t published until 1963! In contrast, among Heinlein’s earliest book publications were three from Shasta Press, a fan outfit: The Man Who Sold the Moon in 1950, The Green Hills of Earth in 1951, and Revolt in 2011 in 1953. (It’s odd how this last title is left out of some bibliographies, including the list of Books and Stories at the Heinlein Concordance (!), as if it were somehow illegitimate, while the central big story in that book, which was published as a serial in the February and March issues of Astounding, “If This Goes On—“, *is* included, though as far as I can tell that short novel has never been published in a separate book form.) These three books were compiled as forming the core of Heinlein’s “Future History”, diagrammed on a chart in the second and third volumes, which ranged from the earliest exploration of space, to a reactionary period dominated by religious zealots, to a revolution that led to the first colonization ships to the stars.

The novella “Universe” and its book completion Orphans of the Sky was the first major canonical story about what has become known as the enclosed universe version of the generation starship. That is, a way to send human colonists to other stars, without magical warp drives. The trip takes so long that you build an enormous starships with a livable environments inside, and the trip takes so long that generations pass aboard ship before it reaches its destination. (A durable theme – this year’s Kim Stanley Robinson novel, Aurora, is the latest consideration.) The consequence that Heinlein, and later SF writers, perceived was that after so much time, the inhabitants of the ship might forget their original mission, or even the idea that they’re on a ship, and instead, as each new generation is raised, assume that the reality of the shipboard life consists of the entire known universe.

(This is one prominent example of my Provisional Conclusion #2 — that for any of a number of reasons, you can’t count on ordinary human perception of reality, e.g. “common sense”, to be an accurate take on what is real.)

Heinlein’s “Universe” concerns inhabitants of such a starship. The story is crafty in that it indicates early on to the reader that the characters are in some kind of environment that is unlike ordinary planetary life – in the first couple pages, our hero Hugh “settles slowly” to the deck, and as he and his pals descend decks, they get heavier. They think nothing of it; but we understand what this means – that they are in a ship that is spinning to produce an artificial gravity.

The plot of “Universe” involves our hero Hugh climbing to the upper decks to contact the “muties” (a term we come to understand is short for both mutants and mutineers) who live near the center of the ship where artificial gravity drops to nothing; being shown the reality of the outside universe, outside the ship; and then returning to the lower decks to try to convince others that the conventional wisdom of their culture is a lie. The sequel, “Common Sense”, ironically employs that phrase to defend the common assumptions about what people on the lower decks assume is real, until a small band of rebels, including Hugh, escape the ship in order to complete its original mission: to colonize the planet that the ship was intended to reach.

There are two striking parallels between this story and a couple stories by Isaac Asimov: “Nightfall”, published in Astounding in September 1941, and “Reason”, the early robot story, published in Astounding in April 1941 – both so contemporaneous with Heinlein’s two stories, given lead times between submission and publications for any stories in that era (or even now), that it can’t be anything but coincidence… or perhaps, the influence of earlier forgotten stories that are lost to time.

First, both stories employ the idea that ancient truths, lost to the current generation, have been preserved in religious texts. Both stories, in fact, quote large passages of such texts! Asimov and Heinlein portray this situation differently. In Asimov’s story, the religious zealot strongly objects to any new evidence that might provide substantiation to the ancient narratives – because to provide evidence would be to remove the need for faith! In Heinlein’s story, an elder to Hugh calmly explains that the ancient texts [physics textbooks!] can’t be understood in any literal sense, but only metaphorically – in a bizarre passage about how the idea of “gravity” is only a poetic metaphor about romantic love (!).

Second, the passage in Heinlein’s “Common Sense”, in which Narby dismisses his vision of pinpoints of light visible outside the ship, is almost identical to the explanation by the creationist robot ‘Cutie’ in Asimov’s “Reason” (which I blogged about in detail here). Mere illusions, pinpoints of light on a black velvet background.

Will continue on next post. The stories in The Green Hills of Earth, and how “If This Goes On—“ (in Revolt in 2100) eerily presages current American politics.

Posted in Heinlein, Provisional Conclusions, science fiction | Comments Off on Rereading Early Heinlein, part 1

Links and Comments from Today’s New York Times: 25 Oct 2015

Posted on Sunday 25 October 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

You can’t escape human nature: Norway Has a New Passion: Ghost Hunting.

As traditional religion has faded in many northern European nations, it’s being replaced in Norway by an increased tendency to perceive ghosts at every corner.

Ghosts, or at least belief in them, have been around for centuries but they have now found a particularly strong following in highly secular modern countries like Norway, places that are otherwise in the vanguard of what was once seen as Europe’s inexorable, science-led march away from superstition and religion.

While churches here may be largely empty and belief in God, according to opinion polls, in steady decline, belief in, or at least fascination with, ghosts and spirits is surging. Even Norway’s royal family, which is required by law to belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Church, has flirted with ghosts, with a princess coaching people on how to reach out to spirits.

And

Arild Romarheim, a Lutheran priest and recently retired theology lecturer, described the conviction of well-educated atheists and agnostics that ghosts exist as “the paradox of modernity” — a revival of old beliefs to slake an innate human thirst for a spiritual life left unsatisfied by the decline of the church.

This “thirst for a spiritual life” is, I think, an artifact for the way the human mind has evolved to perceive the universe in its own terms, not necessarily favoring reality of the actual universe: see the Jesse Bering book linked at Provisional Conclusions: Resources & Bibliography. And this is why I suppose religion and/or superstition, in one fashion or another, will never be completely overcome (despite Arthur C. Clarke, alas).

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Frank Bruni on What Family Really Means. He addresses recent debates within the Catholic Church, which like most faiths, is mostly behoven to standards set in holy books written by ancient tribes in eras when life was relatively short and savage, and tribal. If you think about it and twist your mind a bit, you can come to understand the motivations behind all those Old Testament rules about killing brides who were not virgins and men marrying their brother’s widows and masturbation and not wearing certain kinds of clothes as well as, by the way, condemning men who slept with men. Because in those days, it was all about doing everything to maintain the viability of the tribe, which would be endangered by any activity that threatened individual survival or did not promote the expansion of the tribe. (These motives are all understood as very basic evolutionary strategies, given those circumstances, though of course this understanding would be ironically and stoutly denied by the adherents to those religions who think human beings as special creations of a god and not subject to the natural selection forces that inevitably affect everything else in the universe.)

And yet, here is natural selection at work in one of the largest religions on Earth: if the Catholic Church does not change and adapt to modern times (when human life is not so short and savage, if perhaps just as tribal, as it was three thousand years ago), it will continue to fade, and eventually die. Natural selection will choose a modified version of that church to survive, and not the one that has condemned so many (to an imaginary Hell) according to those ancient proscriptions.

And so the current Pope is floating some changes, about divorce and cohabitation and single parenting. Many in the church, especially in Africa (the region of the world most radically opposed to gay rights), resist.

Bruni’s column is a poignant description of ‘families’ he’s know that do not fit the parameters of the traditional Catholic church. As he says,

I’m more impressed by families who are bound by choice rather than blood. For all that I’ve learned about family around my own Thanksgiving table, I’ve learned as much by watching people without dependable parents, caring siblings or nurturing spouses forge clans of a different kind.

I saw this happen time and again in the 1980s and early 1990s, when AIDS ravaged gay America and many sufferers found themselves abandoned by relatives, whose religions prodded them toward judgment instead of compassion. Friends filled that gap, rushing in as saviors, stepping up as providers, signing on as protectors. Where families were absent, families were born.

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The latest assault against reason is the resistance to GMOs, genetically modified organisms, which, perhaps ironically, is even more prevalent in Europe than in the US.

With G.M.O. Policies, Europe Turns Against Science

Without a trace of embarrassment, a spokeswoman for Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, admitted that the first minister’s science adviser had not been consulted because the decision “wasn’t based on scientific evidence.” Instead, the priority was to protect the “clean green image” of the country’s produce, according to the secretary for rural affairs, food and environment.

“The worldwide scientific consensus on the safety of genetic engineering is as solid as that which underpins human-caused global warming. Yet this inconvenient truth on G.M.O.s — that they’re as safe as conventionally cultivated food — is ignored when ideological interests are threatened.” (My bold.)

(As an aside, not discussed here, is the issue about bananas, which some religious morons claim as evidence of God, for the banana’s supposed ideal design for human consumption; in fact, bananas have been modified over millennia by human beings into what we recognize today; here’s a link that displays what wild bananas were like before human selection intervened.)

Back to the article, which discusses, again, Africa, which promotes wild conspiracy theories about the dangers of GMOs: a crony to Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe claims that “sexual dysfunction is a huge problem in the U.S.A., where males become impotent around the age of 24, at the prime of life” and this is due to GMO foods; and an incident in which the author talked with someone in Tanzania who claims biotech crops would turn his children homosexual [which of course would be a *bad* *thing*].

I think that this is evidence for my general conclusion that science denial is not about consideration of evidence and reaching conclusions that challenge some orthodoxy — it’s about adherence to tribal allegiances. Anything can be denied, at least in public, in order to be straight with your neighbors and social groups, those whom you depend on for day to day life. It’s human nature, and how that differs from the understanding of scientific reality.

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Finally, fascinated by ‘NPR Voice’ Has Taken Over the Airwaves. Ira Glass, the whole All Things Considered and Morning Edition staff, Terri Gross (whom these days I listen to almost every weekday).

So different from the tone of anger and outrage that typifies the right-wing media.

And brought to mind classic narrators. Rod Serling, mentioned here. And maybe my favorite: Vic Perrin’s “Control Voice” from the early ’60s anthology show The Outer Limits.

You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to — The Outer Limits.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Evolution, Narrative, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments from Today’s New York Times: 25 Oct 2015