Good Reason

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

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The entirely understandable evasion of Neil deGrasse Tyson

14 December 2011 / / 9 Comments

Neil deGrasse Tyson describes himself as an ‘agnostic‘, and that’s okay. I’m an agnostic myself, just an atheistic one.

But this tweet seems like an evasion:

“Am I an Atheist, you ask? Labels are mentally lazy ways by which people assert they know you without knowing you.”

Hmm. I didn’t ask him for his label; I asked a question about his stand on some issue, to which one could reasonably answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Sometimes I’ve seen people shun labels as a subtle method of self-flattery. “Oh, I’m so deep and complex and interesting that I can’t be put into a box.” Well, yes, you are interesting, and yes, you can be put into a box. We’re not all special snowflakes; in many ways we’re terribly like other people. I am, anyway. I consume the same products, read the same books and websites, and have the same thoughts as other people with my interests. Hopefully, once in a while I create something interesting and original, and that’s what makes me kind of special.

Anyway, I can understand NdGT not wanting to tick the box for firm atheism. He’s influential in science communication, so he wants more people to listen to him, and perhaps not turn off those who would be turned off by an atheist. We need him doing what he’s doing, and others of us can wear the atheist tag. As for me, if atheism is a label, it’s a label I’m proud to wear.

Still a wonderful life

11 December 2011 / / 1 Comment

Last night I sat down with the boys and Miss Perfect, and watched It’s a Wonderful Life. It may not be my favourite Christmas movie (that would be Brazil), but I find it lives up to its feel-good status.

And what’s not to feel good about? George Bailey is a heroic everyman who’s not out to gouge the people who borrow from him. Mr Potter is an old-school plutocrat.

Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you’re talking about… they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn’t think so. People were human beings to him. But to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they’re cattle. Well in my book, my father died a much richer man than you’ll ever be!

Remember when wealthy “fat cat” bankers were villains in movies, instead of being held up as paragons of virtue and job creation? And when George is down and money goes missing from the bank, the 99% step in and save his building-and-loan from closure and him from arrest. Thanks goodness these themes are becoming relevant again.

For me, though, the peak is George’s new-found elation at being alive, his joy for life, even with its unmet ambitions and frustrations. Okay, so there’s a warning for religious themes (what the hell was Zuzu’s teacher thinking, telling schoolkids that?), but all that aside, it’s still worth a watch if you haven’t seen it for a few years.

Why I engage

6 December 2011 / / 7 Comments

I had an online discussion (or perhaps a “run-in”) with a Mormon guy who I disagreed with on some issue. The issue isn’t important (gay people). What was interesting was his way of dealing with the disagreement. His response was essentially: I don’t expect you to agree with me. I’m a Mormon. You’re an ex-Mormon atheist. Our worldviews are too different.

Now I think this is a cop-out. I’m very open to hearing other views, and if they’re based on sound evidence and logic, I’ll even change my mind. But his “different worldview” view allowed him to miscast my reasons for not accepting his argument. It wasn’t that his reasons or his argument weren’t good ones; no, no. It was that I wasn’t open to change, or that our views just weren’t reconcilable.

I think this is projection on his part. While reason and evidence would change my mind, I seriously doubt that it would change his. He’s the one who is immune to reasoned argument because reason isn’t how he arrived at his religious opinion. And if he tries to use secular arguments, they’ll be hollow because they’re not his real reasons. He’s just using them to justify his religious reasons. He hauls out the secular reasons when he’s talking to secular people, but if those arguments are faulty, it won’t affect him at all. He’ll just shrug and keep believing.

I mentioned the discussion to an ex-Mormon friend who knows him, and to my surprise she said essentially the same thing: What did you expect? He’s a Mormon. He lives in Provo, for crying out loud.

I find this baffling. Here I am on the blog, and a lot of readers probably agree with things I write because, after all, we can’t read everything, and we like to pick things to read that make us feel good about our worldview. (Or I do.) But I’m also happy to engage with readers who disagree, and in fact I hope I get a lot of them. I learn a lot more that way, and it’s more interesting. But I feel like I’m standing on a chasm, shouting to ideological opposites.

Is there any point to discussing things? (Have I done any good on the blog today?) Or are we doomed to be divided into two camps that can never understand each other because of our different worldviews? I don’t think so. I think there’s a point to engaging in the Great Debates for two reasons.

First, people do change their views. I have, quite a lot, and I’ll do it again. Engaging with others is my way of saying that maybe no one’s beyond hope. Okay, maybe an online discussion won’t change the committed, in which case I’ll still keep arguing and discussing because I’m not trying to convince the committed — I’m trying to convince uncommitted bystanders.

The other reason I engage is that if I’m wrong about something, I want to know about it. How is it that I can say so confidently that there’s no evidence for the Book of Mormon? that that arguments for gods are uniformly awful? Because I’m here on the blog, and anyone who wants to can tell me something I don’t know, and I’ll consider it and change my mind if necessary. It’s not just meme propagation. It’s my continuing education.

The Debunking Handbook

4 December 2011 / / Comments Off on The Debunking Handbook

It doesn’t always work to debunk a myth just by presenting facts. Sometimes your careful presentation could actually entrench the wrong information. If your presentation is overly long or complicated, people may only remember the simple myth. And when you’re talking to people who are committed to the myth, your explanation may drive them further into it.

Wait — I’m doing this all wrong. I’m starting with the myth. Let me try again.

Step 1: Present the core fact.
John Cook and Stephen Lewandowsky (of UWA) have released The Debunking Handbook. All science communicators need to read it, if they want to avoid reinforcing the very myths they want to debunk.

Step 2: Give the reader an explicit warning to cue them that misinformation is coming.
One incorrect perception people sometimes have is that people change their views when facts are laid before them. This is a myth.

Step 3: Now that you’ve ripped the misinformation out of the reader’s head, fill the gap with simple, correct information.
Cook and Lewandowsky suggest a few simple ways to communicate scientific ideas clearly, and avoid psychological “backfire effects”.

That’s better. Boy, this science communication can be tricky.

h/t Lara from the “exmormon-atheists” group

Benefits tied to immunisation

30 November 2011 / / 5 Comments

Good news: the Australian government is now explicitly tying family tax benefits to whether children are immunised.

Parents who do not have their children fully immunised will be stripped of family tax benefits under a scheme announced by the Federal Government.

The Government says 11 per cent of five-year-olds are not immunised and has announced a shake-up of the system which will take effect from July 1 next year.

Under the changes, families who refuse vaccinations face losing up to $2,100 per child in benefits.

Children will need to have more vaccines, and younger.

Children will for the first time be required to receive vaccines for meningococcal C, pneumococcal and varicella (chicken pox).

A combination vaccine will replace individual doses of vaccine for measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chicken pox) – which means children will be immunised against measles, mumps and rubella earlier, at 18 months instead of the current four years of age.

This will be great, as long as there are no easy exemptions to render the law toothless. Oh, wait.

What exemptions will be available for the new immunisation conditions linked to the Family Tax Benefit Part A supplement?

While the Government considers that immunisation is an important health measure for children and families, existing exemptions will continue to be available.

A child may have a temporary or permanent exemption if a recognised immunisation provider determines that receiving the vaccine is medically contraindicated. A child may also receive an exemption from the immunisation requirements if a recognised immunisation provider indicates that the parent has a conscientious objection to immunising their child.

This needs to be fixed. Even so, this might push a few more parents to immunise.

How to mark exam questions

26 November 2011 / / 1 Comment

I’m in Exam Marking Hell. It’s not that bad, really — students come up with some interesting things to say sometimes, and that’s how you know it’s a good answer.

For others in a similar plight, I thought I’d share my marking scale. Marking exam questions is easy. All you have to do is put an answer into one of five bins, and the bins all have easy-to-distinguish characteristics.
– – – – –
SPECTACULAR
This answer is so good, I want to memorise bits of it and use them in a conversation later. Brings information about the topic together, and does it in an original way. Wow.

EXCELLENT
This answer has the facts straight, and says something smart and interesting about the topic. Is full of win.

ADEQUATE
While there’s nothing wrong about this answer, it’s flat and uninspired. It goes no farther than we did in lectures, and it even uses some of the same examples. A rehash.

LACKING
This answer is incomplete, gets things wrong, or misses the point completely.

RIDICULOUS
Almost comically wrong. It’s tempting to type these answers out and email them to other professors. The student is trying to bluff you, and failing.
– – – – –
The hard part is deciding what numbers should go with each category, but that’s why they pay us the big bucks.

She’s just a

23 November 2011 / / Comments Off on She’s just a

Is Michele Bachmann a lyin’-ass bitch? The Roots (of Jimmy Fallon fame) seem to think this is an appropriate assessment; the other night, they used the amazing Fishbone song of the same name to play her on.

But isn’t that a little harsh? Whether she’s a lyin’-ass bitch depends on whether she actually believes the insane things she says. If she sincerely believes them, then she’s a crazy, wrong-headed, god-soaked, log-stupid, vicious, callous, deluded, vaccine-denying, dangerous historical revisionist that has no business sitting on a local school board, much less voting in Congress or running for President of a major country.

But not a lyin’-ass bitch.

Well, she might be a bitch.

I’m just glad they played the song because I haven’t thought of it in ages.

Hey, why don’t we throw it on?

You will exercise your right to choose.

18 November 2011 / / 7 Comments

I’m a big fan of compulsory voting. And I’m not the only one. Here’s Lisa Hill, from the University of Adelaide.

The most decisive means for arresting turnout decline and closing the socioeconomic voting gap is mandatory voting: in fact, it is the only mechanism that can push turnout anywhere near 95 percent. Places with mandatory voting also have less wealth inequality, lower levels of political corruption and higher levels of satisfaction with the way democracy is working than voluntary systems. Here in Australia, where we love freedom as much as anyone else, we have a mandatory voting regime that is well managed, corruption-free, easy to access, cheap to run and has an approval rating of more than 70 percent.

And when everyone votes, the outcome is much less dependent on turnout. Electoral swings to this or that party aren’t flukes of turnout; they’re big changes in the overall national mood.

But if everyone votes, including low-information voters, doesn’t that just mean that everyone votes stupidly? That’s the view of Jason Brennan, who argues that — dear heaven! — too many people vote already.

The median voter is incompetent at politics. The citizens who abstain are, on average, even more incompetent. If we force everyone to vote, the electorate will become even more irrational and misinformed. The result: not only will the worse candidate on the ballot get a better shot at winning, but the candidates who make it on the ballot in the first place will be worse.

He doesn’t want a democracy. He wants a cabal of elites to make wise choices for everyone.

I once talked to an angry young man who made exactly this argument. I told him that he was a clever person, but (quoting Douglas Adams) “you make the same mistake a lot of clever people do of thinking everyone else is stupid.” Of course, some people are stupid, but there’s no reason to think that all the stupidity or ill-informedness is always located in one or the other party. The stupidity is likely to be somewhat evenly distributed. Random bad answers will be randomly distributed, and they’ll cancel each other out. And along the way, you’ve gotten input from as many people as you can. If we have to err, let it be on the side of more participation.

Anti-porn with Save the Source

15 November 2011 / / 1 Comment

Madge stumbled upon this flyer, and I had to go because I’m such a sucker for Word Art. Would you turn down an invite to an anti-porn lecture?

No, I didn’t think you would. Nor would about 20 other Perth Skeptics. The speaker had no idea what he was in for.

The sponsoring organisation was “Save the Source“. The “source” is men, or “johns” — they’re the source for all the money that goes to keep the “girls” enslaved in porn. Apparently. And just because the speaker (did anyone catch his name? I’ll have to call him Mr Source) wants to “save” men, this does not mean StS is a religious organisation. No, no. The similarity of his shtick to Judeo-Christian horseshit is purely coincidental.

Rather than describe the sight of Mr Source broken and worn down by logic, facts, and reason — yet still holding fast to his opinion! — I thought I’d present his talking points and arguments so that other can learn from the tactics of this spiritual quackery.

Some men are “addicted” to porn. This would be valid, if a valid definition of addiction were provided, which it never was.

Porn leads to prostitution. This makes no sense. Wouldn’t jacking off at home mean less employment for sex workers?

Porn leads to harder porn. The speaker imagined porn along a spectrum: A nude woman sitting in a chair on one end, and “bestiology” (his term) at the other. But this is by no means a given; it’s a slippery slope argument. Porn could be seen as a collection of genres, where people tend to gravitate toward the kinds of porn they like and leave the rest alone.

Porn leads to rape and violence. In fact, the FBI reports that rape and violence is down. Yet Mr Source claims that porn consumption is booming! How does that work?

Porn harms men. Well, asked someone, what if porn doesn’t harm a certain man? Then, says Mr Source, porn is still bad because it harms the women who act in it. What if (asked someone) a woman is is a porn film because she wants to be? For example, in amateur porn? Then it’s still bad, said Mr Source, because it harms the men who view it. This is circular reasoning. It took him a while to figure out why, but I think I got it through to him in the end.

Porn is a serious problem because he’s seen so many problems associated with it. This is actually two logical problems: confirmation bias — he notices people who have problems, but ignores people who quite enjoy porn. And if they enjoy porn, well, that’s a problem, too! Because he’s defining porn as a problem. This is begging the question, or assuming the antecedent.

Porn gives young men unrealistic expectations about what sexual acts girls ought to be doing. This may be true — inexperienced guys may have unrealistic expectations — until a girl stands up to him and tells him. But this is true for any set of expectations we might have, no matter our age or gender.

One thread that came up over and over again is that women are vessels of purity that must remain pure and unsullied, while men are the drivers of the process — the “source” of the money. Does he know that women look at porn? He does now — the audience saw to that.

In short, Mr Source wasn’t terribly concerned about any empirical work showing the downsides of porn, or using reason or logic. Instead, he chose to argue from his own personal preferences, saying that porn is bad because he knows porn is bad.

I’m a father of two teenage boys, and I’m sure that they are either looking at porn, or they will. When they do, my hope is that they’ll be able to come to me with questions or ask for information, like they already do about sex. I don’t want them to be laden down with guilt and shame about it — guilt and shame that is promoted by people like Mr Source, and converted into money for his courses and workshops.

Shape Type

12 November 2011 / / 6 Comments

The makers of Kerntype have made another typographic game: Shape Type.

When you’re making a font in a digital program like Fontographer, you spend a lot of time pulling the handles of Bézier control points around, trying to massage curves into a plausible letter shape. So can you drag the big pink circles to make a letter that looks good?

This one’s a bit harder than Kerntype — I managed an 86. Beat that, I dares ya.

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