The war of the smug

Michael Nugent is a humane and intelligent fellow, and he’s distressed by the rifts that have formed in the atheist community. So he’s written a good set of guidelines for how atheists and skeptics should interact. I have a small problem with one of his suggestions, but otherwise, it’s an excellent and idealistic plan…and unfortunately, one that has already struck the shoals of rabid misogyny.

As he notes, we’ve got a problem with people who are furious that atheists dare to consider sexism and racism to be serious issues that we should deal with now. He takes the side that I knew he would, that these are problems we should address, because secular thinkers should be best equipped to deal with them.

As skeptics we should objectively examine the impacts of social discrimination, and identify the best ways to promote diversity and inclusiveness. By definition, prejudice depends on not having all relevant information, and as skeptics we are ideally suited to develop and promote arguments for inclusiveness and human rights, based on the evidence of the benefits to individuals and society. We could use this research to tackle the emotional and irrational thinking behind racism, sexism, homophobia, and other prejudices and discriminations. It’s at least as interesting a topic as many we discuss, and a more useful topic than most.

I am fully in agreement. This is the necessary job of this generation of atheists and skeptics, to extend our principles to embrace topics of wider social import. Michael is on our side; unfortunately, you can already see the rifts widening. The very first comment on his article is from someone raving about me and my (?) “horde of five-minute-hate skepchicks”, who then goes on to make up a bunch of lies about the recent disagreement with Rationalia. And of course a known slimepit denizen immediately chimes in. So one obstacle is that a contingent has dug in with illiberal, anti-social justice values, and they are quick to howl at any suggestion that they are less than flawless champions of truth and freedom.

Yes, there is a problem here. And the problem lies in people who are affronted at any extension of atheist values to embrace other social values. Which is why I have some reservations about Michael’s first suggestion, that we have to stay focused on atheism and skepticism. Those ideas should be omnipresent, they should inform what we do, but they need to be a foundation, not a final end result.

We’re in the midst of a little civil war, a war with the smug. For so long, it was an accomplishment to be an atheist — we had rejected the dogma of the majority. It’s really something important. And now we’re growing, and we gather in greater and greater numbers, and while it’s great to find ourselves in large groups of people where we don’t have to be defensive about our disbelief, it also becomes obvious that it is not enough. We are all people who have taken that first step towards real intellectual freedom, and some of us like to just stand in wonderment and demand applause for that one step…while others of us are saying, “good, now we can march forward.” And of course that opens up rifts between us, and of course the smug are sitting there incredulous, resentful that we aren’t content just to applaud those who made that first effort, and laud them as heroes. They want a cookie right now just for being atheists.

So on one side we have smug jerks who hate the idea of being progressive, but on the other, on my side, we’re quite ready to cut the troglodytes loose, and we’re quite ready to move on without them. We see the rift forming, and we actually see it as a good thing; as Natalie Reed said on twitter:

I don’t WANT to be allies with ppl who need to be dragged, kicking & screaming, into treating me like a human.

Michael has stepped into the no-man’s land between the raging forces, and it’s a gallant effort. But judging by the comments already on his article, he hasn’t convinced the smug anti-progressives that maybe they should embrace a wider scope for atheism, and he really hasn’t tried yet to convince the people on the other side that maybe the angry sexists and racists and sneering self-satisfied libertarians are worth bringing on board. I’m inclined to say they’re not, until they grow up and change.

But let me say here: Michael Nugent has put up a plea for civil discussion on these matters. Try it. If you comment over there, be polite to the smug reactionaries already commenting; and here on this thread, too, try to avoid being too vicious, as much as you feel the other guys deserve it. Address his suggestions in the same spirit he made them.

No contest

If you thought Bambi vs. Godzilla was funny, you might want to witness AronRa battling Pastor Bob Enyart. I give you one representative sample of the back-and-forth:

AronRa wrote:Ignoring for a moment the thousands of creationist arguments which have all been proven wrong a thousand times, yet are still being presented on YEC websites around the world, can you show me one verifiably accurate argument, positively indicative of miraculous creation over biological evolution?

Enyart wrote:The 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics.

Thermodynamics does not invalidate evolution. Evolution relies on thermodynamic laws.

Why I am an atheist – Leon Baradat

The defining moment in my search for religious truth came when I took a step back and looked at all the world’s religions.  I realized that many of them make claims that contradict other religions, which means they can’t all be right.  I also noticed that, if you’re not predisposed to think one of them is right over all the others, they all look about equally believable–which is to say, not very.  I’m open to the possibility that there might be a god (or gods) out there, but I’m going to need a very good reason to think that’s true.  So far, no religion has been able to offer any solid evidence that it’s right over all the others, so I see no reason to give any of them special treatment…even the religion I happen to be surrounded by here in the US.

Leon Baradat
United States

Why would anyone want a complete simulation, anyway?

The NY Times is touting a computer simulation of Mycoplasma genitalium, the proud possesor of the simplest known genome. It’s a rather weird article because of the combination of hype, peculiar emphases, and cluelessness about what a simulation entails, and it bugged me.

It is not a complete simulation — I don’t even know what that means. What it is is a sufficiently complex model of a real cell that it can uncover unexpected interactions between components of the genome, and that is a fine and useful thing. But as always, the first thing you should discuss in a model is the caveats and limitations, and this article does no such thing.

I’d like to know how fine-grained the model is; I get the impression it’s an approximation of interactions between molecular components based on empirically determined properties of those elements. Again, I don’t think the authors have claimed otherwise, but it’s implied by the NY Times that now we have an electronic simulation that we can plug variables into and get cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s, without ever having to dirty our hands with real cells and animals anymore.

That’s nonsense. Everything in this model has to be a product of analyses of molecules from living organisms; they certainly aren’t deriving the functions and interactions of individual proteins from sequence data and first principles. We can’t do that yet! The utility of a model like this is that it might be able to generate hypotheses: upregulating gene A leads to downregulation of gene Z, a gene distantly removed from A, in the model, and therefore we get a preliminary clue about indirect ways to modulate genes of interest. The next necessary step would be to test potential drug agents in real, living cells. This model will have a huge mountain of assumptions built into it — and you can only build further on those speculations so far before it is necessary to cross-check against reality.

Also, isn’t it a bit of a leap to jump from a single-celled, parasitic organism like M. genitalium to human cancers and brain disease? Yet there it is in the second paragraph, a great big bold exaggeration.

And then there’s the really weird stuff. Some people need to step back and learn some biology.

“Right now, running a simulation for a single cell to divide only one time takes around 10 hours and generates half a gigabyte of data,” Dr. Covert wrote. “I find this fact completely fascinating, because I don’t know that anyone has ever asked how much data a living thing truly holds. We often think of the DNA as the storage medium, but clearly there is more to it than that.”

What the hell…? Look, I could (if I had the skills) generate an hourglass simulator that calculated the shape and bounciness and stickiness of every grain of sand, and stored the trajectory of each as they fell, and by storing enough data for each grain, generate even more than half a gigabyte of data. So? This doesn’t mean that an hourglass is a denser source of information than a cell. The storage requirements for the output of this program do not tell us “how much data a living thing truly holds” — that statement makes no sense.

As for “We often think of the DNA as the storage medium, but clearly there is more to it than that”…jebus, does a professor of bioengineering really need to go back and take some introductory cell biology courses, or what? Heh. “More to it than that.” I’m glad to see that someone needed an elaborate computer simulation to figure that out.

I am, for some reason, reminded of the time I attended a seminar by a computer scientist on an exciting new simulation of the genetic behavior of viruses that I was told would have great predictive power for epidemiology. One of the first things the speaker carefully explained to us was how they’d incorporated sexual reproduction into the model. I wish she’d waited to the end to say that, because it meant that I sat there listening to the whole hour talk with absolutely no interest in any other details.

A few well-deserved words for Peter Leschak

Peter Leschak writes in the Star Tribune about his conversion from creationist to rational human being. He used to be a smug, condescending, young earth creationist idiot, but he got better. Good for him! He still has a few things to learn, though.

Why is it that despite convincing scientific evidence so many Americans are creationists? For me, at least, the answer was clear: I had never seriously studied evolution and the facts supporting it. I’d graduated high school and college with honors and continued to read widely, and yet was not adequately exposed to a key concept of science. The chief fault lies with the scientific establishment.

[Read more…]

When Venn diagrams go bad

Or, why skeptics sometimes drive me nuts.

Sometimes, skeptics are the most smug and obnoxious people, blind to their own flaws, and lording it over atheists and humanists with their assumption that they are the natural lords of the entire domain of reason (and admittedly, sometimes atheists take the same tack; there are no innocent parties here). It’s extraordinarily annoying, especially when they start looking down their noses at mere atheists.

Case in point: Kyle Hill at JREF. You see, he attended both NECSS, a skeptical meeting, and the Freethought Festival, an atheist meeting, and was shocked at how stupid the atheists were (although he uses nicer words). Some of them didn’t know who Randi was, or what the JREF was, and one person even professed to believing in psychic energy. We’ve splintered too far, he says, when you can be skeptical about god but aren’t skeptical about psychic powers.

Oh, no! There’s a disjunct! Some atheists are idiots! That’s a point I actually agree with — of course there are. They’re human. That means they’re a diverse group, and yes, there will be a wide range of different ideas floating about. Whenever you select a group for a position on one issue, such as disbelief in god, you’ll be able to find some in that group who have fringe beliefs on UFOs or ESP or an afterlife. It’s to be expected.

But this is also true of the organized skepticism he represents. Whenever you select a group for a position on one issue, such as alternative medicine or Bigfoot, you’ll be able to find some in that group who have fringe beliefs about other subjects. Hill himself notices that there are a lot of global warming deniers in the skeptical community, but this was not sufficient to tut-tut over TAM attendees deplorable lack of understanding of modern skepticism.

But here’s the smugness that annoys: this idea that “modern skepticism”, a very narrow and artificially bounded set of ideas, ought to be the parent of atheism…that skepticism is the superset, while atheism is only a subset.

When I talk about skepticism, I believe that I am talking about something that encompasses many other similar philosophies like atheism, humanism, and freethought. By this I mean that atheism, for example, is a logical extension of skepticism. Anecdotally, most skeptics that I know are in fact atheists. However, the disconnect came when I expected the reverse of this observation to also be true, i.e., that most atheists are skeptics.

Most atheists are skeptics. Hill just pretends from an anecdotal sample that most are not, by blithely overlooking the overlap. I could mention, for example, that a certain obnoxiously loud atheist — me — was a speaker at both NECSS and the Freethought Festival. That I hung out with people at the Freethought Festival who were quite familiar with the JREF, attended TAM, and were skeptical activists, and that at NECSS I ran into a number of people who were horrified at the idea of atheism. But unfortunately, skeptical organizations have a history of of marginalizing atheists as politically undesirable and uncomfortable — it is no surprise that there is a disconnect, because skeptical leaders have promoted that separation. And they also constantly make this bizarre assumption that they are in charge.

Take, for instance, this silly Venn diagram Hill uses to illustrate his point.

In the first part, he bemoans the fact that there are atheists who are not fully encompassed within the domain of skepticism — how unfortunate. In the second part, he illustrates his ideal: all atheists should be within skepticism, as a small part. What a shame that there are atheists who aren’t skeptical about psychic powers!

Do you see the glaring problem with his diagrammatic resolution? It jumps out at me, anyway.

Here, I’ll help you out and add a little color, this nice light blue.

WHAT THE FUCK ABOUT ALL THOSE SO-CALLED “SKEPTICS” WHO AREN’T SKEPTICAL ABOUT GOD? Oh, they’re perfectly OK. “Modern Skepticism” is equipped with loopholes to let them off the hook, perfectly illustrated in Hill’s diagram. But you have to wonder — why is Hill writing columns complaining about psychic believers in the atheist community, and global climate change deniers in the skeptical community, and not noticing 1) both communities have idiots in their midst and don’t get to claim the universal evidential high ground over the other, and 2) skepticism has a real problem with institutionalized acceptance of non-skepticism towards a global problem of far greater magnitude than psychic nonsense, the whole issue of religion?

He’s still attached to this flaw of “modern skepticism” that wants to isolate and diminish those socially contentious atheists. If he weren’t so blind to the issue, he might be able to better see my ideal, illustrated here.

I agree that every atheist ought to be a skeptic. But also, every skeptic ought to be an atheist. How can you seriously get all smug and high-minded about rejecting mind-reading because there is no evidence for it, a proliferation of frauds endorsing it, and no reasonable scientific mechanism explaining it, while at the same time sneering at atheists who reject this god notion because there is even less evidence for it, a world-wide history of even greater charlatanry (really, mind-readers are pikers next to priests), and a total rejection of the validity of scientific demands for substantiation from its proponents?

I’ll take organized skepticism far more seriously when they spend less effort at boundary setting and recognize their responsibility to address absurd beliefs of all kinds, not just the easy ones that aren’t embraced by a majority of benighted humanity.