Overcoming Bias

Thanksgiving Prayer

At tonight's Thanksgiving, Erin remarked on how this was her first real Thanksgiving dinner away from her family, and that it was an odd feeling to just sit down and eat without any prayer beforehand.  (Yes, she's a solid atheist in no danger whatsoever, thank you for asking.)

And as she said this, it reminded me of how wrong it is to give gratitude to God for blessings that actually come from our fellow human beings putting in a great deal of work.

So I at once put my hands together and said,

"Dear Global Economy, we thank thee for thy economies of scale, thy professional specialization, and thy international networks of trade under Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage, without which we would all starve to death while trying to assemble the ingredients for such a dinner as this.  Amen."

Beliefs Require Reasons, or: Is the Pope Catholic? Should he be?

In the early days of this blog, I would pick fierce arguments with Robin about the no-disagreement hypothesis.  Lately, however, reflection on things like public reason have brought me toward agreement with Robin, or at least moderated my disagreement.  To see why, it's perhaps useful to take a look at the newspapers...

the pope said the book “explained with great clarity” that “an interreligious dialogue in the strict sense of the word is not possible.” In theological terms, added the pope, “a true dialogue is not possible without putting one’s faith in parentheses.”

What are we to make of a statement like this?

Ask OB: Leaving the Fold

Followup to:  Crisis of Faith

I thought this comment from "Jo" deserved a bump to the front page:

"So here I am having been raised in the Christian faith and trying not to freak out over the past few weeks because I've finally begun to wonder whether I believe things just because I was raised with them. Our family is surrounded by genuinely wonderful people who have poured their talents into us since we were teenagers, and our social structure and business rests on the tenets of what we believe. I've been trying to work out how I can 'clear the decks' and then rebuild with whatever is worth keeping, yet it's so foundational that it will affect my marriage (to a pretty special man) and my daughters who, of course, have also been raised to walk the Christian path.

Is there anyone who's been in this position - really, really invested in a faith and then walked away?"

Handling this kind of situation has to count as part of the art.  But I haven't gone through anything like this.  Can anyone with experience advise Jo on what to expect, what to do, and what not to do?

The Evil Pleasure

Pascal Boyer in Nature on religion:

One important finding is that people are only aware of some of their religious beliefs.  ... For instance, experiments reveal that most people entertain highly anthropomorphic expectations about gods, whatever their explicit beliefs. ... Research has shown that unlike conscious beliefs, which differ widely from one tradition to another, tacit assumptions are extremely similar in different cultures and religions. ... Experiments suggest that people best remember stories that include a combination of counterintuitive physical feats ... and plausibly human psychological features.  ... Experiments show that it is much more natural to think "the gods know that I stole this money" than "the gods know that I had porridge for breakfast." ...

Humans are unique among animals in maintaining large, stable coalitions of unrelated individuals, strongly bonded by mutual trust.  Humans evolved the cognitive tools to ... gauge others' reliability. ... They can emit and detect costly, hard-to-fake signals of commitment. ... When people proclaim their adherence to a particular faith, they subscribe to claims for which there is no evidence, and that would be taken as obviously wrong or ridiculous in other religions groups.  This signals a willingness to embrace the group's particular norm for no other reason than that it is, precisely, the group's norm.

We feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people.  We feel an even deeper pleasure letting everyone know of this fact.  This feeling is EVIL.  Learn to see it in yourself, and then learn to be horrified by how thoroughly it can poison your mind.  Yes evidence may at times force you to disagree with a majority, and your friends may have correlated exposure to that evidence, but take no pleasure when you and your associates disagree with others; that is the road to rationality ruin. 

Added 6Nov: I didn't mean to emphasize the size of the group you agree with.  The emotion is mainly tied to believing the same as an in-group, relative to an out-group.

Dark Side Epistemology

Followup to:  Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies

If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy.

I have previously spoken of the notion that, the truth being entangled, lies are contagious.  If you pick up a pebble from the driveway, and tell a geologist that you found it on a beach - well, do you know what a geologist knows about rocks?  I don't.  But I can suspect that a water-worn pebble wouldn't look like a droplet of frozen lava from a volcanic eruption.  Do you know where the pebble in your driveway really came from?  Things bear the marks of their places in a lawful universe; in that web, a lie is out of place.

What sounds like an arbitrary truth to one mind - one that could easily be replaced by a plausible lie - might be nailed down by a dozen linkages to the eyes of greater knowledge.  To a creationist, the idea that life was shaped by "intelligent design" instead of "natural selection" might sound like a sports team to cheer for.  To a biologist, plausibly arguing that an organism was intelligently designed would require lying about almost every facet of the organism.  To plausibly argue that "humans" were intelligently designed, you'd have to lie about the design of the human retina, the architecture of the human brain, the proteins bound together by weak van der Waals forces instead of strong covalent bonds...

Or you could just lie about evolutionary theory, which is the path taken by most creationists.  Instead of lying about the connected nodes in the network, they lie about the general laws governing the links.

And then to cover that up, they lie about the rules of science - like what it means to call something a "theory", or what it means for a scientist to say that they are not absolutely certain.

Beyond the Reach of God

Followup to:  The Magnitude of His Own Folly

Today's post is a tad gloomier than usual, as I measure such things.  It deals with a thought experiment I invented to smash my own optimism, after I realized that optimism had misled me.  Those readers sympathetic to arguments like, "It's important to keep our biases because they help us stay happy," should consider not reading.  (Unless they have something to protect, including their own life.)

So!  Looking back on the magnitude of my own folly, I realized that at the root of it had been a disbelief in the Future's vulnerability - a reluctance to accept that things could really turn out wrong.  Not as the result of any explicit propositional verbal belief.  More like something inside that persisted in believing, even in the face of adversity, that everything would be all right in the end.

Some would account this a virtue (zettai daijobu da yo), and others would say that it's a thing necessary for mental health.

But we don't live in that world.  We live in the world beyond the reach of God.

Excluding the Supernatural

Followup to:  Reductionism, Anthropomorphic Optimism

Occasionally, you hear someone claiming that creationism should not be taught in schools, especially not as a competing hypothesis to evolution, because creationism is a priori and automatically excluded from scientific consideration, in that it invokes the "supernatural".

So... is the idea here, that creationism could be true, but even if it were true, you wouldn't be allowed to teach it in science class, because science is only about "natural" things?

It seems clear enough that this notion stems from the desire to avoid a confrontation between science and religion.  You don't want to come right out and say that science doesn't teach Religious Claim X because X has been tested by the scientific method and found false.  So instead, you can... um... claim that science is excluding hypothesis X a priori.  That way you don't have to discuss how experiment has falsified X a posteriori.

Of course this plays right into the creationist claim that Intelligent Design isn't getting a fair shake from science - that science has prejudged the issue in favor of atheism, regardless of the evidence.  If science excluded Intelligent Design a priori, this would be a justified complaint!

But let's back up a moment.  The one comes to you and says:  "Intelligent Design is excluded from being science a priori, because it is 'supernatural', and science only deals in 'natural' explanations."

What exactly do they mean, "supernatural"?  Is any explanation invented by someone with the last name "Cohen" a supernatural one?  If we're going to summarily kick a set of hypotheses out of science, what is it that we're supposed to exclude?

By far the best definition I've ever heard of the supernatural is Richard Carrier's:  A "supernatural" explanation appeals to ontologically basic mental things, mental entities that cannot be reduced to nonmental entities.

Intelligent Design Honesty

The excellent and famous philosopher Thomas Nagel on teaching intelligent design:

When ... in response to the finding that the teaching of creationism in public schools was unconstitutional, the producers of creation science tried to argue that young earth creationism was consistent with the geological and paleontological evidence, ... their arguments were easily refuted. ... That is a good enough reason not to teach it to schoolchildren. ..

I agree with Philip Kitcher that the response of evolutionists to creation science and intelligent design should not be to rule them out as "not science." He argues that the objection should rather be that they are bad science, or dead science: scientific claims that have been decisively refuted by the evidence. ... However, the claim that ID is bad science or dead science may depend ... on the assumption that divine intervention in the natural order is not a serious possibility. ...

So far as I can see, the only way to make no assumptions of a religious nature would be to admit that the empirical evidence may suggest different conclusions depending on what religious belief one starts with, and that the evidence does not by itself settle which of those beliefs is correct, even though there are other religious beliefs, such as the literal truth of Genesis, that are easily refuted by the evidence. I do not see much hope that such an approach could be adopted, but it would combine intellectual responsibility with respect for the Establishment Clause. ...

Disagreement is Disrespect

Consider these dueling bumper stickers:

Here religious conservatives do seem unfairly maligned: seeing a behavior as immoral is not at all the same as "hating."  These folks also rightly seethe at how they are usually portrayed in popular film and TV, and at seeing their democratic ideals violated when even local voting majorities can't prevent their kids from being taught evolution in public schools.  You can feel this resentment in the enthusiasm for Palin.  (Of course since I'm not religious about God, sexual preference, or democracy, this all bothers me lots less.)

But this does seem a handy opportunity to repeat that while disagreement isn't hate, it is disrespect.  When you knowingly disagree with someone you are judging them to be less rational than you, at least on that topic.  (Judging them less informed or experienced by itself can't create disagreement.)  It might be only a minor disrespect, if you think this disagreement suggests little about whether you'd disagree with them elsewhere.  But disagreement is disrespect, nonetheless.

Added: Wikipedia says hate speech is:

Speech intended to degrade, intimidate, or incite violence or prejudicial action against a person or group of people based on their race, gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, language ability, moral or political views, socioeconomic class, occupation or appearance (such as height, weight, and hair color), mental capacity and any other distinction-liability. [emphasis added]

How exactly do you disagree with someone's moral views without degrading them?  Can you really say pedophelia is disgusting without degrading pedophiles?

Suspiciously Vague LHC Forecasts

Me in '06:

You can get 80% of the improvement that prediction markets offer by using a much simpler solution: collect track records.  ... When people make forecast-like-statements, write them down in a clear standardized form, and then check back later to see who was more accurate.

I'm at scifoo (Nature/O'Reilly/Google Science Foo Camp) and yesterday heard a talk about the Large Hadron Collider that will go live in a few weeks - and had a disturbing thought.  Odds are very good that within the next few years we will see news articles where bigshot physicists say a new LHC result vindicates a theory they've been pushing.  But today there are no public predictions by high-profile physicists stated precisely enough to be clearly scored for accuracy!  While weather, business, and sport forecasters commonly make scoreable probability forecasts, here are the sorts of forecasts bigshot physicists make: