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It's okay to be wrong. It's not okay to stay wrong.

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Talk the Talk: Fire (now with bonus graphic)

In this week’s podcast, I talk about fire and how it helped bring about language in Homo sapiens. We also talk about Homo erectuses a bit.

There were a lot of interlocking threads, so on my way into the studio, I drew this map to keep everything straight.

Does that make sense? Well, probably not until you’ve heard the podcast. So go and listen.

One-off show: Here
Subscribe via iTunes: Here
Show notes: Here

Pareidolia of the daylia: Elephant! On! Marrrrrzzz…!

People freaked out over the face on Mars

Mars on a bad face day

But how will they react when they see this?

An Elephant on Mars? At Least According to This NASA Photo

NASA managed to snag this unique picture of an elephant-shaped lava flow on Mars in the Elysium Planitia sector of the planet. Located on a Martian plain known for displaying some of the planet’s youngest lava flows, this flow may have occurred within the past 100 million years – a relatively short time in the planet’s history.

Obviously it’s evidence that Ganesha is the one true god. He’s even associated with Mars for some reason. Come on, Hindus, I shouldn’t have to make this stuff up for you.

Science tells us ‘how’, and religion tells us ‘nothing’.

This bit of the Dawkins/Pell “debate” touched on something I’ve been thinking about.

Pell trots out that old chestnut that religious people like to say about science: science tells us “how”, and religion tells us “why”. I’d like to challenge that.

Sometimes we’re touched by tragedy. We lose someone close to us, and sometimes it’s not in a “good way”, like when someone is very old and ready. Sometimes it’s someone young and someone who really needs to be here with us. Sickness and death in that kind of situation is horrible and pointless, and there’s no good reason for it to have happened. And then people who are left alive, trying to pick up the pieces, will say something like, “It sure is hard to understand why this is happening.”

It’s completely understandable to ask why. But wait — wasn’t religion supposed to answer why? It doesn’t do the job in these situations.

Science can answer why. The person died because our bodies do a pretty good job in most circumstances, but not all the time, and sometimes they can’t heal themselves of everything. Our cells reproduce the wrong way, or a virus gets us, or we have a stroke, and we die. That’s why.

But that’s not a satisfying answer because it doesn’t speak to that person’s expectations. What the person is saying is: I had a belief that a loving god was watching over me, and was going to answer my prayerful requests, perhaps if I did the right things and/or had enough faith. Given those beliefs, it sure is hard to understand why this is happening.

So drop the belief. Without the expectations caused by this belief, things become a lot easier to understand. That’s important, because understanding why (say) cancer happens can lead to a way to beat it. But relying on religion to provide ‘why’ answers is confusing and just makes us ask the wrong questions.

Talk the Talk: Life Without Numbers

I’ve just put up an interview with Caleb Everett (not to be confused with Dan Everett). We talked about the Pirahã people and some work he’s done with them on numbers. They don’t have them, and they have quite a time of it thinking in numerical ways. Really interesting stuff.

I also do a bit of scream-metal. It’s as painful as it sounds.

One-off show: Here
Subscribe via iTunes: Here
Show notes: Here

Mormon apostle goes full anti-science

Times come and times go, but religion provides an anchor of constancy (if an anchor’s what you need). So it’s good to see Mormon apostle Russell Nelson engaging in the time-honored religious tradition of slagging science.

Well, that’s not fair. If there’s science that they like, then it’s a gift from god. If they don’t like the science, then it’s either Satan’s deception, or some irrelevant wild guess that will get resolved in the fulness of time.

Here’s the clip (from 7:12).

“Yet some people erroneously think that these marvelous physical attributes happened by chance or resulted from a big bang somewhere. Ask yourself, ‘Could an explosion in a printing shop produce a dictionary?’ The likelihood is most remote. But if so, it could never heal its own torn pages or reproduce its own newer editions.”

The printer’s shop analogy is extremely tired — evolution is not ‘by chance’! Mutation is, but natural selection is non-random. So yes, if books could reproduce and if only the fittest books survived to reproduce, then yes, we would see books that could heal torn pages and update themselves. Nelson is making a false analogy between a living being and an inanimate object, and the two have different qualities.

Analogy aside, what Elder Nelson has done must be very strange and uncomfortable for Mormons. He’s waded into science, and sneered at ideas from biology, physics, and cosmology that he doesn’t undertand, and that there’s real evidence for and no real reason to disbelieve.

To see why this is such weird territory he’s in, let’s take a look at mentions of ‘evolve’ or ‘evolution’ in General Conferences.

Predictably, the most mentions came when evolution was a new theory, and religious people were scrambling to figure out what to do about it. It popped up again as more young people started attending universities, and horrifying their religious parents with the science they were learning. Since then, things were calming down to background levels. The two words ‘evolution’ and ‘evolve’ weren’t even mentioned in all the 1990s! The last time Darwinian evolution was mentioned in General Conference was in 1984, when Bruce McConkie and Boyd Packer both had a bash. That’s 28 years of letting it lay.

So the scene was set for the LDS Church to let the issue go, accommodate evolution, and claim that they were never really against it, which is how they seem to resolve all their old conflicts. Instead, Nelson has recycled his old material, and renewed the attack. That’s going to take some time to walk back.

And just for comparison, no GA has ever trashed the Big Bang — the phrase doesn’t appear in the entire GC corpus. Nelson is really in deep water here.

What must intelligent Mormons be thinking?

a. Oh, Grandpa!
b. Um, are we not supposed to believe in the Big Bang now?
c. He spake as a man.
d. Let’s go shopping!
e. We just heard how not everything from the pulpit is doctrine, so no problem!
f. Holy fuck. This guy is a leader of my church, supposedly getting revelation from god, and he’s completely and unambiguously wrong. What else is he wrong about?

Because he is wrong. He’s proudly ignorant, making a joke out of something he doesn’t understand, and expecting the audience to laugh along. (Which of course they did, nervously.) He’s coming off as really dumb, and he’s considered one of the smart ones! (He was a doctor, doncha know.)

The takeaway: A major LDS leader just put himself (and the church) up against science. Are Mormons creationists now? Or is it possible to ignore an apostle?

Will this shake some educated Mormons up? The likelihood is most remote! But I think it should be a really big deal, and I’d like to hear from some smarter Mormons to see how they’re coping with this.

Dan Everett on atheism

I got to interview linguist Dan Everett last week for an episode of the ‘Talk the Talk‘ podcast.

He’s well-known for his work with the Pirahã people, and we talked about the implications of their language for linguistic theory. But the Pirahã people also served as a catalyst for his deconversion from Christianity, as he has discussed in this video from Fora TV.

So after all the talk about language, I got to ask him about atheism.

– – – – – – – – – –
Daniel Midgley: I’m just curious about atheism. As an atheist myself, I liked reading about your deconversion, but I think that must have been a really difficult time for you.

Dan Everett: Yeah, it was a very difficult time for me. I mean, I was raised with a complete apathy towards religion, and would have considered myself an atheist until I was about 17, when I had a dramatic conversion experience in San Diego in the 60s. And that was very useful; it got me off drugs and other things I was doing that I shouldn’t have been doing. And I met a family who had been missionaries in the Amazon for many years. That got me interested in the Amazon. And when you become a missionary, not only is your faith a personal thing, but it becomes a very public thing. You are being supported financially to do something based on what you say you believe. You’ve raised your family a certain way. So now suddenly to say, “Oh, wait, I don’t believe this stuff anymore,” it causes friends who’ve been giving money to you to help you do this work, and your family — it produces all sorts of trauma. Even when you would rather that it not do that, but at some point you have to say, “I don’t believe this stuff anymore for a number of reasons, and I can’t be dishonest and pretend that I do. I have to just say that I don’t, and take the consequences.

DM: It’s really hard to come out. I had not quite the same experience, but I used to be a Mormon, and I did the whole two year mission that they do. And there’s something about when you feel like you have to say that you believe something, it becomes very difficult — when you’re very much invested, it becomes very difficult to deconvert, I think.

DE: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. And so you would know from your Mormon background almost exactly what it was to go through this huge social pressure, and a lot of people that you like very much.

The other really interesting thing is there is no… I’ve never found a social equivalent to church for atheists. I mean, we don’t get together on a regular basis and sing songs and take care of each others’ children and have potlucks, because atheists don’t share beliefs. They just don’t believe something. And so we don’t have the same positive unifying force as people who share beliefs. And so once you do make that decision, you lose a certain social network that you had before, that, whatever it was based on, was psychologcally supportive. So there are a number of pressures that don’t involve threats that keep people believing, even when their inner brains tell them, “This doesn’t make any sense.”

DM: Do you think humanism could fill in the gaps somewhere?

DE: I’d like to think that it could, but I think that many of us who are atheists are pretty independent-minded anyway. So it’s difficult. I belong to a couple of humanistic societies, and I get their newsletters, and I’m encouraged by what they do, but they don’t have any particular events that look like a lot of fun that I’d like to go to. But I do enjoy the symphony and I enjoy going to concerts and things like that, so those things have to become church to me.

DM: Do you identify with the New Atheism crowd, Dawkins and Myers and skeptics like that?

DE: My view of Dawkins’ book in particular is that … somebody wrote me one time and said “I suspected that Dawkins was an atheist, but I just didn’t realise that he was an amateur atheist!” And my view is that… I respect what they’re doing. I think that, you know, my favourite writer in this regard is Christopher Hitchens. But at the same time, I don’t think that people have done a very good job of trying to understand the cultural meaning that people find in the social attraction in religion, and why really really intelligent people can be religious. I think that just to say that this is all stupid, and anybody who believes this stuff is an idiot… you know, I can see the appeal in saying something like that, but it doesn’t really give a satisfying explanation to me. So while I think there need to be writings trying to lay out the case against theism and why it can be a very negative force, I think we have to do it with understanding and compassion in a way that I haven’t really seen in much of the New Atheism writing.

DM: I think one of the approaches that a lot of people take is that we need a multiplicity of approaches — we have people that, you know, mock and ridicule because that fires up the base and it can shake some people, but then we also have the ‘nice atheists’ who understand what it was like to be maybe a fundamentalist and can approach things a little more gently.

DE: Yeah, as I say, even having said what I just said about the need for more compassion I still find Christopher Hitchens’ work to be absolutely hilarious and wonderful to read and he just brings so much wit to the process. But still, it’s got to be aggravating and I don’t know who it would convince if they believe fervently the other way. So I agree. There needs to be a multiplicity of approaches, and among other atheists, I don’t need to hold back my opinion of theism, but when I’m with… you know, I have people that I love and respect very much who are strong believers, and I don’t hold back — I tell them what I think — but at the same time it would never occur to me to insult them because they believe differently than me.

DM: I tend to say: I respect people but I don’t respect ideas.

DE: Yeah, I agree with that. I completely agree with that. It’s just that sometimes people that we respect hold ideas that we hate. And so we have to speak to those ideas. And there are some times when there’s just no way to be diplomatic about it. So if I say, you know, “I don’t believe in God, and Jesus is not my saviour,” well, that’s what I believe and there are some people who are going to be offended by that no matter how nice I try to say it, but that is the bottom line.

DM: Sometimes you have to say, “I’m not going to sugar-coat this for you. That’s how it is.”

DE: I agree with that, too. Yeah, there are times you just have to say it. My grandkids come up to me, and they say, “Are you afraid of going to hell?” And I said, “No, I’m not.” But I said, “You don’t need to be afraid about it either, because even if there is a hell, you didn’t send me there. I make my own decisions, and I’ll have to deal with it when I die. But I don’t believe I’m going to such a place.”

DM: How do the other family members feel about that?

DE: They’ve become pretty understanding of me nowadays. I mean, it was hard initially for a number of reasons because I made the announcement of my atheism, and that was a very strong contributing factor to my divorce, and the divorce in itself was traumatic, so there’s a lot of stuff going on. But right now they’re all quite understanding of me, and they tolerate me. More than tolerate; they love me as their father, but you know, I don’t bring these things up all the time. Sometimes sitting around at one of my daughters’ homes, their sons will ask me or daughters, you know, what do you think about this? And I don’t lie and I don’t hold back.

DM: I found that my linguistics kind of informed my atheism in a way. Like I used to be a literal Tower-of-Babel believer on some level, even if I never thought about it very much, because I was kind of a literalist, like a lot of Mormons, I think.

DE: Uh-huh.

DM: Did your linguistics factor in?

DE: In a different way. My linguistics factored in for two reasons. One, it was teaching me how to think scientifically. And two, it brought me into contact with other people who were thinking scientifically. It gave me a different social crowd. And I realised that I admired this crowd more — that people who reasoned, however imperfectly, in a scientific way, seemed to be more interesting people than people who did not reason in a scientific way, the people who simply based everything on what they interpreted a book written a couple of thousand years ago said. So it was very appealing, and also I didn’t like all the rules and regulation of religion, to tell you the truth. I was very happy to be able to think for myself about what I thought morality should be, and what I can and can’t do.

– – – – – – – – – –
The rest of this interview will appear on an upcoming episode of ‘Talk the Talk’.
[ Subscribe on iTunes | TtT home page | Facebook ]

Capsicun on MKR again

Since I collect these things, here’s another instance of someone saying ‘capsicun’. I wonder why it’s always ‘My Kitchen Rules’ when people say this.

And this time it’s someone from South Australia.

I’ve also created a ‘capsicun’ tag, if you want to keep up with this wild new language craze.

Talk the Talk – Uptalk

This was a fun episode today. I didn’t think I was going to have enough to talk about on the subject of ‘uptalking’, but there’s quite a lot to say. Plus it was fun to actually ‘uptalk’ because I knew it would annoy our producer Peter Barr.

‘Uptalking’, for the uninitiated, is where you use question-style intonation even when you’re not asking a question. Everyone has an opinion on what it means — you’re unconfident, you’re seeking approval — but I think of this as idle speculation. And then I add some of my own — hey, my idle speculation is as good as anyone else’s.

Subscribe to us on iTunes, or get into Talk the Talk any way you like on our show page.

Google’s contextual spell checker is cool

It was a Great Moment in Tech Support. The caller asked me how he could remove a word from his WordPerfect dictionary.

It was an unusual request, but we got a lot of those. “What word do you want to remove?” I asked.

He stumbled. “Um… ‘pubic’?”

I knew immediately what had happened. ‘Pubic’ is a real word, of course, but he hadn’t meant to use it in his document, and there he’d gone and given a presentation on ‘pubic works’ and how ‘pubic libraries’ operate for the ‘pubic good’. These things can happen when you speak in pubic.

His dumb spell checker had failed him. Spell checkers have been around so long that we’re used to their limitations, and one of them was that it was insensitive to context. Well, no more. Google’s DocsBlog (via Lifehacker) has announced that it’s rolled its “do you mean” spell checker into GoogleDocs.

1. Suggestions are contextual. For example, the spell checker is now smart enough to know what you mean if you type “Icland is an icland.”
2. Contextual suggestions are made even if the misspelled word is in the dictionary. If you write “Let’s meat tomorrow morning for coffee” you’ll see a suggestion to change “meat” to “meet.”
3. Suggestions are constantly evolving. As Google crawls the web, we see new words, and if those new words become popular enough they’ll automatically be included in our spell checker—even pop culture terms, like Skrillex.

How do ordinary spell checkers work?

Spell checkers work by taking words that don’t appear in the dictionary (sometimes known as ‘out-of-vocabulary’ words, or OOV), and comparing the string to a list of known words in the dictionary. To figure out the most likely suggestion, they calculate an ‘edit distance’, or how many changes it would take to go from the malformed word to a known word.

So how do you calculate the edit distance? One easy measure is the Levenshtein distance. It’s pretty intuitive. Ask yourself: How many changes would it take to go from ‘pubic’ to ‘public’? Just one: add an ‘l’. So the edit distance is 1. But the computer calculates this using a grid. This is the cool part.

Start by putting the two words in a grid like so; one word down and the other across. Also, fill the second row and column with numbers. (This will make sense in a minute.)

p u b i c
0 1 2 3 4 5
p 1
u 2
b 3
l 4
i 5
c 6

Now, fill each of the inner boxes with one of three numbers, whichever is lowest:

  1. The number above plus 1
  2. The number to the left plus 1, or
  3. The number to the upper left, plus 1 if the two letters don’t match (that’s called the “cost”), or plus 0 if the two letters do match.

For our example, ‘p’ matches ‘p’, so the smallest number would be the 0 to the upper left. No cost.

p u b i c
0 1 2 3 4 5
p 1 0
u 2
b 3
l 4
i 5
c 6

On we go, down the column. None of the other letters are a ‘p’, so the lowest number for each box would be the one just above it, plus one. Notice how the numbers keep stacking up.

p u b i c
0 1 2 3 4 5
p 1 0
u 2 1
b 3 2
l 4 3
i 5 4
c 6 5

We start again at the next column. The ‘p’ and the ‘u’ aren’t a match, so we give it a 0 + 1 from the left, but the ‘u’ and the ‘u’ are a match, so that box gets a cost-free ‘0’ from the upper-left.

p u b i c
0 1 2 3 4 5
p 1 0 1
u 2 1 0
b 3 2
l 4 3
i 5 4
c 6 5

You can work out the rest of the table if you’re keen, but here it is in full.

p u b i c
0 1 2 3 4 5
p 1 0 1 2 3 4
u 2 1 0 1 2 3
b 3 2 1 0 1 2
l 4 3 2 1 1 2
i 5 4 3 2 1 2
c 6 5 4 3 2 1

Notice how everything’s going smoothly until the number in green, where the first real mismatch is. But the number to watch out for is that last one in the lower right, in red. When the whole table is filled out, that’s where your answer is. So the words ‘pubic’ and ‘public’ have a Levenshtein distance of 1, which matches our intuition about the number of changes we’d have to make to go from one to the other.

You can try this with any two words, either on paper, or using this handy website here. Having a play with it is a good way of getting a grip on this algorithm.

There are lots of ways we can tweak this spell-checker. We can adjust the cost so that near keys (and therefore more plausible typing mistakes) cost less than farther-away keys. We could adjust for frequency so that more common words float to the top of our suggestion list. But what we can’t do is look at nearby words to see what’s likely. That means the classic ‘form/from’ problem is beyond the reach of our spell checker.

But not the one from GoogleDocs. It will flag words, even if they’re real words. Behold:

Note how throwing in a related word (‘pelvis’) in that last example is enough to calm the spell checker down.

How does it do it? It looks like it works by calculating the probability of other words appearing nearby. Articles like ‘the’ and ‘a’ are likely to appear before ‘island’, less likely before ‘Iceland’. The whole thing could be modelled with n-grams (nearby words) using a sufficiently large language corpus, which Google certainly has. And that huge corpus ensures that lots of words will be in the dictionary, including low-frequency or brand new terms.

It’s good to know that people are still adding to a technology that’s so seemingly mundane.

Should we encourage religious abstinence, or “safe religion”?

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