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Hindus want a piece of the yoga action

15 December 2010 / / 5 Comments

One day many Christmases ago, the erstwhile Mrs Daniel and I went to an Anglican Church. (We went seeking pomp, but were disappointed.) While there, we saw some parents we knew from Hippy School.

“So, are you Anglican?” I asked.

“No,” they replied. “We do Yoga!”

The quondam Mrs D was irked. “Yoga’s not a religion!” she later fumed.

Well, no, it’s actually a method of torture, but that’s coming from me, with the shortest hamstrings in the Pecos.

And yet, the Hindu American Foundation would like to take yoga back.

Yoga is practiced by about 15 million people in the United States, for reasons almost as numerous — from the physical benefits mapped in brain scans to the less tangible rewards that New Age journals call spiritual centering. Religion, for the most part, has nothing to do with it.

But a group of Indian-Americans has ignited a surprisingly fierce debate in the gentle world of yoga by mounting a campaign to acquaint Westerners with the faith that it says underlies every single yoga style followed in gyms, ashrams and spas: Hinduism.

At first, I was thinking: fine, but this won’t improve yoga. Doing asanas is fine as a form of exercise, but dragging in a bunch of religious muck won’t make it any better.

Then I realised: Silly me! They don’t want to improve yoga. They just want to piggyback on yoga’s popularity. Which is all right, I suppose. Look at Christianity. They’ve been allowed to piggyback on

  • family
  • personal milestones like birth, marriage, death, and puberty
  • the human qualities of virtue, morality, goodness

So I guess the least we can do is let the Hindus have yoga. Though later on they might try to claim all exercise.

On the other hand, I have no objection if people who practice Christian Yoga are tied up into a knot and rolled over by a thousand fitballs.

And what’s with all the sleeping?

14 December 2010 / / Comments Off on And what’s with all the sleeping?

Top-down v decentralised

13 December 2010 / / Comments Off on Top-down v decentralised

Having seen what governments get up to when their secrecy is assured, we should all be welcoming the WikiLeaks age. (And if you’re a signer of petitions, you could do worse than this one at avaaz.com — h/t nikki)

In the wake of the cable leakages, right-wing authoritarians like Newt Gingrich and Fox News haven’t been shy about using terrorism accusations, and calling for assassination. Seems like they think the only way information should move is from the top down. They hate it when anyone tries to make the information move laterally.

I mention Wikileaks and Fox because it follows something of a pattern I’ve noticed with right-wing authoritarians — a very strong tendency toward hierarchy, as opposed to a more collaborative style of exchange with no centralised control — a configuration I’ve seen associated more often with liberals.

This pattern shows up in the way the two groups get information. The right currently dominates the radio dial — Limbaugh, Beck, Savage, and so forth — where an announcer disseminates information down the channel. The liberal attempt to duplicate it was not a success. It’s just not how liberals communicate. Liberals talk to each other through a loose confederation of blogs, where comments flow between participants and multiple writers are likely to work together on the front page. Righties have their blogs too, but it’s not their main channel. The political discourse on the net skews leftward (at least on the xkcd map).

This pattern also feeds into stories of origin. For conservatives (much more likely to be religious), truth comes from on high, and the diversity of life was caused by a god creating it from the top down. For liberals (more often secular), the story is evolution, with no central controller. Science works by peer-review.

I think collaboration is much more likely to give good answers than a top-down hierarchy will. The success of science is evidence of this, but there’s also Wikipedia, where content always has lots of eyes poring over it and is always being updated. Wikipedia’s not necessarily liberal, but it is true that some conservatives felt it wasn’t serving them, and their attempt to create their own is a farce. Or there’s the terrible Knol, where single authors write what they want, no one has to agree, and good information is very hard to find. Give this liberal a good collaborative effort anytime.

Working with the rough kids

10 December 2010 / / 1 Comment

This week, I took part in a program called ‘Race Around Campus’. It’s an outreach program that UWA puts on to give high schoolers a taste of what they’d be doing at university. I gave the same 20-minute mini-class over and over again for about 18 different school groups.

I got to see the contrast between different groups. Some were great. One group came into the lecture room, and they actually waited at their chairs until I realised what they were waiting for, and I said, “Please take a seat.” Which they did. But these groups weren’t just well-behaved; they were really switched on, they took an interest in the linguistics problems I was presenting, and they grasped them quite readily. Maybe they needed a little ‘entertainment’ in the teaching to keep them interested, but when they got it, they responded.

Other groups were from underpriviledged schools. Some had a teacher/student ratio of about 1 to 4. These groups had real control issues. While some groups were inattentive, some were potentially dangerous. One student started trying to punch a hole in his water bottle with his pen, and ended up injuring himself right there in class. (That was in the first ten minutes.) They had a hard time staying on task. They cracked private jokes at my expense. They talked incessantly, despite the best efforts of their teachers. It was rather dispiriting to be using my best presenting skills, and not magically captivate their interest like I normally do, but eventually I shifted my focus to simply holding their attention, and failing that, maintaining order and getting through the twenty minutes.

I had to reflect about the difference between the ‘good’ groups and the ‘more difficult’ groups. The kids in the good groups were responsive, smart, and able to take an interest in problems and solve them. The kids in the tough groups couldn’t do any of that. They probably weren’t dumb — they just didn’t see the need or take the interest. And why would they? I was presenting material that was utterly remote from their experience. They were never going to do linguistics, and they might not ever see the inside of a university building again. It wasn’t part of any framework they were used to, or one that they had ever succeeded in. It felt like my job was to attract the students that were interested, and let all the rest filter through. Which was the most I could do in twenty minutes.

I felt bad for the kids from the rough schools, and I felt worse for their teachers. But the ones I felt worst about were the students who were actually quite bright, and clearly capable of doing the work, but they were being forced to go to school every day with some unpredictable and rather frightening kids. It reminded me of everything I hated about being that age.

He’s pretty responsive to their wishes

9 December 2010 / / 2 Comments

The Kongressional Krayzee Korps has decided that President Obama doesn’t talk about the Sky-Fairy enough.

President Obama doesn’t mention God frequently enough in his speeches, a group of religious House Republicans said in an open letter to the president, chastising him for skipping over mention of the “Creator,” especially in a recent overseas address.

Forty-two members of the Congressional Prayer Caucus complained in a letter sent to the White House Monday that in a speech delivered last month in Indonesia, the president substituted the U.S.’s religious-themed national motto for a more secular alternative.

The letter suggests the speech was not an isolated incident but part of a series of remarks that “establishes a pattern” of the president intentionally excluding talk of God from his public remarks.

Republican crazies have made a demand, so you know what that means. Expect the number of god-references in presidential speeches to jump sharply.

Extraordinary Claims

3 December 2010 / / 4 Comments

Love the look of this website — Extraordinary Claims — by the Centre for Inquiry Canada. Love the content too. It’s a rundown of a whole crop of bogus ideas, from Allah to Xenu.

From the blog:

Why is belief in Bigfoot dismissed as delusional while belief in Allah and Christ is respected and revered? All of these claims are equally extraordinary and demand critical examination.

At CFI Canada we challenge ideas and ask tough questions to promote reason, science, secularism and freedom of inquiry.

I think I could read this all afternoon. There goes today’s productivity.

And if you’ve read the website, why not ride the bus? Only catch is, you have to be in Toronto.

The atheist group behind last year’s controversial bus ads suggesting “there’s probably no God” is rolling out a provocative new set of posters on buses across the country that places Allah beside Big Foot and Christ beside psychics.
…
They will hit Toronto streetcars in January, pending final approval from the Toronto Transit Commission, said Justin Trottier, national executive director of the Centre for Inquiry, an atheist organization. After the Toronto debut, the organization plans to post the ads to buses in Calgary, Vancouver, Ottawa, Saskatoon and Montreal.

The rest of us can but hope to have such liberal-minded bus advertisers.

Young children are especially trusting of things they’re told

2 December 2010 / / 10 Comments

From the Journal of Obvious Results: Little kids will believe anything you tell them.

In one experiment, an adult showed children a red and a yellow cup, then hid a sticker under the red one. With some children, she claimed (incorrectly) that the sticker was under the yellow cup; with other children, she placed an arrow on the yellow cup without saying anything. The children were given the chance to search under one of the cups and allowed to keep the sticker if they found it. This game was repeated eight times (with pairs of differently colored cups).

The children who saw the adult put the arrow on the incorrect cup quickly figured out that they shouldn’t believe her. But the kids who heard the adult say the sticker was under a particular cup continued to take her word for where it was. Of those 16 children, nine never once found the sticker. Even when the adult had already misled them seven times in a row, on the eighth chance, they still looked under the cup where she said the sticker was. (At the end of the study, the children were given all the stickers whether or not they’d found any of them.)

“Children have developed a specific bias to believe what they’re told,” says Jaswal. “It’s sort of a short cut to keep them from having to evaluate what people say. It’s useful because most of the time parents and caregivers tell children things that they believe to be true.”

Useful, yes, but then some of us have religious parents — good people who love us, no question — but who give us hours and hours of religious indoctrination, filling our heads with appalling rubbish. It short-circuits our logic and makes us believe things are true if the group says they’re true. Our thinking skills now subverted, we’re sitting ducks for all kinds of crazy ideas. Or as Dawkins said in ‘The God Delusion‘:

Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses.

But eventually the influence of parents diminishes. Then you believe it, not because your parents keep telling you it’s true, but because you keep telling yourself it’s true. Your own mind takes over the work that your parents began. At that point, it’s very difficult to escape.

Jesus (that jerk) knew what he was talking about when he said you’d need to be like a little child to be a believer. Undeveloped reasoning skills, and complete reliance on authority figures. Yep, that sums it up.

Even now, when I think of the time I spent on superstition, I feel quite cranky. How much farther ahead I’d be now if I’d been taught (or taught myself) to reason well.

And then every once in a while, I’ll see someone who says, “Even as a little kid, I knew religion was crap.” I look on these people with a kind of awe and envy. It sure wasn’t me.

Great voice work.

29 November 2010 / / Comments Off on Great voice work.

When I heard of Leslie Nielsen’s passing, I immediately thought of this.

‘Dandelion’ by Boards of Canada.

Browse the wreckage of failed hypotheses

29 November 2010 / / Comments Off on Browse the wreckage of failed hypotheses

An interesting question posed by Richard Thaler over at the Edge:

The flat earth and geocentric world are examples of wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods. Can you name your favorite example and for extra credit why it was believed to be true?

Some are interesting:

In the early days of the field of Artificial Intelligence, researchers thought that it would not be terribly difficult to implement a vision recognition or language understanding program.
…
The importance of these misperceptions is the underestimation of the complexity of the brain.

and some are utterly superfluous.

That parrots were not only stupid, but also could never learn to do anything more than mimic human speech.

It was believed to be true because the training techniques initially used in laboratories were not appropriate for teaching heterospecific communication.

Eyeroll.

My answer would be: that superstition and ‘spirituality’ are suitable ways to answer questions about our world and that ‘having faith’ represents some kind of virtue. Spirituality, superstition, and faith have never contributed one thing to human knowledge because the answers they give come from intuitions and preconceptions, not from real data about the world. Yet many otherwise smart and educated people are still unable to relinquish such faulty methods.

My favourite comment comes from Charles Simonyi.

I think we are all too fast to label old theories “wrong” and with this we weaken the science of today — people say — with some justification from the facts as given to them — that since the old “right” is now “wrong” the “right” of today might be also tainted. I do not believe this — today’s “right” is just fine, because yesterday’s “wrong” was also much more nuanced “more right” that we are often led to believe.

Post 900

27 November 2010 / / 1 Comment

I started ‘Good Reason’ five years and 900 posts ago, and now it feels like I’ve run out of things to say. Ever get that feeling? How do you avoid devolving into a cantankerous complaining crank? How do you keep from repeating yourself? What do you do to get back your blogging groove? Maybe I’m living and not having to write about living. Maybe that load of exams I just marked almost killed my enthusiasm for living entirely.

While you’re contemplating that, I’ll leave you with some recent sightings of the Daniel font. Very edgy, not very edgy, and somewhere in between.

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