Good Reason

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

Page 26 of 126

Inappropriate brand identificaton

21 August 2011 / / 1 Comment

There’s enjoyment and there’s investment.

Let’s take the band Gomez for an example. I noticed the other day that I have a lot of Gomez albums, and I like them, but I wouldn’t call myself a Gomez fan. There’s some level at which I haven’t identified with them.

On the other hand, when I first heard the Leisure Society or Seabear, it was more than just liking their stuff. I connected with them in some way that made me say “I can get behind this.” I reserved a tiny part of myself for them, and made them a part of my social identity (because listening to music is as much about social alignment as musical enjoyment).

But defining yourself in terms of musical taste might not be such a great idea. What happens if ‘your special band’ releases a disappointing second album (as the Leisure Society and Seabear both did)? Will you be able to update, or will that be too threatening to your self-image? Maybe you’ll just never listen to the new stuff, and keep thinking they’re great.

What I’m talking about is the perils of Fanboi Syndrome, and it’s the topic of this study (thanks to Kuri). Except this is about brands, not bands.

You may think you’re defending your favorite platform because it’s just that good. But, according to a recently published study out of the University of Illinois, you may instead be defending yourself because you view criticisms of your favorite brand as a threat to your self image. The study, which will be published in the next issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, examines the strength of consumer-brand relationships, concluding that those who have more knowledge of and experience with a brand are more personally impacted by incidents of brand “failure.”

The researchers performed two experiments, one on a group of 30 women and another on 170 undergraduate students, in order to see whether the subjects’ self esteem was tied to the general ratings of various brands. Those who had high self-brand connections (SBC)—that is, those who follow, research, or simply like a certain brand—were the ones whose self esteem suffered the most when their brands didn’t do well or were criticized. Those with low SBC remained virtually unaffected on a personal level.

Boy, do I hear this. I used to be an Apple fanboi. Well, I still kind of am, partly because I think their stuff is good, and partly because of the thousands of happy hours I’ve spent computing on the MacOS. But a little tiny part of me is heavily invested in Apple, to the extent that I have to try not to feel personally affronted if AppleHaterz bag it, and I’m likely to write off their opinion.

I used to be worse. You should have seen me in the 90s, when the Mac was an endangered species. But brand identification is something of a danger. It’s one more kind of bias that keeps us from seeing clearly. Companies shouldn’t have that kind of hold.

30-Day Blog September

19 August 2011 / / 7 Comments

I’m starting something new, and I’m calling it 30-Day Blog September. Every day in the month of September, I am going to blog something. It may be the most interesting news article I found that day, a thought I had, or a longer piece, but it will be something, and it will be every day.

You could try it too, if you have a blog. Maybe it will shake us both out of Blog Lethargy, and help us realise that not every post needs to be a Serious Thought Piece. Want to join me?

UPDATE: I has a graphic.

If you’re up for 30-Day Blog September, slap this graphic somewhere on your blog, and link to this post.

Peace for one day

18 August 2011 / / 3 Comments

A friend showed me this TED talk about Jeremy Gilley, who had an idea: What if everyone decided to stop war for one day?

You could say all kinds of things about this. Crazy. Idealistic. Naïve. And you’d be kind of right. For one thing, war happens anyway. For another, getting people to agree not to fight is futile because war is a failure to agree in the first place. That’s the problem. What you’re saying is, “If only we could get people to agree, then we could start to work on the problem of people not agreeing!”

Not everyone wants peace, anyway. One of the worst Christian memes around now is that if a major world political leader brings peace, that’s a sign that they’re the antichrist. Apparently, God is the only one who is supposed to bring peace, and anyone else is a satanic impersonator. So they’re suspicious of peace. Isn’t that lovely? But anyway.

And yet, despite all this, the Peace One Day project has done some good. Even the Taliban agreed to it one year, and violence went down that day.

You have to try stuff, as idealistic as it seems. Maybe, as Gilley says, it won’t work, and nothing will happen. But maybe it will, and someone won’t get blown up or killed for a day. You have to try.

And anyway, whether it “works” or not isn’t the point. As I see it, the point of this exercise is that it’s important to affirm values. It’s important for the world community to state that peace is a collective goal. We need to say “You know peace? Well, we want that.” And we need to keep saying that over and over again, because some people will keep chipping away at that value. We can’t ever assume that any of our values are so universally held and so solid that we can never lose them. We can slip backward. It happened with torture. It’s happening with the right to choose to have an abortion. You think child labour laws are an irretractable value? Public education? Conservatives right now are working feverishly to turn the clock back on our progressive values, even the ones that we think we could never lose. We need to keep affirming that these are the values we have.

September 21 is the day, by the way. It’s not too far off. Maybe there’s something we could do.

Naming rights

4 August 2011 / / Comments Off on Naming rights

The issue of names and naming is interesting. Names are a rich source of cultural information. They tell us about our history, and our social networks.

In a recent Linguistics class, I brought up the topic of names with an exercise that you can do, if you like.

Try making a list of all the names you have. Don’t skip any. Think about nicknames, or alternate versions of your name that you’ve used. Could someone use more than one name for you? What does it mean if they pick one or the other?

Usually people find, as I did, that names tell about our history. No one calls me ‘Dan’ or ‘Danny’, unless they knew me when I went by those names. Internet names can tell about our interests — sometimes I’m ‘fontor’ or ‘GoodReason’. And a lot of names have to do with our social system; family titles like ‘Dad’, or a name that belonged to a relative that’s been handed down (as is the case with my actual ‘first name’, Thomas). There may even be names that people aren’t supposed to know. Maybe you don’t like your middle name, and you’d rather people don’t know it. Sometimes nicknames between intimates are kept private.

Sometimes names are conferred ritually, which brought me to the LDS temple name. I explained to the class that in my former religion, when someone is initiated into the temple rituals, they’re given a new name which is never to be revealed, except under very limited circumstances.

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” said one student. “What’s the point of having a name, when no one can use it?”

Why indeed?

I answered this way: Who gets to name a comet? Whoever discovered it. Who gets to name a person? The parents. In marriage, a man sometimes gives a woman part of his name, which reflects the social agreement of the time that she belonged to him. In other words, the act of naming is done by the one who has ownership (in some way) over the thing being named.

So the act of naming something isn’t just to create a way to refer to someone. By giving a new name to someone as part of a temple ritual, the church could be seen as asserting its ownership.

Post 1000

1 August 2011 / / 3 Comments

Here it is: My thousandth Good Reason post. And it only took five and a half years.

A lot about blogging has changed since I started the blog. Facebook got huge, and for a lot of people Facebook is their blog. I skipped Twitter, but got onto Google+, which may not be a Facebook killer (yet), but it is shaping up to be a Twitter killer. And there are podcasts, like my own ‘Talk the Talk‘.

What I’m finding is that these other forms of Internet expression are chipping around the edges of my blogging. I use FB or G+ for short ideas or links to articles about politics or religion that I don’t want to do a full blog post on. And ‘Talk the Talk’ is my outlet for linguistics items. So what’s Good Reason for?

What seems to be happening is that I’m using Good Reason less and less frequently, as a forum for pieces of writing which take longer to write, and require more thought. But I’m wondering if I want to post something short every day, like the most interesting link from my browsing that day.

But whatever happens, I’ll still be here posting stuff with some regularity. I don’t think anything else really does what the blog does for me, but its role might change a bit.

Do you find the same thing happening in your writing? Are other forms of media sapping your blog, or adding to it? Are we living in a post-blog era?

Purity, but without the balls.

30 July 2011 / / 1 Comment

I am so sick of sex-negative religious bullshit. And it’s not just because they fill children up with guilt and shame about their bodies and their desires. It’s also because they hector other grownups about how they should conduct their sexuality.

Take this video from the Mormon Church, for instance, which focuses on the meaning of ‘pure’. (h/t profxm)

Wow, feel the waves of pent-up energy.

George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist, is big on the idea that metaphors are instrumental in guiding our thinking. And it seems to me that the metaphor of ‘SEXUAL ABSTINENCE IS PURITY’ is being used as a giant Trojan Horse to smuggle in a very sex-negative view.

I’m going to put on my cognitive linguist hat, and try to unpack what’s going on with this metaphor.

1. Who would disagree with ‘purity’? If purity is an unquestionable good, then going up against it makes you automatically bad. This is an underhanded tactic commonly used when ideas aren’t strong enough to be accepted when stated clearly. Run ‘abstinence’ up the flagpole, and who salutes? Sexually repressed ninnies and religious folk (lots of overlap there, though). Call it ‘purity’ instead, and it’s a lot more palatable.

2. A thing becomes impure by having something else put into it. A pure vial of water becomes impure with the addition of some other liquid. A hypothetical Miss X, before intercourse, was just herself, presumably with no liquids added. She was, if you will, a pure vessel, unadulterated. (Ah, le mot juste. It nicely preserves the etymological link to ‘adultery’.) But after sex with Mr Y, she is impure, coated with someone else’s sticky remnants inside her.

3. Mr Y, on the other hand, doesn’t have very much put into him during (typical) sex. Which is kind of a shame, because it can be nice if done well. Sex doesn’t impurify men. They’re still 100% themselves (minus a few teaspoons).

4. So, taking this metaphor to a logical conclusion, the consequences of impurity should therefore be more serious for women than for men, since according to this metaphor the Anti-Sex Brigade is handing us, they have more to lose in the purity game.

We could therefore make a prediction that the bulk of efforts toward maintaining ‘purity’ would focus on women. And indeed, they do. Is it surprising that the young women in the video says the emotional consequences of having sex are serious, “especially for girls”? The Book of Mormon even says that the Lord delights in the chastity of women. And so the Church obsesses over female ‘purity’, while ignoring the fact that Joseph Smith got as much ass as any sex guru in the modern era (with the possible exception of Brigham Young).

As a linguist, I’m not a fan of language engineering; language is such a big thing that it’s hard for any one person or group of people to move it. But this is one instance where the use has taken hold among the religious community, and now they’re trying to export it to the rest of us. This is kind of a thing for Christians, who have taken a lot of good words for good things, and crammed them into their own sex-hating definitions.

It’s not just the word ‘purity’. It’s also the word ‘morality’. As a Mormon living within the Mormon speech community, I came to think of morality in terms of sexual morality, not in terms of what it took to be a moral person. For many Christians, Bush was a ‘moral’ leader even though he lied about Iraq, but Clinton was ‘immoral’ because he got a blow job. This is a perverted standard of morality.

‘Virtue‘ is another. It comes from Latin vir meaning ‘man’ and it once meant something like ‘excellence’ and ‘valor’. But that’s not the prevailing sense among Latter-day Saints, where it just means ‘sexual abstinence’.

This use of language debases these concepts among its users, and elevates a standard of behaviour that is easy to measure, but which does nothing to promote actual morality, virtue, or purity.

Lectures on Doubt: What faith is

28 July 2011 / / 5 Comments

I once described faith as “the willingness to suspend critical reasoning facilities in the service of a belief for which there is no adequate evidence”. Not everyone likes this definition (strangely), so I thought I’d return to the topic of faith and refine it a bit.

You might think it’s strange for an atheist to talk about faith in the first place. Perhaps you’d say I couldn’t give it a fair treatment, since I don’t have any. Which is a typical faith-y thing to say: you don’t really understand faith (or you’re not qualified to speak about it) unless you’ve fallen for it completely. You have to take the leap, and then you’ll get it. However, if ‘faith’ means ‘fooling yourself’, then a person of faith would be the worst person to ask about it. Anyway, humour me. Treat me as a somewhat objective observer. Have a little faith.

On the other hand, you may take exception to my claim that I don’t have any faith. Of course I do, you might say. It takes faith to do anything! It takes faith to be an atheist, I’ve been told. My Uncle Richard used to say that it takes faith to believe that the floor will be there when you get out of bed in the morning. It takes faith for scientists to study a cure for cancer, since they don’t know that they’ll be successful. It takes faith to believe in, say, evolution. So I’ve been told.

I don’t believe it. When people use this reasoning, they’re stretching the definition of faith to encompass everything, which intrudes on other concepts that we already have words for. Defining ‘faith’ this way makes the word meaningless.

The key insight to what faith is hinges on an understanding of its relationship to evidence, and it’s this: If you have evidence for something, you do not need faith in that thing. You just need to open your eyes. For this reason, I describe faith as belief without evidence.

The Book of Mormon agrees fairly well with this assessment. (It’s not a source I think much of, but some people do.) It says that once you know something, your faith becomes dormant.

32:17 Yea, there are many who do say: If thou wilt show unto us a sign from heaven, then we shall know of a surety; then we shall believe.

32:18 Now I ask, is this faith? Behold, I say unto you, Nay; for if a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe, for he knoweth it.

Faith is only necessary in the absence of knowledge, according to this author. I’d agree. Insofar as evidence brings you knowledge of a thing, there is no need for faith in that thing where there is evidence for it.

So with that in mind, let’s go back to those who think that everything requires faith. Does it require faith to put your feet on the floor, believing it will be there? No. I have a lot of evidence that the floor has been there on previous mornings, and I can infer with some degree of certainty that this morning will be like other mornings. There’s a very high probability that the floor will be there, based on the evidence. (If tomorrow morning I turn out to be wrong and fall through the floor, I’ll update accordingly.) I may have a ‘belief’ that the floor will be there, but ‘belief’ is not the same as ‘faith’. I have a ‘belief’ that I am sitting at a computer writing this, but since this belief is well in evidence, I don’t need to exercise any faith in it.

Does a scientist need faith to work on a cure for cancer? No. A scientist may have a reasonable expectation of success, based on (again) evidence, but this is not the same as ‘faith’. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to describe this situation as ordinary ‘reasoning under uncertainty’, the kind we engage in every day. Or perhaps ‘hope’.

Do we need to have faith in scientific theories, like evolution? Not at all. You can ask a scientist what evidence led them to that conclusion, and they can tell you. Even better, you can replicate those results yourself, given time, equipment, and expertise. Of course, I haven’t actually replicated many scientific results myself. Do I therefore have faith in the scientists? No. It’s true that scientists typically function in what could be called a climate of ‘trust’, but this is optional. People in science can review each others’ results — no faith required.

What happens in faith is something like this: You don’t have evidence for something, but you wish it were true, so your faith makes up the difference and allows you to keep believing. It’s not knowing something, but believing it anyway. In other words, it’s wishful thinking.

Things that you have faith in may not always turn out to be wrong, but they’re likely to be, since it’s kind of hard to get things right. To get something right, you have to observe, generate ideas about what’s happening, control the natural tendency to see what we want to see, and figure out what it would take to prove your idea wrong. Even after you’ve gotten it mostly right, your idea might need to be refined, or overturned entirely if the evidence demands. That’s the cost of making reality your guide. But if you have faith, and you are unmoored from reality, you just keep believing whatever you want! Isn’t that easy?

Well, no. Having faith is not easy, especially when contrary evidence is staring you in the face. That’s when it takes a lot of tenacity to hold on to faith by sheer force of will. I can see why people would consider it a virtue, since it does take a lot of effort. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that people speak of ‘exercising’ faith.

But rather than exercise faith in things for which we lack adequate evidence, how much better it would be to find out the facts, and when facts are scarce, to keep an open mind. Faith needs to be thrown out, and where possible, to be replaced with knowledge.

‘Accidental’ affairs

20 July 2011 / / Comments Off on ‘Accidental’ affairs

There’s a story about a cowboy who told the doctor he’d never had an accident. He’d been bitten by a snake, though.

“Goodness,” said the doctor. “Wouldn’t you call that an accident?”

“Nope,” said the cowboy. “The varmint meant to do it.”

What called this story to mind is a curious article in today’s Deseret News:

Facebook is a breeding ground for accidental affairs

Lawyers are using Facebook as a source for evidence in an increasing number of divorce cases, according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. Of lawyers surveyed, 81 percent noted this increase.

“Accidental affairs” are suspected to be the growing result of these online connections, Nancy Kalish, psychology professor at California State University told Bloomberg.

Kalish has found most Facebook cheaters did not set out to have an affair, and even sustained happy marriages before they strayed. But “our brains often romanticize the past, in ways not entirely within our conscious control,” according to Bloomberg. “Recollecting people, places and experiences can affect our neurochemistry.”

“Accidental affairs”? The term smells of the evasion of responsibility. Spraining your ankle is an accident. Having an affair is a string of careful decisions. It’s not an accident, though it might be a mistake.

I used to consort with a group of people who believed in supernatural beings, unseen agents that could influence your behaviour with their lascivious whisperings. For people who believe in such beings, the reasons we do things must be terribly mysterious! You’d never know if you really thought something, or if some succubus had implanted the idea in your brain.

And with your locus of control that far removed from yourself, it would be anyone’s guess why you do the things you do. I remember a talk by a church leader where he said that he’d never give a woman a ride home in a car. He’d go home, get his wife, and then give the woman a ride (in the car, I mean) with his wife right there. Now, props for avoiding temptation, certainly. But how did he feel about thinking that — just because of mere physical proximity — the decision to go for the gusto with this lady was no longer entirely his? How did she feel with a man who wasn’t sure he could control himself?

If someone’s flirting on Facebook, wouldn’t it be better to admit that they’re doing it because they want to? At least then they could get an honest glimpse into their own desires and their horrible marriage, and get some idea of what to do next. Instead of claiming, oh, it was an accident, I didn’t mean to. Perhaps even thinking that some external being caused the temptation. And then praying to another one to help them sort it out.

I just can’t imagine going back to thinking that way. Now that I think the responsibility for my actions is my own, my reasoning about my actions is a lot more direct and controllable. No mysterious beings. No vicarious expiation, either. Just me.

I give it one star

17 July 2011 / / 6 Comments

You’ve got to give the the LDS Church credit for working the Internet. One of their latest suggestions for members eager to share that gospel message is here (h/t Chino):

Google Reviews for LDS Chapels

This task involves submitting a review of your local meetinghouse to Google. Doing so will help make our local meetinghouses more visible in Google searches for people who are looking for a church to attend.

People can submit Google reviews for churches? Sounds like fun!

You may find a visit here to be pleasant enough. If you decide to investigate the church more in-depth, you will be presented with an escalating series of commitments. At first, it’s going to 3-hour church meetings and reading the Book of Mormon. Eventually, you’ll have promised to give the church 10% of your income and even more of your time. They offer no evidence for their many outlandish claims, including God living near a star named Kolob, or ancient Hebrews building boats and sailing to America. You’re meant to accept all this based on feelings, which are no subsitute for evidence. Mormons are generally nice people, but you probably have better things to do.

Try writing one for your local meetinghouse. It’s hard to be concise, but the real trick is to sound sensible and well-reasoned. If you start raving about underwear, then you sound like the crazy one. It’s so unfair.

Manatees are fair game again

15 July 2011 / / Comments Off on Manatees are fair game again

I don’t like to go after religious nutters. Well, I do, but I feel sort of guilty when I do, like I’m going for the easy targets. But I’m approaching this story in a different way, so stick with me.

This story is about manatees and Jesus.

A Citrus County tea party group has announced that it’s fighting new restrictions on boating and other human activities in Kings Bay that have been proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“We cannot elevate nature above people,” explained Edna Mattos, 63, leader of the Citrus County Tea Party Patriots, in an interview. “That’s against the Bible and the Bill of Rights.”

Their interpretation of the Bible is such that the right of humans to enjoy riding speedboats trumps the rights of manatees to not be killed. Must be that part about having dominion over the Earth, though I think they’re defining that a little broadly.

Of course, a religious person could complain that I’m tarring all believers. They could quite rightly say, “That’s ridiculous. I’m religious, and I think it’s important to save manatees.” Good, and I’m glad you’re out there.

But this is central to my point: Religious methods are not able to help co-believers to come to an agreement about even the simplest of moral decisions. This wouldn’t be a problem, but for the fact that religious people view their religions as (among other things) a morals-delivery mechanism. They routinely claim that their morals come from a god, that their religious system helps people become more moral, and they wonder aloud where people who don’t believe in a god get their morals from. For all that, religion seems to give co-believers widely diverging results on moral issues.

« Older posts Newer posts »

Meta

© 2024 Good Reason

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑