Links and Comments: Religious Intellectuals; Lawrence Krauss; Daniel Dennett

Posted on Thursday 30 March 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Jerry Coyne asks, Are religious people a bit thick?.

He disagrees with someone who claims that many very smart people are also religious.

Look at it this way: if someone spent much of their lives worshiping Santa, elves, fairies, or even Zeus, and maintained in all seriousness that Santa delivers presents to Western children at nearly the speed of light each Christmas, you’d think they weren’t playing with a full deck. But somehow it’s okay if they do the same with Allah, Jesus, Muhammad, God, Vishnu, and the like. They can profess such stuff and still be considered “smart.” I can’t agree.

Of course it’s rude to say such things out loud, or write them down, and sure, one could waffle about how many people are *functionally* effective in their careers and in raising their families while at the same time apparently being quite sincere in their belief in various supernatural entities. The traditional way to think about this is that, these functional matters are one type of behavior, and the way that human minds partition things, often holding contradictory beliefs simultaneously, their religious or supernatural beliefs can be set aside as irrelevant to their otherwise intelligence. Yet Coyne concludes,

I’ll admit here, then, that if you tell me you’re a theist, or adhere to a religion that makes untenable reality claims, I’ll think less of you. I won’t deem you “stupid,” which is an overall assessment of one’s mental acuity, but I’ll think you somewhat irrational and, as the Brits say, perhaps a tad thick.

This reminds me of a Harper’s article from several months ago, The Watchmen
What became of the Christian intellectuals?.

To which Gregory Feeley, on Facebook, posted: “A serious answer: If you are still a Christian in 2016, you are not an intellectual.”

\\

From Vox, and talk between Sean Illing and physicist Lawrence Krauss: Physicist Lawrence Krauss on the greatest scientific story ever told

Well, the greatest story ever told is the intellectual journey we’ve taken to understand the amazing universe we live in, and see that it’s an illusion in a sense. The reality beneath is much grander and more mysterious than we ever imagined. The greatest story is being told by nature, not by us. We’ve been dragged kicking and screaming, clinging to our illusions and grasping for truth, but nature is there to be seen and admired and studied, and the story it tells is far greater than any mythologies invented by human beings.

His “greatest story” (I’m part way through his new book that they’re talking about) is the history of physics, and how profoundly unintuitive the nature of reality is to human minds.

\\

And in The New Yorker, a long profile of Daniel Dennett, also on occasion of a new book: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul.

If philosophy were a sport, its ball would be human intuition. Philosophers compete to shift our intuitions from one end of the field to the other. Some intuitions, however, resist being shifted. Among these is our conviction that there are only two states of being: awake or asleep, conscious or unconscious, alive or dead, soulful or material. Dennett believes that there is a spectrum, and that we can train ourselves to find the idea of that spectrum intuitive.

Posted in MInd, Physics, Religion | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Religious Intellectuals; Lawrence Krauss; Daniel Dennett

Links and Comments: Conservative Cruelty; Blue Lies

Posted on Wednesday 29 March 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Chauncey DeVega at Alternet: Why Are Republicans So Relentlessly Cruel to the Poor?. Subtitle: “Paul Ryan has dreamed of slashing Medicaid since his keg-party days—and that blithe hostility is widespread”.

Because conservatives are more inclined to think that poor people *deserve* their fate. It’s called the Just-world fallacy (aka blaming the victim), and it’s a spin-off of the “everything happens for a reason” fallacy, and both, by examining real-world cases, can be shown to be false. Perhaps it’s also aligned with the “I’m more special than everyone else, in so many important ways” fallacy, AKA the “self-enhancement bias”, as McRaney called it. (Discussed in my review here.)

The essay at hand (retaining some of its links):

Conservatism is a type of motivated social cognition that by its very nature is hostile to those groups located on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy.

Conservatives are more likely than liberals or progressives to believe in what is known as the “just world fallacy,” where people who suffer misfortune are viewed as somehow deserving their fates. Conservatives are also more likely than liberals or progressives not to use systems-level thinking as a means of understanding that individuals do not exist separate and apart from society.  Conservatives are also more likely to defend social inequality as “fair and legitimate.”

Social psychologists have shown that, in effect, poor people are invisible to the rich and upper classes.

\\

Another topic, via Scientific American: Jeremy Adam Smith, The science of “blue lies”: There’s a reason Trump supporters embrace his alternative facts.

Subtitle: “Blue lies are a very particular form of deception that can build solidarity within groups”

Another example, is my first thought, about how human intelligence isn’t about accurate perception of the world, let alone any kind of rationalism, as about surviving and reproducing, and how group coherence is often key toward that goal. The article asks, how is it Trump can get away with telling so many lies?

Journalists and researchers have suggested many answers, from hyper-biased, segmented media to simple ignorance on the part of GOP voters. But there is another explanation that no one seems to have entertained. It is that Trump is telling “blue” lies — a psychologist’s term for falsehoods, told on behalf of a group, that can actually strengthen the bonds among the members of that group.

Children start to tell selfish lies at about age three, as they discover adults cannot read their minds: I didn’t steal that toy, Daddy said I could, He hit me first. At around age seven, they begin to tell white lies motivated by feelings of empathy and compassion: That’s a good drawing, I love socks for Christmas, You’re funny.

Blue lies are a different category altogether, simultaneously selfish and beneficial to others — but only to those who belong to your group. As University of Toronto psychologist Kang Lee explained, blue lies fall in between generous white lies and selfish “black” ones. “You can tell a blue lie against another group,” he said, which makes it simultaneously selfless and self-serving. “For example, you can lie about your team’s cheating in a game, which is antisocial, but helps your team.”

Posted in Conservative Resistance, MInd | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Conservative Cruelty; Blue Lies

Kurt Eichenwald on the Bible

Posted on Monday 27 March 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

This 2014 long article from Newsweek was being linked by some of my Fb friends; I don’t recall having seen it before.

The Bible: So Misunderstood It’s a Sin

It covers first the familiar points that believers, even evangelicals, are hardly more familiar with the Bible that skeptics or atheists. Because if they were, they’d have no grounds for their various claims and accusations of sin and supposed Biblical pronouncements intended to justify passages of laws against people they don’t like.

Beyond that, many examples of the inconsistencies of parts of the Bible, based on the increased scholarship over the past century that shows how it was cobbled together from multiple earlier documents — passed down orally, or copied only by amateurs who didn’t always know the language they were copying, over that time. The two creations; the repeated passages in the Noah story, and so on; in the NT, how phrases attributed to Jesus weren’t in the original gospels but were added by clerics later. How critical points of Christian dogma were established by Constantine’s Nicaea council.

With references to Richard Elliott Friedman and Bart Ehrman.

It ends:

The Bible is a very human book. It was written, assembled, copied and translated by people. That explains the flaws, the contradictions, and the theological disagreements in its pages. Once that is understood, it is possible to find out which parts of the Bible were not in the earliest Greek manuscripts, which are the bad translations, and what one book says in comparison to another, and then try to discern the message for yourself.

And embrace what modern Bible experts know to be the true sections of the New Testament. Jesus said, Don’t judge. He condemned those who pointed out the faults of others while ignoring their own. And he proclaimed, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.”

That’s a good place to start.

Posted in Bible | Comments Off on Kurt Eichenwald on the Bible

E.O. Wilson on the Ephemerality of Life

Posted on Wednesday 15 March 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

In discussing the human advantage of long-term memory [in the book I’ll post notes about shortly], enabling us to plan and imagine possible futures, he reflects that, with every death, an entire library of experience is lost.

He recalls his childhood and his family in Mobile, Alabama.

They existed in what must have seemed to them to be the center of the world and the center of time. They lived as though Mobile as it was then would never change by much. Everything mattered, every detail, at least for a while. Somehow, in one form or another everything collectively remembered was important to someone. Now these people are all gone.

We will all be gone, eventually. Does it matter? What can we do to leave a legacy — or, what should we do, or not do, to promote a greater cause? Just starting the second Harari book, which raises these big issues.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on E.O. Wilson on the Ephemerality of Life

Media Bubbles and Fake News

Posted on Wednesday 15 March 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

There was a fascinating piece on NPR’s Morning Edition Tuesday morning, about an analysis of news media sites shared on Facebook and Twitter during the election campaign, aligned by allegiance to Trump or Clinton. The researchers stressed how neutral they strove to be; nevertheless, they had to conclude that visitors to right-wing sites (dominated by Breitbart) were more apt to visit only other right-wing sites, while visitors to left-wing sites (like Huffington Post) more often also visited more-or-less centrist sites like The Hill. (With CNN, NYT, and WaPo being designated slightly left.) Here’s a link to the radio piece, followed by a link to the actual analysis, with the bubble maps showing inter-relatedness and size of various shared sites.

NPR: Researchers Examine Breitbart’s Influence On Election Information

Columbia Journalism Review: Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda

Here’s part of the interview, between researcher YOCHAI BENKLER and interviewer Steven Inskeep.

Benkler: There is substantial difference between the left and the right. I think–professional journalists, academics–we’re all trying to make sure we’re neutral, by trying to find similar patterns on left and right. But what we saw was quite substantial difference, and the difference has to do with who you attend to.

Inskeep: He says visitors to partisan sites on the left also commonly shared lots of traditional media stories with a more balanced view of events. Visitors to sites on the right tended to stay on the right; they were less likely to share traditional media, which many distrust. People who did check traditional media nevertheless found many stories favored by the right. Mainstream media coverage of Hillary Clinton as shared on social media tended to focus on her emails, or the Clinton Foundation. …

Key point of interest: this is evidence that the right is focused on its own narrative, and is thus susceptible to ‘fake news’, more so than the left. Why would this be?

Perhaps because, virtually by definition, conservatives (the right) are committed to maintaining established, traditional, social and political orders. Yet the world is changing, more and more every decade, as the population expands, previously isolated groups come into contact, if only by virtue of the expanding global population, and the ease of travel outside one’s own community increases.

For those committed to stability and tradition, this reality is increasingly hard to take, and so the narratives they cling to increasingly become ‘fake’ relative to objective reality.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture | Comments Off on Media Bubbles and Fake News

Winter Comes to Water As Well As Land: Gene Wolfe’s “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories”

Posted on Tuesday 14 March 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Gene Wolfe, “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories” (1970) (~15 pp)

Winter comes to water as well as land, though there are no leaves to fall. The waves that were a bright, hard blue yesterday under a fading sky today are green, opaque, and cold. If you are a boy not wanted in the house you walk the beach for hours, feeling the winter that has come in the night; sand blowing across your shoes, spray wetting the legs of your corduroys. You turn your back to the sea, and with the sharp end of a stick found half buried writer in the wet sand Tackman Babcock.

In second person, the story addresses the boy Tackman, who lives in a remote seashore house with his ailing mother and her younger, Jaguar-driving boyfriend, Jason. In town Tackman wants a pulp novel from the drugstore, and Jason steals it for him. The narrative then alternates passages from the book Tackman reads, with the events going on around him in the house, events which he does not entirely understand (such as a lewd remark by Jason about how soft Tackman’s mother is).

In the storybook, a dashing Captain Philip Ransom, lost at sea, washes up on a remote island run by Doctor Death, who, in the manner of Dr. Moreau, is experimenting on turning animals into humans, the humans into…something else.

In the morning after starting the book, Tackman goes out to walk along the beach, and sees Captain Ransom on the beach (or thinks he does).

In Tackman’s world, a Dr. Black visits his mother, along with two aunts, one on his mother’s side of the family, one of the father’s. His mother has divorced recently and the father’s aunt is anxious for her to remarry. At a restaurant, Tackman stands on the balcony, leaning over the rail. Dr. Death is there.

“While you were looking down, I slipped from between the pages of the excellent novel you have in your coat pocket.”

Tackman is worried that Captain Ransom is here and will kill him. Dr. Death replies,

“Hardly. You see, Tackman, Ransom and I are a bit like wrestlers; under various guises we put on our show again and again—but only under the spotlight.”

Further passages from the storybook alternate with activities at the house, as preparations are made for a costume party, one which we see involves drugs and open sex. [There’s a sniff of disapproval of ‘60s culture here, by the straight-laced, Catholic Wolfe.]

But during the party Dr. Death — or whoever is there whom Tackman identifies with him — takes Tackman to his mother’s room, where Dr. Black is injecting her… with something. Alarmed, Tackman races outside to the next house and has the police called.

Later, authorities try to explain what was going on (something about amphetamines). Tackman only partially understands. Dr. Death asks what’s wrong. Tackman doesn’t want the book to end. Dr. Death replies,

“But if you start the book again we’ll all be back. Even Golo and the bull-man.”

“Honestly?”

“Certainly.” He stands up and tousels your hair. “It’s the same with you, Tackie. You’re too young to realize it yet, but it’s the same with you”.

The end.

I thought of this story again recently – a story I’ve reread a handful of times over the years since it was first published – as being a story about stories. The commentary in James Gunn’s 4th Road to Science Fiction anthology characterizes it as about “the joys of escape reading”, but I think it’s a bit more complex than that. Tackman doesn’t just read his storybook to ‘escape’ things he doesn’t understand — he incorporates characters from the storybook into situations in finds himself in in the real world.

All fiction, whether we think of it as ‘escape reading’ or not, is to some extent a simplification into human terms situations among humans, or between humans and the universe, which typically are more complex than any story. That’s why, for instance, filmmakers are so eager to dramatize real events, such as in Flight 93, and last year’s Sully, and a forthcoming TV production about the recent Oakland warehouse fire. We understand the events from news reports, but we don’t fully absorb them until they are retold with the proper dramatic flourishes that emphasize the ‘meaning’ of what might otherwise seem merely random and inexplicable.

Wolfe’s story isn’t exactly science fiction or fantasy at all – it’s a psychological story about how a young boy interprets the world, in which the interpretation happens to come from a pulp science fiction story.

And as the final lines suggest, this kind of thing will inevitably happen again and again. Not only is all fiction escapist in a way, so are the narratives we tell ourselves about the meaning of our society or tribe or individual role in life. It’s in human nature to constantly cast every aspect of the universe into terms that make sense as interactions among humans.

Not only is science fiction not necessarily ‘escapist’ in the crude sense of that charge, on the contrary the best of it suggests that the familiar ordinary ways we humans understand the world around us are not the only ways, and may not apply at all. Just as science does.

*

I should mention that this story is infamous for being the victim of a famous awards mix-up comparable to the mis-announcement of the Best Picture Oscar a couple weeks ago. (Maybe that’s why the story occurred to me again.) For some reason the members of the SFWA, voting in the annual Nebula Awards, selected (through the ranked voting process the awards use) “No Award” over any of the seven nominated stories. (Perhaps because of the unusual number of nominated stories.) But the presenter — none other than Isaac Asimov — handed a list of all the nominees in order of finish, mistakenly announced that Wolfe’s story had won. And then embarrassedly retracted the announcement after an SFWA officer hurriedly pointed out his mistake.

sfadb.com: 1971 Nebula Awards

The story is available in:

Gene Wolfe’s collection The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories

James Gunn’s anthology The Road to Science Fiction #4

Posted in Narrative, science fiction, Short Fiction | Comments Off on Winter Comes to Water As Well As Land: Gene Wolfe’s “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories”

Stuart Brand Quote: The Only News

Posted on Saturday 11 March 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

A thought against the daily onslaught of political news (never mind the weather, local crime, and traffic accidents that comprise the everyday local TV news) — in the big picture of human history (and progress), almost none of that matters; and in the little picture of your life, very little of it matters. You can step away from it for days or weeks at a time, and live your life, and it will go on, without being affected in any way by that ‘news’. It’s not that the ‘media’ is biased or has some agenda; it’s that the media’s job is to attract viewers, and thus to alert you about what’s unusual, what’s different, whether or not it has any true relevance to the big, or little, picture.

In that John Brockman book I mentioned several posts ago, I came across this quote, from Stuart Brand (famously editor of the Whole Earth Catalog):

Science is the only news. When you scan a news portal or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same cyclical dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness; even the technology is predictable if you know the science behind it. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.

Science is news because it changes humanity’s perception of itself and of the universe it resides within. This is why the daily news includes what amounts to political and religious figures trying to deny this changing perception, in order to maintain their political and social advantage. Obvious examples are left as an exercise for the reader.

Posted in Politics, Science | Comments Off on Stuart Brand Quote: The Only News

Science News

Posted on Friday 10 March 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Jerry Coyne comments on an article about where to find the best science reporting, with a nice graphic aligning evidence-based vs. ideologically driven, and compelling reads vs not so much.

Where do you find the best science reporting?

I’m a bit surprised to see that this graphic — which Coyne objects to on a couple grounds — charges NY Times and Scientific American with having mixed records. Read his comments. (Coyne has criticized NYT’s weekly science section of focusing almost exclusively on stories that affect humans, rather than about discoveries or developments in ‘pure’ academic science.) OTOH, my take on Nature and Science is that they are high quality but very technical — the premiere places to publish scientific papers of any kind. Coyne says their summaries are aimed toward the public and worth reading. Maybe I’ll check them out.

Posted in Science | Comments Off on Science News

Links and Comments: Distrust of Science; Trump’s conviction; Global society; a Two State solution

Posted on Wednesday 8 March 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

This subject is everywhere — the rejection of reality by the current administration — and I don’t collect very many of these links, but here are a few more.

Tom Nichols at Scientific American, via Salon: Don’t go with your gut: How does the public’s view of science go so wrong?

Of course, Americans don’t really hate science: They rely on it every day in ways they don’t even notice. From tens of thousands of safe and effective over-the-counter drugs to the directions on a car’s GPS system, Americans trust the work of experts on a daily basis. Rather, it is more accurate to say that the American public distrusts scientists, rather than science itself. Scientists, however, should be consoled by the fact that they are disdained not for their work, but for being part of an undifferentiated mass of “experts” whom a fair number of Americans now view as, at best, a suspect political class, and, at worst, as an enemy.

\\\
Also in Salon, by the great Amanda Marcotte: Here’s the key to Trump’s outrageous lies: He sells them with conviction.

Subtitle: Research suggests people are more easily persuaded by apparent sincerity and wishful thinking than by actual facts

How can Trump’s supporters be so blind to the president’s measurable aversion to facts?

Part of the problem, as psychologist Bill von Hippel explained in a phone interview, is that Trump supporters “feel that what he’s saying he genuinely believes.” This sense that Trump believes in himself may matter more than the actual facts.

With a description of a psychological experiment to back up the claim.

\\\
More about that book, The Knowledge Illusion. Sean Illing at Vox, Why we pretend to know things, explained by a cognitive scientist; an interview with one of the co-authors.

\\\
On a much broader issue, there’s this in Washington Post, from March 3rd:

Americans have lost faith in institutions. That’s not because of Trump or ‘fake news.’

The leaders of once-powerful institutions are desperate to resurrect the faith of the people they serve. They act like they have misplaced a credit card and must find the number so that a replacement can be ordered and then FedEx-ed, if possible overnight.

But that delivery truck is never coming. The decline in trust isn’t because of what the press (or politicians or scientists) did or didn’t do. Americans didn’t lose their trust because of some particular event or scandal. And trust can’t be regained with a new app or even an outbreak of competence. To believe so is to misunderstand what was lost.

This is about the fallout of the Enlightenment…

Rising incomes and the welfare state brought Enlightenment individuality to the people. Political scientist Ron Inglehart proposed in the 1970s that as societies grow wealthier and less concerned about basic survival, we should expect a shift from communal to individual values: People express themselves more and trust authorities less.

Everything about modern life works against community and trust. Globalization and urbanization put people in touch with the different and the novel. Our economy rewards initiative over conformity, so that the weight of convention and tradition doesn’t squelch the latest gizmo from coming to the attention of the next Bill Gates. Whereas parents in the 1920s said it was most important for their children to be obedient, that quality has declined in importance, replaced by a desire for independence and autonomy. Widespread education gives people the tools to make up their own minds. And technology offers everyone the chance to be one’s own reporter, broadcaster and commentator.

Long essay, with graphs.

This goes to the core of our growing planetary civilization, which grates our inherited predispositions to align with our tribes and mistrust all other tribes — and tribes, throughout most of the history of our race, were hunter-gatherer groups of 30 or 100 individuals, in which everyone knew everybody else.

There’s no easy solution to this quandary. I’d like to think it’s just growing pains, and humanity, as we fill up the planet, inevitably must learn to deal with other societies, other groups, other tribes.

\\\
Finally, another essay that identifies the political divide as not so much Republicans v Democrats, or red states v blue states, exactly;

The Hill: Toward an American two-state solution

In their country — call it Redland — there will be no regulations. Cars won’t have seat belts or airbags and no motorcyclist has to wear a helmet. The water in Redland will be full of industrial run-off and the cities will sit under a smoggy haze. No Clean Air or Clean Water Act. White people will live in all-white communities — no immigrants or black people need apply — and everyone, child, teen, college student, adult, can own and carry guns openly.

There will be no “political correctness” in Redland. Citizens can use the N word as much as they like, can call Jews, Muslims, and other non-Christians whatever name they like, and can do whatever they want with or to women—insult, demean, grope.
There will be only one TV station in Redland: Fox. And only one newspaper: Breitbart News. Right wing talk radio jocks and like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity will be broadcast 24/7.

Blueland – where my friends and I will live – is diverse. Our neighborhoods and workplaces include people from countries all over the world; their kids will go to school with our kids; our communities will be multiethnic and multi-colored. We will welcome the already well-vetted immigrants and embrace LGBT folks. In Blueland, we like our press doing its job and holding leaders accountable.

And so on. Amusing.

Posted in Culture, Psychology, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Distrust of Science; Trump’s conviction; Global society; a Two State solution

Links and Comments: Radiohead; Originalism; Principia; Trump brain rot; Homeschooling; Art v Religion

Posted on Tuesday 7 March 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Catching up on links saved over the past week or so.

Vox: Radiohead and sadness: a data analysis. Fascinating.

\\\
Vox: Judicial originalism as myth

It’s always struck me that Judicial originalism — the idea that nothing can be inferred from the Constitution than anything the founders who wrote it might have thought or imagined — is rather like Biblical literalism. It defies the idea that since then, whichever then, circumstances changed, and we’ve learned. Key passage:

What the words of the document meant to the people living at the time is just one of many different factors judges use to decide constitutional cases. So-called original meaning almost never drives the results in litigated cases but instead is used by judges to justify results they reached on other grounds.

\\\
An example of the point I made in this blog post, Science v Religion: New v Old.

Slate: Is Newton’s Principia Still Relevant?

Principia was no doubt a key work in the history of science, but there’s no reason to read it now, except as an exercise in the study of that.

\\\
It’s not that I care so much about dissing Trump — I wish he would go away — as that his presence is bringing to light all the mental biases, the cognitive dissonances, that psychologists and self-aware people have been recognizing for years.

Salon: Beware the Trump brain rot: The cognitive effects of this administration’s actions could be disastrous.

The article’s five points:

  1. An epidemic of lies
  2. An assault on logic
  3. The blustering bully
  4. The society of the spectacle
  5. The endless barrage

Each point’s discussion with many links to supporting evidence.

\\\
More evidence that home-schooling is about shielding children from the modern world. Washington Post: These activists want greater home-school monitoring. Parent groups say no way.

For decades, such concerns have led some parents to turn their homes into redoubts of Christian values, home-schooling their children not only to instill those values but to shield them from what they see as a godless, overly secular world.

\\\
Religion Dispatches: Can Art Save Us From Fundamentalism?

The beauty and awe that religion likes to claim for itself might as well be available through art [which, channeling EO Wilson, signifies a deep relationship with the natural world humans evolved within].

\\\
Enough for today. I have more for tomorrow, and drafts of longer discussions I may or may not ever post.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Music, Politics, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Radiohead; Originalism; Principia; Trump brain rot; Homeschooling; Art v Religion