1. Discussion on PZ Myers being expelled from Expelled

Comment #148049 by wundergeist on March 21, 2008 at 10:09 pm

I FEAR THIS WILL WORK IN FAVOR OF THE MOVIE

No, I'm not stoned. I don't mean that people will agree with it, but they may go watch the movie to be enraged at it, to see how bad it is, with the unfortunate side effect of enriching Ben Stein et alli. Expelling P.Z. might have been a publicity maneuver. I know that my first instinct (before I caught myself) was"I have to go see this, and write a detailed blog post on all its inaccuracies, which I'm sure are many."

Obscurity and irrelevance is what they fear most. We should douse them in it: Treat them like astrologers, alchemists, and other myth-peddlers.

W

2. Berlin gallery in Islam art row

Comment #136872 by wundergeist on March 1, 2008 at 10:51 pm

I OBJECT TO CALLING THE KA'BA "STUPID STONE"

Let's call it what it is:

"Stone cube without any special powers towards which deluded morons pray as a signal of membership in a backwards set of myths used to oppress women and motivate terrorists and thugs."

Nah, too long. Why not a short "Fich" ? (Pardon my French ;-)

3. Christopher Hitchens on Real Time with Bill Maher

Comment #136803 by wundergeist on March 1, 2008 at 6:05 pm

Hitchens in great shape!

The best part:

[People say that a candidate for president has to be religious or won't be elected]

Hitchens - Go ask a 1975 republican if they'll vote for a divorced second-rate actor; they'll say no, because they don't know Ronald Reagan yet. Same with religion.

There's an old problem in market research: how to test a completely new proposition. It is known that simply asking is not the solution; however, simply asking whether people would vote for an atheist is exactly like asking whether they'd like a product they never heard about. Imagine asking people in 1900 about the internet...

W

4. Taking evidence seriously

Comment #135412 by wundergeist on February 28, 2008 at 11:32 pm

Laurie Fraser (#135354):

I wouldn't want to extrapolate from such a small convenience sample. I believe the problem is not the lack of intelligence, rather the attitude some educated people have with respect to knowledge outside their area of expertise. Dawkins described a creationist geologist in The God Delusion that simultaneously believes in Young Earth creationism and on 100,000 year old oil deposits. When I see a professor of statistics fall into post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies, I know that it cannot be simple ignorance or stupidity. At least not just.

The problem with many academics who are knowledgeable and smart is that they have no intellectual curiosity so they fall prey to bad ideas in anything outside their area of expertise. Shermer explains his better by [paraphrased]: smart people believe stupid things because they use their intelligence to defend positions they arrived at by non-smart reasons.

W

5. Taking evidence seriously

Comment #135309 by wundergeist on February 28, 2008 at 8:09 pm

THERE IS NO HOPE!

Convenience sample of four colleagues at lunch. Four professors with PhDs in technical areas.

One reads her horoscope daily and Feng Shueis her office. Takes both seriously. Doesn't believe in God, though. Sadly she's a perfect example of the dumb saying "when you stop believing in God you believe in anything."

Number two believes in Chinese traditional medicine, reflexology, acupuncture, homeopathy. Apparently, anything but actual science.

Me, I'm anti-social, being the rational empiricist of the lot. I've been told many times to accept more diverse points of view.

Number four wins the prize: does not [ok, brace yourself, this is going to be a big one] believe in [have I mentioned her PhD is in psychology?] evolution.

These are professors at a top-tier research school in the united States, teaching undergraduate through phd level courses in technical areas. So, paraphrasing Neil DeGrasse Tyson at the first Beyond Belief conference, the problem is much bigger than we think.

WG

6. Richard Dawkins on five of his favorite books

Comment #133802 by wundergeist on February 26, 2008 at 8:33 pm

Waugh's Sword of Honour (not Scoop?) but no Wodehouse? At all? Surely you jest, Professor Dawkins...

My five faves:

P.G. Wodehouse "The Code of the Woosters"

Carl Sagan "The Demon-Hauted World"

Richard Dawkins "Climbing Mount Improbable"

Voltaire "Candide"

Feynman's Lectures on Physics

7. Charles Simonyi Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science

Comment #127060 by wundergeist on February 14, 2008 at 9:33 pm

Having proposed Pinker and Porco, I now add The Bad Astronomer (Phil Plait). Because:

1) Steven Pinker will not leave Harvard. Harvard would not let him. Money talks...

2) Carolyn Porco, give up playing with space probes? Plus she is so active in research now that it would be a net loss to science. The same goes for V.S. and some of the other notables.

3) The Bad Astronomer does the type of fun things that captivate the general public (like movie reviews) and does not fall into the Kraus 'let's all be friends' trap. (I love Kraus's books and I think he is great when presenting to audiences interested in science, but I don't believe he has the attitude to take on morons that he would have to as the professor of public understanding of science.)

(I raised this with The Bad Astronomer in his videocast but he seemed to think the competition is too strong. I don't, for the reasons above.)

WG

P.S. About Smolin... erm... I guess the string theorists would set New College on fire. Literally, not metaphorically.

8. Charles Simonyi Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science

Comment #126251 by wundergeist on February 12, 2008 at 7:49 pm

Pinker would be a great replacement for RD, though I'm sure Hahvahd would fight hard to keep him.

From the web (http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/silly/Crossed Legs.htm):

Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard says: "The problem with the religious solution [to philosophical problems] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, 'Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.' For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones."

Kraus is too conciliatory. His let's all be friends and convince people using positive aspects of science does not work.

Porco, definitely. But she'd have to leave space exploration behind, so probably wouldn't.

Greene I find a little too limited. Yes, he explains some contemporary physics well, but he is no Carl Sagan.

W

9. Charles Simonyi Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science

Comment #126247 by wundergeist on February 12, 2008 at 7:30 pm

RD said:

> I have simply reached the mandatory retirement age.

Why oh why do universities have such things? The condition for mandatory retirement should not be chronological (especially with advances in medical technology) rather the degree of deadwood-ness of the professor.

So, RD, are you considering a job in an american university, where there is no such rule?

WG

10. 10 cc of atheism

Comment #125083 by wundergeist on February 10, 2008 at 11:28 pm

Can't believe I forgot to mention "King George" and "Lt George."

As to choice of religion, note that it is not just judaism, it is hasidic judaism, which many jews consider outdated and criticize themselves. Christianity had been criticized twice before (the nuns, representing the traditional christianity, and the faith healer, representing the modern-pop version). Which brings us to the T-rex in the room:

Nobody in mainstream media is going to criticize Islam. *

Now riddle me this: if we play a game where we start with four types of agent with beliefs {c,j,i,a}; at each step there is a nonzero probability that a belief is switched from {c,j,a} to one of the others (by coercion, by persuasion, by "getting along by going along") and a zero probability that an agent with belief i changes, what is the long term equilibrium?

W

--
* Maybe "nobody" is not accurate. It's not like a member of parliament in an European country would have to leave that country and get criticized for speaking up by her peers, her neighbors, and religious lead... oh wait... IT IS EXACTLY THAT!

11. 10 cc of atheism

Comment #124532 by wundergeist on February 9, 2008 at 5:59 pm

APPlet:

Hugh Laurie was Wooster in Jeeves and Wooster, an overtly comic role. (Stephen Fry played Jeeves.)

WG

12. Sherri Shepherd needs to go away now

Comment #94528 by wundergeist on December 5, 2007 at 11:31 pm

Actually, I believe she fulfills a very important need:

She demonstrates to viewers that expecting people on television to be knowledgeable and authoritative is wrong. In this age of celebrity-driven credibility, this is an important point to make.

Thanks, Sherri, for being such a perfect example of arrogance combined with ignorance.

W

13. Intelligent design is a science, not a faith

Comment #16990 by wundergeist on January 10, 2007 at 1:34 am

Dear John C:

You mean that Go did not do User Testing, Specification Validation, Human Factors Analysis, Product Creative Uses Lab? I guess he took [ancient professor in rival department]'s product design course. That being the case, I'm surprised humans don't run on steam engines, can be mass produced by unskilled labor, don't need daily maintenance, and don't have higher failure rates... :-)

Seriously though, my point is that humans are a great _adaptation_ given evolution and the constraints thereof, but a terrible _design_ for an omnipotent being. The only reason IDers believe that humans are good examples of design is because they (IDers) don't know anything about design (or engineering, or physics). Remember that God has no constraints and supposedly starts from scratch. Even my lower quintile students would beat God in any design comparison....

The basic premise of ID is fundamentally flawed: humans don't have the appearance of being designed [it just appears so to those who know nothing about design], unless the designer was so constrained that he had to settle for minor changes to a previously existing product. Not very omnipotent, then, is he?

On the other hand, how does the Bible justify hemorrhoids?

WG

14. Intelligent design is a science, not a faith

Comment #16989 by wundergeist on January 10, 2007 at 1:13 am

Dear G Bile:

A C-Grade? Surely you jest! Any student who proposed a curved structure for vertical load bearing with variable dynamics (except if it had aesthetic purposes), segmented and with soft weak joints, and placed a critical communication network running through its center (without redundant alternative wiring paths to boot) would get an F and a recommendation to drop out of engineering and become a poet or bartender (nothing wrong with poets or bartenders, obviously, but I don't want them designing critical load-bearing structures or communication networks, and we can always use a good bartender).

A C grade! Really!

WG

15. Intelligent design is a science, not a faith

Comment #16983 by wundergeist on January 10, 2007 at 12:44 am

I TEACH A CLASS ON INTELLIGENT DESIGN

I do. We try to be intelligent in the design of shopping malls, car interiors, medical computer interfaces, management information displays, child-safe medicine bottles, and self-heating precooked meals to go.

As a lark, in the last class sessions I always ask the students to play God and design the human being. Within ten minutes God's engineering and design credentials are seriously questioned. Students straigten the spine (why have shear forces when simply standing up? Did God flunk out of rational mechanics 101?), create separate inlets for food and air with dynamic redundancy (single point of failure design? Did God go to school in the 1970s?), replace hemoglobin with highly efficient oxygen transport nanites (doesn't God have good SciFi in Heaven?), and so on...

It dawns on them that people who think human beings were designed by some superbeing are completely clueless about design (and engineering... and biology... and science).

By the time the class is over someone will have made the old joke: God's engineering degree must come from [local rival school]: what kind of designer runs a sewer through an amusement area? (Yep, they always get that old joke in.)

I never make any religious points or even discuss the implications of their redesigns (that is not the point of the class and I always keep my classes strictly to the point). But the result is much more damaging to the fundies: being criticized, argued against, ostracized, and even yelled at is nothing compared to being laughed at.

Laughter. Powerful medicine against ID.

(I am all for intelligent design of stuff; especially since so much of the stuff we see --- living beings included --- fail even the most basic design criteria.)

WG

16. Without God, Gall Is Permitted

Comment #16217 by wundergeist on January 5, 2007 at 3:24 pm

A general comment on why the religious guard keeps repeating the "evil atheists" argument - It puts us (atheists, just in case that's unclear) on a defensive posture. Being in that posture has two main disadvantages:

First, by having to argue that atheists are not evil, we keep the thought itself alive, and the memory representation of evel and atheist somehow linked (I recall vaguely an old paper about memory information retrieval and the management of a McDonald's rumor crisis - denial was having a negative effect; see ref.).

Second, there is research in courtroom argumentation (psychologist Reid Hastie's, I think) that shows that when prosecution uses a single line of argument (A went to B's place with the gun C etc) while the defense has to come up with alternative explanations for each fact (A was there to pay the bill, he had the gun because he was going hunting), the simplicity of the story (however cherry-picked and wrong) beat the complexity of the alternative explanations (even if they were the true story). The effect had to do with the way memory works, and simple storylines are easier to remember. As atheists defeat each point of the "evil atheists" argument individually, they are in the position of the defense lawyer.

Before I realized this, I did think that the Dawkinsian approach to religion was too belligerent, that maybe the "honey vs vinegar" approach to catching pious flies made more sense. However, given these biases in human perception and recall, I now think that appeasement of religious evangelists not only makes the evangelists more evangelic, but is bad psychology.

Food for thought,
WG

"Using Information Processing Theory to Design Marketing Strategies," Alice M. Tybout; Bobby J. Calder; Brian Sternthal. Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 18, No. 1. (Feb., 1981), pp. 73-79. Google is a wonderful thing