Law v. Science

Posted on Monday 16 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Nice essay by Jesse Bering — an excerpt from his forthcoming book — about ‘age of consent’ laws and their variation over time and across different countries, whose cutoffs range from 12 to 21. (And in olden times, some US states had the cutoff as low as age 7 -!) A fine example of the conflict between law and science.

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/age-of-consent/Content?oid=17715319

Either some societies have the one true age of consent and every other has therefore got it wrong, or any given society’s age of consent is based on what its citizens have simply chosen to believe about human sexuality and psychological development.

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Matthew Shepard and confirmation bias

Posted on Monday 16 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

A new book about Matthew Shepard suggests the story of his murder was far more complex than the gay-bashing narrative that has been assumed. Turns out it can be seen as a prime example of confirmation bias,

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/09/16/challenging-the-myth-of-matthew-shepard/

Comparable, says a senior editor for The American Conservative, to the narrative that led so many to initially support the Iraq war.

The story of Matthew Shepard as a martyr struck a deeply resonant chord within many gays and their supporters in the media, who created the hagiography and, as this review acknowledges, was fiercely defended by leading gay activists in the face of contrary evidence reported at the time. The thing is, I wouldn’t be quick to accuse these activists and their media allies to have been conscious liars. I know what it’s like to want to believe something so badly that you close your mind to the possibility that things aren’t what they appear to be — and, in turn, you conceal your motives from yourself. This describes the way I responded to 9/11 with regard to the case for the Iraq War, though I didn’t recognize it until years later. There were liberals and a minority among conservatives — including the founders of this magazine — who didn’t buy the pro-war narrative. People like me considered them gutless, or, infamously, “unpatriotic.” We did not grasp the extent to which we were captive to confirmation bias. We thought we were seeing things with perfect lucidity. But we were very wrong.

This is not a left-wing or a right-wing thing. It is not a gay or straight thing, it is not a religious versus atheist thing. It’s a human thing. …

Since I’ve been reading about confirmation bias recently, I’m seeing discussions of it everywhere!

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Sunday Links and Commentary, 15Sep13

Posted on Sunday 15 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Salon:
Inside the conservative brain: What explains their wiring?

Chris Mooney wrote a whole book on this subject (http://www.amazon.com/The-Republican-Brain-Science-Science/dp/1118094514), and it’s fascinating to wonder — setting aside precise partisan divides — to what extent different attitudes about the world are due to underlying assumptions that reside, ultimately, in brain chemistry.

The quick takeaway from this article is:

But first, a very brief tour of more recent political leaders and movements reveals a notable trend: conservatives tend to view human nature as competitive, while liberals are more prone to perceiving human nature as cooperative.

More:

In addition to believing in a competitive human nature and a dangerous world, right-wingers are also more likely to perceive that the world and its morality are increasingly degenerating. The term “conservatives” itself implies a desire to keep what is good and prevent it from deteriorating into something worse. The political left, in contrast, is more prone to thinking that human nature can evolve into something better. The term “progressives” implies this belief that the advancement of morality is possible and desirable.

The sensation of deteriorating social morality is not merely an artifact of the modern Western world; people in ancient Greece, Israel, China, Rome, and nineteenth-century Europe have expressed similar concerns, according to the research of social psychologist Richard Eibach. Likewise, many Americans commonly point to a perceived rise in teenage pregnancy as proof of moral decay. A 2003 poll revealed that 68 percent of adults thought teen pregnancy was on the rise—even though teen births had fallen by 31 percent over the last decade.

This meshes with my impression that right-wing commentators (think, Rush Limbaugh) are in general *angry* and *furious* and *afraid* of all the terrible things happening in the world; while left-wing commentators (think, Rachel Maddow) are in contrast merely bemused with the rantings of the other side.

Nice SF Signal interview with veteran SF writer James Gunn, whose new novel Transcendental seems right up my alley, and theme.
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2013/09/interview-james-gunn-talks-about-transcendental-the-history-of-science-fiction-and-how-it-can-save-the-world/

Salon wonders if we can dismiss the rantings of Pat Robertson and his like, of if we should be more worried that their views reflect a substantial portion of the US population…

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/12/yes_weird_christian_beliefs_do_influence_america_partner/

…right-wing, apocalypse-obsessed Christians are not marginal characters who have little power in the world. They constitute a huge percentage of Americans, and just as disturbingly, they have influence over another huge number of Americans. They actually don’t want attention drawn to their wacky beliefs a good deal of the time. On the contrary, the preferred fundamentalist right-wing communication strategy is to use their own spaces—spaces that are often far from the prying eyes of the larger world—to talk about their lurid fantasies, and they prefer to show a more sensible, moderate face to the larger world.

Slate’s posts about longevity:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/life_saving_inventions_people_and_ideas_cotton_shoes_fluoride_the_clean.html

I particularly appreciate the posts on ‘unconscious bias’, ‘government regulations’, and ‘goodness’.

In a way my career in the aerospace/software engineering industry has been about building processes that channel behavior in ways that avoid issues of ‘unconscious bias’ — e.g. peer reviews, that are designed to avoid groupthink.

An article in The Atlantic speculates that fiction has served humankind in an evolutionary way. This dovetails very nicely with David McRaney’s ideas about our ‘narrative bias’, and my own central theme for the book I might write about science fiction as a heuristic for understanding life, the universe, and everything.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/09/the-evolutionary-case-for-great-fiction/279311/

Among the many things that set humans apart from other animals is our capacity for counterfactual thinking. At its most basic level, this means we can hypothesize what might happen if we run out of milk; in its most elaborate form—we get War and Peace. Stories, then, are complex counterfactual explorations of possible outcomes: What would happen if I killed my landlady? What would happen if I had an affair with Count Vronsky? How do I avoid a water buffalo?

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Resource: The Dummy’s Guide to the One True God

Posted on Sunday 15 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Over the past couple years I’ve collected numerous links to interesting sites or posts, which I bookmark as ‘resources’ for future reference, and which perhaps I should add to my sidebar links on this blog.

For now, this. Whenever I heard some politician’s platitude about how “we all worship the same god”, I recall this chart, posted earlier this year.

The Dummy’s Guide to the One True God

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The One Book I’d Have Every College Student Read

Posted on Thursday 12 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

If I could pick one book that I think every college freshman should read, it would be…

LOGIC AND CONTEMPORARY RHETORIC, by Howard Kahane.

logicetc_140x200Subtitled, “The Use of Reason in Everyday Life”. It covers principles of reasoning, invalid and fallacious types of arguments, and it illustrates these ideas with actual examples from advertising and news (politics). Not to make you cynical about advertising or politics — just to make you understand how these businesses work; how to be an informed citizen, to not be gullible, to not take anything for granted.

This had a great influence on me when I first read it, at age 19 or 20. Though I’d done pretty well in high school, UCLA obliged me to take a ‘freshman’ English course, which I took over the summer at Valley College in Van Nuys. The instructor included this book in his curriculum, and I remember nothing else from the course. It’s one of the few textbooks I’ve kept all these years.

I thought about this book today, and looked up the title on Amazon to see if it was still in print.

 
Why, yes it is. In fact it’s in its 12th edition, now bylined Nancy Cavender and Howard Kahane, it’s nearly 400 pages (my 3rd edition was 280 pages), and as a textbook, it’s priced $127. Glancing through the index via Amazon’s “Look Inside” function, the later editions have obviously been updated with current examples of news reporting, advertising, and contentious social issues.

So it’s a standard. I’m glad. I just wish everyone would read it.

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Sunday Links and Commentary

Posted on Sunday 8 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

PZ Myers compares the atheist movement to the plight of World SF Conventions — in terms of their resistance to being open to interests of younger members.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/09/06/the-future-will-not-be-the-past/

Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/former-christian-fundamentalist-how-science-made-me-lose-my-religion?paging=off

When an engineer raised in a fundamentalist Christian community sees a computer simulation of natural selection working,

It was the beginning of the end. After discovering the practical value of evolutionary computation, Suominen began reading about evolutionary biology. The Genesis story fell apart and frayed the fabric of his Christian belief.

…

ES: “I saw it happening right in front of me on my computer screen. As an engineer with lots of software experience, I understood what the computer was doing. Simulated organisms were evolving remarkable abilities to move, swim, etc., and nobody was designing them to do that. Random mutations and genetic crossover between the fittest individuals in the population produced a new, slightly more evolved population. Repeated over hundreds of generations, it worked.

“My reading did nothing but confirm this. All of the arguments I saw against evolution were made by believers in defense of their faith. I tried to look at both sides of the story, but it became obvious that there was only one side with any credibility. The other was just wishful thinking and denial.”

…

The most robust attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable may well be Philip Gosse’s “omphalos” idea that the universe was created recently with the appearance of great age. Of course, God created Adam with a navel and trees with rings! They wouldn’t be recognizable without those “retrospective marks,” after all. (Christians are faced with the same issue concerning Jesus and his magic Y chromosome.) It’s ridiculous and reduces God to a cosmic cosplayer, but at least it doesn’t try to dismiss all of the Bible’s clear teachings about a young earth and special creation, or fancifully reinterpret 2,000 years of Christian theology.

Or the idea that the world was created last Tuesday, not just with (phony) evidence of a universe billions of years old, but also our (phony) memories of having lived for years and years. It’s the intellectual equivalent of Creationism.

Jerry Coyne: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/09/06/another-canard-dispelled-is-science-a-faith/

This comments on an essay on HuffPo by one Jeff Schweitzer, Science Is Not Religion, a familiar enough theme but worth repeating.

Science is not a “belief system” but a process and methodology for seeking an objective reality. Of course because scientific exploration is a human endeavor it comes with all the flaws of humanity: ego, short-sightedness, corruption and greed. But unlike a “belief system” such as religion untethered to an objective truth, science is over time self-policing; competing scientists have a strong incentive to corroborate and build on the findings of others; but equally, to prove other scientists wrong by means that can be duplicated by others. Nobody is doing experiments to demonstrate how Noah could live to 600 years old, because those who believe that story are not confined to reproducible evidence to support their belief. But experiments were done to show the earth orbits the sun, not the other way around.

Slate: Life expectancy doubled in the past 150 years. Here’s why.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/life_expectancy_history_public_health_and_medical_advances_that_lead_to.html

Clean water. Moving wastewater. Washing hands (germ theory of disease). Better housing. Better nutrition. Preventing contamination of food. Fighting epidemics through quarantine, etc. And, of course, vaccinations.

The essayist provides examples of how a person 100 years ago might have died, in ways that would not cause death today. I’m a prime example– I had a burst appendix at age 13.

Salon: Another prime example of how your brain tricks you.
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/05/study_proves_that_politics_and_math_are_incompatible/

So maybe we can give climate deniers the benefit of the doubt. They’re not stupid, they’re just psychologically committed to their beliefs, in the same way that environmentalists are committed to their own ideology. And it means that just showing them the numbers is never going to be enough to convince them that climate change is real.

–Yet isn’t there some way to be conscious of such a bias and find the ability to reach a correct solution? Or is a correct solution less important than sustaining one’s ideology?

More on this at
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/09/politics-destroys-math-ability

And from Chris Mooney:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/new-study-politics-makes-you-innumerate

Alex Pareene on who Republican politicians follow on Twitter..
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/04/the_congressional_republican_twitter_bubble/

If you’re following Sean Hannity and Michele Malkin because you think they are worthwhile voices or useful sources of information, you’re a terribly misinformed far-right kook. If you’re following them because you have to keep on top of whatever Sean Hannity and Michele Malkin are screeching about today, because you know that your constituents consider them worthwhile voices or useful sources of information, that’s just as bad. Because whether the Republican Party is full of true-believing kooks or merely people forced to act like true believing kooks in order to keep their seats, the result is the same: a party that can’t be negotiated with because it exists in an alternate media universe with its own history and set of facts.

…

Hannity invited a notorious anti-Semite on his show as part of his years-long campaign to push the most absurd Obama conspiracies imaginable and Malkin wrote a book defending Japanese internment during World War II. These two both regularly fear-monger over the imagined specter of widespread black mob violence. It’s not just that these two have toxic beliefs and live in feverish fantasy lands, though they do, it’s that taking these two seriously is a dumb thing to do in a country that just elected Obama twice, while also voting for Democrats for Congress in greater numbers than for Republicans. They’re … not quite in touch with the actual mood of the country now, to say nothing of where it’s heading. That may be hard to grasp in the right-wing media bubble, especially for people representing districts made up primarily of angry white people, but it’s true.

Posted in Culture, Quote at Length, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Sunday Links and Commentary

David Barton, Just this once

Posted on Saturday 7 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Life is too short for this kind of post very often, but once in a while I can’t resist.

Discredited historian David Barton (whose book about Jefferson was withdrawn by its [Christian] publisher Thomas Nelson, for gross inaccuracies), claims that good scientists and mathematicians must first have a proper fear of the Lord.

This would explain why science (and therefore technology) in non-Christian nations like China and India doesn’t work.

Oh, wait.

(Or are scientists in those countries ‘bad’? What would that mean? Science works the same everywhere. There is no Christian science vs Muslim science vs Buddhist science. Science works independently of, and despite, any kind of religious faith.)

In his latest pronouncement, Barton claims that Everything The Bible Says Will Eventually Be Confirmed By Science.

No, it won’t. (A trivial application of the Jack Smith rule.) If anything, the trend is pretty obviously in the opposite direction.

As Right Wing Watch comments,

Obviously, it is now only a matter of time before modern science conclusively proves that adulterers, homosexuals, heathens, blasphemers, and rebellious children must be put to death, just like the Bible says.

As far as I can tell, Barton makes a living telling credulous Christian fundamentalists what they want to hear.

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Another favorite song from May: Empire of the Sun: Alive

Posted on Friday 6 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Though I rather liked it better before I saw the video.

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Favorite song from May; Mr Little Jeans – Oh Sailor

Posted on Friday 6 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

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Religion and Community

Posted on Thursday 5 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Another provocative, insightful essay by Connor Wood, expanding on the theme of the earlier essay I linked, this one keying off the conclusion of a study done by three psychologists.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/scienceonreligion/2013/09/ritual-creates-tribesand-tribalism/

The study concludes it’s not religious belief, per se, that drives violence and intolerance of others — it’s religious *practice*, the rituals that reinforce belonging to a tribe, and a concomitant distrust of other tribes.

Wood concludes with a contrast between worldviews similar to the one in the previous essay:

In a lot of ways, then, religion is a Catch-22. It primes us to be strongly bonded to the people around us, which is one of the single biggest predictors of personal happiness, health, and life satisfaction. We’re evolved to be tribal animals, after all – it makes sense that living in a strong tribe would make us feel warm and fuzzy. But the stronger our tribes get, the more outsiders look like aliens, or like enemies. Ritual per se doesn’t produce this effect, but instead piggybacks on it and intensifies it. The result is that religious people the world over are a bit more likely to be parochial, local-minded, and suspicious of outsiders than their non-religious peers. In its extreme manifestations, this dynamic produces religious wars – such as the 30 Years War that helped kick off the European Enlightenment.

Enlightenment and humanistic values, in contrast, tend to look askance at strong ingroup bonds and ritual, and to preference universalistic values that shatter tribal boundaries. In fact, this post-tribal value system may the knotty root of the religion-science schism; just like religion piggybacks on our tribal tendencies, science historically has piggybacked on our anti-tribal instincts, valorizing a culture-free, objective picture of reality and making many scientists coolly suspicious of ritual, religion, and most tribal identifiers. (When was the last time you saw a famous scientist wearing Denver Broncos facepaint? Never, that’s when.)

This makes sense to me; religion is largely about tribalism — or to use less loaded terms, community; culture. The corollary, is that, ironically, the exact nature of religious beliefs isn’t that important. It’s that everyone in the tribe (group, community) shares them.

This explains the paradox [which I’ve never entirely understood] of why it apparently doesn’t bother most religious people that people of other religions have diametrically, contradictory, different beliefs. They have *some* beliefs, and thus can be respected, in a sense, as members of different tribes.

Whereas atheists! This analysis also explains why atheists are the least trusted of any social, religious, or ethnic group. They’re loose cannons; you don’t know what they’re thinking; you can’t assign them to a tribe; you can’t trust them to conform to some pre-assigned set of beliefs and values.

One can one do with this insight? Just as being aware of the mind’s inherent biases can enable one to *try* to overcome them, would knowledge of this tribalistic connection to religious ritual help a religious person to understand that it’s not about the content — that, you know, all those things about gods and miracles, angels and demons, don’t have to be literally true?

Posted in Culture, Quote at Length, Religion | Comments Off on Religion and Community