Good Reason

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

Category: science (page 7 of 8)

Where’s Daniel? And what’s that hammering noise?

4 July 2008 / / 2 Comments

Been working on a conference paper.

You know what the worst thing is about doing a paper? No, not getting it rejected. Okay, the second worst thing. Not being able to find any research similar to yours.

Actually, it could be a great thing. You could be the genius who has figured out something new that no one’s ever thought of. On the other hand, you could be doing something worthless that no one else wants to do. Or — more terrifyingly — you’re just a sucky researcher who can’t do a literature review, and it’s already been done, and everyone knows it. Except you, you lazy person. Frightening, isn’t it?

So when I get a good result, I always feel elated, but I brace myself. Writing this paper has been a bit like that.

But it’s in the can now. I’ve sent it off to EMNLP, a Very Big and Important Conference. And if you want to see the results of the study, I’ve made a presentation that you can view. You can read a PDF, or you can have a cute Flash animation, if you’d rather.

I got your community standards right here!

25 June 2008 / / 2 Comments

I tell ya, that Google’s useful for all kinds of things.

The operator of a porn web site has been brought to trial for violating ‘community standards’. But who knows what ‘community standards’ are? Well, his lawyer has an interesting answer: check out Google Trends and see what the community’s really up to!

In Florida, it turns out that the search term ‘orgy’ is as American as ‘apple pie’.

Except that ‘apple pie’ hits a spike around Thanksgiving, but ‘orgy’ is popular year-round.

But Perth? Looks like we’re just into surfing. New South Wales is a different story. It’s just about Orgy Season over there. Meanwhile, in Victoria, the worrying fisting trend continues unabated.

Deconversion stories: The Dude with the Horns

23 June 2008 / / 9 Comments

As a religious youth, I was told about Satan. The Adversary. The Tempter. The one who puts all the backwards messages in records. Mormons don’t dwell on the Devil — I heard people say it gave him more ‘power’ — but he was always there hovering around the periphery of my morality.

The Satan meme is a real mindfuck. There’s a totally evil supernatural person who wants you to do bad things. Don’t do what Satan wants. How do you know what Satan wants? It’s bad. What makes something ‘bad’? Satan wants you to do it. And round it goes. Figuring out what Satan wants you to do is like asking who the Terrists want you to vote for. Could they do the ol’ Double Reverse Psychological Fake-out? And of course, if someone starts to question the teaching of the religion, who’s been putting those thoughts into your head? Yep. Better get back in line.

Satan isn’t just a great control tool. He’s a dodge to the problem of Evil. If God’s good and in charge, why do evil things happen? For some reason, saying ‘You are evil’ wasn’t the answer people liked, so Satan did the trick. Why is there evil? Satan. There you go. God is still good, but he wants to see if you’ll follow him or the Devil.

P.S. You are evil.

And it answered a whole lot. Why do ouija boards seem to work? Satan (or one of his many helpers) is moving the table thing. Why do I want to do bad things? You’re being tempted by Satan, he’s putting thoughts into your head. (Another mindfuck. An invisible person is putting thoughts in my head? Scary!) Why are there so many religions? Satan is deceiving people and leading them astray. Satan Satan Satan. Very useful. If he didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.

As it seems we did. This page tells how Satan doesn’t appear to be much of a character in early Hebrew lore (talking snakes notwithstanding). The Hebrew word s’tn simply means ‘adversary’ or ‘opposer’. In 1 Samuel 29:4, it tells how the Philistines mistrusted David, fearing that he would be a ‘satan’, or someone who would oppose them. Only later after the Hebrews ran into the Persians with their Zoroastrian dualism did Satan become an actual character, and for a while there he and the Lord were pretty chummy (see Job).

For me, Satan’s undoing was when I ran into this page about the Ouija Board that church leaders so straitly charged me not to play with.

Some users believe that paranormal or supernatural forces are at work in spelling out Ouija board answers. Skeptics believe that those using the board either consciously or unconsciously move the pointer to what is selected. To prove this, simply try it blindfolded for some time, having an innocent bystander take notes on what words or letters are selected. Usually, the results will be unintelligible.

So the church leaders were right, but they had the wrong reason. You shouldn’t play with the thing, but because it’s stupid, not satanic. A scary spiritual phenomenon had a perfectly sane material explanation. I wonder what else does, thought I.

I reviewed my knowledge of the Horned One, and found that he’s usually held responsible for three things:

  1. Temptation
  2. Deception
  3. Possession

But, you say, what about reality TV?

That falls under ‘Possession’.

Let’s take them one by one.

Temptation. Do people really think that a spirit being is somehow… what, whispering to you? And then you want to do bad things? How would that happen? This has the whiff of dissociation. Why not take responsibility for your own desires?

Deception. Well, the world is a confusing place. It’s easy to be mistaken. But I’ve found that the one who deceives me the most is good old me. No need to blame an invisible being.

Possession can be explained these days by mental illness, though it must have seemed devilishly scary to people in New Testament times.

In short, everything that people blame Satan for can be explained simply, materially, and non-mysteriously, leaving Satan as rather extraneous. Our theory works just as well without him. Occam’s Razor claims another victim.

Once I’d got that settled, it was the beginning of the end for supernaturalism. Turn it around, and suddenly everything we thought god did turns out to be the product of natural forces. No gods. No devils. No angels or demons. Just gravitation, evolution and us, working for good or ill. But then I suppose that’s just what Satan would want me to think.

A true believer in the audience isn’t satisfied. But if there’s no Satan, he wails, then why is the world getting worse and worse?

It’s not, but with that attitude I suppose you can make it as bad as you want.

Too much credit for the religious metaphysicists

14 May 2008 / / 14 Comments

I must be the last person to read “Why Darwin Matters” by Michael Shermer. I like Shermer, and I enjoyed “Why People Believe Weird Things”. So this book is a general explanation of evolution and a takedown of creationist arguments. It also gets into recent legal actions where ID activists, having come up empty on the science, are attempting to wedge creationism into schools. It’s a fun and interesting read.

But I’ve run aground on this bit where Shermer argues that religious people can ‘believe’ in evolution. He mentions the three possibilities for how science and religion can interact:

  • the ‘Conflicting-Worlds’ model: science and religion is describing the same thing, and one must be wrong
  • the ‘Same-World’ model, where science and religion are both describing aspects of the same thing, and both do a good job of it
  • and the ‘Separate-Worlds’ model (which is basically the ‘Non-Overlapping Magisteria’ argument): that science describes the physical world, religion describes the spiritual, and this can work because the two don’t converge.

Inexplicably, Shermer plumps for the ‘Separate-Worlds’ model:

Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. Thus, the most logically coherent argument for theists is that God is outside time and space; that is, God is beyond nature — super nature, or supernatural — and therefore cannot be explained by natural causes. God is beyond the dominion of science, and science is outside the realm of God.

And there the chapter ends.

Shermer is careful here. He’s arguing that this is the only plausible road that theists can take, without saying he’s taking that road himself. And yet, by leaving it there, he’s making it sound approving.

You could take a Carnival cruise ship through the holes in the NOMA argument. Okay, if God is outside time and space, he’s outside time and space. What’s he doing creating planets, then? Or dictating books, or appearing to prophets, or healing the sick, or finding your car keys? As soon as he interacts in the physical world like believers claim he constantly is, then the two realms collide, and we can examine things to check for goddy effects. (None so far; keep you posted.)

Not surprisingly, I’m an unabashed ‘Conflicting-Worlds’-ist. But check out Shermer’s paragraph on it:

This “warfare” approach holds that science and religion are mutually exclusive ways of knowing, one being right and the other wrong. In this view, the findings of modern science are always a potential threat to one’s faith and thus they must be carefully vetted against religious truths before acceptance; likewise, the tenets of religion are always a potential threat to science and thus they must be viewed with skepticism and cynicism. The conflicting-worlds model is embraced by extremists on both sides of the divide. Young Earth creationists, who insist that all scientific findings must correlate perfectly with their own (often literal) reading of Genesis, retain a suspicious hostility of science, while militant atheists cannot imagine how religion could contribute anything positive to human knowledge or social interaction.

To read Shermer erecting the scarecrow of militant extremist atheism is particularly disappointing. 

Imagine that he’s talking about Gershon’s equation: 2 + 2 = 4. If this equation ran up against some religious tenet, you’d hear people saying, “Oh, two plus two could equal five in a spiritual way. To say that two plus two equals four and can only ever equal four is some kind of extremist point of view. You must be a militant fourist. Who’s to say that the fiveists can’t contribute something to our understanding? Maybe the answer isn’t five exactly, maybe it’s closer to four. But coming right out and saying it’s just four… well, that just seems a bit extreme.” And then Shermer says, “The only way to think the answer is five is if you believe that it’s five on a non-material plane that doesn’t interact with this one. Therefore, you can be a fiveist, and still accept that the answer is four.”

I’m sure Shermer knows this terrain, which makes his support for NOMA all the more baffling. Is he trying to trick the rubes into thinking that evolution’s okay? In that case, what you’ll get is people making a nominal committment to science being okay, while being ignorant of what science is, or any of its implications. Which seems kind of dishonest to me. 

The fact is, religions are trying to describe the physical world, and they’re getting it wrong, and science is getting it right. And if they’re trying to describe the spiritual world, they’re doing a pretty crap job at that too, since they can’t seem to agree with each other on any but the most obvious ethical points. Science, on the other hand, gives us better and better descriptions of the physical realm, with a way of disproving bad explanations.

Beware the enemies of reason

2 May 2008 / / 1 Comment

We try to present both sides here at Good Reason.

Here’s a recent scientific advance.

Scientists employing a gene therapy have provided partial vision to patients who were nearly blind from a condition known as Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA) — a severe form of retinitis pigmentosa. Initial results from the clinical trial, which was funded in part by the Foundation Fighting Blindness, were published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

All three patients, who had severely abnormal vision before entering the study, can now read several lines on an eye chart and are able to see better in dimly lit settings. One was also able to navigate better after the injection.

And on the other side, here’s movie star and absolute fool Ben Stein:

Stein: …Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Crouch: Good word, good word.

Read that again: science leads you to killing people.

At its simplest level, science is observing and keeping what works. The opposite approach is faith, which equates to not observing, and keeping something even if it doesn’t work. You’d think it would be difficult to defend something that doesn’t work, but here we are in the 21st century, and people like Ben Stein are still using their seemingly limitless capacity for selective observation in the service of keeping outdated and ineffective dogmas. Science, on the other hand, is making the blind to see and the lame to walk, which is more than any guru, priest, or prophet has ever done.

Beware anyone who demeans reason, logic, and science. I’ve heard many people do this. I’ve heard naturopaths scoff at the mention of the scientific method. I’ve seen church leaders dismiss ‘man’s reason’ as inferior to religious tenets. I’ve read creationists bad-mouthing the process of peer review. And now I see Stein denouncing science itself. They have to do this because reason, logic, and science don’t support their phony claims. When you see this, it is a sure sign that that person is promoting something that doesn’t deliver the goods.

What happens when you stop believing in god?

6 March 2008 / / 28 Comments

Youngest Boy asked me, “What happens when you stop believing in God?”

“Absolutely nothing!” I said. “You’re still the same person you were, and everything goes on like normal.”

And that’s one way to tell that God’s not real. If you stop believing in cars and decide to walk out in the road, reality will soon disconfirm your belief. If you disbelieve in food and water and stop eating and drinking, you die. But if you stop believing in supernatural beings… it’s amazing how irrelevant your past belief can seem, so quickly.

It’s like Philip K. Dick said:

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Youngest Boy thought about all this and said, “But you could not believe in atoms, and nothing would change.” He’s very smart. You have to watch yourself with this kid.

“That’s true,” I said, “With atoms, it would take a long time to notice you were wrong. You probably wouldn’t know until you tried to do some research involving atoms. Then you’d realise that people who know about atoms could predict things you couldn’t.”

But what does belief in god help you predict? You can’t work out who will be cured of illness when you pray. Most people get better with most diseases, some don’t, and some die. Then you say, well, that was god’s plan. It lends itself to loads of ex post facto rationalisation, but not prediction.

It’s not all true that nothing changes though. You are finally able to embrace reason without having to fear it. Because, post-deconversion, reason has already knocked down your rickety system. There’s no more harm it can do you. You are free.

Pacific Islanders are Asians, not Hebrews

30 January 2008 / / 6 Comments

The Book of Mormon tells the story of Hagoth, an ‘exceedingly curious man’ who sails away with some of the Nephites on boats around 55 BCE. They’re never heard from again, and the Book of Mormon narrative continues without them.

When I was on my mission, many of the Polynesian church members I came into contact with were convinced they were descendants of Hagoth (and therefore of Hebrew origin, like everyone else in the Book of Mormon). One Maori missionary even gave an elaborate presentation showing how the Book of Mormon narrative dovetailed with stories of his people’s origin.

And it wasn’t just the rank and file members that advanced the idea:

In the April General Conference of 1962, Elder Mark E. Petersen of the Council of the Twelve said, “As Latter-day Saints, we have always believed that the Polynesians are descendants of Lehi and blood relatives of the American Indians, despite the contrary theories of other men.”

The idea was even taught by President Joseph F. Smith, who told a group of New Zealand Maoris:

“I would like to say to you brothers and sisters… you are some of Hagoth’s people, and there is NO PERHAPS about it!”

But that story’s going to have to go.

Pacific Islanders’ Ancestry Emerges in Genetic Study

The ancestral relationships of people living in the widely scattered islands of the Pacific Ocean, long a puzzle to anthropologists, may have been solved by a new genetic study, researchers reported Thursday.

In an analysis of the DNA of 1,000 individuals from 41 Pacific populations, an international team of scientists found strong evidence showing that Polynesians and Micronesians in the central and eastern islands had almost no genetic relationship to Melanesians, in the western islands like Papua New Guinea and the Bismarck and Solomons archipelagos.

The researchers also concluded that the genetic data showed that the Polynesians and Micronesians were most closely related to Taiwan Aborigines and East Asians. They said this supported the view that these migrating seafarers originated in Taiwan and coastal China at least 3,500 years ago.

There will be a lot of disillusioned Polynesians, if indeed they notice at all.

It seems to me that religions should just stick to statements that can’t be verified. Most of the time, when they say anything falsifiable, it gets falsified.

Stellarium: coolest app in the solar system

21 January 2008 / / 3 Comments

I always wondered how I could find out what stars and planets were in the sky on any particular night. And now I’ve found Stellarium, a free application that shows you that very thing.

You can specify where you are and the date and time, and it’ll render the night sky in glorious Star-O-Vision.

Click for a larger image.
But there’s more. You can zoom in on objects, like planets or nebulae. Try speeding up time and watch Jupiter rotate.


Or you can go to other places and see what the sky looks like from there. Here’s how Saturn looks right now, if you’re standing on Mimas, one of its moons.


Here’s a fun one: try going back in time to the day you were born, and find out what sign the sun came up in. You may be surprised. (Bill Nye explains.)

Youngest Boy and I now spend part of our night sitting on the kerb with the laptop, looking for constellations.

Why science is better than religion, part eleventy-bajillion

24 October 2007 / / 35 Comments

I caught this quote from Republican presidential candidate and evolution denier Mike Huckabee.

A reporter asked Huckabee how he thought his views — including his view on evolution — might play in the general election.

“Oh, I believe in science. I certainly do,” he said. “In fact, what I believe in is, I believe in God. I don’t think there’s a conflict between the two. But if there’s going to be a conflict, science changes with every generation and with new discoveries and God doesn’t. So I’ll stick with God if the two are in conflict.“

He’s actually hit upon the very reason why science rules and religion drools.

Yes, our scientific understanding changes. The ideas we hold as true will in 100 years’ time be superceded by better and more refined knowledge. But that’s a good thing. That’s what’s supposed to happen. Science is good at changing and updating our canon of knowledge as the facts demand it. That’s why our scientific knowledge has increased exponentially, while religions… look pretty much the same as they did hundreds of years ago.

Because religions are based on beliefs instead of facts, they’re not very good at updating when new facts come in. It takes a long time for religions to change, and there’s usually a lot of resistance. To some, this looks like constancy in a world of change, but it’s actually a drag on human knowledge.

And take a look at the direction of flow. Science is considered good if it’s new and current, while there’s a very strong tendency for some Christian churches to be as ‘first-century’ as possible.

I went to an observatory with the boys the other night. I found out how we know how far away the stars are. I heard about what’s likely to happen to our Sun in the future. Best of all, I got to see clusters of nebulae. There’s so much to learn about our universe, and the scientific method is the most successful way to do that. But for people like Huckabee, if this knowledge doesn’t agree with their biblical preconceptions, they’ll stick with a cosmology made up by people who didn’t have telescopes.

Milgram’s ‘learner’ reflects

10 October 2007 / / 2 Comments


Background on Milgram’s experiment.

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