I’d just like to wave a sparkler in the air for the dear old USA on this July 4th. They won’t let me in Australia because of fire danger. The whole place is a constant blaze.

I am still amazed that this experiment of democracy caught on and has lasted so long — long enough to trick people into thinking that stability is natural and that it will always be there.

America (and democracy) is built on the notion that most people, most of the time, will choose the right thing. We have yet to see if this is actually true; I see people making horrible choices a lot, I see photos of warfare and torture, I see people’s emotions manipulated by a fear-mongering president in the most un-American way possible. But I have also seen some good-heartedness in just about everybody, so maybe that’s enough to help people make the good choices when it matters. I hope that such a radical notion as faith in human goodness can last.

Happy Independence Day, America. Hate your prez; love you.

I was walking down the street with Oldest Boy on Saturday. I wanted to tell him about a book.

“I’m reading this book right now…” I started.

He looked at me, and said “No, you’re not.”

Pesty boy.

One well-deserved noogie later, I said, “Well, no, not right now. But about now.”

Temporal expressions have an interesting way of spreading out if we’re not careful. I grabbed some samples from the BNC, and found that ‘right now’ could mean a number of things including:

• this precise moment in time
• I want an answer, right now!
• You have to decide, right now, do you want to go to the hospital or stay…
• at this general time, including now, but perhaps a bit on either side of now
• …right now large multi-national companies are clearing vast areas of that forest…
• There’s a lot of organized suffering in England right now.” Petulancy is Morrissey’s forte:
• and even narrated past (!)
• The only thing he wanted right now was to go back to Jubilee Wood.
• …but she was too shattered right now…
• Tony and I shared the navigation seat, and right now I was in the back…

So there’s some slop if we need it. It sure makes a problem for computational linguists though. You have to have some idea of what’s intended if you want to pin down exactly when ‘right now’ is.

Time expressions have other interesting features. You can use them in place of other things like distance:

“How far it is to town?”
“About 10 minutes that-a-way.”

but not the converse:

“How long was that movie?”
“A mile.”

But I don’t think I’ll elaborate on that right now.

I browse Polling Report from time to time. Opinions are fine, but seeing them in the aggregate can be especially revealing. Take this one:

“Do you feel like Christianity is under attack in the United States today?”
11/29-30/05

Yes	No	Unsure
%	%	%
59	37	4

Yep, a majority of Americans think Christianity is under attack. From? … a minority of the population. Martyrdom has always been a part of Christianity; nice to see they’re keeping it up.

Now here’s a serious one, same page:

“Which comes closer to your view about the relationship between science and religion? They generally agree with each other. They generally conflict with each other. OR, They are not related to each other in any meaningful way.”
9/8-11/05

Generally Agree	Generally Conflict	Not Related	Unsure
%	%	%	%
24	35	36	5

That first column is interesting. I think this response is a good-hearted one. It seems to come from religious people who nonetheless accept science, and don’t see anything contradictory about doing so. It’s a thread that runs through Mormonism as well, as in the phrase “All truth can be circumscribed into one great whole.” A liberal Mormon would probably say that we know some things about spirituality and we know some things about science, and when all truth is known, they’ll match. In the meantime, we should avoid drawing dogmatic conclusions about either one.

As a former liberal Mormon, I used to take this view myself (and I congratulated myself mightily on how broad-minded I was), until I realised just how badly religious views fail. I’ll pick on the Old Testament. It contains statements about the origin of the earth and history that are just plain counterfactual or, at best, unsupported by evidence. Creationism. Tower of Babel. Noah’s Ark. People living for 900 years. Every religion makes unsubstantiated claims about the origins of humankind or the afterlife. Good stories? Yep. Literal fact? Not according to the evidence we have.

The only way you could think science and religion generally agree if
a) you’re unaware of what religious views actually are, or
b) you somehow exclude “discredited religious notions” from the category of “religious notions” because they’re not what the religion “really believes”, or
c) you decide to work it out later.

The second and third options in the poll — science and religion are incompatible, or unrelated — are the only really honest and well-informed ones there. (Besides ‘unsure’, of course.)

You could take the third option and say that religion and science are talking about completely different areas and both could be equally valid and they don’t relate. It’s a tempting position. Try something like:
“Science deals with observable facts, religion is about unobservable (but nonetheless true) facts.”
Or “Science generates testable and falsifiable hypotheses, religion doesn’t.”

See? They’re just different. And isn’t it true that many scientists believe in God? There you go.

But wait a minute. Let’s remember a key scientific principle: Science tests hypotheses against observable data. If the data doesn’t square with the hypothesis, you reject the hypothesis.

How does this relate to religion? A belief system is a theory. If a belief system posits the existence of a god, we examine the claim with regard to the observable evidence. Is the god selective about who he appears to and how? Then it’s not observable. Got a supernatural theory about how the world came to be? Well, if we can explain the world using a natural theory, then that’s a better theory. Got ideas about what happens after death? That’s interesting, but if it’s not testable, it stays in the storybooks.

For this reason, I say that if a scientist believes in an unseen creator, then something has gone terribly wrong with their scientific training. They are accepting a theory without adequate evidence, and in fact despite loads of disconfirming evidence. Whether they grew up with it, or they defer to popular belief, or for whatever reason, they are giving religion a huge pass that it hasn’t earned.

Science is (and scientists should be) eternally opposed to the acceptance of any belief that is unsupported by evidence. Here’s an example from my work. Let’s say I have a theory about dialogue — perhaps that the words in an utterance are a sufficient indicator of the speaker’s intention in making that utterance. I can test my theory using samples of real dialogue. If my theory is correct, I should be able to classify the text accurately using only words as data. It turns out that this isn’t so. If I run this kind of a test, I get only so-so scores. There’s not enough evidence to support the belief.

Now what do I do? If I’m honest, I’ll have to accept that I need to change my belief, and find a theory that works better. That way I can get better results and maybe find something that works. But if I’m too attached to my theory — if it’s too painful to give it up, or too much work, or I’m worried about what people will think — I may ignore or even fudge the data and keep the false belief, evidence or no evidence. I may insist that my science is the true science and complain that the language tech community isn’t accepting my work because they’re too biased. I’ll have to get good at argumentation and marketing to get anyone to believe me. It’ll help if there’s a political element that believes basically the same thing I do. Then I can ingratiate myself with them and maybe score some funding.

If I do these things, I am showing that I value my belief above the truth. I am not doing science. And yet this is exactly what purveyors of religion do when

• they insist that evidence points to an intelligent creator when it does not
• they tout the healing power of prayer when studies show no such effect
• they say that secularism causes social problems when this is demonstrably not so

Why do people think that accepting some false ideas along with the well-supported ones is okay? This isn’t like having a snack once you’ve had your vegetables. Unwillingness to dump counterfactual or unsubstantiated theories is not good science. It’s par for the course in religion, though. They’re incompatible opposites.

I’m aware of Poe’s Law which says:

Without the use of a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to make a parody of Creationism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.

So will someone please tell me if Objective Ministries is a real creationist/Christian site or if it’s just a really straight-faced parody?

I go back and forth. I see no smileys, so I think it’s real. Then I run across this:

Fellowship Baptist Creation Science Fair 2001
2nd Place: “Women Were Designed For Homemaking”
Jonathan Goode (grade 7) applied findings from many fields of science to support his conclusion that God designed women for homemaking: physics shows that women have a lower center of gravity than men, making them more suited to carrying groceries and laundry baskets; biology shows that women were designed to carry un-born babies in their wombs and to feed born babies milk, making them the natural choice for child rearing; social sciences show that the wages for women workers are lower than for normal workers, meaning that they are unable to work as well and thus earn equal pay; and exegetics shows that God created Eve as a companion for Adam, not as a co-worker.

And I feel like I’m reading the Onion.

And this page on ‘Reclaiming Hallowe’en‘:

Just as the winter solstice – which was created by God, not demons – was reclaimed from the villanous grip of the Pagans in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, we as Christians must reclaim Halloween. We must proclaim that Halloween is now Christ’s holiday. From now on it shall be used to witness to the wicked and ignorant. What was once used by Satan as a recruitment program, shall now be used against him. Satan’s tricks shall be turned into the Lord’s treats!

But people could be serious about this. They link to real sites (I think). That Roy Moore banner is just what you’d expect. If this is a fake, they’re not giving anything away. I’m stumped. What do you think?

I’ve decided to change the comments setting from ‘separate little window’ to ‘full page’.

The reason is that if people go to a comments ‘page’, I can track it and see what people are most interested in. Also, I think it looks nicer.

If everyone hates it, I may consider changing it back.

…by one vote. So the Republicans can froth and foam about how America is under threat from liberal elements, just in time for the midterms. And they can try the amendment again next year.

I remember seeing this issue come up again and again in the 90’s, and back then I thought that such an amendment would entail an irrevokable loss of freedom of speech.

Now the flag-burning amendment seems trifling, like some quaint nostalgia.

Bush would have dearly loved this symbolic victory in an election year, but don’t you think people would like a few real victories? “Well, you stranded us in Iraq, gas prices are at record highs, the Constitution is in the shredder… but at least you passed the flag-burning amendment.”

Remind me again: How serious is this issue?

There have been four recorded acts of flag burning in the United States this year, and 13 in 2005, according to the Citizens Flag Alliance, an association of veterans’ groups which supported the amendment.

Sheesh.

Everyone’s talking astrology because a political action figure had a belief in it. I’m piling on. From Atrios:

For an agnostic/atheist like myself lots of religious beliefs sound pretty nutty to me, but as Amy Sullivan keeps telling us we keep losing elections because people like me aren’t sufficiently respectful of religious beliefs even though, you know, we generally are. And, now, from left to right, from Tap to TNR to the wingnutosphere, people are falling all over themselves to mock someone who had a perfectly mainstream belief apparently shared by millions and millions of Americans.

I find that rather odd.

There’s one main difference between astrology and religious belief systems: Astrology yields testable hypotheses that can be disconfirmed. People tend to believe in religion and astrology for the same reasons though: it seems valid, the predictions tend to be vague enough to find a ‘hit’ if you’re trying for one, and people are unwilling to let it go when disconfirmations happen. Other than that, astrology makes falsifiable claims where religion generally doesn’t.

And when those claims are tested, they fail. Here’s a reference to a Nature article in which astrologers were unable to match peoples’ psychological profiles to their natal charts at an accuracy greater than random chance. I did go and photocopy (and read) the article; most worth it. This post from Skeptico has many other references to astrological disconfirmations. (No links, sadly. Might have to use that library thing.)

So I don’t believe in astrology because it doesn’t work. Not everyone is aware of this, however. That doesn’t mean they’re idiots.

I repeat: People who believe in astrology aren’t idiots. I wasn’t an idiot when I believed in religion. I was a reasonably smart guy. I just didn’t know what good evidence looked like. And I was unaware of the cognitive blind spots that people have when reasoning under multivariate conditions, including confirmation bias and shoehorning. Once those two situations were rectified, I could see religion for the unsubstantiated rubbish that it is. And I dumped it. If I’d kept believing after that, then I would be an idiot, and a dishonest idiot at that.

Do I have crazy, unsubstantiated beliefs? I’m sure I do. And when I find out I have ’em, I dump ’em.

Your help in this matter would be appreciated. If I slip up, point it out. I’ll gleefully do the same for you.

I know computational linguistics isn’t very well-defined, but this was unnecessary.

Think of CL instead as an interesting mélange of techniques and approaches. A tapestry, if you will.

There. That’s better.