The JREF would like to relieve some of that burden, and you can help.

The TAM Educator Grant is now accepting donations of any size (every little bit helps!). Like all donations to the JREF, these are tax deductable. However, these donations will only be used for the purpose of sending teachers to The Amaz!ng Meeting.

Please visit the website for more details about this very worthy cause.

If you are a teacher, or studying to become a teacher, and would like to apply for one of these grants, the details and a link to apply can also be found here.

Special thanks to volunteer Dale Roy of Granite State Skeptics for her efforts on this project.

No, I don’t. I may if I see a good reason, but the truth is that responding to him is a bit like debating a creationist. Sometimes one should, but this is not one of those times. In this case, PZ has so grossly misrepresented my writings and statements that it is very clear that no productive discussion can occur with him on the matter. This is not the first time he has done so and not the first time that I have essentially ignored it. The post is almost entirely built on mischaracterizations, straw men, and falsehoods. If anyone else wants to discuss it, I will be happy to do so after you have read what I actually wrote, context and all.

Instead, I think that this is a good time to gather some of the more recent materials on the matter in one place because I strongly believe that most of the discussion in the general community over these issues involve new members trying to get a handle on what we’re all about. So, I will summarize my views on the matter in a few bullet points and provide a list of links to posts, publications, and videos what are free to all.

I will not be discussing tone and approach, but some of the materials do touch on this issue. I disagree with Novella and a few others on that question and it is always a discussion worth having, but separately.

As always, I welcome comments, but ask that if you plan to leave a comment arguing against my stance, please look through the links and read/watch those which appear to address your argument before you do so. I really hate repeating myself, especially when I have written what I think is a clear explanation, so I am quite likely to respond by referring you to one of the links.

A summary of my position and opinions on the issues:

• Skepticism, secularism, humanism, and atheism (as an issue for activism, not a conclusion) are distinct ideologies with differing central values. These distinctions are important for several reasons, including organizational focus, communication, and personal objectivity. Those are covered in more detail in the materials linked.
• Many people have adopted more than one of these ideologies (I, for example, have adopted all of them to some degree), creating a “greater” community we tend to refer to as the “rationalist” community. Not all community members have adopted all ideologies.
• Activism is about goals, and organizations form around specific goals to promote specific ideologies. Although the “greater rationalist community” shares a few core values, most importantly a naturalistic world view, each organization uses its resources in different ways, supporting different priorities.
• Central to one of these ideologies, atheism, is the conclusion that there is no higher power (god). The ideological part is the value that belief in a higher power is harmful. There is more to atheism than that and I will not outline how it differs from secularism, etc., but these points are important because conflation of the conclusion with the value is one source of conflict.
• At the core of scientific skepticism is the view that evidence-based reasoning is the best way to decide what is and is not true.  Furthermore, the only legitimate way to acquire evidence is through the scientific method, which is basically a combination of systematic observation (empiricism) and reason. Therefore, scientific skepticism involves using the scientific method to test claims.
• The major Skeptic organizations have expressed missions to promote scientific skepticism. They do so for a number of reasons, both epistemic and pragmatic, most of which have been discussed at length in past days, weeks, months, years, and decades (and so on).
  • From a “best practices” standpoint, skepticism reaches more people by focusing its efforts on testable claims because it can include those people who have not adopted one or more of the other ideologies I mentioned (e.g., atheism).
  • From a philosophical standpoint, science is a method for acquiring knowledge, all of which is tentative. Because nobody knows with absolute certainty what is true, the method is much more important than personal conclusions. The method is how we can convince other people that our conclusions are accurate.
  • Also from a best practices standpoint, promoting methods (which includes sharing evidence and information such as alternative explanations for events) provides people with the tools to evaluate other claims more effectively.
  • From both a philosophical and best practices standpoint, promoting personal conclusions rather than method is a violation of basic scientific tenets and logic. Likewise, when we judge a person’s ability to use methods based solely on their beliefs (e.g., statements such as “Christians are not good skeptics”), we are judging an argument by its conclusion and not the merits of the argument itself. This is not scientific at all. Ironically, it’s bad skepticism.
• Skepticism activists do promote some conclusions, such as the conclusion that vaccines are relatively safe and effective, however, we do so with great care. Where scientific consensus is weak or lacking, expertise and personal responsibility is vital.
• Objectivity is a central feature of scientific thinking and, therefore, of scientific skepticism. Although no human being is purely objective (arguable, but I think most of us agree), one of the main purposes of the scientific method is to remove subjectivity from the inquiry process. In practice, it’s imperfect, but if we throw our hands up on this issue because scientists are not unbiased, we must reject science altogether. It’s that central.
• Because objectivity is central to skepticism and values such as political ideologies should not drive the practice of skepticism or science, but should be informed by the findings of science and skeptical inquiry (e.g, science cannot tell us if gun control is good, but it can tell us if a specific regulation is likely to reduce the number of deaths by gun). In other words, economy, religion, and feminism are not “off-limits”. They should be and are subjected to the same treatment that all other topics are subjected to. They appear to receive different treatment merely because the claims made in these areas tend to be more complex and more difficult to test (if they are testable at all). Furthermore, these topics tend to be attached to strongly-held values and, because human beings are notoriously tenacious in their beliefs, more controversial.
• The difficulties with discussions of complex topics makes internal agreement less common and without internal agreement, good outreach efforts are not possible because no coherent, unified message is possible. The goal of most activist organizations is outreach more than community and they are trying to maximize success, not put up roadblocks to it. Therefore, they tend to focus on claims which provide a more predictable and clear outcome.

I could get into more detail, but that isn’t my goal with this post. So, I will stop here. Following is a list of excellent materials which discuss, in one form or another, the scope of skeptic activism, its purposes, and its value.

Free Publications (these three should be required reading):

• Where Do We Go From Here? by Daniel Loxton – The most to-the-point discussion of why we do what we do, sometimes referred to as a skeptical manifesto
• What Do I Do Next? edited by Daniel Loxton – a collection of discussion about skeptical activism by leading skeptics
• Why Is There A Skeptical Movement? by Daniel Loxton – A two-part essay with highlights from the history of the movement and a practical discussion of scope

Blog Posts/Web Publications:

• Scientific Skepticism, CSICOP, and the Local Groups by Steven Novella and David Bloomberg – a primer on scientific skepticism and organizational scope
• Bigfoot Skeptics, New Atheists, Politics and Religion by Steven Novella – a response to PZ Myers and another blogger who suggested that skeptical activism needs to expand its scope
• PZ Replies by Steven Novella – a continuation of the dialogue with PZ Myers, responding to a reply in which Myers accuses several of us (myself included) of intellectual dishonesty and cowardice
• Scientific Skepticism, Rationalism, and Secularism by Steven Novella – more clarifications incorporating the discussions which followed the dialogue with PZ.
• Steven Novella Steven Novella Takes on Some of the Oldest Clichés About Scientific Skepticism-Again by Daniel Loxton – more on the conversation between Novella and Myers
• You May Be Forgiven For Thinking That Some Skeptics Are Taking A Firm Stance, But… by Kylie Sturgess – more on the conversation (and a reiteration that the arguments are not new) with added emphasis on the importance of educating one’s self before criticizing
• Further Thoughts on Atheism by Daniel Loxton – discusses the need compartmentalization of concepts (atheism and skepticism), mostly for pragmatic reasons
• The Surprising Twists of TAM9′s Diversity Panel by Daniel Loxton – discusses the way that a focus on methodology allows for a more inclusive group
• The Conflation of Atheism and Skepticism: Fact or Fiction? by Kylie Sturgess – a discussion of the problems with confusing methods with conclusions
• Skepticism and Religion – Again by Steven Novella – a reminder of the reasons behind mission focus and what it does and does not mean in terms of how skeptics approach religious claims
• A Few Comments on the Nature and Scope of Skepticism by Jim Lippard – a discussion of the problems with conflating skepticism with atheism and assuming that one leads to the other. This blog contains a large number of posts on scope, many of which are linked in this post, so I will only link to this one, but I highly recommend browsing through them
• On the Scope of Skeptical Inquiry by Massimo Pigliucci – discusses the relationships among philosophy, skepticism, atheism, etc.
• What Is Skepticism, Anyway? by Michael Shermer – also includes a video, so it’s listed twice here
• Is There a New Atheism at the JREF? by D.J. Grothe – a response to accusations that the JREF’s mission might be shifting with an emphasis on the organization’s priorities
• Media Guide to Skepticism by Sharon Hill – Sharon worked with community leaders to produce a summary of the purpose and scope of organized skepticism.

Posts on this blog:

• Take Back Skepticism Part I: The Elephant in the Room – The first in a three-part series about the scope of skepticism, tone, and arguments about both
• Take Back Skepticism, Part II: The Overkill Window – the second in a three-part series which focuses on the propogation of hate and irrational arguments about tone and scope
• Take Back Skepticism, Part III: The Dunning-Kruger Effect – the third in a three-part series which focuses on overconfidence and anti-intellectualism displayed during arguments about scope
• Paved With Good Intentions – about the dangers of allowing values to drive the process and interfere with objectivity
• Why the “Critical” in Critical Thinking – covers the basic falsification approach in science and critical thinking to explain the purpose of critique
• You Can’t Judge an Argument by Its Conclusion – describes the Belief Bias (a form of Confirmation Bias) and explains why judging a person’s ability to reason based on their beliefs is fallacious (ironically)
• Mission Drift, Conflation, and Food For Thought – discusses some of the dangers of “mission drift” and attempting to add values such as political ideologies to organizational missions
• What Matters – a response to the misguided view that skeptical activism does not focus on things that matter
• Scientific Skepticism: A Tutorial – about definitions and scope

To watch/listen

• Overlapping Magisteria, TAM2012 – Jamy Ian Swiss talks about the importance of mission focus, the value of the work that skeptics do, and the reason we value methods more than conclusions
• Skepticism is a Humanism, NECSS 2010 – D.J. Grothe’s keynote, which discusses the scope of skeptical activism, noting that, although it is methods-based we are motivated to activism by humanist values
• On the Ledge, Skeptrack at Dragon*Con 2011 – A panel discussion with Eugenie Scott, Margaret Downey, D.J. Grothe, and me, moderated by Derek Colanduno about the overlap of atheism and skepticism, its challenges, advantages, and pitfalls. Ideology is discussed about half way through
• What Is Skepticism, Anyway? by Michael Shermer – also includes a blog post, so it’s listed twice here

How To Be A Bad Skeptic, Q.E.D. – D.J. Grothe’s rundown on some of the dos and don’ts of skepticism. You’ll have to guess which parts are facetious and which are serious. By this point, you should be able to do this.

I will add to this post as new content becomes available, so if I have missed any that you think should be included (and it is freely available online), please contact me on Twitter or Facebook so that I can add them into the body of the post. I will also apologize now if I have missed something important. There has been so much discussion of this topic that I was a bit overwhelmed trying to put together just the highlights.

Because they publicly trash mainstream science despite lacking the expertise to properly analyze methodology and draw different conclusions (how scientists do it).

Science uses peer review (not just “review”) to weed out bad studies, test the robustness of findings, and discuss appropriate conclusions. Peers are people who work in the same field – experts.

Scientists in related fields (or even completely different fields) are sometimes able to criticize the methodology of a given study, but big-picture stuff usually requires specific expertise. Non-scientist experts in a field of science are rare. VERY rare.

Pseudoscience and fraud are not science, so please don’t drag out the straw men and accuse me of claiming that only scientists can be good skeptics. I’m not. Think about the role that magicians have played in exposing so-called psychics, for example – the right tool for the job.

So, what am I trying to say here? Well, I’m trying to say that skeptics should criticize people who talk out of their asses about science on a public stage.

And I’m trying to say that skeptics should criticize it rather than do it themselves.

A skeptic, like anyone else, is entitled to make a mistake or two, even a big one. However, making a habit out of spouting one’s uneducated/under-educated opinion (or regurgitating one’s own interpretation of a cherry-picked opinion of an expert) from a stage is not what good skeptics do; it’s what people like McCarthy and Maher do. It shouldn’t be tolerated, much less encouraged.

But this has been discussed before:

http://www.skepticblog.org/2009/12/22/what-if-anything-can-skeptics-say-about-science/
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/1338-need-advice-ask-an-expert.html
http://icbseverywhere.com/blog/2010/12/know-what-you-know/

For the record, there is NOTHING morally or ethically wrong with voicing one’s uneducated (or under-educated) opinion during private discussion or even in a public forum of equal footing. That’s called “discussion”.

This applies to both criticism and promotion, by the way.

Sometimes it is obvious where the line between pseudoscience and science is and sometimes it’s not. SkeptiCamps are a great place to get one’s feet wet and learn where those lines are, but I must warn you that even at these casual events, research-by-Google isn’t usually well-accepted. Do your homework if you’re planning to speak about pseudoscience.

And if you’re planning to talk about science, be very, very careful. Remember that reading a book or two, even if written by experts in the field, does not equate to the 10,000 hours of study required to gain expertise.

A note on why I wrote this:

There has been a lot of discussion about speaker lists in recent months.

I do not condone ultimatums or demands–attempts to bully organizations into punishing people you don’t like because you feel entitled to control. However, I have serious concerns about the quality of speakers at skeptic events and strongly believe that public discussion of the problems in general is needed.

These concerns are not new, but they have continued to grow and currently weigh very heavily on my mind.

So, sorry to be all judgmental and everything, but this stuff matters.

I hate to harp on a point (I really do), but oversimplification and shallow treatment of issues appears to be at the source of so much of the animosity that I think that rational discussion could be had if a short checklist were followed which included keeping one’s mind open to the possibility the other person is not evil simply because they criticized something or failed to submit to demands.

I am short on time and not prepared to discuss “Atheism Plus” in detail at the moment, but the discussion of it provides an excellent example or two that I think provide some insight into how discussions devolve into battles.

First, there is a slippery slope involved which is accelerated by crowd behavior and by unproductive reactions to criticism. We may, for example, start with a civil discussion about whether or not gender disparity in local groups can be attributed to a barrage of unwanted sexual attention women may receive at meet-ups. A number of views will be expressed, some with comments about their own experiences:

Person A: “I don’t do that.”

Person B: “I’ve been groped at meet-ups and it made me feel powerless and alone.”

Person C: “That’s never happened to me.”

Person D: “I think we should ban people who do that kind of thing.”

Person E: “So, I can’t ask a woman out at a meet-up?”

Person F: “Wait, I go to meet-ups to meet men and I like it when they grab me. I can take care of myself and I don’t want that behavior banned.”

Person G: “I’m not going to attend meet-ups anymore if people think that groping is okay.”

…and so on.

None of these views should shut down discussion. The refusal to concede that one’s own view may not be “right” is what turns discussions like these into battles of wills. Note that the original talking point was simple and there are small steps away from it as people talk rather than listen or make assumptions about what was said rather than ask for clarification. Those small steps add up. One day, a woman casually asks that men put a little more thought into when and how they proposition women and a few months later dozens of people are painting everyone who doesn’t support a rather specific call to action as a misogynist or ‘gender traitor’ while some of those called misogynists and gender traitors have dismissed the original problem altogether. This helps no one.

Those promoting “A+” have painted critics with a broad brush; we are “haters” who are “against social justice”. A post by Greta Christina on the issue of inclusiveness provides some insight:

An atheist movement cannot be inclusive of atheist women… and also be inclusive of people who publicly call women ugly, fat, sluts, whores, cunts, and worse; who persistently harass them; who deliberately invade their privacy and make their personal information public; and/or who routinely threaten them with grisly violence, rape, and death.

An atheist movement cannot be inclusive of atheists of color… and also be inclusive of people who think people of color stay in religion because they’re just not good at critical thinking, who blame crime on dark-skinned immigrants, who think victims of racial profiling deserved it because they looked like thugs, and/or who tell people of color, “You’re pretty smart for a…”.

In addition to holding up the reprehensible behavior of a few trolls as representative of the community as a whole, these statements are so full of subtext that they cry out for scrutiny. There are clearly false dichotomies buried in there as many of the proponents of A+ and many of their readers have expressed the desire not simply exclude the asshats who “publicly call women ugly” or “who deliberately invade their privacy”, but also anyone who dares to question whether such things have actually happened in given situations.

As has been said many times, we should be charitable when someone’s meaning is not entirely clear – give them the benefit of the doubt when we have little evidence of malice. This requires empathy. It requires us to resist defensive reactions and reconsider our views when we realize that we have failed in that regard.

Greta also notes that to provide a safe space for people of color, they must exclude “people who think people of color stay in religion because they’re just not good at critical thinking”. I found this particularly interesting in light of the fact that the belief that everyone with faith in a deity of some sort is “not good at critical thinking” is a widespread view among atheists (and skeptics, unfortunately). PZ Myers, one of the founders/owners of FreeThoughtBlogs said  this of the religious in a debate a few months ago (one I urge you all to watch: http://youtu.be/ZsqqFpWh7m8 ): “There’s something wrong with their braaains!”

It may be that Greta meant to refer to those who claim that people of color are generally poor critical thinkers and this explains lower rates of atheism. However, the math does not add up. Try constructing a syllogism from these statements. The proportion of believers in the population of people of color is higher than the general population. Believers are poor critical thinkers. Therefore…

So, who is right? Well, neither is right. Or correct.

Out of curiousity, I watched a recording of a few people discussing “Atheism+” [A+]. Much of this particular discussion involved defending the approach of A+ and suggesting that critics are somehow against social justice in general. I won’t got through the entire discussion; many of the arguments were straw men, which are not relevant. However, many were based on unsupported assertions (assumptions) and that is directly relevant.

One of the participants, Debbie Goddard (of CFI On Campus) attempted to address real criticisms rather than discuss those straw men and from her comments the disagreements became more clear. At one point, Stephanie Zvan criticized skeptics for ignoring evidence, noting that “We have mountains of evidence that ‘treating people equally’ is not treating people equally.” Debbie clarified this by expressing her belief that “color-blindness” is wrong.

That is when I realized that what they are talking about here are legitimate and rational disagreements over how to approach social injustices.

Legitimate and rational disagreements. Meaning that neither view is so well-supported that they can claim to know what’s best.

Yet people attempting to discuss these things rationally have been vilified and views have polarized. And the people who were speaking in this recording were doing so with such certainty that they were “right” that they failed to see that legitimate and rational disagreement was even possible.

And this has happened with many on both sides of the issue with most of the ‘dust ups’ in the community. I think a lot of the problem lies in treating these topics as simple when, in fact, they are not. As Ron Lindsay stated in a recent post on A+:

Social justice is great. After all, who’s against social justice? It’s when one starts to fill in the details that disagreements arise.

And it’s the details that matter here.

There are some who argue that, because minorities are at a disadvantage due to a history of oppression, they require special protection in order to reach equality. There are others who argue that such protection is both unnecessary and racist/sexist/___ist in and of itself. And there is a full spectrum of positions in the grey area in between these two views. 

What Stephanie claimed is that science tells us that the first view is “right”. Her certainty in that conclusion is clear from the video. Yet, she is wrong – sort of.

There are three details that we should consider. I am going to ignore one which comes from that grey area because it is extremely complicated, and that is the question of whether equal opportunity or equal outcome should be the goal. In other words, what “equality” means [If you claim that the answer to that question is no-brainer, you are making my point]. The other two major issues are the evidence for the claim and the evidence which suggests the best courses of action to correct injustices, which is the whole reason for asking the question in the first place.

We all know that stereotypes exist and that racism, sexism, any-ism, are alive and well in our society. And there is plenty of evidence that implicit biases exist. In fact, they are impossible to eliminate. We favor people whom we view as “like us” in many different ways. Depending on one’s definition of “ingroup” in a given context, we favor those who fit it. However, we are capable of making choices and taking actions which render such favor powerless. We are capable of overcoming these biases just as we are capable of overcoming other cognitive biases. Not eliminating, overcoming.

So science tells us that we have implicit biases which require a special effort on our part to overcome. Stephanie is right, no?

Not so fast.

Science may be able to tell us if affirmative action has contributed to the huge reductions in racism and related outcomes which have occurred in recent decades, but it cannot tell us if affirmative action is a good idea today simply based on the knowledge that we need to make a conscious effort to overcome biases. Even the first question is difficult to assess confidently, but I suspect it can be done and I suspect that the answer will be, “Yes. Yes, it has.”

But this is an extremely complex issue and it is further complicated by the fact that we all have dog in the race. We all care about it because we all identify with one or more of those man made categories we sum up as the variable “race”.

My personal views about special protection are like most of my political views (this IS a political issue, after all): very centrist. I believe that we need to pay attention to things like gender parity if we are interested in decreasing it. I am not convinced, however, that quotas are entirely appropriate in all situations. And if you think that science has the answer to whether my views are “correct”, I challenge you to prove so.

And here’s where I say that in my view, both Stephanie and Debbie are wrong. What I won’t do is reject their views outright and wonder why they can’t just see the truth that I think is written in “mountains of evidence”. I won’t do that because, although I am confident in my own conclusions, I am open to the possibility that I am wrong about this very complex, emotionally-charged issue.

Why I think they are wrong:

The goal is not to place blame for disparities, but to reduce them. If the major source of disparity is discrimination, then the act of discriminating needs to be reduced. Science does provide us with information which is useful in efforts to reduce interracial and other inter-group tensions. What the evidence suggests is not the multiculturalism approach that Debbie believes is best, but what she rejected: color-blindness (and gender-blindness, etc.). Or perhaps a better term would be color-not-noticing, but that doesn’t roll of the tongue very well.

We all have multiple identities. I am a woman, a scientist, an educator, a skeptic, an activist, a blogger, etc. There are always people with whom I share some identities and not others. When the context focuses on a specific value or identity, those with whom I share that value or identity are part of my ingroup. Ingroup/outgroup classification changes with context, but some are more flexible than others.

Decades of applied research has failed to demonstrate that interracial tension in schools can be reduced by increasing discussions of cultural differences and celebrating diversity. This should not be surprising given the mountains of research that Stephanie mentioned about ingroup/outgroup mentality. Attention to differences increases that tension.

What reduces the tension? Focus on similarities, seeing people as part of the ingroup and ignoring the differences which are present in a given context. Reducing the amount of “othering” we engage in. The best way to do that is to focus on commonalities. For example, the work that Chris Stedman, author of a soon-to-be-release book entitled Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious  does has been criticized by PZ Myers and others because it brings people of different religious affiliations (and none) together to work toward common prosocial goals. Just yesterday a group of interfaith activists (as they call themselves) spent the day picking up trash on a beach to make it safer and cleaner.

Am I suggesting that people suppress parts of themselves about which they are proud? Let me make this clear: Hell, no. 

If that is what you’re taking from this post, you need to look outside of yourself and try to see the bigger picture. What I am saying is that my gender identity should have zero bearing on whether I am hired for a job or asked to speak at a conference or viewed as a sexual object in a professional context. Does that mean that I should not be proud to be a woman? Of course not.

Interfaith work does not suggest that people ‘check their religion at the door’, either. The work benefits more than just the likelihood that they will accomplish common goals.  Working together exposes each participant to people with whom they both share ideology and differ in ideology. Focus on the common ideology reduces the tensions caused by differences in other views and that reduction spreads to the differences themselves.

For example, a 2009 Gallop Poll result which most will find unsurprising is that people are much, much less likely to oppose same-sex marriage if they know someone who is gay/lesbian. There are certainly problems with drawing causal conclusions from such a study, but the effect is large and the findings are consistent with many lines of research which converge.

As I stated before, this is a complex issue. You may completely disagree with my argument, but to dismiss it altogether would be ludicrous, not to mention closed-minded and, dare I say it?, anti-intellectual.

I prefer to be recognized for my work rather than patronized because I am female. You may not see the issues the way I do, but calling me a misogynist for that disagreement is not only outrageous, it’s insulting and wrong.

When you speak with such certainty about how right and moral you are in relation to your critics without considering the possibility that you may be missing a nuance or two, you cannot hold any sort of moral or intellectual high ground.

My purpose here is not to argue about the topic of social justice, but to make the point that certainty, particularly about moral questions, is something we all need to be careful about. Too much (more than what is warranted) and it gets in the way of rational discussion. Too much and it divides people when no division is necessary. Too much and it is counterproductive. Too much and it is not confidence; it’s arrogance.

NOTE: Before you start commenting that Atheism Plus is about “allowing these discussions” because nobody else will, let me remind you that nobody ever said that discussions about evidence were outside the scope of Skepticism (one of the primary reasons put forward for the founding of A+) just because they relate to issues of social justice. In fact, quite the opposite is true and I think that this post is a good example of how science and skepticism can be applied to those areas.

*For those not following the ‘rationalist’ blogosphere, I apologize for my lack of links to the incidents I mentioned here. Frankly, there are too many and it’s difficult to know where to start or to choose one link which clearly demonstrates what’s happened. It seems to me that one does not need the background information to understand the example, but I cannot tell for certain.

The meeting was smaller than last year (~1200 vs. >1600), but this is a good turnout considering that last year the line-up included both Tyson and Nye. Sizable, also, despite the hubbub that led some people to ‘boycott’, the economy, the growing number of skeptic, secular, and atheism conferences offered each year, and (probably the biggest factor, but the one that everyone seems to forget) the fact that Comicon was held in San Diego the same weekend!

For my part, I was honored to participate in a discussion on the main stage on the Future of Skepticism with an impressive panel: SkeptiCamp creator Reed Esau, skeptical IT guru Tim Farley, and long-time activist Jamy Ian Swiss (moderated by D.J. Grothe). I also presented a workshop on skepticism in classroom settings for a third time, along with Matt Lowry,  and I would like to thank the wonderful panel of educators (Dale Roy, Dean Baird, Ani Aharonian, and Sachie Howard) who took the stage for a round table-style Q & A with only a couple of hours’ (or less) notice.

So, the weekend was a good one. And the video embedded here was the stand-out highlight of it. If you have read more than a post or two on this blog, it will be immediately clear to you why it was the highlight and why I found it important enough to urge you to watch it. I should also note that almost everyone I spoke with at TAM found this talk to be, far and above, the best of the weekend if not more. Please watch it before continuing.

Jamy spoke clearly about the difference between discussion of and battling over issues such as scope, definitions, and goals. What he hinted at, but did not say, is that discussion can only happen among those who are educated about those issues (or those who are trying to educate themselves about them). With a few exceptions, it is usually when people who do not fully understand the nature of what we do insist on being allowed to redefine our work that distinctions become battle lines.

One sign that someone does not fully understand scientific skepticism is something Jamy hit hard – that skepticism, secularism, and atheism are different things. When we all understand this (good fences), we can identify our common goals and work together (good neighbors). The differences are complex, but as Jamy noted, we have general rules for practical purposes that allow us to operate while the philosophical discussions can continue among those interested. However, shallow treatment of the issues (or outright dismissal of the ‘rules’) is an ironic form of anti-intellectualism.

When Elizabeth Cornwell’s TAM2012 talk is posted, I hope you will revisit this post. She discusses the characteristics and behaviors of cyberbullies and it should be clear how it fits here. You might notice the enormous overlap in the sets of people who conflate atheism/skepticism and those who argue for verbal aggression (A.K.A., bullying and ridicule) as a means of outreach (and, apparently, as a general communication style).  It does not need to be this way.

I attended a couple of workshops on Thursday and one was interesting as well as relevant. “Coalition Building for the Skeptical Activist” was lead by the most qualified person I can think of to lead such a thing, Doubtful News founder Sharon Hill. Also on the panel were Kitty Mervine, whose website helps those who believe that they were abducted by aliens connect with other possible abductees and learn about alternative explanations for their experiences, Chris Stedman, an interfaith activist and author of the upcoming book “Faitheist“, American Atheists president Dave Silverman, and vice president of the Secular Coalition for America David Noise. What an interesting combination.

Sharon, Kitty, and Chris are all known for their bridge-building style. Chris’s efforts center around coalitions with diverse groups to work toward common goals. Chris is not a skeptical activist, yet his work and ours overlap in several areas. Chris is the kind of “good neighbor” that Jamy discussed in his speech.

Silverman and Noise, on the other hand, seemed odd choices for a workshop on coalitions. Noise seemed to echo a lot of what Silverman said; he seemed more of an activist for atheism than secularism. During the panel, the language and content both Silverman and Noise provided was related to ingroup-outgroup thinking. They stopped short of discussing the kinds of militant strategies PZ Myers has talked about, but considering that Silverman describes his organization as the “Marines of the Freethought Movement”, it is cause for concern. I heard nothing about building coalitions from either of them, only unsupported assumptions and uncreative, brute-force solutions to problems.

On Thursday, before the main stage events even began, Silverman tweeted this:

Tabling at #tam2012. You can be a skeptic and you can be a theist. But if you’re both, you’re not very good at one of them.

— David Silverman (@MrAtheistPants) July 12, 2012

There are so many things wrong with this statement that it’s hard to know where to start, but I wanted to reply with this entire post. The next morning I gave in to temptation and tweeted:

Pondering #TAM2012 tweets. “If you believe X, you’re not good at skepticism” is poor skepticism (it’s Belief Bias; form of confirm. bias). — Barbara Drescher (@badrescher) July 13, 2012

While Silverman is not known for “waging war” with skeptics over where to draw lines, he has attempted to redefine skepticism (or perhaps simply shown his lack of understanding of it). Furthermore, this kind of insult (which, I will note once again, comes from a place of ignorance) to skeptics who are not atheists does not even remotely resemble an attempt at discussion. Neither did his reply to Kylie Sturgess when she dared to disagree:

#thetruthhurts “@kyliesturgess: Couldn’t disagree MORE: You can be a skeptic & a theist. If you’re both, you’re not good at one of them.”

— David Silverman (@MrAtheistPants) July 13, 2012

My example is not quite an ‘infographic’, but the problems are the same: where do the numbers come from and do they mean what they appear to mean? Campaigns rely on the fact that people, in general, are cognitive misers. We generally will not go out of their way to analyze information, especially if it speaks to our world view.

Today a friend posted this on Facebook with the comment that we should be able to trust the data because the source is UNICEF. As usual, the headline itself is grossly misleading, but this is not apparent unless you click through it. I did and found myself on another non-UNICEF page which included more details and a link to the UNICEF press release.

First, let me make the point that the accuracy of data are not usually the biggest problem. Yes, people make up stuff and that stuff gets quoted, etc., but you don’t need to make up numbers to mislead people. How the data are manipulated and framed are the more common problems with these kinds of reports. Looking at the report that my friend posted, although data may be accurate, the frame is questionable and should be insulting to someone who is actually living in poverty. It is not, in my opinion, a measure of the proportion of children “living in poverty”.

I was prepared to take on the information in the press release, but when I read it I discovered that there was a layer of ‘warping’ between UNICEF and the other reports. The release describes a combination of two measures of ‘poverty’. Of course, one needs to download and at least skim the full report to get the big picture, and who is going to do that? Well, I will, of course, but first let me address the report that was posted to my friend’s page.

Image provided in the UNICEF press kit for their "Report Card" on poverty.

This report cherry-picked one of the measures – the one they could most easily use to twist into an image of the U.S. as not-so-child-friendly.

I take issue with such manipulation. Science is too easily abused for the purposes of selling something, even with good intentions. Although evoking sympathy may prompt people to act, it also warps our views of reality. If we cannot view information objectively, we cannot make the best decisions about how to use the resources at our disposal to meet our goals. In the end, everyone loses.

The definition of ‘poverty’ used in this situation is “living in a household in which disposable income, when adjusted for family size and composition, is less than 50% of the national median income”. In other words, they took the income for each household in the country, subtracted an estimate of the cost of basic expenses and adjusted it for family size/structure to determine ‘disposable income’ (more on that later), divided all of the households in half according to the resulting value, then counted the children in each group. They did this for each country separately. Then they ranked the countries accordingly.

There was no standard for ‘poverty’ applied to all countries, so the comparison is severely limited in terms of what it can tell us. The UNICEF report notes a number of justifications for their choices, mostly related the problems associated with alternative measures. I agree with many of their notes about other measures, but that does not solve the problems associated with this measure. In addition, their methodology for determining disposable income and adjusting for family size and structure was very questionable and involved a complicated formula that I will not even attempt to explain.

They found that, in the U.S.A., just over 23% of the children live in households in the bottom half. Frankly, I was surprised by this number. I thought that it would be much higher. It means that more than 3 out of 4 children live in households with an above-average amount of disposable income!

The comparison states that there are 34 other countries in which the proportion of children in the top half of the country’s households in terms of disposable income is higher than the proportion in the U.S.

Poverty, in this analysis, does not mean what the dictionary or Wikipedia say it means (“…an economic condition of lacking both money and basic necessities needed to successfully live, such as food, water, education, healthcare, and shelter.”), yet people will still think of it as such.

This is poor perspective.

The report provided justifications for the 50% threshold, however, I cannot help but be reminded of how often someone is shocked when they hear a report that 50% of people are below average in some desirable measure. It seems to me that no matter how much is done to improve the lives of those children, we will always have a ‘bottom half’. This is one of the problems with framing things in relative terms.

Of course we want all children to prosper, but just as we want everyone to have an above-average IQ, we cannot achieve such a thing when we define our goals in relative terms. The only way to increase the number of children in the upper half of that distribution is to increase the number of adults in the lower half. That’s tough when you consider that adults need to care for children, so nobody who cares for children can be in the lower half, either.

Perhaps that bottom half should be made up entirely of childless, middle-aged people? Or the elderly?

As the press release noted, the UNICEF includes two measures of ‘poverty’. The other measure defined poverty in a standardized manner which was more consistent with the traditional definition. They listed 14 items which were considered essential and considered a child to be “living in poverty” if they lacked two or more of those items. However, this analysis was limited to European countries. So, there is nothing in the report that tells us the proportion of children in the U.S. who are living in poverty as it is traditionally defined. Nothing.

Furthermore, the original post and the one it linked to suggest that we don’t take care of our children. Programs like National School Lunch Program (established in 1946), Head Start, and even basic public assistance are designed to provide those basic necessities, yet receiving them does not affect whether they are considered “living in poverty” by the UNICEF definition, which considers reported income.

Whether or not you believe those programs are sufficient is not something I am even qualified to argue about and not the point. I think that efforts to promote social programs, something which requires some political maneuvering and framing, have redefined what “poverty” means. That may have helped sell those programs, but in the long run we need to readjust in order to see things the way they are. My point is that losing perspective is never a good thing. In the end, we need to see reality if we are to determine how best to distribute resources and services to achieve goals like reducing economic disparity.

When we talk about poverty, I would like to see a more nuanced approach. For example, the most common measure of need used by public schools is whether a child qualifies for the National School Lunch program. Children who are homeless are lumped in with kids whose parents may struggle to make ends meet, but have enough to eat, clothing, shoes, a roof over their heads, and even cell phones. I do not mean to minimize the problems of people who are barely scraping by, but when their problems are not distinguishable from those who are literally going without essentials, that is shameful.

…skepticism, secularism, and atheism are different things. Among them, secularism has the closest ties with liberal ideology, but even secularism is not liberalism.

Shane Brady left a comment which included:

The one panel from last year’s TAM that DJ seemed to take the most criticism for, seemed to be because he resisted an overt support of a particular political idealogy, not a hesitance to attack claims.

The intersection of these two strikes me as important.

That post addressed a specific comment in a much longer piece by Ashley Miller, a comment made my many, so I did not identify the author in order to focus on the issue. However, the broader theme of that piece now comes to mind as I think about this issue: do secularist efforts need to be careful here?

Skeptical activism must ignore ideology in order to maintain its integrity. Science – the method, anyway – is ideally ideology-free. Now, how that works out in practice is another issue. The point is that if we promote scientific skepticism and the idea that science is the best way to find out what’s true about the world, we must follow the rules of science.

Arguing against this is like arguing that some of the Bible is meant to be literal, some of it is symbolic, and that one’s own religion is the single religion which knows which is which.

Most readers know the definition of “secularism”, of course, but humor me. Merriam-Webster defines it thus: “indifference to or rejection or exclusion of religion and religious considerations”.

Secular organizations seek to remove religious influence from public life, mostly through the separation of church and state. In the United States, the separation of church and state is designed to promote freedom of religion and, by extension, freedom from religion. We are free to practice any or no religion because the government does not endorse or favor one or more religions. This, at its core, is a liberal concept. The extreme of this, the eradication of religion, is a conservative one.

Secularism tends to be promoted most by those who subscribe to liberal ideology. However, the terms “liberal” and “conservative” carry a fair amount of baggage and self-contradiction. In this country, for example, self-identified liberals tend to support gay marriage, but also support gun control and welfare and some even oppose capitalism. The most extreme of the self-identified conservatives today have formed the “Tea Party” movement, which opposes what they consider to be excessive taxes. In other words, while the political parties may have formed around a narrow idea of how much involvement government should have in the lives of the governed, they have morphed into something else entirely.
Quite frankly, I find both parties oppressive, just in different ways. Each seems to think that they know what is best for the rest of us and each insist on imposing their platforms on the rest of society. Neither is truly liberal or conservative. Both, in my opinion, are oppressive to those who disagree with them.

One problem we face in both skeptical and secular activism is that the larger the movement, the more pluralistic it is. If an organization does not maintain focus and begins to endorse specific political or social ideology, its stances on complex issues will be less and less internally consistent. In a movement based on the concept that reason is the most valuable tool we have, internal consistency is absolutely vital.

I think that people who find these communities see a ready-made audience – an audience whose members appear to share more values and ideologies than the one around which the community was formed. As I noted in my last post, it is easy to wave the liberal flag of “helping people” and rally this audience around another cause, but where is the line drawn?

If, for example, secular conferences take on gay marriage, why not polygamy? Do all skeptics, secularists, and atheists agree with me that polygamy should be legalized? How about an effort to eradicate marriage altogether? What about government-run health care? How about education? Is privatization the answer? What about charter schools? Education, after all, is a central issue for those who care about social justice, so why should skeptics and secularists talk about it?

I’ll tell you why: we do not agree on the solutions, nor do we agree on what is “fair” or “moral” in these areas. These are issues of values. Skeptics can discuss evidence regarding specific questions (e.g., whether outcomes-based teaching is effective), but skepticism cannot tell us whether or not the education of children should be the responsibility of the government. When groups endorse specific values and conclusions which cannot be empirically supported, they’re endorsing ideologies and, in the case of skepticism at least, rejecting the very methods they claim to promote.

I have already made it clear that failing to understand and apply the differences between skepticism, secularism, and atheism makes one a poor skeptic, but does it also make one a poor secularist? Maybe it does. It appears to me that many secular groups today fail to maintain those fences between themselves and atheist groups or individuals with large audiences (e.g., PZ Myers) who have made it clear that their goals go beyond securing the rights of atheists and eliminating social stigmas attached to atheism. Their goal is to eradicate religion. So, the liberal ideology of “freedom of/from religion” is shifting toward the conservative “my belief system is king”. The oppressed become the oppressors, the victims of bigotry become the bigots.

This is what happens when missions drift. Sometimes the righteous mission becomes the immoral one.

You may think that the direction you want to take it is the best and the most righteous, but everyone thinks that about their own ideology.

Just some food for thought.

I will start by quoting from the comments of another blog because I don’t want this comment to go unread. The comment was written by D.J. Grothe, President of the JREF.

…Leaving aside your conflation of atheism, skepticism and secularism, allow me to respond to a few of your remarks.

I appreciate that you reference the diversity panel I programmed into last year’s TAM schedule. JREF is happy to have taken the lead in such programming at conferences, having had both a panel and a workshop on women’s issue in 2010, and a panel on diversity in 2011. We plan some similar programming along these lines in 2012. And I am personally proud that half the speakers at TAM last year were women, and about 40% of the attendees were women (we programmed TAM this way not out of some commitment to quotas, but because we know that skepticism in general and the event in particular are better off if we include the talents of everyone, not just one half of the population). This is a marked improvement over where these allied movements were 15 years ago when I first got involved professionally.

As the only organization in the skeptic/atheist/humanist world run by a gay man, JREF takes issues of diversity seriously (http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/1430-diversity-at-the-amazng-meeting-9.html), including political and religious diversity. (I might add that this one reason why we find it very important to avoid conflating skepticism with atheism; to repeat what I have said elsewhere: JREF is not an atheist organization (http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/1081-new-atheist-directions-at-the-jref.html). Similarly, even though Randi and I are both gay men, JREF is not a gay rights organization.)

But to clarify, I never argued that skepticism should be completely removed from social issues. Indeed, I argued quite the opposite, both in that diversity panel and in a number of previous talks (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/10/d-j-grothe-skepticism-and-humanism/) that I have given over the years. The skepticism JREF advances is motivated by our interest in the well being of others, and out of our commitment to make the world a better place, not just from a petty desire to prove others wrong. When skeptics rail against the use of the ADE 561 dowsing rod as a bomb detector at checkpoints in Afghanistan and Iraq, we do so because that unfounded belief kills people. When skeptics rage against psychics who prey on the grieving, we do so not only because belief in psychics in bunk, but because belief in psychics really hurts people.

I do believe it is important for nonprofits to remain focused on their unique missions, and to avoid “mission creep.” The JREF’s mission is to “promote critical thinking by reaching out to the public and media with reliable information about paranormal and supernatural ideas so widespread in our society today.” Obviously, there are many other important missions and causes for folks to commit themselves to, in addition to JREF’s cause. Indeed, for nearly 20 years I’ve been involved with LGBT activism, as well as with atheist activism, and with environmentalism. But I would never join, say, PETA and insist they focus on other causes I care about like global warming instead of their mission, nor would I join the NRA and demand they start advocating for gay rights instead of the right to bear arms.

That said, JREF’s work over many years has been precisely to address the harm that results from undue credulity, and often within marginalized communities. Consider that Peter Popoff preys mostly on socio-economically disadvantaged communities of color, or that there is a lot of harmful pseudoscience peddled about and within the gay community. Or look at the work of Leo Igwe, the Nigerian skeptic and activist who works with the JREF to combat persecution of “witches” in Africa….

D.J.’s comment mainly addressed the following (NOTE: this is edited somewhat, but I do believe that there is enough context to convey the author’s intended message.):

One of the things that I have trouble with in this movement is the lack of focus on issues that “matter”…

…as someone who cares deeply about social justice, it has very often been a very difficult movement to be a part of. For me the great appeal of secularism, the great tragedy of religion, and my own personal passion for this cause is all centered around the fact that religion is the source of many evils or used to justify those evils perpetrated against humanity. As was said several times over the weekend, UFOs and Bigfoot aren’t that important to me, skepticism is much more interesting when applied to issues that impact people’s lives in serious ways. Children, minorities, people of color, women, poor people, the disabled, the elderly, LGBT, and other marginalized groups would benefit so much from having the tragic consequences of religious bigotry removed from their lives.

So when people in charge of important organizations speak on a panel at TAM to say that social justice isn’t and shouldn’t be within the purview of skepticism, or people in my local atheist group leave because they think it is inappropriate that someone posted a link to a story about the Rally Against the War on Women because who cares about that feminist bullshit, or important people in the movement tell me not to bother submitting something to TAM if it has anything to do, even tangentially, with women’s issues, I start to doubt why I am even involved.

First, I must say that I find the implication topics in traditional skepticism do not “matter” nothing less than offensive. If you agree with that statement, I invite you to visit whatstheharm.net and read a few of the stories under topics that D.J. mentioned. Then tell the families of children who were maimed or decapitated by witch doctors that their suffering does not “matter”. Tell the people who were bilked out of their life’s savings by psychics that their problems do not “matter”. Tell the people whose loved ones succumbed to cancer because they were told that their faith would heal them that their deaths – that they - do not “matter”. Tell them that these things did not “impact their lives in serious ways”.  Need I go on? Or perhaps that statement should have read, “…lack of focus on issues that “matter” to me.”

According to a CBS poll, the majority of Americans believe in psychic phenomena, although that proportion is declining, thanks to the efforts of groups like the JREF.

Newsflash: The issues addressed by the JREF and other skeptic organizations matter to me. They matter to others. They “matter”.

It is easy to wave the vague flag of liberal ideology, to throw out terms such as “marginalized groups” and claim to care about the well-being of others, but how does that translate to real progress? What, exactly, are you doing that “matters” more than the work you claim does not “matter”?

Next, although D.J. is not named, it is clear that in the second paragraph the author refers first to D.J.’s comments on a panel about diversity in skepticism which appeared at last year’s Amazing Meeting. This panel sparked quite a bit of discussion and at least one blog post. Many clarifications and “hammer-it-home” comments were made, including this one by D.J. (bold mine):

No questions should be off-limits to us, no issues taboo, including religious beliefs. And I feel the same way about diversity when it comes to political and economic views. I would hate to see the skeptics movement become merely a platform for left-leaning (or right-leaning) ideologies. As I have said many times, I personally favor a skepticism that is widely and consistently applied (and personally believe that will lead to atheism), but I professionally also favor organizations that have clear and limited missions, since an organization that tries to do everything may end up doing nothing very well…. our mission is focused on the paranormal, pseudoscience and testable supernatural claims. Unapologetically.

D.J. noted that the JREF plans to post video of the entire panel soon, so you can see for yourself what was actually said about the scope of skepticism.

Before I add my two cents (or more of it), there is one part of D.J.’s comment which I think is likely to be challenged:

…I might correct the misinformation or misunderstanding that there are people who go around insisting that skeptics only focus on UFOs or Bigfoot; a quick review of the program over the last few TAMs should disabuse you of the misunderstanding, or combat the misinformation…

Discussions of the scope of the movement have popped up in the past and there are those who advocate for a focus on traditional topics such as psychics and UFO abduction. However, any interpretations of those efforts as “insisting”, “telling people what to do”, or even as a question of the definition of skepticism, are misguided.

I know of no instance in which an individual connected with a skeptic organization (big or small) or a blog or anything else which might identify the person as involved with Skepticism has disagreed with the ideal behavior of applying skepticism to all aspects of life. If you think that is untrue, please read at least the first half of this post before reading further here. If you still disagree, please provide examples in the comments of this post.

There are good reasons for organizational focus which go beyond the issue of “mission creep”. One involves the fact that movement skepticism is, as D.J. noted in his discussions of the diversity panel, diverse. I say this, not to point out the inclusion that goes along with diversity, but the fact that a group of people who agree on what is best for society in every possible way is not a group at all. It’s an individual. People are complex. Issues are complex.

Skeptics promote scientific skepticism because they agree that it is the best way to evaluate claims. They do not necessarily agree on political, economic, and social issues.

Most importantly, however, is that the only role that ideology can play in science or scientific skepticism is in motivating individuals to act. Ideology [30 min mark] gets in the way of good reasoning and good science.

This does not mean that science and scientific skepticism should not inform one’s personal ideology, but this is not the same thing. It also does not mean that one’s values should not motivate them to do what they do, as D.J. has noted on numerous occasions (follow the links in his comment). For example, the claim that homosexuals are more likely to be child molesters is one that organized skepticism can address with scientific evidence.  The claim that homosexuality is “morally wrong” is not.

It is worth noting that self-described skeptics are overwhelmingly supportive of gay rights initiatives, but that does not make gay rights a skeptical issue. The ability to separate scientific and logical reasoning from ideology makes it possible to know what we know about homosexuality, which paves the way for acceptance of it. however, when we start with ideology and allow it to lead us, we greatly impair our ability to draw reliable conclusions.

Moving on, I would like to say something about the conflation issue that D.J. set aside, because I think that the problem is related. Here’s my hypothesis about what happens in this community:

1. There are large overlaps of the communities of skepticism, secularism/humanism, and atheism, with individuals who are involved in more than one and with organizations working together on specific projects.
2. There is a high correlation of identification with one or more of these communities and socially-liberal values.
3. An individual discovers the community, either through skepticism, secularism, or atheism, and mistakes this correlation with a “movement”.

Here’s the thing: skepticism, secularism, and atheism are different things. Among them, secularism has the closest ties with liberal ideology, but even secularism is not liberalism.

This may seem unimportant to some and I have often heard the argument, “But people care about X!” That argument is not relevant. If you care about X, promote X. Just stop calling it Y and stop insisting that promoters of Y also promote X.

Furthermore, referring to complaints about conflation as “nit-picking” is ironically anti-intellectual. These distinctions matter. A lot. If you do not know the difference between these things, and if you discuss them as if they are one, the integrity of skepticism as a scientifically-minded endeavor is lost. So are your ability to reason well and the ability of skeptic organizations to achieve their goals. As Daniel Loxton often says, “good fences make good neighbors”.

Individuals new to the communities are best served by studying these issues before publicly opining about them, much as we are all best served by speakers whose expertise supports the content of their talks. Unfortunately, I think that many do not see a role for themselves in activism unless it’s a leadership role. I find that a bit sad; there is plenty to be done while one learns the field.

Finally, I will add that complaints about TAM and other conferences failing to offer “what I want” leave me scratching my head. Most of these complaints are ridiculously off-base if you look at the content that is offered. Even if the topics you want are not discussed, so what? It is not organized just for you and what you think is important.

The Amazing Meeting is a curated event for which speakers (and discussion topics) are chosen by the curators themselves. It is clearly content hat more than 1650 people wanted last year, a number that has grown by at least 10% each year. If you are not among those people, then by all means, go to a conference that meets your requirements for “worthy of attending”.

Or perhaps this is really about whether or not the community should have input into the programming of such events. In that case, I can only point out that the community has plenty of input. You choose to attend/not attend. If you attend, you are asked to provide comments about what you did/did not like as well as offer suggestions for the future.

Anyone here think that your input should be valued more than that of the other attendees?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, this statement is grossly misleading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

They should have stuck to quotes of the press release.

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

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

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

and this a few paragraphs down:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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