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.
If I could pick one book that I think every college freshman should read, it would be…
LOGIC AND CONTEMPORARY RHETORIC, by Howard Kahane.
Subtitled, “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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
Though I rather liked it better before I saw the video.
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?
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.
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.
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.
