The difference between skeptical thinking and scientific thinking

Skepticism has a serious problem, and there are a couple of reasons I’ve grown disenchanted with its current incarnation. Belief is a continuum, and I think that skepticism as it stands occupies an untenable part of that continuum.

On one side lie the extremely gullible; people who drift with the wind, and believe anything a sufficiently charismatic guru tells them, no matter how absurd. Far to the other side are the conspiracy theorists. These are people who believe fervently in something, who have a fixed ideology and will happily twist the evidence to support it, and are therefore completely refractory to reason and empiricism.

And then, somewhere in the middle lie science and skepticism. People readily conflate those two, unfortunately, and I think that’s wrong. Science is all about following the evidence. If a bit of evidence supports a hypothesis, you willingly accept it tentatively, and follow where it leads, strengthening or discarding your initial ideas appropriately with the quality of the evidence. You end up with theories that are held provisionally, as long as they provide fruitful guidance in digging deeper. It is ultimately a positive approach that winnows out bad ideas ruthlessly, but all in the cause of advancing our knowledge. I am far more comfortable with science then skepticism, because I’d rather be working towards a goal.

Skepticism is the flip side. It’s all about falsification and disproof and dismantling proposals. I think it is the wrong approach.

Consider one classic example: Bigfoot. Skepticism is all about taking apart case by case, demonstrating fakery or error, and demolishing the stories of the Bigfoot frauds. That’s useful — in fact, skepticism is most useful in dealing with malicious intent and human fakery — but it doesn’t advance our knowledge significantly. The scientific approach would involve actually studying forest ecology, understanding how the ecosystem works, and getting a handle on what lives in the forest…and at the end, you’re left with something informative about the nature of the habitat, as well as a recognition that a giant ape isn’t part of the puzzle.

Again, sure, there are good and necessary aspects of skepticism. When you’ve got a fraud like Burzynski peddling fake cancer cures, the skeptical toolbox is helpful. But in the end, when you’ve shown that injecting processed horse urine into people doesn’t help anything, what are you left with? Better to understand the nature of cancer and normal physiology, providing alternatives and useful explanations for why the cancer quacks are wrong. That’s why the best skeptics of quackery are doctors and scientists — they have positive insights to contribute in addition to simple falsification.

So far, I haven’t said anything that makes skepticism bad; it might be better regarded as a complement to the scientific approach, that clears away the garbage to unclutter the operating field. Unfortunately, the current doctrines of organized skepticism open the doors to pathology, because they so poorly define the proper domain of skepticism, and what they do say are inconsistent and incoherent. What we’re stuck with is a schema that tolerates motivated reasoning, as long as it looks like debunking.

So we get skeptics who argue against the dangers of second-hand tobacco smoke, or anthropogenic climate change — it’s OK, because they’re being critical — and these same skeptical entertainers are lauded for berating an MD and throwing him out of a party, because he had criticized their pandering to a quack…and also their climate change denialism. Do I even need to get into their contemptible sexism or their Libertarian bullshit?

And then the movement as a whole has been wracked with this bizarre denial of sexual harassment, and refusal to deal with the issue. I think part of it has to be a culture of dealing with complications by rejecting them — that the movement is full of individuals whose favored approach to the deplorable messiness of human interactions and the existence of malefactors is by retreating into a Spock-like insistence that the problem does not compute, and therefore can be ignored. It’s a culture of explaining away, rather than explaining.

Also…hyperskepticism. Some people take their skepticism to such pathological extremes that they become conspiracy theorists or fanatical denialists of simple human behavior. I encountered an example of this yesterday that had me stunned with its contrarian stupidity. Not all skeptics (hah!) are this bad, but too many tolerate and approve of it.

A short while ago, I received a very nice letter from a young woman in Indiana who liked my book. I scanned it and posted it, with her name and town redacted — it was a lovely example of a phenomenon we’ve noticed for quite some time, of the way the internet and books about atheism have opened the door for many people who had previously felt isolated. It also said kind things about The Happy Atheist, so of course I was glad to share it.

Some nut named Cavanaugh, in the name of True Atheism and Skepticism, has posted a lengthy dissection of the letter. He doesn’t believe it’s real. He thinks I wrote it myself. To prove his point, all he has is the scan I posted…so he has taken it apart at excruciating and obsessive length. He has carefully snipped out all the letters “w” in the letter, lining them up so you can easily compare them. My god, they’re not identical! He has another figure in which he has sliced out a collection of ligatures — would you believe the spacing between letters, in a handwritten letter, is not consistent? She used the word “oblivious” a couple of times…a word that I also have used many times. She wrote exactly one page, not two. He mansplains the psychology of teenaged girls to assert that there’s no way a 15-year-old woman could have written the letter. You get the idea. He is being properly skeptical, accumulating a body of “facts” to disprove the possibility that someone in Indiana actually wrote a letter.

Furthermore, he lards his account with purely imaginative stories about what my correspondent was thinking — he injects his account with the most contemptible interpolations, like this one.

It’s okay, Mr. Myers, she reassures him, I think you’re cool. I’m just like you, and if I can make it through, so can you. Keep spreading the word. Oh, and come rescue me from Indiana — I’ll be legal in 2016.

That was not in the letter, of course: he made it all up. On the basis of his own foul-minded speculations, he transformed a pleasant fan letter into a come-on from a small town Lolita. It’s a disgusting spectacle of hyperskepticism gone wild. Oh, and skepticism and atheism: Jebus, but you do have a misogyny problem. Please stop pretending you don’t.

And boy, am I glad I cut out the name and hometown from that letter. Can you imagine if I’d left it in, and asshole Matt Cavanaugh thought it would be clever to do some investigative skepticism, tracked down her phone number, and called her up to slime her with innuendo directly? It would be a natural and expected step in the hyperskeptical toolbox to make such a thorough examination of all the data.

So stands movement skepticism, perfectly tuned to question the existence of chupacabras or UFOs. But also poised to doubt the existence of the US Postal Service, while simultaneously sneering at atheists who reject the biggest chupacabra of them all, god, flying in the grandest possible UFO, heaven. When your whole business model is simply about rejecting fringe claims, rather than following the evidence no matter how mainstream the target, you’ll inevitably end up with a pathologically skewed audience that uses motivated reasoning to abuse the weak. And you end up valuing flamboyance and showmanship over the contributions of science…unless, of course, the scientist has grope-worthy breasts.

So no thanks, skepticism. I’ll stick with science.

Also, if my Indiana correspondent should stumble across this faux “controversy,” I am very, very sorry. Apparently it isn’t quite safe yet for everyone to come out — the wider internet, as well as rural America, has its share of small-minded, pettily vicious shit-weasels.

Making Ken Ham cry some more

Poor Ken Ham is heartbroken by the latest polling data.

bibledecline

Look at that! More people regard the Bible as a book of fables than ever before. This hurts the Hamster, who declares that they must keep doing more of what has discredited the book.

In this day and age, I consider Genesis, out of all the other books of the Bible, to be the most attacked, scoffed at, and ridiculed—from within parts of the church and outside. You see, because of the indoctrination in the belief evolution and millions of years through the education system and media, many people believe that Genesis 1-11 cannot be taken as literal history. As a result, such evolutionary teaching is a stumbling block to many non-Christians even listening to the gospel from the Word of God—and many people in the church are put on a slippery slide of unbelief in the Scriptures as the infallible Word of God.

Reports like this one on the poll emphasize the great need for creation-apologetics teaching in churches and homes.

Please, please, please keep it up — these Bible literalists do so much to help the cause of atheism. When you insist that a short page of fuzzy poetry must supplant all of biology and must be regarded as absolutely, literally true in every word, rational people are given cause to doubt…and once they begin to doubt the first page of your sacred holy book, they begin to question page 2, and page 3, and page whatever, and quite soon the dedicated priests of your cult are wondering why there is a sudden, catastrophic loss of believers.

“I’m not a scientist, but…”

Jonathan Chait makes an interesting observation.

Asked by reporters yesterday if he accepts the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions contribute to global warming, John Boehner demurred on the curious but increasingly familiar grounds that he is not a scientist. “Listen, I’m not qualified to debate the science over climate change,” the House Speaker said. Boehner immediately turned the question to the killing of jobs that would result from any proposal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which he asserts with unwavering certainty. (On this question, Boehner is not held back by the fact that he is also not an economist.)

This particular demurral seems to be in vogue for the Grand Old Party. Florida governor Rick Scott (“I’m not a scientist”) and Senator Marco Rubio (“I’m not a scientist. I’m not qualified to make that decision.”) have both held up their lack of scientific training as a reason to withhold judgment on anthropogenic global warming.

Now I can’t unhear it. Everywhere you go, you hear idiots proffering that disclaimer. Watch this video and you’ll see:

Alice Roberts is clear and competent; Jeremy Paxson is abrasive to both sides (but really, “It’s just a theory”? Come on); but John Lewis is a stammering twit. You’ll notice it repeatedly. Every time he’s called on an issue, he backs off. He’s not a teacher, but; he’s not an official of ACE, but; he’s not a scientist, but. He’s so busy making excuses for why he’s not competent to be discussing any of the subjects brought before him that one has to wonder why the heck he was asked on the show.

It’s the same with the politicians that Chait cites. Why are they so quick to say that they aren’t qualified to discuss an issue, yet they seem to think they are qualified enough to disapprove of any resolution to address problems? Or in John Lewis’s case, they’re willing to say what lies children ought to be taught despite admitting to having no qualifications whatsoever to judge.

Chait’s explanation:

“I’m not a scientist” allows Republicans to avoid conceding the legitimacy of climate science while also avoiding the political downside of openly branding themselves as haters of science. The beauty of the line is that it implicitly concedes that scientists possess real expertise, while simultaneously allowing you to ignore that expertise altogether.

I think that’s true. But I also think there’s more.

In today’s media, taking a side is seen as a violation of neutrality. One thing they’re doing by announcing that they’re not scientists is declaring that they are an objective outsider…because as everyone knows, having extensive knowledge about a subject biases a person towards a particular best answer. Only the empty-headed fool can truly determine what is right. You’ll also see this philosophy in practice in the current penchant for debates, where you’re not supposed to decide the outcome by who most accurately reflects the truth, but by who makes the best case to a naive audience.

Another factor is that this is a dogwhistle. People like Chait or myself hear “I’m not a scientist,” and what we think we hear is a cautious disavowal — they are avoiding “openly branding themselves as haters of science”. But spend some time talking to strong creationists or climate change denialists, and you will discover that hating science is not the problem we think it is. To them, “science” is all ideologically driven propaganda promoted by egg-headed welfare recipients — all them scientists are getting rich off their fat gub’mint grants. So people like that hear “I’m not a scientist,” and they hear a declaration that the speaker is on their side, not one of the lying elites.

In a world where the tribal lines are stark, there’s a definite benefit to announcing that you are not one of them. And if you can do it in a coded way that doesn’t immediately antagonize your opponents and let them know what you’re doing, all the better.

Eric Hovind living down to his reputation

Typical creationist misrepresentation: Eric Hovind got together with a guy named Darek Isaacs to tell us all about evolution, and stupidity follows, predictably. The weird part starts around 5:50 in the video, in which Isaacs declares that evolution is all about the man propagating his DNA…and you can stop right there. I guess women have nothing to do with this evolution business. But he babbles on with this naive version of evolution which is all about death to the weakest, and that apparently all that matters in reproduction is the frequency of intercourse, whether the woman is willing or not. They don’t seem capable of considering the possibility that perhaps other factors than ejaculation play a role in the successful propagation of human beings.

Oh, well, just watch this. Rebecca Watson deals with it more entertainingly.

Ing gets email

It is rather bizarre.

The ONLY way for Hominid branching to be possible is through RACE. Yet you have a professor deliberately teaching junk science which completely DESTROYS the theory of human evolution by saying RACE DOESN'T EXIST. Do you guys REALLY want … to be known as a University teaching nonsense which destroys Human Evolution? … i am only a HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE AND EVEN I KNOW WITH 100% CERTAINTY THAT THIS IS JUNK SCIENCE

The ONLY way for Hominid branching to be possible is through RACE. Yet you have a professor deliberately teaching junk science which completely DESTROYS the theory of human evolution by saying RACE DOESN’T EXIST. Do you guys REALLY want … to be known as a University teaching nonsense which destroys Human Evolution?

…

i am only a HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE AND EVEN I KNOW WITH 100% CERTAINTY THAT THIS IS JUNK SCIENCE

Gosh. I’m only a university professor of biology, not AGuyWhosYoutubeChannelGetsMillionsOfViews with a high school diploma, but I thought the key ingredients for speciation were reproductive isolation and subsequent divergence by drift and/or selection. Not “race”, which is a sociologically loaded term that is poorly connected to any legitimate scientific concepts. Does this guy really think that humanity is poised for branching into 3 or 5 or 7 or 63 (or whatever the current tally of ‘races’ is nowadays) species? Is the unit of any potential speciation event in our future likely to be what we label as ‘race’?

Does anyone know who AGuyWhosYoutubeChannelGetsMillionsOfViews actually is? I’d love to watch some of his videos. I’m sure they’re…entertaining informative amusing irritating.

The ‘human biodiversity’ racists are at it again

I have roused the furious slap-fighting anger of the HBD crowd, that’s for sure. They have now come up with a priceless argument to refute everything I’ve said, and are accusing me of being a creationist.

This image is priceless. Yes, @pzmyers, by definition, is a creationist. Why does PZ hate Darwin so?

This must be a doozy of a refutation, encapsulated in a single image. And here it is.

The Cultural Marxist War against Darwinism Creationists: evolution is a social construct, not biologically real. Liberal Creationists: race is a social construct, not biologically real. Charles Darwin: I'm not a creationist: I'll use the word 'race' in title of my Origin of Species

The Cultural Marxist War against Darwinism

Creationists: evolution is a social construct, not biologically real.

Liberal Creationists: race is a social construct, not biologically real.

Charles Darwin: I’m not a creationist: I’ll use the word ‘race’ in title of my Origin of Species

You might have seen an earlier version of this argument in the comments here, but that was before they ran out and got the juicy quote from Charles Darwin.

I confess, the first thing that had me confoozled was that term “Cultural Marxist”. I had to scurry over to Wikipedia to look it up, I’m embarrassed to say. Here’s the definition:

Cultural Marxism refers to a school or offshoot of Marxism that conceives of culture as central to the legitimation of oppression, in addition to the economic factors that Karl Marx emphasized. An outgrowth of Western Marxism (especially from Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School) and finding popularity in the 1960s as cultural studies, cultural Marxism argues that what appear as traditional cultural phenomena intrinsic to Western society, for instance the drive for individual acquisition associated with capitalism, nationalism, the nuclear family, gender roles, race and other forms of cultural identity; are historically recent developments that help to justify and maintain hierarchy. Cultural Marxists use Marxist methods (historical research, the identification of economic interest, the study of the mutually conditioning relations between parts of a social order) to try to understand the complexity of power in contemporary society and to make it possible to criticise what, cultural Marxists propose, appears natural but is in fact ideological.

Oh. Hey. I am sympatico with most of that (I’d disagree with the arrow of causality implied in that phrase “to justify and maintain hierarchy”, but this is just a synopsis so maybe the reality is more sophisticated than that). I guess I am a Cultural Marxist then, in the sense that I oppose the appropriation and distortion of natural processes to justify ideological ends.

You learn something every day.

Of course, I don’t think my critics use the term in that rational sense. They are using it as a conservative insult.

In current political rhetoric, the term has come into use by some social conservatives, such as historian William S. Lind, who associate it with a set of principles that they claim are in simple contradiction with traditional values of Western society and the Christian religion. In this usage, political correctness and multiculturalism, which are identified with cultural Marxism, are argued to have their true origin in a Marxian movement to undermine or abnegate such traditional values.

I have to go along with that, too: fuck Western tradition and religion.

And then, conveniently, the racist wackos have lately been sending me a link to their favorite definitions. Here’s one from a site called Destroy Cultural Marxism.

Cultural Marxism: An offshoot of Marxism that gave birth to political correctness, multiculturalism and “anti-racism.” Unlike traditional Marxism that focuses on economics, Cultural Marxism focuses on culture and maintains that all human behavior is a result of culture (not heredity / race) and thus malleable. Cultural Marxists deny that biological reality of race and argue that race is a “social construct”. Nonetheless, Cultural Marxists support the race-based identity politics of non-whites. Cultural Marxists typically support race-based affirmative action, the proposition state (as opposed to a nation rooted in common ancestry), elevating non-Western religions above Western religions, speech codes and censorship, multiculturalism, diversity training, anti-Western education curricula, maladaptive sexual norms and anti-male feminism, the dispossession of white people, and mass Third World immigration into Western countries. Cultural Marxists have promoted idea that white people, instead of birthing white babies, should interracially marry or adopt non-white children. Samuel P. Huntington maintained that Cultural Marxism is an anti-white ideology.

Now that’s more like it. That’s the attitude I get from these loons: that I’m a race traitor because I recognize the humanity of people who are not white, and think our society perpetuates racist myths that require active opposition. It’s also a load of nonsense. I don’t tell white people that they should marry black people, or any other color-matching bullshit: I think people should be free to marry whoever they love.

That site also has some other charming definitions that I never wanted to know, but are very revealing.

Concepts to oppose Cultural Marxism:

Genophilia:  The love of one’s own race. A natural instinct that Cultural Marxists want to deny (at least for whites).

Identitarian Religion:  An older form of religion that stresses ancestral obligations.  Adamantly opposed by Christian Cultural Marxists (at least for whites). Throughout nearly all human history, identitarian religion (aka, ethno-religion), has been the norm.

Leukophobia:  The irrational fear of whites organizing racially.

Nation:  The very word ‘nation’ (from Latin ‘nasci’) implies link by blood.  The traditional (non-Marxist) understanding of nation implies racial homogeneity.  (Until very recently Europe has always been racially homogenous and USA, in 1960 census, was 90% white.)

It’s true. I don’t love my own race. I love people, though, and I don’t see any reason to exclude the majority of humanity from my circle of friends simply because of their ancestry, nor do I think it’s a good thing to start slicing up countries into tinier fragments of pure ethnicities, bolstered by a racist religion. And what are these people going to do in a few decades, when the USA is less than 50% white? Leave and go back to their racial homeland? Which is where?

As for their bogus syllogism that tries to equate denying that something is biologically real with being a creationist, some things aren’t biologically real — there are no fairies, unicorns, or winged monkeys. Stating that they don’t exist does not make one a creationist. There are differences between individuals that are genetic, and therefore the distribution of individuals carrying them fall into clades, but that does not imply that all of humanity cleaves naturally into a small number of discrete groups. That is a recipe for hate, as well as being biologically invalid. Which, I guess, makes the Human Biodiversity phonies all a bunch of creationists, by their own reasoning.

Also, bad news: Darwin was a racist. He carried a great many of the prejudices of a typical Victorian gentleman, and they come through in his writings; but at least they were softened by his humanism, and he aspired to be more egalitarian. But you don’t get to call St. Chuck your perfect ideal. He was flawed. And the theory does not rely on the perfection of one of its discoverers.

Holly Dunsworth also has a relevant quote from Darwin’s The Descent of Man.

Man has been studied more carefully than any other organic being, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classified as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawford), or as sixty-three, according to Burke.

I’ll add to that this quote:

Although the existing races of man differ in many respects, as in colour, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body, &c., yet if their whole structure be taken into consideration they are found to resemble each other closely in a multitude of points. Many of these are of so unimportant or of so singular a nature, that it is extremely improbable that they should have been independently acquired by aboriginally distinct species or races. The same remark holds good with equal or greater force with respect to the numerous points of mental similarity between the most distinct races of man. The American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans are as different from each other in mind as any three races that can be named; yet I was incessantly struck, whilst living with the Fuegians on board the “Beagle,” with the many little traits of character, shewing how similar their minds were to ours; and so it was with a full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate.

Darwin isn’t your friend, HBD racists, and even if he were, it would be an element of his character to deplore, not reason to accept race hatred as a necessary component of evolutionary thought.

Think about why it was trending

Remember that video by Joshua Feuerstein in which he claimed to destroy evolution in 3 minutes? It went viral. The BBC interviewed him, and got Aron Ra’s perspective. Feuerstein himself is bragging about the power of Social Media.

But they don’t ask why that video got so many views. I saw it because so many other atheists were linking to it…and laughing. It was this beautiful distillation of rank, raving creationist idiocy — a supremely confident ignoramus gushing over creationism’s dumbest hits as if they haven’t been smacked down a thousand times before.

Feuerstein got his moment of fame because he was that week’s stupid cat video, or comedic compilation of crotch punches, or amazingly clueless thing said by a Republican.

What is wrong with Chris Hedges?

I was grumbling about Chris Hedges 6 years ago, and every few years after that he seemed to spew more nonsense about atheists again. And then he gave an incoherent, illogical, dishonest talk at UMM last January. He’s been busily undermining his reputation as a journalist for years with babbling drivel.

And now I learn, via Ophelia, that he’s committed the unpardonable sin for a journalist: Chris Hedges is a serial plagiarist. Somehow, I’m not surprised. When I heard him speak, I was convinced he was a lazy hack, and so it’s not unexpected that he’s been stealing other people’s work and presenting it as his own. Perhaps the reason his anti-atheist material has been so much less persuasive than his work in other areas is because, in this case, he’s been reduced to stealing from creationists and far right wing ideologues.

The battle for Hedges’ reputation has begun with a familiar refrain.

Kaufman went on to note the “relative positions in the journalistic community between Salon and Truthdig and between Mr. Ketcham (and his spouse) and Mr. Hedges.” Because of these “relative positions” in the hierarchy of journalism, Kaufman stressed that “the issue of commercial motives cannot be disregarded,” and cited without elaboration “possible personal, economic and commercial gain that would be derived by Salon and Mr. Ketcham from damaging the reputation of Truthdig, Mr. Hedges, the Nation and other competitive publications and authors.” Nowhere in her letter did she address the Postman correction and its implications.

Get that? Hedges and Truthdig are so lofty and prestigious that Ketcham (the fellow who noted the plagiarism) and Salon (which was planning to run the piece, and then backed down) must be doing it for the vast monetary benefit to be gained from criticizing a famous writer. That has to be the only explanation. Integrity doesn’t exist — the only possible reason for criticizing a Big Man has to be for the attention/clicks/money. Sam Harris has done this, too, as have many of the big names in the atheist community — even the same people I’ve argued have been misrepresented by hacks like Hedges. And it’s a bad argument. It doesn’t work that way. Whistleblowers and critics of the power structure do not gain from their efforts, ever.

I though this comment from mesh at Butterflies and Wheels was insightful. They’re taking about Jaclyn Glenn, who has another video out (no, not that stupid one, but a new one that I thought was pretty damned stupid, too).

The last bit is particularly revealing when you consider the frequent charges of attention-whoring for blog hits; you don’t become popular by fighting the status quo, you become popular by promoting it. If such trends are any indication the way to get hits is to rage about the castration agenda of the feminazis, blame everything except attitudes towards women for their treatment in any given circumstance, and laugh at people who receive rape threats. If someone’s a feminist just for the attention they’re doing it horribly, horribly wrong.

You don’t get fame and fortune by disagreeing with a Movement Star, you get it by hitching your wagon to them. Rather than profit, one hopes the reward is for that intangible gain of being right and true.

This is also not about hating on Hedges — I have actually liked his anti-war, anti-authoritarian message, and some of his stuff has been very good and powerful (although now, unfortunately, I have to wonder where he cribbed the good stuff). I was dismayed to see the irrational turn his mind had taken with his anti-atheism writing, and it is dismaying to see worthy ideas tainted by these bad associations.