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

Progressives and Regressives

Posted on Wednesday 4 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

The passage cited in the previous post reminded me of a Facebook post from Robert Reich, several weeks ago, which I managed to track down via Google and capture here for my reference.

Why is it that most progressives live in cities and on the coasts where there are major ports, while most regressives live in rural areas far removed from the nation’s major ports and cities? The same pattern holds in other nations and regions of the world. Historically, fascist movements have begun inland; liberal movements, around major seaports and cities. It’s probably because major ports and cities are far more exposed to the rest of the world, and to a diverse range of people and a broad range of ideas, while rural inland areas are more homogeneous and insular. America’s regressives — trying to stop abortions, prevent gay marriages, keep their guns, hold back immigration, militarize the border, limit voting rights, prevent the teaching of evolution, deny climate change, tear down the wall between church and state, and cut safety nets — reflect the values and views of those who are cut off from the realities of the 21st century. Our problem is they have disproportionate political power, and are determined to hold onto it as long as they can.

This verges on caricature; yet. The reason folks who live in rural areas tend to be ‘homogenous and insular’ is because the kids who grow up there — I’m especially thinking of the kids who realize at some some point they are gay — [this is not something they can control, something that is ageless throughout human culture, though this is a topic for another post] — tend to *move away* from those small town places, to the big cities. This is a long-recognized pattern. Thus the big cities become more diverse, and the small towns they left remain homogeneous, and insular.

A similar effect explains why journalists and university professors and show biz folks are more progressive. Partly first, because they are exposed to more diverse types of people and necessarily shed their prejudices about anyone who is different from themselves. And second, frankly, it’s because journalists and university professors are more informed about the world around them, not just within their specialties. The reason most journalists are liberal is because they know more about the world than most of their readers. The reason most university professors are liberal is because they know more about the world than the conservatives who, thinking they already have the answers to everything through their religion, don’t go to those universities in the first place. 😉 Or only go to ‘universities’ that exist to confirm their religious convictions — Christian universities — without challenging anything they might already think or believe… which deny, I would think, what universities should really be about.

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Conservatives and Liberals, and why we need both

Posted on Wednesday 4 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

I came across new blog on the vast Patheos website, Science on Religion, and this post by one Connor Wood, a PhD student at Boston University in religion and science, a post called Calling an End to the Culture Wars, which in turn links to his essay at CivilPolitics.org, from which I quote…

Conservatives are, for my purposes, people who exist close to the heart of a traditional culture, whatever that culture is. They tend to be invested in religion, because religion is another way of saying culture. They are not bigots per se, but they tend to distrust or act coolly toward those who live beyond the warm bubbles of their own traditions. Tribal beings, they are cocooned in worlds of constructed social meaning: culture.

Liberals, in contrast, are those who dwell at the flickering edges of their cultures, in the strange and eerie space between the spheres of the world’s traditions, religions, belief systems. They tend to be cosmopolitan, to live in places where many different cultures rub up against one another daily. Because of this exposure, liberals have perceptive, even burdensome insight into how each culture is flawed and deluded in its own, often very serious, way, and so they cannot allow themselves to buy into any of them wholesale. From a liberal perspective, to belong to a culture unthinkingly means to accept that culture’s injustices and stupid horrors: to grin blithely at the binding of women’s feet and the redlining of black neighborhoods. And so the liberal can never fully trust human culture. She is destined to live just at its peripheries, in the weird interstices between worlds.

…

Conservatives are microscopes. Liberals are macroscopes.

But conservatives, reliably, are happier.

The difficulty with being a progressive, radical, or liberal is that the scale of the world is far larger than a woman or man can ever be. There is a basic mismatch between the aspirations and dilemmas of liberal-leaning people and their meager status as individual, warm-blooded mammals who must live in family and tribe.

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Frederik Pohl

Posted on Tuesday 3 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m not sure it’s generally appreciated the extent to which Frederik Pohl underwent a sea change in the mid-70s, much as Silverberg had done a decade before [partly under Pohl’s editorship]. Pohl had been a significant writer in the ’50s, more of a significant editor in the ’60s, and then after a quiet period re-emerged as a major writer, an order of magnitude beyond his previous work. Initially with short fiction like “The Gold at the Starbow’s End” and “Shaffery Among the Immortals”, then with novels, first Man Plus (1976) and Gateway (1977), then with JEM and The Years of the City, with The Cool War and the Gateway sequels, and so on, with at least one substantial, if not always major, novel pretty much every year for another 25 years.

He was like Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein, in that respect, all of whom had periods of silence in the ’60s and early ’70s until they reappeared with major works. As if to reassert the dominance of traditional SF after the passing turbulence of the New Wave. Not everyone welcomed their return. (I liked Gateway well enough, but at the time was more impressed by Benford’s In the Ocean of Night.)

I’ve read Pohl since the 1970 Ballantine release of collection Day Million, with reissues of several earlier collections, all with Escher-esque cover art by Ian Robertson. I only met Pohl twice, I think, once in ’78 at a book signing, because I have signed first editions of Man Plus and Gateway, and again about a decade ago, when I finagled my way to having dinner with Fred, his wife, and Charles Brown, on the last night of a convention, by offering to pay. (That works.) They were good conversationalists, as I recall, but finicky eaters.

Posted in Personal history, science fiction | Comments Off on Frederik Pohl

Does anyone ever change their minds about anything?

Posted on Tuesday 3 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Via Andrew Sullivan

Why Even Your Best Arguments Never Work

The arguments people make are those that appear the strongest to themselves and the people who already agree with them. But such arguments tend to be meaningless to people who disagree.

How does this happen?

It starts with the universal desire to protect against threats to your self-image or self-worth. People are driven to view themselves in a positive light, and they will interpret information and take action in ways that preserve that view. The need to maintain self-worth is one reason we attribute our failures to external factors (bad luck), but our success to internal factors (skill.)

…

One line of research has found that self-affirmation—a mental exercise that increases feelings of self-worth—makes people more willing to accept threatening information. The idea is that by raising or “affirming” your self-worth, you can then encounter things that lower your self-worth without a net decrease. The affirmation and the threat effectively cancel each other out, and a positive image is maintained.

I find this kind of thing fascinating in a way even more than any particular political or scientific issue. Because it speaks to how human minds work, how they engage with the world. Every opinion or belief about science or religion or politics is hosted in a human mind, and human minds — so it seems — are riddled with biases that make it difficult to engage with the world as it ‘really’ is. And everybody does it; our minds all work basically the same way. This is why I’m fascinated by books like David McRaney’s, which explore cognitive biases, heuristics, and logical fallacies. Here’s a quote from the one I’m part way through — “You have a deep desire to be right all of the time and a deeper desire to see yourself in a positive light both morally and behaviorally. You can stretch your mind pretty far to achieve these goals.”

We all do this. We all engage in confirmation bias to seek out evidence to justify what we already believe, and ignore evidence that challenges it. We all use heuristics to simplify complex issues and get on with our lives.

But that doesn’t mean it’s hopeless to try to be aware of these biases and overcome them. I like to think that if I’m wrong about something, I’d like to know about it, and am willing to hear reasons why I should change my mind. At least I like to think that I am.

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Endeavour

Posted on Sunday 1 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Both boys are in town this holiday weekend, so the four of us headed (via lunch at a Korean BBQ place in a dicey part of town) to the California Science Center — one of a cluster of museums just south of downtown and USC and north of the Coliseum (focus of the 1984 Olympics) — where the space shuttle Endeavour has found its home, after the trip, almost a year ago now, on the 747 over Los Angeles, and the slow tow across the city from LAX to the Center.

The Science Center is largely an aerospace museum comparable to the Smithsonian’s in DC, or the Space Center in Huntsville AL, which I’ve been to several times — all of them preserving Mercury and Gemini and Apollo capsules, with mockups of satellites and rockets, and jet and experimental aircraft, such as the SR-71. Endeavour is obviously CSC’s crowning attraction. The facility is temporary, basically a large warehouse just big enough to hold it. An expansion of the center is planned, where the shuttle will sit upright.

I hadn’t planned to take pics, but started doing so on my iPhone when I saw this…

(Click or double-click to see huge photos)

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Not a great pic, but. This is the Rocketdyne Operations Support Center — ROSC — a set of computer consoles and screens that used to be a large room at my place of employment, in Canoga Park, CA. For the duration of the shuttle program, we maintained a sort of mini-Mission Control, where technicians would monitor the shuttle — in particular all the sensors in the SSMEs, Space Shuttle Main Engines — from before launch and especially for the 8 minutes of the launch while the SSMEs fired to put the Shuttle in orbit.

When the Shuttle program ended, Rocketdyne donated the whole facility — complete with desk chairs and Rocketdyne mugs — to the California Science Center.

(I never served duty in that room, being, as a software programmer, a couple steps removed from actual operations. But I’d been through the room several times.)

Here’s another pic of the ROSC, with the poster about where it came from.

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Endeavour fills the space, so it’s hard to get good pics. Here are a couple.

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And, at the back, the three SSMEs.

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In the northwest corner — about where I was standing to take previous pic — is a mounted SSME. (Not in great focus, sorry.)

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And in this pic, the black box in the middle center of the frame, about the size of a microwave oven, is the Controller, which contained the software that monitored the sensors, 60 times a second (IIRC), and sent commands to the engines from the cockpit to throttle up, down, and so on. The software for this Controller is what I spent most of the ’80s maintaining.

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By ‘maintaining’ I mean, making small changes to the operating instructions as NASA decided such changes were needed. But also, occasionally, redesigning entire sections of the logic to make it more efficient. This box had 16K memory -! Every word counted. The biggest thing I did in the late ’80s was to redesign the entire sensor processing module, which had been patched over several years, to make it more efficient and save some 10 or 20% of memory that it had taken up.

At the back end of the shuttle, under the tail and behind the landing gear hatches, were two open panels…

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We deduced these were the connections from the fuel tank to the SSMEs. Both liquid oxygen and hydrogen.

Not a very clear pic, but–

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These are Jimmy, Michael, and Yeong, looking at the SSME. Michael is finishing his second summer internship at Rocketdyne, and is more knowledgeable by now than I am, about how rocket engines work. He’s headed to UCLA for grad school next month.

Finally,

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A schematic of what the eventual display of the shuttle will be, when it’s built. Upright, with fuel tanks and solids.

Posted in Personal history, Space | Comments Off on Endeavour