Many people think that they can influence the universe with only their thoughts. It goes by ‘faith’, ‘manifesting’, or ‘creating your own reality’.

Whenever I run into one of these souls, I sometimes tell them about the Parking Spot Effect, which I’ve blogged about before, and which was mentioned in Gilovich’s “How We Know What Isn’t So. Here’s how the PSE works: You believe — really believe! — that you’re going to get a spot, and your thoughts somehow go out into the universe and cause people to vacate spots close to where you’d like to park.

I was telling a dear friend about this over the weekend, only to find that she was a fervent believer in PSE. “Oh, yeah, that totally works. I do that all the time,” she said.

“It could work,” I said. “Or it could be that you’re just noticing the times you get a good spot and not noticing the times you don’t.”

She didn’t like that very much. I think I was being insufficiently believing.

I explained how you could test the idea statistically. Compare how often you get a ‘good spot’ to how often not. Time it. Try ‘believing’ and ‘not believing’.

But she refused the test. Her reason? “If you believe it, you wouldn’t do the test. You have to believe all the way, not sort of believe and sort of doubt.”

And so her faith in PSE will go unchallenged by facts.

Why is it that the PSE seems to have such a hold on the minds of credulous folk? I think it may be the fuzziness of the test. How often would you completely fail to find a spot and have to return home? Never. So you have a huge chance of finding some spot within a wide range of time.

A good test would look like this:
The PSE works if you
a) do a concrete ritual to influence the universe.
The ritual needs to be concrete so that you can try doing it and not doing it, and compare the effects either way.
Once you’ve done the ritual,
b) find a ‘good spot’
c) within a ‘narrow range’ of time.
And then you define ‘good spot’ and ‘narrow range’ in terms of meters and minutes.

Compare this to what folks usually do with the PSE:
a) ‘believe’ somehow, which is very fuzzy,
b) find some spot (revising the definition of what a ‘good spot’ is so that any spot you get is a ‘good one.’)
c) within any range of time.

Under these circumstances, it would be difficult for the test to fail, and there are a lot of out-clauses.

The PSE shares a lot of features with other kinds of traditionally religious faith. The Priest says “Exercise faith and you’ll get something that you want.”
If it works, the system is considered true.
If it doesn’t work, extend the parameters and definitions so it still seems to work.
If even that fails, you can claim the conditions weren’t met (you didn’t have enough faith), or the desired outcome wasn’t part of the Plan.

Anything to salvage the belief system. Just don’t examine it too closely. When you examine something fake too closely, it breaks. If it’s real, it works whether you believe in it or not.

The odious “PATRIOT Act” has been renewed by the Senate. (Warning: PDF link.)

Here in Australia, we have a mostly functioning opposition party. It is vocal against the Howard government, and makes the Liberals fight for everything they get. Usually.

It’s sad that the Democrats in the USA aren’t able to do the same. However, if there is a bright spot, it exists in the form of senators like Patty Murray (D-WA). She was one of only ten senators to vote against this legislation. She is a Democrat who isn’t afraid to act like a Democrat, and that gets my support.

It’s hard not to feel worn out sometimes, not only by a corrupt White House, but by a Democratic Party who is so fearful of conflict that they sell out every time. Senator Murray’s opposition to the Bush regime is the closest thing to an opposition party — and a conscience — that we have in American government today.

Who wouldn’t like their computer to warn them about their language? After all, computers aren’t intrusive or annoying enough yet. Laura from lanceandeskimo.com has noticed that Eudora warns you if your emails (coming and going) are a little spicy.

For one thing, Eudora assigns a “chili pepper rating” from one to three. Actually, two to three. No one has ever gotten one chili pepper. I attempted this feat several times by sending myself emails with various levels of swearing in them, but finally I gave up. On the way, though, I did make a few interesting observations.

They are interesting — and hilarious. (But not work-safe. You are warned.)

But surely it wouldn’t be hard to surpass the performance of Eudora’s classifier. From these examples, it seems to examine a very narrow n-gram window (2 or 3 max), doesn’t attempt word-sense disambiguation, and leaves out some really juicy lexical items. Does Eudora do this poorly on spam detection? This makes me want to trawl for filthy Usenet messages and build a better classifier. Anything for science.

While my mind’s in the gutter, I should mention that ‘Good Reason blog’ scores a slatternly 23.81% on the Slut-o-Meter.

Remember how a few years back, Bush wanted to take the government’s responsibility to care for its citizens and offload it onto religions? I remember seeing that and thinking, “Hmm, more money for charities, that’s nice.” Then I thought, “Wait a minute, this is Bush we’re talking about — what’s he playing at?” Then I realised that he was a) funneling Federal money to religions, and b) preparing for a phase-out of welfare. Bush called this a ‘faith-based’ approach.

Well, it’s happening here, and it’s being worked by Liberal Minister for Health and Ageing Tony Abbott.

He’s vocal in his opposition to abortion, which is fine. Too bad he’s not some guy in a bar, and is instead the federal health minister, and was in a position to decide whether Australian women got to have RU-486 or not. Cooler heads prevailed, and the Senate removed Abbott’s veto powers.

The Liberal government was down, but not out. Having lost that battle, PM John Howard is now advocating ‘faith-based’ counseling services using church organisations.

That isn’t so strange. Lots of counseling services are religiously-affiliated (e.g. Anglicare), and they do some good work. My concern is that doctors will be gagged when giving professional advice.

DOCTORS with links to abortion clinics will be banned from providing taxpayer-funded counselling to pregnant women, under the Government’s $51 million plan to cut the abortion rate.

But Prime Minister John Howard hasn’t ruled out allowing church-affiliated groups to offer counselling to women with an unplanned pregnancy, insisting the advice will be “non-directive”.

But won’t the faith-based services be hesitant to recommend abortion?

Mr Howard said the counselling helpline would not be set up to provide a specific viewpoint on pregnancy or terminations. “The referral process will not be cooked in favour of a particular attitude,” he said.

I don’t see how you could not have any bias there. I’d steer people away from abortion if I were on the phones, and I believed that abortion were a moral evil (instead of what I actually think, which is that abortion is a horrible thing that is sometimes necessary, and ought to be safe and legal for women who need it).

And so Australia shuffles bit by bit toward ‘faith-based’ solutions. I’m for religions acting in a helping capacity — it’s one thing they do really well. But in this case, religion is being used by government to accomplish its ends, and women are the losers.

New CBS poll has Bush at 34% (and 29% on personal favourability).

That’s a record, folks.

And as Josh Marshall pointed out,

once you get down below, say, 40% you’ve really, really gotta earn every new lost point on the way down.

But I think the real story is how Bush is playing in Utah, where Bush support is the highest. Survey USA has him at 58%. This seems pretty high, but it’s rare for Bush to drop below 60 in the Beehive State.

That dispassionate number conceals agonies of cognitive dissonance among the Republican faithful. Latter-day Saints are conditioned to obey authority, and the conflict between obedience and disgust must be harrowing for some Utah Republicans. Oh, sure, there are plenty of ‘kick Al-Qaeda’s butt’ Bush worshippers, but among them are conservatives in the classic mold. Fiscal responsibility, limited government, avoid foreign entanglements. I’ve had many conversations with these folks, and while I disagreed with their approach, I respected some of these core values. That was in 1992, before the irrational Clinton-hatred and the takeover of the Republican Party by neo-conservative radicals, Bush among them.

I don’t mean this to be exculpatory; the Republicans chose to go after the mouth-breathing religious conservative vote, and in many ways Bush is nothing more than the logical extension of their policies and tactics. The devil take them all! But this does give great pain to people who remember what conservatism used to be about.

Never mind. It seems we’re due for a contraction, as conservatives smell the wind and turn on Bush and Co in order to gain some distance for the midterms. There’s going to be a lot of blood on the floor.