Expelled Beats Sicko

Metacritic (a review aggregator) gives Michael Moore's latest movie Sicko a 74 out of 100, while the new Expelled gets only a 20.  Expelled, however, is a better movie.

In Sicko, Moore shows US folks facing high prices for docs, drugs, and surgery.  Sad anxious people find that if they can't pay, they may not be treated.  But then we see happy glad folks in England, France, and Canada getting all the medicine they want for free.  Free good, expensive bad -- that is the depth of Moore's celebrated case for universal care.

Sicko makes Expelled seem like a graduate seminar.  In Expelled, experts on many sides speak at length in their own words.  The movie makes a good case for its main claim, that intelligent design advocates are shunned by academia.  And they get opponent Richard Dawkins to admit a 1% chance of God, and a higher chance Earth life may have been designed by distant ancient higher powers.  Both these estimates justify devoting higher-than-now fractions of origin-of-life research to such possibilities.  (And I estimate betting markets would endorse >1% chances for these.)

For my taste, the movie overdid threats to a mythical "academic freedom" that supposedly made the US great, but probably never existed.  It also overdid how understanding Darwin leads people to reject God, and emboldened Nazis to brutality.  These claims are not relevant to the truth of intelligent design, but they are admittedly true and relevant to most viewers' desire to avoid beliefs with such consequences. 

Sadly, it seems reviewers praised Sicko because they agreed with universal care, and panned Expelled because they disagreed with intelligent design.  The tug-o-war continues.

Should-be-unneeded disclaimers: There are good arguments possible for universal care, and in a betting market I'd probably be short both God and universal design.

Comments

[anonymous]

http://www.expelledexposed.com/index.php/the-truth

I bet the "communist universal healthcare" affected your review of Sicko.

[Shane Legg]

Creationism is a myth supported by no scientific evidence what so ever. None. Universal health care is nothing of the sort: in first world countries it's the norm. Arguments can be made against it, sure, but to implicitly compare it to a religious myth?

You might want to look at overcoming your bias.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

The first discussion of "Expelled" in the overcomingbias space is to compare it to "Sicko", a movie on a completely different topic that came out over a year ago? I'd love to read your own good faith meta-analysis of what motivated you to write this post, and to write it the way that you did.

[Sam B]

Warning: Partially baseless comment coming up (I haven't seen either movie, though I have seen Moore's earlier movies, Columbine and Fahrenheit).

Moore is a very talented documentary maker. Even when he's wrong, he's funny, and even when he's horribly over-the-top, he's thought-provoking. Watching him make a film about the perverse state of healthcare in the US is bound to be better than watching the religious complain about how their opinions are being shut out of science just because they're unscientific. Moore's claim (socialised medicine is better) is highly debatable but certainly defensible, much more so than "there's a conspiracy against ID".

And I'm not sure if I'm reading your sentence correctly, but I would say that the notion that "understanding Darwin emboldened the Nazis to brutality" is not true, it is in fact complete nonsense. Coming from one side, it was a variety of factors including a ubiquitous state, anger at Germany's post-WW1 humiliation and the tendency not to ask awkward questions about your own government during wartime that emboldened the Nazis. Coming from the other, Darwinism provides no justification for either anti-Semitism (if Jews are an inferior race, shouldn't they have gone extinct by now after so many attempts?) or genocide (inferior species do not go extinct because a higher authority dictates they must die, they go extinct because they all get eaten or die of starvation or disease).

To get back to the point, in my opinion, documentary films are primarily entertainment. If I want to educate myself about global warming or gun control or ID, I'll read a book (except in the case of ID - it would be quicker to huff paint, and less damaging to my brain). Moore understands this, which is why he makes good documentaries. Sicko couples a good documentary maker with a good subject, a subject of interest to everyone who isn't immortal. Expelled couples a bunch of strawman scluptors with a bad subject, one of no interest to anyone who isn't a creationist. Sicko is good entertainment. Expelled is not.

To expand on one thing there - there is a crucial difference between the debate Sicko is part of, and the debate Expelled is part of, which is why Sicko is of universal interest while Expelled is only of interest to those who agree with its makers. If I'm arguing with someone that state-delivered healthcare is best, and he retorts that private-delivered healthcare is best, we still share something in common - we want the sick to be healed. The argument is about how to reach that shared goal. If an alien spaceship suddenly landed next to us and gave us thousands of healing pods which would restore anyone to full health at trivial cost, our argument would be solved without either one of us being proved wrong. We would shake hands and walk away.

Arguing with someone about whether an "alternative" hypotheses to evolution should be considered purely for the sake of an "alternative" is different. He wants an alternative to evolution taught in science classes, I view this as like offering poison as an alternative to food in the school canteen. There is no shared end. There is no conceivable spaceship scenario which renders our argument moot without proving either one of us wrong. This makes the argument far more bitter than the argument where we share an end and only disagree on means.

This is why watching a documentary propounding an opinion with which you disagree with can still be worthwhile in the case of healthcare, and an exercise in masochism in the case of intelligent design study.

[Robin Hanson]

Shane, the topic is intelligent design, not creationism.

Hopefully, what would be a better popular documentary to compare with? There are no other on ID, and Moore is the most popular documentary director.

[Herman]

Robin, Intelligent Design and Creationism are pretty much the same thing. The Intelligent Design movement was started as a way to introduce creationism into the classroom without running afoul of the establishment clause.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District#Decision

(as judge Jones ruled there: "The overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.")

[Shane Legg]

Robin: Intelligent design is creationism, albeit with a new name and catch phrase. It is so blatant that in one of the trials it was discovered that they took a book on creationism and literally did a search and replace on the text to make it a book about ID.

[Caledonian]

Expelled, which never actually describes the differences between ID and evolution, or even explains what they are, and has Ben Stein pretending he's never heard about the Holocaust before, is a better movie than Sicko?

Robin Hanson, what are your religious beliefs?

[david]

(And the IDists didn't even do the search and replace well - anyone remember the "cdesign proponentsists"?)

[david curran]

>It also overdid how understanding Darwin ... emboldened Nazis to brutality.

>Moore is the most popular documentary director.

Let us say we take Hitler as the most popular Nazi. A quick look through Mein Kamf reveals no mention of Darwin. The book does talk about evolution of races but in a way that shows no understanding of evolution of species by the means of natural selection.
Copy of Mein Kamf http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt
Now just because the Nazis did not reference or understand Darwinism does not mean they weren't emboldened by it does make this less likely.

@Caledonian
>Robin Hanson, what are your religious beliefs?

I do not really see how this is relevant. Could you tell me what sort of car you drive so I can decide whether to listen to you or not?

[Herman]

Search and replace: http://www2.ncseweb.org/wp/?p=80

[Robin Hanson]

Sam, I found Expelled as entertaining as Sicko, and its topic has wide enough interest to support a movie.

Herman and Shane, the movie consistently discussed only intelligent design. When someone claims and seems to argue for X, it is bad form to insist without strong evidence they are really arguing for Y.

David and Sam, you'll dismiss the Nazi-Darwin connection without even hearing the movie's case?

[Rolf Nelson]

In general, most people would agree that ideological bias is a problem in reviews. How could the problem be ameliorated? (Assuming, of course, that you want it ameliorated; documentaries like Expelled and Sicko show that many people will even pay money to receive one-sided propaganda that confirms things they already believe.)

One way might be to use a Metacritic-style coding to determine the correlation between an average reviewer saying "The thesis of this documentary/book is noble and just" and "This is a great documentary/book". Then, code each review with a "bias-adjusted score" by scaling up or down the score appropriately, expecting that some of their love or hate for the documentary/book came from their regard towards the righteousness of the thesis. People probably do this informally already to some degree. Obviously this could be "gamed" by reviewers in the unlikely event it became wildly popular.

[Jamie McCarthy]

If this is trolling or devil's-advocacy, it's not a very good example of the genre.

[burger flipper and Cavalier driver]

"Both these estimates justify devoting higher-than-now fractions of origin-of-life research to such possibilities."

Does a 1% chance of the existence of God alone really justify any expenditure? Doesn't the question have to be researchable? What form would this research take? Even in that 1% instance, what probability is there that the research will prove fruitful? I'd like to hear Dawkin's take on that.

The most realistic scenario I could imagine where such funding would be justified were if the omni-potent/scient one were just waiting to see a demonstration of good faith research spending before revealing himself.

[Herman]

Robin, did you read the link I provided? Or at least read the quote: "The overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory."

You contend that it is bad form to insist that ID is creationism without "strong evidence". The evidence is not just strong, it is "overwhelming".

[Caledonian]

I do not really see how this is relevant.

Because up to now, 100% of the reviews I've encountered who have not spoken about the incredibly dishonest arguments, use of deceptively-incomplete data, and shoddy reasoning of Expelled have been from religious apologists from its position, and I wish to see if the correlation holds.

I'm sure Sicko is not an especially good movie, but even some people who vehemently disagreed with it had some good things to say about its presentation. No one likes Expelled - except Robin Hanson, who yet again has departed from the common wisdom, against his own stated belief that doing so is unwise. Curious.

[david curran]

>David and Sam, you'll dismiss the Nazi-Darwin connection without even hearing the movie's case?

Without access to the film I believe analysing the Nazis original material is reasonable step. But no I will not dismiss the Nazi-Darwin connection without even hearing the movie's case. Another analysis of the Nazi-Darwin connection is here
http://richarddawkins.net/article,2488,An-Open-Letter-to-David-J,Richard-Dawkins

@Caledonian thanks for the explanation.

[Stuart Buck]

The comments in response are a useful example of how human beings typically analyze someone else's tastes by reading the signals that are supposedly intended (even if those signals are expressly disclaimed), and moreover with the impulse to categorize that person as friend or foe. Some people really do seem to think that if you say, "I thought this was a decent movie in some ways, although I disagreed with it," you have thereby signaled that you secretly do agree with it after all (or else why would you even take a moment to identify anything good about it whatsoever?)

[Stuart Buck]

The comments in response are a useful example of how human beings typically analyze someone else's tastes by reading the signals that are supposedly intended (even if those signals are expressly disclaimed), and moreover with the impulse to categorize that person as friend or foe. Some people really do seem to think that if you say, "I thought this was a decent movie in some ways, although I disagreed with it," you have thereby signaled that you secretly do agree with it after all (or else why would you even take a moment to identify anything good about it whatsoever?)

[Robin Hanson]

Caledonian - why take issue with my post if you won't bother to read it? (Especially the last ten words.)

Herman, your evidence is not about this movie. I'm reacting to this movie, not all other who speak on similar topics.

[Herman]

Stuart, the review does not say "I thought this was a decent movie in some ways, although I disagreed with it". Robin reviews it as a decent movie and explains that he agrees with the premises that:
* Intelligent Design is a viable scientific theory and is being ostracized by the scientific community
* Darwinism leads people to reject God and emboldened Nazi's to their brutality.

[Cyan]

Robin,

You've done a limited examination of the arguments in the two movies, and concluded that Expelled's argument is better constructed. Fair enough -- Michael Moore's appeal to emotion and simple storytelling omit rather a lot. This doesn't justify the statement "Expelled, however, is a better movie." Reasonable people might agree with everything else in the post and still think that Sicko was a better movie, because there's more to a movie than just its arguments.

[Herman]

Robin, in your first comment, in response to Shane, you said "the topic is intelligent design, not creationism." and thereby avoided responding to the substance of Shane's comment. As several people have pointed out, and supported with evidence, these two are basically the same thing. If you agree with that, then why not respond to the substance of Shane's first comment, instead of dodging it? If you do not agree, please explain why, given the evidence presented.

[Unknown]

As Robin said, "Sadly, it seems reviewers praised Sicko because they agreed with universal care, and panned Expelled because they disagreed with intelligent design."

The same is true of the comments here, verifying Robin's point.

[Nick Tarleton]

Does a 1% chance of the existence of God alone really justify any expenditure? Doesn't the question have to be researchable? What form would this research take?

Well, with respect to creation/ID at least, you could look for reasons that the life we see couldn't have evolved in the available time, or the impossibly rapid appearance of new forms in the fossil record. But I don't think "higher-than-now fractions" of research are justified; the creation/ID faithful have been researching this for some time, with (needless to say) zero convincing results.

[anonymous]

Unknown, the rationality, biases (or lack of) and arguments in a documentary do and should affect reviews, since for example I think Apollo moon landing conspiracy films suck because they use false arguments and unscience to present their claims. Besides, according to most reviewers Sicko is technically a lot better (it is better presented) than Expelled.

[DaveInNYC]

Robin - how would you distinguish ID from creationism?

[Caledonian]

I am still waiting to hear about Robin Hanson's religious views.

[Unknown]

Caledonian, why don't you stop being rude?

If you are interested in Robin's religious views, it is easy enough to gather this from the disclaimer in this post, as well as from any number of other places.

[Ian]

A few thousand years ago absolutely everything was god, was designed, was a creation from a higher power. And every day since the creation of god or a "designer" the human race has been figuring out more and more information that at first rain was god now christians don't say that rain is god literally giving us rain, it is evaporation and the entire precipitation process. Settling for this is so complicated someone or thing must have made it is settling for the same crap that made people think pigs were evil because they made people sick. People just weren't aware of bacteria and sickness from spoiled food and excrement. Creation and Intelligent Design are religious views of the worlds beginning and it needs to stay in their religious institutions and not in academia. Why not apply it to math, because since jesus turned a fish into many fish, maybe 1=100 to a creationist, this is ridiculous that in this day in age creation arguments aren't just dismissed. Creation=Belief, SantaClaus=Belief, should we teach santa in schools too? Should we not laugh at someone arguing for the existence of santa and give them a fair shake at their ideas? Only a nation of primal morons would even entertain the idea.

[Jen]

How can a blog whose aim is to "obtain beliefs closer to reality" support the argument that any tenuous connection between evolutionary theory and Nazism is "relevant" in evaluating evolution vs. ID/creationism?

Other thinkers have covered this before, but briefly: an appeal to evolution for support of a genocidal agenda is a gross misreading of Darwin (not to mention modern evolutionary theory). Farmers and livestock owners have practiced "artificial selection" since the dawn of agriculture, long before Darwin; his primary advance in understanding was pointing out that *nature* also exerts selective forces.

To claim that his evidence for such *natural selection* should somehow motivate humans to start killing each other is absurd. Anyone who uses this as an argument against evolutionary theory has succumbed to the naturalistic fallacy and the is-ought fallacy.
See, e.g., http://www.txstate.edu/Philosophy/fallacies/isought.htm and http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/social.html

I thought these irrational patterns of thinking were exactly the kind of thing this blog was supposed to help readers "overcome"...

Furthermore, how can the claim that an understanding of evolution causes people to reject god be "admittedly true and relevant," when prominent biologists like Ken Miller, Francis Collins, and Francisco Ayala stand as such stark and public counterexamples?

Misinterpretations of evolutionary theory in support of some other agenda have no bearing whatsoever on the truth value of evolutionary theory (or ID/creationism), as you note. Ditto for any relationship that might exist between evolution and atheism.

But then, why praise a movie that claims we should base our choice of ideas on those considerations, committing the specious fallacies described above? Expelled (which I have seen) spends the bulk of its time working to make the viewer forget that science is descriptive, not prescriptive/normative.

I thought the main theme of "Overcoming Bias" is that we should learn to accept things that are real and true, rather than shutting our our eyes and rejecting true information because we don't like the apparent consequences or implications. Please return to that worthwhile goal.

[TGGP]

I believe Hanson has stated elsewhere that he is not religious, although he once was. Caledonian really shouldn't have had to ask, as it was evident that Robin didn't really think the IDers were likely correct.

the creation/ID faithful have been researching this for some time, with (needless to say) zero convincing results.
Have they actually done any research on the subject? All the work I was aware of them doing seemed limited to the "culture war".

[Shane Legg]

For those interested in just how biased (and plain out dishonest) Expelled is I would recommend the Scientific American article:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=six-things-ben-stein-doesnt-want-you-to-know

[Robin Z]

If you have a couple hours at some point, Mr. Hanson, Ken Miller's presentation on Intelligent Design is worth watching.

Other than that, I shall remain silent, as I have seen neither movie.

[Nick Tarleton]

TGGP: think Michael Behe, William Dembski, the Discovery Institute, or sections B-F of the Index to Creationist Claims. I'd call that (fairly stupid) research.

[Caledonian]

And they get opponent Richard Dawkins to admit a 1% chance of God, and a higher chance Earth life may have been designed by distant ancient higher powers. Both these estimates justify devoting higher-than-now fractions of origin-of-life research to such possibilities.

What does Darwinism have to do with origin-of-life research? The Theory of Evolution says nothing about the origins of life. It is not at all incompatible with the possibility that Earth life developed from the designs of intelligent entities.

[Sam B]

"David and Sam, you'll dismiss the Nazi-Darwin connection without even hearing the movie's case?"

I believe that the chance of Darinwism having anything to do with Nazism is sufficiently low, that the certainty of wasting two hours of my life watching Expelled is not worth the tiny chance of gaining any utility from realising, courtesy of the movie and the movie alone, that it actually is.

Luckily of course, I don't need to spend two hours. A minute with Wikipedia tells me that the movie's "case" consisted of one of the worst selective quotation jobs I've ever seen in my short life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expelled:_No_Intelligence_Allowed#Charles_Darwin_quotation_issue

About 50% of the quote was cut from the inside, plus some important stuff at the end. By this standard I can quote you, Robin, as saying:

"For my taste, the movie probably never existed. It also overdid how understanding Darwin leads people to reject brutality. These claims are not relevant. They are admittedly true to most viewers' desire to avoid consequences."

[Tom P]

Robin, I'd be interested to know how you differentiate your degree of belief in a proposition (God) and your estimate of the price a prediction market would put on it. Aren't you implicitly opening yourself to arbitrage by having different numbers here?

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Cyan said: You've done a limited examination of the arguments in the two movies, and concluded that Expelled's argument is better constructed. Fair enough -- Michael Moore's appeal to emotion and simple storytelling omit rather a lot. This doesn't justify the statement "Expelled, however, is a better movie." Reasonable people might agree with everything else in the post and still think that Sicko was a better movie, because there's more to a movie than just its arguments.

Seconded. And while I've seen neither movie, it doesn't follow that Expelled's argument must be better constructed, because experts speak in their own words; I believe Dawkins has claimed hatchet-quote-remix of his own interview. Sicko, from your perspective, may convey no more information than "individual patients pay less at the office in other countries, and I'm not telling you anything about other costs". Fine; this is bad. But it is possible to do worse than emptiness if you remix soundbites from many apparent experts. In short, there is such a thing as anti-knowledge.

Perhaps this come down to, "I wish Sicko had quoted experts the way Expelled pretends to?" or "At least Expelled is pretending to the standard forms of debate rather than neglecting them entirely."

[poke]

david curran,

Could you tell me what sort of car you drive so I can decide whether to listen to you or not?

I drive an invisible car that loves me. Still think I'm worth listening to?

I'm with Stuart Buck on this. Robin stipulates that both films are propaganda pieces, and grants that the thesis of Moore's film is highly more probable than that of Stein's. The merits of the competing claims aren't even in issue.

As far as evaluating the films themselves qua films, though, I sure wouldn't have thought that "seeming like a graduate seminar" made for a "better movie"!

[david curran]

poke
>I drive an invisible car that loves me. Still think I'm worth listening to?

Cool can I buy it off you for some magic beans? If you are implying that anyone who has an imaginary friend called "God" is not worth listening to that would seem pretty harsh. You would have to ignore every film star but Keanu Reeves, almost every politician and almost all the worlds population.

Cars are different from religions in that no one expects you to believe in them.
"Most witches don't believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don't believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman."
-- Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

[Kaj Sotala]

I get the feeling most commenters are missing the point, here.

Whether ID or creationism or whatever is a good idea to support, or even remotely believable, is irrelevant to Robin's post. Arguably, so is the intellectual honesty of Expelled's makers. We're not talking about any of that - we're talking about whether the structure and presentation of either movie's arguments were good. I haven't seen Sicko (nor Expelled, for that matter), but I did see Bowling for Columbine. A large part of the arguments presented there were misleading or outright lies. Yet I consider it a good movie, because the presentation was convincing and entertaining. Same principle here - the movie might be good even if the content was garbage, but apparently many reviewers are attacking it on the content alone.

[Z. M. Davis]

Caledonian wrote: "[...] Robin Hanson, who yet again has departed from the common wisdom, against his own stated belief that doing so is unwise. Curious."

I'd like to second that this really is a curious phenomenon.

[Paul Gowder]

Robin, here's a thought experiment.

Suppose I write two books. One book is 70% bad arguments in support of a proposition that has a .5 probability of being true. The second is 50% bad arguments in support of a proposition that has a .01 probability of being true. On what basis would we compare the two books?

If we're comparing mere badness of argument, we'd evaluate the first book as worse. But if we're comparing, e.g., overall injury to the truth, disposition of the author to produce cynical propaganda, etc., we'd probably evaluate the second book as worse.

[Davis]

It also overdid how understanding Darwin leads people to reject God, and emboldened Nazis to brutality. These claims are not relevant to the truth of intelligent design, but they are admittedly true...

If Darwinism was a motivator for the Nazis, then why were books on Darwinism banned under the Nazis? This claim is actually rather contentious, and it's unfortunate that you're willing to grant it.

[Caledonian]

Perhaps the problem here is that Robin Hanson has radically different criteria for judging movies than most people.

Robin, can you offer us some examples of films you thought were excellent? What about films you hated?

[TGGP]

Davis, were you referring to the following quote?

Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel)

That seems to be specifying a certain kind of Darwinism, rather than the whole thing, somewhat like Lysenko's attack on "Mendel-Morganism".

[Davis]

TGGP,

That was indeed the quote; and the more I read it, the more it's unclear to me whether this is a rejection of certain kinds of Darwinism, or simply an insult leveled against Darwinism within the text of the law. The previous section, stating

All historical writings whose purpose is to denigrate the origin, the spirit and the culture of the German Volk, or to dissolve the racial and structural order of the Volk

lends some support to an overall distaste for Darwin's work (since it would claim the Volk are related to the lower races). I'd be interested in some clarification on this point.