Instant Insanity

Posted on Thursday 21 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Does anyone remember this? Wikipedia: Instant Insanity

This was a puzzle that was produced in the late 1960s, a stack of four plastic cubes, with the sides of each cube a seemingly random pattern of red, white, green, and blue sides. The object of the puzzle, once you unwrap it and scramble it, is to restack the cubes such that each side of the stack has all four colors. (Before you unwrapped it, the cubes were stacked in the solved solution.)

Here is the solution. These are front, right, left, and back colors. Start at the top, and there is only one cube that will fit each sequence.

blue red blue white
white green red green
red white green blue
green blue white red

I think I bought this puzzle when I was… 12 or 13, in 1967 or 1968. It was after our family had moved from southern California, to Cambridge, Illinois, a small Bradbury-esque town where we stayed for a few months in my grandfather’s house until my father bought a house in a Chicago suburb (Glen Ellyn), where we subsequently lived for three years while he worked as an engineering architect for what became known as Fermilab, and where I finished junior high school and started high school (at Glenbard East — everything is online these days!).

In my grandfather’s house in Cambridge, I brought home this cellophane-wrapped Instant Insanity puzzle, bought from the local drug store/soda fountain, Swan’s — which shows up now as a liquor store! — and where I wrote down and memorized the sequence of colors around each cube, the sequences I remember to this day.

That’s how much a geek I have always been.

(Years later was Rubik’s Cube. Another post.)

Posted in Personal history | Comments Off on Instant Insanity

Links and Comments: Flip-Flopping Politicians; Jerry Coyne’s new book; Six Basic Storylines; Trigger Events

Posted on Wednesday 20 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Slate: Our Best Presidents Are Flip-Floppers

Politicians are attacked for changing their positions due to political expediency — as Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, a one-time biology major, has done about the teaching of creationism in schools, to appeal to his ignorant base — but changing one’s mind in reaction to new evidence should be a measure of intellectual integrity. (That’s how science works.) Of course, the link above is about how politicians do this for political expediency…

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The event of this week is the publication of Jerry Coyne’s long-awaited book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible. Got my copy today. Its topics are familiar to me as themes of this blog, but it’s nice seeing all these issues summarized and encapsulated into a rigorously referenced and indexed volume. I’ll blog my own summary and responses in a week or so.

Coyne’s own distillation of the themes of this book formed this short essay at The Scientist:

But while science and religion both claim to discern what’s true, only science has a system for weeding out what’s false. In the end, that is the irreconcilable conflict between them. Science is not just a profession or a body of facts, but, more important, a set of cognitive and practical tools designed to understand brute reality while overcoming the human desire to believe what we like or what we find emotionally satisfying. The tools are many, including observation of nature, peer review and replication of results, and above all, the hegemony of doubt and criticality. The best characterization of science I know came from physicist Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.”

In contrast, religion has no way to adjudicate its truth claims, for those claims rest on ancient scripture, revelation, dogma, and above all, faith: belief without sufficient evidence. Is there one God, or many? Does he want us to work on the Sabbath? Is there an afterlife? Was Jesus the son of God? The problem, of course, is that faith is no way to decide what’s true. It is, à la Feynman, an institutionalized way of fooling yourself. Religion acts like science in making claims about reality, but then morphs into pseudoscience in the way it rejects disconfirming evidence and insulates its claims against testing. The toolkit of science is—and will remain—the only way to discover what’s real, whether in biology, physics, history, or archaeology. Religion can offer communality and can buttress morality, but has no purchase on truth.

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The Independent: All fiction follows one of six basic storylines, according to new research.

I recall Hemingway (or was in Heinlein?) said there are only three basic stories. Anyway, here is more evidence that I need to understand concerning my Provisional Conclusion about narratives — that we as human beings, our minds having been honed by evolution for survival, rather than accurate perception of the real world, interpret everything in terms of cause and effect, beginnings, middles, and ends — because our daily lives involve incidents that have consequences. And this is why we have such negative reactions to narratives (e.g. certain TV series) that don’t end as we think they should.

The most popular storyline, according this article:

What do the following novels have in common: Pride and Prejudice, Brideshead Revisited and Carry On Jeeves? Well yes, they’re all written in English by famous English authors, and they all feature characters and dialogue; but on the face of it, they’re completely different. Not to Professor Matthew Jockers from Stanford University, they’re not.

According to his computerised analysis, they’d all be examples of the “Man in a Hole” form of fiction – an emotional arc in which our hero/heroine starts out happy, hits a patch of unhappiness (Lizzie Bennett discovers her baby sister’s been seduced by the cad Wickham, Charles Ryder discovers his best friend Sebastian is a hopeless drunk, Bertie is tasked with stealing an embarrassing manuscript from a prospective father-in-law) and winds up happier and/or wiser at the end.

Prof Jockers suggests that 46 per cent of the world’s novels are variants of the Man in a Hole storyline. …

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There have been numerous articles in recent weeks and months about “triggering events”, about whether students in literature classes at universities, say, should be warned in advance that the various classic works of literature (Shakespeare, et al., et al.) that certain situations in these works might … upset them. That is, acknowledging the reality that many events in human history have involved murder, rape, sexism, and so on, which while hopefully will not affect any of these students’ lives, but which nevertheless actually happened in the past, might be troubling to their studies.

Here’s Jerry Coyne again, at New Republic, on this subject: Life Is “Triggering.” The Best Literature Should Be, Too.

The pathway of such trigger warnings—not just for sexual assault but for violence, bigotry, and racism—will eventually lead to every work of literature being labeled as potentially offensive. There goes the Bible, there goes Dante, there goes Huck Finn (loaded with racism), there goes all the old literature written before we realized that minorities, women, and gays weren’t second-class people. And as for violence and hatred, well, they’re everywhere, for they’re just as much parts of literature as parts of life. Crime and Punishment? Trigger warning: brutal violence against an old woman. The Great Gatsby? Trigger warning: violence against women (remember when Tom Buchanan broke Mrs. Wilson’s nose?). The Inferno? Trigger warning: graphic violence, sodomy, and torture. Dubliners? Trigger warning: pedophilia. 

Which is to say, the *whole point* of reading literature is to expose readers to other ideas and realities, about why other people have different ideas about what is true and proper, and while what you may upset about in any particular story is not something necessarily universal. Which leads us back to Coyne’s new book, about how science and faith have such different, and dramatically differently effective, methods for identifying what is real about the world.

Posted in Book Notes, Narrative, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Flip-Flopping Politicians; Jerry Coyne’s new book; Six Basic Storylines; Trigger Events

Links and Comments: Decline of US Religion; Narrative in Science and TV Finales

Posted on Monday 18 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Major news this past week, covered by many sources.

NPR: Christians In U.S. On Decline As Number Of ‘Nones’ Grows, Survey Finds

Washington Post: Christianity faces sharp decline as Americans are becoming even less affiliated with religion

It’s often been noted that religiosity drops with rising economic conditions and educational levels, but this shift seems to be something different – the polarization of American politics, and the association of religion with retrogressive social policies.

And there have been several articles like this recently, pointing out how the modern Christian fundamentalist movement is an artifact, not of anything our ‘Founding Fathers’ did or intended, but on social and economic and political forces of the 20th century.

Salon: Christian fundamentalism is a capitalist construct: The secret history of American religion.

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Leonard Mlodinow, whose new book THE UPRIGHT THINKERS I just bought, has an associated op-ed in the New York Times a few days ago: It Is, in Fact, Rocket Science.

This is about how the common narratives about certain scientific discoveries — Darwin and the finches, Newton and the apple, Hawking and black holes [as depicted in the film The Theory of Everything] — are at best simplifications of much more complex and subtle events. To me this is about the human bias toward narrative — making complex events simple and easy to understand within some basic template.

We all run into difficult problems in life, and we will be happier and more successful if we appreciate that the answers often aren’t quick, or easy.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project summed up a recent study by saying that the negative effects of today’s ubiquitous media “include a need for instant gratification.” The Darwin, Newton and Hawking of the myths received that instant gratification. The real scientists did not, and real people seldom do.

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Along the same lines, an NPR story this morning by Shankar Vedantam, about how TV show finales (in particular last night’s Mad Men finale) affect, of all things, the stock market. It’s about how important narratives are to our lives, and how the endings of stories by characters we’ve come to identify with leave people in a kind of mourning, and thus more risk-averse.

Some psychologists have made the argument that for most of our evolutionary history, the only characters we saw around us were real people who were physically around us. … Today, a lot of the faces and voices we hear around us come from technology. And at a conscious level, we know those people are not actually in our physical presence. But at an unconscious level, the machinery in our brains, which evolved in this different time period, makes us feel as though these people are actually our real companions. And so this is why when people hear about scandals and gossip involving celebrities or politicians, we react to those scandals and that gossip as if we’re hearing about actual people in our lives when in fact we have no connection with those people whatsoever.

Posted in Human Progress, Narrative, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Decline of US Religion; Narrative in Science and TV Finales

Bad Astronomy, 1

Posted on Tuesday 12 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m currently reading through the eponymous book by the popular ‘Bad Astronomy’ blogger Phil Plait, now posting regularly at Slate.com, where he celebrates scientific breakthroughs and criticizes anti-science movements (anti-vaxxers, state-sanctioned teaching of creationism, etc.). His first book, which I’ll review more fully once I finish it, explores various misconceptions about astronomy (thus the title), from ideas about the tides to the illusion of the moon’s size near the horizon, to the moon landing ‘hoax’, to top examples of bad astronomy in Hollywood pictures.

Some of these, e.g. the moon illusion, I’m familiar with since my earliest reading — e.g. Martin Gardner’s Science Puzzlers, which I must have bought at a book fair in the 7th grade.

Which is to say, an underlying theme of this book, and of that old book, is how human intuition and perception can be misleading. (And thus one of my provisional conclusions.) A paragraph from Plait, page 86:

My point here is that often our perceptions conflict with reality. Usually reality knows what it is doing and it’s we, ourselves, who are wrong. In a sense, that’s not just the point of this chapter but indeed this whole book. Maybe we should always keep that thought in mind.

Posted in Astronomy, Book Notes, MInd | Comments Off on Bad Astronomy, 1

Links and Comments: 11 May 2015

Posted on Monday 11 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Contrast the right’s paranoid claims of a war on religion with their very real war on abortion (NYT). When laws are being passed demanding a 48 hour waiting period before being let into church, then I’ll believe there’s a war on religion.

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Mary McNamara in the LA Times discusses the approaching conclusion of Mad Men, along the way pondering why it is we (or some people at least) obsess over certain shows. It goes back, in a way, to Star Trek.

Now that ‘Mad Men’ has changed the TV landscape, what does it all mean?

Not since “Lost” has a show been so combed through, picked over and commented on. “What Would Don Draper Do?” became a cultural construct. Gothamist began a standing feature called “Unpacking Mad Men,” which details the show’s historical references in alarming detail and more general tea leaf reading quickly became ubiquitous. Aided by social media, Easter egg hunts followed virtually every episode: Was that a secret reference to “MASH” (Esquire.com)? Did someone on Reddit find the Rosetta Stone of Sterling Cooper (Uproxx.com)? Was that a dream sequence in reverse, and what did it mean (slate.com)?

Audience speculation and detailed exegesis drove certain shows before “Mad Men” —”Star Trek” built an ancillary industry on symbolism and trivia, as did the soon-to-be-resurrected “The X-Files.” Indeed, the foundation of geek culture, now a dominant force in pop culture, is careful reading, painstaking cataloging and wild theorizing.

Something here about the necessity of narrative, and of teasing meaning out of things that do not necessarily have any meaning.

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NY Times Book Review: review of ‘Speak Now’ by Kenji Yoshino, part memoir and part account of a past Supreme Court decision concerning same-sex marriage.

It’s an expression of gratitude for his own growth, from a troubled young man for whom “common milestones — falling in love, marrying, raising children — seemed unattainable,” into a happily married father of two as a result of remarkable changes in the law beginning in 2003. That year, the Supreme Court outlawed criminal bans on sodomy and the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts became the first American court to legalize same-sex marriage. He writes, “My own life has deprived me of any capacity to be cynical about the law.”

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NY Times Magazine: John Herrman’s Letter of Recommendation: ‘X Minus One’, about a 1950s radio show that adapted science fiction stories of the time into radio plays. It’s an insightful look into how SF has regarded the future, and how that regard may or may not have changed since then.

Fiction about the future doesn’t often age gracefully. Its predictions harden, inevitably, into claims. At its worst, “X Minus One” is dated drama told well, but its better episodes have matured into half-hour exercises in a peculiar and intoxicating form of temporal eavesdropping. They let us watch, with great ease and clarity, people who are straining much harder to see us. Usually they’re looking just slightly off to the side. Sometimes they’re looking the wrong way entirely. But occasionally, in the show’s most thrillingly prescient moments, it’s as if they were staring straight at us.

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Friendly Atheist: Conservative Christian Comedian Doesn’t Realize His Critique of Islam Also Applies to His Own Faith

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And the latest from Jeffrey Tayler: The left has Islam all wrong: Bill Maher, Pamela Geller and the reality progressives must face

Posted in Narrative, Religion, science fiction, The Gays | Comments Off on Links and Comments: 11 May 2015

Natalie Angier, The Canon

Posted on Thursday 7 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

As I was unpacking books these past few weeks, at our new home in Oakland, I came across this book which I hadn’t yet read, but which seemed appropriate to read in the context of my current project to consolidate my thinking about science and philosophy with the perspectives of science fiction and fantasy. So here is one more piece of the puzzle I am putting together.

The author is a Pulitzer Prize winner for writing about biology for the New York Times. The introduction describes her motivation for writing this book: her dismay that her friends gave up their museum memberships as their kids grew up. She realizes most adults don’t care about science — even find it boring. Scientists are not good at promoting the relevancy of their fields, and she summarizes the familiar arguments for promoting scientific literacy. And science, she emphasizes, is fun.

The foundation of the book is hundreds of interviews Angier had done [I’m using past tense since the book was published 8 years ago] with real-life scientists [as opposed to citing and quoting from books by those scientists]. The result is, as it says, a whirlwind summary of the basic points of the major scientific disciplines.

That’s cool. But the author’s style is the opposite of matter-of-factual; it veers between ingratiating and grating. She likes cute, sometimes clever, metaphors, like, e.g., describing entropy (and potential energy):

The energy is there, but it might as well not be, like a taxi passing you on a rainy night with its NOT IN SERVICE lights ablaze, or a chair in a museum with a rope draped from arm to arm, or a teenager.

Or a teenager. Cute. A longer example, about the Second Law of Thermodynamics:

The second law might also be called the “Humpty Dumpty directive.” Once the big, smirking, pedantic, cravated egg had his great fall, all the king’s horses, all the king’s men, all the plastic surgeons, duct tape, and members of the National Transportation Safety Board couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. The second law is the reason why either you or a hired professional must expend considerable effort to clean you house, but if you leave the place alone for two weeks while on vacation, it will get dirty for free. It explains why some drinks taste good cold, some taste good hot, and most taste lousy at room temperature — red wines, of course, excepted. The second law guarantees a certain degree of chaos and mishap in your life no matter how compulsively you plan your schedule and triple-check every report. To err is not just human; it’s divined.

So if you’re not completely turned off by that style, the book is useful. Especially for the first three chapters, which address general concepts about “thinking scientifically”, probabilities, and calibrations. Science is not a body of fact, but a way of viewing the world; it assumes that there is an objective reality. Evidence counts, not opinions. Mental biases are the enemy of science. Scientific thinking is about overcoming the intuitive understandings we develop in childhood.

Probabilities: a statistics teacher split her class into two parts, one to flip a coin a hundred times to capture a set of actual random results, and the other to create a list of what they thought a set of random results would look like. The teacher could always tell the difference: because randomness looks nonrandom, including runs that people think do not look random. Such patterns in randomness suggests hidden meanings… thus superstitions.

Interesting asides about Enrico Fermi’s fondness for challenging co-workers with on-the-fly estimations: how many piano tuners are in Chicago? The goal was to get within an order of magnitude of the actual right answer.

And the third chapter is about Calibration: Playing with Scales. Look at the stars, look at the Grand Canyon. “Throughout history, people have wildly misjudged distances, proportions, comparisons, the bead of being … We have evolved to view life on a human scale, to concern ourselves almost exclusively with the rhythms of hours, days, seasons, years, and with objects that we can readily see, touch, and count on…”

Thus we perceive numbers of things in groups of five; our unit of time the second, is about a heartbeat. And so on.

After these three initial chapters, there are six following chapters that address:

  • Physics: Feynmann’s single sentence to leave to survivors of a worldwide cataclysm; the idea that in American high schools physics should be taught first, not last; the atom; charge; ‘electricity’; matter and energy, potential vs kinetic; electricity and magnetism; the vast range of ‘light’; the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics
  • Chemistry: Chemists have a persecution complex. But 115 elements generate a virtually infinite number of molecules, which depend on bonds: covalent, ionic, metallic, hydrogen. Why carbon is the most versatile element. The chemistry of change, from solid, liquid, gas, depends on bonds.
  • Evolutionary Biology: the overwhelming evidence for evolution, and the resistence to it. Familiar quote: “Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution” (Theodosius Dobzhansky). The chapter goes on with many familiar examples and evidence. And how evolution deniers evolve, ironically, from fundamentalists to ‘intelligent design’ advocates, supporting the idea of irreducible complexity, which amounts to just giving up about any idea of coming up with an explanation for anything.
  • Molecular Biology: Bacteria are everywhere. The central structure of biology is the cell. Prokaryotic, eukaryotic. How proten shapes determines chemical interactions. DNA and genes.
  • Geology: The planet records its own history. Plate tectonics. Comets brought water to Earth; the oceans are 3 to 4 billions years old, but our present atmosphere, with its oxygen content, was not established until about 400 million years ago.
  • Astronomy: about the two big discoveries of the 20th century. Astronomy is the study of light. Hubble realized the ‘nebulae’ were other galaxies, and noticed that all other galaxies were moving away from us. Balloon analogy: dots on an inflating balloon all see themselves moving away from all others. The deduction of a beginning led to the prediction about background radiation– that was confirmed. The earliest stars exploded, creating higher elements, which enabled our planet and life. Is there anyone out there? Perhaps. But Drake Equation.
Posted in Science | Comments Off on Natalie Angier, The Canon

Links and Comments: Balancing the budget; the existential threat of atheists

Posted on Wednesday 6 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Balancing the federal budget has a simple-minded, intuitive appeal, but it’s not actually necessary. The nation is not a family; and even families don’t balance their budgets from year to year. (E.g. mortgages.)

Vox: Families don’t balance their budgets, and neither should the federal government

Paul Krugman has discussed many times, but it’s nice to link to another source.

You’d think even Republican politicians would understand this, but of course, they’re playing to a base that doesn’t.

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Friendly Atheist: New Research Shows the Existential Threat Atheists Pose to Believers; No Wonder We’re So Disliked!

Which of course supports my Provisional Conclusion #8: the resistance by believers to anything that would threaten their worldview.

Posted in Atheism, Economics | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Balancing the budget; the existential threat of atheists

Links and Comments: Dan Dennett, Emotional Intelligence, Worst Predictions, Jeffrey Tayler

Posted on Tuesday 5 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Via Morning Heresy, Dan Dennett is interviewed at Religion Dispatches about, among other things, why the edifice of religion seems to be cracking:

Protecting your inner workings is becoming very difficult; it’s very hard to keep secrets. Religions have thrived in part because they were able to keep secrets. They were able to keep secrets about other religions from their parishioners, who were largely ignorant of what other people in the world believed, and also keep secrets about their own inner workings and their own histories, so that it was easy to have a sort of controlled message that went out to people. Those days are over. You can go on the Internet and access to all kinds of information. This is going to change everything.

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Re a previous post from The Atlantic about The Science of Superstition, with an item about how autism, i.e. that entails diminished social skills, is correlated with nonbelief in God and other supernatural entities, here’s the latest “Study of Studies” from The Atlantic, When Emotional Intelligence Goes Wrong, which correlates high social skills with narcissism, manipulation of others, and gullibility to charlatans.

In a 2013 study, college students were shown news footage of people pleading for a missing family member’s return—half of whom were in fact responsible for the person’s disappearance. When the students rated the sincerity of these pleas, those with higher EI were more likely to be duped, perhaps due to overconfidence in their ability to read others [11].

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Also in this month’s Atlantic: What Was the Worst Prediction of All Time?.

Examples include abolishing war by 2000, how Apple would never come out with a cell phone, that nuclear power would be too cheap to bother measuring, and others. Every one of these is very interesting, and I fit these into the framework of my worldview at item 10, as among the failures of science fiction and/or futurism in trying to predict the future. SF isn’t about predicting the future, of course, but many others do try predicting the future, and often fail. Why would this be? Something about the volatility of human culture, in contrast to the relative certainties of science.

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Latest from Jeffrey Tayler (he should write a book) at Salon: Ted Cruz, our ayatollah: Fight back now, or welcome to the 2016 religious right hellstorm.

As usual at Salon, the subtitle is more on-target than the perhaps inflammatory title. This subtitle: “Way too many of us believe in a magic book negated by science and peppered with all manner of misanthropic myths”.

Much of this piece consists of Tayler’s responses to a critique of an earlier post by Tayler from Matt Barber, “a columnist for Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, and the founder of WND’s Christian fundamentalist site Barbwire.com“. Sample:

Barber then chooses to embarrass himself with a declaration that confirms he should stick to batting in the Little League of modern-day thinkers:

Every man, woman and child understands through both general revelation and human reason that this unfathomably intricate, staggeringly fine-tuned universe didn’t create and fine-tune itself. It’s a tiny minority of angry, self-deluded materialists like Jeffrey Tayler who deny this self-evident truth.

Many believers might indeed find such a boner-studded profession of ignorance credible (and surely Barber does, given that he earned all three of his degrees at religious institutions), but secularists who read grown-up books will immediately see how it contradicts what physics and biology tell us about the cosmos.  The universe, we now know, did create itself, arising out of a quantum event – a “singularity,” when time and space were wrapped into one — some 13.7 billion years ago, exploding from a tiny speck of unimaginably dense, hot matter to its present dimensions.  (And it’s still expanding.)  Some four billion years back, it is postulated that a still-unexplained chemical occurrence gave rise to the first self-replicating biological molecule from which began life on Earth and from which we evolved according to the (eminently comprehensible) process of Natural Selection.  This renders God, as Richard Dawkins put it, “an excrescence, a carbuncle on the face of science,” unnecessary for any phase of “creation.”  (For more information, Barber might wish to set aside his magic book and delve into the oeuvre of the theoretical physicists Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking, and, of course, Dawkins’ own “The God Delusion.”)

He does tie it back to the Salon editors’ title:

Barber’s blog is but a symptom of the seemingly incurable malady of faith. In fact there is a remedy — free speech, applied liberally to infected areas. Rationalists must resist all calls to show respect for religion, be it Christianity or Islam or any other faith with universalist pretensions. Recall the damage these stultifying ideologies of control and repression have done the cause of progress throughout history. And remember the stakes now, with so many of our presidential candidates flaunting their belief, and seats on the Supreme Court likely to free up, especially post-2016. We either fight back by speaking out now, or we may end up living in a Christian-theme-park version of Iran, with Ted Cruz as our ayatollah.

This is about my Provisional Conclusion #8: Resistance. But also about #9: a species “reset” could involve a religious revolution that cancels out the progress of our 21st century. Religious forces have held humanity in thrall for centuries in the past. (And there are SF works that describe such religious revolutions, thinking of works by Margaret Atwood off-hand. The alignment of my PvC framework with SF is where this blog is going.)

Posted in Psychology, Religion, science fiction | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Dan Dennett, Emotional Intelligence, Worst Predictions, Jeffrey Tayler

Links and Comments: Politics and Ideology; About Changing One’s Mind

Posted on Monday 4 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Politics and Ideology:

This theme has been around for some time: Republican economic policies rely on ideologies (ideas about government non-interference, about individual freedom, about the moral turpitude of the poor, etc.), while the actual evidence shows that the country’s economy does better under Democratic presidential administrations than Republican.

Salon: Sean McElwee: Republican presidents flunk the economy: 11 reasons why America does worse under the GOP

The article has graphs and a list of eleven specific reasons — with links to evidenciary studies — about why the economy does better under Democrats.

This aligns with the Paul Krugman column from a couple weeks ago, Zombies of 2016, on this same theme, one he’s returned to again and again, about how the Right’s predictions about (among other things) the disastrous effects of Obama’s policies have not come true.

Consider, for example, the zombification of the debate over health reform.

Before the Affordable Care Act went fully into effect, conservatives made a series of dire predictions about what would happen when it did. It would actually reduce the number of Americans with health insurance; it would lead to “rate shock,” as premiums soared; it would cost the government far more than projected, and blow up the deficit; it would be a huge job-destroyer.

In reality, the act has produced a dramatic drop in the number of uninsured adults; premiums have grown much more slowly than in the years before reform; the law’s cost is coming in well below projections; and 2014, the first year of full implementation, also had the best job growth since 1999.

So how has this changed the discourse? On the right, not at all. As far as I can tell, every prominent Republican talks about Obamacare as if all the predicted disasters have, in fact, come to pass.

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About Changing One’s Mind:

We just heard this show on NPR radio this past weekend, while driving around, though I see the original broadcast was the week before. Anyway, this to me is a crucial topic: do people ever change their minds? Or are we all hobbled for life by the tribalistic ideologies of our childhoods and our adult social groups? Are we an intelligent species, or not? As adults, can we change our minds about fundamental topics about the reality we live within, or does it not actually matter, as long as we survive and reproduce…?

The Incredible Rarity of Changing Your Mind

The prime examples are about gay marriage and abortions. It happens that when opponents of these things talk with a person who listens to their reasons, and that person, the interviewer, is gay himself, or has had an abortion herself, and explains why, and explains how this issue has affected his or her own life…. the interviewees sometimes (not always) change their opinions, sometimes by 180 degrees. The reality of forming a connection with another person with an opposite perspective changes some people’s minds. Not everyone’s. –But enough to swing elections! And virtually no other process — feeding of information, talks with neutral interviewers — has any effect. But making a personal, human connection, does have an effect.

Posted in Economics, Morality, Psychology | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Politics and Ideology; About Changing One’s Mind

A Month’s Worth of Links and Comments

Posted on Friday 1 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

New York Times, March 20: In the Age of Information, Specializing to Survive

The Internet makes it easy to learn almost anything. And yet

And yet, even as the highbrow holy grail — the acquisition of complete knowledge — seems tantalizingly close, almost nobody speaks about the rebirth of the Renaissance man or woman. The genius label may be applied with reckless abandon, even to chefs, basketball players and hair stylists, but the true polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin seem like mythic figures of a bygone age.

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NY Times Magazine, March 29: Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant

Immigrants don’t just increase the supply of labor, though; they simultaneously increase demand for it, using the wages they earn to rent apartments, eat food, get haircuts, buy cellphones. That means there are more jobs building apartments, selling food, giving haircuts and dispatching the trucks that move those phones. Immigrants increase the size of the overall population, which means they increase the size of the economy. Logically, if immigrants were “stealing” jobs, so would every young person leaving school and entering the job market; countries should become poorer as they get larger. In reality, of course, the opposite happens.

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NY Times Op-Ed, T.M. Luhrmann: Faith vs. Facts

MOST of us find it mind-boggling that some people seem willing to ignore the facts — on climate change, on vaccines, on health care — if the facts conflict with their sense of what someone like them believes. “But those are the facts,” you want to say. “It seems weird to deny them.”

And yet a broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental creatures. People process evidence differently when they think with a factual mind-set rather than with a religious mind-set. Even what they count as evidence is different. And they are motivated differently, based on what they conclude. On what grounds do scholars make such claims?

This then, would be a problem with religion.

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Jerry Coyne, Two readers testify that evolution helped them give up religion

It’s very rare for anyone to leave religion on the basis of being exposed to facts religion denies, but it does happen. The two examples here also illustrate how some religions — in these cases, Jehovah’s Witnesses — simply lie about the evidence for, say, evolution…

I found out (in part thanks to your book) that the people who lead the religion, whom I had trusted implicitly, had been shockingly dishonest about the evidence surrounding evolution. I was absolutely appalled at the quotes taken out of context, logical fallacies (I had to learn what a logical fallacy was), and thoroughly biased presentation of the subject. None of this was apparent to me when I was a believer because of the information control that the religion imposes (including not trusting ‘worldly’ sources of information, and completely shunning apostates – refusing to even look at anything they have to say).

… and how they shun you once you wake up and leave. (Scientology, notoriously, does this too.)

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Wall Street Journal, Daniel Dennett: Why the Future of Religion Is Bleak

This dovetails with the previous item, that religions survive by controling what their adherents know. But this is getting more difficult in the modern internet world. Dennett notes the growing proportion of “Nones” in America.

If this trend continues, religion largely will evaporate, at least in the West. Pockets of intense religious activity may continue, made up of people who will be more sharply differentiated from most of society in attitudes and customs, a likely source of growing tension and conflict.

Could anything turn this decline around? Yes, unfortunately. A global plague, a world war fought over water or oil, the collapse of the Internet (and thereby almost all electronic communication) or some as-yet unimagined catastrophe could throw the remaining population into misery and fear, the soil in which religion flourishes best.

Dennett goes on,

With hardly any significant exceptions, religion recedes whenever human security and well-being rises, a fact that has recently been shown in numerous studies, but was suspected by John Calvin in the 16th century.

And concludes,

If we are lucky—if human health and security continue to rise and spread around the globe—churches might evolve into humanist communities and social clubs, dedicated to good works, with distinctive ceremonies and disappearing doctrine, except for a scattering of reclusive sects marked by something like institutional paranoia.

If we are unlucky and calamity strikes, our anxiety and misery will provide plenty of fuel for revivals and inventions of religions we have happily learned to live without.

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Business Insider cheerfully shows 5 ways the world could really end.

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Resources:
The history of the world in one chart (I have a copy of this)
Related: The Histomap of Evolution

And on the topic of the supposed abnormality of homosexuality, this book: Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. 450 species!

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Salon: The GOP’s demonic alliance: How the religious right & big business are dumbing down America

Anti-intellectualism in America goes way back.

Today, the Republican party still supports these basic social and economic ideals. But the social issues are what truly gain votes, and they inevitably result in a hostility towards intellectualism and science. Many of Republicans seemingly vote against their economic self-interest in support of the conservative social values, which results in a vicious cycle of ignorance and poverty. Social conservative views, whether it be abortion or homosexuality, all sprout from the Christian faith, and the Christian faith inevitably clashes with modernity and science.

We see it around the country, with schools teaching creationism and politicians denying man-made climate change. In states like Texas, Louisiana, and Tennessee, public school teachers are allowed to teach “alternatives” to evolution, while in the states Florida, Indiana, Arizona, Ohio, Washington, and elsewhere, taxpayer money goes to funding private creationist schools. Evolution is quite incompatible with biblical stories, and the lack of scientific education in many states shows itself in polls – according to Gallup, 42 percent of Americans believe that God created humans in the present form.

Specifics about Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker.

Anti-intellectualism is an American tradition, and these new contenders denying scientific facts and calling Harvard a communist institution are simply embracing a populace that individuals like Billy Sunday and Joseph McCarthy once embraced. The alliance of religion and big business has fully incorporated America’s unfortunate anti-intellectualist culture, which has resulted in millions of people voting against their interest because of their own ignorant hostility towards anything that could be deemed elitist. It is a cycle of ignorance and poverty, and it is exactly what the real elites, like billionaire oil men, aim for.

And a quote from Isaac Asimov.

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The latest from Jeffrey Tayler, Bill Maher, American hero: Laughing at religion is exactly what the world needs, also quotes Isaac Asimov (who wrote two big books about the Bible).

“Properly read,” declared the science-fiction author and biochemistry professor Isaac Asimov, “the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” He was right. The same may be said of the Quran, the holy book of Islam, which the late, dearly missed Christopher Hitchens called “not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require.”

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I’ll paste this and see if it works:

If the only thing keeping you from behaving badly is fear, then you're saying you're not a good person at heart.

Posted by David Gerrold on Sunday, April 26, 2015

David Gerrold on Facebook responding to a priest’s typical suspicion of atheists: you can’t trust an athiest president because he wouldn’t fear eternal damnation.

This is the problem with claiming your morals are derived from a holy book: it means you have none yourself.

Related: Amanda Marcotte in Salon/Alternet: 10 egregious myths the religious perpetuate about atheists, debunked.

6) Atheists don’t have a moral code. Atheist are routinely asked how people will know not to rape and murder without religion telling them not to do it, especially a religion that backs up the orders with threats of hell. Believers, listen to me carefully when I say this: When you use this argument, you terrify atheists. We hear you saying that the only thing standing between you and Ted Bundy is a flimsy belief in a supernatural being made up by pre-literate people trying to figure out where the rain came from. This is not very reassuring if you’re trying to argue from a position of moral superiority.

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Here’s a couple counter-intuitive articles about history. In The Week, How Christianity invented children. Because in ancient Greece and Rome, children were nonpersons.

Back then, the entire social worldview was undergirded by a universally-held, if implicit, view: Society was organized in concentric circles, with the circle at the center containing the highest value people, and the people in the outside circles having little-to-no value. At the center was the freeborn, adult male, and other persons were valued depending on how similar they were to the freeborn, adult male. Such was the lot of foreigners, slaves, women…and children.

The frightening power of our emboldened police High infant mortality rates created a cultural pressure to not develop emotional attachments to children. This cultural pressure was exacerbated by the fact that women were more likely to develop emotional attachments to children — which, according to the worldview of the day, meant it had to be a sign of weakness and vulgarity.

Times change and morality evolves.

And a letter to Dan Savage challenges the assumption that medival attitudes about sex were very conservative.

I’m not saying that the Middle Ages was a great period of freedom (sexual or otherwise), but the sexual culture of 12th-century France, Iraq, Jerusalem, or Minsk did not involve the degree of self-loathing brought about by modern approaches to sexuality. Modern sexual purity has become a marker of faith, which it wasn’t in the Middle Ages.
…
The thing that really screwed up a lot of us religious kids was that engaging with our sexuality destroyed our religious identity: We stopped being Christians or Muslims when we started having sex, or sometimes, just started desiring to have sex.

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The New Yorker: Mute Button

How to control the narrative: Kill the atheist bloggers, kill the satirical journalists.

The value of intellectual freedom is far from self-evident. It’s hardly natural to defend the rights of one person over the feelings of a group; to put up with all the trouble that comes with free minds and free expression; to stand beside the very people who repel you. After the massacre at the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, in January, even defenders of free speech couldn’t help wondering why the cartoonists hadn’t just avoided Islam and the Prophet, given the sensitivities involved. Why be provocative? And when freethinkers are a tiny minority in a terribly poor and overwhelmingly religious country on the other side of the world, with no First Amendment or republican tradition of laïcité, it’s easy to feel that they’re admirable eccentrics who speak for nothing and no one beyond themselves—which may explain why they’ve received so much less attention than their brethren in Paris.

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Brief article in The Atlantic summarizing numerous mental biases, and how even scientists are prone to superstition.

Matthew Hutson: The Science of Superstition.

With references to studies that identified them. Now the last sentence here is really interesting:

Magical thinking is not just a result of ignorance or indoctrination—it appears to be a side effect of normal, socially adaptive thinking: we attribute intentions to the natural world in much the same way that we attribute intentions to other people. Indeed, a recent paper from a lab at the University of British Columbia reported that the better study participants were at reading others, the more strongly they believed in God, the paranormal, and the notion that life has a purpose [6]. Meanwhile, one of the few true avenues to atheism may be autism. The same lab found that the more autistic traits a person had, the less likely he or she was to believe in God. [7]

Makes sense: the very mental biases that lead to magical thinking (including religion) are useful (i.e. they promote survival) because they enable interpersonal communications. But this doesn’t mean there really are faeries in the garden, or the Virgin Mary in a tree stump.

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Still a bunch of links, which for now I will just link without comment. And perhaps return to another day.

  1. Paul Di Filippo: Ten Essential Utopias
  2. Adam Lee: The Sci-Fi Fans Who Fear Change (Note that the extremists among these are also racist, anti-evolution, anti-gay, and given to conspiracy theories)
  3. Science Mag: To foster complex societies, tell people a god is watching. Another reason magical thinking is actually evolutionary adaptive. Connor Wood has an essay on this, which I haven’t yet read: Is religion evolutionarily adaptive?
  4. Some atheists debate whether there is, in principle, any kind of evidence that would convince them God exists. PZ Myers takes except to the way the challenge is framed: It is not close-minded to demand reasonable kinds of evidence
  5. An excerpt from Dan Barker’s Losing Faith In Faith: From Preacher to Atheist: Leave No Stone Unturned. He challenges Christians to examine the gospels and explain what happened on Easter, exactly.
  6. Freeman Dyson’s favorite novelist of all time is the late SF author Octavia Butler
  7. Think Progress: How To Tell If The Article About Climate You Are Reading Is B.S., In Four Easy Steps
  8. Americans Go to Church About As Much As Godless Europeans: America is not a Christian nation. We’re a secular nation that suffers a small but vocal minority of theocrats.
  9. Republicans cling to discredited ideologies: Paul Krugman: Zombies of 2016
  10. And if you have the magical thinking itch but can’t religious claims seriously, just redefine your terms: More nonsense at NPR about God

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Finally a fine essay by Frank Bruni from nearly a month ago: Bigotry, the Bible and the Lessons of Indiana.

But in the end, the continued [Christian] view of gays, lesbians and bisexuals as sinners is a decision. It’s a choice. It prioritizes scattered passages of ancient texts over all that has been learned since — as if time had stood still, as if the advances of science and knowledge meant nothing.

Very nearly words I’ve written myself. Going on:

It disregards the degree to which all writings reflect the biases and blind spots of their authors, cultures and eras.

It ignores the extent to which interpretation is subjective, debatable.

And it elevates unthinking obeisance above intelligent observance, above the evidence in front of you, because to look honestly at gay, lesbian and bisexual people is to see that we’re the same magnificent riddles as everyone else: no more or less flawed, no more or less dignified.

Meanwhile, Republican politicians like Rick Santorum keep saying things like [He’d] Make a Great President Since He Fought to Keep Gay Sex Illegal. Huzzah.

Posted in Children, Culture, Economics, Evolution, MInd, Morality, Narrative, Psychology, Religion, Science, The Gays | Comments Off on A Month’s Worth of Links and Comments