The sleep of the innocent

I sleep fairly well — as I’ve gotten older, I sleep less, but most nights I go to bed, read quietly for an hour or so, and within minutes of turning out the lights, I’m out. Then I’ll typically wake up around 5:30am. I get between 6 and 7 hours of solid sleep most nights, which is about what I need. That’s my pattern, I’m sticking with it.

Clearly, the reason I sleep well is because I’m an atheist — you know, unconflicted by storms of Catholic guilt or Protestant sanctimony. At least, that’s the implication of a study. After all, when it’s called a “study”, you know it’s serious business.

A new study out of Baylor University finds that 73% of atheists and agnostics sleep at least seven hours a night, compared to only 55% of Baptists and 63% of Catholics. Atheists and agnostics also reported fewer difficulties falling asleep at night. The findings held even after controlling for details like age and socioeconomic status.

Gosh, it fits my personal experience as an atheist, so I get that little buzz of confirmation. I don’t have any personal experience sleeping as a Baptist or Catholic, but I still get a little buzz at the idea that the Others are tossing and turning at night. And now, when my religious friends (if I had any!) show up at work tired and red-eyed, I get the smug satisfaction of being able to tell them they ought to become an atheist so they can get a good night’s rest for a change.

If I were an idiot.

I took a look at the study. They’re just mining a bigger data set for correlations, which is not a kind of science I care much for. In other words, there was a survey that asked a large collection of semi-random questions of religious and non-religious people, and then afterwards they fished for anything that might show a difference. It could maybe be useful if they followed through and figured out what caused the difference. But they don’t; this is just a cold wet plop of an observation from a data set.

Another thing that always bugs me is that when a study is reported in the popular press they always strip out important qualifiers that at least the original work includes.

Religious affiliation was associated with sleep duration, but not in the predicted direction. Atheists/Agnostics (73%) were significantly more likely to report meeting consensus sleep duration guidelines than religiously-affiliated individuals (65%), p< .05. For example, Atheists/Agnostics reported better sleep duration than Catholics (63%, p< .01) and Baptists (55%, p<.001). Atheists/Agnostics also reported less difficulty falling asleep at night than Catholics (p=.02) and Baptists (p< .001).

Notice the word I highlighted: these are the results of a self-reported survey. They don’t necessarily mean what you think they mean. It could mean that atheists are very insecure and like to lie positively about their health and confidence. Go ahead, Baptists! You can read it that way! Even if I know in my heart that you are tormented by your god-belief.

That’s the only thing that jumped out at me about this trivial and mundane study. It’s a great example of how the press likes to file the serial numbers off a paper: they report “atheists sleep better” when the actual paper says “atheists report that they sleep better”. In this case, they’re making a change that’s favorable to the godless, but it’s also what they do with studies that go the other way. This paper even begins with a statement of the common presupposition!

The psychology of religion literature indicates that religious engagement is beneficial to physical and mental health.

I don’t trust that interpretation any more than I do the suggestion that atheism is beneficial to your sleep.

Also, it’s a Templeton funded study.

I’m an atheist, so there’s no way I’d fall for QAnon

They misspelled “disinformation”

Ha ha, I’m joking. QAnon sounds like the perfect bait to capture a subset of atheists — you know the ones, the same ones that got addicted to culty anti-feminism and regularly logged on to 4chan and regressive reddit message boards and spent a few years telling the world I was a tyrannical pussy-whipped cuck who was anti-free speech. You know the ones. They still pop up on YouTube and FaceBook in my comments.

I think the 4chan/8chan link is the real giveaway. The people there tend not to be your usual evangelical Christians and did preach a lot about anti-authoritarianism, but evolved into a significant groupthink mentality (amusing, since that’s what they accuse SJWs of) that has wider appeal, and has since absorbed evangelicals and New Agers without schism. 4chan/8chan has obviously had deep rifts — the founders are tearing at each other even now — but they spawned a remarkably stable loony cult.

It’s clear that QAnon is a creature of 8chan, birthed from the diseased mind of Jim Watkins, one of the founders of the chan group.

Unlike many cults—which rely on the charismatic appeal of the leader—QAnon works because of the leader’s anonymity. It allows followers to imagine Q as a perfect embodiment of their ideals, working deep inside the structures of government power.

In this framing, Q must conceal their identity and communicate through coded messages in order to continue operating in the upper echelons of the American government. If Q instead turned out to be a pig-farming smut peddler living in the Philippines…that might change things.

As it turns out, the founder of 8chan (since rebranded as 8kun)—where Q has posted those coded messages since abandoning 4chan in November of 2017—has been claiming to know the identity of Q for some time now. According to him, Q is in fact a pig farming smut peddler living in the Philippines—and also the current owner and operator of 8kun…

Ironically, QAnon, which got some life from its anti-pedophile #PizzaGate nonsense, is a product of a guy who distributes child- and Asian-fetish porn.

Since then Watkins has moved to the Philippines, got married, started a pig farm, founded a conspiratorial right-wing news outlet called The Goldwater (that also fetishized Asian women), hijacked the domain of 2channel, and took over 8chan—which has since been under scrutiny by the Philippines’ National Bureau of Investigation for allegedly enabling the distribution of child-abuse materials.

Why would a government informant working to expose a global pedophile ring choose to operate on a website that has itself been labeled as a pedophile ring?

It’s been enlightening to see godless 4chan evolve into godly, sanctimonious, delusional QAnon over time, and atheists should take it as a warning — you’re also susceptible to conspiracy-thinking.

I make a bold prediction: David Silverman is burrowing down into the muck, and when he finally openly adopts a religion, it will be Q.

An AiG apostate!

Well, this is fascinating: a former employee of Answers in Genesis comes out with her story.

What I found unsurprising is that AiG is an authoritarian tyranny that abuses its workers, with people monitoring social media of employees outside of work hours and threatening them with firing if they step out of line, on top of all the oppressive requirements to get a job there in the first place.

She came from a faith tradition that thought AiG was too liberal (I shudder to imagine it — some of her fellow employees even wore pants, which surely put them on a slippery slope to atheism). But she did not hurtle into godless evilutionism herself. What led to her breakaway from AiG was the exploitive work conditions and her growing awareness of the hypocrisy of her religion, and she now calls herself an agnostic who is on the fence about evolution vs. creation.

That’s all we can ask for, that people think honestly about their beliefs and avoid dogma.

Oh, man, Ken Ham is going to be so pissed off about this video.

reasonable and humanistic

I find it hard to imagine something I’d want to do less than listening to a conversation between David Smalley and David Silverman, two awful people associated with the dying atheist movement. So I didn’t. Chris Johnson did, though, and came away with some of the choice wisdom of Silverman, who is considering voting for Trump because because of his position on race.

I don’t get upset when felons get the shit kicked out of them by cops
George Floyd was human garbage. It’s not such a terrible thing that he’s dead
My point was that all people are not of equal worth, and I care a Lot less if a felon dies in the act of committing a crime than an innocent or child. That is reasonable and humanistic.
Denying this is not humanism because it protects felons.

I was paired with David Silverman in a session at Oxford of a humanist conference, and I witnessed the reaction of the audience to his tirade. Let me just say — David Silverman is no humanist, and doesn’t have the slightest understanding of the philosophy of humanism. To say that humanism puts the value of human life on a variable scale in which you get to judge whether someone is allowed to live or die is not humanism. Furthermore, describing the actions of leftists in protesting racial inequity and police criminality to be “race-baiting” to a degree that you’ll vote for Donald Jackoff Trump does not make you a humanist — it makes you a racist, plain and simple. Those are not synonyms.

I wasted a decade of my life on this terrible gang of atheist assholes, why do they keep oozing up out of the muck to remind me? I have this dread that I’m either going to get killed by COVID or by the Republican lackwits that surround me here in Red Minnesota soon enough, and that’s what I’ll be thinking of as I go down. It’s depressing to be mired in regret at being both an atheist and an American, neither of which I can change.

Atheists & Christians learn to tolerate the right kind of hate

This does seem to be the new axis upon which YouTube spins: Heartwarming: Christian and Atheist YouTubers Used to Hate Each Other But Now Agree the White Race is Under Attack.

Most people think Christians and Atheists get along like cats and dogs! But these two YouTubers are smashing stereotypes by showing you can get along with someone who has different views on religion, so long as you both think America is for Europeans only.

Oh, wait — there’s another axis, atheists joining hands with Christians to hate trans people. That one has led to many a schism recently.

But…it’s a satire site! Hasn’t anyone told them that satire is dead?

This is just the tackiest pseudoscientific ménage à trois ever, someone turn off the soap opera

Perhaps you’ve forgotten, but the Discovery Institute, that spider hole of bad science and pseudo-scientific religious apologetics, is actually just another conservative think-tank that milks rich capitalists for funding. The DI was founded by George Gilder and Bruce Chapman — Phil Johnson was just the charismatic Christian babbler who was the front — and from the beginning, it was really all about promoting conservative values, supply-side economics, and Republican politics. The creationism was the attention-getting garnish on the story, but just one side. They also have a wing that focuses on policy issues in the Pacific Northwest, the Discovery Institute Center on Wealth and Poverty. Aren’t you cheered to know that they’re going to take the same insight and detailed appreciation of knowledge that they brought to biology, and have been focusing it on economics?

Recently their representative made an appearance on Tucker Carlson (oh god the idiocy is converging) to opine on the protests in Seattle and Portland. OK, the topic is definitely within their geographic remit, but no, a far-right arch-capitalist money-grubbing institution crusted with a patina of religiosity is not the authority we need right now, even if Fox News thinks so.

But the real amusement here is to see who else is jumping in bed with them: Quillette!

Yep, the Institute of Advanced Craniometry, Phrenology, and Evolutionary Psychology, AKA Quillette, is absolutely jubilant about joining forces with the Discovery Institute’s “Kill the Poor” department to find common cause with Fox News and the poor little rich boy, Tucker Carlson. Really, I’m not at all surprised. In this hell year, it’s exactly the right little touch of flavor to enhance the whole experience.

Why do people believe the Earth is flat?

That’s a hard question, with a lot of different answers — I’m more accustomed to addressing a similar question, “why do people believe in creationism?”, and I agree with one of the assertions of this blogpost that says flat-earthers (and creationists) aren’t necessarily stupid. It’s true! The problem with these misbegotten questions is that smart people get derailed into defending them, at painful length. It’s tragic, because these are people who are deeply interested in what are scientific questions, and they’ve become committed to the wrong answers, because humans are better at deciding their presuppositions are correct, rather than in questioning whether they might be wrong. So I’ll accept half of this statement.

I, as many people in science communication, am fascinated with flat earthers. Here you have a group of people steadfastly rejecting evidence that’s right in their face. Today, I want to tell you why I nevertheless think flat earthers are neither stupid nor anti-scientific. Most of them, anyway. More importantly, I also want to explain why you should not be embarrassed if you can’t remember how we know that the earth is round.

The part I disagree with is the claim that they are not anti-scientific. Not stupid, sure, but the whole problem is that they are using their intelligence to promote anti-scientific perspectives. I think the author is trying too hard to be charitable and infer a shared respect for the scientific method. I also think she’s fitting the breadth of weird views into too narrow a range, even while acknowledging the diversity of flat earth beliefs.

But first I have to tell you what flat earthers actually believe and how they got there. The most popular flat earth model is that of a disk where the North pole is in the middle and the south pole is an ice wall on the edge of the disk. But not all flat earthers sign up to this. An alternative is the so-called bipolar model where both poles are on the disk, surrounded by water that’s held by a rim of something, maybe ice or rocks. And a minority of flat earthers believe that earth is really an infinite plane.

They mostly agree though that gravity does not exist, and that the observations we normally attribute to gravity come instead from the upward acceleration of the flat earth. As a consequence, the apparent gravitational acceleration is the same everywhere on earth. I explained last week that this is in conflict with evidence – we know that the gravitational acceleration is most definitely not the same everywhere on earth.

Here’s a problem: I’m not an expert on flat-earth belief, but I’ve seen the documentary Behind the Curve, and a scary number of YouTube videos, and I’ve never seen this claim that the flat earth is constantly accelerating upwards. Most of the stuff I’ve seen is people also freaking out over the idea that the earth is in motion, spinning and moving through the universe. It’s the notion of movement that is part of their objection.

They do often deny the reality of gravity (and also of space, in general), but the most common explanation is “density” — that denser objects sort of “sink” downwards, which kind of misses the question of what defines “down” in the first place. Their rationalizations are an incoherent mess, and there is a multitude of bad explanations. Should we give them credit for honestly trying to answer the question, but being hindered by a weak notion of evidence? Like creationists, flat-earthers do seem to only be aware of evidence from personal experience, and are unpersuaded by mathematical abstractions or theoretical considerations or observations that aren’t a product of simple eyewitness interactions.

Where I object is in the idea that their disagreement ought to be taken seriously philosophically, or that they are really trying to address a question scientifically…they just lack the tools to get the answer.

What’s wrong is that flat earthers’ claim they are leading a scientific argument. But there is no scientific argument about whether the earth is flat. This argument was settled long ago. Instead, flat earthers’ argument is about whether you should trust evidence that other people have collected before you. And it’s an important argument because this trust is essential for society and science to progress. The only alternative we have is that each and every one of us has to start over from scratch with birth. You see, flat earthers would eventually figure out the earth is round. But it might take them a thousand years until they’ve reinvented modern science.

This is why I think scientists should take flat earthers’ philosophical problem seriously. It’s a problem that any scientifically advanced society must address. It is not possible for each and every one of us to redo all experiments in the history of science. It therefore becomes increasingly important that scientists provide evidence for how science works, so that people who cannot follow the research itself can instead rely on evidence that the system produces correct and useful descriptions of nature.

Except there’s a fundamental misapprehension here that they want a correct and useful description of nature. They don’t. They have a conclusion already, and what they actually want is a rationalization that only looks scientific that delivers them to their desired answer. That is the opposite of scientific reasoning. They want validation, preferably in the form of buzzwords from physics or biology or whatever discipline they realize has more credibility than their uninformed speculations.

Ultimately, most of these people are trying to defend religious beliefs. Many of them are painfully overt about it — the Bible says we were created in 6 days, or that the Earth is flat and has corners — and openly declare that science is atheistic and not to be trusted. Scratch a creationist or a flat-earther, and you’ll typically find a religious zealot.

Again, that doesn’t imply that they’re stupid. The most effective supporters of their religious beliefs have been smart people who are very good at twisting logic to deliver their predetermined conclusion. Look at Philip Johnson, for instance: a clever, educated man who used lawyerly logic to support an unscientific claim of Intelligent Design creationism, and he was darned effective.

What I’m saying is don’t underestimate your opponents, don’t assume they’re ignorant yokels, but at the same time don’t give them credit for sharing your appreciation of rational, scientific thinking, because that’s not what they’re doing.

It’s bad, so bad

Tomorrow morning at 10am Central, I’ll attempt to do a Bad Science Sunday video live. I’ve got an awful creationist book — it’s by an engineer — and we’ll have some fun tearing into it.

I won’t try to do the whole thing, but will focus on his arguments about evolution. You’ll see how bad this book is, even though he tries his best to pretend he’s all about logic and reason and not at all about creationism, but he’s not very good at hiding it.

Done! Unfortunately, it took an hour and a half to just skim through a few fragmentary excerpts fro this very bad book. Creationists have a real advantage.

Scott Adams is making desperately bad arguments now

I haven’t been able to read Dilbert for decades now without imagining the lunatic writing it. When he became a Trumpkin, that was the last shovel of dirt out of the grave for his brain. Now he’s in the advanced stages of cerebral decay, because his case against Biden is absurd.

Adams argued that if there was any proof to be had of the Biden campaign’s ties to satanism, small signs of proof would be “hiding in plain sight.” He pointed to Biden’s slogan, “Build back better.”

“Build back better—BBB. If you were going to imagine ‘666’ and you wanted to show it to people and disguise it at the same time, can you think of any letter that the numeral six would fit inside completely? Only capital B,” Adams said.

Even Joe Biden’s name, Adams said, has a satanic coincidence.

“Did you know if you took the capital letter J—just imagine the capital letter J in your mind—now think of the next letter in ‘Joe.’ It’s an O. Now just move with your mind the O to the left until it’s on top of the J. It’s a backward six,” Adams said. “Now suppose the next letter is the lowercase E. What does a lowercase E look like if you turn it upside down? Well, it looks like a six.”

He continued, “So you’ve got the J and O together. If you combine them it looks like a backward six. You’ve got this lowercase E that looks like an upside-down six, but that’s just two sixes. Six​, six wouldn’t mean anything, right? But the next letter is capital B for Biden, and capital B is where you hide your six. So even J-O-E-B is 666.”

He surmised that the letters I, D, E, and N left in Biden’s last name is short for “identity.”

“666 identity. That’s what Joe Biden’s name actually is,” Adams said.

He’s a total clownshow. Why do papers still publish his crappy cartoon? (Probably because once your cartoon is syndicated, it’s syndicated forever, and it doesn’t matter how unfunny and tiresome it becomes.)