As I noted in my last post, the study I’ll be discussing was grossly misreported, starting with its press release. Since the study itself appears to be behind a pay wall for most people, I’ll describe as much detail as I can in a blog post as I discuss the study’s validity and findings of the study, published in the Journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science and titled “My Brother’s Keeper? Compassion Predicts Generosity More Among Less Religious Individuals”.

But for those who are not at all interested in the research methods or a breakdown of why I rate the quality of the study the way I do, I will give you the the bottom line so you can skip the rest or only read the sections that interest you (I’ve used headings to make it easier).

Summary

I think that the findings will hold up to replication, despite some issues I have with the way they did a few things. Overall, the research quality is quite high.

The groups they compared did not include atheists, agnostics, believers, non-believers, highly religious, or any other label that you can throw at it. In the studies they used raw religiosity scores and made some comparisons of “higher” and “lower” using values from the distribution. In a sense, the compared those who scored in the lower half of the sample to those who scored in the upper half.

They found:

• Differences in prosocial behavior cannot be dismissed as due to political affiliation, socio-economic status, or other factors often held up as responsible.
• Religiosity is correlated with trait compassion; the more religious, the more compassionate.
• Trait compassion is related to prosocial behavior in general. This relationship is stronger in the less religious than in the more religious. This does not mean that the less religious are more compassionate (see number 1) or that the less religious are more prosocial. It just means that compassion is a bigger factor in prosocial behavior in the less religious.
• The findings of the first study can be interpreted one way that isn’t discussed in the paper: when the relationship between compassion and religiosity is accounted for, the more religious are not more prosocial than the less religious.
• The findings in the second study, which involved inducing feelings of compassion, were similar for generosity, except that the more religious were more prosocial even after accounting for compassion.
• The findings of the second study also included a different pattern when the prosocial behavior was giving to charity. Compassion induced more giving, but the effect was weak and did not differ much across religiosity. Religiosity had a significant affect on charity. This can be explained by the guidelines provided by many churches for how much of one’s salary one should give.
• In the third study, in which state compassion (how compassionate the individual felt at that time) was measured and the prosocial behavior measure involved real-world cash, religiosity was not related to either compassion or prosocial behavior.
• In the third study, state compassion was positively correlated with prosocial behavior, but the effect was greater in the less religious than in the more religious.

What the findings as a whole say to me, and what I believe the press report tried, but failed, to express, at least with convincing support: We do not need religion to be prosocial. We need compassion.

This is great news for secularists.

However, it doesn’t say anything negative about religion or the religious, nor does it provide anything that should make atheists feel superior. It just shows that one can be good without God; that motivations can come from other sources.

Now on to the details…

NOTE: to keep this as short as possible, I’ve included a lot of links to terms and demonstrations. Where I describe problems in more detail I still water-down quite a bit. I will do my best to make it understandable without rambling on and on, but keep in mind that it takes many years to learn enough about research design and statistics to understand why some of these are problematic. Furthermore, not all researchers will agree on the consequences of some of these problems. I am still learning this stuff myself (probably always will be learning).

The Study (description)

The article reports three studies, each related to the relationship between compassion and prosocial behavior in less-religious individuals. I have created graphs using the information in the paper, but in some cases I did not have exact numbers, so while the relationships are visually accurate, there are only values where I could use exact numbers.

Theoretical Foundation

The introduction discusses research which documents that religiosity is associated with prosocial behavior. Specifically, religious people give more and volunteer more than nonreligious people, over and above what they give to and do for religious organizations. The researchers note that the nonreligious do give; when we compare groups, we do so using averages. However, it may be that the motivations for prosocial behavior vary in a way that interacts with religiosity. In other words, the more religious among us may be motivated to prosocial behavior by one set of factors and the less motivated by another.

The researchers hypothesized that compassion is a more influential factor in prosocial behavior for the less religious than for the more religious among us.

Study 1

The first study examined the relationships among religiosity and traits of compassion and prosocial tendencies. What this basically means is that situational factors were not involved; traits are a matter of personality or attitude. For example, “trait anxiety” refers to how anxious a person is in general, while “state anxiety” refers to how anxious that same individual feels in a given situation.

This study involved analyzing data from a 2004 “survey”. I put that term in quotes because it usually refers to a set of questions that do not measure more than what is apparent at face value. Established measures of latent variables (variables which cannot be measured directly such as feelings and attitudes) are usually called an “inventory” or “scale” and we refer to them loosely as “measures”. In this case, the survey involved such measures and I want to make that clear.

The sample was comprised of 1337 participants and covariates (variables other than those of interest which could explain differences among the groups) of gender, political orientation, and education were included in the analysis. The variables of interest were religiosity, compassion, and prosocial behavior. Religious identity (identification with a specific religion or no religion) was also considered.

Results

Correlations

• Covariates had little impact on the results.
• Trait compassion was positively correlated with religiosity* and prosocial behavior. On average, the more compassionate the individual, the more religious they were and the more the more prosocial they were.
• The relationship between religiosity and prosocial behavior was marginally significant (statistically).

Hypothesis Test (See Figure 1)

Figure 1: Study 1 results. "Higher" and "lower" are defined here as 1 SD from the mean.

• A regression analysis revealed an interaction of religiosity and compassion on prosocial behavior. What this means: The effect of compassion on prosocial behavior differed among levels of religiosity.
• More specifically, the level of trait compassion affected prosocial behavior less as religiosity increased.
• There was also a main effect of compassion, but that was apparent in the correlational analysis.
• There was no main effect of religiosity on prosocial behavior. This is interesting, because they found a marginally significant correlation, but it does not mean the there are no difference in prosocial behavior. I would interpret these findings, when put together, as suggestive of little or no difference between the more religious and the less religious in prosocial behavior over and above the differences accounted for by compassion.

The authors discuss the findings a little differently, though, focusing on the differences in the way that compassion affected prosocial behavior (the interaction in the first hypothesis test result) and ignoring the way that the effect of religiosity disappeared when compassion was entered into the equation. It seems more interesting to me to treat compassion as the moderator. It also makes more sense in the end.

Study 2

This study was experimental in that the researchers manipulated state compassion. In other words, they induced feelings of compassion in half of the participants and compared the amount of prosocial behavior those participants engaged in to the amount of such behavior in a control condition.

The sample included 101 participants and the study was conducted online, so the age range was exceptional (from 18 to 68 years). Participants were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions and each watched a short video under the guise that there would be a test of memory afterward.  The videos were established manipulations of feelings of compassion and neutral emotion (i.e., other researchers tested their effectiveness). Following the video, participants completed two tasks which are well-established measures of prosocial behavior commonly used in such research.

Results

• Again, covariates had little impact on the results.

Hypothesis Tests (See Figure 2)

Figure 3: Results of Study 3. Values are relative.

There were two tests since the participants completed to different prosocial tasks, one involving generosity and the other involving charity.

For the generosity task:

• This time there were a main effects of both religiosity and compassion on prosocial behavior. The more religious, the more prosocial. Those who watched the compassion-inducing video were the more prosocial on average than those who watched the neutral video.
• The interaction appeared again in the manner as in Study 1.

For the charity task:

• There were main effects of both religiosity and compassion on prosocial behavior.
• There was no interaction.

This is where they screw up, in my opinion.

The pattern of the moderation was in the predicted direction but failed to reach statistical significance.

This is not an acceptable statement unless the findings are marginal. This was not. The p-value was .408. This is not even close to meaningful. Still, they went ahead with the analysis of the interaction and reported an effect of compassion on charity for the less religious participants and no effect for the more religious.  The problem is that post-hoc analysis like this assumes that a significant interaction was observed. Their tests inflated alpha (the probability of a Type I Error) and can only mislead. They stated that they had found “partial support” for their hypothesis, but they did not in this case.

The relationships in the generosity task are very clear when we look at a Figure 2. The interaction is the interesting finding. Compassion had little effect on the more religious, but a very large effect on the less religious, who gave practically nothing when compassion was not induced. There is no analysis to tell us if the less religious surpassed the religious by a statistically significant amount when compassion was induced, but they were clearly out done by the more religious when not made to feel compassion.

The charity task showed no such interaction and the authors did not include a graph of this effect that I could recreate, nor did they provide the information to make one.

Study 3

For this study, the sample of 120 completed a state compassion inventory (a measure of their feelings of general compassion at the moment) and a series of “economic tasks designed to measure their generosity, trust, trustworthiness, and motivation to reward others’ generosity.” What differed in this study, however, was that the ‘points’ they earned in these tasks could be exchanged for cash at the end of the study. Participants did not know how much cash, but they knew that the more points they earned, the more cash they would receive.

Results

Hypothesis Tests (See Figure 3)

The findings of this study were very different from the other two.

• State compassion was not related to religiosity.
• Religiosity was not related to prosocial behavior.
• There was an interaction of religiosity and compassion on prosocial behavior. The amount of compassion felt had more of an effect on the behavior the less religious than it did on the more religious.

The graph of these findings, a reproduction of their graph since they did not provide information to create one that would make more sense (to me anyway), is a bit misleading. The values are z-scores, so they are relative to one another and not actual values. What is interesting, though is how little the prosocial score varied in the more religious group and how that line barely dips below the mean value (represented by 0).

There is also a problem with the press release in that it makes the claim that the high state compassion/less religious group out-performed the others. There is no statistical analysis comparing the groups in that way, so this is a misstatement. We do not know if less religious individuals are more generous than more religious when motivated to act prosocially. We just know that they are more generous when motivated by compassion than when compassion is low.

The Study Overall

As I noted, my opinion of the studies as a whole is relatively high, but I do have some major criticisms. Some of the language makes me cringe (e.g., results are the product of statistical tests, so “We tested our results”…), but I have seen more and more of this as scientific reports in general have grown sloppier.  Study design and method is much more important, as is the quality of the reporting beyond language.

The authors also throw around the term “robust”, claiming in the first study that the relationship between compassion and prosocial behavior is “particularly robust” for less religious individuals. That term refers to findings which are “sturdy” and will stand up when some supports are removed – effects which appear to hold up in different situations. Since this was one analysis of one data set, that term just doesn’t work. It does not fit in any of their uses of it.

In fact, they err in Study 2 by saying that the effect was “attenuated” for the more religious. That term is relative; attenuated compared to what? The effect was not “robust” in one condition and “attenuated” in another; they can only be compared to each other. The effect was greater in the less religious than the more religious.

Missing Information

There are a number of bits of information which are considered to be, at minimum, required for a good research report. A general rule of thumb for methods and results sections is to include enough (without being redundant) information to allow other researchers to replicate (in a strict sense) the study and to confirm that the statistical findings are properly interpreted.

I am not sure that this article meets that criterion. The methods are pretty well fleshed out and the paper is full of statistics, but some descriptive statistics are missing that I would have liked to have seen (e.g., means reported overall for measures, but not by group) and there was not enough of the right information to recreate them.

Grouping the Data and Errors of Generalization

One overall criticism which warrants discussion is in the grouping of data. There are some problems with this and they are related. The sensitivity of the religiosity measure is one problem that, by itself, is not a big target for criticism. Combined with the second problem of grouping participants, though, it becomes more serious.

The practice of comparing groups of people based on a variable which is distributed on a spectrum is a common one. The question the researcher wants to answer is important in deciding whether to group and, in this case, I do not disagree with that choice, but I question how they grouped and how it was communicated. If the data are clustered (the distribution is multi-modal), grouping is simplified, but if the data are distributed more loosely, it can be tricky and dangerous.

First, the researcher loses information, therefore they lose sensitivity and usually lose power. The sensitivity problem is relevant in the first study, but mostly because it makes the findings difficult to interpret.

Second, if the way that the grouping is communicated is not consistent and clear, it is likely to be misinterpreted, compounding any existing problems with the method. I discussed this problem in my last post. Most of the reports referred to the groups compared as “highly religious” verses “atheists and agnostics” or something like that. However, where are all of the people in the middle (i.e., most likely the bulk of the sample)?  Within each group there was variation in religiosity and comparisons are made using averages. Generalizing only works when the samples are representative of the population of interest and this applies in either direction of the generalization (i.e., specific to mixed or mixed to specific).

Third, researchers must decide where to draw the lines between high and low (and anything in between). Since the majority of variables in psychology are normal distributed (therefore symmetrical), the lines are usually drawn using rankings of sample values and the most common way to split a sample in half is to put all values above the median into “higher” and those below into “lower” (called a “median split”). However, ease is not a good reason to use this technique.   Here is an interesting demonstration of the dangers of dichotomizing normally-distributed variables.

But… religiosity is not usually distributed normally; it’s usually skewed. Skew means that it’s not symmetrical, so a median-split would make even less sense.

In this case, it seems that the authors tried to have the best of both worlds by treating religiosity as a continuous variable, but doing post-hoc analysis on it, discussing it, and graphing it as if it were dichotomous, choosing values which were one standard deviation from the mean in both directions as the central tendencies of each group. The biggest problem with this is the assumption of normality. If the variable is not normally-distributed (and I suspect that it is not), this grouping is a bit tough to swallow.

When this problem is mixed with a limited range as it is in the first study (the religiosity scale only had four points), it’s a problem. The four possible values were 1 = no religion, 2 = not very strong (religious identity), 3 = somewhat strong, and 4 = strong. Since the mean was 2.99, the bulk of the sample were fairly religious. one standard deviation (1.03) below the mean is not exactly in non-believerland and one above is off the scale (literally). It is just very difficult to see where “higher” leaves off and “lower” takes over.

Although the range is adequate in the other two studies, the problem of discussing groups which do not actually exist and have fuzzy definitions remains. In my opinion that is one of the reasons it was so misreported.

But, overall, the research is of a relatively high quality and interesting. I would like to see more variation in the prosocial tasks, given that the outcome of the charity task was so different from the tasks of generosity.

It seems that the less religious are at least as generous as the more religious, but their reasons for acting prosocially differ. I would like to see the day when, as a group, we are generous and prosocial consistently, without the need to be provoked and without needing to feel an emotional connection to the receiver.

Saslow, L., Willer, R., Feinberg, M., Piff, P., Clark, K., Keltner, D., & Saturn, S. (2012). My Brother’s Keeper? Compassion Predicts Generosity More Among Less Religious Individuals Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550612444137

Related posts:

1. Science and Spin Are Very Bad Bedfellows
2. There is No Debate Over Evolution
3. Is that a fallacy in your pocket or can you cite some sources? A response to Women and Feminism at TAM8

A press release by UC Berkeley about a study that was recently published on the relationships among religiosity, compassion, and prosocial behavior has been making the rounds over the last couple of days, waved by proud atheists as evidence of superiority and bashed by the more skeptical as bad science (even though most haven’t appeared to have read the study). The latter has been exacerbated by the fact that the majority of reports include very big mistakes.

I’m going to analyze the study, but I will post that separately since it is likely to be long and I also want to discuss the incredible mess of BS this has become. In that post I will also discuss the reasons some of the errors that seem minor here are actually quite serious.

I blame the press release. Unfortunately, as the culture of higher education becomes more consumer-oriented, strapped-for-cash universities must market themselves strategically, and scientists are forced to compete for funding, the integrity of science is diminished. I don’t know if the study’s authors were involved, but my guess is that the press release’s author is mostly responsible for spinning the findings, omitting important parts of the findings, and cherry-picking statements by the scientists to make it appear that their speculative explanations for those findings are solid conclusions. I think that spin, along with the fact that the findings involve an interaction (a notoriously difficult concept to grasp due to its non-linear nature), confused science writers, many of whom are not in the practice of reading studies and many of whom added their own spin to the mix.

The study, published in the Journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science, is titled “My Brother’s Keeper? Compassion Predicts Generosity More Among Less Religious Individuals”.  The first error of the press release was made in its title: “Highly religious people are less motivated by compassion than are non-believers” by incorrectly describing the subjects of the study. It also errs in a few minor ways (e.g., describing the study as “three experiments” when one only one was experimental, one was analysis of existing data, and one was quasi experimental), but the biggest problems are practically criminal in the science world. The author correctly (with the exception of the description of the subjects) reported that the relationship between compassion and prosocial behavior was stronger among less religious participants than more religious participants, but omitted the findings which clearly showed that the more religious participants were, in general, more compassionate and generous overall.

When sloppy reporting took over, the result was an utter mess.

On the one hand, the authors claim in their introduction to be interested in what motivates less religious people to act prosocially, so perhaps the spin was the plan all along. However, if they were not interested in religiosity as a variable – if they were not interested in comparing the more religious to the less religious, then they should not have limited their study to the population of interest.

Something I found interesting is that the third paragraph of the press release makes a statement which should have sent red flags up because there was no follow-up that made sense. It started with:

The results challenge a widespread assumption that acts of generosity and charity are largely driven by feelings of empathy and compassion, researchers said.

And yet the rest of the piece focused on the fact that empathy and compassion DID drive generosity and charity in less religious participants, even if it repeatedly incorrectly referred to those participants as “non-believers”. If the author had included the findings that more religious participants were more generous, this would have made sense.

The author errs again with this circular definition of “compassion”, conflating the dictionary definitions of “compassion” and “prosocial behavior” with an effect:

Compassion is defined in the study as an emotion felt when people see the suffering of others which then motivates them to help, often at a personal risk or cost.

Compassion cannot be defined in a study as an emotion felt by someone. That’s a variable we can’t measure directly. In a study, we use operational definitions. In this case, compassion was defined differently in each of the three studies within the article.

The author continues the spin with statements such as (bold mine):

When they looked into how much compassion motivated participants to be charitable in such ways as giving money or food to a homeless person, non-believers and those who rated low in religiosity came out ahead: “These findings indicate that although compassion is associated with pro-sociality among both less religious and more religious individuals, this relationship is particularly robust for less religious individuals,” the study found.

What the bold suggests is that participants who fell into the “low religiosity” category were more prosocial and/or more compassionate. That’s not what the finding means. What was greater was simply the relationship between compassion and prosocial behavior. Because the “high religiosity” participants were more compassionate, they were also more prosocial overall (marginal significance – see discussion below).

Finally, this statement is grossly misleading:

Those who scored low on the religiosity scale, and high on momentary compassion, were more inclined to share their winnings with strangers than other participants in the study.

What participants do in a study is really not interesting. What their behavior tells us about how people behave in the world is. Because there was no statistical analysis comparing the “low-religiosity/high-momentary compassion” group to the other groups, this finding does not allow us to infer anything about the population of interest. You and I could complete a game of Scrabble with a final score of 102 to 103 (respectively), but I would not brag to my friends that I am the better Scrabble player.

Most reports of the study either posted the press release as-is or quoted large chunks of it. Headlines ranged from the simple and correct, if misleading, “Compassion may motivate faithful less” to the still incorrect, but closer “Confirmed: Atheists more motivated by compassion in charitable giving than believers are” to the blatantly incorrect statement suggested by, “Are Religious People Less Compassionate?”

Almost none of the reports describe the samples correctly. The samples were broken into two groups based on measured religiosity, a common practice in social psychology. Thus, there was a range of values and those who scored in the top half were considered “more religious” and the bottom half ”less religious”. The “less religious” group cannot be described as “athiests”, ”agnostics”, ”non-believers”, or even “people low in religiosity”. The “more religious” group cannot be described as “highly religious”, either.

One site that I usually find more accurate contained a much more serious error than an incorrect sample description. It reported a finding not found in the press release that is actually the opposite of what was reported in the study:

Two other experiments also confirmed that more religious participants seemed to be less generous.

They should have stuck to quotes of the press release.

The worst by far, though was on a site called “PsychCentral“. The first paragraph reads:

A provocative new study from the University of California, Berkeley suggests highly religious individuals are less likely to help a stranger than less religious people.

Um. No. That’s not what the study suggests. At all.

and this a few paragraphs down:

Experts say the results challenge a widespread assumption that acts of generosity and charity are largely driven by feelings of empathy and compassion.

Why they added “experts say” to this is a mystery because it’s basically a lie, but this statement is particularly baffling when you consider that the progression of statements: 1) nonreligious are more generous 2) nonreligious are more motivated by compassion to be generous 3) results challenge the assumption that generosity is driven by compassion. On what planet does that make sense?

I’d lament that people don’t actually read, but the worst part is that someone actually wrote this. Sure, it’s mostly quotes and they made stuff up, but they changed some words and moved things around, so they had to pay attention to something.

A friend shared one decent report; it did not seem that the author read the journal article, but at least he read one report (on livescience.com) that is almost a duplication of the press release and put some thought into it. He noted that the findings reported an interaction – that generosity was more related to compassion among the less religious than it was among the more religious – and questioned who was more generous overall. If the press released had not omitted those findings, he would have had an answer, or at least a theoretically-likely hypothesis. Still, he did a little bit of research on his own and noted some well-known findings that the religious tend to give more to secular charities than atheists.

Finally, the press release included a few statements by the authors which were highly speculative. It is standard for authors to discuss possible explanations for their findings, but they are often presented to the public as conclusions the authors reached. In this case as in many others, reports of the study often imply that these things are findings when the study did not examine them at all. For example, the last paragraph of the press release is:

“Overall, this research suggests that although less religious people tend to be less trusted in the U.S., when feeling compassionate, they may actually be more inclined to help their fellow citizens than more religious people,” Willer said.

The rawstory.com report ended the same way, except they changed the last word to “concluded”. This statement serves as a hypothesis for another study, but it is not a finding of the study and cannot provide a conclusion.

I have heard a lot of explanations of what motivates more religious people, but most have been based on personal beliefs or experiences – duty to God, moral obligation, sense of community, etc.  This question may have been answered and looking to other studies might yield something, but this study does not address it – it did not set out to address that question.

A full analysis of the journal article will follow in a separate post later today.

UPDATE: Analysis can be found here.
ANOTHER UPDATE: The award for the most botched report now goes to MSN for this doosey.

Related posts:

1. Are Atheists More Compassionate or Prosocial Than Highly Religious People?

First, I want to address the tired complaint that traditional skeptics exclude “the god question”.

Yup, we do. But before you roll out the silly paragraphs in which you substitute “God” and “religion” with “ghosts” and “the paranormal”, understand this: we also don’t address “the ghost question”.

Or “the psychic question” or “the Bigfoot question” or “the angel question”.

Statements such as “There are no ghosts” with claims that this is more than a personal conclusion are not good scientific skepticism*. Neither is “All psychics are fakes”. Neither is “there is no God”.

I can’t tell you if ghosts exist. I can tell you that I don’t believe in ghosts. I can explain why I don’t believe in them. I can give you alternative explanations for the noises coming from your attic. I can discuss reasons that you might ‘feel’ that ghosts exist. But I cannot prove to you that there are no such thing as ghosts.

I can devise an experiment to show that your dog is not psychic, but I can’t prove that psychic energy doesn’t exist.

I can explain the mechanics of sleep paralysis and the nature of memory, but I can’t say for certain that aliens did not abduct you if you remove the testability of your claim by adding things like “they reset the clocks”.

I cannot prove that there is no dragon in your garage if it does not interact with the world in measurable ways. I can only say, “I am not convinced.”

What I personally believe about these things is irrelevant. It is poor skepticism, poor science, and poor reasoning to include my beliefs in a discussion of your claims. (NOTE: “Belief” is defined in my posts as “that which one holds to be true”.)

I will not speak for everyone who has “harped” about this issue, but I can tell you that this has always been my bottom line in these arguments, so those who would take it out of context and build straw men like “she says that religion is off-limits”, don’t bother.

What I really want to talk about is about here is why this isn’t good skepticism. I’d also like to refute the tired argument that only atheists are good skeptics.

Since there are several versions of this argument and I acknowledge that they carry different meanings, I am also arguing against the following claims:

• Only atheists are rational.
• Theists/Deists may be good skeptics when it comes to other areas, but they are not skeptical about religion.
• Agnostics and theists/deists do not ‘go far enough’.
• There are no reasons to believe in/is no evidence for the supernatural.

The problem with these claims is that they are based almost entirely on a conclusion – the conclusion that there is no god (atheism). It is human nature to judge the validity of arguments by the believability of the conclusion. For example, consider the following syllogisms and decide whether each is valid or invalid:

Some students are tired.
Some tired people are irritable.
Therefore, some students are irritable.

All dogs have four legs.
Daisy is a dog.
Therefore, Daisy has four legs.

If I study, I will get a good grade on the exam.
I got a good grade on the exam.
Therefore, I studied.

If you are like most of my students, you identified the first and third as valid, but the second as invalid. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. An argument is valid if and only if the conclusion logically follows from the premises. Validity is not truth. This is important, because none of us actually knows with 100% certainty what is and is not true.

When we assume that we know what is true, we fail to evaluate arguments on their own merits. If it we were wrong, we perpetuate and strengthen our misguided beliefs instead of discovering or errors.

To know how strong a conclusion is, we must examine two things: 1) the validity of the argument that produced it and 2) the strength of the premises.

The validity of the argument lies only in its logical progression, so we can evaluate this without going beyond what is presented. However, the strength of the premises is another matter. To evaluate those, we must consider their sources. In science, some are conclusions of other arguments (often previous research) and we must evaluate that research to know how strong the premise is. Others are a matter of observation, which is subjected to interpretation and induction. For example, in the famous syllogism about Socrates mortality, the strength of that conclusion relies on the assumption that the premise “All men are mortal” is accurate. Since not all men have died, we don’t actually know with 100% certainty that all men are mortal. We accept it based on a large number of observations and converging evidence, but certainty is not possible.

In my examples, the second syllogism is logically sound, but most people reject it because they “know” that not all dogs have four legs. Perhaps you’ve seen or heard of a three-legged dog (I met one once named “Tripod”) or you have knowledge of how it could occur. This does not make the argument invalid, but it does address #2, making the conclusion unsupported. We cannot determine if it is true from this argument.

The first and third arguments are invalid because the logic is unsound. We may “know” that the conclusions are true, but we can’t know that based on these arguments, so if we want to convince others we need to come up with better evidence/arguments.

The tendency to judge conclusions based on current beliefs is a product of how our brains evolved and developed – a side-effect of what makes us successful organisms. It is human nature, it is wrong and must be overcome if one is to be consistently rational (This, by the way, is a bit of a pipe dream, but I think it’s a good goal).

This problem pops up in a host of cognitive tasks and is a manifestation of the most influential of human frailties: the confirmation bias. This makes it extremely resistant to correction, especially in real-world contexts. In my experience, the concept of “validity” is difficult for many people to grasp because of this problem.

So, going back a few paragraphs, note that I wrote, “The problem with these claims is that they are based almost entirely on a conclusion – the conclusion that there is no god (atheism).”

Reason is about the validity of arguments, so judging a conclusion as valid or invalid without examining the argument is itself an irrational act. Without the argument, your only yardstick is your own belief about the truth of that conclusion. Although we have reasons for our beliefs, so do the people whose beliefs we’re evaluating. Everyone thinks that their beliefs are well-reasoned and accurate. That’s why they believe them!

If you find their conclusion unbelievable, then by all means, be skeptical, but to call it “irrational” without evaluating the argument is to say that you are 100% certain that there is no rational argument. That is the very definition of arrogance and it is not scientific.

Science does not tell us what is (true). Science tells us what is likely (to be true) and, in most cases, how likely. It does so by making arguments. Science is shared knowledge, not because it tells us facts, but because we can discuss the evidence and logic processes behind why we should be reasonably certain of many things. Although science is both a process and a set of knowledge (I’ll call them ‘facts’), the facts in that set are the products of the process. This may include negatives such as “my dog is not psychic” and “vaccines do not cause autism”, but testing is required to make such conclusions scientific.

Science is not about those facts, though. It’s about the process of discovery. When scientists make arguments (by publishing papers), they cite previous literature by noting the findings and, in some cases, describing how those findings were produced. They do not list facts; they discuss evidence.

Scientists doesn’t judge conclusions. Scientists judge arguments. Scientists look at the whole argument – the assumptions, evidence, and methodology that make up the premises as well as the logic that holds them together – and judge if the conclusions logically follow from those premises.

Likewise, scientific skepticism is about testing claims, examining evidence, and providing natural explanations for the evidence. If there is no evidence to examine, there is nothing to discuss.

Because science ignores untestable claims and because some scientists (e.g., Carl Sagan) have discussed the reasonability of belief without evidence, many people oversimplify the issue (as Melody did in this Twitter conversation) by making the statement that belief in God is within the scope of scientific skepticism because “You don’t believe something without scientific evidence”.

This is misguided for several reasons, but the two main reasons are:

1. The assumption that most or all religious belief is completely blind faith is simply wrong. “Evidence”, scientific or otherwise, comes in all manner of forms. In a 1998 study conducted by the Skeptic Society, the most popular answers among believers for why they believe in God involved empirical evidence and/or reasoning (you can find this in Michael Shermer’s How We Believe). These people certainly think that they have good reasons to believe. How people interpret evidence varies a great deal. Most real-world questions are very complex and what seems an obvious conclusion to one person may seem ridiculous to another. Skepticism is about how we interpret evidence, how we reason, and how we consider alternative explanations, not about the conclusions we eventually draw.A good example of interpreting evidence is the study that prompted me to send a tweet to Melody in the first place. She’d first shared a link, then tweeted it again, this time directly to Daniel Loxton, editor of Junior Skeptic, with the comment “More good news about atheists that you might find hard to believe:” Only Melody knows what she meant by the comment, but when I read the study I was disappointed to find that it is not “good news about atheists” at all. I will include details in a post to follow shortly, but the gist is that article’s spin is a very loose interpretation of the findings that fails to mention some sobering facts. Its overgeneralizations and assumptions are criminal. For example, the study reported doesn’t involve atheists. Researchers measured religiosity, then divided participants in half (“more religious” and “less religious”), a common practice in social psychology. Sure, there were atheists among the “less religious”, but we don’t draw conclusions about a part of a sample. Furthermore, taking the three studies as a whole, the ‘more religious’ were more compassionate and more prosocial than the ‘less religious’ half. In essence, anyone wanting to spin the findings another way could easily do so by noting that the less religious half onlyacted prosocially when moved to do so by compassion, whereas the more religious were consistently prosocial. This is not a finding that atheists are better people and, quite frankly, I am sick of people trying to prove such nonsense. Promoting the fact that one can be good without God does not require atheists to be morally superior and, as this study shows, it is a good thing that it doesn’t.Again, we all think that our beliefs are well-reasoned, but what’s more interesting is that people tend to assume that those who disagree do so because either they “need to” (In that same Skeptic Society survey, the most popular reasons believers gave for other people’s beliefs in God involved the stereotype of comfort and meaning to life.) or they are not as rational.
2. Even if there was literally zero evidence, the “null hypothesis” argument is an oversimplification of a concept borrowed from statistical rules and applied to the assumption that science makes that every hypothesis is testable. Science makes this assumption, but it also acknowledges that the assumption could be wrong by excluding the possibility of 100% certainty and by limiting its scope to testable hypotheses. You cannot invoke science as an answer to claims it cannot test, nor can you claim that someone’s conclusion is wrong because science cannot test it; that’s circular reasoning unless you’re saying that science is the only way to know something. By that logic, people cannot be scientific thinkers and also have morals**. Science (shared knowledge) may ignore the supernatural, but people (personal knowledge) do not and cannot use scientific processes to examine every question and still manage to function in the world, so if you want to attack person knowledge as wrong, you’ll have to do better than “it’s not scientific”.

So, what about the other versions of this claim?

Are atheists more rational than believers? Probably on average, considering the other variables which are correlated with atheism. However, given how poorly all human beings are at reasoning, that isn’t saying much.

Is atheism rational? I can’t answer that. Atheism is a conclusion. Whether it’s a rational conclusion depends on why the individual drew that conclusion.

Is religion rational? Again, I can’t answer that and neither can you. It’s a conclusion. Whether it’s a rational conclusion depends on the reasoning of the individual and the evidence they considered.

From what I know about how human beings process information, I can see a great many valid arguments for the existence of God that would be perfectly rational. They’d have to have some extraordinarily well-supported premises in order to convince me, but lacking support for those premises won’t make them irrational. Reasoning well does not require convincing others.

As I’ve said twice now, everyone thinks that their conclusions are the ‘right’ conclusions. So what makes your conclusion (that there is no God) better than someone else’s?

If your answer is “mine is well-reasoned”, that’s not a comparison. See two sentences back.

To know that you are “right” and they are “wrong”, you actually have to examine their argument/evidence. If you haven’t examined their argument, then who are you to tell someone that they are irrational? Who are you to tell them that they have no evidence when you haven’t even bothered to ask them what their evidence is? This is exactly what you’re doing when you claim that any belief in a god is “irrational” or make a blanket statement about the intelligence or cognitive abilities of those with religious beliefs. It’s elitist, arrogant, bigoted wishful thinking.

You cannot judge an argument by its conclusion, no matter how unbelievable the conclusion seems to you.

Finally, the following is a list of things that I have NOT said. In fact, I do not believe that any of the people accused most of making these statements actually has:

• “Religion is off-limits in skepticism.” There are plenty of testable claims related to religion, but test the claims and discuss the evidence rather than attacking belief in them.
• “Stop talking about ‘the god question’.”I have no problems with debates about the existence of God. What I have a problem with is criticizing conclusions as rational or irrational without examining the argument that produced them and calling such criticisms “skepticism”.
• “Stop promoting secularism.” I am a strong advocate of secularism, but promoting atheism is, in my opinion, no different from promoting any other set of conclusions. Freedom from religion requires freedom of religion. Removing religion from government does not mean taking it away from its citizens.
• “Atheism is not the only valid conclusion of properly-applied skepticism.” I did not say that it was, either. Hopefully my discussion explains why that question is not relevant.

I had planned to ignore Melody’s accusations that my criticisms are ‘mean-spirited’, but I cannot do that, either. It certainly is mean-spirited to attack people, but that is not what I have done. You won’t find a personal comment about Melody here. If it is mean-spirited to address (or even attack) what people say and do, especially when one finds what they promote to be harmful, then our whole business is ‘mean-spirited’.

*Given that all of the major organizations in skepticism have adopted scientific skepticism, this is what I’m discussing. If you would like to argue that activism should go beyond scientific skepticism, please do so elsewhere. For that matter, this post is not even about limiting scope for practical and strategic purposes, which is an entirely different cup of tea.

**Yes, I am aware that Sam Harris claims that science can tell us what is moral, but so far his arguments fall far short.

NOTE TO WOULD-BE COMMENTERS: Please do not comment if you have not actually read (not skimmed, READ) the post. Also, before you write a comment about how Dawkins and others (i.e., persons whose credentials you think I should not question) argue that science refutes the existence of God or should include “the god question”, I recommend a thorough review those arguments (that means more than reading a couple of blog posts by bystanders or comment threads). Their treatment of the subject is much more considered than the oversimplification I’m addressing here and their arguments are not as shallow. Finally, if your plan is to quote from Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World, you might want to read the whole book first.

No related posts.

Arguments over scope and the conflation of atheism and skepticism have reached a fever pitch, as have arguments over tone. I will talk about some of this, but I will not attempt to explain all of the issues in any detail because everything that needs to be said has been said here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here… Well, you get the picture. In fact, if you want to argue the definition of skepticism or Skepticism* in the comments of this post, don’t bother. Instead, read what I wrote about it last year, which I would simply repeat in answer…

…I suggest is this: Skepticism*, as a movement, is not hindered so much by the conflation of atheism and skepticism, the ridicule of believers, or attempts to promote values-based ideology as it is hindered by the blatant ignorance, arrogance, and irrationality displayed when those acts are committed.

In a field dedicated to reducing ignorance and irrationality, a field in which arrogance is toxic, I find this kind of behavior offensive. It is time that we reclaim Skepticism and restore its credibility and integrity.

If one of the major goals of Skepticism is to educate, shouldn’t we all understand the material?

I am angry. I am angry and a little fearful for our future. We live in dangerous times and the work of Skepticism is serious. The work is hard. It requires patience, discipline, empathy, and knowledge.

I am angry because an influx of people who have stumbled upon or been recruited to the work of Skepticism are making it much more difficult. We’re moving backwards. This is happening, in part, because some of these rookies insist that their understanding of that work is as good or better than the understanding of people who have studied and worked in the field for years. Many have little or no education in the basics of science or the scientific process. Some claim to follow the teachings of people whose works they have never read. Some believe that the ‘old guard’ have more to learn from them than the other way around. These people voice their opinions on blogs and in talks, discussing topics about which they consider themselves competent after reading a couple of blog posts, listening to a podcast, considering their own limited experiences, or MAYBE reading a book or two on the topic.

What’s worse, they argue about details with little or no understanding of even the big picture. They believe that their understanding is complete and, therefore, requires no study, no thought beyond the surface features, and certainly not time or mentoring.

This is anti intellectualism in a field which promotes intellect and deep thought.

The problem has bothered me for some time and, in fact, ignorance of one’s own incompetence is something that bothered me in my classroom so much that I studied its relationship to academic entitlement, narcissism, external attributions for achievements, and study strategies. What we learned is that narcissism, entitlement, and shallow study strategies are strongly correlated with the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is the phenomenon that the least competent people overestimate their competence the most as part of a self-serving bias. As relative competence increases, overestimations decrease, until the 75th to 95th percentile (depending on the domain), when estimates are fairly accurate. This is particularly problematic in an academic setting because the less students understand a concept, the more likely they are to believe that they understand it, the less likely they are to make changes to ensure that they learn it, and the more likely they will be to feel entitled to a high grade for their poor work.

Skeptical activism is not unlike academics.  Incompetence feeds on itself in this effect. The more an individual overestimates their competence, the more entitled they believe they are to an uncritical audience to which they can voice their opinions. What’s more, the more confident a blogger appears, the more their audience will reinforce their views (because they convince the audience that they know; the same thing occurs with eye witness testimony), although this is somewhat limited to situations in which the view is shallow enough to for the audience to understand, a perfect enhancement to the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

But high confidence is not an indication of actual understanding, nor is the number of supportive cheers of agreement from their followers.

The rest of this post will focus on one example of this, but there have been countless. This particular example is an especially egregious one, since she attacked both a friend for whom I have a great deal of respect and the field I defend daily. It was back-breaking straw for me.

When Amanda Marcotte whined that Daniel Loxton doesn’t want us to talk about religion, she built a now very familiar straw man and dressed him with inappropriate comparisons and other ignorant rambles. She appears to be upset because she somehow thinks that the usurping of a movement in motion, one which is founded on scientific principles, for the promotion of her personal political and religious ideology, should go unchallenged.

Amanda does not appear to understand what skepticism actually is or what science involves, yet she’s thrown her hat in, anyway. Perhaps she is insulted that somebody tried to tell her, I really don’t know, but I do know that the confidence with which she writes about the issues is unwarranted, a fact which is clearly demonstrated by the content of her post.

Amanda wrote,

“Look: atheism is the result of applying critical thinking and demands for evidence to the god hypothesis. It’s not any different than non-belief in all sorts of supernatural claims, such as ESP and ghosts. All of the weaseling around that is intellectually dishonest. It’s not about critical thinking, but about politics and frankly, not taking on religion because religion is seen as too powerful. “

Wrong.

What is intellectually dishonest is arguing about something you do not fully understand against people who are experts in the field. What is intellectually dishonest is advancing an uneducated opinion because the educated one does not help you achieve your own goals.

Her first two sentences demonstrate the problem with this entire post and most of the comments on it: ignorance. The rest of the paragraph is bullshit that Amanda made up. Nobody is ‘backing down’ and there is no concern that “religion is seen as too powerful”. This is not about politics. It is about scientific integrity.  This point has been made again and again, but ignored by people like  Amanda. Perhaps they ignore it because they do not understand it, or maybe they ignore it because it doesn’t help them, but the reasons don’t matter. Ignoring it won’t make it go away.

Science is the pursuit of truth. Truth is not value. Desires are not facts. Facts are not morals.

Scientific integrity requires adherence to scientific principles. Likewise, scientific skepticism relies on scientific integrity. Otherwise, we are just a bunch of people with opinions.

… Loxton decided to shit all over the work of people looking at improving gender, sexual oriention, class, and race diversity in the movement by complaining that the panel at The Amazing Meeting dedicated to this didn’t have any fucking Christians on it.

Again, she’s just making stuff up. Daniel noted that the diversity of the panel did not reflect the diversity of the audience in one important aspect. Framing this as “complaining that there were no Christians” is dishonest and the implication that Daniel does not care about issues of gender, class, and race is simply unfounded and abhorrent. Anyone who actually knows Daniel understands just how stupid that accusation is.

He firmly believes that the god hypothesis should be off-limits for skeptics, and that there should be a bright line between atheism and skepticism. This is ridiculous. “God” is a supernatural claim just like fairies and ghosts.

This statement, once again, not only demonstrates gross ignorance and shallow thinking, but the fact that she’s written an entire blog post questioning the knowledge of a professional skeptic on very basic definitions of the field without first educating herself is offensive and disrespectful. Had she even tried to understand the issues, a task which takes time and energy, she might have learned enough to at least recognize that she has a lot more to learn.

But I am clearly expecting too much, because Amanda thinks that “I don’t get it” equates to “It must not be true” as demonstrated by this parroting of Skeptical sound bites and bullet points, mostly taken out of context or misused (bold mine):

The excuse from “traditional” skeptics for making an exception for religion is that the god hypothesis is an untestable claim, and they’re only interested in testable claims. But as this fairy example shows, that’s not really true. There are plenty of things skeptics are skeptical about because of the preponderance-of-evidence standard. We don’t believe in ESP or ghosts or fairies because no one has ever produced solid evidence in favor of these things existing, and we combine that with an assumption that these things are highly unlikely and so the burden is on the people making the claims to prove them. I don’t see how god is any different.

… Yes, it’s true that you can’t test whether or not there is a god somewhere that simply refuses to show himself, but that’s also true of fairies, people with ESP, and ghosts. And yet it’s considered a good use of skeptical time to point out the weakness of the ghost/ESP argument. So why not god?”

She doesn’t ‘see it’, so it doesn’t exist. I hate to add to the sound bites when what is needed here is serious coursework, but there are some basic concepts that could help Amanda “see how” these things are different, starting with breaking down some of her giant straw man. Here are a few basic points that Amanda should have known before she wrote this post:

• Science is empirical, therefore scientific skepticism is empirical. This is more important than testability, although it is related. NOTE FOR THE RECORD: The concept of testability is watered down somewhat in my posts and comments because it is complicated. For a good discussion of these issues, I recommend Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World.

• Skeptics do not “make exceptions” for religion. The fact that “God exists” is not an empirically testable hypothesis is not the fault of skeptics or Skepticism. It is the nature of the hypothesis. Science and skepticism have nothing to say about any hypothesis which can never be tested empirically.

• Skepticism is not a set of beliefs or conclusions. This is important. “We don’t believe in ESP or ghosts or fairies” is not something that a good skeptic would say and the ‘we’ part is presumptuous. I certainly do not want someone like Amanda Marcotte speaking for me if this what she thinks skepticism is.

• What any Skeptic believes is irrelevant. Personal knowledge is derived in whatever way the individual chooses to derive it. Science and skepticism deal with shared knowledge. Shared knowledge requires empirical evidence.

• The reason that we can easily discount ESP in most cases is because it is usually easily tested empirically.

• Requiring empirical testability is not “giving religion a pass”. It is holding true to the scientific process, which is designed specifically to ensure that our human biases and personal values do not affect our ability to distinguish what is true from what is not true. Religion’s most basic claims usually involve an omniscient and omnipotent being, making them largely untestable. This is not at all true of ESP, ghosts, or other traditional topics in skepticism. More on that below.

• A good skeptic would never state that there are no ghosts. A good skeptic would investigate specific claims of hauntings, searching for natural phenomenon which would explain the evidence. A good skeptic would not say there is no such thing as extrasensory perception. A good skeptic would say that we have no evidence to support precognition, telekinesis, etc.

• Skepticism is not about pointing out the weaknesses of arguments. It is about evaluating the evidence. These are not even close to being the same. When a self-proclaimed psychic moves the bar and says, “If it failed the test, then the forces that give me these powers do not want to be seen,” they make their claim untestable. Skeptics then have nothing to say in response. However, skeptics can provide natural explanations for phenomena (e.g., reveal that Peter Popoff was being fed information via an ear piece) which are much more parsimonious than supernatural explanations. This is also what we do with religious claims. If someone claims that God created man as he is today, we can point to the evidence which support the theory of evolution. If they claim that God created the universe, we can point to the evidence for the Big Bang. If they claim that God created the universe and man by making these natural processes possible, well then, we cannot refute that.

But Amanda would like to cast out Pamela Gay because Pamela believes in a personal God. Never mind the fact that she has never tried to sell that view to others, that she never claimed to support it with evidence, or that she is a very competent and knowledgeable Skeptic, scientist, science educator, and science communicator. Nevermind that Pamela Gay is a valued member of the Skeptical community who has done more to educate and excite young minds about science than all but a few others. [NOTE: minor edit for clarity, 08/07/11 9:50am]

Pamela Gay is not being irrational. Amanda Marcotte is.

Marcotte’s diet example is another case of irrelevant comparison. She states, sarcastically, that people are also touchy about their diet and so expressing skepticism about food trends is probably bad idea, too. This is clearly a straw man. We can demonstrate the effects of gluten empirically, so it is a poor comparison, too. Nobody is saying that people should not express skepticism about the existence of a God. What we are saying is that we cannot demonstrate empirically that God does not exist, therefore, if that is your conclusion, you cannot share that conclusion with others. The difference between personal knowledge and shared knowledge is not trivial.

Making others comfortable is not the issue, either, although making people uncomfortable out of arrogance and ignorance is certainly a part of the issue. I would like to point out that Amanda’s double-standard is pretty obvious in that paragraph. Apparently, the needs that matter are the needs of those she thinks deserve our attention and that’s it. But while we’re on the subject, it doesn’t matter if you are promoting skepticism, atheism, or your favorite restaurant. Being an asshole is being an asshole. The reason that DBAD matters to the rest of us is that when a dick represents Skepticism, they make our jobs more difficult.

The issue of scope is more complicated than the atheism/skepticism debate. The only reason that religion is given special consideration in the discussions of scope is that there are more people conflating atheism with skepticism than ever before. There are more people acting like superior assholes than ever before. People who could be helped by skeptical outreach as well as people who contribute a great deal to the movement (people like Hal Bidlack, a brilliant, scholarly, honorable man with years of service to the community) have been run off by the relentless arrogance of people like those I have discussed in this series of posts. The ignorant, the arrogant, and the irrational (I’m picturing monkeys of the ‘no evil’ variety, but with interesting facial expressions).

And this problem is growing.

Most of the comments on Amanda’s post demonstrate a frenzied groupthink that will further convince her that she’s on the right track. Comment number 41 describes this problem (among others) quite well: “One cool thing about having a political blog which is allegedly powered by skepticism is that people will be much more tolerant of logical fallacies.”

Some of the most fallacious comments:

…There’s nothing worse than an agnostic who thinks he’s more logical and skeptical than an openly religious person. Whether you’re an agnostic or a believer you’re engaging in special pleading on the god question, subjecting it to a different standard than any other question of existence, and you are not a skeptic nor are you logical.

“Special pleading” is a straw man that is repeated often. But it is just that: a straw man.

what the hell is skepticism for if not doing away with false beliefs?

More ignorance. There is no such thing as a ‘false belief’. Beliefs are simply what you hold to be true. Nobody actually knows for certain what is true. Skepticism is about evaluating evidence, period.

H0: There is no god. H1: There is a god. There is a serious shortage of evidence for H1, therefore we must accept the null hypothesis.

Introductory statistics cannot address the question of whether or not God exists.

If there’s a lack of humanpower and ressources to do everything, the question skeptics organizations should ask themselves is not why they should get involved in the more political aspects of skepticism, but why they should still waste ressources on the trivial, non-political aspects like Bigfoot/UFO/ghost/cryptozoology debunkings and such.

Wow. This is very disturbing, and I’m not just talking about the spelling or misuse of words like “aspects”. Apparently many commenters don’t watch television or get out of the house much. The number of shows devoted to ghost hunting alone is staggering. Then there are the shows about psychics of all ages, animal mind readers, monster hunting, etc. These shows are appearing on channels once devoted to science, for FSM’s sake. As for why we don’t get involved in politics, read this.

And anyone who is interested in the bigger picture – the picture concerned about meeting the goals of the movement – should read Comment number 75 on Amanda’s post.

The parroting that atheism is the result of applied skepticism that is so prevalent in the comments and stated in Amanda’s post is anti-skeptical. It demonstrates a failure to understand the fundamental process of skepticism and the empirical nature of science and scientific skepticism. The definitions of science and scientific skepticism were arrived at through centuries of study, collaboration, contemplation, and discussion. They are not negotiable, at least not without agreement from a vast majority of scientists.  If you cannot accept these definitions as they are, you have three choices:

1. Publish your opinions in peer-reviewed journals and hope that philosophers and scientists agree with you.
2. Keep arguing about it with Skeptics and impede our progress.
3. Go do something else.

*”Big-S Skepticism” refers to the work of the skepticism movement in promoting the practice of skepticism.

Related posts:

1. Take Back Skepticism, Part I: The Elephant in the Room
2. Take Back Skepticism, Part II: The Overkill Window
3. There is No Debate Over Evolution

…I suggest is this: Skepticism, as a movement, is not hindered so much by the conflation of atheism and skepticism, the ridicule of believers, or attempts to promote values-based ideology as it is hindered by the blatant ignorance, arrogance, and irrationality displayed when those acts are committed.

In a field dedicated to reducing ignorance and irrationality, a field in which arrogance is toxic, I find this kind of behavior offensive. It is time that we reclaim Skepticism and restore its credibility and integrity.

And

When I can’t tell the ‘good guys’ from the ‘bad guys’, there are no good guys.

At the World Atheist Convention, there was a panel called Communicating Atheism. Video from this panel was posted to YouTube. The comments were almost as disturbing as the video, with Rebecca Watson on the receiving end of all manner of misogyny (and my definition of this is much narrower than hers) and the others being cheered on without thought to the contradictions in their statements. The most interesting part about this is that the most rational person on the panel, and the one to receive the least support from internet commenters, was the one most closely associated with skeptical movement, Rebecca Watson. Next was Richard Dawkins, who is also associated with Skepticism*, although less so than he is with atheism. The least rational were the other two panel members – people I had never heard of until I saw this video. All made reasoning errors of some kind.

The panel was about communicating atheism, however, Rebecca chose not to talk about that. Instead she talked about sexism in the atheist movement. It would not be until later that I would discover just how badly this needed to be discussed. I will remind you at this point that I am usually somewhat critical of Rebecca and that this is the very appearance which sparked elevatorgate. Since I have already chimed in on that, it should be no surprise that I have little negative to say here and I will just leave it at that.

The last person to talk (but more rational than the other two) was Richard Dawkins. He made a statement that I appreciate: he specifically stated that he does not advocate ridiculing believers, but rather ridiculing beliefs. I am not generally against ridiculing beliefs myself, however I believe that goals and context are vital in determining if such ridicule is appropriate. But then he really stepped in it. Dawkins is a highly intelligent and relatively rational person, yet he used weasel words. What exactly is this consciousness-raising that he keeps talking about? He did not define it, but suggested that it was akin to enlightenment. These weasel words were the cornerstone of his statement. Flimsy, Dawkins. Really flimsy.

What’s more, Dawkins began his statement with this:

Last year at the TAM conference, Phil Plait got a lot of applause for a talk about how to communicate atheism… uh, and he began by taking a vote of people who used to be religious and were now atheists and he got a great show of hands and then he said, ‘How many of you changed your mind as a result of being called an idiotic retard?’”

That’s not at all how I remember it.

So, let’s see what Phil really said. After all, the video is freely available on the internet and there is even a partial transcript which includes that opening:

Let me ask you a question: how many of you here today used to believe in something — used to, past tense — whether it was flying saucers, psychic powers, religion, anything like that? You can raise your hand if you want to. [lots of hands go up] Not everyone is born a skeptic. A lot of you raised your hand. I’d even say most of you, from what I can tell.

Now let me ask you a second question: how many of you no longer believe in those things, and you became a skeptic, because somebody got in your face, screaming, and called you an idiot, brain-damaged, and a retard? [Very few hands go up]

Perhaps the conflation of atheism with skepticism was deliberate, or perhaps he just remembered it that way, but does Dawkins really care so little for his own work that he couldn’t be bothered to spend five minutes preparing? Really?

AronRa is YouTube famous. That’s all I know about him. He told the story of how he came to be an evangelist for evolution and atheism. Most of what he discussed was anecdotal and he stated that he does not believe that we can be certain of anything – a fundamental scientific principle. However, his ‘bottom line’ contradicted all of his statements about truth and science (bold mine):

“You can’t reach these people. Religion has this basis of… the purpose of it is to make believe – now where I come from we call that ‘pretend’ – but that is the goal. You can’t question the conviction…”

This is simply not true. ‘Fantasy’ is not the goal or purpose of religion, even if that is what the beliefs boil down to in the end. Many religions even encourage questioning and testing one’s faith. A great many people have been “reached” through education. Think about how many current activists were once people of faith. Michael Shermer studied Christian theology before changing his major and eventually gave up religion, but not without a few years of education and many hours of discussion. Perhaps AronRa isn’t reaching anyone because his approach does not consider the audience’s current point of view. If you want to educate people, you need to understand where they are coming from.

“To me, honestly matters. Only accurate information has practical application. And accountability matter. If you’re going to teach something, make sure that you’re going to teach something that is correct. “

I could not agree more with this statement, but…

“Faith itself is inherently dishonest because faith is an unwarranted assumption that is inserted [sic] with unreasonable conviction. It would be unwise to hold an absolute conviction even when there is evidence, but we’re talking about something that it is asserted with no reason at all other than some subjective thing. “

Who says that all, or even most, believers ‘hold an absolute conviction’ or even that their beliefs are ‘unwarranted’? Who says that they have ‘no reason at all’ to believe? Do believers all agree that their evidence is subjective? Is subjective experience worthless? Does it equate to “no reason at all”? Absurd.

Then he finishes with this:

“Some of us have a need to believe and others have the desire to understand. Those who have a desire to understand will improve their perspective and will find the faults and will correct them. Those who have the need to believe will not correct anything and will remain just as wrong as they started out, at least.”

AronRa doesn’t know why people believe. Belief is not that simple.

Most people think that their beliefs are rational and that the beliefs of other people are emotional or otherwise irrational. This is a good example of the self-serving bias, which is probably second only to the confirmation bias in driving human behaviors today. For example, when Michael Shermer asked readers with religious beliefs why they believe in God, the most popular answers were related to rational arguments and the complexity of the universe. However, when he asked those same preople why others believed, the most popular answer was because it is comforting; belief is consoling and gives meaning and purpose to life. In other words, “I believe because I am rational. You believe because you need to.”

AronRa makes assumptions about why people believe because he does not understand why other people cannot see the world as he does. He discounts their reasons for believing. He discounts the evidence that they believe they have seen with their own eyes or heard with their own ears. It doesn’t matter if their evidence is refutable because they do not believe that their claims have been refuted; usually, it is not the evidence that is the problem, but one’s interpretation of it.

Essentially, AronRa’s claim that these people have no reason to believe is arrogant and disrespectful. What’s more is that he makes this claim with no evidence to support it, which is ironic. He placed people into two categories: those who need to believe and those who want to understand, a false dichotomy if I’ve ever heard one. People are much much, much more complicated than this. AronRa’s assertion also assumes that everyone has the capacity to understand. AronRa believes – assumes – that he is rational, yet in the midst of his criticism of others is an irrational argument to promote his beliefs about the difference between atheists and theists, a belief grounded in a little bit of casual observation and whole lot of assumption. How is this different from religion?

Then the most offensive and irrational panelist spoke. Tom Melchiorre’s website sports the tag line, “Making a World of Difference With a Positive Voice for Atheism”. Positive. Right.

Mr. Melchiorre talks about “…not just communicating atheism, but advancing atheism.” So, he is not just interested in secularism. He is not just interested in the right not to practice a religion. But he is also clearly not talking about education, so how does a lack of belief in something advance? As for the “positive” part, when discussing a model for activism, he mentions a motto of the LGBT movement, “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.” But he says,

“I have a version that’s ‘We’re here, you go to your hell, you crazy religious bastards. Get used to it.’”

This, of course, receives a round of laughter and applause. Melchiorre then justifies his meanness and intolerance by giving a history lesson. I wondered, though, if Melchiorre was also from Texas (AronRa’s home), because his version of history was definitely a little bit tilted:

“Malcolm X was a very dark black and he wore very dark clothes and he spoke ominously. He scared the shit out of white people…they did violence – verses Martin Luther King, who was strictly passivist…In reality, Martin Luther King in his movement as a pacifist would not have gotten as far as fast had Malcolm X not provided an extreme opposite and pretty much forced the white population in power to say, ‘Okay, we don’t want to deal with this violent black civil rights person, so who do we deal with? Oh, here’s this nice sweet guy over here, Martin Luther King, Jr., very pacifist.’ But who’s to say the two of them were not talking behind the scenes?”

At this point, Richard Dawkins did a double-take. That last sentence is very enlightening; Melchiorre is just making stuff up. That is fantasy.

“We need to have a second movement of atheism along side the hardcore – the hard atheists, the new atheists, and that’s pretty much what I’m calling the soft atheists, or the pacifist atheists. So that when the religious get a little upset and want to do something about our demands, but are afraid to talk to us angry, hardcore, confrontational, hostile, evil atheists, they don’t have to. They can go next door and talk to the softer, gentler, you know, pretty atheists who don’t shout at them.”

Melchiorre never mentioned The Overton Window, but some of the language he uses (such as “demands”) is reminiscent of other discussions about the application of this theory in other realms and discussions on the blogosphere last year about the relative contributions of MLK and X in the movement.  His description above fits with suggestions of The Overton Window quite well and even sounds a little like something out of Glenn Beck’s novel The Overton Window. No, I didn’t read it, but I have read some of one blogger’s review of it:

This, perhaps (though I am open to suggestions otherwise) is the most ridiculous moment of the chapter:

Just like Dr. King, we aim to eliminate evil, not those who perpetrate it. To speak of violence in any form is to play right into the hands of those who oppose us. They’ve already invested countless hours into portraying us as violent, hateful racists, and they are just waiting for the chance to further that story line. Don’t give it to them. Instead of Bill Ayers, give them Benjamin Franklin. Instead of Malcolm X, give them Rosa Parks. Instead of bin Laden, give them Gandhi.

The Overton Window is well known in the field of activism (Desiree Schell talked about it in her talk at TAM9) and I have been told that ‘new atheists’ sometimes evoke it, although I have not read much of this myself (I do not tend to follow their conversations). However, there is no scientific support for this theory.

The Overton Window simply describes any set of cultural norms. It also attempts to explain how those norms can be changed. Unfortunately, I did not find it in any of the academic literature in political science or sociology. The Overton Window is a pop-political science (bordering on pseudoscientific) concept based on a technique for persuasion called “door in the face”, which is found in abundance in the psychological literature. The door in the face technique starts with a much larger request than one hopes will be accepted. For example, if you were a charity asking for money and hoping for $50 from each household, you might ask for $500 to start. Once this request is refused and you ask for $50, the new request seems reasonable in comparison. You are much more likely to receive something from the target than if you simply asked for $50 outright.

The idea of The Overton Window theory is that starting with outrageous demands such as “abolish public schools!” will move the window of acceptable demands enough to receive support for what you really want (e.g., school vouchers).

There are probably some kernels of truth to this theory and the tactics it dictates may work in some specific situations, but lasting change is unlikely. Humans are very good at anchoring and adjusting. In other words, we use points for comparison. However, psychological effects involve the behavior of individuals on average and in a limited set of situations. Groups of people are not individuals and do not behave like individuals. Political affiliation, religion, and other attitudes are often much, much more complicated than such a simple theory could predict. There are many more factors involved in what makes culture. For example, who says that anyone has to listen to either the person with the extreme view or the moderate? And, as Desiree Shell mentioned, even the theory says that people need to be able to tell the difference between these two and they need to care about that difference.

There is an abundance of literature which suggests that the stronger or harder the sell, the less likely an individual will respond by changing their view. They are much more likely to become more polarized in the other direction. Skeptics demonstrate this all the time. So do atheists. What are believers to think when they meet activists who approach believers with belligerence, insults, and arrogance? It is more likely to mistrust any atheist than they are to compare the behavior to that of other atheists they meet.  My prediction, or rather an analogy of what I predict, is found in the comic I commissioned from my son(click to enlarge), dubbed The Overkill Window.

Even if he was not thinking of The Overton Window, Melchiorre’s example of Malcolm and Martin is a story, nothing more. There is no evidence to support the history he described. In fact, it is not the most parsimonious explanation for the success of the civil rights movement. During the 1950s and 60s baby boomers were hitting puberty and early adolescence. What happens during adolescence? Kids rebel. Against everything. The Korean War, the impending Vietnam War, the momentum of civil rights prior to this time, the fact that the black community in the United States grew much more quickly than the white community, and many other factors overshadow the inner conflicts in the movement itself.

Melchiorre’s suggestion that Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were collaborating is completely irrational. He said this with absolutely no evidence whatsoever and even provided the counter-evidence that they met only once. But he saved the most offensive stuff for the end (bold mine):

“They can go next door and talk to the softer, gentler, you know, pretty atheists who don’t shout at them. Now, those are not humanists. Those are not freethinkers. Those are not rationalists. All of whom pretty much share our view, they just go by a different name. But if we want to communicate and advance atheism, we have to deal with the religious as one group. Atheists as one group. We can’t have the religious going to the humanists, because that means we’re still marginalized as atheists. To advance atheism, we have to be atheists as a group.”

Um. Who are not humanists? Is “You go to your hell, you crazy religious bastards” what humanists say?  Who are not rational? Is it those who evoke unproven theories and squeeze and mold them to meet one’s needs?  Who again? And how could Malcolm and Martin be both different and one group?

What I would really like to see happen: atheist activists take their ball and go play in their own yard. I have nothing against those who work in both fields and know the difference. I know many. Most I would consider secular activists rather than atheists. But people like AronRa and Tom Melchiorre make the job of Skeptics much more difficult when they, or those like them, claim to be fighting the same fight as Skeptics. Although I did not sense that AronRa or Melchiorre were familiar with Skepticism, Richard Dawkins and Rebecca Watson suggested that Skepticism and Atheism are interchangeable (and they are not alone, not by a long shot).

In Part III, I will talk about offensive ignorance, arrogance, and the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

*”Big-S Skepticism” refers to the work of the skepticism movement in promoting the practice of skepticism.

Related posts:

1. Take Back Skepticism, Part I: The Elephant in the Room
2. Take Back Skepticism, Part III: The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Nutshell

Arguments over scope and the conflation of atheism and skepticism have reached a fever pitch, as have arguments over tone. I will talk about some of this, but I will not attempt to explain all of the issues in any detail because everything that needs to be said has been said here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here… Well, you get the picture. In fact, if you want to argue the definition of skepticism or Skepticism* in the comments of this post, don’t bother. Instead, read what I wrote about it last year, which I would simply repeat in answer. It is clear from the comments on these posts that those who need to are not listening and I am rarely in the mood to spin my wheels. Instead, I will try to focus on the main reason these arguments should not be abandoned: it would be bad Skepticism.

In my opinion, the tone and scope arguments dance around a bigger problem and I do not believe that we can afford to ignore the elephants in the room any longer. We should not give people ‘a pass’ simply because they claim to be on our side.

In both his TAM6 and TAM9 keynote addresses, Neil deGrasse Tyson talked about a letter he wrote to the editor of The New York Times regarding a case in which a teacher was accused of promoting creationist-style anti-science (bold mine):

To the Editor:

People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah’s ark carried dinosaurs.

This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it’s about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
New York, Dec. 19, 2006

Similarly, what I suggest is this: Skepticism, as a movement, is not hindered so much by the conflation of atheism and skepticism, the ridicule of believers, or attempts to promote values-based ideology as it is hindered by the blatant ignorance, arrogance, and irrationality displayed when those acts are committed.

In a field dedicated to reducing ignorance and irrationality, a field in which arrogance is toxic, I find this kind of behavior offensive. It is time that we reclaim Skepticism and restore its credibility and integrity.

A Tiny Bit of Background

The issues of tone and scope have been widely discussed for years, but Phil Plait’s now famous “Don’t be a Dick” speech at TAM8 has become a centerpiece in the debate over tone and Daniel Loxton has become its whipping boy. Daniel also advocates for the limitation of scope for the movement for several reasons. It is the most basic of these limitations that seem to kick up the most dust: empirical claims. It is the dust around religion that I would like to talk about in these posts.

But before I do, let me say this about tone: decades of research tells us that it matters. The next time you read something like, “Neither method is well-supported” or “They can’t prove that my way doesn’t work”, remember that the Discovery Institute still produces propaganda about the irreducible complexity of baterial flagella, despite having been educated about the clear and indisputable counter-evidence repeatedly over the past decade. Then read Tavris & Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me).

What the research tells us is that swearing, sarcasm, and ridicule are great ways to rally your followers and gain new followers. This behavior polarizes groupthink, excites, incites, strengthens group cohesion, and promotes ‘othering’ of outgroup members. The target of ridicule and sarcasm is extremely likely to polarize as well, adhering more strongly to their beliefs** as those beliefs are threatened. Although direct and non-confrontational criticism of a belief is not likely to change the mind of the believer either, it is a seed with chance to germinate and is less likely to strengthen the belief.

Just so that you don’t think that I am a hypocrite, I will say right now that have very little hope that the targets of my criticisms in these posts will allow anything to grow; that soil is hostile. Planting seeds is not my goal. Okay, enough background. Let’s get back to the point:

Skepticism 2.x has been costly.

It is unclear when the tide turned, but at some point the expansion of skepticism as a movement began to get ugly. With “Skepticism 2.0″, the rise of wonderful and creative independent and grassroots efforts made possible by technology, came a wave of fresh new voices. Unfortunately, this has coincided with changes in culture and education practices which seem to be rooted in the United States, but are spreading beyond our borders very quickly – practices which reinforce shallow thinking when it is accompanied by overconfidence. The result is that too many of the new voices are – to borrow wording from Greg Laden – speaking out of their nether regions.

One factor is that self-identified skeptics in general do not seem to be much more rational than the general public. Intelligence is not enough. A rational person is one who has two things:

1. the tools (knowledge and intelligence) to reason well in a given situation.
2. open-mindedness and flexibility of thought; the ability to consider that their current knowledge might be wrong.

Without both of these characteristics, individuals resolve cognitive dissonance in all manner of ways except the rational way, which is to alter their current knowledge to accommodate new evidence. I do not believe that anyone has done the research, but it makes sense that self-described skeptics and atheists have more of the first characteristic than the general public. Atheism is correlated with education and IQ; it seems reasonable that skepticism would be as well. However, I have seen little evidence that, beyond many successful professional skeptics and scientists, they are any more open-minded or flexible than the general public. In fact, I would not be surprised to find that the opposite is generally true. And although there is “generational” component to this phenomenon, some of the most stubborn people that I have seen in the Q & A sessions at meetings, shouting that “some people are JUST WRONG!!” and putting people into two categories: atheists and irrational people, were middle-aged white men.

The behaviors which, in my opinion, are the most troublesome, are:

• conflating atheism with skepticism. This goes beyond the old arguments about testability and method vs. conclusion. In recent years, I have see these terms used interchangeably far too often. More and more speakers at major conferences (like TAM) have little connection with Skepticism and more atheism-laden conferences are adopting names and promotional language which suggests that the meeting is about Skepticism. I suspect that the overlap of ‘members’ of the atheism and skepticism movements is at the root of this.
• calling for social change related to political ideology or other values. Attempts by Michael Shermer and Sam Harris to promote their values were at least attempts to provide scientific support for those values. More recently Shermer publicly acknowledged (during the climate change panel at TAM8) that political values are outside the scope of Skepticism. However, there remain a large number of Skeptics who continue to argue for the promotion of ‘progressive values’ and Liberal ideology in the name of Skepticism.
• insisting that offending and ridiculing believers is an effective means of outreach.

These behaviors are troublesome because they impair us in various ways. The impairments are severe enough to see daily if one is on the front lines of grassroots work. For example, recruiting students to my campus club was easy. Retaining them was not. Several of my students abandoned the work they’d begun after encounters with other ‘skeptics’ at meetings and online. This happened with students whose beliefs can be described as agnostic and atheist; imagine if any of my recruits were Christians.

Even more troublesome than these behaviors is the uneducated groupthink that arises from these behaviors. By ‘uneducated’ I mean incorrect. Or so far afield that it’s ‘not even wrong’. This ignorance (and refusal to learn) is another very influential factor. If one of the major goals of Skepticism is to educate, shouldn’t we all understand the material?

Arrogance and ignorance, along with some shallow thinking, need only a cause to produce mob behavior. Opinions become stronger, more polarized, and more emotionally-laden they are spewed by overconfident people with an audience. When groupthink grows, hate often grows with it.

There is a very large overlap in the make-up of atheist and skeptic communities. My Facebook friends list is full of people whom I suspect sent requests only because I am an atheist. Despite little interest in atheism or religion, I once supported atheism-related activism. I continue to be a die-hard supporter of secularism. However, I will think twice before supporting any endeavor with the label ‘atheism’ in the future. In my opinion, the current climate of the atheist movement is making the work of Skepticism much more difficult. It has become, in my opinion, a septic tank of arrogance and hate.

For example, when reports spread that the man suspected of killing more than 90 people in Norway was a Christian, I read comment after hate-filled comment on Facebook and Google+ calling for the annihilation of Christians. Comments which claimed that Breivik was mentally ill were quickly attacked under the straw man that mental illness somehow absolves him of responsibility. I don’t happen to agree that an illness is more than an explanation of behavior (even in court, ‘insanity’ is much more than a diagnosis of ‘illness’), but that’s beside the point. What we wish to be true has no bearing on what is true. Even if, as reported at the time, some of the evidence suggested that he committed these acts as part of a God-loving crusade, the idea that he would not have been just as motivated by some other extreme ideology (e.g., anti-capitalism ideology) is absurd and an individual acting alone is much more likely to be mentally ill than to be part of an organized terrorist effort. His manifesto eventually revealed that he was fueled by any ideology that fit into his clearly delusional view of the world.

Some argued that all terrorists are mentally ill; there is no difference between Breivik and an organization like Al-Qaeda. Or they described all terrorists as ‘evil’ – an evil created by religion, as if religion is the only reason that people commit terrible acts. This simply is not reality. Psychologists have studied ‘evil’ relentlessly since the atrocities of the holocaust during World War II and we have learned that average people will commit some fairly heinous acts if situational factors are aligned. If we do not recognize that good, sane people are capable of bad acts, we will be helpless to prevent it. What’s more, such extreme ‘othering’ may make us feel better, but it closes our eyes to our own potential for wrongdoing.

The right-wing propaganda machine has done its best to paint Breivik as an isolated, politically-motivated nut job who was not a Christian. This is clearly wrong. However, painting him as part of a Christian terrorism-laden culture is equally wrong and serves only to fuel even more hatred. Hate breeds hate. Following are some examples of the kind of hate that I see growing among atheists.

A comment on a link to a report that the Westboro Baptists plan to protest at the funerals of the Norway victims made by a now ex-Facebook friend who claims to work for ‘The God Killers Inc’ (and two replies):

“FUCK THE Westboro Baptist Cult, and the God they pray to. I hope someone guns down this whole fucking group of hate fueling motherfuckers.”

“Hopefully the Norwegians will take them into custodian at the airport then fly them far north and dump them on a shrinking iceberg!”

“I always wondered why that hasn’t happened already? What a sad world we live in where innocent children are slaughtered and WBC isn’t? WTF OMG LMFAO…not really “

A Status update from the same ‘God Killer’ quoted above:

“Got banned on Teens Need Jesus page for telling the truth on the BS they were slinging trying to suck teens into their cult. Only took 1 day before I got banned this time. The Truth Is Consider A Crime By The Religitards.”

A commenter wrote this about a member of a Christian teens group:

“sick fucks are everywhere and need to be grouped together and sent to antartica or somewhere nice and cold”

…then posted a warning about a Facebook virus without first doing a simple search to find out if it was a hoax (it is).

Another now ex-Facebook friend whose comment, “fucking religitards!” prompted me to visit his wall, which reveals contact information that includes links to several Herbalife sites. His ‘activities and interests’ section includes ‘fuck Walmart’, ‘fuck religion’, ‘profanity’, and ‘rationalism’. Yeah, ‘rationalism’. Because God is fucking stupid and Walmart is fucking evil, but Herbalife really works, right?

Finally, one former Facebook friend blew me away with this series of equal-opportunity status updates and link introductions:

“The fat behind the desk rush said the heat index is all made by the government. And the earth is cooling f ing idiot”
- on an article about Rush Limbaugh

“Xtains fundies are diferent musnutts fundies”

“This guy is bat shit crazy and be taken awaywith men in white coats” – about Glenn Beck

“Pat was funny he’s jusy bat shit crazy now.” – on a post titled Tell MSNBC to Fire Pat Buchanan!

“Another bat shit crazy” – about Donald Trump

“Just found out 22 dems votedfor bonehead biil the f ing retards”

And the shocker (bold mine):

“Hate spreads quickly with the idiots he he bought his clips from the US” – on a link titled Norwegian Shooting Suspect’s ‘Manifesto’ Inspired By American Right-Wing Thinkers

Which was followed the next day by:

“F ing republicnuts I hope they get what coming to them” – on an Article in The Daily called How Republicans Screwed the Pooch

When I can’t tell the ‘good guys’ from the ‘bad guys’, there are no good guys.

And this leads me to something I’ve been trying to write about for weeks. In Part II I will discuss examples of irrationality and hypocrisy at the World Atheist Convention.

*”Big-S Skepticism” refers to the work of the skepticism movement in promoting the practice of skepticism.

**In my writings, the word “belief” refers to anything that an individual holds to be true. This includes those things that we accept on faith, because of convincing evidence, or as a philosophical conclusion.

Related posts:

1. Take Back Skepticism, Part III: The Dunning-Kruger Effect
2. Take Back Skepticism, Part II: The Overkill Window
3. There is No Debate Over Evolution

Matt engages the audience. Photo by Dean Baird (minor retouching and cropping by me)

Matt recapped the most important concepts from his piece last year and presented more of his fun and interesting demonstrations. I used to think that cognitive psychologists had all of the fun because we study the interesting ways that our brains and minds fool us and can blow those minds by showing them. However, after some thought I realized that the physics teachers I know have the coolest, scariest, ickiest, and most surprising demonstrations. They deal with the physical world and there are almost as many bizarre things in the physical world as there are in the mind.

No, I do not remember what I was saying when I made this face. Photo by Dean Baird (minor retouching and cropping by me)

I was a bit nervous about this workshop because some of the material I presented is very different from my usual “Oew” and “Ah” and “aHA!” stuff. In addition, its connection to promoting skepticism is distant, at least on the surface. The title of my presentation was Deep Thoughts: Facilitating Critical Thinking at All Ages. In teaching critical thinking, the age of the student is extremely important in determining methods and focus. For adults, the biggest roadblock to critical thinking is overconfidence. This is just a nice way of saying “arrogance” or “closed-mindedness”. The irony is that we humans are so overconfident that we think the term applies to other people and not ourselves.

For young children, there are few roadblocks. What we should focus on is guiding cognitive development in a way that minimizes overconfidence. In my opinion, the best way to do this is to encourage the practice of consideration and deep thinking. This, I suggest, is accomplished through discussion of philosophical questions.

I have yet to read a review of the workshop. However, the immediate feedback I received was very positive and I heard my words flowing from the mouths of others all weekend, including on the stage. It is entirely possible that others have been thinking about the same issues, but I choose to take it as evidence that my ideas were discussed and found worthy of some consideration.

A Short TAM9 Review

Unfortunately, I was still tweaking my workshop presentation and was unable to attend the other workshops. I caught only some of the activism workshop – the one I needed the most – but luckily there is a wonderful manual available which was produced by Desiree Schell and Maria Walters. Last year’s reception, which kicks off the official meeting on Thursday night, featured music and live interviews. This seemed to defeat the ‘meet and greet’ purpose of most attendees. The reception this year returned to the usual format of conversation, but there were so many people that it was difficult to find anyone. Friday morning JREF president D.J. Grothe announced the final headcount. Attendees, organizers, and presenters at TAM9 From Outer Space totaled 1652, approximately 300 more people than last year, which was 200 more than the year before.

In general, the long list of speakers booked for this year included the most inspiring scientists and science communicators in the skeptical community. The original keynote speaker, Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, is a personal hero of mine. His talk repeated much of what he covered in his very long and satisfying TAM6 talk, but I never tire of the material or his presentation style. Unfortunately, the other keynote speech, delivered by Richard Dawkins, was as boring (to me, anyway) as Tyson’s was entertaining. I have never found Dawkins to be a dynamic speaker, but this was particularly snore-worthy. He chose to spend much of his time describing his soon-to-be-released children’s book rather than discussing anything of note. Likewise, I find PZ Myers’ style a little bit dull, but I usually enjoy his talks simply because he chooses to talk about some of the most interesting topics. This year is no exception. His was one of the few talks that I missed, but I am looking forward to his discussion of alien anatomy when the JREF posts video of his talk (they committed to making all of the content available online).

Every other talk (not including the Sunday Paper Session, which varied in quality) was fantastic.

Some of the highlights for me:

• Carol Tavris delivered a speech about reducing cognitive dissonance by first considering the target’s vantage point (i.e., empathy). This was probably the best speech I have ever heard, and I have heard a LOT of speeches and talks.


Dylan Keenberg, Sabrina Gibson, and me Photo by Daniel Loxton (minor touch-ups and adjustments by me)

• Dylan Keenberg, a former student and collaborator of mine, delivered a wonderful Sunday talk describing one method for talking to others (Rogerian argumentation) which is highly likely to reduce both cognitive dissonance and misunderstandings. The most important aspect of this method is, once again, empathy. In order to more than simply fake empathy, though, one must be open to the possibility that one’s current understanding is wrong. My informal polling of TAM9 speakers and other community leaders tells me that I am justified in feeling extremely proud.
  
  

  Dylan Keenberg and Daniel Loxton Photo by Sabrina Gibson (minor touch-ups and cropping by me)

  Daniel Loxton’s discussion of these two talks (Tavris’s and Keenberg’s) as well as the two which specifically addressed activism (one by JREF Communications Sadie Crabtree and the other by union organizer and radio host Desiree Schell) is much more thoughtful, thorough, and interesting than what I could write at the moment.

• Daniel also wrote about the panel to discuss diversity. In a nutshell, the discussion was quite a mess for the first half, but the more they discussed the more each clarified, and in some cases, changed their views until they settled on a middle ground that I think all could embrace. Essentially, they agreed that applying skepticism to a more diverse set of problems/questions/domains would result in a more diverse community without compromising the integrity of skepticism as a movement. Political, moral, and social ideology are ‘outside the scope’ of skepticism because they remove objectivity. In addition, untestable claims (e.g., “Does God exist?”) are off-limits because they cannot be addressed scientifically.

  I am always thrilled to hear D.J. speak about such things from a stage because he tends to be clear, firm, and directly on-message. Last year, for example, he made a point of asking nearly every speaker to clearly define the scope of their organization and each answered with some form of “scientific skepticism”. This year, he elaborated on this by noting that he strives for a diversity of religious views.

  However, I did not leave TAM9 with the optimism that Daniel Loxton left with. One reason for this was that D.J. made those statements while discussing “Diversity in Skepticism” with Debbie Goddard, Greta Christina, Jamila Bey, and Hemant Mehta. Debbie Goddard is the campus outreach director for CFI, a secular organization with a branch devoted to skepticism (CSI). The panel’s moderator, Desiree Schell, is firmly rooted in the skeptical community as the host of Skeptically Speaking and an occasional blogger on Skeptic North. The other three panelists are closely identified with atheism and, in my opinion, have contributed little, if anything, to skepticism itself. I kept wondering who this “we” was in the discussion (e.g., “We could offer…”).

  The conflation of atheism and skepticism is a very serious problem with dire consequences. The most important of these is the degradation of the integrity of skepticism itself. The scientific method only works when scientists are open to interpreting any result objectively – to consider all evidence with an open mind and to hold all conclusions tentatively. The conclusion that there is no God cannot be arrived at empirically, so it cannot be “the result of properly-applied skepticism” as some claim. I am very worried about this trend to conflate these two for several reasons, including the manner in which the majority of atheists talk to and about the faithful.

• Bill Nye’s talk was condensed from the longer talk he gave at the Skeptic Society’s Science Symposium last month. In his position as the executive director of The Planetary Society he is concerned with science education and the consequences of failing in this area. For this reason, he is another hero to me.
• The panel discussion of the future of space exploration was almost as lively as the diversity panel would be two days later. Most notably, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s verbal sparring with Lawrence Krauss left Bill Nye and moderator Phil Plait with little room to get a word in. However, Pamela Gay managed to do so by literally shushing Tyson – three times! For that, if not for the plea during her solo talk for all in the audience to be activists for education, made her another hero. Phil’s talk last year still rings in my years, so the odd man out on that panel – Lawrence Krauss – was the only one on the stage that I would not walk a few miles, breaking a path in the snow, to hear speak.
• Speaking of heroes, there were two announcements at TAM9 which deserve to be noted. One was that The Richard Dawkins Foundation has committed to fund child care at meetings and conferences like TAM. The other involves everyone’s hero, Genie Scott. At the end of a talk in which she described the parallels between evolution denial and AGW denial (described and discussed in a great post by Donald Prothero), she announced that the NCSE is beginning an initiative to fight climate change denial in public education.
• Finally, two Jennifers, Jennifer Michael Hecht and Jennifer Ouellette, merged poetry and popular culture with skepticism and science, respectively, in the most uplifting and inspiring ways. Hecht condensed a normally hour-long history of doubt into half an hour by speaking quickly, but this only enhanced the talk. Jennifer held a cultural mirror up to science and space exploration, showing clips and images from A Trip to the Moon to Doctor Who and beyond. These were as, if not more, intellectually fulfilling as the talks given by the psychologists (okay, I’m biased) and neurologists (Elizabeth Loftus, Richard Wiseman, Susana Martinez-Conde, and Stephen Macknik all spoke). Wiseman even introduced me to a new favorite ‘suggested lyrics’ video, so I think that I will leave you with that.

Related posts:

1. Reaching Out and Geeking Out
2. The Amazing Meeting 8: Skepticism 2.1 (reboot)
3. There is No Debate Over Evolution

I was hoping to kick-start this blog with a highly critical review (AKA, rant) about the BS spouted by two members of a panel at the World Atheist Convention. The four-person panel all made reasoning errors, the severity of which ranged from ‘not even notable or worthy of criticism’ (Rebecca Watson) all the way to ‘so ironic, hypocritical, and irrational that I can see why atheists are so hated’ (AronRa). I may still get to this at some point, but I have been sidetracked by something else and I am highly motivated to write about it instead.

So here I am, about to do something that may shock a few people who have read my criticisms of her in the past. I am about to stand beside Rebecca Watson.

While reading James Croft’s review of the CFI Student Leadership Conference, mostly to find out how the agenda, which focused on activism (especially the featured talk by Desiree Schell) was received, I got to this:

The skeptical twitterverse has been buzzing with criticism of Watson’s talk due to her singling out a specific member of the movement by name and critiquing them in her talk.

Well, that got my attention. A talk about sexism (Watson’s topic was the Republican War on Women) in which she names names? Curiosity took over and I popped over to Twitter for a look. The first thing that caught my eye was this post by an attendee. I watched the video in which Rebecca describes her experience at the WAC after the same panel I was planning to write about. Essentially, after a day in which she publicly discussed her experiences with sexism and after making it clear that she was tired and wanted to go bed, she had (from her post on the matter):

…an unpleasant encounter I had with a fellow atheist that I thought might serve as a good example of what men in our community should strive to avoid – basically, in an elevator in Dublin at 4AM I was invited back to the hotel room of a man I had never spoken to before and who was present to hear me say that I was exhausted and wanted to go to bed.

In other words, he just didn’t get it.

I initially skipped the reply from a blogger in order to get an understanding of what any of this had to do with naming names at the CFI Conference. Then I got the gist: It seems that Rebecca quoted (and named) this blogger at the beginning of her talk, knowing that the blogger was in the audience. A blogger who’d criticized her. On a public blog.

The rest of the post recounted the discussion among some of the conference attendees that followed the talk. I found most of it somewhat disturbing, but I have to say that there was a part that made me laugh out loud (bold mine):

The primary response to the incident seemed to be that there was a power imbalance, and it was inappropriate for Rebecca to use her power as a nationally-known skeptic and as an official CFI-endorsed speaker at the conference to attack a student at said conference. Moreover, having been publicly called out by Rebecca Watson, Stef McGraw’s reputation as a skeptical student leader is now ruined forevarz.

The discussion of “power imbalance” carried over in a rebuttal by McGraw.

So there are multiple issues here, but I think they are related and I hope to make that relationship clear here. The questions are:

1. Was the story a case of sexualizing? Is Watson whining and/or demonizing men?
2. Why the disagreements? Don’t we recognize sexism when we see it?
3. Was Watson wrong to identify McGraw in her talk?
4. Was there an “imbalance of power” comparable, as was suggested by many, to sexual harassment in the workplace?
5. Is Watson an hypocrite?

Regarding the issue that sparked it all, I will spare you an analysis of what makes the incident a case of sexualizing (and creepy). Rebecca did a fine job of that in a post herself (which I quoted above). I am more interested in the incredible shallowness of the discussion, the lack of empathy demonstrated by McGraw and those who ‘sided’ with her on the issue, and the way the whole thing completely occluded any discussion of Rebecca’s talk, which is a talk I actually want to see and hear about.

I was amazed that a young woman could hear the story and not find it creepy. Perhaps it takes years of experiencing sexism for yourself before you can recognize and understand it. However, empathy doesn’t require that kind of understanding and I find the lack of empathy among the students who commented on this disturbing.

Watson blamed Stef’s reaction on ignorance and I won’t disagree, but a lack of perspective is more than just a failure to read the feminist literature. The difference between ‘getting it’ and not, I think, is in how deeply one is willing to think about the issues as well as and how much one is willing to be educated. Most importantly, how willing they are to listen to the views of those with more knowledge and experience than they have themselves. It is not dissimilar to the problem of expertise and, unfortunately, I see this as a symptom of a cultural shift away from both respect for others and the willingness to work for knowledge.

Mostly I think that shallow thinking and disrespect for wisdom stems from the narcissistic idea that one knows enough already. I realize this sounds like the typical crotchety “kids today!” attitude and maybe it is, but I am not alone in my thinking on it. I have seen so much of this in my classroom that it is now easy to for me to spot. Many simply do not think beyond the surface features of concepts, especially if doing so means that they might need to change their view.

The surface features of feminism that seem to get the most attention today are sexual freedom and equal voice. Both of these issues are complex and, when people oversimplify them in the name of feminism, the ‘solutions’ can exacerbate the problem. Sexism, the thing that feminism fights against, is not simple either.

On Sexual Freedom

If I were an anthropologist studying our culture today, I might get the idea that “sexual freedom” is about incorporating sex into every aspect of life or that it is the freedom to express one’s self sexually without regard to other people’s feelings. It’s not. Sexual freedom means YOU get to choose what happens to your body. You get to choose when and with whom to have sex. That’s all it means. In order to have that kind of freedom, we have to take responsibility. Culturally, it must be as okay to say “no” as it is to say “yes”. This cannot happen if women are primarily viewed as sexual objects when they do not choose to be.

With all freedom comes responsibility. In the Watson vs. elevator guy example, there were responsibilities on both sides. Watson’s responsibility was to refrain from expressing an interest in sex if she didn’t want it. She did more than that. She clearly expressed a desire to do something else: to sleep. Alone. The man in the elevator had a responsibility to consider the situation and put a little bit of thought into how she might feel about being propositioned at that time in that setting.

On a side note, calling women “prudes” because they do not choose to have sex with multiple partners, do not like it when men stare at their boobs (instead of listening), or do not enjoy a constant barrage of dick jokes, is the opposite of sexual freedom. Think of it as freedom of religion, which includes freedom from religion.

On Sexism and Equal Voice

Sexism is a deeply-rooted cultural phenomenon that is perpetuated, in part, by personal interactions involving struggles for power. Sexism is the set of subtle thought processes that keep women from equal access to resources for the same effort. It is not about simple numbers. It is not, for example, the high ratios if male to female speakers at conferences. It is the set of thought processes that, in part, leads to those high ratios and the thought processes that those high ratios perpetuate. What needs to change are the thought processes.

Getting more women involved is not a cure-all, especially if the women who are included are not qualified to contribute (which only serves to exacerbate the problem as it appears that’s what women have to offer; that’s what makes tokenism bad). And nobody who is qualified wants to be asked to speak simply because they have the right genitalia. This is what some people mean when they say that ratios are a “non-issue”. It’s not that they don’t matter. It’s the fact that the problem is not the ratios. The problem is the culture that keeps them high.

On Watson’s Public Flogging

Regarding the ‘naming of names’, I don’t know if I would have added the quotes to my talk, knowing that the blogger was in the audience, but how doing so is wrong escapes me. One comment was that Watson was “using the first part of her talk as a soapbox”, which tells me that either they haven’t seen her talk before or they haven’t been paying attention. Most of her talks begin with personal stories. Some are very long and most are irrelevant “small talk”, but some are soapbox-like. I don’t know if it is an intentional strategy for her, but it has the effect of bringing most of the audience closer, which makes them more receptive to the message. Speaking style is one of Rebecca’s strengths. As for the “soap box”, I wonder if they realize that what we ALL do is stand on a soap box and preach. Few of us actually take actions to affect policy change.

Other criticisms included calling into question Watson’s “atheist credentials”. I didn’t realize atheists needed credentials, nor is it relevant. Yes, I have criticized her openly (on more than one occasion, actually) in the past for speaking outside her knowledge base. I do not think she has done so in this case, but that does not matter because it is just not relevant.

One commenter actually claimed that, “…Dawkins or Christina [Greta, I assume?] would never insult someone who was in the audience at a peer conference.” Um. Really? Indeed, they would if it were warranted. At The Amaz!ng Meeting last year, Massimo Pigliucci’s talk was built around criticizing two very prominent skeptics, Michael Shermer, and James Randi (whose organization hosted the meeting; Shermer’s co-sponsored it) for a lack of hubris! In a university setting, academic talks are criticized on the spot by colleagues, in front of other colleagues. Open discussion, including criticism, is how shared knowledge is built.

The bulk of the criticism of Watson’s ‘calling out’ seems to be about power. Power to do what? Some have compared it to sexual harassment, which is a bit ridiculous and, again, shallow thinking.

McGraw and others claimed that Watson’s position and ‘celebrity’ in skeptic circles put McGraw at a disadvantage. That may be true, but I fail to see the relevance of this, either. This is not about power at all. There are no decisions to be made, positions to fill, salaries to pay, or awards to be given. It’s a disagreement, not an exchange. In cases of sexual harassment and discrimination, power is used to control people or coerce sexual favors in exchange for access to resources. To use some stereotypical examples, get the job, you need to sleep with the casting director. To get a raise, you’re expected to look the other way when your boss ogles you or slaps your ass. If you have sex with the teacher, they’ll give you an A. THAT is about power.

And McGraw’s reputation has “ruined” by Watson? Rebecca doesn’t have that kind of power. Nobody does. First, people do not start with “a good reputation” that can then only be reduced. Nobody is entitled to such a thing. A reputation is something you earn. Nobody can harm your reputation unless they lie. If they are telling the truth, then it is you who have harmed it.

Finally, some discussion of whether Watson is a hypocrite was pushed around. I have to say that, although it clearly doesn’t change my view of the elevator man’s actions or Rebecca’s in naming McGraw in her talk, it is clear that her actions and messages today are a world apart from what they were just a few years ago – or even more recently. However, I am encouraged by this recent edit to a 2006 post:

EDIT, June 26, 2011: Someone just sent me a link to this and asked me what I think about what I wrote more than five years ago. Well, I think I was wrong to make a joke that sexualized two women. I made a lot of off-color jokes back then, and to be fair I probably still do — but the difference now is that I’ve had five years to grow and change and learn about ideas like feminism and the patriarchy, and I’ve figured out that my actions and words will never be separate from those concepts.

And I am equally encouraged that she wrote this instead of trying to bury or hide from the past.

I have heard, third hand, that Rebecca’s talk, which was about a dangerous threat we face today, was excellent. I will have to wait for the video to be posted to judge for myself. In the meantime, I am hugely disappointed that some of the students were so wrapped up in the drama and threatened by the idea that we still have work to do to in promoting equality (work that doesn’t involve raising our own self-esteems) seem to have missed it along with its point.

Related posts:

1. Is that a fallacy in your pocket or can you cite some sources? A response to Women and Feminism at TAM8

No related posts.

Brian Dunning received a Parsec Award for his work on Skeptoid. Photo by Daniel Loxton

Until I read Skepchick Rebecca Watson’s article at the Skeptical Inquirer Online entitled DragonCon: A Chance to Preach Beyond the Choir?

According to the article, some of the talks did not “really capture the attention of the sci-fi/fantasy crowd”. There was some question as to whether a talk called Mathematical Modeling Pitfalls could compete with a panel on the Science Track called How to Raise a Mad Scientist“. Rebecca implied that she would have rather attended a session titled Robot Battles than participate in a panel and suggested that the audience for this panel was small because of the competing session. She also suggested that, due to the distractions of other events, “…it may be well worth the effort for SkepTrack’s dedicated volunteers to avoid the typical and occasionally dry topics we see elsewhere and instead cater to the ridiculous.”

The promotional efforts of the Skepchick/Women Thinking Free (WTF) Foundation project were presented as an example of effective outreach to be emulated. The project involved bringing a free vaccine clinic to the adjacent Mall (it was too late to arrange for space at the convention itself) and a table for the organization was set up outside the large “Walk of Fame” ballroom at which they placed posters of sci/fi-fantasy characters with bandages from vaccinations.

Finally, several loaded/rhetorical questions suggested that Skeptrack is full of self-described skeptics and fails at outreach.

Essentially, what I read in this review is:

• Skeptrack is boring.
• Skeptrack content doesn’t appeal to Rebecca Watson, therefore she doesn’t think that it appeals to non-skeptics.
• Skeptrack events must be more appealing to compete with interesting events on other tracks.
• Skeptrack content should be “ridiculous” so that it can attract non-skeptics.

Valid, constructive criticism is invaluable, especially when a group with goals is struggling to meet those goals.

Baseless criticism is often harmful and sometimes offensive.

I was offended by this review.

I understand that many people found it innocuous and even amusing. Perhaps my being is offended is related to my level of personal involvement given the examples chosen for the article. However, I do not believe that I am alone in thinking that changes like those suggested are unwarranted and that implementing them could move Skeptrack in the wrong direction. These decisions are the track director’s to make, but such public criticism has a way of creating pressure even when it is clearly unfounded.

Skeptrack is the product of year-’round hard work by track director Derek Colanduno and a dedicated staff, including Robynn (A.K.A. Swoopy) McCarthy, who directs a track of her own devoted to podcasting. They work closely with the Space and Science Tracks to create a well-rounded program. Many of us present on those tracks as well. In its second year, Skeptrack was given a room quite a bit larger than similar tracks to accommodate the volume of attendees it attracted the first. This, its third year, saw a daunting schedule which began at 8:30 am and did not end until between 11:00 pm and 2:00 am. The audience size varied by day, time of day, and other factors, but all events were well-attended and many were standing room only. In other words, the track is extremely successful in terms of attendance.

Extremely.

Tables for the organizations were set up - a great place for outreach. Here Kylie Sturgess minds the store while chatting with George Hrab and Mykel Alvis.

Despite this success, the title of the article suggests that the track is merely “preaching to the choir”. There is no evidence presented, not even anecdotal, to support this assertion. I have seen this in only one other place and the evidence presented there was limited to “I don’t think I would be interested if I wasn’t a skeptic.” Since we do not have a systematic analysis of the audience to measure the level of familiarity each attendee has with “the movement” and compare this with those ouside the room, we can only determine if the large crowds were mostly self-described skeptics using our personal experiences, which are dictated largely by what we choose to do and with whom we choose to interact.

Kylie Sturgess’s review describes some of the interactions I had during the conference which formed my opinion that Skeptrack is successful outreach. This view is shared by many and documented in reviews, the most moving of which is Brian Dunning’s discussion on Skepticblog. Brian expresses some surprise and great pleasure that the event was indeed not only valuable outreach, but “rivaled that of any other critical thinking conference” he’d attended.

Regarding competition with other events, indeed, Rebecca walked out of Mathematical Modeling Pitfalls about 20 minutes into it. Her departure was conspicuous to me because it was not long after Jennifer Ouellette had handed me the microphone and I was looking out at the audience. Rebecca could therefore could not have seen first hand that there was still a line at the microphone when we ran out of time for the question and answer portion, which was allotted half an hour. The room, which seats nearly 300, was 80% plus full. The article does not state whether Rebecca attended the other talk or if that room was full, however, the Science Track room holds approximately 150. Even if full, the law of conservation and, yes, a little mathematical modeling, tells us the answer to her question, “How could a talk about calculus ever compete with a talk about [How to Raise a Mad Scientist]?” Apparently, quite well.

The article also fails to note that Skeptrack included a parenting panel of its own. “Raising Skeptical Geeks” was held in the Crystal Ballroom in front of a packed audience. That room seats approximately 1,000 people. Adam Savage’s time at the microphone was short compared to that of the other panel members, yet many, many people have commented that it was their favorite panel of the weekend.

During the convention, I participated in panels and talks about consumer skepticism, the psychology of skepticism, parenting, perception, education, sex, feminism, and, yes, calculus and mathematical modeling. Perhaps some people find those topics boring, but I do not and, judging from the sizes of the audiences I saw, neither do a great many Dragon*Con attendees. Some of those were standing-room-only. None of faces of the people I spoke with following any of the panels were familiar and I recognized only a very small portion of the audience members, if any.

Attendance at the “Blogging 2.0″ panel that Rebecca wanted to cancel in favor of attending a Robot competition was approximately 70%. This is on the low side for Skeptrack, but that is more likely due to the fact that it was held on Monday than due to any competing event. I moderated a panel during the parade, which is the most popular event at the convention. The audience for it was smaller than other events, but still quite large. I had the same experience last year. There were plenty of geeks to go around.

The article also claimed that many of the panels were “composed of fans and enthusiastic amateurs talking about the subjects that interest them.” I was confused by this. I am not familiar with the content of all of the tracks, but since the topic of the article was Skeptrack, I found this insulting. Although there were a few individuals placed on a some of the later panels at the last minute, usually replacing someone who could not make it, these could be counted on one hand and not done without thought to their likely contributions. The content was certainly not “fans and amateurs” just “talking about subjects that interested them.” I suppose one could describe anyone who doesn’t receive a salary for skeptical activism or science as technically “an amateur”, but then that would include half of the Guest list.

As with any endeavor, even a hugely successful one such as Skeptrack, improvements are possible. The article suggests that we replace what the dry, boring content with… well, I’m not sure. The approach to promoting the vaccine clinic was described as “embracing DragonCon’s crazy, pop-culture-obsessed energy” by creating the posters I described above. I do not want to minimize the success of the clinic as measured by the number of people vaccinated in comparison to the numbers usually seen by the CDC. Even without a cost-benefit analysis, it is clear that 200 people vaccinated in the middle of an epidemic is an achievement. However, the question of whether the posters drove those numbers is unanswered. They were seen by 30,000 to 40,000 people, but the number of people who see advertisements is no measure of their effectiveness.

How many of the 200 who were vaccinated were involved in setting up the clinic? How many were skeptics presenting on Skeptrack? How many heard about it while attending a Skeptrack event? The clinic was promoted in nearly every panel on the track and in some on the Science Track. The claim that “it worked” is untenable and the suggestion that Skeptrack needs to “get crazy” is unsubstantiated.

The list of questions at the end of the piece ask, “What can we do to get them to step inside? How many are interested in what we have to say? How many are skeptics who just don’t know it yet?” I think that Derek and his crew have answered those by offering content which clearly interests people, gets them to step inside, and, judging from the personal anecdotes of new “skeptics” I have met in the past year, informed people not only that they are skeptics, but that being a skeptic is cool, fun, and interesting.

We have observed Skeptrack’s success. There is absolutely no reason to think that the programming is boring other than Rebecca Watson and a couple of other people claim to be bored by it.

Instead of suggesting changes which could turn the boat around, perhaps the critics would benefit from emulating and accommodating the current model at other conventions. Create Skeptracks everywhere and shoot for the same level of success Dragon*Con has seen from this model.

Related posts:

1. Dragon*Con 2010