No Jesus, No Peas

Then this happened...

2012-01-18T09:56:00.001-08:00

That would be the olecranon process of my proximal ulna. Having surgery on Monday. D'oh.

Free will and hot peppers

2012-01-09T05:05:00.000-08:00

Daniel Dennett and Jerry Coyne are hanging around the former's apartment. Dennett goes to the kitchen, pulls a jalapeno from the coldest part of the refrigerator, and takes a bite out of it.

"Hoo boy, that's hot!!" Dennett exclaims.

Jerry impatiently corrects him: "No, Dan, it's not hot, it's spicy. Silly philosophers..."

Only the above little story is not really fair to Jerry. Really the encounter should take place in an alternate universe where, with the exception of food scientists and a handful of enlightened chefs, the vast majority of people believe with all their hearts that the chilled jalapeno really does have a high temperature despite being in the fridge all day, and find the suggestion that it might just be a heat-like sensation to be disturbing to say the least.

Capsacin really does exist, and the compound really does produce a sensation of burning in mammals when it comes in contact with their soft tissue, and it does this by stimulating sensory neurons that are involved in the perception of heat. In other words, even though there is no heat, the sensation of heat is, in a sense, real. Furthermore, the sensation is culinarily useful and it would be a shame if it were dismissed as just some silly illusion.

By way of analogy, I am increasingly of the mindset that what philosophers mean when they refer to compatibilism in the context of free will is very much a real thing; that as our understanding of neuroscience increases we will come to define its mechanisms in as much detail as we now understand the working of capsacin; that those same mechanisms are what is responsible for the sensation of libertarian free will that we all experience; and that the concept is extremely relevant and ought not to be discarded just because it creates an illusory sensation. In many ways, whether (and to what degree) an entity possesses free will in this compatibilist sense is a rather key litmus test as to what rights, etc., ought to be afforded that entity.

(This last point could be a post unto itself, so I'll simply terminate that line of reasoning right away rather than risk going into a several page digression.)

All that said, as a result of Jerry's posts as well comments from folks like Ben Goren, I am increasingly of the mindset that although all the above is true, it is confusing at best to give this phenomenon the label "free will", and at times the motive may even be deliberately obfuscatory.

In a world where people so desperately want to believe there is warmth in even the coldest jalapeno, referring to them as "hot peppers" -- even if us sophisticated foodies understand that we are simply referring to the presence of capsacin rather than some mystical ability to maintain a high temperature -- is going to be received by the vast majority of laypeople as a confirmation of what they already wish was true.

So after much deliberation, I think Jerry is right: We ought to call them spicy peppers, and we ought to start calling compatibilism by a name other than "free will".

Another way to tell pseudoscience from ordinary bad science

2012-01-05T06:06:00.000-08:00

Whether it's deserved or not, the general consensus on NASA's revelation of arsenic-based life seems to be largely negative, i.e. that the research was poor or tentative at best, and did not warrant the kind of hoopla the organization made over it; and Felisa Wolfe-Simon has taken a rather remarkable drubbing -- to the point where I've even seen some who condemn the research question whether her treatment has really been fair.

The NASA team didn't always respond in the best possible way, e.g. their rather odd comment that all dialogue had to be conducted via peer-reviewed journals, coming immediately on the heals of a rather splashy press conference they had just held. But one thing they never did was try to sue their critics.

This is what Cee Lo really should have sang

2012-01-01T07:02:00.000-08:00

If Cee Lo wanted to turn John Lennon's provocative and sharply challenging song into a warm fuzzy group hug, why didn't he go whole hog? Here's what he should have sung:

Imagine dogs go to heaven
And kitties too, why not?
Hell is only for Hitler
Any maybe for Pol Pot

Imagine all the people not thinking much today

Imagine we helped some countries
Marginally improve
Nothing too hard or controversial
(Don't knock their religion, dude!)

Imagine all the people with UN troops keeping the peace

You, you may say I'm a coward
But I'm just an average joe
I hope some day you'll just give up
And we'll preserve the status quo

Imagine more possessions
For those of us who lack
We'll keep the greed, just not the hunger
And a progressive income tax

Imagine all the people with slightly less income inequality

You, you may say I'm a coward
But I'm just an average joe
I hope some day you'll just give up
And we'll preserve the status quo

Why Cee Lo's word change to Imagine is really crappy

2012-01-01T06:02:00.000-08:00

I was not the only one to notice that Cee Lo Green, when performing John Lennon's Imagine just before the ball drop last night, changed the words to the second verse. Specifically, "no religion too" was changed to "and all religion's true."

This sounds innocuous enough, but it's actually really crappy for three reasons.

1) It completely misses the point of the song. I have no problem with singers changing around the song they are covering. Hell, I do it in my band. I don't even necessarily have a problem with changing it around in a way that changes the meaning (my band used to do a version of Why Don't You Do Right that completely changed up the perspective).

But what I do have a problem is subtly changing the meaning and trying to pass it off as if it's still the same as the original. I think it's clear that Cee Lo felt those words still conveyed the message of the song. But they don't.

This is not because Imagine is an anti-religious song; it's because the entire point of the song is to challenge the very idea that we need these institutions in the first place. As a reminder, the verse that Cee Lo mangled begins like this:

Imagine there's no country
It isn't hard to do

It doesn't say, "Imagine we fixed our country." It dares the listener to imagine there is no country to begin with. It compels us to "imagine" a world that is radically different in ways that most of us -- myself included -- take for granted.

Cee Lo's sanitized softball version greatly diminishes that challenge. Instead of asking the listener to question their most basic assumptions about how a society can work, instead it just lets us close our eyes and think of puppies and happy things. Boo.

2) We know people would have been offended if he hadn't changed the words; why aren't they offended anyway? I'm sorry, but I can't imagine that the same folks who would be apt to write angry letters over the "no religion" line would be particularly cool about me saying, "Hey, the United States shouldn't even exist." And yet, that's exactly what the first part of that verse says, isn't it?

The thing is, when it comes to "Imagine there's no country", most people "get it". They understand their assumptions are being deliberately challenged, and even if they disagree, they don't take it as a personal affront.

But as we well know, the hot button of religion has a tendency to blind people to things like this. Instead of being provoked to think deeply, they are provoked to angry shouting. And that's just crappy.

3) "All religion's true" sounds like a nice sentiment -- until you think about it for five seconds. And I got just three words for ya on that topic: Westboro Baptist Church.

Of course I know it's not supposed to be literally saying that, it's just supposed to be a bit of ecumenical mushy-headedness. But this is exactly the kind of thinking that gives intolerance a free pass, as long as it's not too extreme, and you couch it in terms of faith.

The Phelpses may be a pithy counter-example, but of course we know Cee Lo didn't mean them. Yet what about those whose faith drives them to vote against marriage equality? What about Muslims in some parts of the world engaging in female genital mutilation? What about the Catholic church (and many others) not allowing women in leadership roles? Did Cee Lo implicitly mean to exclude all of those beliefs too? It seems unlikely.

It might seem like a warm fuzzy group hug, but there's a nasty side to making such a blanket statement.

Anyway, lots of outrage against Cee Lo on Twitter. No surprise. I knew he was going to change the words... As soon as he started singing, I said, "There's no way he'll do the 'no religion' line." And I was right. Sigh.

Gender politics and Automoblox

2011-12-23T08:13:00.001-08:00

Update: Jason Thibeault, who has a much larger readership than I, helped me publicize this issue (thanks Jason!)... and the co-founder showed up in the comments and provided some corrections. Apparently this is the case only the case with the sports cars: the other models put the woman in the driver's seat. I still think it would be even better if all of the shapes were such that they could be rotated 180 degrees, but it seems the company has been trying to do the right thing from the get-go. Kudos to them.

I am still reading Susan Calello's comments and may have a second update later.

Some cursory googling seems to indicate I am the only person to have noticed this (or at least, the only person to have noticed it and blogged about it). The otherwise excellent toy Automoblox appears to have a subtle -- and probably unintentional -- misogynist implication inherent in its design. This is not really a huge deal, and since I'm thinking about posting this to Facebook (where my cousins, who bought them for my son, might well read it) let me say that this does not change the fact that my son loves them, I still think it's an absolutely fantastic toy, and I am ever so grateful to the Geigers for the gift. This is merely meant as food for thought.

So what's the misogynist implication? Well check this out: The two figures that ride in the car have features that strongly imply gender, and the way the car comes preassembled, the man is in the driver's seat. That by itself is not really an issue (it would be a nice feminist statement of Automoblox to have reversed it, but I can't expect everybody to actively support every cause 100% of the time) but the problem lies in that, although Automoblox can be reassembled in a variety of different ways -- this is part of what makes it an excellent toy -- a bizarre quirk of the design makes it so that you can't ever put the woman in the driver's seat.

In describing the educational benefits of Automoblox, Wikipedia states that "the passengers in each car have specifically shaped bases which lock into matching sockets in the car to encourage shape recognition and matching." Indeed -- except that the male passengers have either a square- or circle-shaped base, meaning that they can be rotated in any direction, while the female passengers have either a star- or triangle-shaped base (both with an odd number of sides) meaning that they cannot be rotated exactly 180 degrees from the default position.

You can reassemble the car so that the star-shaped socket is on the driver's side, but you cannot face the female passenger directly forward. No matter how you configure it, she will always face at an off angle if placed in the driver's seat. What's frustrating is that if they had just used, say, a hexagon and an octagon for the bases, this problem would be averted.

I imagine this was unintentional. And it's an excellent, excellent toy. I suppose the next step is to contact the company and maybe if they get enough pressure, in future versions they can correct this. Or am I just being hypersensitive here?

On Hitchens: Oh how wrong he was... and how much we have lost for his departure

2011-12-16T08:49:00.000-08:00

I've noticed something about a lot of the Hitchens tributes today. A great number of them contain a digression along the lines of, "I disagreed strongly with Hitchens in regards to this or that issue, but..." Indeed, it is probably safe to say that Hitchens is unusual in that even among those of us who had the deepest admiration for him and his opinions and his impossibly sharp prose, virtually all of us had more than one point on which we thought he was not just wrong, but badly wrong, shockingly wrong, dangerously wrong. The Iraq war is the obvious example, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. Scan a few of the obituaries and blog posts and you'll see what I mean. Here is a man who inspired even his dearest friends and most dedicated supporters to voice their differences in a damn eulogy!

And in a way, this is the best tribute we could pay to a man who so relished an argument, who convincingly defended (whether right or wrong) the most seemingly untenable positions, with a quickness and wit the potency of which was rivaled only by the contents of his ever-present rocks glass. For fuck's sake, by the time Hitchens unleashed his savage takedown of Mother Theresa, the woman was so venerated in our culture that she had become an idiom for unimpeachable goodness ("He's no Mother Theresa, but..."). It helps that in this case Hitchens' criticisms appear to have been largely right on the money, but my god -- who else could possibly possess both the audacity and erudition to have launched such an iconoclastic attack? One cannot separate his rightness in this case from his wrongness on so many other issues. The entire world telling him he was full of shit? A mere trifle to the Hitch.

We have lost not only one of the most astonishing orators and scintillating essayists of our time, we have also lost a man with a unique ability to be gloriously unflappably wrong in the eyes of everyone he respected (and everyone he didn't respect, too). "Conventional wisdom" will sleep easy tonight, I fear.

On consciousness-raising

2011-12-13T09:33:00.001-08:00

I've been making an effort in the past year or so to use the female pronoun whenever referring to a hypothetical person. There was recently a discussion about pronouns over at Crommunist (and by the way, if you aren't reading Crommie, start now!), and coincidentally the gender politics of pronouns came up twice yesterday at work... so I've been thinking about it quite a bit over the past several days.

One can make an argument that simply replacing the male pronoun with the female one when referring to a hypothetical person is not really any better. I think this opinion commits the fallacy of ignoring the broader social context, but after some recent contemplation I'm going to go one further: Even if it really isn't any better, it's still a worthwhile exercise simply as a matter of consciousness-raising.

If you're a man -- especially if you are a white heterosexual middle-class man like myself -- it can be difficult to put yourself in the shoes of a person who experiences institutionalized bias. I can abstractly recognize that it's a little messed up for the male pronoun to just be acknowledged as the default, but that doesn't tell me anything about how it feels. However, experiencing other people using the female pronoun as the default, especially when I am being asked to picture myself in the role of the hypothetical person they are referring to... well that's an eye-opener. It feels weird, doesn't it? I think a valuable piece of knowledge is gained when one viscerally experiences that weirdness for oneself.

I'm also certain I would not have spotted one of the incidents yesterday were it not for the effort I have been making to substitute my default pronoun. Two co-workers were explaining to me some work they have done that involves a collaboration with educators, primarily with elementary school teachers. I noticed every time they referred to a student, they said "he"; and every time they referred to a teacher, they said "she". Both did it, consistently, without exception. (I'm probably going to mention something about it to them today or tomorrow, but I've been mulling over how best to approach it without coming off as confrontational)

So even if female-as-default really is no better than male-as-default (and as I said, I don't think that's necessarily the case when viewed in a broader context), it's still a good exercise in consciousness-raising. If you haven't tried it, you ought, at least for a little while. It's, well, it's weird. And I guess that's the whole point, isn't it?

The title to a PZ post today helped me tie this together with another thing I've been thinking about: Whether some of the more confrontational secular holiday displays that have gone up are a good thing or not.

While these displays surely tell the truth, and while I am certainly not concerned about constantly policing tone in general, some of these displays don't exactly make me feel holiday cheer inside, y'know? In a perfect world, holiday displays would all be positive messages, and some of the secular ones going up clearly are not. Negative messages are often necessary when opposing injustice or changing the social zeitgeist, but at Christmas/Channukah/Solstice? It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Yet I still felt like I supported the controversial displays anyway, even if I don't personally like them. And now I think I can articulate why: It's yet another exercise in consciousness-raising.

Yeah, these displays probably do make believers feel uncomfortable at a time when we as a society have traditionally tried to come together in mutual joy and generosity. But you know what? That's exactly how many non-Christians feel when an elaborate government-sponsored creche is on display to the exclusion of menorahs or Santa or anything else. That's exactly how many non-Christians feel when the War on Christmas people demand that Happy Holidays be expunged from our vocabulary in favor of an abject deference to Jesusmas. Like a man being asked to put himself in the place of a hypothetical person being referred to as a female, this asks Christians to momentarily slip into the shoes of a maligned minority, a minority whose holiday traditions are demeaned and devalued.

An eye for an eye is obviously not a good long term strategy, especially when we're talking about actual violence. But when we're talking about the possibility of maybe some mild discomfort and some hurt feelings, and when a big part of the problem is that the privileged group simply can't understand what it feels like to be in the out-group because they've never experienced it -- yeah, this is fair game.

Always using the female pronoun may not really be any better than always using the male pronoun. And an aggressively atheist holiday display may be no better than an aggressively Christian holiday display. But what both of these things do is make you think, to put yourself in the place of the other. That's what consciousness-raising is all about.

That will be that

2011-12-03T07:49:00.000-08:00

From my wife's blog, about wrestling with grief coming up on the first anniversary of Nicole's death:

I hung some of the stockings on the fireplace last week, but not hers. I would like to be the sort of person that hangs her stocking and puts some of her favorite things in it, enjoys her memory, then brings the stocking to her grave on Christmas and lays it there gently, says a prayer. But I am not that sort of person. I will probably throw her stocking into the fireplace. Maybe I'll fill it with coal and hang it on her gravestone. Or more likely the rage will pass and I'll do something sensible, like taking the family to her resting place on the 21st with some of her favorite ice cream (butter pecan sans pecans). And I won't really want to be there, and the visit will have nothing to do with the holidays. I will go out of a begrudging sense of duty that Nicole would have appreciated. We'll be sensibly sad and cry a little, then we'll go home and live our delightful lives. She'll be extracted from my holiday memories for several years and then one day I won't even think twice about using the roses on the tree, and her stocking will be long gone. December 21st will be a day when maybe Jay or I will say, "Hey, isn't it the anniversary of.." and whoever didn't say it first will be embarrassed, then we'll distract ourselves with something more fun to think about, and that will be that.

I love my job

2011-11-29T17:44:00.000-08:00

If you are using Firefox or Chrome, and your video drivers are very up-to-date, you should see something more than a couple of non-functional buttons below. Putting this together took me a little more than half an hour (I had to dig up an undocumented feature of X3DOM) and it totally counts as work. Awesome.

The Burzynski Clinic, and the thug Marc Stephens

2011-11-28T09:10:00.001-08:00

Mostly just wanted to do my part to Streisandify the shameless thug Marc Stephens, who claims to represent the Burzynski Clinic (though it's not entirely clear yet that he does) and has taken to such low methods as posting Google Satellite pictures of a 17-year-old blogger's house. The guy is a grade-A asshole, and no amount of daylight is too much for his thuggish tactics.

I also wanted to be clear about exactly what the Burzynski Clinic is doing that is ethically wrong. After all, antineoplaston therapy isn't completely implausible (though what evidence is available seems to go pretty firmly against it), and when there are no known better treatments, isn't it okay to try unproven methods, in the hopes they might pay off?

Not if you charge money for it. Patients typically don't pay to be in a medical trial, for somewhat obvious reasons. Even if antineoplaston therapy still looked promising (it doesn't) it would be unethical to charge patients exorbitant sums of money to receive it -- doubly so if the treatment is already looking dubious from the results of previous trials.

Why I oppose the figurative use of the term "militant" in all contexts

2011-11-28T07:14:00.000-08:00

Uh oh, I go and call Bruce Hood a "nice guy", and Bruce himself responds in the comments unfortunately triggering one of my big pet peeves.

No, it's not that Bruce thinks the outspoken atheism strategy is "misguided" and that he doesn't "understand" it -- reasonable people can disagree, and I stand by my point that there is a difference between Bruce, who simply favors a softer approach towards religion, vs. folks like Mooney, Rosenau, etc., who spend a sizeable fraction of their time talking about why other people's approaches are wrong.

What bugs me is Bruce's use of the phrase "militant atheism". The problems with this phrase have been pointed out time and time again, but I'm going to go a step further: I do not think it is appropriate ever to use the phrase "militant" in a figurative/non-literal manner, no matter what group you are talking about.

My reasons for this are threefold: First, the original literal usage -- meaning engaged in or favoring actual military action -- is still quite common. Second, which usage of the word is intended is largely determined by the group to which it is attached. Third, and most importantly, it seems to me that when the group in question is advocating in favor of a historically oppressed classification, they are far more likely to get the figurative usage. And that to me sounds like an attempt to slander and squelch.

If we are talking about a militant Islamist, it is clear we mean one who advocates violence; we do not call Harun Yahya a militant Muslim, even though he is very aggressive about promoting Islam. It would seem incongruous and even libelous to label him as such. This is true for pretty much any religious group one attaches the word "militant" too, as well as for most types of purely political causes, e.g. a "militant separatist" is not simply someone who advocates strongly for independence, but who endorses and/or participates in military action in order to achieve it.

On the other hand, if we are talking about a "militant feminist", it is obvious we do not mean a woman who literally endorses violence against men or against misogyny. That's just absurd. The same goes for "militant atheist" and "militant homosexual", etc. Although I did hear that the Queer Eye guys were thinking about forming a paramilitary group to assassinate public figures with a poor fashion sense. Oh no wait, I didn't.

Now, maybe part of this is simply because there really aren't any militant atheists, feminists, or LGBT people. It just generally doesn't work that way. (Side note: Obviously in some places atheistic communism used violence to enforce atheism, but typically we would not identify those folks as "atheists" first and foremost, but rather as communists/Marxists/Stalinists/etc. If you wanted to call Mao a militant atheist, however, I would not argue with you.)

The situation is somewhat murkier for groups where there are true militants, but which sometimes get the figurative usage anyway. An example might be civil rights activists. Certainly I would not object to labeling some members of the former Black Panther Party as "militant civil rights activists" (although "militant black supremacists" might be more appropriate in that case). But you hear "militant" being used here sometimes just to refer to people who are outspoken and/or uncompromising in their views. Other examples would be animal rights activists or environmentalists, although it seems to me that in those cases, the usage of "militant" is predominantly literal. (Surprise surprise, since they don't deal with a historically oppressed group) I think I've heard non-violent people referred to as "militant environmentalists", but if I have, it hasn't been very often. That term is generally reserved for people who firebomb SUVs and such.

In any case, while the figurative usage of the term is quite common (in fact it is the first definition at Dictionary.com), it still feels terribly incongruous when it is applied figuratively to one of the groups for which the usage is normally meant literally. It would seem odd to call James Dobson a "militant Christian", for example, even though he is at least as strident in his beliefs as "militant atheists" like PZ Myers.

(Interesting side note: I googled for "James Dobson militant christian" just to see if anybody actually calls him that -- and in fact many do, for what it's worth -- and the first link that came up quotes James Dobson referring to "militant homosexual groups". I think my point has been made...)

Until that discrepancy in application of the term is resolved, I think the figurative meaning should be avoided altogether. Only call someone "militant" if they specifically endorse or participate in violence. Otherwise, you are falsely equating them with those who do. As long as "militant Islamist" implies someone who kills for Islam, you can't call someone a "militant atheist" without implying the same things about them.

Why are left and right reversed when you look in a mirror, but up and down are not?

2011-11-26T05:07:00.000-08:00

I encountered this brain-teaser on another blog quite some time ago -- wish I could say which one, but I no longer recall -- and it turns out to be harder to articulate the answer than one might think. I puzzled through it at the time, and then I remembered it again last night and had to re-figure it. Thought I might record my thoughts on it this time around.

One reason I don't remember the original blogger is that he or she simply left it at, "Nobody can really quite say!", which is simply not true: it's just very difficult to say it, but one can indeed figure it out. Try it yourself before you read on, if only to realize that it's not as trivial as one might expect!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, 95% of the answer stems directly from how left and right are defined, and if you want to skip to that, click here. Before that, however, I think it's useful to consider some directions which are not reversed in counter-intuitive ways.

Imagine a woman facing north and looking dead-on into a mirror at eye-level. She is wearing a ring on her "left" finger -- but this is the last time I will use the words "left" and "right" until we come to the answer, so let's say instead that she is wearing a ring on her west finger. Her eyes are facing north, as previously stated, and her head is pointing up.

For the woman in the mirror, all three axes -- north/south, east/west, up/down -- behave exactly as expected for a reflection in the plane of the mirror. Mirror woman's ring is still on her west finger, her head is still pointing up, but now her eyes are facing south. No surprises here, right?

This is because north, south, east, west, up, and down all have definitions which can be expressed independent of both a) any other direction, and b) the content of what you see. (There's actually a couple different ways of thinking about this for up/down, but for an earthbound mirror at eye-level the ambiguities don't come into play, so let's ignore them for now.) The compass points are defined by the Earth's magnetic field -- or by geographical convention if you prefer, but the result is the same -- and up and down are defined in relation to Earth's gravitational field. (Probably.)

In contrast, left and right are not well-behaved in this way; they are defined in relation to two other directions, namely top and front. Uh oh, and there's two new directions, "front" and "top". These are not well-behaved either; they are defined in relation to the content of the scene. For now, however, I am going to treat "top" as synonymous with "up", for simplicity, and then re-examine that assumption later. So when you add it all up:

"Left" is defined as the cross-product of "up/top" and "front", while "front" is defined by visual cues within the scene, such as the direction a person's eyes are pointing. (I think I got my signs right there, but don't beat me up if the correct cross-product is the other way; you get my point!) In our example of a woman facing north straight-on into a mirror, "up" stays constant, because it is (probably) defined in relation to gravity, while "front" reverses compass directions. The real woman's front is north, while the mirror woman's front is south -- we know this because "front" is defined in this case by the side of her body where her eyes are.

Interestingly, if one could make one's brain do the mental contortions, it ought to be possible to visualize it so that the woman's front and back have been reversed, i.e. that her eyes are now on the "back" of her head, her toes point "backwards", her back is now on her "front", etc., and if you could do that, then I believe one would also see that her left/right have not been reversed. The ass-backwards mirror woman still has her ring on her left hand. However, I find this impossible to fully conceptualize; I get about halfway and my mental image ends up looking like the teleporter scene from Spaceballs. It's worth trying this exercise anyway, if only because it helps illuminate why it is so difficult to articulate the answer to the titular question of this blog post. Our assumptions about the definition of left/right and front/back are so ingrained that even when we name the assumptions and express a conscious intention to discard them, we are still stuck with them. We can't help it.

Now imagine the woman turns 90-degrees to her left, so that she is facing west (but the mirror is still north of her). This is actually an easier case. Now we see that front and back are still the same -- west and east respectively -- but left and right have been reversed because they are directly perpendicular to the plane of reflection. It's no surprise that left and right are reversed in this case; how could they not be!

The math gets slightly more complicated if the woman is facing into the mirror at an angle (but still at eye-level, for now), but it ends up working out the same. In these scenarios, rather than one relevant axis staying the same and the other being reversed, both axes are partially transformed. It all works out though: Left/right will be transformed directly by reflection over the plane of the mirror, and indirectly via the same transform of front/back, and together it winds up with left/right being completely reversed.

I've been hand-waving so far on up/down and top/bottom, because they are the same as long as the mirror is at eye level. But what if the mirror is directly above the woman's head, and she is looking straight up at it? This case works out as well, although now it is important the we distinguish "top" as being something defined by the content of the scene, and we will also see that the definition of "up" is a bit slippery and people might have different ways of looking at it -- especially once you moved away from the Earth into space!

I also want to look at some cases where maybe left and right are not reversed in a mirror, because there are no cues to give you front/back or top/bottom. Alas, my sons really need some attention right now, so this will all have to wait for a follow-up post.

I finally put my finger on what bothers me about the Occupy movement

2011-11-20T06:20:00.001-08:00

Let me start this out by saying a few things: First, I unreservedly support the general aims of the Occupy movement, such as they are. Second, I do not want to make the mistake (and don't think I am) of impugning a movement or protest simply because its aims are not crystal clear; many a movement has been successful in enacting change without necessarily having specific demands at all times. Third, the police response in many places has been utterly appalling. Given the nature of the protest, it's almost unavoidable that there will be conflicts and arrests -- the entire point is to create an inconvenience, isn't it? -- but the lack of proportionality in places like Oakland, the bizarre unprovoked use of pepper spray in places like Berkeley, etc... it's just crazy!

All of that said, I've always intuitively felt like there was something not quite right about the Occupy movement. I knew it had something to do with their lack of specific goals, but as I said before, a movement doesn't necessarily need specific demands in order to be effective. Still, something about that just felt a little futile, a little misdirected somehow...

And yesterday, driving past the Occupy Rochester protest, it suddenly hit me: You can have a protest or movement that doesn't have specific demands, but you can't have a "we're going to stay here and we're not moving until either you arrest us all or..."-style protest without specific demands. How will you know when you're done? And if you can't know when you're done, how can you have a we-aren't-moving-until protest?

People like to draw parallels and contrasts between Occupy and the Tea Party movement. The validity of many of these comparisons is a bit questionable in my mind, but let me take the Tea Partiers as an example and show why they don't have this problem, despite having arguably even more nebulous goals than Occupy. The Tea Party movement is ongoing, but each rally or protest has a distinct start and end. Eventually the movement will peter out, but it won't seem like surrender when it does.

Occupy can't last forever, and since the point of the protest is "we-won't-leave-until", and since "until" is completely undefined, it will inevitably look like a surrender. The protesters will leave, despite the fact that "until" never happened.

Now, there are advantages to Occupy's approach. Certainly it was able to get the attention of the media despite an early unwillingness to give much coverage to OWS. (On a side note, I'm apparently so embedded in alternative media that I didn't even notice this lack of coverage until people started to complain about it) And the fact that it is a style of protest which is especially likely to generate conflict with law enforcement does create the opportunity for both more exposure and more sympathy for the movement.

But will we see "Occupy candidates" being swept into national government in Nov. 2012, the way we did with the Tea Partiers in 2010? I just don't see it. I don't know if has anything to do with this hokey Underpants Gnomes-esque format, or if it's more because of the general political lay of the land right now, or what. I just can't get excited about Occupy, because I don't think they have a path to the sea to actually accomplish anything. And it's not only because their demands are vague; it's because they are nevertheless operating in a way that is most effective at achieving specific demands. It just doesn't add all the way up for me.

I must reiterate, however, that I do support the Occupy movement nonetheless.

Rates for phone calls from jails and prisons should be federally regulated

2011-11-19T06:05:00.001-08:00

My brother-in-law was diagnosed schizophrenic around the time he turned 20, he's struggled with drug addiction, and he's been homeless 90% of the time for I think over a decade now. No surprise under these circumstances that he is frequently in and out of jail. Given his preference for the West coast, he's often in jail on the other side of the country where we can't possibly visit him in person.

Which brings us to the issue at hand: Those who have not had friends or relatives land in an out-of-state jail may be unaware of this, but the rates to accept a collect-call from jail are typically very high. Well, no, that's not quite accurate: The rates are fucking extortion, that's what they are.

My mother-in-law tipped me off about a recent Huffington Post article about a prison in Georgia which charges inmates $5/minute for phone calls. That's over eight cents per second, for those of you playing along at home. And don't think that's an isolated case; I'm afraid I can't tell you what the rates are from the various jails my brother-in-law has landed in, because we only did it one time and were so shocked by how expensive it was we couldn't really consider it in the future. But it wasn't much less than in Georgia.

The HuffPo article focuses on how it is private prisons seeking to maximize revenue that are doing this, and while this is true, it somewhat misses the point: The government is letting them do it.

Corporations excel at maximizing short-term profit; in fact that's pretty much what they do. Something like two centuries ago, it was observed that if an entity is the sole provider of a particular good or service, they can maximize short-term profit by doing some really brutal sketchy shit. Like, I dunno, charging inmates and their families five fucking dollars a minute to make a phone call, for example.

We have laws that limit trusts and monopolies for exactly this reason. The government either ensures that there are multiple entities offering the particular service, or else when that is unfeasible, e.g. in the case of utilities, the sole provider has to submit to heavy government regulation in order to make sure they are playing fair.

But this is somewhat of a special case that doesn't fall under the existing legislation. (There are many special cases like this, for what it's worth) A prisoner at a particular jail or prison has no choice about who provides phone service for him, or for that matter, who provides any sort of long-distance communication whatsoever. It's either an in-person visit (which is not remotely practical if you're imprisoned on the opposite coast of your family) or bending over and taking whatever fees the jail wants to shove up your ass. There is no ability to leverage the competitive nature of the free market here: What are you gonna do, make sure you get tossed in a different jail the next time?

I can't entirely blame the companies who run these prisons. They are, after all, doing exactly what they are supposed to do: heartlessly maximizing profits above all other concerns. And what they are doing is legal. But it shouldn't be. Private prisons have the exclusive ability to profit from their inmates' desire for outside communication , and consequently that ability ought to be closely regulated to ensure it is not being wielded in an exploitative manner. Maximum rates should be dictated by federal law and kept at a reasonable level.

And by the way, if anybody shows up in the comments and says, "If you don't like it, don't commit a crime in the first place!," fuck you. With a rusty knife. Maybe you missed the part when I said my brother-in-law is a diagnosed schizophrenic, making it nigh impossible for him to hold down a job. Or maybe you didn't notice the fact that it's not me who committed the crime, but it is me who would be the victim of this immoral extortion if I want to let my wife speak to her brother.

Exploiting the families of inmates for huge profits is dirty pool, and it ought not to be allowed. And that's all I have to say about that.

Nicole's scar

2011-11-11T17:46:00.001-08:00

I don't really write poetry. My song lyrics, of course, but I struggle with those, and in any case, one might say that every song I've written is a lie: usually they are about a character, even if written in the first person, and even when I am talking about myself I will freely change facts or even themes to make a rhyme or to enable a cool line. This post is in the spirit of a poem, but my forte is prose (that is the only way I know how to tell the truth) so that is how I will deliver it.

Nicole had a scar above her right eye. Or maybe above her left; it's strange how fast these details fade from memory. I asked her about it one time. When she was very young -- maybe three? or was it older? -- she had wandered in front of a kid on a swingset, and had gotten clobbered. It was pretty deep. Nicole always wore a lot of makeup, maybe too much, but nonetheless you could always see the scar.

During her life, I thought it was sad. I thought, "What a stupid little incident, and yet this scar will be here forever." But the other week I realized that scar isn't there anymore. Nicole's been cremated. There is no trace of that scar anymore, except for echoes: in photographs, and in the reverberations of Nicole that live on in the neural pathways of her friends and loved ones.

I used to think the saddest thing was that the scar was forever. But I was wrong, the saddest thing is that the scar was never forever.

There's probably no Dawkins?

2011-10-10T06:19:00.000-07:00

Hmmm.

Christians are so silly. How can you be angry at an Oxford professor you don't even believe in?

As long as you don't throw the rest of us under the bus...

2011-10-09T05:51:00.001-07:00

I've been meaning to write this post for a week or two, and the latest post from Jason Rosenhouse addresses a very similar topic, so I figure I best get on it.

At a party the other weekend, I was talking to a friend and mentioned my blog (which he was already aware of) in passing. Actually, I only mentioned it because I was saying how relieved I was that the looming Markuze threat had been neutralized -- here's hoping Dennis is feeling better, by the way! In any case, this prompted him to say, "That reminds me something I've been meaning to ask you," and for clarity, I'm going to loosely paraphrase him in the first person:

I'm an atheist, but I have no desire to engage religion on any level. The whole idea just seems incredibly silly to me, and I'm just not really interested in discussing it.

But lately I've been thinking about third-wave feminism, about how a lot of young women today don't appreciate, or even want to disassociate themselves from earlier first-wave feminists like Susan B. Anthony, or second-wave feminists like Gloria Steinem. They've grown up with the default assumption that women and men ought to be treated equally, and it's disappointing when they aren't willing to acknowledge how hard their predecessors had to fight for this basic notion.

I started to wonder if that's me in regards to my atheism. Am I obligated to be outspoken, to be part of the struggle? Or can I just be myself?

Hopefully it is not too unseemly to have a pair of thirty-something guys discussing how young women are "doin it rong" in regards to feminism! But I think the analogy is clear -- who has not had the cringe-inducing experience of hearing a young woman declare that she is "not a feminist" or "not one of those feminists"?

I think it is a very good question, and my answer was this: You have absolutely no obligation to do anything you are uncomfortable with, to be more of an "activist" than you are naturally inclined to be. The only thing I think is important is that you don't throw other atheists under the bus because of their own way of expressing it. To extend the analogy to feminism, I don't think that every single woman ought to feel compelled to get out there and "burn her bra" (to use the popular metaphor), but I do find it unseemly when women are critical or dismissive of those who do. By the same token, you can just be an atheist and you don't have to make a big deal out of it or push for greater acceptance or try to highlight the flaws of religion. You are totally fine just ignoring it -- but please don't make other atheists out to be villains because they have a different approach.

The one thing I did say I thought was useful for all atheists to do, if they can -- although situations vary and this is not always practical -- is to be open and forthcoming about their lack of belief, to be "out" as it were. Drawing an analogy this time to the gay rights movement, I don't think there is pressure for every LGBT person to march in Pride parades, to campaign for marriage equality, etc., but there is at least some pressure to come out of the closet, if they can. And I think this is appropriate. Obviously some circumstances dictate remaining in the closet, whether it be an LGBT person or an atheist -- a young person living at home in an unaccepting family, the possibility of damaging one's career, etc. But generally speaking, this is something which everyone ought to do if they can, as it can have such a powerful effect on public perception.

Beyond that -- be yourself! And let other people be themselves too.

The Rosenhouse post today quotes from a bridge-building atheist -- as opposed to an I-don't-care atheist like my friend -- but the principle is the same: Everyone has their own approach, and that's okay. What's not okay is telling somebody else their approach is wrong and they should shut up. We ought to all be on the same side here. It's this throwing-under-the-bus that separates nice guys like Bruce Hood from dickheads like Nick Matzke.

"I'm not one of those atheists" is just as unseemly as "I'm not one of those feminists." Look, you don't have to be. Just don't demonize us.

It ought to be possible to measure whether the death penalty actually makes victims' families feel better

2011-09-28T07:54:00.000-07:00

You often hear it argued that the families of victims will not "find peace" until the murderer/rapist/etc. is executed. Certainly, victims' families feel an intense burning desire for retribution. I would too, I am sure! But does it actually make them feel better? As one who does not really believe in the idea of "closure", I am skeptical... But it just occurred to me while reading the recent Hitchens piece on the topic that we ought to be able to measure this.

One problem might be getting a large enough sample size, since there are only so many people executed per year, and you need to get the families to agree to do a series of questionnaires. And you need to have the first questionnaire administered before anybody's been executed, and you don't know for sure whether the execution will be granted, etc.

Anyway, I figure you want to have three cohorts (and two of them are indistinguishable before the end of the study, so it's tricky). One is families of murder victims where the perpetrator will certainly not be executed because the state does not have the death penalty. Another is families of murder victims where the death penalty was sought and granted, and the third is families of murder victims where the death penalty was sought but ultimately denied. You take various measurements of their psychological state at the outset of the study, then at various intervals later (e.g. 1 year later, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, or something), and also immediately after the execution for families in the relevant cohort.

In this fashion, we could see whether seeking and getting the death penalty actually does make victims' families feel better. My hypothesis would be that we'd expect to see a short-term bump immediately after the execution, but no long term differences -- and I would not be surprised if families in the cohort where execution was sought but denied might do worse even in the long term. I would love to see it measured...

Mr. Neutrino, I'd like you to meet Mr. Bayes

2011-09-24T07:04:00.001-07:00

A lot of people who want to believe the faster-than-light neutrino result (and count me as one who would love it to be true!) are displaying a tendency to get quite pissy at those of us who remain skeptical, e.g. see this comment over at Bad Astronomy, which is actually one of the more mild ones. There are accusations of dogmatism, that a "true" skeptic should just follow the results.

That is true as far as it goes, but in my never-humble opinion, if you want to "follow the results" properly, you must be a Bayesian.

The prior probability, based on everything we know about physics, that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, is vanishingly small. The results of countless past experiments would have to be either dismissed, or given a completely different explanation. Anything is possible, of course, but as somebody else said (can't remember where, sorry, no credit), this is "possible" on the order of saying, "Oops, turns out gravity doesn't attract, it repels!"

And Bayes tells us then, that even what would be very solid experimental support for this result in another context is totally unconvincing in this context. Bayes Theorem doesn't quite work this way, but to just simplify it: Let's say last week I gave you trillion-to-one odds that neutrinos could travel faster than light. Then we come up with an explanation for how this result could be an error, but unfortunately it requires a series of coincidences that are a billion-to-one against. I'd still believe it was the billion-to-one error before I'll believe FTL neutrinos were a real thing.

It's probably something much more mundane, of course. Or perhaps it will turn out to reveal some weird new physics where the neutrinos can appear to some observers to exceeding light speed, but in a way that doesn't screw up causality and relativity; that would be neat. But if you're a Bayesian (and you should be), then you can be virtually certain that it's not really FTL. Sorry, sci-fi fans. No galactic empires for you.

Drawing Lines on Star Trek-Based Discrimination

2011-09-21T04:47:00.000-07:00

Ed Brayton over at Dispatches has a thoughtful piece up titled Drawing Lines on Religion-Based Discrimination, which takes as a jumping-off point the example of a gay couple in Illinois suing a bed-and-breakfast that refused to host their wedding, and goes on to examine the complex relationship between religious freedom and religious discrimination, and attempts to explore in which contexts religious-based discrimination is acceptable. It's a balanced and well-written piece which comes to some very reasonable (though tentative) conclusions... but while reading, I just couldn't stop shaking my head. All this, to prevent conflicts over what seems to me to be obviously made-up bullshit! Explicit protections for religious freedom are crucial, of course, but it's not because there is some critical benefit to diverse religious beliefs; rather, it's because without those protections, religion becomes a tool of oppression. Establishment of a state religion is no better or worse than the state establishing a mandated preference for Star Trek: The Next Generation over Star Trek: The Original Series, it's just that the latter issue tends not to arise because people don't get nearly as stupid-crazy over Star Trek as they do over religion.

But that got me thinking... What if people did get that crazy over Star Trek? And so without further ado, I present Ed's piece, rewritten as if we lived in an alternate universe where countless wars were fought to settle the age-old question: Who would win in a fight, Kirk or Picard?

The Chicago Tribune reports that a Picardian couple is suing two bed and breakfasts for refusing to rent facilities to them for a Borg-themed civil union ceremony.

The Beall Mansion in Alton told the Wathens via email that it “will just be doing traditional weddings.” The owner of the Timber Creek Bed and Breakfast in Paxton wrote in an email to the couple: “We will never host Borg-themed civil unions. We will never host Borg-themed weddings even if they become legal in Illinois. We believe the Borg are not canon and are mere fiction based on what The Original Series fails to say about them. If that is discrimination, I guess we unfortunately discriminate.”

Here’s the legal situation:

The couple filed a complaint with the Illinois Department of Human Rights, which investigated and found “substantial evidence” that a civil rights violation had been committed.

The August finding allows the Wathens 90 days to file a complaint with the state Human Rights Commission or take civil action in Circuit Court. The Wathens’ attorney, Betty Tsamis of Chicago, told the Tribune that her clients have chosen the latter path and will file lawsuits against both businesses as early as next week.

This action, should it proceed, could bring to the courtroom a debate over the boundary lines between Trekkian freedom and discrimination in Illinois.

Steven Amjad, an attorney representing Timber Creek, said the state constitution guarantees Trekkian freedoms.

“These are business owners that have strong Star Trek-based convictions. The Legislature has created this (conflict), and the courts will have to sort this out,” he said.

Andrew Koppelman, a professor of political science and law at Northwestern University, said the question is whether the state’s Star Trek Freedom Restoration Act — which protects Trekkian freedoms from government intrusion — can trump the state’s Human Rights Act, which includes the protection of people based on whether they are into the Borg or not.

“The hotels seem pretty clearly in violation of the Human Rights Act,” Koppelman said. “And if you’re going to say that somebody is exempted from the human rights law under the Star Trek Freedom Restoration Act, that would mean that people could discriminate based on Trekkian views. It’s a slippery slope.”

I’ve written recently about the billboard put up in Grand Rapids by my friends at the Center for Inquiry – Michigan. They had a billboard company refuse to put up their sign before finding one that would. After last week’s CFI meeting, I had an interesting conversation with the director of that group, Jeff Seaver, about whether that was illegal discrimination or not. He had actually been asked about that by a local TV reporter and had said something like, “And that’s okay, they’re a private company and they can turn down our business if they want to.” But since then, he’d been thinking about it and he wasn’t so sure that was true.

Interest in the Borg is not covered by the anti-discrimination statutes in Michigan, or at the federal level, though it is covered by some states. But Star Trek series preference is covered nationally and in every state and it does cover private businesses. A Kirkian restaurant could not refuse to serve someone because they’re Picardian— or atrekist, for that matter. This is well established law and enjoys overwhelming public support, so it’s pretty well settled. So what’s the difference?

On the other hand, a Star Trek club can, of course, limit its hiring to only those who prefer the same captain. This is known in legal terms as the nerdisterial exception. And this is a crucial principle. Freedom of Star Trek would mean nothing if the state could force a Kirkian club to hire a Picardian as its treasurer. But what are the limits of such an exception? What about a Star Trek school? Could the government force a Picardian school to hire an atrekist teacher? I think the vast majority of people, even atrekists, would say no.

But what about a Star Trek club-operated day care center? Or a homeless shelter? Or a restaurant set up by a Star Trek club to fund some charitable activity? Jeff offered this possible distinction: If the activity is explicitly Star Trek-related, then the exception should apply, but if it’s a service that is not inherently Trekkian in nature and is open to the public, they should be required to accept all takers both in terms of employment and servicing the public. And that seems reasonable, though not a perfect solution.

Some Kirkians claim that requiring them to serve Borg-loving customers in any context is a violation of their Trekkian freedom. But if it is, it is exactly the same as requiring them to serve customers of every race or gender. Discrimination on the basis of race can be and historically has been based on various TV series as well, yet almost no one seriously argues today that any business should be able to turn away a black person. Who is going to stand up and say that a business should be allowed to refuse to hire women because their sincerely-held Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire-based beliefs tell them that women should stay at home and not work?

Even if someone would make that argument, it’s not going to work, either legally or politically. It’s simply a non-starter. And there is no difference between those situations and discrimination against Borg-loving people or atrekists. If it is a violation of Trekkian freedom to force businesses to serve or hire Borg fans and atrekists, it is just as much a violation of television-based freedom to force them to serve or hire black people or women.

But Prof. Koppelman is right to point out that, legally, the Star Trek Freedom Restoration Act and its many state versions does complicate this. That law requires that Trekkian groups and individuals be given exemptions from generally applicable laws unless the government can show a compelling state interest in enforcing the law on them specifically in that particular context. And those laws are used everyday to exempt Star Trek clubs from zoning regulations and lots of other laws.

It may be that STFRA and other such laws should simply be done away with, that there should be no exemption for Trekkian groups or individuals, period. But then we go back to that nerdisterial exception, which I think even the most hardened atrekist would agree with — no one thinks we should force Star Trek clubs to hire people who are fans of the other show. So perhaps Jeff’s solution is ultimately necessary, a narrowly drawn exception for Star Trek clubs and probably Star Trek club-run schools, but not for businesses that just happen to be owned by Kirkians who feel the need to discriminate.

Thoughts?

Update: I swear to God, I had not seen this before I wrote this. 2:10 is most relevant.

The Times (of London) says something weird

2011-09-02T06:59:00.001-07:00

The Times has a great article about Richard Dawkins' new book, The Magic of Reality (behind a paywall, but reproduced here), but right in the middle of it they have a couple of paragraphs that leave me scratching my head a bit:

Pitting religion against science, at least in enlightened cultures, is to formalise a dichotomy that need not exist. While [Dawkins] may not agree, many would argue that religion has provided mankind with a moral framework possessed of a strength and clarity that, without God, thinkers since the time of Socrates have struggled to replicate...

The argument that creation requires a sentient creator — the teleological argument — had been ably sunk long before Professor Dawkins’ hero Charles Darwin began to fret whether a benevolent deity would have wilfully created a parasitic wasp that lays its eggs inside the body of a living caterpillar. David Hume perhaps scuttled it best, pointing out that if something as complex as the Universe required a creator, then that creator, being more complex, must have required one, too.

Losing our belief in a creator, though, should not entail we lose our wonder too.

Huh. If I might glibly paraphrase, what I'm hearing here is, "Religion is totally AWESOME! But you know, there's obviously no God, and educated people have known this for centuries..."

(I realize the passage leaves room for a God that is a part of the universe rather than its creator, but... for a lot of people that wouldn't really be God.)

I know what they are trying to do. They are trying to play the usual condescending game of "belief in belief": "I know a lot of you are turned off to Dawkins because he's always hating on religion -- but we don't hate on religion, and we liked this book!" I don't want to get too hung up on this point, it's otherwise a great article. I just feel like the inherent condescension of this position is really on display here. I mean, if I believed in God, I think I'd find that passage a bit off-putting. "I don't believe in that rubbish, but I think it's totally awesome that you are deluded in that way!" Blech. Heh, oh well.

Skepticism without cynicism: It's a win-win

2011-08-29T07:19:00.000-07:00

This morning as I was getting out of the shower, my wife reported that our two-year-old had said something rather, uh, disturbing: "Grandpa fell down! Grandpa fell down! Now he's sleeping..." Given that my parents are both over 70, Grandpa one day suddenly "falling down" and "sleeping" is unfortunately a fear that seems all too real. I said, "Lucky thing we're skeptics, otherwise that could be pretty scary!"

Later, my wife figured it out: The other day she had sung the "old man is snoring" song, but replaced "old man" with "grandpa". In other words...

It's raining, it's pouring, grandpa is snoring
Bumped his head on the bed, now he can't get up in the morning

Okay, now it's not so mysterious as to how our toddler got an image of grandpa falling down and sleeping, is it?

But here's why skepticism is a win-win: Since meaning is something humans invent, I can take whatever personal meaning from this I want to. My folks haven't gotten to see the boys in a few weeks, and I really ought to set up a time for us to get together. I managed to avoid the ominous fear that a more credulous person might have felt, but I also get a useful reminder to keep in touch with family. Huzzah!

In which I try really hard to avoid common ground with Ophelia Benson

2011-08-16T20:27:00.001-07:00

Over at Butterflies and Wheels, Ophelia Benson issued a challenge to have a "nuanced dialog" about whether sexist epithets are acceptable. It seems other candidates either refused to use their real name, or else had other issues complicating the debate, so I have volunteered to take up the other side.

This is going to be challenging since unfortunately I'm basically on the same page with Benson. But I feel there are just enough differences in where we stand that if I focus on those aspects, we may be able to get something going here. Maybe. Already at least one commenter has noticed we don't hardly disagree. But hey, it's a challenge, right?

I win an argument with Dan Cooper!

2011-08-09T10:59:00.001-07:00

I won't bore anyone with the details, but I just totally whupped Dan Cooper (yes, that Dan Cooper) in an argument on Google+. After I said that he had earlier indicated there was no gender discrepancy in earnings, Cooper said:

Prove to me that I said what you say I said.

A fair request. I obliged, in detail, although I did have to admit he only implied the salary gap was a thing of the past, rather than stating it explicitly. I must have really hit the mark, though, because his sole reply was:

You're totally castrated. Very sad. And you think men run things? You are ruled by women.

Awesome. Not even a "you're wrong" or "I didn't imply anything" or even an "I don't have time for this." I prove he contradicted himself, and he responds by saying I have no dick. Never have I won an intertubes debate in such spectacular fashion. Full of win!

Why is oxygen the third most common element in the universe?

2011-08-02T09:34:00.000-07:00

So it appears from several sources that the three most common elements in the universe are, in order, hydrogen, helium, and oxygen.

The first two make perfect sense to me. Hydrogen especially -- it's basically just a stray proton, right? Most of them have an electron buddy, of course, but it's not hard to see how that could happen. And then helium is two protons fused together, and as far as I understand it requires the lowest amount of energy to fuse. So that makes sense. You've got a universe full of stray protons (your most common element) and when they start to clump together producing heat and pressure, you fuse pairs of them together and get your second most common element.

But whence oxygen? It's #8 in the periodic table. My simple-minded imagination would have thought the order of frequency of elements would have been roughly the same as their atomic number, allowing some idiosyncracies for what's more stable, etc. And if it weren't, I would have expected the next most common to be maybe a noble gas, or just generally something with a distinct position in the periodic table. I can't see anything special about oxygen...

I'm assuming it has to do with some idiosyncrasy of stellar evolution. Can anybody help me out here?

So much for having a place for non-believers to grieve...

2011-07-14T10:56:00.000-07:00

In the comments to an earlier post, somebody pointed me to an exciting Facebook group called "Grief Beyond Belief". The purpose of the group should be obvious from the name.

Here's a couple posts from a thread there today, with some emphasis of my own added:

Little offensive calling them delusions, don't you think? I too am an Atheist, however....I do believe that we have souls. I don't believe in god, heaven, hell, or anything pertaining to religion. As I believe religion was nothing more but created by man to control people. But It has been proven that spirits do exist. I'm all about if it's been proven or not. It's well documented and caught on camera and such that spirits do exist. People have seen them, heard them, ect.. It's not religous nuts either, because they are usually against that kind of thinking. As they think the soul goes up to heaven and their loved ones are with "god". I very much believe that the spirits/souls of our loved ones are around us and can/do make contact or let their presence be known sometimes. Some aren't so lucky to experience it, or maybe we've over looked it? I don't know really. But I do believe it happens and don't discredit someone if they had a legit experience with it.

NO ONE has a clue about what happens after death, atheist or holier-than-thou. we can all have an opinion, but no one has the right to call another delusional. and jeff, unless you've been dead and brought back in the ambulance (like i was in '89), i'm guessing you have even less of a clue. i have no freakin idea what happens and no idea if there's any 'being' out there. i've had unexplainable occurrences after my husband's death of cancer just 10 wks after diagnosis in 2007. as recently as the eve of the 4th of july when i was sitting on my porch. i wasn't even thinking about him and yet when i looked at the other rocker, there was an outline of him in his jeans and boots. and frankly, i don't care if anyone believes it or not.

God fucking dammit.

I'm not comfortable criticizing someone while they are grieving, but the whole fucking point of this Facebook group is that I don't have to listen to people talking about, "Oh, mwah, nobody can KNOW what happens after death!" and "There's spirits all around us talking to us!" What the fuck. Fuck you.

I wrote a very nice guarded comment on the thread explaining why these statements made me very uncomfortable. Now on my blog I am venting. This is fucking bullshit. If you fucking believe in spirits all around us, you AREN'T a non-believer, you are a New Ager. And THIS GROUP IS NOT FOR YOU. If you are having trouble finding a group for you, let me help you with that. Goddamit...

If relativity hadn't predicted the precession of Mercury, would skeptics be obligated to study Einstein's proofs in detail anyway?

2011-07-13T08:48:00.001-07:00

A thought occurred to me while commenting over at Jerry Coyne's blog, and I just want to give a more concise version here.

The equations underlying the theory of relativity are quite elegant and beautiful. A friend of mine tells me of a modern physics class he was taking where the students burst into applause when the professor finished the derivation of E=mc². So much complexity is summed up so simply and in such a cohesive theory.

This suggests that it might be true, but it's not evidence. One of the first solid pieces of evidence in favor of relativity was that it accurately predicted the precession of Mercury. And of course many more observations came later which confirmed the value of Einstein's theory over Newton's. One by one, the skeptics were forced to take Einstein's work seriously.

But let's imagine an alternate reality where relativity hadn't made this prediction, and in fact it's prediction for the orbits of all the other planets was somewhat less accurate than traditional Newtonian dynamics. Would a contemporary skeptic still have to take Einstein seriously? Would Einstein have been justified in saying, "You simply don't understand the math behind it. Look how elegant this equation is! Look how it unifies space and time in such a concise way! If you aren't convinced, I think you really need to read my book..."?

No he would not. And in a world where, it seems to me, the evidence against theism is overwhelming, we are under no compulsion to explore logical arguments for God. Arguments based on pure reason are often useful, but they ultimately carry very little to no evidential weight. I don't need to understand Aquinas' Five Ways in detail, or be able to point out the flaws in them, because I can just look around say, "Welp, no gods here. Must be some flaw in his reasoning or a concealed false assumption or something." Pure reason is valuable, but it has no power to convert the skeptic, nor should it. And that goes whether you are talking about science or theology.

The Conundrum of Progressive Belief

2011-07-12T07:37:00.000-07:00

Since I just read a Greta Christina article which touched on the controversy over whether or not liberal/progressive belief enables extremism, it is apropos that a (religious) friend of mine posted the following to Facebook today:

"Is it working? Your belief system, that is. Is it really working? God's intention all along has been for the believer's life to work." Beth Moore

(On a side note, this Beth Moore does not actually appear to be all that progressive of a believer -- though still progressive enough to piss off other evangelicals I guess -- and is strongly anti-gay among other nasty things.)

Anyway, this is an interesting little quote, because on the one hand it is all wrong from a logical/epistemologial perspective, and if taken literally it could even be potentially dangerous; while on the other hand, for the target audience I think the message is generally a positive one. That pretty much sums up the conundrum of progressive theism right there, so let's dissect this one.

First, the bad: For starters, there is a hidden circularity here which renders it somewhat of an empty statement. If your criteria for determining what you believe is, "Does it work for me?", then logically the only basis you have for asserting anything about "God's intention" is whether or not that belief works for you. It's a tautology. Moore is basically saying, "I believe whatever works for me, and that includes believing that you should believe whatever works for you." It's pretty hollow when you think about it.

Worse yet, there is at least a theoretical danger in any untethered epistemology. If we take this statement literally, I might say, "Well, I feel bad that I shoplifted, but it's nice to have this free stuff. Wait a minute... if I just tell myself that God wants me to shoplift, then I don't feel bad about it anymore. Works for me!"

That's perhaps an unrealistic example, but there could be others. For instance, the process of examining one's own unconscious prejudices can be a painful one, and if you can just get yourself to believe that God shares your prejudice, then you can go on comfortably ignoring it. How many people have short-circuited a logical examination of their reasons for opposing marriage equality by just hiding behind religious belief? That is starting to sound like more than just a theoretical problem.

On the other hand, the message the target audience is going to receive from this assertion is probably a positive one: If a particular piece of dogma is not working for you, if it just seems terribly wrong to you, well maybe you ought to discard it. Moore's justification is wrong and perhaps even dangerous, but the conclusion is right.

I think the following is probably a bad example, since from what I can find it appears Moore toes the Evangelical line on homosexuality, i.e. she is dead fucking wrong and screwing up people's lives, but it's the only example I can think of, so let's go with it: Imagine a gay Christian teen who is struggling to come to terms with the contradiction between her identity and her beliefs. While I, and presumably most readers of this blog, would much rather see her discard the bonds of theism altogether, that can be a supremely difficult thing for people to do, especially as they may be struggling with other deeply emotional issues. Furthermore, as Richard Wade has eloquently pointed out, many young people still living at home may find that the security of their most basic needs is tied to belief, or at least the facade of belief. Better than nothing is if this hypothetical teen were able to say to herself, "Hey, this silly dogma about homosexuality is just not working for me. God couldn't possibly want me to feel so awful in this way. That has to be a mistake, and I'm not going to believe that crap anymore."

Again, Moore unfortunately fails to take this philosophy all the way and still clings to Evangelical beliefs that are downright hateful. But the quote on its own has some merit for believers -- if they're going to stick with belief that is. And that's always the conundrum, isn't it?

Three reasons why gnus especially should temper their criticism of outspoken feminists

2011-07-11T06:21:00.000-07:00

The catalyst for this post, of course, is the ongoing Rebecca Watson/Elevator Guy/Richard Dawkins debacle. I don't want to say much about that, beyond just that my position is similar to Ophelia Benson's, i.e. Dawkins was wrong but not that wrong. I'm hearing now that some people are upset more over how Watson treated McGraw than anything else, but I've already expended too much mental energy on this whole little blow-up to look into it any further.

I think the majority of gnu atheists would consider themselves feminists or pro-feminism -- after all, religion has historically been used as a tool of misogyny (or is it the other way around?) and so it's only natural that those who ardently oppose the negative effects of religion would also oppose misogyny. But there also seems to be a very large contingent who, despite being nominally in favor of gender equality, are deeply resentful of what they see as overly "strident" feminists. They complain that it was not "us" who caused all of this oppression, both historical and ongoing. They complain that they are being treated unfairly, perhaps even claiming to be the victims of misandry.

Well, gnus shouldn't be making that type of mistake. Gnus, of all people, should be sympathetic towards the most outspoken forms of feminism -- even if that position can be wrong at times. Now I'm not saying someone ought to adopt an incorrect opinion, but gnus should not be infuriated by it, and should understand the value of these "strident" voices. And here are three reasons why:

Gnus ought to know that when attempting to change the public conversation, being polite, even-handed, or fair is not always the most important thing. The phrase you hear bandied about often is the Overton window, though I've become less comfortable with that term over time simply because of Glenn Beck's stupid novel of the same name. The point is that for far too long women have been expected to shut up and take their proper subservient place. And make no mistake, it's still socially acceptable in far too many contexts to express that view. On the flip side, far too many people find it unseemly or rude for a woman to speak up about gender issues.

This ought to sound all too familiar to atheists. And as gnus, how have we chosen to tackle that problem? By refusing to stay silent about our views, even in situations where it is perceived as rude or inappropriate to air those views. Our criticisms of religion may not always be entirely fair, but goddamnit, it's high time somebody said those things anyway. Gnus ought to understand that the same thing goes for feminist viewpoints, which have historically been squelched. You don't fix that problem by asking politely if maybe it's your turn to talk now; you fix it by expressing your views openly, unapologetically, and even vociferously. Eventually it just becomes okay to talk about those sorts of things, and then the nice calm polite conversations take place.

We're still not at a point in our society where everyone can have that nice calm polite discussion, and that goes whether you are talking about religion or gender. As a result, I don't blame atheists for being loud, ardent, or even rude. And I don't blame feminists for it either.

Gnus ought to know that crowing about 'persecution' from a position of privilege is pretty unflattering. When Christians in America complain about being 'persecuted', boy does that make my blood boil. It's true that Christianity is sometimes ridiculed in the media, sometimes even unfairly. But by god, Christians can proudly say that every elected US president has shared their religious views; they can expect their faith to be perceived a a positive character trait by the vast majority of the population; there is no shortage of media catering directly to their religious tastes, including whole separate musical genres; and numerous points of Christian dogma are codified into law, with far too many legislators talking with a straight face about adding even more. Yeah, you're not being persecuted, STFU.

News flash: That's how feminists feel when men complain about misandry. Are men sometimes criticized unfairly? Oh sure. But uh... yeah, you and I have got it pretty good, bro. Every elected US president has been a man; men are perceived as more capable than women in a wide variety of tasks, to the point where we can just expect a higher salary without even trying; there is no shortage of media catering directly to men, including the fact that the vast majority of protagonists in popular media are men; and until very recently, numerous laws were explicitly beneficial towards us. (As a side note, it is true that alimony law requires reform in many states now that, you know, we're actually letting women have jobs and stuff... but this is a legacy artifact of historic misogyny, not a result of misandry. Get that straight please.) On top of all that, most of us men don't have to constantly worry about getting raped.

So yeah, you know... stop complaining. I think it's okay sometimes to point out ways in which men are screwed over by laws or societal mores or whatever (as evinced by my parenthetical remark about alimony reform) but as the privileged group, we need to approach that sort of thing with due humility. No whining.

Gnus ought to know that cultural criticism doesn't take place in a vacuum. This is sort of the reverse of the previous point. I am much harsher when criticizing American Christians, for example, than when criticizing American Muslims; and by the same token I am much harsher when criticizing Muslims living in Islamic countries than I am when criticizing American Muslims. American Muslims may at times be worthy of criticism, but they are also getting a whole lot of bigotry and prejudice thrown their way. I always try to check myself, to see if I'm really trying to follow a legitimate point, or if I'm getting bamboozled by what essentially amounts to racism and/or jingoism.

Those who are formulating a criticism of an outspoken feminist would be well-served to do the same sort of introspection. There may be valid criticisms, but is the perceived importance of those criticisms getting amplified by the continuing societal hostility towards feminism and towards women in general? Are you getting bamboozled by misogynists? It's worth reflecting on.

To sum up, when you are advocating in favor of a group that has historically been oppressed, silenced, discriminated against, and devalued, it's okay to be a little brazen, a little overly harsh, a little angry, and at times even a little unfair. For too long, religious belief and open misogyny have simply gone unquestioned, enjoying a privileged position where not only do those on the wrong side wield the power, but have manipulated the bounds of socially acceptable conversation to squelch any opposing voices. Now after all these centuries, atheists and feminists are speaking up, making their story part of the public consciousness. And those who, in the face of that history, would criticize these proud new voices for seeming a bit too shrill -- maybe they ought to reconsider that.

Space, time, and oblivion

2011-06-01T07:38:00.000-07:00

Mortality's been on my mind more lately, for really obvious reasons: A very close family friend died suddenly in December, a former girlfriend of mine died suddenly a few weeks ago, and there has been a spate of two-degrees-of-separation deaths as well, i.e. not people we knew, but people we knew knew. That'll sure make you think about death a lot!

It still doesn't hugely bother me, and I mostly stand by what I wrote about the topic back in January 2010. The thought of oblivion is a little bit more unnerving now that it's more viscerally "real" to me, but not that much more unnerving. What's actually been troubling me more than the idea of my own eventual annihilation has been proton decay and its implications about the fate of the universe. I'm finding the idea that someday every particle in the universe will have disintegrated, even if it's an absolutely inconceivable 10⁹⁰-odd years in the future, to be really troubling and bleak.

So then this morning on the drive to work I was thinking about cosmic voids (yes, really) and for a moment I had that same feeling of an incomprehensible magnitude of bleak nothingness -- though not quite as powerfully as when contemplating the eventual breakdown of all the protons in the universe. It hit me that, depending upon how we view the relationship between space and time, as well as how much stock we put in the concept of the present, they could be no different!

Nobody really quite knows what to make of time. I tried reading The End of Time by Julian Barbour, which proposes a radical reimagining of how we perceive time in relation to physical reality, but I only made it about 2/3 of the way through before the heady math and geometry was just too much for me. In any case, where I'm leading is that one way of viewing the universe is as a static 4- (or more-) dimensional object. There's no particular present, just points in spacetime. Of course there are many different ideas on how we ought to interpret time in relation to physical reality, but this is one of them, and based on our limited knowledge at this point in history, it could be valid.

If we look at it that way, then there is little practical difference between the incomprehensible emptiness of cosmic voids in the spatial domain vs. the incomprehensible emptiness of a dead universe in the temporal domain. (Depending on the spatial geometry of the universe, there could be one important difference, in that if the universe is finite but unbounded for example, there's no spatial direction you could go in where you would encounter unending emptiness, but there is a temporal direction where you can... but I'm not sure how important this is to my point here.) So when we stare into the temporal abyss, when we contemplate the eternal death of the universe, it ought to be no more existentially disturbing than when we contemplate the spatial abyss of these incomprehensibly large voids.

Which is to say, it's still pretty freakin' disturbing, but perhaps more manageable. Voids are still one of the bleakest things I've ever heard of.

Breastfeeding and feminism

2011-05-31T12:54:00.000-07:00

Well there's a potential minefield for ya. I'm not sure why I would hazard to even try and write about this -- as a man, me telling women "ur doin it rong" in regards to feminism is unsavory at best, almost always condescending, and just generally a bad idea. But I have some thoughts about it, and I'd like to take my mind off some other stuff, so I thought I'd share what I have to say.

My thesis here is that the most sensible "feminist" position on the issue would be that a) women should be maximally facilitated to breastfeed if they choose to do so, including legal protections on doing so in public and employers providing a place to pump; while b) women should not be unduly pressured to breastfeed if they don't want to, that they especially should not be made to feel like they have failed or anything like that, and that if somebody's reason not to is simply "I just don't want to", that should be accepted uncritically. I will now try and defend that position.

It is important when we discuss anything like this to be ever mindful of the naturalistic fallacy. Nature has given women a distinctly different deal than it has given men in regards to this issue, and we should not be confused into thinking that this implies anything about what ought to be the case. At the risk of pissing off so-called lactivists -- whom I largely agree with, by the way -- the fact that breastfeeding is natural doesn't inherently argue that women ought to do it, nor does it even in and of itself mean that it ought to be socially acceptable to do so in public. There are plenty of things that are "natural" that we don't tolerate in public, sometimes with very good reason. I happen to feel very strongly that public breastfeeding ought to be tolerated and even encouraged, but my reasoning has very little to do with it being "natural".

So shall I proceed to those reasons? For starters, there really isn't any defensible reason not to tolerate public breastfeeding. There's nothing other than social convention that makes some people find it unseemly. Nature enters into it a little here in that if people did naturally find it disturbing, then we might want it to be a private activity; but it's not like that and I really just can't see any argument not to tolerate it.

More importantly, however, a lack of tolerance for public breastfeeding adds an additional burden to those who might choose to breastfeed. Constantly being shunted off to a bathroom or some other private location interferes with a breastfeeding woman's ability to fully participate as an adult in social and professional situations. Nature has already dictated for us that if a child is to be breastfed, it is the mother who will be doing the bulk of the work; there's no reason we should exacerbate this imbalance.

There's an important caveat here, that if a woman is not herself comfortable with breastfeeding in public, that is her business and nobody should be criticizing that. I guess some people even feel that it is a betrayal of values for a woman to cover when she is breastfeeding in public! No way. Even if it is an unfair social convention that creates this lack of comfort, a woman should not be forced to be a martyr for social change if she wishes to breastfeed.

I think this is so important that I favor legislation clarifying that any place which allows infants must also allow breastfeeding, and legislation forcing employers to provide for mothers to pump during the workday.

I don't want to make it sound here like I am characterizing breastfeeding as an inherently unpleasant or burdensome activity -- far from it, many women find it very rewarding and enjoyable. In fact, biology has also been unfair to men here, in telling us that we can't breastfeed even if we want to. (I guess it can be done with hormones and such, and certainly feeding an infant from a bottle provides some of that same feeling of bonding... but the point is that even if we have overcome nature in this regards, which I'm not convinced of, our natural biology was still unfair) I do not want it to come across as if I am saying, "Nature has shafted women by making them breastfeed, and we should undo the damage as much as possible." Rather, I am saying that our biology creates an inequity, and that inequity should be minimized without regard to whether it is inherently positive or negative.

So what about the flipside? Can advocacy in favor of breastfeeding become an anti-feminist position? Again at the risk of being patronizing, I think it can if we are not careful.

As already mentioned, even in the best of situations nature has dictated to us that if a child is to be breastfed, the mother will be doing most of the work to facilitate that. (Even if the mother were to exclusively pump and her partner or other family members did all the feeding, it still can be a physically and emotionally demanding activity, and in any case some women simply may not feel comfortable with it) By providing an alternative to breastfeeding, formula potentially frees mothers from this obligation. You can now be a mother and not breastfeed if you don't want to. When we denigrate that, we are aiding and abetting an unfortunate misogynist aspect of our biology.

Another important digression on the naturalistic fallacy is due here. The preponderance of evidence does seem to show that breastfeeding is superior to formula feeding -- but we can only have determined that by evidence, not by reasoning it out or favoring what is "natural". There are plenty of examples where "unnatural" things are clearly superior. Just thinking in the category of "things that are consumed", fortified milk, iodized salt, and fluoridated water are all relatively uncontroversial examples. (Apart from the anti-fluoridation crackpot conspiracy theorists, there are some legitimate questions about the cost/benefit of the amount of fluoridation that is employed in some areas, but there's little doubt that the practice itself has been beneficial) So it could have been the case that formula turned out to be much healthier than breastfeeding for some reason. It's not, but we couldn't have known that without evidence.

And furthermore, it's important not to oversell the benefit. While the data is mixed, the benefit does appear to be fairly modest. It's not like using formula is automatically going to make your child fat, stupid, and emotionally maladjusted. It may very slightly increase the odds that she will be obese as an adult, to pick one example of a possible benefit to breastfeeding -- but we all make choices every day that affect our children's future, sometimes negatively, and unless it's something with a really pronounced effect, e.g. like smoking during pregnancy, there ought not to be a moral stigma attached to it.

Telling a woman that she is failing her child if she doesn't breastfeed is equivalent to saying that you should not be allowed to be a mother unless you are willing to conform to your "proper" womanly role. And that is a distinctly anti-feminist thing to do. In my male opinion, that is.

Biology has not given men and women equal treatment; we cannot change this. But as I have argued previously, that doesn't mean gender inequality is a good thing! If we value gender equality -- and I do, very much so -- then we ought to do whatever we can to minimize the impact of those facts of biology which get in the way. In the case of breastfeeding, that means doing everything we can to facilitate women who choose to breastfeed, and it also means letting women know it is perfectly alright to make a choice not to breastfeed. Ultimately it's about empowering the individual to be whatever he or she wants to be -- nature be damned.

This should not be happening in my 30s

2011-05-16T07:41:00.001-07:00

I really haven't been intimate with all that many women. Two of them have died in the past six months. What the fuck?!?

WorldNetDaily should hire me as writer

2011-05-06T06:01:00.000-07:00

So today Al Qaeda confirmed bin Laden's death. Now, I read on the interwubz somewhere that Obama had just faked bin Laden's killing in order to secure re-election. Therefore, this latest news could only mean one thing: Obama is in charge of Al Qaeda!

(Seriously, I betcha some conservative nutjob has already said this...)

Obama releases hastily photoshopped birth certificate

2011-04-27T08:13:00.000-07:00

I hope nobody is buying this obvious photoshop job released by the White House. This is just a doctored version of the Kenyan long form birth certificate that was leaked in 2009:

An unconventional take on gender stereotypes and biology

2011-04-11T07:52:00.001-07:00

A friend posted a link to Facebook that showed two word clouds, one showing words used in advertising for toys aimed at boys, the other showing words used in advertising for toys aimed at girls. I'm not actually going to post the link here, because while I think the author's point is correct, I think the post itself does nothing to support the point being made, and this is all a distraction from what I actually wanted to talk about. There's been something I've wanted to say for quite some time about gender stereotypes, gender bias, and biology; and thinking about how some toys are perceived as gender-specific finally revealed to me what I think is the right way to say what I am trying to say, without coming across as patronizing.

Is gender discrepancy in toy preference purely a societal construction, or does it have any biological roots? Well, I don't think one can assert a clear answer to this question (it's undeniable that social convention reinforces this discrepancy, even if it didn't create it, which makes it very difficult to measure). But consider the following facts: Men are on average larger and more muscular than women. Babies only come out of vaginas, and milk (generally; don't distract from the central point) only comes out of the nipples of women. Given those realities, I don't think it would be surprising if we were to discover that, independent of culture, boys were more likely to play with fighting superhero toys, and girls were more likely to play with baby dolls. I'm not asserting that as true, but I really don't think it would be surprising.

But that's only a bit of speculation about what is; it says absolutely nothing about what we ought to do about it. Worse yet, it's not even the complete picture: It's undeniable that, even with gender stereotypes being bolstered by powerful cultural reinforcement as they are today, many boys would still rather play with dolls and many girls would still rather play with superheroes. It is not fair that these individuals be short-changed or stigmatized just because they don't fit a stereotypical mold, even if that mold has a perfectly natural origin. (Edit: In re-reading this, I think I inadvertently came across as presenting somewhat of a false dichotomy, i.e. that each individual either likes "boy's" toys or they like "girl's" toys. That's bullocks, and of course equally important is that even if, say, a given boy might usually want to play with superheroes, he should ideally not feel reservations about playing with baby dolls on occasions when it strikes him to do so.) Individuals should be empowered to do what they want, to act according to individual preferences and desires. This personal liberty and autonomy is one of our most important shared human values!

The upshot of this is that if it is the case that gender stereotypes have a biological basis (and again, I do not believe there is sufficient evidence to make an assertion about this either way), then that would only intensify the importance of minimizing any cultural reinforcement of those stereotypes. It might even suggest that we ought to work towards not only elimination of that cultural reinforcement, but an outright reversal of it, i.e. a society where it's "cool" to explore the opposite gender stereotype.

There is absolutely no reason to believe natural selection should be egalitarian in regards to gender. The moderate sexual dimorphism of our species suggests evolution has not been entirely blind to gender in H. sapiens (though thankfully we are quite a bit better off in that regard than C. lectularius!), and therefore we should be prepared that there might very well be natural behavioral differences between men and women. But as organisms with a uniquely powerful ability to reason about concepts of fairness and morality, we owe it to ourselves to do better than unguided evolution in this regard. The possibility that conventional gender roles might have biological roots is not an excuse to shrug our shoulders at stereotyping and inequality: rather, it is a call to redouble our efforts in combating those pernicious effects.

Thinking about meta-ethics...

2011-04-11T06:07:00.000-07:00

I've come to learn a lot more about meta-ethics since I wrote this fumbling post way back in August of 2009. That long ramble is still fairly close to my current thoughts, but now I know a lot more of the conventional views and terminology -- and let's face it, even though jargon can be obscure and irritating, properly used it can help clarify and focus our thoughts, by giving us a name by which to refer to a very complicated idea -- and as of late, I've been stimulated to ponder it much more deeply by four events: The discussion over Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape, which I suppose I will have to read now; a series of posts from Russell Blackford about meta-ethics, partially as a follow-up to discussions with Harris; my discovery of Daniel Fincke's blog Camels with Hammers, and his unconventional take on meta-ethics; and a conversation with Bjørn Østman in which he called me out on sloppily referring to objective morality in another post without proper caveats. So my thinking is evolving.

Despite the fact that as recently as a week ago I declared that I "certainly do not" subscribe to moral error theory, I am beginning to think that on some level it is the most accurate approach to meta-ethics. Although I think it is utterly irrelevant in practice, if we want there to be (as Blackford puts it) "more metaphysical grunt" behind morality, if we want to assert that people are compelled to behave morally as opposed to just naming what is moral and what is not... if that's important to us, well, you can't have that, so in that sense if that is what most of us are trying to say when we make moral statements, then that is necessarily an error, and moral error theory must be correct.

I am not sure if in practice the lack of a true metaphysical imperative is really all that important, though. I might also describe myself as a moral realist in the sense that I think what is meant by morality is non-arbitrary, describable at least in principle, and -- here's where I got into trouble tossing around that word "objective" so flippantly -- once we have all that, I think that for many moral propositions we can confidently assign it an unambiguous truth value.

The only thing that is missing is some ghostly metaphysical demand that we "ought" to behave that way, but I don't think this is actually a problem. As a result of natural selection, virtually all of us (excepting true sociopaths and those whose meta-ethical foundations have been severely distorted by bogus ideologies and dogmas) buy into the core subjective "ought": namely that we ought to try and promote those universal values which seem to be shared among all human cultures.

The elusive metaphysical imperative is unnecessary, because we already have the necessary imperative built in; indeed, one could argue that it's a pretty fundamental part of being human.

Which is not to say that humans naturally behave morally, heavens no. But we all naturally have an inclination towards fairness, towards avoiding undue suffering, etc., and given that, our big brains are (or ought to be) able to puzzle out some more advanced moral concepts in order to support that underlying imperative.

So I am asserting: that morality is supported by a built-in imperative universal to virtually all humans; that it is non-arbitrary; and that for at least some moral statements, we can confidently state their truth or falsity in a way that firmly transcends culture. That's 99% of the way to moral realism, I think, and so I am hesitant to disclaim the label. Call it moral quasi-realism perhaps?

Now there is a parallel here to my thoughts on the Problem of Induction. In both cases I am making an assertion ("inductive reasoning is effective", "people ought to behave in a way that promotes universally shared values") which I believe to be ultimately unsupportable, but I am not too worried about it because I think these assertions are shared by pretty much everybody; and I think that the rest of what we want to get (objective reality in one case, moral truth in the other) flows naturally from that.

There is one important difference, however: In the case of inductive reasoning, while I believe the assertion is unsupportable without resorting to a defective circular argument, I also happen to believe the assertion is objectively true, no matter what humans might have to say about it. If the world blew up tomorrow, I'm pretty confident that inductive reasoning would continue to be a valid way of uncovering reality (assuming there were some other beings around to do the reasoning, but of course even if there weren't, it would still be true that it would work). Objective reality does not depend on the existence of humans or other sapient beings. I cannot prove this, nor can I really offer any evidence without resorting to circular reasoning; but I am extremely confident it is true nonetheless.

In the case of morality, however, even though I think it is non-arbitrary and that moral statements can sometimes be classed as true or false, all of that depends on humans (or sapience, or at the very least sentience). Morality is non-arbitrary only in reference to who we are, and if we didn't exist, or if what it means to be human fundamentally changed in certain key ways, those assertions would no longer stand up.

So while my belief in objective reality depends on an unsupportable assertion, I believe that assertion is objectively true. It's objective all the way to the core. In contrast, my belief in "objective" morality not only depends on an unsupportable assertion, but that assertion depends on some subjective traits of humanity. My meta-ethics has a crunchy objective shell with a chewy subjective middle. Bite into it, and I suppose I subscribe to moral error theory; but for all outward intents and purposes I am a moral realist.

Another breathless science story for the blogosphere to open a skeptical can of whup-ass on?

2011-04-08T05:25:00.001-07:00

The BBC reports that researchers at the Tevatron particle accelerator in Illinois are claiming the possible discovery of a new high-energy particle not predicted by current formulations of the Standard Model. It's not nearly high enough energy to be the Higgs-Boson, so they are thinking it's something completely unanticipated.

Now I am not a particle physicist, but this smelled fishy to me right off the bat, even before I remembered the whole story with Tevatron. Extraordinary claims, and all that. There are surely many refinements to be made in our understanding of particle physics, and the precise energy of the expected Higgs-Boson particle is of course highly uncertain. But a completely unanticipated particle, that would be... well, highly unanticipated. These things happen, of course, but it would take a lot of convincing, and even the researchers themselves agree they have not met the required uncertainty threshold yet.

But there's more. The BBC was extremely remiss in failing to point out in the article that Tevatron is scheduled to cease operations this September, unless they somehow miraculously secure an extension of their federal funding. The reason given is that it has been "made obsolete" by the Large Hadron Collider. Oh, and lookie, the scientist they quote casting a skeptical eye on this discovery works on the LHC. Hmmmmm, are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Again, I am not a particle physicist, but it seems obvious to me that this is what's going on:

The Tevatron folks are desperate. They feel they can still do useful work (and for what it's worth I agree; see below) and yet the whole project is going to be shut down in less than six months.

Now, the folks at these particle accelerators comb through a lot of data. As a recent XKCD graphically illustrates, the more data you are going through, the higher your chances of false positives. The standard of certainty for these guys isn't p < 0.05, it's p < 0.00001 (I think I counted the right number of zeroes... 5-sigma certainty). Tony Weidberg, the guy from the LHC project, is quoted as saying, "every few years we get these three-sigma [p < 0.001] effects..." (That is the certainty level being claimed by the Tevatron researchers at present.)

So a shade over five months from Doomsday, the Tevatron data fortuitously happens to show one of these three-sigma blips. In a desperate gambit to garner public exposure for the (still very useful!) work they do, they decide to go public with it right away, with breathless claims of a possible new particle. If their plan works, there is an initial spike of popular support for the Tevatron effort, which barely diminishes when (as not reported prominently in the mainstream media) the blip turns out to be nothing. Hell, maybe they can even leverage some of the populist jingoism we are so afflicted with these days -- after all, the LHC is located on the border between France and Switzerland. We can't let those cheese-eating surrender monkeys gain the edge in particle accelerators, can we?! The hope is that they can parlay this into an extension of their funding.

And to be honest, I don't really begrudge the Tevatron researchers for this last ditch maneuver. It is true that the pace of significant discoveries from Tevatron has waned, and it's also true that the LHC is bigger and better in virtually every way. On the other hand, there is only one LHC, so having the lower-energy Tevatron operational means the world's researchers can run twice as many experiments within that energy range. The LHC could be knocked out of commission for a period, by like a catastrophic magnet failure or something -- I know it sounds far-fetched, eh? Moreover, the annual operating budget for Tevatron is $35 million. So dudes, like, take one day off from mixing it up in Iraq, and you can keep Tevatron open for eight more years. (Seriously, fucking do the math, it's that ludicrous!)

Is it ethical? Would I engage in this kind of misrepresentation in their situation? Hell, I dunno. But I sure don't blame 'em. They're getting short shrift here, and if this little PR sleight of hand buys them some more time, more power to 'em.

Thurgood Marshall on the Founding Fathers

2011-04-07T07:54:00.001-07:00

[T]he government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights, we hold as fundamental today.
--Thurgood Marshall

Damn, he was totally dead-on with that. Worth pondering, I think. The US Constitution, for all its successes, undeniably had some real crap in it to start with, and arguably still does. (I'm looking at you Electoral College and ambiguously-worded Second Amendment!) One can certainly admire the Founding Fathers and the document they crafted, but to insist there's some magical super awesomeness that needs protecting... that's just plain ahistorical (unless you want to scrap every single amendment past the Tenth and reinstitute slavery, I suppose...)

Cultural relativism: Mullah-ing it over

2011-04-04T10:02:00.000-07:00

Much has been made -- appropriately, I think -- of the fact that the shameful murders of UN workers in Afghanistan was not directly in response to Terry Jones' burning of the Koran (which initially did not make that much press this time around since it was after all just some crazy fundamentalist kook holding a dumb little ill-attended show inside his church), but rather in response to Afghani president Hamid Karzai's very public announcement and condemnation of Jones' actions, and subsequent incitement by some very angry mullahs. I immediately spotted the parallel to the Danish cartoon affair, which barely made the news outside of Denmark until a couple of imams decided to tour the Mideast a year later stirring up anti-Danish sentiment (I was not the only one to make this observation, by the way).

So in both cases we have a Western nation experiencing an otherwise rather short-lived and mostly harmless free speech controversy, in which freedom of speech ultimately triumphs despite widespread condemnation of the message (which is just great; that's how liberal democracies are supposed to work) -- which was later turned into an international incident when some mullahs deliberately tried to make an issue out of it and fan the flames of violence. To me, it seemed easy to see where the blame lies: with the mullahs, not with the dumb bigot pastor or the controversial cartoonists.

That is, until I realized that unless one rejects cultural relativism (which, thankfully, I do) that argument falls apart, or at the very least undermines some other moral statements we'd very much like to make.

Take for example the problem of child witchcraft accusations in parts of Africa. Ophelia Benson's blog is a good resource to find out about this, but in a nutshell, there is a problem in certain parts of Africa where bad events are blamed on local children practicing witchcraft, and the children are then exiled or murdered in the most brutal ways. Terrible stuff.

Of course, like the Terry Jones book-burning and the Danish cartoons, locally it is not that big news. Sadly, that's not too far out of bounds for how things are done in those regions.

Perhaps this is a poor example because, shamefully, this travesty hasn't gotten much press in the West. But if we did want to do something about this, the way to do so would be to publicize what had been only a minor local issue, get people over here angry about it and motivated to do something. In other words, do exactly what the mullahs have done in regards to perceived slights against Islam in Western nations.

Don't misread me here. I am not drawing a false equivalence. I happen to think that murdering children in the name of superstition and scapegoating is not even comparable to the questionable exercise of free speech. And I happen to think I am right about that in some objective sense, not just as a matter of cultural or personal bias.

But that's just the point I am making. Without a strong statement that, in this particular case, one culture has got it right and the other one has just plain got it wrong, we cannot blame the mullahs for inciting violence. They simply drew public attention to what, in their cultural perspective, was an unacceptable event taking place elsewhere -- an event so unacceptable that they felt, just as I feel about the child witchcraft stuff, that they could not turn a blind eye to it just because it is happening halfway across the world. From their cultural perspective, burning a Koran is as bad or worse than murdering children. And so, unless we reject cultural relativism, the mullahs were perfectly justified in what they did.

As much as a sick fuck as Terry Jones is, it's baffling and enraging to me that people want to put as much blame on him as they do on the mullahs who directly incited violence, or on the angry mobs who murdered innocent UN workers in their infantile rage. But maybe it's because of cultural relativism run amok. After all, unless we flat-out reject the idea that it's okay for another culture to be as angry about their holy book being desecrated as we Westerners might be about murdered children, then we have no leg to stand on in condemning them.

We should not make the leap from a long overdue rejection of our history of cultural imperialism and an appropriate humility about our own cultural perspective and its potential flaws, into a pure ungrounded cultural relativism. There is nothing inherently superior about Westerners that ought to make our culture always superior; and when culture does not warp people's values into a twisted caricature of morality, cultural variation is part of the rich tapestry of human experience. But none of that changes the fact that there can be issues on which another culture is just flat-out objectively wrong, no ifs ands or buts.

Rosenau jumps on the Gnu Atheists = Teabaggers bandwagon

2011-03-29T08:56:00.001-07:00

There was a time when Josh Rosenau was one of the more reasonable of the anti-gnu brigade. He would occasional make a point I felt was worth listening to and contemplating. But some time in the last year or so, he went completely off the deep end. His latest stunt: He has bought into the absurd comparison between New Atheism and the Tea Party. His justification? Tea Partiers (some of them) say that Obama is a secret Muslim; Jerry Coyne says that Obama is a secret atheist.

Where to begin? On a superficial level, this sounds like a convincing analogy, but just the tiniest iota of honest reflection shows it to be a completely ludicrous comparison.

Now, I need to start off by saying I disagree with Coyne on this one. I think the preponderance of evidence suggests that Obama is sincere in his Christianity (though I do think he considers the literal truth or falsity of it to be irrelevant) and in any case, we ought to respect people's self-identification unless it is clearly erroneous. Obama says he's a Christian; that makes him a Christian. If it turned out the Pope didn't believe in God, would that mean bears didn't shit in the woods?

With that out of the way, let's look at a few things here. Let's start with motivation, because that's the easiest one: Coyne is nominally attempting to discern the truth, and if we dig a little deeper we see he is probably being optimistic. He wishes Obama was an atheist, because a) he thinks an atheist president would do a better job, and possibly b) he admires Obama and so wants to view Obama as part of his tribe. Now, I'm speculating about Jerry's internal subconscious motivations here, and I could be way off -- but the point is, we see that at worst Jerry is being irrationally optimistic. There is certainly nothing nefarious in Coyne's intentions, of that we can be sure.

Contrast this with the Tea Party. It is plainly obvious they are painting Obama as a Muslim in an effort to discredit him. Do we really think there are Tea Partiers saying, "Yeah, it doesn't effect Obama's ability to do his job, but I do think he is secretly a Muslim"? Come on... On a side note, if we imagine a hypothetical devotee of Islam who speculates positively that Obama might be a secret Muslim, while that would obviously be pretty irrational, it's not the kind of attempted slander being perpetrated by the Tea Party. There's a big difference between saying, "I bet this guy is secretly on my team," vs. "Look out, that guy is secretly on the other team!"

Next let's look at what is being claimed. It is a feature of Tea Party conspiracy theories about Obama that he is not only secretly a Muslim, but that he is doing so in an attempt to covertly usher in Islamic influences to American politics -- even that he is seeking to "destroy America". In contrast, Coyne is speculating that Obama is a secret atheist who nevertheless approves of faith, and is simply concealing his unbelief in order to avert prejudice against him. Again, if we imagine our hypothetical Muslim who claimed that Obama was secretly a moderate believer in Islam, that he nonetheless approved of Christianity and other faiths, and that he simply had to hide his true faith in order to maintain electability... well, that's a little crazy maybe, but it does not merit comparison with the Tea Party.

Lastly, let's look at plausibility. Now, I am inclined to take any given politician at her word regarding her faith. But does Rosenau really think there are no closet atheists in American politics?!? That we have never had a congressperson (or even a president! It's a virtually certainly we have) who privately found religious belief to be logically untenable, but kept it to himself anyway? I think it's a safe bet that there are a number of secret atheists in Congress, and at all levels of politics. We know there are plenty of ordinary folks, people who aren't even in the public eye, who have to conceal their atheism from their employer. Why would it be remarkable if the president happened to be one of those people?

We also know that plenty of churchgoers are secretly atheists. (Fuck, thanks to Dennett and LaScola, we know that plenty of clergy are secretly atheists) Many of these people aren't even hiding their atheism out of fear or anything: They appreciate the communal and ritual aspects of their chosen church, but find true belief to be a fanciful and unlikely position. These people are all over the place.

Now, I must reiterate here that I think Obama is sincere in his faith; reading Dreams from My Father gave me the impression that while Obama was initially drawn to Christianity for the potential of black churches to organize community activism, that he soon became so enamored with the whole thing that he ceased to care about the validity of the truth claims and was willing to swallow the dogma along with the community whole hog. However, the fact that Obama goes to church is not evidence that he couldn't possibly be an atheist. Quite the contrary, it says very little -- especially for someone who has admitted that he joined initially for political reasons, and especially for someone whose employment, and possibly whose very life, would be in danger if he were to come out as a nonbeliever. While I do not believe it to be the case, it is entirely plausible that Obama might have attended Christian churches for decades and publicly professed Christian faith, while all the time being an atheist.

Is it just possible that Obama did all those things while secretly adhering to Islam? Well, I guess, but it seems far less plausible. For one, it's not hard to imagine an atheist publicly praying to Jesus and not feeling as though she is doing anything wrong. It's more difficult to imagine a devout Muslim doing the same thing and feeling like that was okay, that it was not a betrayal of his values. (And if the Muslim in question is not unflaggingly devout, why would he maintain his faith intact through decades of immersion in a different faith community?) For another, when Obama first became involved with Christian churches in Chicago, if he had really been a Muslim at the time it seems somewhat more likely that he would have sought out members of that faith community for the purpose of grassroots organizing. I suppose it's just possible that this very young and politically raw Obama had the foresight and the cold calculating nature to recognize that black Christian churches were a more fertile field for organization, and so to have hid his Muslim faith in order to mine that community... Yes, this is all possible, but it's far more of a stretch than Coyne's rather modest suggestion that he chose to embrace this community despite a disbelief in their central truth claims and dogmas.

So let's check our scorecard: The Tea Partiers' claims that Obama is a secret Muslim are malicious, conspiratorial, and implausible. Jerry Coyne's claim that Obama is a secret atheist is benign or optimistic, matter-of-fact, and (although unlikely in my opinion) at least baseline plausible. The only thing the two have in common is they probably aren't the most rational position.

Rosenau is engaging in a rather sick, twisted, and frankly obvious bit of false equivalence here. The only question is whether he is doing so intentionally and dishonestly, or if he really is that much of a fucking idiot.

Why I eschew the use of the phrase "pyramid scheme"

2011-03-24T05:18:00.000-07:00

"It's not a pyramid scheme, it's multi-level marketing!"

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that I've never really heard the difference articulated in a way that I understand, if proponents of MLM feel that the label "pyramid scheme" unfairly tars them, I am perfectly happy to criticize MLM on its own merits (or lack thereof). Telling someone that their MLM endeavor is nothing more than a pyramid scheme distracts from the central issue by allowing them to protest ad hominem. I prefer to avoid the terminology dispute altogether: Make "MLM" the dirty word, and leave the antiquated phrase "pyramid scheme" in the dustbin of history.

MLM induces people to take business risks they are often not fully cognizant of, it tends to turn people into annoying evangelists for their product and encourages them to exploit their friendships for the purposes of making money (even if the exploitation is not often conscious), and it almost always results in crappy products.

The reason for the last point, in my opinion, is that with MLM the business model is the primary product. Individual profit incentives focus on selling the business model, whereas the nominal product is secondary, a placeholder. I had to say "almost always" in the previous paragraph, because I am told Avon products are pretty good - but the vast majority of everything I've ever seen sold via MLM has been utter shite.

A friend recently spammed all of his Facebook friends to try and recruit them for Herbalife. Blech. I don't want to say anything (see my Three Rules for Facebook for why I believe in basically never calling someone out on Facebook) but man, that's annoying. Why do people do that crap?

Strawman much?

2011-03-23T10:00:00.001-07:00

I think I just encountered the most strawman-ish description of New Atheism ever in this inflammatory post from Jacques Berlinerblau:

For those not familiar with their world-view, let me help you understand their central and timeless insight: Unless you as an atheist are willing to disparage all religious people, describe them all as imbeciles and creeps, mock every text and thinker they have ever produced, then you must be some sort of deluded, self-hating, sellout, subverting the rise of the Mighty Atheist Political Juggernaut...

Emphasis in the absurd original.

I stopped reading right there, because, WOW, that's the worst description of such I have ever seen. I did skim down to the end where he admits never having debated with a New Atheist -- but of course that doesn't stop him from pronouncing himself an expert on their positions! Dumbass...

(h/t Ophelia Benson)

Revisiting "strong" vs. "weak" accomodationism

2011-03-22T12:25:00.000-07:00

When I set up an RSS reader for my new phone, I added Phil Plait's blog. I've been enjoying it quite a bit. Reading an article right now about the accelerating expansion of the universe -- cool stuff.

Phil Plait's got a little bit of a bad name in the gnu community at the moment, because of his infamous Don't Be a Dick speech, but I think it's unfair to lump him in with the likes of Mooney, Rosenau, and Ruse. The reason is related to a post I did a while back on the difference between "strong" and "weak" accomodationism.

In a nutshell, a "weak" accomodationist prefers an approach of reconciliation between science and religion, often asserting that faith and reason are perfectly compatible. This describes people like Eugenie Scott, who has advocated for faith/science compatibility as part of her job as executive director of the NCSE. A "strong" accomodationist not only prefers this approach, but thinks anybody who doesn't is Not Helping and should STFU. This describes your Mooneys and your Rosenaus, who constantly denigrate the gnus. The former don't bother me; the latter are annoying as all get-out. (FWIW, I think some of the gnus spend a bit too much of their time tackling the accomodationists -- Jerry Coyne's blog is one of my favorites, but he pushes it sometimes, for instance -- so it's not a problem restricted fully to the other side.)

Despite the DBAD speech, I think Plait clearly belongs in the former category. Now, the lack of specificity in that speech is problematic: I'm not actually sure whether I disagree with him or not. But let's assume for sake of argument that he meant that speech in the most anti-gnu possible interpretation. Then I would say I disagree with him, but that's okay, and since he isn't constantly writing blog posts about how stupid people like me are for disagreeing with him, I'm not all that interested in constantly writing blog posts about how stupid people like him are for disagreeing with me.

The problem with Mooney and Rosenau and Ruse is not that they have a different tactical approach. It's that they are constantly saying how destructive our approach is. I think they think the same about us, judging from comments about accomodationism being a "cardinal sin" (that was actually the 3 Quarks Daily guys, but the sentiment has been expressed by the others). Yet I think one will be hard pressed to find very many blog posts from gnus strongly condemning Genie Scott, Michael Schermer, or even Phil Plait (despite the recent noise over the aforementioned speech) -- because they have their opinion and don't seem to be bothered by the fact that other people have different opinions.

The "cardinal sin" is not asserting the compatibility of faith and science. The "cardinal sin" is asserting, even by implication, that it's not okay to proclaim their incompatibility. Because we care about open dialog -- in fact, the goal of stripping away the special deference towards religion which prevents open dialog is pretty much the defining characteristic of "New Atheism" -- assertions that seek to shut down an open dialog really piss us off. Go ahead and disagree with me about faith/science compatibility, but don't tell me I don't even have a right to my opinion or that I'm not allowed to say it in polite company.

My two cents on that.

An update on cooking steaks

2011-03-20T07:11:00.000-07:00

From the blog Serious Eats comes a post similar to the one I did last month on cooking steak. It largely matches what I had to say, with three important divergences, all of which sound reasonable to me:

If you haven't salted yet and are going to cook your steak in less than 40 minutes, salt it immediately before it goes in the pan. You will have to read the Serious Eats article for the technical explanation of this, but it sounds completely reasonable to me. I imagine you could mitigate the problems of late salting somewhat by thoroughly patting the steaks dry with a paper towel immediately before cooking, but I won't assert that without trying. Still, with that one important caveat, the Serious Eats post confirms my conclusion that salting well in advance is best.

The butter and oil mixture I use might not quite be the best approach. In my previous post, I repeated the claim I had heard that combining equal parts butter and oil raises the overall smoke point. Serious Eats says this is crap, because the milk solids will still burn regardless of whether they are immersed in oil or butterfat. I had wondered about this from the get go, but was inclined to believe that it really did raise the smoke point, because a) I heard it from a trusted source, and b) experientially I have gotten excellent results with a one-to-one mixture.

I suspect there is still some merit in my approach, possibly because even butter with burnt milk solids still imparts a nice toasty flavor, and the mixture with oil allows it to keep cooking at a higher temperature even as the milk proteins break down. I absolutely disagree with Serious Eats that the best approach is to only use oil, but the technique they mention of adding butter to the pan at the last minute so that it doesn't have time to burn sounds promising. I will likely try this next time I do steaks.

Serious Eats has a lot to say about flipping, whereas I didn't even mention it. When I cook a steak, I flip it only once. I'm not religious about this, and in fact I didn't even mention it in my previous post. But Serious Eats insists that you must flip your steak every 15 to 30 seconds in order to ensure a good sear while minimizing the "grey zone" of overdone steak that often appears between the crust and the pink or red interior.

Before going further, I should mention that this is probably really bad advice if you are grilling or if you have not used sufficient fat in the pan. The reason is that under those conditions the steak will tend to stick until a certain amount of sear has been achieved -- and if the crust tears off, your steak will look bad and taste bad. But with the oil-sufficient pan-searing method both I and Serious Eats endorse, at the very worst frequent flipping should be harmless. So is it actually helpful?

Maybe. I find that I get a virtually non-existent grey zone anyway, even with the one-flip method. But then again I have a nice heavy cast-iron skillet, I have a gas rather than electric range, one of the burners is extra large with an absurdly aggressive flame (it is labelled "POWER BOIL"), and I exploit all of these advantages to the fullest in order to get a really high temperature going in the pan. Not everyone may be able to achieve such a hot cook surface with their equipment, however, and the frequent flipping method seems like it should at least in principle mitigate any issues created by a somewhat lower cook temperature.

So, I cautiously endorse the frequent flipping approach, with the aforementioned caveats about grilling or pan-searing with insufficient fat. It's far more important that the steak releases fully from the cook surface than it is to minimize the grey zone, so if it's sticking at all, just leave it until it's ready.

(Edit: I looked up the post on which Serious Eats bases this advice, and their conclusion turned out to be remarkably similar to what I wrote above. I quote: "[T]his testing doesn't take into account variables like cooking at a higher or lower heat, getting nice grill marks on an outdoor grill... And for all you single flippers out there? Well, you can keep doing what you're doing and it probably won't hurt your burgers none, but lighten up a bit, will ya?" In other words, what I previously believed turned out to be largely correct: Single-flipping can produce better appearance in a grill application, surface cooking temperature affects the usefulness of multi-flipping, and in the end it really doesn't make that much of a difference after all.

I had also mentioned in passing that I sometimes stand it up on edge to sear the sides but had downplayed the importance of this, while Serious Eats is insistent on it. They mention the "edge is often the fattiest, most delicious part of the steak," which I suppose is true depending on the cut, and when that is true making sure to get a sear on that and render some of the fat would indeed be important. So I buy all that, too.

On a side note, the Serious Eats post mentions that searing, contrary to popular belief, does not seal in moisture. They are absolutely correct. However, a properly seared piece of meat still tastes moister, because the complex molecules generated by the Maillard reaction cause you to salivate more. The only time that this knowledge has any practical value is when roasting. Some recipes for roasting have you start with a very hot oven to get a good crust (or crisp the skin in the case of roast bird) and then reduce the temperature, while others have you start with a moderate temperature and then crank it up at the end to get the crust/crisp effect. It doesn't actually matter which you do; those who advocate the former method on the grounds that it seals in moisture are just plain wrong. The latter method probably has some modest advantages in that it is easier to avoid burning the exterior of whatever you are roasting, but in practice I don't think it matters that much. I have used both methods and don't find that one is tremendously better than the other. (Edit: Serious Eats makes a convincing case that it matters a lot in the case of prime rib.)

There is one more thing I should mention which was covered in the Serious Eats article, but regrettably overlooked in mine: How do you tell when it's done? I had mentioned a couple of times that you take it out of the pan as soon as you have a good sear, and I more or less stand by that, but having some way to gauge doneness is important too. I'm afraid I overlooked this point because over time I've gotten pretty good at just telling doneness by feel -- somewhat ironically, my most important practice for this was from a summer job as a fry cook at the rather crappy family restaurant chain Perkins, where, despite the steaks I churned out being of relatively low quality and not cooked all that skillfully, the sheer number I cooked, and the time pressure which precluded any more involved investigative methods, helped me to hone this skill -- so I don't tend to consciously think about this issue very much. My bad.

Serious Eats' coverage of this topic is both fascinating (I would never have guessed the cut-and-peek method did so little harm to the steak!) and apparently sound. One very brief point I have to make: In the end, they endorse the use of a "good, accurate digital thermometer." My response to this is "Yes, but" -- yes, if you are willing to shell out the cash, a good digital thermometer is the best method for determining internal temperature; but if you intend to cheap out, as I did (twice), an inexpensive analog thermometer is superior to a poor quality digital thermometer. I used to own the latter and now own the former. Leaving aside that it would have been better to have not cheaped out in the first place, since in total I ended up spending almost as much as it would have cost to get a good digital thermometer, I am much happier with the analog one than I ever was with the digital one. The cheap digital one never seemed to be all that accurate, and if I attempted to use it in a very hot environment, e.g. on the grill, it had a tendency to glitch out sometimes. The analog one is accurate, trustworthy, and was dirt cheap. The only disadvantage of it is that it takes a few seconds to get an accurate read, whereas a good digital thermometer can give you an internal temp right away. Since I mostly use it for testing the internal temperature of roasted poultry (which can take on the order of an hour or more to cook) that few seconds is a non-issue. But if I were using it for pan-seared steaks (where you are cooking them on the order of a couple of minutes) that few seconds could become a problem I suppose.

Anyway, there you have it. In all honesty, Serious Eats is probably a much more reliable source than myself for these sorts of things, as testified by their rigorous experimentation (whereas I'm basing all of my B.S. on mere experience and accumulated knowledge). You'll notice, however, that there is significant convergence in our conclusions. Proper salting technique in particular is, I think, one of the most overlooked skills for most home cooks. So if there's one take-home from these two posts, I think that would be it.

(h/t Ed Brayton)

Do you have a God-shaped hole in your heart?

2011-03-18T10:49:00.000-07:00

This post from PZ mentions that inane expression about how we all have a God-shaped hole in our heart that can only be filled by Jeebus. Gag me with a spoon.

But I think from a certain perspective, we do all have an existential deficiency that one might (if one were so-inclined) describe as a "God-shaped hole in the heart", whether we are aware of it or not. Only problem is, God doesn't fit, and neither does anything else. That's because the "hole" is a hallucination, an inherent artifact of human cognition. The God delusion works for some people to distract them from the "hole", because all of the inherent contradictions and incoherencies make it difficult to maintain a sharply-reasoned focus on the problem at hand; but it really doesn't do anything to address the problem.

The "hole" which I am referring to is the lack of an existentially satisfying answer to two of the Big Questions, specifically, "Why is there something rather than nothing?", and "Why do we actually experience our sentience?" It is my opinion that both of those questions, as reasonable as they sound (and still sound to me), aren't really questions at all, they are just meaningless words, no more useful than "This sentence is false." But they sure don't feel meaningless, and this is why I say we all, whether we admit it or not, have a specific existential deficiency.

I talked about the question of subjective conscious experience in a recent post, and also mentioned the problems with "Why is there something rather than nothing?" I want to amplify what I said in that post: Both of those questions are apparently subject to an infinite regress, but I believe that regress is a result of a cognitive deficiency inherent in being a human (and maybe inherent in being a sapient being of any kind). Just like the sensation of free will, they are nothing more than hallucinations -- but a hallucination that is impossible to avoid.

The correct answer to "Why is there something rather than nothing?" lies in physics and cosmology. I will not attempt to mount any sort of answer, because 1) I'm not qualified, 2) I'm not sure we really have the right answer yet anyway, and 3) I'm not entirely convinced the right answer is knowable by us even in principle. Note that this last point is entirely distinct from whether there is a right answer. In the distant future, the accelerating expansion of the universe will mean that galaxies are moving apart faster than the speed of light, and so any sentient observers that might be around at that time would have no way of knowing even in principle what the rest of their universe looks like -- but that doesn't mean the rest of the universe wouldn't be there. I don't rule out that the physical answer to this question may be similarly inaccessible to us.

But that still leaves us with the distinct feeling that there is a metaphysical question that remains unanswered, that for any physical explanation one can always say, "Okay, why that?" I am pretty sure that is nonsense. It's not existentially troubling (well, to me at least) to think that there are fundamental particles for which the question, "Okay, but what are those made of?" is invalid and a bit silly. So why should it be existentially troubling for there to be fundamental laws that just "are", and don't need some other deeper layer to explain them? Well, it's existentially troubling anyway, and knowing that it's nonsense doesn't really help.

It seems trivial to me -- so trivial that I continue to be baffled that philosophers and theologians ever took this stuff seriously, let alone that they still argue about it to this very day -- that any sort of goddy explanation is equally vulnerable to the apparent infinite regress. That is, if fundamental laws of physics are not an acceptable answer to the something-rather-than-nothing question (and I think it is acceptable, it just doesn't feel that way to us silly humans), then neither is the god hypothesis. Many people feel like it does, but they are just being distracted. "Okay, why that?" "Magic!" That's not an answer at all.

I've already covered the other question, but in brief, the correct answer to the problem of subjective experience is to point to our neurology. The infinite regress here is, "Okay, but what's actually experiencing those neural impulses?" It's a nonsense question; the question was already answered. It just doesn't feel like it has, because of our difficulties in comprehending our own non-existence. And just as with the other one, the theistic explanation dazzles rather than explains. If neural circuitry is not a sufficient substrate for conscious experience (and I believe it is, it just doesn't feel like it), then neither is the "soul" a sufficient substrate. "It's magic!" is no answer at all.

Most of the other Big Questions I think do have rather satisfying answers. "Why are we here?", for instance, has the literal answer that rests in natural selection, and the metaphysical answer that, since sapience is the substrate of meaning, the "why" has to come from us. We have a monopoly on meaning, and the idea of an external meaning to ourselves is just silly-talk. It's not even that our existence is externally meaningless; it's that meaning-external-to-sapience is nonsense words. You might as well ask about light-external-to-photons. Once we realize that 100% of meaning is determined by ourselves, I think that's both liberating and inspiring. The correct answer to "What happens after we die?" is troubling, I suppose, but it's a clear and unambiguous answer, with not even the appearance of an infinite regress or anything like that. And so on.

But yeah, we do all have a "god-shaped hole in our hearts", and it's the inability to ever give an existentially satisfying answer to those two hallucinatory questions. God doesn't actually fill that hole, but for some of us He's shiny enough to distract us from it!

I finally understand why people think same-sex marriage "threatens traditional marriage"

2011-03-17T10:37:00.000-07:00

This quote from PZ was one of those "Oh damn, now I get it" moments for me:

If we strip marriage of the asymmetry of power, as we must if we allow men to marry men and women to marry women, then we also strip away the man and wife, dominant and submissive, owner and owned, master and servant relationship that characterizes the conservative view of marriage.

Of course! I was always really puzzled how anyone could assert with a straight face that allowing more people to get married was somehow destructive towards the "institution of traditional marriage". But my confusion was a result of me thinking that the definition of "traditional marriage" was simply that it was between a man and a woman. If that were the case, then I would be right, same-sex marriage poses no threat to that "institution" because, with the possible exception of a few sexless sham marriages, the number of people getting "traditional marriages" would be exactly the same as before, and the couples in them would be entirely unaffected.

But if the definition of "traditional marriage" inherently implies patriarchy as well, then of course same-sex marriage is corrosive to that institution. No heterosexual person is going to look at someone else's same-sex marriage and say, "Hey, that looks like fun, I think I'm going to decide to be gay!": sexual orientation doesn't work like that. But it's entirely plausible that many heterosexual women might look at a happily married well-adjusted same-sex couple and say, "Hey, how come they treat each other like equals? Shouldn't I be treated as an equal with my husband?" And that's just bad for business. If you're a misogynist patriarchal theocrat, that is.

Why a nuclear reactor can never turn into a nuclear bomb

2011-03-15T09:05:00.000-07:00

Edit: Karl Withakay has pointed out a couple of omissions and a small factual error in this post. I have indicated this in the footnotes. Please do read his illuminating comments, especially if you are interested in the more technical aspects of nuclear technology.

The news from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant continues to be horribly depressing. For me, nothing mitigates this kind of discouragement more than being overly technical about it, so let's do that.

As bad as the situation is, there's been lots of really just stupidly over-the-top fear-mongering, and other websites have done a good job addressing that. One thing I've noticed has been omitted, though, is that while there are many resources out there reassuring people that a nuclear explosion is not possible in this case, because a nuclear reactor and a nuclear bomb are two completely different things, I haven't seen anyone offering a lay explanation of why that is the case. So I will attempt to do so here.

Say you've got a lump of Uranium-235, the fuel used in most nuclear reactors. Really, you'd have a lump of rock that contained some amount of U-235, which you would have attempted to purify as much as possible, but this is all beside the point¹. This lump of U-235 can be subcritical, critical, or supercritical.

To understand what these terms mean we need to briefly revisit the basics of a nuclear fission reaction. I'll leave the detailed explanation to the Wikipedia article, but for our purposes, the important point is that when a U-235 atom splits into two pieces, along with the energy that is released, it also ejects three stray neutrons. It turns out that what induces the U-235 atom to split in the first place is being struck by a stray neutron. So you fission one atom, which causes three more atoms to split, which in turn trigger nine more fission reactions, then 27, then 81, and so on exponentially until you get a whole heapin' load of energy.

Except not quite. The stray neutrons don't always hit a U-235 atom. Sometimes they miss, and just go shooting off into the distance. Actually, since all the matter around us is mostly empty space, they usually miss.

And here's the key point: The more dense your lump of U-235 is -- the closer together the atoms are -- the more likely it is for an ejected neutron to bump into one of the atoms. I'm sure this makes good intuitive sense, since obviously it's easier to hit one of a whole bunch of targets clustered close together than it is to hit a one of a few targets scattered far apart.

If the odds of a neutron hitting a U-235 atom are less than 1 in 3, i.e. on average, each time an atom splits and ejects three neutrons the average number that go on to trigger another fission reaction is less than one, then we say the mass is subcritical. You will get some energy released, but the reaction will rapidly peter out as you run out of neutrons.

If the odds of a neutron hitting a U-235 atom are exactly 1 in 3, i.e. on average, each time an atom splits and ejects three neutrons an average of one of them connects, then we say the mass is critical. You will get a fairly constant release of energy until all of the fuel is used up. This is how you want to run a nuclear reactor.

If the odds of a neutron hitting a U-235 atom are more than 1 in 3, i.e. on average each split atom causes more than one other atom to split, then your mass is supercritical. All other things being equal (which they aren't; more on this in a second) fission will continue in a chain reaction style, releasing energy faster and faster, until you get a mind-numbingly large explosion.

This is how you want to build your nuclear bomb. But the thing is, just being supercritical isn't enough. Your mass has to be really supercritical to get a bomb of any serious yield. This is because supercriticality tends to be self-limiting. To see why this is, let's examine what (probably) happened with North Korea's unsuccessful atomic bomb test: Fizzle.

The North Korean bomb test managed to create a pretty supercritical mass of U-235². The chain reaction starts, and, as intended, a really impressive amount of energy is delivered in a really short period of time, causing an explosion. But in that unsuccessful bomb test, the resulting (relatively small) explosion blew the mass of uranium apart before most of the U-235 had a chance to fission. So there was an explosion, but not nearly as big as they were looking for.

It turns out it's really hard to get around this problem. The North Korean engineers had to work pretty damn hard even just to get the result they did. If you tried to just slowly squeeze some U-235 together to make a supercritical mass, you'd never get there, because as soon as you got very slightly supercritical, you'd either burn up enough uranium that you weren't supercritical anymore, or you'd heat it up and the density would go down enough to take you out of the supercritical zone.

And that's what makes it so damn hard to build a nuclear bomb. Your bomb contains some amount of subcritical material, and you need to smash or squeeze it together so that it becomes not just a little supercritical, but hugely amazingly supercritical, and it does it so fast that the bomb doesn't blow itself apart when you are only halfway there. Even successful nuclear bombs of the type described so far have a fairly low percentage yield, which is why engineers have designed all sorts of clever ways to mitigate this problem.

(For a moment, I must digress because I noticed my enthusiasm is showing through here. I find the technology behind nuclear weapons to be absolutely awe-inspiring; it is just such a remarkable feat of pure engineering. But from a human perspective they are also terrible terrible things, and I am confident the world would be better off without them. Just to be clear. My fascination with the technology does not in any way diminish my opposition to the horror that these devices can wreak upon humankind.)

So what does all this have to do with nuclear power plants? Well, as mentioned before, you want the fuel for your nuclear power plant to be right around (actually just under) the critical mass. That means it's not even close to exploding. (The explosions at Fukushima Daiichi were hydrogen combustion explosions, not nuclear explosions, and other blogs have already explained how that happened far better than I ever could)

Even if somehow the fuel got compressed so that it became supercritical, it would rapidly self-correct down to the critical level, by heating, melting, or (if somehow it got really supercritical, which it wouldn't) blowing apart. It's just so damn hard to get uranium to the level where you'd have a legitimate atomic bomb explosion, there's just no way it could possibly happen by accident.

We might have intuitively expected this, since the first artificial nuclear reactor was built by Enrico Fermi and a handful of grad students on a freakin' abandoned tennis court (and in fact it even occurs naturally in at least one place in the world), whereas the first successful nuclear bomb test required scores of the world's top physicists, a massive industrial support operation, and god knows how much money and resources. But it's worth understanding the reasons anyhow.

This doesn't mean that the situation at Fukushima Daiichi couldn't get really bad. The worst case scenario for a nuclear power plant is more akin to a dirty bomb, which is not exactly super happy fun time either. And, I struggle how to say this tactfully, but the real tragedy may be that this torpedoes our last best shot at a politically tenable solution to (at least temporarily) dodge the problem of global warming. It is only a little bit hyperbolic to say that this tsunami may in the end kill billions. More about that in a future post, perhaps.

¹Turns out this is not so much "beside the point" as I thought. Karl Withakay tells us that while the fuel used in commercial nuclear reactors is enriched to contain about 3-5% U-235, the minimum purity requirement for a bomb is around 20%, and in practical devices it is much much higher. So not only is it impossible for even highly-enriched uranium to "accidentally" become supercritical enough to create a significant explosion, you couldn't even do it on purpose with the fuel used in nuclear reactors.

²Karl also points out that the North Korean test used plutonium rather than uranium. For the purposes of this explanation, the concept is similar enough to suffice. But please do read Karl's comments, which provide some additional technical background and clarify a few minor errors I made in trying to whip off this post using top-of-my-head knowledge rather than actually doing the research.

Angry Birds Rio: Most confusing cross-promotion ever?

2011-03-14T10:33:00.001-07:00

So the very popular cellphone game Angry Birds is coming out with a sequel/more episodes/however you want to call it, called "Angry Birds Rio".

But you won't be able to buy it in the Android Marketplace or in the iPhone app store. It is being launched exclusively for Android in the Amazon Appstore.

Oh wait, but the Amazon Appstore doesn't exist yet. It is co-launching with Angry Birds Rio. Which is probably a good idea, because otherwise nobody fucking cares (it's like launching your video game platform at the same time as the first "killer app" -- the failure to do so being a big problem for Playstation 3 initially, for example). But it still adds to the confusion.

And then the title turns out to be a reference to the upcoming animated movie Rio. So the whole game is a product tie-in for a completely different product.

Weird.

Tempeh parmesan

2011-03-11T06:14:00.001-08:00

A friend asked for some vegetarian/vegan recipes on Facebook, and I realized in responding that I had never recorded my recipe for tempeh parmesan. Unfortunately I don't have pictures, which would be really useful for this recipe since the only real innovation is how I cut the tempeh. I'll try to do it with a diagram, but maybe I'll plan on making this sometime next week and then doing an update with pics. Without further ado:

Tempeh Parmesan

One 8-oz. package soy tempeh¹
1 egg
1/3 cup (approx.) flour
1/3 cup (approx.) Panko bread crumbs (or any bread crumbs)
Vegetable oil
Jarred tomato sauce
1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
2 Tbsp chopped Fresh basil (optional)
Freshly shredded parmesan (optional)

The key here is how you cut the tempeh in order to yield two rather convincing-looking "breasts". If you get it just right, then the appearance will be exactly like chicken parm, the texture will be exactly like chicken parm, and the other flavors will come through enough that you will barely notice it ain't chicken. If it looks complicated, that's only because I'm explaining it poorly; once you've done this one time, it should take you less than five minutes, tops, to carve the "breasts".

First, make a diagonal cut about a 1/3 of the way from each end of the tempeh to yield two identical right trapezoids, like so:

Next, place each trapezoid in turn flat on the cutting board, and make a lateral cut starting at the pointed end, about 1/4" or less from the cutting board, angled slightly up so that the cut finishes about halfway back through the "breast":

Round out the three corners to give it a less artificial look.

Finally, in a manner similar to the previous step, look for any sharp or artificial-looking edges that remain and trim just a teensy bit off where necessary to give it a nice rounded organic look. At this point, it's more art than craft: just do your best to "sculpt" it to look like what you think a chicken breast ought to look like. Discard the trimmings, or reserve them for a different use.

Place both "breasts" in a pot of boiling salted water for 15 minutes or so. Drain carefully -- don't accidentally break off the tips of your nicely carved "breast", as I have done on occasion! -- and pat dry.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Obtain three shallow bowls and arrange them left to right, with your "breasts" to the left of them and your stove to the right. In the first bowl, thoroughly beat the egg. The second bowl gets the flour, and the third bowl gets the Panko bread crumbs. On the stovetop, pour vegetable oil in to a medium heavy-bottomed skillet until it is about 1/4" deep, and heat over medium-high heat.

When the oil is up to temp, take each "breast" in turn and dip it first in the egg using your left hand. Then, using your right hand, dip it in the flour and shake off any excess. Again using your right hand, dip it in the bread crumbs and again shake off any excess. Try to get as many bread crumbs to stick as possible. (The point of using separate hands is to avoid inadvertently breading your hands, which is gross and makes it hard to work) Place the "breast" in the pan and quickly repeat the process with the other "breast". If increasing the recipe, work in batches of two so as not to crowd the pan.

Fry in the oil until bottom side is golden-brown, about 1-3 minutes. Flip and continue to fry until other side is done, another 1-2 minutes. Remove to a plate with a paper towel on it to soak up excess oil.

Place "breasts" in a shallow baking pan, and pour sauce over the top until both are covered. Sprinkle mozzarella cheese on top. Place in oven and bake until sauce thickens and cheese starts to turn golden-brown around the edges, about 15-20 minutes. Remove from oven, place each "breast" on a plate, and spoon any excess sauce from the pan on top. If using basil and/or parmesan, sprinkle over top just before serving.

Serves two, but can be easily increased.

¹I strongly recommend against grain or flavored tempeh for this recipe, as the nutty flavor competes with the breading, tomato sauce, and cheese flavors, making it seem less "Italian". The more neutral flavor of soy tempeh is a much better fit.

Belief in the "soul" does nothing to address the problem of subjective consciousness

2011-03-10T07:51:00.001-08:00

Apologies in advance for the even-more-rambly-than-usual nature of this post. I am fighting off a bit of a cold -- which you'd think would advise against attempting to tackle existential questions of consciousness, wouldn't you? Ah well. I'm sure I'll catch some of it in proofreading, but it may be a little, eh, disorganized from time to time.

I mentioned I've been experiencing a bit of existential angst recently, mostly surrounding the nature of subjective consciousness. For one thing, I have recently come to view the following quote, commonly attributed to Mark Twain, in a different light: "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." True, my non-existence will surely bother me as much after I am dead as it did before I was born (i.e. not at all). But when one really contemplates the fact that one's consciousness did not exist in the past, it seems to me to be just as terrifying an existential abyss as contemplating one's future annihilation! Now not only do I have to look death straight in the face and come to terms with it, but I have to have a staring contest with the birth of consciousness as well. Oy...

But the fact that I know I won't "suffer the slightest inconvenience from it" is indeed a comfort. I guess the bigger question that has really been troubling me can be expressed most succinctly as, "Why aren't we p-zombies?"

Now, before going any further, I need to be clear that I think p-zombies, in the strongest sense (and in the sense that is troubling me), are a silly idea. Perhaps it is my philosophical naturalism talking, but it seems plainly obvious to me that an identical physical replica to ourselves would experience consciousness in any possible universe. To borrow from Douglas Hostadter, that would be like trying to imagine an identical copy of an internal combustion engine, except this copy doesn't actually burn gasoline to create energy, it just simulates doing so. Yeah, that's silly.

But of course the allure of Chalmers's concept is that it sure seems like a sensible question even if it's not. Indeed, compared to the real universe, it is comparatively easy for me to imagine a universe populated by p-zombies, in that they really do think, and they sure do appear to experience subjective feelings, but there's nobody actually really experiencing it, at least not the way I subjectively experience it. To reference Hofstadter again, he referred to consciousness as "a hallucination hallucinating itself," a phrase which I found somewhat obtuse at the time I read it (though I knew what he meant and basically agreed), but now that same phrase has real resonance, and is terrifying at the same time.

This has been bothering me enough that for a moment I was like, "Man, I almost wish I believed in a soul and the afterlife and all that..." But then I realized that doesn't even answer the question. The question of why some living things are sentient and some are clearly not, and the blurriness of that line... that is all left completely unexplained. Unless, I guess, you believe that no animal except us ensouled humans feels a damn thing (which I realize was the predominant Christian worldview until fairly recently), but that just seems so clearly implausible on its face. And that only resolves the blurriness of the line, it still leaves all of the "whys" untouched.

There is a similar infinite regress as one encounters when trying to give a theistic answer the big "Why is there something rather than nothing?" To that question, for any answer, you can always say, "Okay, so why that?" (e.g. why god?) Similarly, "Why do we have a subjective experience of anything?" has a similar infinite regress. Sure, I can describe how human neurology seems to be quite an adequate machine for simulating subjective experience -- but from an intuitive standpoint, that seems as existentially unsatisfying as Lawrence Krauss' answer to the "something rather than nothing" question: "Nothing is unstable." Krauss' answer is pithy and compelling, but it is no less vulnerable to the reply of, "Okay, why that?"

But if a perfectly good mechanistic reason seems existentially unsatisfying, why should a magic reason be any different?

I can ask, "Why do we feel?" and you can point to all of the neurological mechanisms that allow us to feel, and I can always retort, "Okay, sure, that all makes sense, but why do I actually feel it?" (Which I believe to be a nonsensical question, but it doesn't always feel nonsensical on a sleepless night) If to the first question you instead pointed to the soul, I can ask the same damn question! Well, except for the "making sense" part. But still... again, maybe it's my philosophical naturalism talking, but it seems to me that saying that the soul is the substrate of subjective experience is just as existentially dissatisfying (actually, more so) as saying that the brain is the substrate of subject experience. What is there about the substrate that allows it to experience stuff? Does my soul have a soul? Does my soul's soul have a soul? Where does the regress end?

Answer: It ends with our biology, clearly. There's something rather charming and beautiful and amazing about that, but also rather dizzying. I've been angst-y about it lately, but I still feel like the materialistic explanation is ultimately the most satisfying -- and not only from an expository perspective, but from an existential perspective as well. Magical explanations like the soul don't resolve anything; they just dazzle us enough to make us forget the original question.

Death and coffee

2011-03-09T06:06:00.000-08:00

This is the first time I've used our coffee maker at home in quite some time -- it got moved into the basement when we were renovating our kitchen, and we didn't move it right back up when we were done because my wife couldn't drink much coffee when she was pregnant. I'm working from home today, so I fired it up.

I remember, when Nicole (my friend who died in December) would come to visit us, she would use way too many coffee beans and grind them way too fine, which would cause the water to back up in the filter and spill all over the counter, making a huge mess. It drove my wife absolutely bonkers, but Nicole didn't want to do it any differently because "I do this with my coffee maker and there is no problem!"

Seems petty in retrospect, but of course that's in retrospect. It would be nice if we could interact with our loved ones every day as if it might be the last time we would see them, but in practice it just doesn't work like that. I think we could all use a little more perspective, but too much perspective is crippling.

Just some random thoughts. I've been experiencing a lot of existential angst lately (nothing like the sudden passing of a close friend and the birth of your second child coming within six weeks of each other to make you think about life and death, eh?!) and I've been thinking of doing a post about it, but haven't quite collected my thoughts.

Fort Bragg, Rock Beyond Belief, and the taxpayer

2011-03-08T06:11:00.000-08:00

Regardless of one's theistic preferences or political leanings, everyone should be outraged about the recent decision by military brass at Fort Bragg to put crippling restrictions on the planned Rock Beyond Belief festival, leading to its cancellation. Even if you are an uber-conservative Evangelical Christian Tea Partier, you should still be pissed off about this indefensible decision.

One paragraph of very brief background for anyone who is not aware of this: Fort Bragg recently hosted a Rock the Fort music festival, an Evangelical Christian event which was expressly for the purposes of obtaining converts, for which the military shelled out over $50,000 and which was explicitly endorsed by the military as part of its controversial Spiritual Fitness program. Concerned about the questionable constitutionality of this activity, Sgt. Justin Griffith, backed by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), applied to host a similar secular event caled Rock Beyond Belief, taking advantage of a DoD regulation compelling the military to provide similar accommodations to groups of differing viewpoints whenever it sponsors an outside organization. It looked like everything was proceeding smoothly, until last week when it was abruptly announced that the Fort Bragg brass were going against the advice of their legal team, and refusing to provide any funding for the event, confining it to a smaller venue than originally promised, and demanding a special disclaimer on any promotional materials for the event stating that it was not endorsed by Fort Bragg.

Now, many people may ask why the military ought to be compelled to shell out $40k+ to host a pro-secularism event on a military installation. Indeed, it rather seems like the military shouldn't really be in the business of doing that, eh? I agree! Better would have been for Fort Bragg to stay out of this altogether, and fund neither the Rock the Fort nor the Rock Beyond Belief event. But it's too late for that now, and both the constitution as well as DoD regulations are quite explicit about the next steps. You can oppose both events, but you can't support the first and oppose the second.

Another fair objection might be that while the military is bound by their own regulations to support Rock Beyond Belief, the level of funding and accomodations should be proportional to the expected audience. It turns out this argument fails on a technicality, since the relevant DoD regulations specifically mandate the same level of support, but I am willing to entertain this argument on a pragmatic basis. The Fort Bragg leadership's decision still fails when exposed to a numerical analysis.

In 2001, Christians comprised 71% of the active duty military. This includes Catholics and other denominations, so it is not really fair to use this number to represent potential interest in an Evangelical event, but I'm going to be extra generous here. Those who identified as atheist or as having no religious preference weighed in at 21%. (Note that, contrary to the pernicious "No atheists in foxholes" myth, this is slightly higher than among the general US population. I guess something about seeing little children get shot in the face has a tendency to diminish one's belief in an omnipotent omnibenevolent being... but I digress!)

If we were to argue that the level of financial support for a given event should be directly proportional to the number of potentially interested participants, by my calculations the military should have offered around $16,000 to Rock Beyond Belief. Now, as I said, this would still be a violation of the DoD's own regulations, and in any case it is clearly unethical to act like you are going to give someone $40,000 and then very late in the planning stages cut the funding by more than half. But even by this very lax standard of behavior, the Fort Bragg brass looks really bad: They are offering Rock Beyond Belief a grand total of zero dollars and zero cents.

The Fort Bragg leadership have offered a few other excuses for refusing to finance the event, e.g. they claim the smaller venue is acceptable because none of the musicians or speakers that have been lined up for Rock Beyond Belief have widespread mainstream appeal (never mind that the same was true of the Rock the Fort lineup...). But the point is, even if you buy these arguments, to offer no financial support at all, and then, adding insult to injury, to demand that all promotional materials for the event carry a notice disclaiming any implicit support by Fort Bragg whastoever -- this is just not justifiable based on any sort of practical argument.

There is one more argument, an ideological rather than practical argument, that one might make for the decision to scuttle Rock Beyond Belief: that, simply put, Christians are Good, and atheists are Bad. To that, I would first like to say, "Fuck you," but I would also like to point out that Fort Bragg's own legal team advised that the original plan be accepted without modification. There is just no way that the military will prevail in the forthcoming lawsuit, and the legal costs are going to be a hell of a lot more than forty-grand. Not only are their actions clearly unconstitutional, but DoD regulations impose an even stricter standard than the Constitution, eliminating any ambiguity of interpretation about what the military was legally bound to do.

In particular, the bizarre decision to demand the disclaimer pretty much guarantees that the military is going to get their asses handed to them in court. One has to ask what they even thought the point of this requirement was. Clearly, when the funding was denied, Rock Beyond Belief was already cancelled as a practical matter. You can't take a fourty-thousand dollar event and then cut its primary source of funding just weeks before it is supposed to take place, and expect the Show to Go On. The disclaimer requirement was utterly unnecessary, because in practice it was never going to come into play. It is almost as if they were asking for an unwinnable lawsuit.

I think there are only two explanations that make sense here: Either a lone zealot in the Fort Bragg leadership (most likely Garrison Commander Colonel Stephen Sicinski, if this is the case) was so offended by the idea of Rock Beyond Belief that he embarked on a quixotic quest to spit on the First Amendment rights of 21% of the active duty military; or else this was done on the orders of some higher-up(s) who is/are looking for an opportunity for political grandstanding, and couldn't care less what the results of the lawsuit turn out to be, since a defeat for the military would only bolster their martyr posturing.

In either of the above cases, this is being done on the taxpayers' dime, who, make no mistake, will end up paying through the nose for excessive legal costs, and almost certainly for an expensive settlement. If you aren't outraged by this, I just don't know what to say....

Bee-bim Bop!

2011-03-07T06:51:00.000-08:00

I've been starting to try and pay a little more attention to, well, blog-whoring to put it frankly. One thing I noticed from Google Analytics is that while most of the traffic I get is obviously on the most recent post, the trickle of hits I get on older posts is predominantly due to cooking- or food-related Google searches. Even before I noticed this, I had been meaning to knuckle down and do more cooking related posts. So the goal for a little while here will be one post per day (except weekends, when I may or may not post) and alternating one atheism-related post with one cooking-related post. Yesterday I blogged about the whole "Tom Johnson"/Wally Smith mess, which was obviously atheism-related -- so without further ado:

One of my older son's first favorite books was Bee-bim Bop! by Linda Sue Park. The title refers to a Korean dish, generally rendered as "bibimbap", which translates literally to "mixed-up rice" or "mixed-up meal". Each line of the book ends with "Hungry for some Bee-bim Bop!" or "Time for Bee-bim Bop!" or some such. When Quinn was just first learning to say a few words, my wife or I would read it to him, ending each page with an anticipatory "Beeeee.... Bimmmmmm....", and then wait for him to shout "BOP!", much to both his and our mutual amusement.

Recipes and interpretations vary wildly, with the only commonality being that the ingredients are served without being mixed together, and then the diner mixes them together at the table inside their bowl. Park's version focuses on ingredients that can take the form of strips or strings (e.g. thinly sliced beef, bean sprouts, julienned carrots, egg "pancakes" that have been rolled and then sliced in a sort of chiffonade style, etc.) which are served in separate bowls, along with rice, allowing the diner to choose which ingredients they want to use. You choose the ingredients you want, spoon them on top of your rice -- and then, as the penultimate page of the book instructs us to do, "MIX IT! MIX LIKE CRAZY!"

I won't post the recipe here, because a) I feel it would be a genuinely unethical violation of copyright, and b) the only part of the recipe I follow religiously anyway is the marinade for the beef, and to be honest it's a fairly straightforward sweet-savory Asian marinade with sesame oil anyway, so I'm sure you can find a comparable recipe online. I will, however, show a picture of the spread we had set up for it Saturday night:

The two bowls on the left are white rice and brown rice. The remaining ingredients are, starting at the back row and going left-to-right and then back-to-front: Asparagus, pan-fried sliced red peppers, julienned cucumbers, marinated sirloin beef strips, "chiffonaded" egg pancakes, pan-friend julienned carrots, steamed mung bean sprouts, sliced scallions, and pan-fried quartered baby corns.

The asparagus was a spur-of-the-moment experiment. I've been itching for asparagus season to start, but unwilling to buy some that's been shipped halfway around the world so my fat American ass can have it in winter. But it occurred to me that for bee-bim bop, I would want really very thin stalks (which are the opposite of what I usually buy since I usually roast or grill them, in which case a nice thick stalk is good for getting some browning without totally draining them of any crispness) so that they would bend easily and be more suitable for this "mixed-up" meal, and that with all those other ingredients the quality wouldn't matter as much. It was a success, and I will probably do it again.

(If you'll pardon a brief digression... I just recently found out, from the excellent magazine Cooks Illustrated, that the thickness of asparagus stalks is not at all determined by when they are harvested, but rather by the age of the plant itself, which will yield stalks annually for a good five or six years. Young plants produce thin stalks, older plants produce thicker stalks. Wild, eh?)

The baby corn had been another spur-of-the-moment experiment, from the previous time I made bee-bim bop. I had been in the grocery store buying the ingredients, and saw that they carried fresh baby corn, as opposed to the frozen or canned kind. I took a gamble that this might give it a nice bright flavor (in contrast to the mushy blandness of your typical stir-fry baby corn), and that if I cooked them by themselves in a hot pan with some oil I might be able to get a little caramelization of the sugars going to further enhance the taste. I turned out to be right on both counts -- they came out crisp and bright and with that nice inimitable roasted vegetable flavor. The only problem was that the whole baby corns didn't "mix up" very well, so this time I quartered them lengthwise, which was a win-win since it also increased the surface area for caramelization.

The one part of Park's recipe I will directly paraphrase -- since I think it's a common technique but one I hadn't encountered before and really liked -- is the "chiffonaded" egg strips. You just beat up some eggs, put a little bit in a pan with some oil so that it forms a thin "pancake", flip it once, remove it from the pan, roll it into a tight little roll, and then thinly slice. When it unrolls, you get these nice little egg confetti things that are a great addition to bee-bim bop, and would probably work with pretty much any stir-fry, maybe even on a salad or something.

So there you have it. Nothing too special here, but a really fun meal, both to prepare and to eat. It takes a little longer than is optimal for a weeknight meal, since every ingredient has to be prepared separately (though you really don't need to do nearly as many as I did here, half as many veggies would have been fine). But as a special little family tradition, it's just fantastic.

"Tom Johnson" inadvertently highlights the epistemic peril of religion

2011-03-06T05:43:00.000-08:00

"Tom Johnson" has been outed, and I can't say I feel good about the whole thing. Just bad feelings all around, nothing much to be learned at this point.

But, one interesting thing is that we now have an article from OnEarth which appears to be a first-person account of the event on which the original fabricated "Johnson" story was based. The climax of the story turns out to provide a potentially valuable teaching moment about the extent to which accomodationist-like tactics are appropriate, and where they can go off the rails:

[A]n elementary-aged child asked me the usual question that comes up when I show animals to a crowd.

"Why do these things even matter?"

Here was my chance, my opportunity to lecture about amphibians' contributions to energy flow in ecosystems, about their intrinsic value as biodiversity, why anyone with least bit of education should understand why we need to protect diversity. Before I had my chance, an older man in the crowd piped up.

"Because God created them, and it's our job to make sure they stay around," he said simply. A rumble of "mm-hmm's" and head nods rippled through the congregation...

Could it really be that simple, finding some common ground for conservation? I'd like to think so. Here I was, my head full of fear-inducing facts about biodiversity loss and data from published studies, and the older man's answer was more than enough to satisfy the child. My name-dropping of famous environmentalists and quoting of influential studies was going to have little more impact than speaking in Latin would have. Our reasons may have been different, but our goals were the same: conservation in the name of morality, of science, of God - whatever you wanted to call it.

Now, I'm not sure whether Wally Smith went on to give his favored answer anyway -- "My [answer] was going to have little more impact..." (emph. mine) could imply that he went ahead and gave his answer anyway, even knowing it would have little impact ("was going to" signifying something about to happen); or it could imply that he decided not to ("was going to" signifying something that had been planned to happen, but no longer). If the latter, he did those kids a serious disservice. And in either case, his touchy-feely ecumenicism in regards to the motivation for conservation contains some serious hidden dangers.

First, let me make clear what I am not suggesting. Nobody thinks that Smith should have said, "Well no, that's not actually true, because God doesn't exist. The real reasons are..." That would have been needlessly confrontational, and would obviously have undermined the important message he was trying to get across. Does anyone really believe that even the most fiery of the Gnu Atheists would have responded that way?

I'm not even suggesting something like the somewhat more innocuous, "Well I don't know about that, but..." He was there for the primary purpose of getting these folks on board with conservation, and he was presenting to a group where (unfortunately) even the merest hint of skepticism would have undermined his credibility. I get that. As strong an advocate I am of being "out" as an atheist, I acknowledge there are rare occasions where tact and/or tactics legitimately dictate reticence on that point.

An appropriate way to continue would have been something like, "Not only that, but.." or "It's also been observed..", etc. But in any case, it was imperative that Smith continue on and give the secular answer, even if most of his audience couldn't care less beyond the old man's godsaidso explanation. I'll quote from a comment I left at the article:

How do you know that amongst the chorus of "Mmm-hmmms", there weren't a few kids remaining silent, kids who had started to realize the worldview in which they were raised had serious cracks? What if that little girl gets a little older and suddenly "godsaidso" isn't a good enough answer for her anymore? Hell, what if she doesn't even leave her faith, but moves to a different town with a pastor who says that none of this matters because the end times are coming soon?

Smith states that "our goals were the same: conservation in the name of morality, of science, of God - whatever you wanted to call it." But the problem with this attitude is that morality¹ and science are real, and God is not. This matters. If I may wax biblically for a moment, this is the difference between building your house on a rock and building your house on the sand.

Because there are no epistemic underpinnings to faith-based beliefs, there is no mechanism for sorting good ideas from bad. If my commitment to conservation is based on facts, then if someone wants to modify my beliefs they will have to challenge those facts directly, by showing that either I was mistaken, or that other factual concerns outweigh the ones I was aware of. If my commitment to conservation is based on some old guy's interpretation of what a mythical being wants me to do, there are countless vulnerabilities that could be attacked. Not only might I some day come to realize that said being is in fact a myth, but much more trivially, someone could simply argue that the old man's interpretation was wrong. Who's to say? We are talking about the commands of a fictional being, of whom the only "official" account we have is a very long book written thousands of years ago and riddled with contradictions and obvious errors. There is no mechanism by which we could even in principle test whose interpretation was right. So ultimately, my commitment to conservation has literally no grounding whatosever.

There is an important qualification to be made here. I recognize that fundamental beliefs tend to be far more resistant to change than derived beliefs, and that could seem to contradict what I am saying. After all, it probably would be easier, for example, to convince someone like me that anthropogenic global warming was a hoax than it would be to convince a committed Christian that Jesus never existed. I doubt I ever shall be convinced of such a thing, but we could easily talk in principle about what kinds of new information and arguments would convince me; whereas it is impossible to say what would convince a committed Christian to abandon her belief in Jesus, because it would require a fundamental shift in worldview.

But here's the thing: I don't think that conservationism is a fundamental belief for most conservation-minded theists, certainly not for the sorts of folks who would be at an Alabama gathering of the Southern Baptists. I think that conservationism for them is derived from other beliefs -- if Smith's account is to be believed, primarily from faith-based ones. It is probably fair to say that no matter how convincingly Smith might have argued for a secular motivation behind conservation, there is probably no way he could have made that belief more resilient than the audience's belief in Jesus, etc. But that doesn't say a damn thing about the resilience of the audience's belief in faith-inspired conservationism!

The audience's fundamental belief in their religion may be rock solid, but because that belief happens to be hollow to the core, with no epistemic grounding to speak of, any derived beliefs based solely on their religion are inherently arbitrary, and are therefore quite weak.

Again, I don't know what Smith actually did. Maybe he did just what I thought he should do, maybe he continued on with the secular explanation anyway. And for what it's worth, I think that given the crisis situation we are in regarding the environment, it is probably a legitimate tactic to exploit theists' beliefs to bolster their commitment to conservation. But if we let that be their only commitment to conservation, that is a massive blunder, both a tactical and a strategic failure. Even from a hardcore accomodationist perspective, I don't see how anyone could argue otherwise.

¹Okay, I realize error theorists, relativists, and non-cognitivists might well disagree with me here. Let's leave the meta-ethics discussion aside for the moment, as fascinating a topic as that is, because I don't feel that it is crucial to the point I am making here.

Do you have your snark-hunting permit for this year yet?

2011-03-04T05:22:00.000-08:00

Well, as everyone in the atheist blogosphere knows by now, Jeremy Stangroom has begun a rather interesting campaign to document instances of inappropriate/unacceptable incivility on the part of the Gnu Atheists. I actually give the guy some credit for doing this; for too long, the gnu-bashers have accused us of systemic and unconscionable incivility, and then when challenged to back it up with examples, they have responded with stony silence.

Stangroom, in contast, is attempting to put his money where his mouth is, and as far as it goes, is not doing a terrible job. Out of the six examples he has cited so far, I admit I found two of them to be positively cringe-worthy (Dawkins' "stupid face" comment, and Blackford's calling Chris Mooney a "disgusting traitor" simply because he took Templeton money¹). The other four inspired more of a shrug in me -- have you heard of this new thing called "weblogs", where people say whatever they want in an unedited and unmoderated forum? -- and it doesn't reflect well that Stangroom is reaching back several years to find this stuff. His campaign is ultimately a big fat "So what?" -- as several have pointed out, in order to show that gnus are systematically more incivil than other similar groups, he'd have to be citing several egregious examples every day -- but I still give him credit for rising to the challenge, however ineffectually.

What I want to talk about briefly, even though I don't have that much to say about it, is PZ's post on the topic, or more specifically, the comments. PZ is really pushing it here with this post, but of course, that's PZ's schtick. Are there really people out there who wish that every single outspoken atheist were perfectly level-headed and fair all of the time??? If so, I think those people are really boring. PZ flirts with "the line" all the time, and sometimes crosses it, and that's what makes Pharyngula so entertaining.

The comments, though, I think are going way too far. There's some rather vulgar reinventions of Stangroom's name, a whole lot of empty ridicule, etc. The commenters are trying to make a point, of course -- that they will not be reigned in by the tone police, and that any attempt to do so will just result in further escalation -- but it's unseemly and not very flattering towards them.

In other words, it looks kind of like most of the rest of the Internet. Only spelled better.

I'll be honest, I think the comments section at Pharyngula is a rather nasty place, and I don't really spend any time there as a result. But I'm not losing sleep over Someone Is Being A Jerk On The Internet. To be frank, I think some of the commenters on that post are being real tools; but I would not even be motivated to mention it if snark-hunting weren't such a hot topic lately. If you don't like how a particular online community is behaving, find a different one. Ho hum.

And I guess that's what's so puzzling about the anti-gnu brigade. Since when does the fact that you happen to agree with someone on a particular existential issue give you the prerogative to endlessly fret over their level of civility? To be clear, we're not talking about something like Christians needing to condemn and disassociate themselves from the "God Hates Fags" crowd, or god-forbid the obstetrician murderers. We're just talking about matters of tone and framing. It is so strange to be obsessed with someone else's civility level.

As others have pointed out, the charge that the gnus are giving all atheists a bad name is simply laughable. Even forgetting about Overton window-like phenomenon, which I believe are very real, atheists already had a bad name, and not because some of our number made some inappropriate comments on a blog one day.

Yes, damn right, some people in our community sometimes cross the line. Some of them go way over the line at times, and some of them (though I would argue not any of the prominent bloggers) do so habitually. But why are certain folks so obsessed with this rather trivial fact?

Edit: In re-reading some of Stangroom's series on snark-hunting, I am struck once again by the fact that he is resorting to empty ridicule in the very same posts in which he is nitpicking on examples of empty ridicule. It's got to be intentional; Stangroom doesn't seem nearly that self-unaware. I'm just a little fuzzy on the point he is trying to make. Is it supposed to be baiting people into a "you can dish it out but you can't take it" trap? Just a straightforward "taste of your own medicine" ploy? I dunno, I'm almost certain he's doing it to make a point, as opposed to just being cluelessly hypocritical (the presence of at least one ad hominem per post just seems too consistent and too "forced" almost to be a coincidence) but I guess I just don't really grok his point...

¹My opinion on taking Templeton money could be a blog post all to itself, but not today. In short: I think Templeton is being very sneaky and is working towards a goal with which I disagree. That said, if I were a researcher or a journalist, and Templeton offered me money to conduct a study/write an article, and I felt comfortable with the request if not with the requester -- you bet your sweet bippy I'd take it. I've got mortgage payments to make, y'know! If you believe in what you are doing, having it funded by an organization like Templeton may create an undesirable conflict of interest, but it's not the worst thing in the world. It would be nice to be in a position to turn it down, but not everybody is, and I'm not typically going to judge someone too harshly for choices like that -- not even Mooney.

Attacking the Problem of Induction with camels and hammers

2011-03-03T13:13:00.000-08:00

Daniel Fincke of Camels with Hammers responds to some noise I had been making in the comments of an old post of his. In a nutshell, I was contending that Hume's Problem of Induction could only be resolved via an epistemological leap of faith, and so thus an iota of actual "faith" was necessary for even an atheistic worldview -- though of course all beliefs beyond that can remain properly tentative.

Daniel quite accurately points out that my argument, which seeks to characterize as circular any and all attempts at reasoning one's way out of the Problem of Induction, is itself circular reasoning. Well I'll be damned, indeed it is.

I still maintain that the Problem of Induction is fundamentally intractable, and thus needs to be hand-waved rather than attacked with reason. Frankly, I think Daniel's point actually reinforces this position rather than diminishing it, at least from a pragmatic standpoint. To wit: I had attempted to show that no epistemology can claim to be rooted entirely on reason without first taking the validity of inductive reasoning on faith. Daniel points out that my attempt to do so fails without somehow presupposing the validity of inductive reasoning. This undermines my attempts to assert that inductive reasoning must be accepted on faith, but it accomplishes this by (IMO) effectively demolishing any attempt to say something about the epistemology of inductive reasoning and still maintain firm philosophical footing.

Daniel has not (yet) shown that faith is not required in order to accept inductive reasoning, he has so far only shown that I can't prove that it is required. I look forward to his promised follow-up post where he intends to describe "a way that inductive reasoning might be understood to be...virtuously circular" (emph. in original). Good stuff!

Wait, why shouldn't the children call the emperor a "fatty"?

2011-02-28T06:30:00.001-08:00

The endless accomodationism rumble has gotten a bit of a shot in the arm lately with a post by Jean Kazez in which she basically comes right out and says that science/religion compatibility should never be discussed in the public square, regardless of tone -- it is just not understandable by the unwashed masses. I hadn't read the post, because, well, I don't really care. The money quote was pretty shocking, but whatever, I'm ever so sick of rehashing this fanciful idea that making an idea more visible somehow makes it less popular.

I had heard that Kazez had also said something within the same thread of posts where she extended the Emperor's New Clothes analogy to try and present the accomodationist position. I finally read the relevant passage when it was quoted over at Metamagician, and I quote it at length here:

The emperor marches along the parade route stark naked [ignore the green underwear in the picture], and the adults ooh and ahh about his finery. One brave girl speaks up and says, naively "The emperor has no clothes!" Good for her! Hurray!

...

Now we have the sequel: "The Emperor's Gnu Clothes." Other kids were impressed with the brave girl. They started saying the same thing--"The emperor has no clothes! The emperor has no clothes!" Soon just saying he had no clothes lost its appeal. They shouted louder and louder, and called the emperor a fatty and laughed uproariously.

Some of the adults said: "Children. You're right he's naked. The brave girl was perfectly right to say so. But you've gotten carried away. It's time to think this through. Maybe the emperor actually enjoys being naked. Maybe he really doesn't know he's naked, and he can't figure it out when you're yelling at him. Maybe when he looks at you, your clothes look ridiculous to him, too! Control yourselves, think about how you're communicating!"

This made the children very, very angry. They wanted to believe they were just like that first brave girl. They didn't want to see themselves as rude and insulting. So the children went after the adults who had chided them, and called them names, and derided the whole idea of Communicative Restraint and Politeness, which they called crap for short.

Perhaps the analogy is a bit tortured here, but I'm never one to shy away from analogy waterboarding, and in any case I think Kazez makes her point quite clearly with this story.

My question is: What's the problem?

Let's strap this analogy onto The Rack and take a step back here. Who is the emperor? In the original story, the emperor is a pompous dictator who is so full of himself that he is actually taken in by a pair of weavers who fraudulently promise him a set of clothes that are "invisible to those unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent." He's rich, powerful, and so egotistical that he actually commissions a parade specifically for the point of making all of his subjects look stupid because they can't see his new clothes. Furthermore, at the end of the story, while the emperor is certainly embarrassed, he does not appear to have lost one iota of power. In fact, as the procession goes on, the closing line of the English translation I am looking at states that "his noblemen held high the train that wasn't there at all." The emperor is so feared and powerful that even after he is revealed in front of all his subjects as being a hopeless fool, he still commands so much power that rich guys continue to go along with the farce.

So now with all of that mind, Kazez wants to, what, make us feel sorry for the emperor that some kids are calling him a "fatty"? Srsly?!? Please, I'll trade places with the emperor any day of the week. I get to have unrestricted power over an entire kingdom, I get noblemen who will publicly play along with whatever absurd fantasy I ask, I get to be rich beyond my wildest dreams... and the only price I pay is I have to put up with some schoolkids snickering at me and calling me a "fatty"? Bring it on!!

And could there be a better analogy to the special deference afforded to religion in American society? This is so familiar... Public policy is all too often shaped by religious dogma; any American politician of any stature has to at least pay lip service to faith (and preferably Christian faith); there's a designated National Day of Prayer; people who profess to be highly religious are automatically presumed to be better, more moral people; criticism of religion in the public square will get you branded as "intolerant," or worse... and then amidst all of this, if a couple of bloggers occasionally make unkind and overly broad sweeping generalizations about Christians, the cry goes out, "ZOMG Christians are being persecuted in America!"

Please, persecute me like a Christian. And mock me like an emperor. That would be awesome.

2010 GSS first to show more Americans in favor of same-sex marriage than opposed

2011-02-25T09:12:00.000-08:00

The 2010 edition of the General Social Survey shows for the first time more Americans supporting same-sex marriage (46%) than opposing it (40%). Not that majority rule ought to determine who gets civil rights anyway, but can we finally look forward to an end to all those faux-democratic arguments against same-sex marriage? Can we stop hearing about the myth of "activist judges"?

(h/t to Sherkat)

Three Rules for Facebook

2011-02-23T05:15:00.000-08:00

In order of ascending importance:

Rule One. Your profile pic should really have your face in it somewhere, preferably featured prominently.

This is not a big deal, and probably more of my friends break this rule than follow it. It's just a pet peeve of mine. I get a friend request, and I'm like, "Wait, is this the 'Joe' that I met at a party the other week, whose last name I don't know? Or is it just some random guy who spams friend requests in the hopes of getting his friend count up? Gee, I don't know, because your profile pic is a shot of your dog or your kid or something. And I haven't met your dog or your kid. Hell, I don't even know if you have a dog or a kid!"

For things like e-mail, blogging, chat, by all means, use whatever you want for your profile pic (I do). It's just that part of the point of Facebook is as a means of locating old friends, acquaintances, etc., and if you don't have your face in your profile pic, it makes it that much harder.

Rule two. Don't post anything too controversial to your wall. Save that shit for blogs, forums, etc.

I've already discussed this one, so I'll just add one thing: If you were at a Thanksgiving dinner with the in-laws, you wouldn't spout off about religion or politics (or politically-charged topics like abortion, alternative health claims, etc.), would you? I thought so. So why would you say it, not just in front of your in-laws, but in front of your in-laws and everyone else you've ever friggin' met? Maybe some of them think your opinyuhn are dum.

Rule three. For the love of God, don't directly criticize someone on their wall. This is actually why I had to unfriend a friend of mine, because she broke rule #2 and I felt I could no longer obey rule #3 as a result. Like, really, you are going to call someone out and tell them they are wrong and a crappy person in front of all of their friends and family and acquaintances? The dangers of an argument getting out of hand is bad enough online even when the communication is private or semi-private. Now you are going to criticize someone publicly? Are you stupid or something??

I would also add the Hehir Corrolary to Rule Three: Especially don't criticize someone on their wall while they are grieving. Double especially don't criticize them in regards to the manner in which they choose to grieve. On their wall.

Yes, this actually happened, and it set in motion a chain of events that has caused me to lose my primary creative outlet and only regular independent social activity. Goddamn you Mark...

Adaptationists, neutralists, frequentists, and Bayesians -- oh my!

2011-02-22T06:18:00.000-08:00

There's a bit of a minor dust-up taking place at Sandwalk, Larry Moran's blog, over adapationism vs. neutralism in regards to evolutionary theory. There are some really great minds engaging in this discussion -- even Richard Dawkins has weighed in! -- so really I'm sure there's nothing a lay person such as myself can meaningfully contribute. But hey, if you thought I was going to go that route, you have significantly underestimated my ego.

A few months ago Bjørn Østman and I were having a discussion about the degree to which selection-for must be thought of as an abstraction rather than a reality, and I presented the following (admittedly somewhat over-the-top) example:

Let's say in the year 5673 BC, one peacock was saved from certain death when his tail got caught in some branches, and that slowed him down enough that an impending avalanche that would otherwise have hit him now missed him -- whereas his brother with a slightly smaller tail continued unimpeded and was killed in the avalanche. Do we now have to include in our analysis a 10^-10% contribution to the selection of the tail by "stops peacocks from walking into the path of avalanches"? If not, why not? (Without invoking agency, that is)

Don't get too distracted by my use of the peacock's tail -- that just happened to be the trait we were talking about at the time. Anyway, I want to flesh out my thoughts on this somewhat in light of the present discussion regarding neutralism.

First, a brief digression on two major schools of thought in probability theory. Let's say I roll a die three times, and I get the sequence 1-3-5. After I have finished the experiment I say, "Now what are the odds I would get that sequence?" A frequentist answer would be 216:1, because, assuming a fair die, if I perform this experiment enough times, I should get the sequence 1-3-5 approximately that often. An extreme Bayesian answer would be 100% -- as long as you were asking the question after performing the experiment. After all, we know that's what I rolled; it can no longer be anything else. Given the state of information we have now, the odds are 100%.

The Bayesian interpretation is not very useful there, but it's quite useful in regards to things like cancer screening. And nobody is so extreme of a Bayesian that they would stubbornly argue for the position in the previous paragraph. Anyway, you can get piles of information on this by Googling, and probably most people who have read this far are already more or less familiar with the concept, so I will not expound on it further.

If we wanted to take the really extremely stubbornly uber-Bayesian interpretation of natural selection, we would have to argue that every single extant trait is adaptive. After all, the a posteriori probability of evolution having taken the path that it has is 100%. Given the information we have now, every trait which exists in the present has perfect inclusive fitness, and every trait which is no longer extant is perfectly unfit.

I am making this rather stubborn and perhaps overly philosophical point in order to drive home the idea that any useful description of selection must inherently be an abstraction. It's not just that we need to use an abstraction in order to analyze it in practice; even in principle, one cannot say anything meaningful about natural selection without taking a frequentist approach, abstracting out the actual environment in which a given organism lives, reproduces and dies, in favor of an idealized, "typical" environment analogous to an idealized fair die roll. Without taking this important step, the most meaningful thing we can say about evolution is, "What happened happened."

(As a brief aside, I think the primary mistake made by Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini was their failure to take that next step from the stubborn philosophically pure position to recognizing that the whole enterprise can be handily salvaged by just drawing a few abstractions. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit I haven't read their book, but I've read critiques and defenses of it, and unless there's some amazing revelatory concept in the book, this seems to be the rather obvious problem with their entire argument.)

I think this already somewhat undermines the dichotomy of the selectionist/neutralist debate, since both are exposed as abstractions which are (again, by necessity) pretty far removed from the most literal reality of evolution. Because each organism (or each allele if you want to take the gene-centric view) exists in its own actual environment rather than being repeatedly tried in some ideal environment, to even pose the question of whether a particular trait is adaptive or not by necessity admits a sliver of teleology-esque reasoning into your model. By no means am I objecting to this! But it is worth observing.

Of course we can still ask which model is more useful, even if it turns out that the answer is "it varies" -- so there is meaningful discussion to be had. As a lay person, I'm not going to attempt to answer that. But what I will do is point out one problem with the intensely¹ neutralist view espoused by folks like Larry Moran.

Consider the example of the rhinoceros' horn discussed in the comments at Sandwalk. Let's say for sake of argument that, in comparison to each other, the Indian rhino's one horn has no selective advantage over the African rhino's two, and vice-versa. Let's go one step further and assume that sexual selection doesn't even play a role, and that if you could magically give some fraction of Indian rhinos an extra horn, or take away one from some African rhinos, it wouldn't affect the afflicted rhinos' inclusive fitness one iota. Does that necessarily mean that "neutral" is the best way to describe the trait(s)? I'm not so sure.

This is a pretty unrealistic hypothetical, but run with me here for a moment: Let's say the common ancestor of the Indian and African rhinos had a sort of bumpy ridge where the nose is. Two sub-populations become separated, and (here's where the unrealistic part comes in) a single transposition event in one sub-population causes the ridge to grow into a single horn, and a single transposition event in the other causes the ridge to grow into two horns. In each sub-population, only one of those two possible mutations is available, and in both cases the transposition event is so unlikely that we would not expect it to occur again. Assume further that horns -- whether one or two -- have a tremendous selective advantage over the bumpy ridge.

How can one argue with a straight face that either trait is "neutral"? Both mutations are tremendously adaptive over and above the available alternatives in the gene pool. If by the time the two sub-populations are reunited they can no longer produce viable offspring, then we now have two species, each with a mutually exclusive trait that is no better than the other's, but both of which are clearly adaptive. Genetic drift doesn't even come into it, except in the trivial sense that all novel alleles have to arise via random mutation.

I am again being somewhat stubborn and over-the-top, I think, but the point I am making is that in the long term and in a large enough population, every single trait that goes to fixation is adaptive, in the sense that it is superior to the immediately available alternatives present in the gene pool. Now the manifestations of those immediately available alternatives are influenced by effects such as genetic drift, of course. And it's probably fair to argue that it is not uncommon to have multiple available alleles in a population which are (within the limits of our abstraction) no more adaptive than each other, and in those cases the neutralist account would indeed be the most sensible. What I am saying, though, is that just because two potential traits of an organism have no particular selective advantage over one another if both had been readily available in the same population at the same time, that doesn't at all invalidate a selectionist account.

This is all probably hopelessly redundant, covered territory in evolutionary biology, and as a layman I should probably just not blather on about it. But oh well, those are my thoughts on it.

¹I struggled with the wording here... I initially had "extreme" rather than "intensely", but I felt that was unnecessarily -- and unintentionally! -- pejorative. Given our human penchant for promiscuous application of teleology, I think the "extreme" (not in a pejorative sense!) neutralist position is a very necessary part of the tapestry of evolutionary inquiry. Without neutralists like Moran, the adaptationist model could easily get completely out of control. Even great minds like Dawkins, who has been entertainingly referred to as an "uber-adaptationist", have at times seemed a bit too eager to prematurely embrace an adaptationist account. All deserved respect to Larry Moran here, by all means!

Facebook vs. Blogging

2011-02-21T12:01:00.000-08:00

So I got a new phone, one of them Droids, and since it had this widget just sitting there saying, "Hey, why don't you connect this to Facebook! Are you too old or something? All the cool kids are doing it...", well, I decided to give it a shot. I'd had a Facebook account already but I only used it for contacting people or having them contact me -- so that we could then switch to e-mail or whatever. But now I'm giving it a shot.

It's actually sort of cool seeing my friends' little updates about what is going on in their lives and stuff. But I also had to unfriend someone within the first 24 hours so as to be able to keep her friendship (ironic, eh?). See, she posted an article from Joe Mercola, and it turns out when I think someone is factually incorrect, I am totally incapable of keeping my mouth shut... so better to just not see the updates.

Which leads me to my point -- I am thinking, if you are going to say something controversial, get a blog or something. Use Facebook for social stuff, not for political or other controversial stuff. I'm also thinking of the time that my wife and her uncle mixed it up on Facebook and sort of wound up on temporarily bad terms, because of some sort of political/religious discussion.

The thing with Facebook is that what you write goes out to all your friends. Not just the ones who think your scholarship on the Peloponnesian War is fascinating, but all of them -- so if you want to write about the Peloponnesian War, get a blog.

I dunno, just thinking about it...

The two biggest flaws of the Star Wars prequel movies

2011-02-17T06:41:00.000-08:00

I watched Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III recently, for only the second time. I've problem seen the other three, the original three, the good three, a hundred times or more (I watched them a lot as a kid).

When fans of the originals complain about how bad the prequels are, one response you hear sometimes is, "Look, the originals were just as bad, you just remember them fondly because you were a kid. They are all completely absurd space operas with lousy dialog and naive kidsy themes. And you complain about Jar Jar -- look at the freakin' Ewoks!" I've never felt this complaint was quite right, but I've also had some trouble refuting it in the past.

One thing I noticed on the first viewing, and this was while watching The Phantom Menace in the theater when it first came out, was that the CGI they used in the new ones just looks too "clean". One of the lovely things about the originals was that the highly detailed models Lucas and his team built just looked so gloriously dirty. They actually looked like something that had been traveling through deep space for a long time. In contrast, the ships and robots in The Phantom Menace just looked like run of the mill modern sci-fi. (I suppose one could justify this on the grounds that the Old Republic had better, more well-maintained stuff; but this reeks of Star Wars apologetics, and I'm not having it)

However, on the second viewing, I think this was a minor problem at best, and really a subset of a much bigger problem. So without further ado, here is where I think Lucas made two very simple missteps that severely tarnished the prequels and prevented them from having that fantastic charm of the originals.

So let's talk about Jar Jar. No discussion of what's wrong with Episodes I and II can be complete without discussing the much-maligned Senator Binks. As I stated before, some Jar Jar defenders/fanboy critics have compared Jar Jar to the Ewoks, saying both are equally comic, equally silly, had equally annoying voices, and that both are obviously designed to appeal to kids rather than adults. Fair enough.

And yet, the Ewoks don't piss me off nearly as much, and, though I realize this is hopelessly subjective and I have no real basis to assert this, I just can't make myself believe that the reason is because I grew up with the Ewoks. Flight of the Navigator seemed like a grand adventure to me as a kid, and was also one of my favorite movies, but today I see it for the corny trash that it is (though I do think some of the sound editing, particularly in the early scenes just before the protagonist discovers the spaceship, is masterful). Why did the Ewoks age so much better?

I think I know why: The Ewoks didn't speak English. In fact, they weren't even subtitled. Sure, when Wicket screeches "Beecha-wawa!" after almost being hit by a Stormtrooper's blaster, it's just as grating as anything Jar Jar says -- but it feels like an alien who just happens to have a high-pitched voice, because of the Ewoks' inscrutability: an inscrutability that would have been impossible to pull off if they had spoken English. In contrast, when Jar Jar says, "Meesa so scared!", it sounds like a damn cartoon character.

If you compare both trilogies, this is very consistent. Virtually every alien in Episodes I, II, and III speaks English, whereas in the originals most of them do not (and many of them are not subtitled). Hell, R2D2 and Chewbacca were main characters through all three movies, and neither of them ever said a word that was directly comprehensible to the audience. (As a brief side note, Ebert's review of The Empire Strikes Back notes -- correctly in my opinion -- that the film's biggest flaw is Chewbacca's incessant mournful cries. They work to express the intended emotion, but they just get so repetitive. However, that was a problem with execution, and a minor one at that. Just imagine how bad it would have been if Chewbacca had the same voice, but talked in pidgin English! Perish the thought...)

Think of the scene with Greedo in Episode IV. Nobody is going to call that scene kidsy -- Han Solo murders him with a gun concealed under the table, for chrissakes! But think about it: Greedo had a pretty funny-sounding voice, didn't he? Imagine if Greedo had that gurgly, almost trilly voice, but spoke English instead of Rodian. Granted, it wouldn't have quite been a disaster of Jar Jarian portions, but it would have significantly undermined the tension in the scene. (Another brief digression: In the updated version released in the 90s, why oh why did they have to make Greedo fire first? It's so freakin' corny... From a realism perspective, how the hell would he miss at that range? And from a character development perspective, it sort of undermines the early establishment of Han Solo as a "scoundrel". Oy...)

In any case, having your aliens speak their alien language allows you to get away with a lot more, without having it come across as cartoonish. I'm sure Lucas felt that having the characters speak English improved pacing and made the movies more kid-friendly by obviating the need for subtitles -- but I was probably seven or so when I first saw the original trilogy, and I still was enchanted by it. Big mistake.

On a side note, I have no particular opinion on the racial aspects of the anti-Jar Jar criticism. I am certain it was not intentional. But I absolutely see how people perceive it that way -- though on the other hand, my wife does not see it at all. I'm not sure if it rises to the level of being racially insensitive or not. As I said, I have no strong opinion on that issue.

Moving on... The other big problem with the prequel trilogy, particularly Episode I, is more subtle, but possibly more pernicious. You see, one of the reasons the original trilogy worked so well despite a number of absolutely preposterous conceits (a freaking laser sword being the preferred weapon of the Jedis? When guns are available??? Uh huh...) is that the entire Star Wars universe exists in a vacuum. You can make yourself believe it's in "a galaxy far, far away", because there is a total absence of pop culture references. Those concepts which overlap with our world tend to have a historical mystique to them ("Imperial senate", "knights", etc.) which contributes to the other-worldly flavor rather than detracting from it.

Now think back to the pod racing scene in The Phantom Menace. Intended to be the most stunning set piece of the movie (they had a freaking video game based solely on that scene timed to coincide with the release of the film!), it was marred by the corny two-headed announcer(s). Out of context, there's nothing so bad about that gag. It was like something straight out of a Pixar movie, and you know what, all the Pixar movies are pretty good. I'm sure kids found the announcer(s) to be pretty funny, and while the jokes weren't exactly scintillating humor, the dialog was passable as it goes.

But the reason that gag "worked" is because it was a parody of the standard two-person commentator team used in most US sporting events, play-by-play and color analyst. It was a direct pop culture reference. So what the fuck? Does this "galaxy far, far away" get American broadcast television? From the future? No, of course not, it was just a bad choice on the part of the scriptwriters, but nonetheless it degraded the illusion of otherness that pervades the original films.

Though the two-headed announcer(s) were the most egregious example, such problems pervade Episode I, and are present to a lesser extent in Attack of the Clones as well. (I feel Revenge of the Sith finally broke this trend, and is one reason why many fans feel that is the best of the prequel trilogy) I mentioned earlier that the ships look too clean; they also look too much like modern conceptions of sci-fi. Compare Qui-Gon Jinn's ship in Episode I to the Millenium Falcon, both pictured below. If you had never seen any Star Wars movies, and I told you that one of these was thought-up by humans and another was built by aliens, what would your guess be? I thought so. Most of the other ships from the original trilogy are less alien than the good ol' Falcon, but they still don't look like modern fighter jets. (Which brings me to a minor realism niggle: All of the ships in the prequel trilogy are highly aerodynamic, which doesn't matter a damn in space. Many of the ships from the original trilogy are far less so.)

I think there are other examples that are more subtle, and I won't attempt to list all of them. I'd have to watch the movies again in order to catch many more anyway, and I don't expect to be doing that again until my eldest son is old enough to dig Star Wars. But I'm telling you, I think this sort of problem is what wrecked the prequel trilogy, or at least the first two episodes. For all the corny dialog and stilted acting and baldly implausible ideas in the original trilogy, it felt like something from out of this world -- which made suspension of disbelief that much easier, and made all the crap much easier to swallow. The flaws were partially obscured by a fantastic other-worldly mystique. The prequel trilogy mostly failed to cultivate this atmosphere, and as such all of its warts were laid bare.

In defense of blindly voting for one party

2011-02-17T06:25:00.001-08:00

When it comes to legislators, particularly at the federal level, I would vote for an incompetent Democrat before I would vote for a well-qualified Republican. I would do this even if I agreed with more of the Republican's stated positions than the Democrat's. And I believe I am on firm rational footing with this.

In the United States -- as in most representative democracies, it turns out -- legislative voting is nearly always virtually party-line. I mean, hell, we even have an official position in each party, recognized by congressional regulations if I'm not mistaken, dedicated to making sure this remains the case!

And while individual candidates might have their own quirks, it is a fact that my positions and values are far more in line with the Democratic Party platform than they are with the GOP platform. I disagree with the Democrats on a number of issues, but geez, it's not even a close call here.

So in the hypothetical introduced in the first paragraph, if this highly-qualified Republican legislator gets elected, so what? Most of her votes will still be along party lines, and therefore will be for positions that I disagree with. And if the incompetent Democratic gets elected, most of his votes will be for positions I agree with, even if he himself is an idiot. Even those representatives who have the biggest reputation for being "mavericks" (God, how that word has become tainted) still vote with their party something like upwards of 90% of the time.

This argument is less applicable when it comes to executive branch positions, and doesn't hold at all for judicial positions. (Why the hell do we elect judges anyway? That just seems like a patently stupid idea to me... but I digress) But when it comes to legislators, you bet your sweet bippy I'm voting Democrat, no matter who the candidates are, and I make no apologies for it.

Morality does not and CAN not come from God

2011-02-13T07:00:00.001-08:00

I've been meaning to do this post for awhile, so I'll have something to link to for reference, because this point comes up a lot and it's already settled philosophy, and has been for hundreds of years -- even the theologians agree on this one! This will be old hat for almost anyone reading this, but I just want to get it down so I have something to link to.

Morality does not and CAN not come from God. The argument to show this is quite simple. Consider: What if God commanded you to eat babies? Would that make it moral? Three possible answers:

1) No it would not. Good for you. Hence, morality exists independent of God.

2) God would never command such a thing, because She is perfectly moral. Slightly trickier than the first, but this still proves that morality exists independent of God. The statement makes a prediction on what God would or would not say based on what is moral -- but if morality is defined by whatever God says it is, then this test is circular. The assertion becomes "God would never command such a thing, because He's never commanded such a thing." This is obviously unworkable. Therefore, in order to answer this way, one must posit a morality independent of God.

3) Yes it would. Well okay then. I would argue that anyone taking this position is fundamentally amoral, and I'd be rather frightened of them. Beyond that, many philosophers assert that morality cannot be synonymous with simple obedience, and that therefore this would not form a coherent morality either. I'm not sure if I think that part of the argument is bulletproof -- but I'm not worried about it, because as far as I'm concerned, as soon as somebody takes this position, I've won the debate.

Now, many people may still legitimately argue that God/belief in God helps them to be moral. I would almost always disagree, but this is a position that can be reasonably debated. It cannot be cleanly logically refuted; it must be debated on evidence. However, the position that morality does not exist without God is empty. It's dead. It's been defeated long long ago, and cannot be adequately defended.

Good, so now I can just link here instead of retyping this every time.

How to Properly Cook a Steak

2011-02-12T20:13:00.000-08:00

It turns out that cooking a goddamn good steak is really easy, but you need to know just a few important tips. Really, only three that are critically important, and a few more minor tips that help a little. None of them take very much time or effort (though the most important one requires you to spend sixty seconds with the steak a couple hours in advance) and none of them are anything that your average home cook should have trouble with -- and yet, so many people cook flavorless, overdone, rubbery steaks. There is no need. The perfect steak turns out to be ridiculously easy.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING: Aggressively salt and pepper the steak at least one hour in advance, preferably two or three or more. Use kosher or sea salt, and use more than you think you should have to use. Do not skip this step. I don't care if you have high blood pressure and one too many milligrams of sodium might just kill you; if it's that much of a problem then just don't eat a steak.

Salting the steak in advance does two important things. Pundits will tell you that it creates a reverse osmosis reaction that tenderizes the steak, and this is more or less true... but far more importantly, it will allow salt to penetrate all the way through the meat, which means that you will actually be able to fucking taste it... and even better, because salt makes you salivate, this will make the entire steak seem juicier, even though the moisture content is unchanged.

Do this every time. I am not kidding. This is the #1 most important thing you can do to your steak. It is simple, it is easy, it costs nothing, it doesn't hinge on matters of personal preference, and it can make the difference between a bland hunk of cow versus a beautiful buttery bite of beef.

THE NEXT MOST IMPORTANT THING: Get your pan hot. Really hot. Like, as hot as you can get it. If you are doing it on the stovetop, this means using a cast-iron if you have it, or the heaviest pan you can find if not. Pick the biggest burner, and turn it on as high as it will go. Gas is best, of course. The pan should just start to smoke (you haven't add the fat yet either; see the next tip) before you are ready.

If using a propane grill, put an upside down baking sheet and/or foil over the part of the grill you intend to cook the meat on. This will superheat it, then remove it immediately before you put the steaks on to cook. Trust me, it's worth it. If using charcoal, buy yourself a chimney. Seriously, don't skimp on this. This is a whole separate topic in itself, but a charcoal chimney is indispensable. Pile the coals all in one corner as soon as they come out of the chimney, and cook your steak over that.

THE LAST CRITICAL TIP: This applies only if you are pan-frying your steak, as I prefer these days (though I will address grilling here too). Thou shalt use the following fats in thy pan: one tablespoon butter, one tablespoon vegetable oil. Not olive oil. A lot of cooks, myself included, like to use olive oil where many recipes call for vegetable oil, because it's healthier and more flavorful. Not here, folks. You want a really high smoke point, and all the flavor is coming from the butter anyway. (And dude, you are eating a pan-fried steak... you're worried about health?! Please...) Don't add the fat until the pan is just starting to smoke, as I mentioned in the previous tip. Then toss it in, swirl it around just until it coats the pan, and throw your steak in.

If you are using a grill, take a paper towel or a clean rag, splash some vegetable oil on it, grasp it with tongs and rub it on the part of the grill you will use to cook the steak right before you cook it. This is actually a good idea with almost any meat you cook on the grill. You can't really do the butter thing this way though (which is one reason I have started to prefer pan-fried steaks over grilled steaks).

THIS IS SO OBVIOUS IT DOESN'T COUNT AS A TIP: Cook your steak rare or medium-rare. Please. If you are going to cook it more than that, I say, Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Seriously, the way Biblical literalists feel about homosexuality, that's how I feel about well-done steak. It's a crime against nature. But anyway, I realize preferences differ, so the meat (har har) of this tip is how to get a good rare/medium-rare.

If your pan is as hot as I said it should be, this means about 2 minutes per side. If it is a particularly thick cut, like more than two inches, stand it up on the edge for just a bit, so that you can't see any pink when you put it on the plate (not only because it looks weird, but because there is a potential safety issue if the surface temperature has not hit 165F). In any case, make sure that the top and bottom sides have a nice crust -- which they should, if you got your pan hot enough and you used the butter-oil mixture I commanded you to use.

THE LESSER TIPS: All of these things matter if you want a really perfect steak, though they are less crucial. If you don't do the first three, you will have done violence to your steak for no good reason. If you follow them, your steak will taste like a damn steak, and that's worth doing. These remaining tips will help put it over the top.

Rewind all the way back to when you are buying the steak. Buy a thick cut. How thick is the minimum depends on your equipment. I have a nice Lodge cast-iron skillet, and one of the burners on my (gas!) range gives an unconscionably intense flame (the dial labels it as "POWER BOIL"), so I am able to get 3/4" cuts to cook up quite nicely. One to two inches is better, of course, and even thicker is even better. The thicker the cut, the more seared you can get the crust while leaving the inside nice and red.

The flip side of this tip is that if you are one of those "alternative steakstyle" types who likes it medium or above, buy yourself a thinner cut. I don't have much to say about this, as I consider it to be immoral in the extreme, but the point is that you want a certain amount of sear on the outside and then you want to take your steak out of the pan -- so buy the thickness of steak that will result in the insides being done to your liking at the point that the outside is done appropriately.

Now proceed slightly forward to when you were salting the steak -- depending on the cut, it's probably worthwhile to trim off any major external fat deposits while you're at it. If it's a filet mignon, probably not, any fat there will just turn buttery as you cook it. A strip steak, though, or a ribeye, or whatever, it's worth trimming off what you can easily get to without hacking too much meat off. Of course the diner can always cut it off at the table, but I'd rather take care of it in the kitchen. It makes a nicer presentation, and it allows the diner to just chow down without having to work around any inedible parts.

I've heard it said that you should let the steak sit at room temperature for 20 or 30 minutes before you cook it. This makes good sense, as raising the surface temperature means that you can get a good sear faster than you would otherwise, which means the center can stay appropriately rare. Cooks Illustrated even has a method (which I have used with some success, though I consider it ultimately unnecessary) where you cook the steak in a low oven before pan-frying it, thereby warming it and -- according to them -- activating enzymes which help to further tenderize the steak. I do not doubt the validity of all this, but I will say that, while following the remaining tips in this guide, I have never had a steak come out too tough or with too much of a "gray zone" separating the crust from the nice red innards. I mention all this because, though I think it unnecessary, I find the science sound: if you are concerned about getting a proper crust, or about getting a sufficiently tender steak, but all means, try pre-warming it.

Finally -- and this should almost be one of the Critical Steps, because it makes a pretty big difference -- when the steak is done, you should let it rest for a few minutes before serving. But don't let it just rest on a plate! Take a slice of bread, and let it rest on that. Then, depending on how juicy your steak is and how hungry you are, either eat the beef-sopped bread yourself, or else feed it to the dogs. Why do this? Well, if you listened to me about getting your grill really super hot, and about using a nice butter/oil mixture to fry it in, you should have a really nice crispy crust on both the top and bottom. You have to put one side or the other down, and, since you did such a good job keeping this steak nice and juicy, whichever side you face down is going to puddle in its own juices. If you do nothing to abate this, you will re-sog that side and obliterate that nice beautiful crust you just went to all this (not very much) trouble to create. Better to stand it on a slice of bread, which will soak up the drippings and allow the crust to stay intact.

So this post is a little longer than I meant, because I wanted to cover all the bases, and explain the reasons why in addition to just issuing the commandments. To summarize, here is a simple recipe that will guarantee you a better tasting steak:

1) Buy a thick cut to get a good rare/medium-rare (assuming you aren't one of those pervs who likes it medium or worse, in which case buy a thin cut).
2) Unless it is a very expensive cut like filet mignon, trim any visible fat.
3) Aggressively salt and pepper your steak at least one hour in advance, preferably more. Seriously, if there's one lesson I could leave to my sons, it would be to season your fucking steak in advance. It's so easy, and will make your steak taste 200% better than if you hadn't done it. Even if you ignore every single other piece of advice in this post, season your fucking steak.
4) Get the pan really hot.
5) Once the pan just starts to smoke, add 1 Tbsp butter and 1 Tbsp vegetable oil.
6) Toss in the steak and cook 2 minutes per side, or just until a crust starts to form. If it is a particularly thick cut, use tongs to stand it up on edge for half a minute or so until all the external pink is gone.
7) Set each steak on top of a slice of bread and let rest five minutes-ish before serving.

This is an absurdly easy recipe. You owe it to yourself to follow it, or at least to digest the information in it. Every time I eat a steak that has not been properly seasoned or has not been cooked at high enough temperature, I die a little inside. Please don't do that to me.

For 32 years I've been unbuttoning my pants the wrong way

2011-02-08T06:39:00.000-08:00

How one buttons or unbuttons one's garments is not something of which most of us are particularly self-reflective. I know I'm not. It's something you figure out when you are a wee person, and then it's just an unconscious action. Just like when I walk to the door, I don't think, "Okay, first the right foot, then the left, then the right," but instead I just visualize myself walking to the door -- in the same way, you don't think about the hand motions when you operate a button, you just visualize the button being done or undone and muscle memory does the rest.

I think I discovered last night that I've been undoing the button on my pants in a rather silly way, which probably nobody else does. I'm sure I've been doing this as long as I can remember, and of course you never think about it.

Up until last night, the way I did it was that I grasped the fabric on the left side with my left hand (so far so good), and then with my right hand, instead of grabbing the button, I grabbed the fabric near the button. Then with my right hand I pushed downward and twisted back and to the left, while simultaneously pulling up and forwards with my left hand. This causes the button to turn somewhat, and if all goes well, it just pops out. (Bear in mind I never thought about the mechanics in nearly this level of detail -- or really, at all -- until last night. This is a post hoc reconstruction, based on simply paying attention to what my hands were doing when I let muscle memory do its thing.)

On reflection, this probably puts unnecessary stress on the threads holding the button in place (which would explain why I've had a few pants pop their button after a surprisingly small amount of use) and in any case is just fairly silly. But you'd be surprised how well this actually works -- well enough for me to get into my thirties without ever noticing I was doing it or that it didn't make any sense.

Apparently, though, if the buttonhole is too small, this does not work. I got a new pair of pants last week and I had been having the damnedest time getting them to unbutton. Last night, I was having a particularly difficult time (and I really had to pee, besides!) so I decided to try a different tack. I brought my right hand around the front, grasped the button directly with thumb and forefinger, and slid it through the hole.

"Oh, that was easy," I thought. Then: "Wait just a minute... I bet everybody in the world except me already does it this way!"

Yeah, being a human is strange sometimes.

Now that's some efficient health care!

2011-01-27T09:49:00.001-08:00

Just had a really bizarre complete waste of my time... Our family practitioner's office called me and said a bunch of claims for my wife and my son were denied -- from 2009. I don't even have the same insurance anymore. The explanation on the EOB was "do not provide that service", and apparently the insurance company told the provider that I would have to call.

So I'm fuming of course... I mean, 2009?! WTF? Luckily I didn't really have to wait on hold, although, the phone menu wanted to fuck me over, but mercifully I got to a point where I could just mash 0 and get to an operator. Talked to the person a bit... apparently there were only two "claims" (although the one on my son was apparently a whole bunch of separate claims that got lumped into one or something) that had failed to go through because there was a computer error while the claim was being submitted.

Yeah, that's it. A short-term computer glitch. All that needed to happen was for the insurance company to resend the claim to their computers.

So I have two questions: What kind of shit-ass IT setup do they have where if there is an intermittent network error while processing a claim -- and it appears to have been internal to the insurance company, no less -- that it requires the intervention of no less than three humans in order to recover? And second, why couldn't the insurance company just work this out with my health care provider?

In a perfect world, the system should have recovered automatically. Transmission error during claim submission? Okay, retry! Failing that, it should have been one phone call between my health care provider and my (former!) insurance company. I mean... really?

Single payer, man, single payer. It's looking better every single day.

Do atheists spell better?

2011-01-20T12:34:00.001-08:00

Well, based on actually empirical data, probably a little bit, but not much. But in my direct experience amongst atheist bloggers and blogophiles? ZOMG, the comments on the blogs I frequent are a joy to read compared to the tripe that infests most of teh interwubz. It's not even just what is said, or the logic and critical thinking that is applied -- though that counts for something too. It's that people seem to care a little bit about spelling and grammar, at least enough to try and make themselves understandable.

What occasioned these remarks is that I happened to stumble upon this while I was Googling for something else. Neither the Creationist nor the person debating him/her comport themselves particularly well. They both come across like idiots. I didn't read the whole thing, so I don't know if "99octane" eventually got around to anything of substance. But "ViRuS"'s initial post is just hilarious. Best line of all:

If evolution is so write then hocome it's still called a theory?

This is not even Poe's Law; this is beyond Poe's Law. If someone were to present this little gem as a parody of intertubian Creationists, I would say that it is not realistic, nobody could be that dense and still manage to find the right buttons to post to a forum. I pray (figuratively!) that English is not his or her first language, because then it would be partially understandable -- although the "hocome" part just blows my mind.

Well, at least "ViRuS" used the proper form of "it's"/"its"...

Public perception of journal publication vs. the Scientific Method

2011-01-18T08:12:00.000-08:00

[I]f we take the scientific method and the process of peer review seriously, that commits us to occasionally (or even frequently) publishing work that we believe time will eventually prove wrong.
---Tal Yarkoni, writing at [citation needed]

Yarkoni was writing in the context of the recent infamous paper by Daryl Bem published in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which purports to show evidence of ESP. Yarkoni's analysis of the paper is truly awesome, and worth a read if you are at all interested in research methodology (which means: nobody except for actual researchers, and perhaps hopeless pedants like myself).

Yarkoni's conclusion is in line with the impression I was already getting from reading other bloggers' and pundits' comments on the paper: It's a good paper as far as it goes, even though the conclusions are almost certainly wrong. (I differ from Yarkoni in the weight that I give to good ol' Thomas Bayes in rejecting the ESP hypothesis -- I frankly think that is the most important indicator of how we know this paper is wrong, and the rest is just a post mortem to determine what went wrong) Bem has been admirably transparent and thorough in documenting what exactly he did. As I've written elsewhere, that in many ways redeems the paper's publication, in that it provides the opportunity for a teaching moment in experimental design and what exactly can go wrong.

The quote from Yarkoni with which I open this post is indubitably true from a research perspective, but in a broader societal context, it's highly disturbing. No, I'm not criticizing Yarkoni; he's damn right, and that's exactly what is so disturbing about what he points out. The public doesn't see it that way. The popular press really doesn't see it that way. For science journalists and the lay public, a single provocative paper published in a reputable journal (and even then, the public -- and to a certain extent I include myself in this -- is generally ignorant as to which journals are reputable) is as good as gospel.

What can be done about this? Yarkoni is right, that if the only papers that got published were the ones which had a very high probability of being correct in their conclusions, it would entirely sabotage the scientific method. In fact, pretty soon you wouldn't be able to publish any papers according to that criterion, because a big part of how certainty is achieved is via a long line of less certain research which all points to the same conclusion. And in any case, many people -- including myself -- are increasingly of the opinion that publication bias is a tremendous problem, resulting in large amounts of waste, as well as retarding the rate of science's natural self-corrective ability. In that light, the last thing we want is to publish fewer papers.

The most effective solution, I think, would be for science journalists to collectively behave more responsibly. But good luck with that. That's only slightly more likely than thinking the entire public is suddenly going to become more skeptical.

There is some hope -- as demonstrated by the recent evisceration of the NASA-funded paper into arsenic-based life forms, the blogosphere is increasingly flexing its muscles in order to keep that sort of credulous nonsense in check. In the past, the blogosphere couldn't really be effective in that role, because even if a zillion science bloggers pointed out the flaws, they were only reaching a niche market of readers -- but now, enough noise in the blogosphere amounts to a news story in itself, one the mainstream media feels obligated to report on.

There's a potential blueprint here: Mainstream science journalists breathlessly report on the latest novel finding of public interest, as if one half-way decent p-value proves some controversial hypothesis beyond a shadow of a doubt; trained researchers blog about how the news stories are all full of shit and explain why the paper is either wrong or should be taken with a grain of salt; other interested bloggers link to and write about these criticisms, and in typical Interwubzian fashion, generate a lot of drama and heat in a short period of time; and finally, that becomes a story in itself, forcing those same mainstream science journalists to write articles playing down the earlier reports.

It's far from a perfect system -- people will in general still remember the early credulous articles rather than the later more skeptical ones, and those with an agenda (Buy my supplements! Don't vaccinate! Religion makes you live longer!) will cite the peer-reviewed-but-wrong papers for decades as if there was nothing wrong with them and they were never contradicted by later research. But the sheer noise the blogosphere is capable of generating, and in such a short time, I think makes the situation somewhat more promising than it has been in the past.

In any case, go back and read the quote from Yarkoni at the top of this post. He's hit the nail on the head here. This sort of thinking should be taught in grade school, and hammered away all through a person's education. Science is messy, and by it's very nature it will frequently produce wrong results -- in fact it is this very embrace of uncertainty which gives science epistemological dominance over all other attempts to get at the truth. We should neither discount science because of its dynamic and ever-changing character (for that is where its power lies!), nor should we assume that every proper application of the scientific method produces an unquestionable truth.

Google's Ngram viewer and the shortcomings of OCR

2011-01-17T12:14:00.001-08:00

I was having a bit of fun playing with Google's Ngram viewer, searching for terms that were coined in the 20th century, to see if anybody had used those same words incidentally in the past. Turns out for some of them, most of the results are an OCR failure. For instance, here it mistakes "Jan" for "Jazz" in an 1805 essay. Whoops.

What the Palin defenders (and even some of her detractors) aren't getting

2011-01-13T09:01:00.001-08:00

So I'm not even going to touch Palin's invocation of "blood libel" in her anything-but-an-apology video she released today. It may be some kind of fundamentalist codeword that the likes of us don't understand. In any case, it's deeply, shockingly offensive, and I'm not even going to comment on it beyond this paragraph.

What I want to talk about are the people who don't get why Palin should apologize for the "crosshairs" thing. I take this comment from MarkCC's blog as an example:

You’re touchy about the phrase “blood libel”, but you have no problem falsely blaming someone for a mass shooting.

Okay, look, I'm not blaming her for it. In fact, I think the shooter probably couldn't have cared less about Palin. He may not have even seen the crosshair graphic, and it's a near certainty that he wasn't inspired by it.

Many commentators have focused on the political climate inspired by the militaristic and sometimes even explicitly violent rhetoric coming from the Right. While I agree whole-heartedly -- and in fact, I remember so many people making predictions that an assassination attempt of a national US politician could very well take place sometime in the near future due to the overheated and divisive speech coming from that side -- I think that in terms of why Palin should personally apologize, even that's not the most relevant issue.

The reason why Palin should apologize is because if you implicitly wish death on someone, even in jest or in metaphor, and then that person dies or someone tries to kill them -- well, if you have an ounce of humanity in your entire body, then you feel really horribly guilty about that!

Say you were at a party and you got in an argument with one of your friends. A really nasty argument, let's say, that ended in shouting, and as he was storming out, in your rage you shout something vulgar like, "Eat shit and die!" And then let's say he was in a horrible car accident on the way home that left him in critical condition. How would that make you feel? How would you react?

If you were a human being, you would feel awful. You would apologize to everyone at the party. Your soul would be wracked with guilt.

If you were Sarah Palin, you'd make a video painting yourself as a martyr.

This is particularly resonant for me right now, because my wife's and my relationship with our deceased friend had been very rocky towards the end. The reasons make sense now, but that doesn't make it feel any better. The second-to-last e-mail I sent to her before she died was giving her flak about cleaning up her dog's poop when she visits us. That hurts, you know? I mean, I wasn't doing anything wrong, and these things happen... but you always wish the last thing you could say would be something meaningful and heartfelt. I know the world doesn't work that way, and I know -- I think I know better than most -- that in the end it doesn't really matter, that death is death, and that it would sting pretty much just as bad no matter what our final words had been. But I'm human, so I still think about these things.

Now, this situation is pretty different, I guess. Palin was never a friend of Giffords, of course. But then again, I didn't publish a website with a picture of crosshairs over a map of my deceased friend's apartment.

So no, Palin didn't have anything directly to do with this. And as for the extent to which violent political rhetoric created an atmosphere that was encouraging to the Loughners of the world, Palin is hardly the only one who shares blame for that.

None of that matters. Any halfway decent normal human being would feel absolutely awful about the horrible coincidence between the crosshairs incident and the assassination attempt on Giffords. And the fact that Palin apparently doesn't feel bad about it at all -- or at least won't say so in public -- is just fucking sickening.

Really, Markuze?

2011-01-12T11:06:00.000-08:00

My friend just died, and Dennis Markuze, a.k.a. David Mabus, a.k.a. Makes the Phrase "Has No Life" seem woefully inadequate, is still spamming my blog with his violent hateful brainspooge. He always comments on the most recent post, regardless of what that is... whether it's a rant against religion, or a heartfelt mourning for a deceased friend, Dennis Fucking Markuze doesn't give a shit. Why would he care? He apparently feels nothing. It's an insult to even call him a human being.

So fucking go to it, Dennis. This will be the "most recent post" for a little while, and I'll leave the comments on. Go ahead and toss violent death threats at someone in mourning, with the same nonchalance you always do. Show everyone in the world that you are the most despicable human being on teh interwubz.

The Memetic Equivalent of the Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve

2011-01-12T07:49:00.001-08:00

A post over at Epiphenom got me thinking about the old idea of religion as a product of natural meme selection, and how that metaphor could be viewed from different angles.

The recurrent laryngeal nerve is a nerve that provides sensation and motor control to the larynx. It is called "recurrent" because it takes this weird backwards-looping path through the neck, when there is no apparent reason -- without the evolutionary background, that is -- why it shouldn't just descend straight from where it branches off from the vagus nerve down into the larynx.

The reason becomes obvious when you examine the morphological transitions from fish to land animals and eventually to mammals. A common trait in nearly all modern animals is a segmented body plan, which seems to have evolved very long ago. You can often figure out how the segments in one group of animals map to the segments in another group -- adding a segment here, replicating one here, transforming this one for an entirely different purpose... And if you do this morphological comparison with fish vs. mammals, it becomes pretty clear what happened with the recurrent laryngeal nerve. It's morphological equivalent in fish followed a perfectly sensible path, and as the body plan was rearranged, it just got pushed further and further out of the way.

And why didn't natural selection ever fix it? As an engineer, I put it as, "Because evolution by natural selection is an algorithm that is highly susceptible to local maxima." Perhaps a simpler way of saying it is that by the time the laryngeal nerve had developed a routing problem, the type of mutation required to fix it was far too complicated to occur in a single generation -- and a mutant who only got "halfway there" would not be likely to have a functioning laryngeal nerve!

Is the modern concept of prayer the memetic equivalent of the recurrent laryngeal nerve?

First, an obligatory caveat: Whenever we talk about memetic evolution, we must remember that we are just drawing an analogy. Genetic evolution only works "right" because it is digital (i.e. each base pair has a discrete value -- each base is either A, C, T, or G, and you cannot have a base that is 75% A and 25% T!). This turns out to be really important in making the math work out, because it enables traits to be inherited as a discrete unit. As an example, if your mother has green eyes and your father has brown eyes, probably you will get one or the other, but you will not get a blend. If genes were not digital, and if sexual reproduction produced a blend rather than a discrete sampling, evolution via natural selection would not work.

Memes are sometimes digital, as when the meme is a particular phrase or perhaps a particular translation of a book. In those cases, evolutionary analysis tends to work quite well (nearly identical techniques are applied by both evolutionary cladists as well as those examining the "mutations" over time of copied manuscripts). But memes are often not digital -- as, I would argue, in the case of religions themselves, even if the texts are digital -- and in those cases it is not clear to what extent evolutionary theory really works. So when we talk about a meme like religion "evolving", we might just be blowing smoke.

With that out of the way, let's assume it's valid to talk about religion "evolving" by natural memetic selection. When we look at the evidence for biological evolution, there are certain fingerprints of natural selection that we expect to see, and -- as the Intelligent Design losers are always pointing out -- if we didn't see these fingerprints, it would be pretty disturbing to current theory. These fingerprints are things like the recurrent laryngeal nerve. That's an extreme example, but the point is that we should see animals "designed" in a way that betrays a compromise modification of an earlier design, rather than an optimal "clean sheet" design.

So do we see those fingerprints on religion? Yes we do. And I think that the concept of prayer, at least as it relates to most modern religions, is a real doozy. I haven't posted much about it, but I've discussed with my wife the bizarre contradiction among virtually all modern religions between belief in a God that is omnipotent and omniscient and benevolent and has a perfect "plan" vs. the habit of prayer. If God's plan is perfect, why are you bothering her with suggestions?

This logical clunker is a damn good candidate for the Abrahamic equivalent of a recurrent laryngeal nerve. If you look at the Judaic God, omnipotence and omniscience (but not necessarily benevolence or possession of a perfect "plan") are important adaptive traits, which the Torah hammers home again and again in pointing out that if you mess with God, he will mess with you -- and how! (visited upon the third and fourth generations, etc.) The same is true of Yahweh's predecessors and rough contemporaries, but I mostly want to look at the Abrahamic lineage here. (On a side note, another distinctive "adaptation" of Judaism is the idea of a chosen people. This trait seems to be a big winner early on, but it also seems to be directly in contradiction with that whole "evangelical zeal" thing, which turns out to be hugely adaptive, for obvious reasons.)

For an omnipotent -- but not necessarily benevolent -- God, prayer makes perfect sense. "Please sir, if you could just find it in your heart to not kill us all today, that would be great." She can do whatever she wants to you, but if you ask nicely, there is still room for convincing.

Now, I am not an expert on the development of early Christianity, but at some point there seems to have been a definite shift towards the idea of a benevolent God. I suppose one could argue that this shift had already begun with Judaism. As megalomaniacal and erratic as the God of the Torah is, his capriciousness does not rise quite to the level of the Greek Gods, for example. Yahweh might kill every living thing on Earth except for one family just because he thought some of them were dicks, but he wouldn't turn into a bull and go rape some people on a whim. Christianity pushed things even further in this direction: God is perfect and fair and benevolent (and by the way, if that seems to be a laughable impossibility in the face of the evidence, it's Your Fault for not understanding his "mysterious ways").

The adapative benefit of this is obvious as well. The Greeks had less incentive to devote themselves to their gods, because who knows when Poseidon will just randomly trick your wife into cheating on you. The Jews have more incentive, because God at least claimed to have specific enumerable rules that one could follow if you wanted to stay on his good side. And the Christians had more incentive still, because not only was God supposedly perfectly fair and just, but he also really wants to help you out. He's on your team. Work with him. Be his buddy.

But now what of prayer? The Torah speaks of an antecedent religion that used human sacrifice, which mutated to animal sacrifice, which finally mutated away from even that at some point in the development of Christianity. The methods of supplication kept getting pushed in a more humane direction, in a direction where god was less of an "insane bully" and more of a "protective father". Just like the laryngeal nerve, the method of placating one's god kept shifting to accommodate newer adaptations. And just like the laryngeal nerve, by the time this gradual shifting becomes a problem, it's too late to do anything about it.

Surely many thinkers over the centuries must have realized the inanity of pleading with an omniscient being who already has a "perfect" inalterable plan. But what are you going to do? "The Pope has determined that prayer doesn't make any damn sense any more, so although Mass will still include communion, confession, etc., there will be no more prayers." No, of course not. Prayer was such a fixture of the religion by that point, it couldn't be changed. Even if prayer makes as much sense in modern interpretations of Christianity as it does to get from the vagus nerve to the larynx by looping underneath the thorax.

There are more obvious "fingerprints" of the evolution of religion, of course -- basically, anything that can be traced back to syncretism, such as celebrating the alleged birth of Jesus (which, if one takes the Bible literally, can be inferred to have probably occurred in September, or maybe in the spring, but most certainly not in winter!) over the same time frame as a pagan winter festival, and adopting numerous traditions from said festival. But those syncretic fingerprints are neutral. There is no horrible logical contradiction in choosing an arbitrary date for celebrations, and plenty of practical value in lining it up to coincide with other religions' festivals.

But I think that prayer in the face of omniscience is a really interesting one, because it really demonstrably is a suboptimal solution. I'm not the only one to realize that it doesn't make any sense. One of the most visible and frequently practiced aspects of your religion is a bald logical contradiction. Even with most homo sapiens being rather poor critical thinkers, that still can't be good for business. And yet, it ain't gonna change, because to fix it without doing damage would require a radical memetic reorganization, one that is unlikely to occur naturally.

This is important because it really drives home the fact that even if religion became so dominant because it evolved to confer certain social benefits, that tells us nothing. Just as with the laryngeal nerve -- which, to be fair, works just fine -- with human foresight we might just put together a system that's far superior and far more sensible.

Take lots of pictures of yourself, just in case you die young

2011-01-07T11:30:00.000-08:00

I've been going through all of the remaining online photo albums that belonged to my deceased friend, as we're putting together a memorial slideshow for this Sunday. Of course, since she took the pictures, she's hardly in any of them!

So the lesson is: If you think you might die a tragic untimely death, make sure to take lots of pictures of yourself. heh...

Chris Mooney's Peace Anthem for Science and Religion

2011-01-05T07:17:00.000-08:00

Mooney's got an article in Playboy touting his most recent tactic for denying the science/faith conflict, the one I call the Spirituality Gambit. The basic ploy is this: If you use a rather fuzzy definition of "spirituality" -- you might call it a feeling of awe or transcendence -- then it is true that scientific understanding can inspire this fuzzy "spirituality" in even the most secular-minded folk. So there you go! Everybody, theist or atheist, experiences "spirituality". Why not work there for common ground?

I must confess to not having read the current article. I don't feel I need to, because the Spirituality Gambit is a mess. The main criticism is that Mooney is engaging in semantic trickery. "Spirituality" is an ill-defined word. Certainly it no longer retains its etymological roots denoting a belief in spirits. But even then, many religious people mean it much more specifically than this fuzzy "feeling of transcendence." Even if they don't, I think it is safe to say that most people who would identify as "spiritual" believe there is something literal about what they feel, i.e. it is more than a feeling.

But that's already been well-covered (see here and here). I want to focus on a different, and equally serious problem with Mooney's Spirituality Gambit, one I have mentioned before in comments on other blogs, but which I think deserves its own post.

If you've never heard Tim Minchin's Peace Anthem for Palestine, you owe it to yourself to scroll down to the bottom of this post and check it out. The song consists of one repeated refrain:

You don't eat pigs, we don't eat pigs
It seems it's been that way forever
So if you don't eat pigs and we don't eat pigs
Why not not eat pigs together?

At the risk of ruining a good joke by explaining the punchline, the song is funny because it naively suggests that a long-standing enmity between two violently opposed groups can be resolved by focusing on a superficial similarity -- in this case, that both Jewish and Muslim orthodoxy prohibit the consumption of pork. Of course this is absurd, because the conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims has nothing to do with dietary requirements. While finding some common ground is often a first step in conflict resolution, it's usually expected that the common ground will have something to do with the conflict in question.

And so it is with the Spirituality Gambit. Yes, it is true: To borrow Obama's inaugural phraseology, "people of all faiths and none" experience feelings of awe and transcendence. Your point? We also all (presumably) wipe our asses after going to the bathroom, but that hardly addresses the epistemological divide between scientific inquiry and revealed truth, does it?

Even if Mooney weren't engaging in clever word games, his point would still fall flat. In fact, many people have maintained that this is an argument in favor of discarding faith -- countless people, myself included, have found that they can accept the reality of a harsh uncaring universe without giving up their sense of wonder and fulfillment. This helps dispel the myth of secularists as some kind of emotionless Spocks, and undermines one of the more common arguments against embracing a nontheistic worldview.

The Spirituality Gambit is nothing more than a distraction. If it tells us anything, it's that atheists aren't as scary as many people make us out to be. But it tell us nothing about the epistemological (il)legitimacy of faith, nor about the societal effects of religion. Calling it a red herring would be an insult to Clupea harengus.

Lehrer's getting a raw deal, but...

2011-01-04T11:20:00.000-08:00

Jonah Lehrer is getting a lot of flak from the skeptic community over an article in the New Yorker he wrote about the "decline effect", whereby some statistically significant correlations tend to "wear off" over time as more and more attempts are made to replicate them.

It's an interesting problem, and for the most part he gave a thoughtful examination of the issues and their causes (the primary cause, IMO, being simple publication bias). However, he was harshly criticized -- and rightly so -- for the final paragraph of the original article in which he seems to flirt with a destructive form of post-modernism, a rejection of the very nature of objective fact. The worry is that he has given more fodder for science deniers of all stripes to ignore the overwhelming evidence in favor of evolution, climate change, etc. and against most forms of alternative medicine, psychic ability, etc.

I felt his first follow-up (sorry, I can't find the link at the moment) clarified his position sufficiently, and I sort of think the continued criticism he is receiving is overblown. I do want to highlight one rhetorical question from his most recent follow-up, however, because I think this question is very answerable. The context here is that he is discussing how the theory in evolutionary biology of "fluctuating asymmetry" initially got several false positives in numerous studies, before the preponderance of evidence turned against it.

This raises the obvious problem: If false results can get replicated, then how do we demarcate science from pseudoscience?

In principle, there is a very simple answer to this question, though of course applying it is often quite messy in practice: Bayes' theorem.

I'm a bit too busy at work right now to give even a brief treatment of the Bayesian mode of thought, but the Wikipedia article does a nice job, so read that if you are unfamiliar. As it applies to Lehrer's present question, we can (usually) demarcate science from pseudoscience by taking a guess at the prior probability.

Fluctuating asymmetry falls in the "science" camp, despite the fact that it ultimately turned out to be false, and even despite the fact that it was prematurely elevated to the status of "true" based on an (in retrospect) insufficient number of positive results, because it was a priori plausible. Homeopathy, on the contrary, falls in the "psuedoscience" camp, despite the fact that some trials of homeopathy have achieved positive results, because it is completely implausible.

As I said, this can get messy in practice. How would one classify early trials of acupuncture, when plausibility could be argued either way? And how much undue resistance was there to the theory of continental drift (now solidified in the more complete theory of plate tectonics) because most scientists at the time found the idea of moving continents to be a priori implausible?

But we already knew science is messy, and I think that overall Lehrer's original article and follow-ups have helped illuminate one of those messy aspects to a lay audience. I must reiterate that I agree with those who found the concluding paragraph of the original article to be severely misguided -- and I think in this most recent reply, he also missed an opportunity for a teaching moment by not digging deeper into his self-posed question. The question about demarcation does have an answer, one that is relatively simple in principle, if not in practice.

Facets

2010-12-28T08:12:00.000-08:00

The weekend before Christmas, a very close friend passed away suddenly under relatively shocking circumstances. She lived out of town, but had been supposed to drive up and stay with us starting last Thursday, as she does for most holidays. She apparently kept a very detailed diary, which continues to provide her family and us with more and more stunning revelations to heap upon the already tragic story.

Sometimes people succumb to the temptation to refer to "the real Nicole," i.e. the side that she showed us, as if the heretofore-unseen facets of her personality were somehow not a part of reality. With the caveat that it might have been better -- given that she was already dead -- if we had never found out about the other facets, now that we know about them, I think this is the wrong approach. It is simply the other side of the coin that labels everything we knew about Nicole as a "mask", some kind of illusion to hide a dark reality. Neither is correct. We all have many facets, and they are all equally real, all an inescapable part of what composes the whole.

I'm not really a condolences kind of person, so I'm turning off comments for this post. Instead, you can keep our family in your thoughts. And maybe sacrifice a goat or two.

Feel good? Do good? Not in my church, young man!

2010-12-17T07:23:00.000-08:00

Via RichardDawkins.net comes a disturbingly credulous article from CNN about a minister/theology professor who published a book called Almost Christian, regarding some supposedly horrible decline in religious passion among youth. Ho hum. One line really struck me, though:

Many teenagers thought that God simply wanted them to feel good and do good...

The article then goes on to have the author/minister/theologian explain why this is a bad thing.

So much for religion being a force to make people happy. You think God simply wants you to feel good and do good? No no no, we can't be having that! Why, thinking that the point of life is to be enriched and to enrich others... that's practically humanism! No no, the real God wants you to be miserable and sexually dysfunctional and afraid of eternal hellfire. I guess you got the wrong impression with this whole "Love one another" business. See, that's just a mistranslation. In the original text, what Jesus actually said was, "I hate fags, I hate women, now give me your damn money." Feel good and do good?!? That's the devil talking!

Yeah so, anyway... message for my son: Feel good. Do good. Be yourself.

I feel bad for Chris Maloney, but he's still a quack

2010-12-08T07:27:00.000-08:00

Oh dear. Maine naturopath Chris Maloney is at it again, this time sending a cease and desist letter to PZ Myers (who, it should be noted, hasn't said anything about Maloney in months).

I actually feel a little sorry for the guy. There is a grain of truth to the sentence in the letter that reads, "It is one thing to make statements against a particular profession -- it is another thing entirely to attack a particular practitioner, injuring his reputation by calling him a quack." Of course, the fact that they are two different things does not always make the latter bad... some people need to have their reputations injured, lest they retain an ability to con, fleece, or otherwise injure other people. In this case, Maloney is bringing it on himself by thinking he can silence criticism on the Internet. It's entirely foolish -- but I'm also struck by a certain naivety about it. I do kinda feel bad for the quack. If only he'd learn to keep his mouth shut...

A "War on Christmas" Checklist

2010-12-07T11:08:00.001-08:00

h/t to FriendlyAtheist for linking this video on why Christians are not being oppressed in the United States. Only problem with the list in the video is that, while everything in their is true, the Glenn Becks of the world will deny bits of it. Also, not to get all accomodation-y, but the opening card saying that Christians are the oppressors is going to sabotage any attempt to make this video resonate with people who do believe in the mythical War on Christmas.

So here I have culled the checklist down to only those things which I think are so indisputable that even Bill O'Reilly wouldn't deny it. Obviously you don't want to link "War on Christmas"-believers to this blog -- but feel free to copy-and-paste this link, without credit, to anybody who asserts that Christmas is under siege.

Things that Christians can say that no other religious group in the US can:

I can expect to get the day off for my faith's holidays in almost any job.
I can easily find books, in virtually any bookstore, accurately describing the beliefs and practices of my faith.
I can go into a non-specialty store and find decorations specific to my faith's holidays.
I can go into a non-specialty store and find greeting cards specifically designed for my faith's holidays.
I can go into virtually any music store and find music pertaining to my faith and my faith's holidays.
I can easily find various paraphernalia -- bookmarks, T-shirts, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, jewelery, etc. -- that pertain to my faith, my faith's symbols, and my faith's holidays, in numerous non-specialty stores.
I can put up decorations around my house and in public view pertaining to my faith's holidays without worrying that people will judge me negatively or think I am "weird."
I can easily find a group to worship with and carry out my faith's rites and ceremonies.
I can easily find spiritual counseling in my area from someone who shares my faith, often paid for by health insurance.
I can easily find support groups and charities organized by people of my faith.
I don't have to worry that someone will tell me my faith isn't a "real" religion.
I can easily find holiday specials on TV that depict people celebrating my faith's holidays.
I can expect the media to try and accurately portray my faith's views on any political matter.
I can walk onto any campus in the country and find a group dedicated to my faith.
I can be pretty sure I won't cause a huge controversy or a moral panic if I try to open a community center for my faith.
In virtually every election I have voted in, at least one and often both of the major candidates share some variant of my faith.
The majority of Americans identify with some variant of my faith.

Whatever your feelings are on religion, it ought to be crystal clear that Christians are not being oppressed in the United States. I hope this list has demonstrated that beyond any shadow of a doubt.

Torture is useful after all!

2010-12-02T08:33:00.001-08:00

Well this is a new one for me... Intelligence gathered from the use of torture may have helped bring WWII to a close.

Except that it was the Japanese employing the torture in this case, and the "intelligence" they gathered turned out to be absolute hogwash.

According to Wikipedia, it seems a B-29 crew was captured shortly after the massacres at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and were interrogated to see what they knew about the atomic bomb. Under extreme torture, the pilot panicked and made up some silly story about how the US had hundreds of bombs ready to go, and that Tokyo and Kyoto would be hit in a matter of days. (For extra chuckles, I am told by a source whose reliability is unknown that the pilot also made up some baloney story about the physics behind it, which must be read to be believed.)

Now, if the Japanese had known the truth (that actually Tokyo would be bombed in a few weeks, not a few days, and that a fourth bomb wouldn't be ready for another month or two) would that have changed their mind? Perhaps not. But still, this is really a beautiful demonstration of the dubious value of torture as an interrogation technique. It's doubtful the pilot was being clever... it seems he was scared shitless and in severe pain, and just said whatever came to his mind that he thought would satisfy the interrogators. Torture's great at producing information -- but whether that information is accurate or not, it's a crap shoot at best (and probably worse than a crap shoot, since there is some evidence that torture gives victims the incentive to lie).

Go torture!

The Republican War on Statistics

2010-12-02T08:03:00.001-08:00

Ah, sample size. We all know that sample size can be a real problem. Too small of a sample, and you get all sorts of spurious results. This is especially true if your population is huge but your sample is small.

But what would you say about a study with a population of about 400,000, that actually sampled a full 28% of the population? Oh my god, this is a statistician's wet dream. A sample that large and that comprehensive, assuming there are no major selection biases, you can basically get the precise answer for the entire population. It would take an astounding coincidence for that to be misrepresentative sample.

And yet... and yet... In the Senate hearings on DADT that are going on right now, at least three Rethuglican senators (McCain, Inhofe, and Brown... oh joy, tools all around) have expressed concern that the Senate committee report on the possible repeal of DADT "only" sampled 28% of the 400,000 or so active military personnel. Inhofe even said that 28% "isn't very much."

Wow. I mean, even for these lying sacks of shit, that's just... just... I'm speechless.

This would be like a baseball player, who hit a home run every third time he swung at a pitch. "Hmmm, I dunno, one in three isn't very much. I don't think that guy's very good at hitting home runs..." Oy.

The Reason for the Season...

2010-12-01T09:18:00.000-08:00

...is because the winter is drab and depressing in northern latitudes. Deal with it.

I probably don't need to tell that to most readers of this blog, but I need to get this out of my system anyway. The evidence for this simple fact is overwhelming. Is it just a coincidence that every single culture living in northern latitudes has some sort of mid-winter festival involving fire and lights and feasting? The winter festival was our ancestors' way of dealing with Seasonal Affective Disorder. Late December through February are depressing up here, and we all could use some cheering up.

Further evidence that a Christmas-like winter festival long predates Christianity is the infamous condemnation of Christmas trees in Jeremiah 10:3-4:

3 For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.
4 They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not. (KJV)

So that pretty much settles that. The "reason for the season" is to spread some good cheer at a time when those of us who live in harsh wintry climates could really use it.

Now let's be clear about what this observation is not. This is not a volley in the mythical "War on Christmas". This observation does not seek to undermine the religious observance of Christmas whatsoever. The true "reason for the season" may be far more pragmatic than a religious celebration, but the fact that for many people it takes the form of a religious celebration is (more or less) fine by me.

And that's why I am writing this post. There exists a certain subset of people, who, when they see non-Christians celebrating a winter holiday, get this absurd notion that we are co-opting and diluting/distorting their religious celebration. For anyone with even the slightest clue about the history of Christmas and other mid-winter festivals, that's just absurd.

Christmas is one in a long line of many, many, many winter festivals -- and that's okay! It's even okay that Christmas as celebrated by the majority of Christians borrows heavily from pagan traditions that predated the Common Era. (As surely every educated adult knows by now? I hope??) There's nothing wrong with syncretism, despite God's aforementioned condemnation of it in Jeremiah (the Jews were big on enforcing their cultural distinctiveness, you see). Christians are quite welcome to join the whole rest of the world (at least those living in cold climates) in having a nice cheery festival this time of year, with their own spin on it.

But please. Spare us the accusations of cultural co-option. That's just stupid, and any educated adult ought to know it by now. Maybe you can argue that the primary reason for Christmas is to celebrate Jesus' birth. But the general reason for festivals in the December time frame (as well as the reason for the scheduling of Christmas -- remember, virtually all theologians believe Jesus was definitely not born on December 25th) is to combat the winter doldrums. Christians who believe otherwise really need to get over themselves.

Before, During, and After

2010-11-22T19:14:00.001-08:00

I don't usually blog much about home improvement, but I figured I ought to do a follow-up post to the one about venturing into the crawlspace above my kitchen. It was a success. I won't bore my readers with details of the other various kitchen renovations we have been doing (painting all of the cabinets, stripping wallpaper from and painting the walls, removing an old non-functional built-in double oven and replacing it with new shelving, replacing the faucet, etcetera etcetera...) but I figured I'd do a brief pictorial chronicle of the soffit upgrade.

Before:

During:

After:

Boo-yah. It would be even more effective if I had included the atrocious wallpaper that was on there before (the wall had already been painted below the soffit in the "before" picture, which I know is totally the wrong order to do things, but we kept waffling on whether or not to take out the soffit before Thanksgiving). Anyway, I figure there has probably been many a past homeowner of this house that cursed that awful defunct soffit, and finally it is gone thanks to me. Feels good.

Imagine No Religion - by 2100?

2010-11-22T12:12:00.000-08:00

Occasionally blogger abb3w -- who has done a lot of interesting work with the GSS -- has a fascinating blog post where he/she analyzes the rise of the so-called "nones" (those with no particular religious affiliation) according to birthdate. The result is a surprisingly good match with a logistic "S" curve (I'm sure I knew what that was once upon a time, but no longer -- but it sure is shaped like an S!), which if extrapolated shows the "nones" exceeding 90-95% around the year 2100.

This is a highly idealized model of course, and nobody can predict the idiosyncratic nature of future history. But even the historical data is encouraging.

Update: Since some people are obstinately not getting it, let me make some clarifications.

First, as a reasonable person might have guessed from the heavily caveated second paragraph of this post, as well as the presence of a question mark in the title, I am not claiming any sort of certainty about whether this trend is real or not. In fact, it seems just as likely to me that it's not than that it is. I just thought the data abb3w turned up, in particular the close fit with a logistic curve, was intriguing.

Second, as abb3w made clear in the original post, and as I made clear in the comments, even if this trend is real it says nothing about religious belief -- it only speaks to religious affiliation. The so-called "nones" include SBNR types and so forth, for example. I thought that this was obvious from abb3w's post, and I didn't really intend to imply anything other than, "Hey look, abb3w has a cool post," so I felt it unnecessary to state this up front. But since I'm being accused of "intellectual dishonesty" for failing to spell it out for my less astute/more paranoid readers, I have chosen to update the post to reflect this. By the way, I still find the trend encouraging, because while I think that theistic belief in general is not compatible with critical examination, I think that vague personal theistic beliefs are usually not particularly harmful. (They may even be beneficial to some people, but I think the jury is still very much out on this one, and I feel it would be elitist to claim that some people "need" their comforting delusions without possessing very solid evidence to support that position)

Third, although this seems plain as day to me, I now find it necessary to point out that this post was not intended to be polemical. If you want polemics, just browse my blog for a bit, you'll find plenty. But this post is not included there. I'm not trying to "persuade" anybody of anything. I think it ought to be clear that no atheist living in America in the year 2010 is going to find the Argument from Popularity at all persuasive! As such, I would not attempt to employ it to convince others either. It is a rather lousy argument, after all. The percentage of people who are religiously affiliated, or who believe in God, or whatever, are completely independent from the truth value of any given theistic proposition, which itself is completely independent from whether or not religion is a force for good. These are all entirely separate issues. Again, if you want to hear me make an argument in regards to the truth of religion, or in regards to the positive/negative effects of religion, one will not have to look far in this blog -- but this post is not it. This post does not even fringe on those questions.

I hope all is clear now.

I really need a male friend and a beer right now

2010-11-17T09:08:00.000-08:00

The American male culture of not showing fear or other perceived signs of weakness may be emotionally stunting, but damn, now and then it can have it's advantages. I'm scared out of my wits right now, but if I had a male friend and a beer in my hand, I'd be cracking jokes and ready to dive right into the job.

Some backstory... we are renovating our kitchen, and there is this thing coming down from the ceiling (we are calling it a soffit, which I guess it technically is, although usually when you say "soffit" in relation to kitchens, you are talking about the part of the ceiling that comes down above the cupboards) that has nothing in it but a single recessed light (which might as well be on the ceiling proper) and a bunch of insulation. No ducting, nothing. We haven't quite figured out why anybody would have put it in to begin with. It looks safe to remove, so... we're gonna do it.

This fucker is coming out.

You can see the soffit in the picture to the right. Sorry for the bad lighting; the electricity is off in the kitchen (for obvious reasons). You can see the soon-to-be-former recessed light hanging out, and then a pole that I stuck up in there. I'll tell you why the pole in a second.

As I mentioned, the thing is stuffed with insulation. I had originally been anticipating a god-awful mess, a veritable rain of insulataion, at the point when I planned to saw the drywall out -- but then my sister suggested there is probably a crawlspace above the kitchen, and maybe I could shovel the insulation out first. So there is, and as intimidating as crawlspaces can be, on reflection I think that is the right solution.

So here I stand, with the crawlspace open and a halogen light shining into it, completely shitting my pants about going in there. It was bad enough opening the door -- I expected a gollum to jump out and bite my face off, or at the very least for a big pile of dead bodies to come rolling out and knock me off the ladder. The fact that I don't believe in monsters is cold comfort when you are by yourself, on a ladder, opening a creepy looking door that you anticipate crawling through in the near future.

It's a mess up there. To get my bearings, I stuck a pole up through the hole where the recessed light is, so I can see how far back I will need to go.

There's this weird perceptual effect... if I walk from the garage (where the crawlspace entrance is) to the kitchen, I would estimate the soffit is maybe 10-15 ft away from the entrance.

"Your mission, should you choose to accept it..." (The pole is circled in red)

But when I peer through the crawlspace, my estimate is more like 25-30ft!

If only I was holding a cold beer and had a guy friend here. That old male conditioning would kick in, and I'd just take a big swig and say (imagine frat boy voice here) "Let's DO it! Hell yeah!" But alone, beerless, and with no incentive to conform to a specific gender role... damn, this sucks.

de Waal's in over his head

2010-11-05T12:21:00.001-07:00

Frans de Waal writes a response to all of the comments he got on his previous article, which went on and on about how morality clearly had a natural origin, then at the end said, "But maybe we need religion to be moral anyway!" de Waal seems like he is not aware of a lot of what has been said on this already. I could not manage to read his whole response (I read the first one, it was disappointing, and this one is just aggravating). But I want to comment on two things:

Even though 90 percent of my text questions the religious origins of human morality, and wonders if we need a God to be good, it is the other 10 percent — in which I tentatively assign a role to religion — that drew most ire. Atheists, it seems (at least those who responded here) don’t like any less than 100 percent agreement with their position.

Sigh. The reason you're getting so much "ire" over that particular 10% is because it has a hidden implication that us atheists (including de Waal!) may be less equipped to be moral than our deluded counterparts. That's offensive. I mean, imagine if he had written a piece in which he hints that Islam might be inferior to Christianity when it comes to keeping people moral, and then was all surprised when Muslims get pissed off at him. Duh! Of course that is going to piss atheists off. In fact, I don't understand... is de Waal saying he himself is less moral?

I understand that de Waal is trying to draw a distinction between societal effects and individual effects. But that kind of comes across as elitist ("I don't need religion to be moral, but the unwashed masses do!"), and in any case, the way he put it in his previous column and the way it just came out of left field with no evidence was really off-putting. "Morality clearly has nothing to do with religion... but now I'm going to say, for no reason whatsoever, that our society might become immoral without it!" WTF. Of course that raised our ire.

Those who wish to remove religion and define morality as the pursuit of scientifically defined well-being (à la Sam Harris) should read up on earlier attempts in this regard, such as the Utopian novel “Walden Two” by B. F. Skinner, who thought that humans could achieve greater happiness and productivity if they just paid better attention to the science of reward and punishment. Skinner’s colleague John Watson even envisioned “baby factories” that would dispense with the “mawkish” emotions humans are prone to, an idea applied with disastrous consequences in Romanian orphanages.

Double sigh. So, he hasn't followed any of the discussion surrounding Harris' controversial idea? First of all, a lot of atheists think he's full of it, and that morality has to stem from arbitrary conventions. (I fall somewhere in between) So he's representing a false dilemma here: Old-time religion vs. Harris' radical idea. Um, no. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, a huge amount of the discussion about Harris' idea is in regards to similarities and differences between past Utilitarian and Utilitarian-esque ideals. de Waal is late to the game here if he think he's enlightening anybody by pointing out that Utilitarianism is not only insufficient, but has a real dark side. Get with the program.

Of course, he follows that with the dumbest fucking comment of all:

And talking of Romania, was not the entire Communist experiment an attempt at a society without God?

Really?

Seriously?

Can I get some of what you've been smoking, de Waal?

Yes, Communism in its two most high-profile manifestations, as well as many others, tried to enforce a society-wide atheism, but that's not central to the Communist experiment. Look the fuck up what Communism is. It has nothing inherently to do with godlessness, it has to do with economics and distribution of resources. And yes, it turned out to be a big failure. It turned out to be an even bigger failure because those high-profile manifestations were also brutal dictatorships. Did it occur to de Waal that maybe the human rights disaster in Communism was partly because the people were forced to abandon their religion, which is not what any sane person is discussing.

Gah. Fuck you, de Waal. You're an idiot.

Another [--------] for Paladino/Edwards

2010-10-29T06:57:00.000-07:00

I previously blogged about my confusion regarding a sign that said "Another Democrat for Paladino/Edwards", but was placed on a freeway off-ramp where clearly there was no Democrat for it to be referring to.

I now think I was on to something much more significant -- and to my surprise, I cannot see that any other bloggers or news sites have described this curious issue:

That appears to be the only official campaign sign the Paladino camp has released since naming a running mate.

Prior to the running mates being named, I saw similar numbers of Cuomo and Paladino signs. Since I live in a fairly liberal part of town, it was slanted a but more in the Cuomo direction, but I still saw a sprinkling of the old "I'm mad too, Carl!" signs.

In the first couple of weeks after Edwards was named as Paladino's running mate, I only saw a single Paladino/Edwards sign (the aforementioned one from the freeway offramp). Now they are starting to appear, albeit in smaller numbers than I would have expected -- and here's the crazy thing: All but one or two of the signs I have seen have either had "Democrat" blacked out with marker, or the "Another Democrat for" area of the sign (which is in a small font) cut out. (I'll try to get some pictures tomorrow)

That's right. Some genius decided to only print campaign signs that said "Another Democrat for...", and of course given the left/right polarization we are in right now, no Paladino supporter wants to identify themselves as a god-hatin' Democrat! And FWIW, I can understand: I had an Obama sign up in my yard in the run-up to the '08 prez election, and I try to think back and imagine if the only sign available had said, "Another Republican for Obama/Biden"... would I put that in my yard? FUCK. NO.

What the hell were they thinking?! Seriously, I am now seeing a massive skew towards Cuomo/Duffy signs, even in more conservative parts of town, in my opinion most likely because conservatives wouldn't be caught dead with the current Paladino campaign material. Not that Paladino had much of a chance to begin with (these populist nutbags tend to flounder once they get enough public exposure, because then even the easily-deceived start to notice that they are batshit insane) but could it be that this boneheaded "Another Democrat for" decision is enough to put the nail in the coffin for his campaign?