The Digital Plague

It occurs to me that many of you may not be aware of a very serious epidemic that’s been silently ravaging the globe, so I’d like to take this time to talk with you about it. Before I begin, let me start with the obligatory disclaimer: I am not an epidemiologist. I do not have a degree in virology or anything similar. What you are about to read may not be 100% medically accurate, and I apologize in advance for any inaccuracies. Where I lack the medical jargon to deliver this information with clinical precision, I have instead substituted analogy. In the many places I am sure to deviate from good science, you are encouraged to take my words as the metaphor they are intended to be. Do not give in to the affliction I am soon to discuss. Engage your irony sensors before objecting. Let us now begin to discuss the digital plague—digititis, if you will.

Common symptoms include:

Headaches, vomiting, and nausea in one’s neighbors. Mental flatulence. Reflexive disagreement. Inflamed sense of self-importance. Uncontrollable urge to make everyone know how right one is. Inability to back down. Intermittent fusion of one’s cranium and buttocks.

Of course, this list is not comprehensive, and some of the items need elaboration, so let’s begin, shall we?

TAM 2012

Do you like science, skepticism, rationalism, critical thinking, magic (the real unreal illusion kind), humor, and other awesome things? If so, go here, and lose the rest of your day to TAM 2012 related things, including links to recordings of various presentations.

Don’t blame me for any loss of your day, though. Seriously.

Edit: Boo. All the big stuff is on the first page. It gets pretty thin pretty fast. I’m sure more will be released in the future, since apparently most of the talks were recorded. Patience is not a virtue of mine, however. (Aw hell, it’s not even a virtue.)

Here are the videos worth watching so far:

Carol Tavris, Ph.D. – “A Skeptical Look at Pseudoneuroscience” – TAM 2012

Jamy Ian Swiss – “Overlapping Magisteria” – TAM 2012

If you don’t know what rbutr is (Shame on you!), watch this one (the audio sucks): rbutr at TAM2012 – Tim Farley’s Workshop

The Sound a Duck Makes

Hey, you know what’s bullshit? Aromatherapy.

“As a holistic practice, Aromatherapy is both a preventative approach as well as an active method to employ during acute and chronic stages of illness or ‘dis’-ease.”

No, sticking nice smelling things in your nose on on your feet or chakras or whatever other nonsense is not preventive medicine. It’s just perfume for newage hippies.

“It is a natural, non-invasive modality designed to affect the whole person not just the symptom or disease and to assist the body’s natural ability to balance, regulate, heal and maintain itself by the correct use of essential oils.”

Hey guys, guess what! If you use vaguely sciencey-sounding words like modality, people might not notice that you’re completely full of it! Yay!

The body is not some discrete entity that gets sick because it’s not “vibrating at the right level.” It isn’t full of an invisible, intangible* energy web that controls physical well-being. We get sick because either 1) foreign invaders are thriving inside of our bodies by killing off the native fauna and too rapidly reproducing; or 2) because some of the organisms comprised by “the body” are themselves damaged. The body is a microcosm of cooperating and competing life forms. Our brains give us the illusion of selfness, but we are, each of us, a multitude.

It’s a bit funny, I think, that both sides of the political climate use the same ridiculous argument. On the right, “evolution is just a theory.” On the left, “germ theory is just a theory.” Seriously guys, science has got this one covered too.

* How strange that only newage woo-meisters are capable of detecting this "energy!" There's one
group that really profits from the placebo effect. And people accuse Big Pharma of immorality...

Nature’s Law and Gods

The Laws of Nature

What are “laws of nature?” In the conventional sense of the word law, we see a meaning akin to “a rule that people must abide by.” In the governmental sense, laws do not absolutely restrict; they can be broken, even if there are penalties for doing so. When discussing natural laws, this is not the case. Natural laws cannot be broken. This tells us that we are dealing with a very different sort of idea when we use this version of “law.”

I fear I may have just set the stage for a massive deception, however. If you conceive of natural laws as similar to those of the legal sphere (only unbreakable), you’re going at it entirely wrong. The laws of nature are not some combination of metaphysical sliding scales that determine the speed of light, logical progression, mass, energy, or the deliciousness of cheesecake. The laws of nature are deceptively mislabeled—they do not decide the parameters of reality; they merely describe the things we’ve identified as consistent in the observations we’ve made about our universe. These “laws” have been rewritten several times as new information has been discovered. Newtonian physics led to relativistic physics. Observations made under a microscope do not apply to forces acting at the Planck scale or in quantum physics.

In the same way that we might describe a tune played in a minor scale as somber or one in major as uplifting, the laws of nature describe the observable cosmos. As we discover new things, we are forced to refine or reevaluate what we had previously taken to be “law.”

Disproving Evolution

Creationists love to try to disprove evolution, but they always miss the mark. Why is that? Well, the most obvious reason is that they simply don’t understand it. That’s what perplexes me so much. How can you hope to attack a scientific model you know nothing about? It would be like telling a Muslim that Islam is wrong because it forces its adherents to eat pork!

When I engage with Christians about specific doctrinal issues in the Bible,* I’m often told that I don’t properly understand Christianity. (This particularly amuses me when I’m using one Christian’s arguments against another’s. See also.) In my limited understanding of the Bible, I am told, I simply do not understand the greater context in which a specific passage (e.g., the pro-slavery ones) is meant to be taken. The Bible has contradictions, and each Christian handles these in their own way. Science works differently; because it’s far less individualistic, there’s less room. The scientific process works only thanks to a vigorous interpersonal process of bias-elimination, falsifiability, and objectivity. It’s a collective process, meaning that many minds contribute to the development of any given theory.

This makes it incredibly implausible that one ignorant creationist (and all of the young Earth ones fall under this category) will find “the one proof” that “evolution is false.” If you’ve thought of it, chances are that some biologist somewhere has already encountered the idea. If your criticism had any merit, the evolutionary model would be rewritten to account for it or discarded entirely.

Within the specific perspective of individual creationists, of course, it’s not all that surprising when they believe their criticism disproves evolution. This is because they are simply mistaken about what evolution is. What they are attacking (and indeed, probably successfully!) is nothing but a straw man—an erroneous construct that does not correspond to the actual position it is meant to refute (in this case, the scientific theory of evolution). If I were to suggest that all Christians are immoral because they are all pro-slavery, this would be a straw man because, while the Bible does advocate slavery, most Christians do not support this practice. Both Hanlon’s razor and personal experience suggest that creationists are not deliberately misrepresenting the theory of evolution; they have merely been grossly misinformed about what that theory says.

Jerry Coyne has a list of seven things that could actually disprove (or seriously discredit) the theory of evolution, and it’s a pretty good, concise analysis. In the event that you come across one of those ignorant creationists, this list can be a helpful thing in answering the question, “How would you know if you’re wrong?” These are concrete, evidential findings that we might expect if the theory of evolution were wrong.

How would creationists know if their beliefs are wrong? If the answer is “we can only know after death,” that should set off a pretty big red flag.

* As time goes by, I do this increasingly infrequently. Why? I've come to realize that most Christians do not
actually believe in the Bible. Instead, they believe in their own personal interpretation of the Bible, which
often actually just means the interpretation that their priest/pastor/whoever has told them to believe.

As an aside, I'd also like to point out that an omnipotent god would be capable of guaranteeing that its holy
book would be instantly and unambiguously interpretable so that anyone in the world would be able to precisely
follow that god's mandates without requiring sixteen years of training in apologetics.

Screw Your Preconceptions (Part 2)

As a follow-up to this post, I’d just like to point out the difference between sex and gender. Sex is seen as biological while gender is a social construct. What it means to be a man or a woman varies by culture (masculinity in Mexico is not at all the same as masculinity in Japan, for example). What this means is that a person can be biologically XY (sex) while also being female EDIT: a woman—thank you to ellenfremedon for the correction—(gender). Even this man-woman dichotomy is an erroneous preconception, however! Humans have more than two sexes, and genders vary so much across the world that I wouldn’t want to have the job of counting them all. And just in case you were wondering, etiquette dictates that you refer to someone with the pronoun appropriate to their gender, not their sex. (When in doubt, ask, but don’t be a jerk about it.)

Simple Answers for Simpletons

It can’t just be me—surely other people have noticed the freakishly high frequency at which people who are trying to sell you something will insist that their product is easy to understand. In the public sphere, every time I hear a politician advocate for common sense solutions, I throw up a little in my mouth. Running a country (especially one with over 300 million people in it) is not easy. It’s can’t possibly be simple. Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is lying to you.

Here’s a simple statistic: the US government spends over $400 million dollars … per hour. Can you even imagine that much money? Most people don’t make anywhere near that much in a single lifetime. (Indeed, most won’t even earn even one percent of that.) The US government spends that much every single hour.

Common sense has absolutely nothing to do with such a system.

You know what else common sense has nothing to do with? Anything. This alleged common sense thing is complete crap. It’s just crap. Common sense is an intuition, and intuitions are inconceivably unreliable. Seriously.

Creationists say that biologists are wrong about evolution. Why? Because it’s easier to believe goddidit. According to them, that’s a common sense answer. Those creationists who insist on trying to develop further reasons have been rather prolific, and you could end up wanting to claw your own eyes out before you finished reading all of their nonsense. (I recommend you stop before reaching that point.)

Denialists of global climate change deny that the planet is warming. Why? Because some scientists’ emails were leaked without context, and some of the stuff they said looked fishy, so obviously all scientific conclusions about climate are false. To them, easier to believe in a conspiracy than it is to understand all the complicated science that goes into climatology.

Birthers continue to insist that Barack Obama is ineligible for the office of the Presidency. Why? Because he’s black. Or something. Actually, I don’t really get this one at all. I guess “amazingly sophisticated multi-generational international anti-American plot” seems far more likely to them than “all the available documentation that demonstrates his US citizenship is authentic.” Whatever.

The point is that there are a lot of people who try to oversimplify reality to sell you a message, and these people are terribly misinformed. (I wanted to say evil, but Hanlon’s razor won out. I’m willing to believe that most of them are just well-intentioned fools.)

So in keeping with this spirit of oversimplified and/or completely wrong answers being given in lieu of actual reasoning, I’d like to address this little gem I came across today. Get your barf bag ready because it offers “six straight-forward reasons to believe that God is really there.” And you know what? They’re uniformly terrible reasons.

Critically Missing the Point

Recently, I found myself engaged in conversation with someone about the topic of climate change, and this conversation is a striking example of why critical thinking skills are so important. As the result of his unwillingness to question his sources—especially someone he viewed as an authority—this gentleman was claiming not only that there has been no increase in average global temperatures but also the more egregious notion that the human species has had and is not capable of having an impact on global climate. In his view, it seems that nothing we do to the environment actually matters.

The amount of mental acrobatics that must go into maintaining this belief is staggering. I would have loved to present to him a small earthen dish containing naught but dust, but I rather doubt he would have appreciated the joke.

Microevolution

I get really confused and depressed when people misunderstand evolution badly enough to use the word microevolution. Creationists often love to fall back on the old “microevolution is real, but macroevolution is a lie!” trope. I don’t get it.

Microevolution is macroevolution. Evolution is evolution! What creationists call macroevolution is just evolution taking place over relatively long periods of time. What does that mean, “relatively long?” It means “long enough for populations to deviate enough from one another that we perceive them as different species.” The only part of that definition that differs from what they call microevolution is time.

Whoa there, I’d best back up a bit. What is microevolution? Well, according to biologists, it’s a bullshit word made up by ignorant creationists. According to those ignorant creationists, it describes changes that occur within a species, such as different breeds of dog. The reason I call these creationists ignorant is that this is evidence for, not against, the theory of evolution.

Disappointment

I miss my Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Right, context. Let’s go back a bit.

Mormons and Witnesses are all over the bloody world. For most of my life, I was entirely ignorant of this fact. I took their presence for granted when I was growing up. They were just the strange Christians who show up at your door uninvited, trying to sell you their god and litter your house with magazines containing crappy illustrations and horrible advice. Everyone deals with this back home. God salespeople are, after all, a ubiquitous part of American life.

As I saw it, all these people were really good for was occasionally messing with, but I wasn’t even all that interested in taking the time for that! Usually I just wanted to get back to whatever I was doing before they had interrupted me. Even though I’d heard stories about how fun it could be, I didn’t have the patience to try to convert them as they sought to to convert me. (Those video games weren’t going to play themselves!)

I didn’t really give them any other thought until I went to study in Germany. One afternoon after classes had ended, I went out to buy groceries to make dinner. This was ordinarily a pretty mundane process, so I tended to do this on autopilot. This one day, however, I noticed something amiss on my way back from the store. Standing on opposite sides of the quad were two young gentlemen who clearly weren’t residents. As I approached, I saw the more distant of the two begin talking to some passersby, but I paid this pair no other attention.

Not until I got within conversation range of the closer one, that is. He made eye contact with me, and it was obvious that he was about to approach me.

I thought to myself, ‘Something about this is very strange, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Why is this so odd?’

He was close now, still very obviously determined to talk to me. It dawned on me suddenly in that moment. This situation was strange because I had not seen anyone else in Germany dressed like this before. In fact, I recognized these outfits. They were dressed like the people who used to interrupt my TV watching back in the United States!

“Hi,” he said to me, “do you speak English?”

Crap. There I am, groceries in hand, right outside my apartment-dorm-thing, and I’m about to be subjected to what may very well be a serious case of inanity.

My eyes darted to his name tag. So-and-so, Latter Day Saints. Great, a fucking Mormon. In Germany. Am I hallucinating this? Apparently not.

“Uh, yeah.”

And so it began. In actuality, the conversation wasn’t terribly long. They were there promoting an event sponsored by the Mormon church, which had arranged to bring in some famous Mormon speaker to give a presentation at a local conference hall. I told him that I wasn’t religious, so I probably would not be in attendance, and he accepted this amicably, noting that I would still be welcome.

I had to know, though, “I was really surprised to see you guys here. Why Germany?”

“Oh, it’s to fulfill our service requirement. Yeah, we fly missionaries all over the world.”

My mind was blown. I was completely, utterly repulsed by this revelation. Not only were the LDS missionaries interrupting the leisure of millions of Americans, they were also—are also—corrupting the minds of innocent people throughout the world. I politely ended the conversation to go ponder the consequences over dinner.

My time in Germany (especially my visit to Berlin) had already left me with a very bad taste in my mouth about religion, and this experience did not help things. Still, I had more immediate concerns, and this exchange drifted slowly out of my consciousness as the months passed.

Cut forward to November of last year, when it all came rushing back to me.

*Ding-dong*

The doorbell. There are two Japanese guys outside my door. (Of course they’re Japanese—I’m in Japan.) I open it. They’re Jehovah’s Witnesses. I am surprised. These people are the direct result of brainwashing that the pair from Germany had come to represent in my mind. In spite of this, I am friendly. These are very nice people, so my demeanor is sincere. We talk. There is a language barrier, but it is not insurmountable. The elder one asks if we can spend more time talking in the future. I readily agree. We schedule a time. The day comes. I invite them in. I make coffee. We discuss life as we drink it. Eventually, the conversation turns to religion. Good. This is what they are here for—it’s what I want them here for. I ask why they believe. They give mostly nonanswers. They have nothing to say but deepities. (I expected no less.) Still, they are genuinely pleasant people, and I invite them back regularly. These conversations continue sporadically over the next three or four months. The junior member occasionally varies, but the senior member is always the same. It is slow going because of the language barrier, but we are making significant progress. The senior member does most of the talking. I offer scientific conclusions to rebut his supernatural claims. “Ah, you believe God and Satan control earthquakes, but we understand the process—well enough to make predictions about them. We do not need God to explain them. We can even affect them ourselves through purely physical means.” He did not know this. Suddenly I am glad I took those geology courses. This process repeats a few times, until finally, one day, it stops. I know he’s still around because another pair of Witnesses has come to my door since then, unaware that I had ever been involved in such conversations with their colleague, and they report that he is well. (This new pair said they’ll come back. I’m not holding my breath.)

I miss my Witnesses. They were a superlative exercise in confronting supernatural ignorance with facts and rationality. I felt like I was making progress, and I suspect that’s exactly why I don’t see them anymore.

I sometimes get into debates with theists online. Like my Jehovah’s Witnesses, I enjoy the conversations that come out of this. Even if I do sometimes get frustrated with all the miscommunications that inevitably arise from the medium, it isn’t substantially different from combating the language barrier with my Japanese Witnesses. In both cases, they rely on the erroneous spirituality of deepity to form superficially profound yet utterly meaningless conclusions. In both cases, they make a swift exist when I begin making progress.

Over the last week, I’ve been involved in a few different conversations with believers, and each time, as I felt like I was truly beginning to get my point across, the conversations just … stopped. Like the Witnesses, they took the safe exit rather than examine their beliefs: to flee for the hills without looking back.

Where once each conversation had flown so effortlessly, right when it seemed we were on the verge of a breakthrough, their responses just—