I had an interesting conversation yesterday with a church leader type person. I’ll call him The Priest. He’s a good guy. He thinks he’s fighting for my soul, which is very nice of him. He has some funny ideas, but they’re the same funny ideas that I had until recently. I think I understand his view better than he understands mine.

He was talking about the importance of having faith. I don’t like the idea of faith because if a theory is really valid, it works whether you believe in it or not. Nobody gets all funny about having to believe in gravity — it just works.

So he asked me, “What is faith?”

I thought it was perhaps a rhetorical question, until he repeated, “What is faith? I’m asking you.”

Well, he asked for it. So I told him what I’d written in my journal some weeks earlier:

“Faith is the willingness to suspend critical reasoning facilities in the service of a belief for which there is no adequate evidence.”

He was silent for quite a while after that. He didn’t seem happy, but he listened as I explained.

“What if I told you,” I said, “that there was a race of blue fairies that lived in the shrubbery outside? You’d expect some kind of evidence before you believed it, I hope. But what if, instead of providing you with some evidence, I merely told you to have faith?”

He’s not likely to believe in the fairies. It doesn’t do anything for him. Maybe if his mom and dad and everyone he knew believed… well, let’s just say that people can be induced to have faith in a good many things. And this has a lot to do with the way we reason.

We are bombarded by data all the time. Luckily, we have some pretty good cognitive tools that help us to group things and cut down the complexity. We can recognise that a group of shapes coming towards us is a bus, and we can get out of the way. We can categorise ideas (right- or left-wing, new-agey) or occurrences (coincidence, miracle, odd, mundane). Finding patterns in data helps us make sense of the world.

A problem comes when we used biased reasoning. Bias tends to confirm what we already believe, whether it’s valid or not. I view faith as a kind of bias, where the believer

Over time, as this cycle repeats, the certainty of the believer increases. It quickly reaches the point where, when confronted with facts that contradict the belief system, the believer dismisses the facts and keeps the system.

One example of ‘exercising faith’ in my religion of origin is the practise of the ‘laying on of hands’ for the healing of the sick. It’s not unusual for someone to ask for a ‘blessing’ when ill. Sometimes they get better, and they have a great story to tell at church. Sometimes they don’t, but believers never seem to take this to mean the practice is ineffective. Some other explanation is invoked, such as the need to ‘understand God’s will’. I don’t know if anyone’s done the numbers to see if people with blessings get better more quickly or more often than people without. I suppose that having faith means not conducting such a test in the first place. And then explaining your way around it when it doesn’t seem to work.

For me, learning about critical thinking broke the cycle of faith. I learned that I was engaging in many different kinds of bad reasoning in my religious practice, including selective sampling, wishful thinking, confirmation bias, and cognitive blackouts when a line of thinking became too threatening to a cherished belief. (I plan to treat each of these in future posts.)

I could go back to ‘exercising faith’ after learning about all of this. But to do so, I’d have to be willing to suspend my critical reasoning skills, and instead just believe the beliefs. Accept the pattern. Start interpreting things according to the theory. In time, it’ll seem like it’s true.

Of course it would. Any system is more believable if you’re willing to believe in it. But that’s not good evidence.

This kind of talk upsets The Priest. His faith makes so much sense to him. As you might expect.

When you spell-check your blog using Blogger’s spell-checker, the word ‘blog’ gets flagged because it’s not in the dictionary.

Discuss.

I’ve been reading about something called the availability heuristic. Sometimes events seem more likely or more common than they really are because they’re easier to recall. See here for a fun demo.

Now we’ve all been seeing pictures of angry Muslims in the news lately, torching embassies and what not. It would be easy to conclude that a vast percentage of Muslims are the batshit crazy kind.

I’ve seen pictures of batshit crazy Christians too. They’re the ones holding the “God Hates Fags” signs. Or shooting doctors and so on. Hell, I’ve met some real loopers, back in the Utah days. Yet because I have been a Christian, I know a lot more Christians that aren’t the crazy kind. For that reason, I’d say that the crazy kind represent… I’m guessing… maybe 5% or less of all Christians. Generously. A small minority.

Can anyone who knows more about this than I do tell me what percentage of Muslims are the crazy kind? Just a guess? Go ahead and put your guess in comments, and (as per the name of the blog) tell what your Good Reason is for thinking so. I have a feeling that the availability heuristic is making it look bigger than it is. I hope I’m right.

I tell you what though: if I were a moderate Muslim, I’d be screaming right now. The loonies are grabbing all the attention, and the moderates are getting tarred with the same brush. Whenever I do hear moderate Muslims speak out on the issue (which isn’t very often), they speak in measured tones, a voice of reason. But loud loonies are louder than measured moderates. That’s the way it always goes.

A friend mentioned the “Mirror Hypothesis” to me yesterday, in a context I hadn’t considered.

The Mirror Hypothesis is an explanation of how human language (among other things) may have originated. The hypothesis arose from an observation: If you show a primate (even a human one) a video of someone else grasping something, it activates neurons in the viewer’s brain related to grasping. You’re not grasping, but the brain scan will show activity in your grasping centres, if that’s even a term.

Dr Michael Arbib is a leading proponent of the view that the capacity for language grew from this tendency; first, that primates could grasp, then they could understand that someone else was grasping, then to pantomime, and on and on to language. He’s here at UWA from time to time, so it’s interesting to talk to him about it.

Anyway, my friend pointed out this article from TPM Cafe which suggests that the Mirror Hypothesis is a good explanation for how morality arose in human life. We have the ability to feel what other people are feeling, almost like it’s happening to us. (Unfortunately, we have to turn it off sometimes as a defense mechanism. Evolution has not yet equipped us for the nightly news.) This ability has given us the capacity for empathy and altruism. This has probably conferred some selectional advantages on humans because helping each other helps more people to survive, which leads to a diverse and healthy gene pool.

I haven’t had anyone try and tell me that morality comes from God yet, but if they do, I’ll suggest there’s a simpler explanation.

In a move that cost them nothing, the US State Department blasted the real cause of tension between the West and Islam: cartoons!

“We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression but it must be coupled with press responsibility,” [spokesman Justin] Higgins told AFP.

And ‘press responsibility’ means the responsibility to print what we tell ’em!

No wonder the US came out on this one. They can’t stand it when the media won’t follow message discipline. Whip them into shape!

It’s the eternal conundrum in the world of electronic music.

1) Kraftwerk is amazing.
2) Techno music is about 90% derivative of Kraftwerk.
3) Techno sucks.

So there I am in the airport, waiting for my family to come back from holiday with relatives. Music videos are on a TV set nearby. I hear a familiar tune, but with guitar instead of synthesiser. And I see that the new Coldplay song ‘Talk’ has slavishly lifted the melody from the very beautiful ‘Computer Love’ — everything from verses to chorus.

Should I be annoyed? I was at first, but was soon assuaged. I realised that the Coldplay tune is really good. They did a good job on it. You could even say it’s respectful of its source material. It’s not a rip-off; it’s a homage. Anyone who knows music would recognise that melody, and Coldplay used enough of it to let you know that they love it too.

It brought me back to one of the things I always loved about Kraftwerk: yes, they had effects before effects were cool, but they always had such a fine sense of melody. Which is why they are so great, and effect-driven techno isn’t.

The older son’s hair is getting kind of long.

He says “I’m thinking of getting my hair cut.”

“Really?” I ask. “Are you going to cut it short, or just shorter?”

“Just shorter,” he says.

Now isn’t that funny. Normally you have ‘short’, which is short, and ‘shorter’, which is more short. But in this case, it’s less short. I wonder why.

Probably an ellipsis thing. ‘Shorter’ here means ‘shorter… than it is’. You don’t say that part, but it’s there. And ‘shorter than it is’, by comparison, would be longer than the standard ‘short’.

The ‘just’ probably also contributes.

Any other theories?

I think I’ve figured out the Bush presidency.

1) Settle on some issue you want to tackle.
Iraq, Social Security, teen pregnancy, whatever.

2) Do exactly the wrong thing, and do it stupidly, so the problem gets worse.
For example, on teen pregnancy, push abstinence-only programs that don’t work and cause more teen pregnancies.
On Iraq, turn it into a hotbed of terrorism by waging a war incompetently, angering the populace, and inadvertently creating a market for new terrorists.
Social Security, Medicare, abortion, foreign policy, you name it.

3) Use the newly escalating crisis to demonstrate how much of a crisis we have on our hands.

4) Point out that the only way to handle the challenges we now face is your bold leadership.

5) Repeat.

Was it Ernest Benn or Groucho Marx who said:
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

Update: On point 3, don’t forget the happy talk. Be sure and tell everyone how great things are going, but that there’s still a crisis. It sounds trickier than it is. The key is to talk about things you’re gonna do once you get your new superpowers.

I’ve been heavy into the research lately, which means I do nothing except run experiments on the laptop, eat (sometimes), listen to too much Radiohead (I’m afraid of Amnesiac), and take care of my wife’s dog.

Oh, and check the Net. I found a video of a flash mob I was in back in October 2005.

Here’s something I wrote about it at the time.

I was in a flash mob today. Outside the Art Museum in Perth, people were to bring pillows and start pummelling each other (gently) upon a pre-arranged signal. And then upon another pre-arranged signal, everyone was to put away the pillows and walk away as if nothing had happened. Very silly. Very Pythonesque.

So I caught the bus into the city after work to see what would go down.

I saw Postgrad Jeremy there with a friend. “You’re looking mighty suspicious,” I said.

“The cops are here,” said Jeremy. “Someone must have tipped them off.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ll take ’em. Us against the Man.”

There were seven of them.

“What would they charge you with?” wondered Jeremy’s friend.

“Aiding and abedding,” I suggested. “Assault with a comfy weapon.”

There were a couple of minutes left. I stood there with my green shopping bag bulging. A guy I didn’t know came up beside me and said, “Looks like a big turnout.”

I let a moment pass and said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Then it started. A whistle blew. I ran for the centre. It was like a huge mosh pit. I couldn’t see how many people there were, but it looked like a lot from the inside. I clobbered everyone I could see.

Then the whistle blew again, and it became just another walkway, except for random piles of fluff.

I told a friend about this, and he said, “The police were probably concerned that you were terrorists. Some kind of sleeper cell.”