Month: February 2013

Misunderstanding Faith vs. Analytic Thinking

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2013 02 16 How Critical Thinkers Lose Faith in GodThis article from Scientific America is from back in May 2012, but I’ve seen it making the rounds today on Facebook, so I thought I’d point out a couple of problems with it very briefly. The article starts by observing that if you encourage people to think analytically, their belief in God falls in subsequent surveys. I don’t question that result, but the article then goes off the rails a bit:

These studies demonstrate yet another way in which our thinking tendencies, many of which may be innate, have contributed to religious faith. It may also help explain why the vast majority of Americans tend to believe in God. Since System 2 thinking requires a lot of effort, the majority of us tend to rely on our System 1 thinking processes when possible. Evidence suggests that the majority of us are more prone to believing than being skeptical. According to a 2005 poll by Gallup, 3 out of every 4 Americans hold at least one belief in the paranormal

Aside from the reference to this characteristic being “innate” (which is spurious, at least given the contents of the article) and the too-easy parallel between supernaturalism and religion, the primary red herring is the implication that System 2 (which virtuously requires “a lot of effort”) is superior. Is it? Is it really a question of just being too lazy to think hard and therefore invariably realize that God doesn’t exist?

Well, try Googling “analytic thinking empathy“. You will find a series of articles describing that analytic thinking suppresses empathy, and that empathy also suppresses analytic thinking. Does this fact complicate the naive assumption that System 2 thinking is automatically superior? To my mind, all this article really demonstrates is that when one starts out with an extreme bias towards sciemtism, one ends up with scientism. Rationality is obviously important, and analytic thinking is valuable. I didn’t get two graduate degrees in analytic disciplines (economics and systems engineering) without realizing that fact. But there’s more to humanity than analytic thinking.

Friday Music: The Killers

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I like The Killers. Who doesn’t like The Killers? My favorite song by them, even before I knew what it was about, is Bling (Confessions of a King).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkfNkdHXX10

2013 02 11 Brandon FlowersIt turns out that the song actually has a concrete meaning, however. It’s “the victorious story of Flowers’ dad forswearing – overnight – alcoholism and Catholicism to become a Mormon when Brandon was five” (Guardian). They lyrics, which are beautiful but far from clear, are even more powerful for me in that context. 

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Tyranny in the United States

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2013 02 14 Three Felonies A DayMy father once told me something he had learned from an older friend who had grown up in the USSR. He said that one of the most important tools for a tyrannical government was to ensure that every citizen was always breaking the law. This was one of the benefits of the dysfunctional Soviet economy: everyone had to resort to the black market. That meant everyone was a criminal. And, since Soviet law enforcement knew that, it meant that it was entirely in their discretion to arrest you or not. When anyone can be arrested at any moment, you live in a constant state of fear.

We’re not there yet in the United States, obviously, but the rapid expansion of regulation means we might be closer than some think. In 2011, Harvey Silvergate published Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, which argued that on average, each individual American commits at least three felonies every single day without any knowledge that they are doing so.

Now Glenn Reynolds has a new paper out called Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime. According to the abstract:

Though extensive due process protections apply to the investigation of crimes, and to criminal trials, perhaps the most important part of the criminal process — the decision whether to charge a defendant, and with what — is almost entirely discretionary. Given the plethora of criminal laws and regulations in today’s society, this due process gap allows prosecutors to charge almost anyone they take a deep interest in.

What good is due process on a crime-by-crime basis if there are so many unknown criminal statutes that everyone can be prosecuted–successfully–for something?

SW Fans Out of Control: Kickstarting Death Star and X-Wings

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2013 02 14 Mickey Vader

It’s understandable that Star Wars fans would be energetic after the Disney purchase of LucasFilmsn and subsequent announcement that Disney intends to do to the Star Wars franchise what they are doing for Marvel: milk it for all its worth with a series of major films (Avengers / new trilogy) and stand-alone films (Iron Man or Thor / Han Solo or Yoda). Given how well this has worked for Marvel, Disney, and comic fans so far, it’s no wonder everyone is excited.

But things are getting seriously out of hand.

Not long ago, the White House issued an official reponse to the official petition to build a Death Star (“The Administration does not support blowing up planets.”) and then raised to 100,000 signatures the threshold to trigger an official response (so the Death Star petition, with only 34,435, wouldn’t have required a response). Naturally, the Galactic Empire responded to the White House’s announcement:

Representatives on behalf of the nation-state leader from the unimaginatively named planet refused to acknowledge the obvious cowardice of their choice, preferring instead to attribute the decision to fiscal responsibility.

It did not end there, however.

2013 02 14 Deathstar

Next thing you know, there’s a Kickstarter project with a goal of £20,000,000 to create an open-source Death Star. (Why would it be open source?) So far, £254,438 have been pledged. That’s real money, folks, although given the size of the goal it’s unlikely that anyone will actually have to cough up the dough.  Technically, the initial goal is only to draw up detailed plans and invest in “enough chicken wire to protect reactor exhaust ports.” The stretch goal, to actually build the Death Star, is £543,000,000,000,000,000. (That’s “quadrillions”, in case you were curious.)

Not to take this lying down, the Rebels have now responded with their own Kickstarter. Naturally, they are raising money to build X-wing fighters. (I guess they didn’t get the memo about the chicken wire for the exhuast ports.) So far they have only a fraction of the backers (300 vs 1,700) but they are doing better on the money front. They’ve raised about $300,000 (note: dollars, not pounds) so they’re still behind but they are much closer than they should be based just on number of backers. The Force is strong with them, apparently.  Their initial goal is $11,000,000 (the cost of the first Star Wars movie, not accounting for inflation), but stretch goals include an entire squadron of X-Wings ($4,485,672,683), “a Class YT-1300 Freighter (heavily modified) and a crew consisting of a Corellian smuggler and a Wookiee co-pilot” (13 million standard Galactic Credits), and Y-wing bombers ($23,000,000). The stretch goals aren’t in any sensible order, but at least it does make (some) sense for the Rebels to be open-sourcing their plans.

2013 02 14 X Wings

All of this is both hilarious and awesome.

But also a teensy bit creepy. I envision our civilization collapsing, a new civilization arising, and digital archeologists reconstructing some of the Web and wondering “Were all these people completely insane?” I often wonder about Greek mythology too, and think that rather than being particularly naive and gullible, the Ancient Greeks were just having some serious meta-humor that we’re totally missing out on.

In any case, I don’t plan on contributing to either Kickstarter. Why? With a month and a half left for each one, I’m kind of afraid they might actually hit their goals…

Did Penicillin Start the Sexual Revolution?

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The theory is that by providing an effective way to treat syphillis, penicillin kick-started the sexual revolution in the 1950s, 10 years earlier than most people would assume. From EurekAlert:

Syphilis reached its peak in the United States in 1939, when it killed 20,000 people. “It was the AIDS of the late 1930s and early 1940s,” Francis says. “Fear of catching syphilis and dying of it loomed large.”

Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but it was not put into clinical use until 1941. As World War II escalated, and sexually transmitted diseases threatened the troops overseas, penicillin was found to be an effective treatment against syphilis.

“The military wanted to rid the troops of STDs and all kinds of infections, so that they could keep fighting,” Francis says. “That really sped up the development of penicillin as an antibiotic.”

Right after the war, penicillin became a clinical staple for the general population as well. In the United States, syphilis went from a chronic, debilitating and potentially fatal disease to one that could be cured with a single dose of medicine.

The basic idea, that people react to incentives, is not new. Just the incentive. And, in this case, I can’t help but think about the fact that treating syphillis might have made sex a lot safer for men, but women still had the risk of pregnancy to worry about. I wonder if the unequal shift in incentives had any social impact.

Leaving Westboro

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2013 02 12 Megan Phelps-RomerIf you haven’t heard yet, Megan Phelps-Roper and her sister Grace recently left the Westboro Church. The story is getting a lot of press, but I think this account from Medium is the original. It’s a powerful story about the change and growth that can come when you break free from epistemic closure, but also about how some things are constant even in a storm of doubt and change.

She hopes to emerge from this season “with a better understanding of the world and how I fit into it,” she says, “and how I can be an influence for good.” This all sounds lovely and rainbows and unicorns, but really? You may believe it or you may not, but Megan won’t budge on this—and a trace of the characteristic Westboro stubbornness that I experienced in Topeka resurfaces. She is emphatic: “It’s true! I wanted to do good! I thought I was. And that wish hasn’t changed.”

Let’s Control the Government’s Guns

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2013 02 13 SWAT

You might think that that’s a sarcastic comment, but it’s not. The increasing militarization of law enforcement agencies is totally unneccesary and deeply disturbing. Deroy Murdock explains why for the National Review in one of those rare pieces that I’d expect the Nation to also grudgingly agree with. There’s a lot of scary and wrong in that article, but the worst is definitely the police murder of Jose Guerna in 2011:

Fearing that criminals were invading his home on May 5, 2011, Iraq veteran Jose Guerena, 26, hid his wife and son, age 4, in a closet. He grabbed his rifle and went to investigate. An Arizona SWAT posse seeking marijuana kicked down Guerena’s front door, saw his rifle, and lethally pumped 71 bullets into him. Guerena did not fire a shot. Indeed, his rifle’s safety mechanism remained engaged. The dead father and husband had no criminal record, and his home was devoid of contraband.

Jose Guerena, murdered by a SWAT team while trying to defend his family.
Jose Guerena, murdered by a SWAT team while trying to defend his family.

None of the officers involved in killing Guerena ever faced criminal charges. Some of Guerena’s family members were later found to be guilty of drug trafficking, but Guerena himself has no criminal record, was never charged, and had no contraband of any kind in his home. All of this leads me to two thoughts:

  1. Murdock doesn’t fully diagnose the problem. It’s not just about excess money. It’s also about incentives: No government official wants to have to explain why cops got killed when a SWAT team was available. They get held responsible for that. They don’t get held responsible for killing innocent people or shooting the family dog. (Which they do a lot, read the article.)
  2. The fact that neither the Democrats or Republicans are willing to take a stand on this issue shows you how pathetic our current political parties are, and how divorced they are from common sense and basic principles.

Faith Is Rational

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My guest stint at Times And Seasons went well enough that they decided to let me join as a permablogger, for which I am both grateful and excited. This coming Monday, I’m going to start posting weekly with the first in a series I’m planning about modern secularism and Mormonism. But I’ve got some general comments about the claims of modern secularists that I want to get to right now.

1. Atheism and Christianity: Not Apples to Apples

Any debate between a modern secularist (i.e. New Atheist or New Skeptic) and someone of religious faith starts with a tactical advantage for the atheist because atheism, as a category, has no history, no text, and no dogma. There’s virtually no content and therefore nothing to defend. The representative of religion, by contrast, is expected to answer for the history, text, and dogma not of theism (which, like atheism, is a mere category), but of Christianity (or other religions), which is a particular instance of theism.

2013 02 13 New AtheistsA fair debate would either pair generic atheism with generic theism, or it would pit a specific instance of atheism against a specific instance of theism. It’s not as though there are no organized instantiations that fall under the broad umbrella of atheism, after all. Maoism would be one particularly unpalatable example, since it clearly embraced atheist belief in the non-existence of God and drew the conclusion atheists often draw which is that religion is irrational and dangerous. As a result, Mao bloodily repressed religion during the Cultural Revolution. Am I suggesting that atheism ought to be held responsible for the actions of every instantiation of atheism? Absolutely not, nor am I suggesting that Maoism is typical of atheism any more than radical Islamic terrorists are representative of religion (or even of Islam). I’m just illustrating how much of a tactical advantage it is to only have to defend a generic abstraction.

The reality is that the New Atheists actually do make specific, concrete claims that deserve scrutiny and require defense. In particular, the New Atheism entails myopicy materialism, radical reductionism, and extreme empiricism. Each of these is a contentious philosophical proposition, and none of them can be defended by pointing to scientific, quantitative experimentation. Nope, it’s experimentation itself that actually requires philosophical defense.

It’s not that modern secularists are deliberately avoiding these tough questions, of course. It’s more a matter of the fish not knowing what “wet” is. Scientism is so ascendant in particular regions of Western civilization that folks aren’t even aware that they have a specific paradigm, and much less that it might have feet of clay. 

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