The best psychologists (besides actual psychologists) would have to be salespeople. They’ve learned lots of ways to exploit all our cognitive funny bits.

Case in point: a grocer friend of mine has alerted me to an interesting tendency among shop-goers. Say you’ve got a big pile of oranges, but with one spotty one featured prominently. Even though all the other oranges look great, they’ll all stay right where they are. No one will touch them until you remove the bad one. Then they’ll start to move again.

In this case, people are making assumptions involving sampling bias. We may believe that most of the oranges are good, but that one prominent bad orange is somehow more salient than the others, and we weight it more heavily when deciding how good the rest of them are. Perhaps the bad orange is more salient than all the good oranges because of the ‘Minimax principle‘ — we want good outcomes, but we often just try to avoid bad outcomes.

This also reminds me of the ‘Volvo fallacy‘, where a negative anecdote can overrule more reliable information.

I read an internet exchange once where someone said, “You have arrived at the right answer, but for the wrong reasons. And so you will revert to your earlier wrong opinion.”

The author of this article is doing just that. I was considering not putting a link because a) I’ve never linked to the bedwetters at townhall.com, and I hesitate to start, and b) there’s an annoying ad there urging you to fight some kind of imaginary liberal bias in the media. I’m linking anyway if you want context, but wash your hands afterwards.

He raises a lot of issues about Joseph Smith (who Mormons consider to be a prophet) in the form of a quiz:

After I was asked to read about (and consider converting to) Mormonism, I came across some rather disturbing accusations against Joseph Smith, Jr. Were he alive today, I would submit the following true/false test to the founder of Mormonism:

1. True or False. Among your 33 well-documented plural wives, there were close to a dozen unions in which the wife was already married to another man.
2. True or False. In your lifetime, you married four different pairs of sisters.
3. True or False. You once married a young woman and also married her mother.
4. True or False. At least one of your plural wives was as young as fourteen.

And so on and so on.

His implication is that if Joseph Smith did those things (and I have no reason to doubt that he did), that somehow invalidates Smith’s claim to be a prophet. But there’s an assumption here: God wouldn’t tell Joseph Smith to do those things because I don’t think God would condone that behaviour. And why wouldn’t s/he? Is the columnist so in touch with the divine that he can figure out what God would do? Seems that a lot of people are claiming the privilege of theo-telepathy lately.

This is the same kind of trap that atheists commonly fall into when they discuss the problem of evil: how could God allow suffering? After all, I wouldn’t allow it, and God must be… just like me! And then they are easily countered by scriptures like “Your ways are not my ways.” After all, maybe God is an sadistic God who likes to see suffering, but who you should worship anyway. Or he has his own reasons for doing things, which even a cursory glance at the Old Testament will confirm.

Atheists are only on slightly firmer ground when we say, “God claims to be loving, but allows suffering, and that doesn’t seem very loving.” And then the believer finds a way around it with the ‘free-agency’ argument or the ‘growth through adversity’ argument, or any argument that comes to mind — they’ve evolved millions of them.

No, the way to attack this is like so:
1) Smith claimed to receive revelations from God.
2) The existence of God is unsupported by any real evidence.
3) There are therefore other non-supernatural explanations for the things Smith wrote and did. We accept those explanations because it is more likely that Smith was mistaken or deceptive than that God exists.

And then you can debate that without having to get into guessing the mental states of hypothetical beings.

São Paulo by Morcheeba Album: Charango
The closest I’ve ever come to Brazil is Spain, which I realise isn’t very close. (In fact,Washington State may even be closer.) But walking around Barcelona was lots of fun. What an interesting and sexy place. It didn’t seem unusual to see a young man and woman riding a bicycle together, but with her in front facing him. Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. Morcheeba. And when you’re walking along the beach meeting extroverted people, this is the soundtrack. But why is the singer so depressed? It’s chill. Go with it.

Sex and Candy by Marcy Playground Album: Triple J Hottest 100, Volume 6
I don’t know much about the band, but I like the groove of the song. And while the phrase ‘disco superfly’ never really made into the vernacular (partially because of questions as to its usage), it wasn’t the fault of Marcy Playground. A good listen.

Captivate by Nitzer Ebb Album: Belief
I was on this huge industrial thing back in 1990-91. Ebb was a band that I quite liked, even though I knew they were kind of derivative. Except that I never really knew how to pronounce the name. ‘Night-zer’ seems to have prevailed, though I was a ‘nit-zer’-ista. There’s a sexual streak in the Ebb, especially this song. Smooth beats pump, not pummel as in so much of their work. Is it a seduction, or something a little rougher? Does the lead singer have his hands down his pants, in that special way that thrilled so many concert-goers?

Junk Culture by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark Album: Junk Culture
OMD was an anomaly, in that they actually got better the more commercial they got. And while every band peaks and each successive album gets suckier and suckier, each new OMD album after Junk Culture turned out to be not as sucky as you expected it to suck. In fact, they were quite good. At the time. Junk Culture finds OMD poised at their perfect moment — the experimentalism of Dazzle Ships is over, and ‘If You Leave’ is yet unpenned.

A Guide for I and I by Thievery Corporation Album: Ministry of Sound: Clubbers Guide to Breaks
I am not a clubber. I do not club. It’s just that you see these albums at the library, and you think, “Here’s a chance for me to hear how the other half lives, without having to actually waste money on the CD.” And then someone sees it in your iTunes Library and says, “Don’t you feel like a dick having songs by somebody with ‘DJ Whatever’ in their name? What are you, 18?” And I’m like, “39 is the new 18.” I will defend this track; it grooves along pleasantly, despite the annoying references to ‘Jah Almighty’. It could probably be longer, even. But you didn’t hear it from me.

Does God exist? Only one way to find out:

A man shouting that God would keep him safe was mauled to death by a lioness in Kiev zoo after he crept into the animal’s enclosure, a zoo official said on Monday.

“The man shouted ‘God will save me, if he exists’, lowered himself by a rope into the enclosure, took his shoes off and went up to the lions,” the official said.

“A lioness went straight for him, knocked him down and severed his carotid artery.”

So that’s pretty conclusive, then.

It’s a senseless tragedy, and very sad for the man, his family, and the observers. I can’t find any way to express the enormity of this, except through the sensitive medium of poetry. So I’m challenging everyone in the world to a limerick contest on this topic. Put ’em in comments. I’ll post mine when I’ve got a good one.

An article from the New York Times today about Utah Republicans who still — still! — back Bush all the way. Read it — it’s head shakin’ good.

“When I watch him, I see a man with his heart in the right place,” said Delia Randall, a 22-year-old mother from Provo, the hub of a county that gave Senator John Kerry just 11 percent of the presidential vote in 2004. “I like George Bush because he is God fearing, and that’s how a lot of people in this area feel.”

…

“He’s strong, and he doesn’t waver,” said Jaren Olsen, 18, a freshman at Brigham Young, the nation’s largest religiously affiliated private university, who is from Albany. “I like that he is for the family, that marriage should only be between a man and woman. And the war, we need to finish what we started.”

Another student at Brigham Young, Danielle Pulsipher, a junior, offered blanket approval of the president. Asked to name which of his actions as president she liked most, she was hard-pressed to answer.

“I’m not sure of anything he’s done, but I like that he’s religious — that’s really important,” Ms. Pulsipher said.

I used to live among these people, and the ’92 election season was pure hell. I felt like I was in some kind of asylum. Boy, was everyone cranky at BYU the day after Clinton won.

At the heart of the Mormon experience is the gaining of a ‘testimony’: a spiritual conviction that the principles of the Church are true. And how do you gain a testimony? By feelings and experiences. In other words, for a Latter-day Saint, if you pray about something and you feel ‘good about it’, that means it’s true. That’s supposed to serve as verification! It’s garbage in, garbage out. You’re just bound to arrive at stupid conclusions if you buy stupid premises.

And that’s why Bush is so popular among Utah Mormons. He hits all the right buttons. They feel ‘good’ about him. Facts don’t matter; feelings do. Come to think of it, this is probably the process by which Bush decided to invade Iraq. No wonder they love him. They truly think alike.

Today is 6.6.06, the Day of the Beast. Unless of course, you go for the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, which puts the number of the Beast as 616. In which case the Day of Evil was last January or last week, depending on the date encoding conventions in your area.

The remake of “The Omen” opens today. Housemate went to an advanced screening last night, and said it was okay, but the kid looks a lot like Youngest Boy. With the filthy glares that kid can give, I’m not surprised.

I hate scary movies, but for some reason, it doesn’t frighten me when a movie features one scary character who’s doing evil things. What really scares me is when a bunch of people who think they’re good act evilly. It’s a major theme in To Kill a Mockingbird, which I’m reading aloud with Oldest Boy. You have a whole community of decent people, but because racism is so entrenched, it turns out all wrong. And yet they see nothing wrong with the outcome. You have lots of tiny bad decisions by lots of ordinary people enforcing their values ignorantly, and it multiplies into monstrosity.

Let’s look at a case:

The customer is always right? Not at Geno’s Steaks in South Philadelphia.

Belly up to its counter and order a cheesesteak in a language other than English, and you’ll walk away hungry. Fromage-avec? Fugheddaboudit.

It seems that Joseph Vento, Geno’s owner, feels strongly that everyone in this country ought to speak English – even if they’re tourists from faraway climes looking for that fabled Philly cheesesteak fix.

Vento insists his customers order in English. No pointing at the menu items. Speak English, a sign at Vento’s popular, curbside counter reads.

Okay, so the guy has an value that it’s important to speak English in the USA. Fine. It probably is. But what an ignorant ass to enforce this value in such an ignorant way.

I’m a language-learning guy. I speak Spanish and French (pretty well), and Russian (some, but I’ve forgotten a lot). I’ve also taken some first-year Japanese, and I can still recognise a few words and phrases. But when I go to Japan, I have real trouble with ordinary tasks. And I’m so grateful when someone is helpful to me, the dumb gaijin who can’t speak Japanese. What if no one helped me? First, they’d be assholes. And second, I’d starve. Which they’d probably be happy about if they were the kind of assholes that are running Geno’s Steaks. Or the kind that are currently whipping up popular ire about America’s language policy.

This is the kind of evil I find really scary. The kind of evil where a whole community turns the cold shoulder to someone because they don’t speak the right language. Or have the right colour skin. Or the right religion or family connections or … well, you can fill in the blanks. If there were just one evil person, you could find them and stop them, but when it’s everyone making those tiny decisions, they don’t feel like they’re doing anything evil at all.

I recently heard (again) that line that Edmund Burke probably never said: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

To that I would like to add: People aren’t always very good at knowing whether they are good or evil. And evil often triumphs when good but ignorant people take it into their heads to do something.

Oldest Boy once asked me if Bush had done anything well during his presidency. Ordinarily, I can find one or two good points about anything, even if it’s not something I like. The incompetence of Bush poses a special challenge in this way.

I told him that there was one thing Bush was very good at: winning elections. He had a way of finding just the kind of issues that would split the electorate, to his advantage.

But the skills needed to govern are not the same as the skills needed to win elections, and I don’t think Team Bush has even yet figured that out. Which is why the President has decided to stake his recovery on an issue that worked for him in 2004, but which has gone cold since: gay marriage.

In our free society, people have the right to choose how they live their lives. And in a free society, decisions about such a fundamental social institution as marriage should be made by the people — not by the courts.

Talk about poor governance: he’s stacked the Supreme Court with conservative judges, but still feels the need to complain about judicial activism. (He didn’t see the need to complain about judicial activism when the SCOTUS made him President, though.) And so he’s going populist in the hopes that voters will support a Constitutional amendment that will discriminate against a segment of Americans.

Will it work? Public opinion-wise, it looks less likely than ever. The latest Gallup Poll shows a 39/58 split, for vs. against. Back in 2004, it was 32/62, so the public is slowly shifting views on marriage to match the recent acceptance of homosexuality. Once again, Bush plays to the extremists rather than the mushy middle, but this time, the base may be too alienated to return. But the middle will be even more alienated by this ploy, and Bush will continue his slow slide to 25.

Ms N_
Graduate Research School

Dear Ms N_

I noticed your call for participation in the 9th National Student Leadership Forum on Faith and Values, to be held in Canberra this September. I’d like to apply as a student representative. I may not be the ideal applicant because I don’t have any faith, but I do have values like you wouldn’t believe. I’d like to tell you about some of them, and you can decide if they stack up favourably.

One of my values is that government should be kept free of religious interference. For that reason, the idea of a leadership forum that leans toward religious faith is deeply unsettling, especially when political leaders are speaking at it.

However, another of my values is to balance my skepticism with open-mindedness. So I try to stay open to the idea that the whole forum might not be a disingenuous attempt to increase religious influence in government using coded religious language with perhaps the goal of taking power from non-religious citizens, funneling federal money to religious groups, and stripping Australia’s citizens of rights they currently enjoy. If I see any evidence at the forum to contradict this view, I’ll be sure and mention it in my report.

But my most important value involves faith. Faith is superfluous, even harmful, to the pursuit of knowledge, and a university has no business promulgating it. Faith feeds on the natural human tendency to see what we expect to see. It is a form of bias that causes the believer to stick with poorly-supported theories. The only reason anyone would need to exercise faith in an idea is if that idea lacks adequate evidence to support it. University students (among which I include myself) need to learn not to hold ideas because of faith, but because of empirical evidence and sound reasoning.

It is these values that I wish to discuss at the forum. Thank you for considering my application. I await your reply.

Is it Friday again? Time to Refresh…

I Could Be Dreaming by Belle & Sebastian Album: Tigermilk
I first saw this album in 2000 and thought, ‘Hmm, Smiths.’ I didn’t buy it, though. Then I saw people on the Duffylovers list talking about it, and I downloaded “She’s Losing It”. Loved it. Bought the first three albums on eBay. I don’t know how I feel about B&S now. I think I may approve of them more than I like them. But the song’s good, and the cover’s slightly charged. Do Scottish people really talk like the girl on the outro? How do vowels vary so much in such a small geographical area?

Sugar High (Slow Version) by Duffy Album: Needle Mythology (Single)
Duffy is Stephen Duffy of Lilac Time fame. Or, sadly, non-fame. Stephen is brilliant, but his work has been ignored by all but the most musically knowedgable. And people like me who’ve been lucky enough to notice. This comes from his foray into Britpop in 1996. Best lyric: “It’s all there/In the air/And in every young girl’s hair.” This ‘Slow Version’ is thirteen seconds longer than the album version. Discuss.

Fathers’ Pyramid by Powderfinger Album: Parables for Wooden Ears
Powderfinger’s huge in Australia. This one’s an early one from 1994 that I haven’t listened to very much. It’s what you listen to when you feel like listening to something sort of Pearl Jam-ish, which for me never ever ever happens. Ever.

Petrol by Severed Heads Album: Bulkhead
More Severed Heads. This song hasn’t stood up well for me. It’s metallic and industrial, but it sounds so lightweight, so 1982. Better try something a bit more aggressive, like Bad Mood Guy or Come Visit the Big Bigot.

Universal Daddy by Alphaville Album: Afternoons in Utopia
I used to love this album. It was sort of science fantasy, and the lyrics contained cross-references and conundrums. And the songs! Put on your headphones and come for a walk to the Crystal Castle out across the snowy fields of Aris! Fantastic. Still not too dated. Best lyric: “Throwing stones against your window/Don’t pretend you’re not at home.” That captured what it was to be forever young in 1986.