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

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.

I am sure that most people have not thought much about why it’s called “critical thinking” and, when asked, would probably assume that “critical” refers to its importance (especially skeptics). However, they would only be partially correct. “Critical” means “crucial”, but it also refers to discriminating judgments. Critical thinking is an process in which we distinguish accurate information from inaccurate information and/or determine the best course of action given a set of possibilities.

The reason criticism is so important is a bit abstract, but it can be at least partially illustrated through the principle of falsification. Essentially, attempting to falsify a hypothesis is the best way to determine if it is likely to be true.

Most skeptics are familiar with the confirmation bias, which is the very strong human tendency to favor confirming information. We notice, remember, believe, and assign more weight to information that confirms what we already believe to be true than other information. What is discussed less often is how this bias extends to how we seek knowledge and test hypotheses. Humans tend to experiment to determine relationships in the world, but we do so in a confirmatory manner when a better approach is to attempt to falsify. That is, we tend to try this or try that to see what happens. However, the best test of a hypothesis is one in which the outcome tells us what is likely to be true by eliminating other possibilities. This is how science works most of the time and I think that we can agree that science works better than any other method.

A good illustration of this human tendency is the Wason 4-Card Task. Fortunately, it is also a good way to explain why falsification is ideal.

In the Wason 4-Card Task (A.K.A. the Wason Selection Task), participants are given the following problem:

There are four cards in front of you, each with a letter on one side and a number on the other side. The rule is: If there is a vowel on one side of a card, then there must be an even number on the other side.

Which cards must be turned over to determine if the rule holds true? (How many cards, minimum, and which ones?) 

The most popular answers in this task are the E and 4 cards or just the E card. This demonstrates an approach to hypothesis testing which is confirmatory in nature. That is, we search for examples of the first condition, then confirm that the second condition is met. This is similar to how most people deal with other types of questions, such as whether or not a pill reduces headache pain. How would you find out? Would you should take the pill when you have headache pain, then judge the pill effective if the pain is gone an hour later?

Unfortunately, this approach is not a very effective means of gaining knowledge. To understand why, let’s look at what we can learn from turning over each card.

Only the bold information tells us anything about whether the rule holds true or not and only in the cases in which it is violated do we learn something meaningful enough to draw a conclusion. The correct answer to the basic Wason Task is that both the E and 7 cards are required. The E card can confirm the rule, but what is important is that it, and the 7 card, have the ability to falsify it. Turning over the 4 card is unnecessary because the rule does not even apply unless it has been followed, therefore, we learn nothing interesting.

If my statement about is confusing, you are not alone. This task is one of the most well-studied in the field of cognitive psychology, yet why humans are so bad at it is still a bit of a mystery. One of the hypotheses is that people have a difficult time recognizing that the rule is not bi-directional. In other words, the rule is:

If there is a vowel on one side, there is an even number on the other side.

it is NOT:

If there is a vowel on one side, there is an even number on the other side and vice-versa.

However, when conditional statements like this are made, we often assume that they are bi-directional unless we have context which tells us otherwise. For example, rules like these provide context which suggests more than what is stated:

If it is Monday, then the banks are open.

If I buy a ticket, I will win something in the raffle.

Because we have schemas that tell us that banks are open on weekdays (at least), we understand that the reverse of the first conditional (If the banks are open, then it is Monday) is not necessarily true. In the second conditional, our knowledge of how raffles work tells us that a raffle ticket must have been purchased if the author won something in it. In each case, however, we are not evaluating the statements on their own merit. We introduce information from our knowledge base. The problem with this kind of reasoning is that we assume that our knowledge is accurate.

When these statements are included in arguments, we draw conclusions based, at least in part, on our current understanding of the world, which could be wrong.

One example that I often used in class illustrates how strong this bias can be and how it affects our ability to determine cause and effect relationships. Given the following argument, students are asked to judge whether the argument is valid or invalid. They are reminded that “valid” refers only to whether the argument is logically sound and not whether the statements within it are true (truth is a separate property):

Major Premise: If I learn a lot, I will get a good grade on the test. 

Minor Premise: I got a good grade on the test.

Conclusion: Therefore, I learned a lot. 

On its surface, the argument appears valid. However, it is not. There is nothing in the major premise to indicate that learning is the only way to get a good grade on the test – that learning is required for a good grade. It merely states that learning will guarantee one. Unfortunately, some dedicated students who have successfully used flash cards and other rehearsal techniques in courses in which memorization is helpful – introductory courses with multiple-choice exams and so forth – will assume that this method of studying equates to learning. When they fail in a more rigorous upper-division course in which conceptual understanding is necessary, they will be unlikely to attribute that failure to their study methods.

Going back to the example of how to determine if a pill takes away your headache pain, the method most people follow is to turn over the E card and nothing else. If your headache pain does not go away (outcome: an odd number), then you will know that the pill doesn’t work. However, what if the headache does go away? Is it possible that headaches go away on their own? Could taking the pill induce a placebo effect? What you need is to design an experiment in which you can eliminate all other possibilities (headaches go away by themselves, placebo effects, etc.). What you need to do is set the pill up to fail. If the headache goes away when it should (turning over the E card and finding an even number) AND it does not go away when it should not (turning over the 7 card and finding a consonant), then we can conclude that the pill worked.

The confirmational approach is like asking a psychic to predict the flip of a coin, but only counting the times in which the psychic was correct. This is an excellent way to find out if they have supernatural powers, but only if you also know the rate at which they are incorrect. When skeptics test psychics, they compare the outcome to what would be expected by chance. If they can consistently outperform blind guessing, the only logical conclusion is that they must not be guessing. To eliminate alternative explanations, skeptics ensure that the psychic is not receiving information from other sources such as body language cues.

Now, what does all of this have to do with criticism?

What science does, both in single studies and as a general process, is eliminate incorrect hypotheses. In general, scientists come up with likely hypotheses and theories based on what we are reasonably certain is true (as many as humanly possible), then eliminate them until only one remains. We eliminate them by finding faults with them, by demonstrating that they can’t be true (or are highly unlikely to be true).

Critical thinking works this way, too. The most effective process of evaluating information is one which looks for faults, inconsistencies, and weaknesses. Applying critical thinking to plans and ideas, otherwise we waste resources and time as well as risk harm. After we have completed a project, even a successful one, analysis should not focus on “what we did right”. We can’t know why we succeeded without comparisons to similar situations in which we failed. Focusing on what we think is good is like counting the “hits” and ignoring the “misses”.

Related posts:

1. Is that a fallacy in your pocket or can you cite some sources? A response to Women and Feminism at TAM8
2. Reaching Out and Geeking Out
3. Naughty Elmo Revisited

Some years ago, Dr. Robert A. Burton was the neurologist on call at a San Francisco hospital when a high-profile colleague from the oncology department asked him to perform a spinal tap on an elderly patient with advanced metastatic cancer. The patient had seemed a little fuzzy-headed that morning, and the oncologist wanted to check for meningitis or another infection that might be treatable with antibiotics.

Dr. Burton hesitated. Spinal taps are painful. The patient’s overall prognosis was beyond dire. Why go after an ancillary infection? But the oncologist, known for his uncompromising and aggressive approach to treatment, insisted.

“For him, there was no such thing as excessive,” Dr. Burton said in a telephone interview. “For him, there was always hope.”

On entering the patient’s room with spinal tap tray portentously agleam, Dr. Burton encountered the patient’s family members. They begged him not to proceed. The frail, bedridden patient begged him not to proceed. Dr. Burton conveyed their pleas to the oncologist, but the oncologist continued to lobby for a spinal tap, and the exhausted family finally gave in.

As Dr. Burton had feared, the procedure proved painful and difficult to administer. It revealed nothing of diagnostic importance. And it left the patient with a grinding spinal-tap headache that lasted for days, until the man fell into a coma and died of his malignancy.

The oncologist’s intentions were good, but he cared so much for the welfare of his patients that it clouded his judgment about what was best for his patients. The goal he wanted to accomplish was driven by his values, as most goals are, but his ability to accomplish that goal was hindered by the same values.

In the past month alone, I have seen good skeptics deny consensus science, cherry-pick, hyper-rationalize, and engage in a number of poor practices in order to justify their decisions or actions. In the past few years, I have noted an embarrassingly large number of occasions in which skeptics have charged forward with ideas in ways I consider to be counterproductive and, in some cases, potentially harmful – giving talks and workshops without an appropriate amount of knowledge on the subject, staging meaningless protests simply because they’ve gained attention, or wasting resources conducting surveys and experiments without clear goals, training, or regard for issues such as the ethical treatment of human subjects. I am sure that these skeptics were motivated by a desire to make a difference – a desire to do something. However, ideology, values, passion, and beliefs got in the way of good reasoning. For example, last year a group of skeptics, angry that an anti-vax rally starring Wakefield was going on in their town, charged forward without consulting an expert and distributed a number of fliers which said, in part:

Vaccines…don’t cause diseases or disorders or distress or dystopia. In fact, receiving vaccines is completely safe.

I don’t think I need to go into the possible ramifications of this mistake.

Skepticism, as a movement, promotes critical thinking, careful consideration of evidence, and attention to details which are easily missed. When skeptics fail to apply those same principles to the work their actions are, at best, wasteful and, at worst, potentially harmful.

I found myself scratching my head last week when D.J. Grothe posted this article to Swift titled Should skepticism be divorced from values?. It was a surprise for two reasons. 1) On most matters of the philosophy of skepticism and even activism, D.J. and I are in near-total agreement, yet I did not agree with this piece at all. 2) It seems to contradict some of D.J.’s statements, particularly those he has made on the stage at various events.

In an effort to better understand, I entered a conversation on Facebook and tried to explain my confusion as well as my opinion. I failed. D.J., no doubt drawing on experiences in conversations with me and others about similar topics, is certain that we agree and that talking it out will eventually lead us both to see that. I am not as confident. Although I do not doubt that D.J. will agree with nearly everything in this post, I think we will remain divided on an important point.

First, let me declare now that I have a tremendous respect for D.J. At every event he seems to find ways to communicate the most important fundamentals of organized skepticism, facts that new participants need to know (and seasoned skeptics need to remember) such as organizational scope, tolerance, and integrity. He does so without apology. He is also one of the best panel moderators and interviewers I have ever seen. He asks tough questions without blinking and, when those questions are not directly answered, he steers the conversation in the direction intended. That said, the post bothered me and not a little bit.

Second, I will not use the term “divorced” because I don’t feel that conveys an appropriate level of distance (so, in that sense, one may split hairs and say that D.J. and I agree). I will use “separate”.

A little bit of background

In the post and afterward, D.J. notes that the post is a reinforcement of his 2010 NECSS talk – a talk I quite like. There are elements of the talk of which I take issue, but overall I feel that it is a good “initiation” talk for new skeptics. I would summarize the talk this way:

“Skepticism” refers to a method for evaluating claims, but it also refers to a movement. The movement is a type of humanism. It is a type of humanism because those who began it did so for humanitarian reasons. To Randi, it’s just the right thing to do. This humanism drives me (D.J.) and most others I know; we debunk and educate because pseudoscience is harmful. We share the value that to know reality is to avoid such harm. In order to do this work, we must also have a strong mind – the kind of mind that allows us to see reality as it is and not how we would like it to be.

I don’t think that D.J. would disagree with this summary, but perhaps his emphasis is different from mine. I would expect that. As an instructor and researcher, I have focused on the importance of objectivity and how to achieve it. As an activist, D.J. has focused on the reduction of harm.

However, I believe that D.J.’s Swift post differs significantly from this talk and introduces a serious problem in an attempt to emphasize the humanistic goals of organized skepticism. The problem is in the title and is the theme of the post – a theme I do not believe it shares with the NECSS talk. Regardless of D.J.’s intended message, I feel very strongly that this post sends the wrong message – a message that it’s okay (maybe even important) to allow one’s “moral indignation” to dictate how the work is done. It’s not. In fact, it’s more than just not okay. A core property – THE core property – of good science is objectivity. Values are important. Values motivate us to act and provide us with goals. However, values, practically by definition, erode objectivity almost universally.

In a comment on Facebook, D.J. stated:

I don’t want the position that one must separate ethics from her skepticism to gain ground. It’s both wrong, and also counter my goals.

Ethics are a slightly different issue and very domain-specific. D.J. specifically described a moral imperative (to mitigate the harm that pseudoscience causes), so in my mind “moral values” replaces “ethics” in his sentence and I address it as such.

The problem of values

It is actually unethical, in my opinion, to fail to separate one’s moral values from the work.

Is it ethical for a pharmacist to refuse to sell contraceptives, yet expect to be allowed to continue in that career? Is it ethical for a doctor to tell the parents of a fifteen year old victim of incest about her pregnancy because he believes that she’s lying and the father is the head of the household?

Those are, of course, examples of situations in which the values conflict with the work. However, there are many, many ways in which the same values that motivate people to pursue a career or volunteer work hinder their ability to do that work well. This is more obvious in some careers than others; some that come to mind immediately (other than the most obvious, scientists) are doctors, politicians, judges, journalists, and teachers. For example, would it be it ethical for the teacher who wrote this letter to fail to teach evolution because he feels that it makes kids “think like atheists”, something he feels is harmful to kids? Is it okay for a journalist to slant a story rather than simply report the facts?

One of D.J.’s comments sums up the differences between us, I think. He wrote:

I do not favor letting the suggestion stand that the method of skepticism should be practiced in a value-neutral vacuum.

Insisting that practitioners separate their values from the work is not even close to creating “a vacuum”. The “moral imperative” provides both motivation and a general purpose (e.g., “to reduce or eliminate the harm caused by pseudoscience”). However, that is where the role of values should end. I contend that any practice of skepticism that does not strive to be value-neutral is contradictory, counterproductive, hypocritical, and generally just bad.

Another of his comments reads, in part:

If what you are saying is that the work of skepticism should be practiced in a value-neutral way, and that our priorities as skeptics should not be informed by our ethical commitments (as an example, defrauding someone of their nest egg with fake psychic claims is equivalent to your grandpa thinking he can dowse in your backyard) then I disagree.

Well, this is quite a loaded statement, but I am saying something very much like this. I am certainly not saying that those two examples are equal, but I am saying that priorities should be informed by facts. One of those facts is a goal or set of goals which were derived, in part, from values. Once a general purpose or mission is defined, the question of priorities is epistemological; we need to know which projects best meet our goals. The examples D.J. provided are easy to compare, but what about the more difficult comparisons? Which should be a higher priority, rallying people pass out fliers at a “talk” by the author of an anti-vaccine book or producing materials to be used in classrooms to teach kids how to evaluate claims? In both the easy and the difficult scenarios, the choice should be driven by the organizational goals (facts) and information about how each scenario meets those goals (more facts). Values should be set aside because they impair our ability to perceive, process, and remember facts. 

Recognizing one’s motivations and separating them from the process of reasoning is a fundamental part of both science and skepticism.

If you think about the psychologists who have spoken at TAM and other events, most of the topics covered are d to the myriad of ways that human beings err in receiving, recording, remembering, and processing information about the world. It is precisely because we are so bad at this that we need science. And it is precisely because we are so bad at this that skeptical activism exists.

The examples we use to demonstrate these flaws are usually a bit removed from daily life. Visual illusions, pareidolia, and probability problems do not always show how subtle the reasoning problems can be. Consider this example from a recent Scientific American blog post Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Trust in The Facts, Not Your Version of Them (bold mine):

When we look around us, what is it that we see? Do we see things as they are, or do we at once, without thinking, begin to interpret? Take the simple example of a wine glass. All it is is a transparent object that holds a liquid–which we know by experience should be wine. But if we’re in a store and late for a party? It’s a present, an object of value and beauty for someone else to appreciate. At home and thirsty? It becomes, perhaps, a water glass, if nothing else is available. Bored? A toy to turn around and around, seeing what reflections we can see, how we can distort our own face on the curved surfaces. Solving a murder? Potential evidence of some final, telling pre-death interaction–perhaps the victim took a final sip before he met an untimely end.

Soon, instead of saying there is a wine glass on the table, you say the victim’s glass had been empty at the time of the crime. And you proceed from there. Why was the victim drinking? Why was he interrupted? Why had he placed the glass where it was? And if it doesn’t make sense? Impossible. You’ve started with a fact and worked your way forward. It must fit. The only thing is, you’ve forgotten that it was just a glass to begin with. The victim’s? Maybe not. Placed there by him? Who knows. Empty at the time of the crime? Perhaps, but perhaps not. You’ve imbued an object with a personal take so naturally that you don’t realize you’ve done it. And that’s the crucial–and sometimes fatal–error, of both reasoning and world perception. A pipe is never just a pipe.

Hardly ever, in describing an object, do we see it as just a valueless, objective wine glass. And hardly ever do we think to consider the distinction–for of course, it hardly ever matters. But it’s the rare mind that has trained itself to separate the objective fact from the immediate, subconscious and automatic subjective interpretation that follows.

The way our perceptual and cognitive systems operate allows us to function in the world, but higher-order thinking requires recognizing the flaws in this system and correcting for them. This is the “strong mind” that D.J. was talking about in his NECSS talk. Most skeptics are intimately familiar with the confirmation bias, which is the tendency to notice, remember, believe, and assign more weight to information that is consistent with our current beliefs than neutral or conflicting information. This bias is one of many biases and heuristics, but it is arguably the one that does the most damage to our ability to reason well. What many skeptics may forget is how many of our beliefs are ideological – driven by moral values and opinions more than facts. These beliefs are even more difficult to set aside because they embody what we wish to be true more than simply what we think is true. So it is even more important to separate ideology from epistemology and decision-making than other beliefs.

Most readers are familiar with the thought experiments in moral reasoning which provide a framework for the practice of solving moral dilemmas, but they illustrate my point well. A variant of “the trolley problem” is particularly relevant:

A train (trolley) is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five, but you know for certain that it will work. You do not weigh enough to stop the train, so simply jumping is an act of suicide that will not save the people. Nobody will see you push him, so there are no social or legal consequences to consider. Would you push him?

This is a very tough choice. On the one hand, your ability to act in this situation alone makes you morally obligated to act, at least according to many. Failing to act is an action in and of itself; you’ve allowed five people to die. Pushing the man off the bridge is an act which can only be considered murder. The most morally-correct decision is generally considered the utilitarian decision to throw the fat man over, yet few people make that choice. [NOTE: I am fully aware that some argue about whether utilitarianism is truly rational and I will not discuss those issues here. I will just say that these scenarios severely limit the number of possible strategies and force a choice between them.]

This is, admittedly, grossly oversimplified moral reasoning without an epistemological context, but it is not difficult to add such context.  In fact, this exercise was, ironically, part of a recent study that provides that kind of context in addition to explaining what’s wrong with using the problem as more than an illustration.

Bartels and Pizarro presented students with a series of bridge-style exercises, including a “fat man” version the trolley problem. What they found was that the rate of utilitarian responses were positively correlated with measures of psychopathy (someone high in psychopathy will be low in empathy and relatively anti-social) and machiavellianism (the degree to which an individual is emotionally detached, cynical, and manipulative).

If you don’t understand the study, as the media clearly didn’t (big surprise), you might be tempted to conclude (as the media did) that people who care little about others can make the best decisions about what is best for the majority. This is an ugly finding that many people are likely to reject, simply because they don’t like it. Science doesn’t work that way. Science is about truth, not values, and sometimes the truth is just not pretty. Scientists who fail to separate their values and motivations from their work fail to interpret evidence appropriately (or form good theory). The same is true for skepticism.

However, when viewed in the context of the literature on moral judgments, the finding is not about the characteristics of reasoners, but the use of these exercises to measure moral reasoning:

Our study illustrates that the widely adopted use of sacrificial dilemmas in the study of moral judgment fails to distinguish between people who are motivated to endorse utilitarian moral choices because of underlying emotional deficits (such as those captured by our measures of psychopathy and Machiavellianism) and those who endorse it out of genuine concern for the welfare of others and a considered belief that utilitarianism is the optimal way of achieving the goals of morality.

Now, I think that there is something missing from this study that would likely wash out the effects, namely that the sample of college students is likely to be filled with people who have not yet spent much time thinking about moral dilemmas. In fact, a 2008 study suggests that most undergraduate students do not even know what a moral dilemma is. There are exceptions, but many students might have genuine concern for the welfare of others, but fail to recognize utilitarianism as an optimal choice at this time in their lives. I suspect that, given a sample with a wider age range, the effects would be reduced or disappear as the proportion of caring utilitarians increases.

Even with such a sample, though, the authors’ conclusions in regard to their purpose stand because, in part, the scenarios do not consider how the individual arrived at the choice. A common problem in studies of cognitive processing is that arriving at the prescriptive answer is no guarantee that one has followed good reason to get there. Consider the atheist who endorses alternative medicine (*cough* Bill Maher). The exercises are easily reduced to a simple math problem. What they have measured is one’s ability to determine the “morally correct” course of action given a specific scenario, not whether they have adopted the moral values that we assume are embodied in that choice.

So what does this have to do with skepticism and values? Let me explain by telling you what I would predict if I could observe participants in real-life situations as described by the “fat man”. I believe that the psychopaths and machiavellians would fail to push the fat man. They may know that this is the best moral choice, but not care. They have no motivation to act. The result is failing to save four people (net).

So, I believe that values are extremely important because they motivate us to take action. However, which action is best? The individual who is unable to separate their values from the choice they have to make, at least according to and this many other studies, usually fails to make the utilitarian choice in any case. If you do not know what the best choice is, how can you take the best action? (This, by the way, is what is meant by “informing values”. I contend that we can only do so by first setting them aside.) I’d predict that those who both value the lives of others and are able to set that value aside and solve the problem objectively are much more likely to take action than either of the two others. In less restricted, real-world scenarios, these are the people who take the actions which are most likely to lead to positive change.

The consequences of value-driven actions

Humanism is an ideology which drives us to promote skepticism. That same ideology drives others to a long list of careers and activities, from social worker to clergy to homeopathic product sales. Secular humanism may reduce that group to atheists and agnostics, but my point here is that humanism is not why we promote skepticism. It’s why we want to help people. We promote scientific skepticism for a number of reasons, some of which are shared, such as the belief that it is the best way to evaluate claims. Some other reasons to choose skeptical activism as a means of helping people are that we find it interesting or have a specific skill set which can be of use. However, these are motivations to do the work and not the work itself.

I realize that I now sound like a broken record, but if we fail to separate these motivations from the work, we fail to be objective. “Righteous indignation” may lead to action, but it does not always lead to positive actions when it clouds our judgment. How do we keep it from clouding our judgment? By separating it from the work. Cool heads prevail; hot heads make mistakes.

Good intentions have motivated people to do all sorts of things. Outcomes from the actions we take with good intentions are just like those we take when our intentions are not so good: they vary from great to devastating. Take, for example, the well-intentioned “Self-Esteem Movement”, an effort to increase academic performance, reduce bullying, and create a long list of other benefits.  With the best of intentions and motivated by values that I believe most of us share, educators, parents, and psychologists plowed forward with programs and policies which are still very alive and well today. These policies have done irreparable harm to our children and society in general because they achieve the opposite of the goals they set out to acheive.

Contrary to popular belief, children do not need high self-esteem in order to succeed.  In fact, efforts to raise self-esteem are extremely counter-productive and harmful because they tend to increase not self-esteem, but narcissism. These efforts are particularly harmful when enacted as part of a bully prevention program. The Freudian idea that bullies are compensating for low self-esteem is not only myth, but the opposite is true. Bullies are narcissistic and entitled. Attempting to raise their self-esteem makes the problem worse, not better. Recent reviews of the literature lead to clear conclusions: narcissists often respond to criticism and rejection with aggression. They do this because they are incapable of understanding the point of view of another and, therefore, helpless to change it. Like a toddler with no negotiation skills, they throw a tantrum.

Most laypersons adopt similar views of criminals and others with anti-social behaviors. It feels better to think of people who do bad things as “broken”. Not only does it allow us to think that people can never be inherently bad, but it gives us a sense of control. If we can just “fix” them, they’ll be good, or if we can stop the cycle of abuse…  right?

The use of pop-pedagogy is another example of good intentions and values getting in the way of reason. If you doubt that pseudoscience in education is a serious problem, attend a back-to-school night or just visit some education websites and count the number of references to “Learning Styles”, “Multiple Intelligences”, “Emotional Intelligence”, or “Bloom’s Taxonomy”. Then visit the education department of any university and discover why. Instead of teaching from the academic literature, they are teaching from textbooks with content drawn from popular press. Teachers adopt these ideas because they seem right and they address good values – the idea that every child is equally intelligent, just in different areas, the idea that all children are capable of learning everything that every other child can learn; they just learn “differently”. Experiences easily reinforce the ideas through the confirmation bias. (Caveat: “Bloom’s Taxonomy” is supported, but it is descriptive. The suggestion that drawing from all levels of taxonomy in teaching or assessment is unsupported.)

When we allow our good intentions to pave the road, it doesn’t lead to truth. Yes, we should be motivated by our values. We should consider our values when setting general goals. However, in order to reach the goals we claim to care about, in order to achieve the things we claim to value, we must separate those values from the work. We must not allow those values to enter into our decision-making processes.

In an effort to get to the bottom line in under 4,500 words, I’ll end with another quote from D.J. Grothe and a new, more direct reply:

I argue that the work of skepticism should not be divorced from our ethical imperative or “righteous indignation” to mitigate the harm that undue credulity causes. I don’t think you’re saying this.

Well, yes, actually (if you replace “divorced” with “separated”) I think I am.

No related posts.

For those new to the community (and this blog), Skepticism is well-represented at Dragon*Con thanks to Derek Colanduno and Robynn (Swoopy) McCarthy of Skepticality. Derek is the director for Skeptrack, the skeptic fan track at Dragon*Con, with the help of Swoopy (who directs the podcasting track) and a number of awesome staff. The track began as a few talks/panels on the Science Track and grew quickly, claiming a large room of its own. Equipment on loan from AburptMedia, along with some handy technicians (who, along with Derek, Swoopy, and the rest of the staff, donate their time) make it possible to stream the Skeptrack content in one’s home on another continent.

This year I participated in five events, including one on the Science Track. This was half as many as last year, so I was able to attend many more of the other talks and panels. But don’t get me wrong – I am quite satisfied that my work was productive and was very glad to be a spectator as others, particularly Phil Plait and Pamela Gay, appeared to run from room to room and talk themselves hoarse as I did at D*C 2010.

I particularly enjoyed a “quiz show” hosted by Brian Thompson called Wait! Wait! Don’t Fool Me! with contestants Phil Plait, Rebecca Watson, George Hrab, and Blake Smith. Tears were streaming down my face, I laughed so hard. Another great show was a series of cool science demos which reminded me of my childhood visits to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and the Museum of Science in Boston. Matt Lowry walked on glass! Here’s a short video of some of what I saw:
 

A panel about activism was mostly excellent, with D.J. Grothe echoing some of the concerns about which I have written recently, but a few statements rubbed me the wrong way. In particular, Brian Brushwood appeared to advocate for “trying anything” without thought to whether it would accomplish any goals or finding out whether it’s been done before by someone who can offer advice. We need innovation, but careless abandon is dangerous and wasteful. Resources are limited and risks are always involved. Another point that was raised was that many people new to skepticism are concerned primarily with issues of religion. I fail to see the relevance of this point. All of the major organizations defend science and science education (e.g., evolution). All of the major organizations debunk testable claims with religious content (e.g., faith healing). Most importantly, however, there are many atheist organizations for those who would like to attack religion or make religion a focus. The idea that defending the focus and scope of skepticism somehow ties the hands of individuals is a bit silly. All of the major skeptic organizations limit their missions to testable claims for reasons which have nothing to do with the threat level or pervasiveness of the claim. The focus on evidence, not conclusions, is a matter of scientific integrity. But of course I have said all of this before.

Two other talks that did not disappoint were given by Genie Scott and Jonathan Strickland of How Stuff Works. Scott gave a fascinating history of creationism and Strickland covered consumer skepticism of tech products. Both were excellent.

A quick summary of the events in which I participated:

The Surprising Science of Self-Esteem – I admit that I was a bit nervous about the attendance for this talk, even though it was a terrific time slot (Friday night at 7pm) on the Science Track. It isn’t the kind of title that would attract me, but my hope was that some of the audience would be deterred from some of the self-esteem boosting BS that I’ve seen, which was more likely if they were there expecting to hear about it. I also pimped the talk to all of the friends I could find beforehand. It’s a topic I have spent a great deal of time with recently and I put quite a bit of work into the material for this talk. Of course the track itself is a draw and the room was packed as always.

I opened by warning the audience that I had misled them a bit. I was planning to talk about self-esteem, but more of the hour would be devoted to something related, but different: narcissism. I do not know if anyone was disappointed; unfortunately, an hour is just not enough time to cover the topic the way I’d wanted to cover it and there was no time for Q & A. Judging by the response (and the sharp victory cry of ”YES!” from one audience member when I said, “If you were hoping for a motivational speech, you’ll be disappointed”), most in the audience were glad they stayed.

I will be writing about the topic and my talk in a series of blog posts. In the meantime, a few signs that you might be a narcissist:

• Your name is part of the title and/or URL of your blog (unless you are a best-selling author).
• Your resume is padded with exaggerated or imaginary accomplishments.
• You are as concerned with what your date is wearing as you are your own appearance.
• You believe that you can help others improve their appearance (makeover!) and you are not a hairdresser.
• You celebrate a win by yelling “In your face!” at your opponent rather than “Good game”.
• Your Facebook photo albums (other than your profile pics) include more pictures with you than without you, especially if the pictures are of you alone.
• You brag, especially when you’ve receive a compliment or two from people who are either biased (family and friends) or otherwise not in a position to judge.
• You equate criticism with disrespect or insults. Narcissists do not handle rejection or criticism well and many become angry and aggressive in response.
• You often park in handicapped spaces or red zones, cut in line, cram into elevators before letting people out, block isles and walkways, etc. Entitlement is very, very highly correlated with narcissism.
• You wear clothing with your own likeness on them.
• You have any bumper stickers or social media graphics like those below.

Education/Debunking: What’s the Difference? –  JREF president D.J. Grothe moderated and the panelists were myself, JREF education director Michael Blanford, Skeptical Teacher Matt Lowry, Podblack Cat Kylie Sturgess, and IIG-West’s Brian Hart. I think that we agreed that ‘debunking’ was helpful in education and that teachers do not need to choose between facts and methods. Usually, teaching facts and debunking claims is best accomplished by discussing how we know what we know (empirical testing) and demonstrating that particular feats (e.g., apparent mind reading) can be accomplished without supernatural forces.

On the Ledge – Moderated by Derek Colanduno, this panel was originally planned as a discussion of the independent film The Ledge, but the film’s writer/director, Matthew Chapman, was forced to cancel at the last minute. Although the film came up, the panel, which included D.J. Grothe, NCSE executive director Eugenie Scott, Margaret Downey of The Freethought Society, and myself, focused on the definition of skepticism as well as the missions and scopes of the organizations promoting skepticism, secularism, and atheism.

I believe we agreed on the overlapping, but separate roles and goals of these organizations as well as the reasons demarcations between them exist. It is about more than focus and the best use of resources. It is a matter of maintaining integrity. Something that Genie Scott said stuck with me. She noted that we each have ideologies which we cannot and should not ignore; they make us who we are. However, these ideologies (about which we do not all agree) must be set aside in the pursuit of knowledge because they affect the way that we reason and make decisions (as the literature in my field has clearly shown). This is precisely the argument made in regard to the scope of skepticism (the broader scope, anyway): political, religious, and other ideologies carry with them the baggage of untestable claims, non-empirical conclusions, and conclusions which are arrived at through biased views of evidence.

Very Superstitious… – Moderated by Kylie Sturgess, panelists were me, Atlanta Skeptics Stephen King (a Stephen King, not the Stephen King) and Robert Blaskiewicz, and Skeptic Neurologist Steve Novella. We heard some funny stories about some of the more interesting superstitions which are widely (or narrowly) practiced and discussed the origins of superstitions as a natural product of the pattern- and control- seeking human brain.

Token Skeptic Podcast – I participated in a live recording of Kylie Sturgess’s podcast, along with Derek Colanduno and Steve Novella. It was the last day of Dragon*Con and Kylie was the only Australian in attendance this year. In a departure from the usual serious science and skepticism Kylie produces, she took the opportunity to abuse the Americans. In the first five minutes, she managed to claim Tim Minchin for Australia and disown Mel Gibson, throwing in Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe to boot. I think she just wanted an excuse to dump Mel on us. If that wasn’t enough, she tortured the audience with musk sticks and vegimite! Of course, I don’t know if you can call it torture when they volunteered, but she certainly would have known that they would be skeptical of Steve Novella’s description of vegimite (“It’s like chewing on my dirty gym socks.”) I likened it to Big Foot’s toe jam and I stand by that assessment. Musk sticks are a particularly vile “candy” which tastes strangely like aftershave. blech.

She did redeem herself by offering some wonderful carmels and discussing a topic I know little about: gaming. Apparently, my co-guests were both avid gamers and Novella wrote a few (well, more than that – 7) rule books. As the wife of a gamer who is often asked to calculate odds, I was impressed. The rules for these games are incredibly complicated and must be balanced enough to ensure that a game holds the players’ interest. I thought the panel was going well until the fire alarm went off and Kylie did her best Mel Gibson impression before diving off the stage into the audience… Okay, that’s not exactly how it went, but the panel did end and the ‘all clear’ was sounded before we got much further than the hall.

Related posts:

1. Reaching Out and Geeking Out
2. Dragon*Con 2010

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

First, the swan song: three undergraduate students are on their way to The Amaz!ng Meeting 9 this year, but they need your help. They have raised about half of the amount they need to cover registration and travel expenses, but they still have nearly $1,000 to raise. Please consider purchasing a WooDoo Doll – a fun outlet for your frustrations, loosely based on the voodoo doll – or making a direct donation. Every little bit helps.

To skip the news, scroll down for more information about these students, the adorable WooDoo Dolls, and for a link to donate.

Yes, I said “swan song”.

As some readers may know, I will not be returning to teach at CSU, Northridge in the fall. I resigned from my position for several reasons, most of which I hope will become clear in the coming weeks and months as I write more about my experiences of the last decade. If you are interested, stay tuned. This will soon be a ‘real blog’ again as I will have much more time to write.

In the meantime, there are many questions to answer about what I will do now and where this leaves the organization(s) I have started. Woo Fighters will continue in some form, but not as it is today. The mission of the organization was to motivate students to become activists for science and scientific/skeptical thinking. Since I will no longer have students – at least in the traditional sense, the focus must change.

In addition, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the name of the organization. I like it. I like the term “woo” to describe pseudoscience and I find “Woo Fighters” catching and fun. However, many whom I respect find the term bordering on offensive. Although I often make fun of what I deem to be some of the sillier beliefs, I have always spoken out against the ridicule of believers. That distinction is lost on some.

The final ‘nail on the coffin’ for the name comes from my son, who started the first “Junior Woo Fighters” club at his middle school. The club was very successful and I hope that he continues it next year, however, they quickly settled into calling the group a “Skeptics Club” and that is the name that stuck. So, “Woo Fighters” wasn’t such a great name after all.

I will keep the site up for now, but will eventually archive the entries somewhere accessible to all. As for the organization, I need to spend more time thinking about my personal goals before I make any decisions about rolling it into another organization, but Woo Fighters will ‘die’, at least in name and at CSUN, at the end of this summer.

I feel somewhat sad at its passing, especially before it had the opportunity to gain a great deal of momentum. That said, there are several reasons to call it a success. Not only did several students discover that they are excellent writers and critical thinkers, some discovered a community of people who think like they do. At least a few will become activists or educators focused on changing the world one thinker at a time.

I am especially proud to announce that Dylan Keenberg, who attended his first TAM last year with your help, fulfilled his promise to submit a proposal for a Sunday talk this year and has earned a spot at the podium!

Among the new TAM-goers this year are three of my most capable and promising undergraduate students.

Kameron Nason (Kami) and Heather Rees served as teaching assistants for research methods courses during my last semester. Kami has her sights on a career as a therapist. She has been drawn to skepticism in the past year as she has learned more about science and has become more comfortable with uncertainty.

Heather is a self-described “scifi geek” whose plans include research in social and cognitive psychology and university teaching. She is deeply concerned with gender issues and thinks that encouraging critical thinking will reduce social inequalities.

Loretta Aguilar learned about skepticism in my applied cognition course last fall, but like most skeptics, she was once very interested in psychic phenomena and astrology. She hopes to learn more about the promotion and teaching of critical thinking and skepticism so that she can help family and friends make better choices. Loretta is currently planning a career in clinical psychology.

These three are among the brightest and most motivated students I have had the privilege to teach. They are all looking forward to meeting more like-minded people and learning more.

How you can help

To raise the money needed for registration and travel expenses, we have been very busy making WooDoo Dolls – a fun outlet for your frustrations, loosely based on the voodoo doll. The online prices include shipping, but if you are planning to attend TAM9, you may be able to pick up one directly from the students for only $5. These dolls are handmade and rough-looking, but sturdy. Choose from 5 options for hair color to personalize your doll.

If you are not interested in a doll, but would still like to help, please consider making a direct donation of any amount. Every little bit helps!

Thank you for your support and readership over the last two years! Look for me at the TAM9 workshop “Skepticism in the Classroom”. I will be making suggestions and providing resources for critical thinking education at various ages. I will also be presenting at Dragon*Con again this year in September.

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