I hope everyone is comfortably recovered from both Skepticon and any holiday shenanigans. I’m not entirely, but it’s time to follow up on the reactions to my “Why I Am Not a Rationalist” post last week. There’s been a fair amount of heat in response to the post, as well as a good bit of confusion. Let’s see whether I can clear some of that up.
Here are the most common questions and objections I’ve come across. Continue reading “Why I Am Not a Rationalist, Part 2: Questions and Answers”
I am not a rationalist.
I have friends who are rationalists. I do my best to think of it as a nice little hobby of theirs. I do cryptograms and other puzzles in my down time. They spend time hacking their thinking processes, or trying to. We’ve all got our thing.
Every once in a while, though, they’ll promote some argument or another from another rationalist, and I have to speak up. Why? Because the argument is a dreadful bundle of wrong wrapped up in a “logic” bow. Why? Because it doesn’t matter how well you regulate your thinking. You could overcome the limitations of the human brain and turn yourself into a computer. (You can’t, but bear with me here.) You’re still going to get garbage out if you put garbage in. Continue reading “Why I Am Not a Rationalist”
Yesterday, the Center for Inquiry Management Committee put out an unprecedented statement.
We, the management committee of CFI, believe it is appropriate to confirm that Ms. Hensley is suffering from PTSD. Among other reasons, both Ms. Hensley and CFI receive comments on a regular basis that assert or imply that Ms. Hensley’s statements that she has PTSD must be false. For example, just the other day, CFI received a communication stating “Your organization is terrible for having people on its staff that claim to have PTSD from Twitter!” Some communications on this issue, especially those directed to Ms. Hensley, have themselves been abusive and harassing.
This reaction is disappointing on a number of levels. As explained below, these communications are based on mischaracterizations, false assumptions, faulty reasoning, unscientific attitudes, or misunderstandings. (And, of course, the subset of these communications that are abusive are intolerable.)
This is important for a couple of reasons. Continue reading “A Skeptical Statement from CFI on PTSD”
In case you missed it yesterday, Dawkins had his say on Twitter about the morality of aborting fetuses with Down syndrome. More accurately, he stated that it was immoral not to abort those fetuses.
@InYourFaceNYer Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 20, 2014
Today, predictably, comes the apology, though as usual, it’s mostly a defense. I appreciate Dawkins’ concern that something he tweeted to one person is being shared widely. I’ve certainly had that happen to me, though if the response to my situation is anything to go by, he won’t find much sympathy among online atheists for that.
Still, Dawkins is who he is, and who he is requires that comments like this be addressed when they become widely known. Continue reading “No, That's Eugenics”
Jeff Johnson is running for governor of Minnesota this year, on a platform of making us more like Wisconsin. (I know people in Wisconsin, so, no.. Also I like my governor.) I didn’t remember that I’d written about Johnson before, in August 2009.
Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson has no quarrel with publicly funded treatment for alcoholics. But he said he struggles with taxpayer money going to housing for chronic alcoholics that offer no treatment at all.
Not only that, he was surprised to learn, the so-called “wet houses” don’t even require their homeless residents to stay sober.
“I understand these people are very sick, but I don’t think that means you should expect absolutely nothing out of them,” Johnson said. “If we’re going to provide you housing, you should figure out how to stop being drunk all the time.”
[sigh]
Jeff is a nice guy, generally. I used to work with his wife, so I’ve met him and the kids, and a cuter family you’re not likely to meet. But this…. Continue reading “TBT: Reality-Based Politics”
Nothing quite like noticing an interesting conversation in your Twitter feed and discovering that it is, in part, about you.
@GretchenKoch: I see. Rape culture doesn’t exist, but “outrage culture” does. Seriously, @DJGrothe? That makes my brain hurt. http://gravityswings.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/tilting-at-windmills-outrage-culture-and-manufacturing-enemies/
@DJGrothe: @GretchenKoch “Outrage culture” isn’t exactly a sweeping and systematic critique of society. But I’m glad you got the rhetorical point.
@GretchenKoch: .@DJGrothe I wish I didn’t. I’m tired of crap like that. And this: http://freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2014/08/04/alcoholism-and-personality-disorders/
I’m no longer interested in what you have to say.
@DJGrothe: @GretchenKoch Well, that Zvan piece is typical rubbish, impressive falsehoods. Her predictable MO. #outrageculture
Naturally, having made that post true to the best of my ability and knowledge, I asked.
@szvan: .@DJGrothe What falsehoods would those be, D. J.? Be specific. @GretchenKoch
@DJGrothe: @szvan I’ve communicated with you zero times in years. Not about to start now. Obsess over someone else. @GretchenKoch
@szvan: .@DJGrothe You’ll claim I’m lying but you won’t back it up. Of course. @GretchenKoch
I guess I should be happy he didn’t tell me he was going to forward me the email that contained all the proof. That’s his MO when asked to back up his side of a tale, the promised email that never arrives.
He is right, to the extent that I do have an MO. That MO just happens to be that I don’t let damaging lies like Grothe’s stand when I have the power and the information to knock them down.
That’s what I did in the post he objected to here. That’s what I did in the post reacting to his threats against Pamela Gay. That’s what I did in some of the posts I linked to in order to demonstrate his pattern of lying.
Grothe’s MO is to lie to improve his own situation, then refuse to back up his claims. Mine is to dismantle his lies. I like my MO better.
Update: As Tom notes in the comments, someone is trying to make the laughable argument that Grothe wasn’t talking about Amy in his tweet. Not only does that make no sense in the context of his tweet, but as someone pointed out to me, this isn’t even the first time he’s used the accusation of personality disorders and alcoholism.
@DJGrothe: @gthnk There are a lot of mean girls in atheism etc. But go easy on them: don’t discount the role of alcoholism and personality disorders.
For anyone who might be unaware, “mean girls” is Sara Mayhew’s preferred term for women who don’t want to hang out with her after she’s put so much work into harassing them and their friends. Grothe has been openly sympathetic to her complaints.
So if you’d like to claim Grothe meant someone else, you’re going to need to come up with a better explanation.
Am I emotional? Why, yes. Yes, I am.
I’m annoyed. I had plans for today that had nothing to do with addressing Richard Dawkins’ self-serving justifications for his Twitter trolling. But no, he chose today to brand consequence-based ethical arguments about how he should shape his public messaging as “taboos”, as though they were based in religion or tea-table politesse. That means I get to take time to address that today. You can’t let that sort of thing sit around. It starts to stink up the place. Continue reading “Yes, Richard Dawkins, I'm Emotional”
Apropos of nothing in particular, it’s worth reminding ourselves why stage magicians were originally considered experts on the topics classically adopted by the modern skeptic movement. They really were experts in their topics once upon a time. Their expertise consisted of determining how people could hide their behavior from observers.
Harry Houdini really was an expert on spiritualism because he understood how people could manipulate their environments while appearing to have their motion restricted. Have a “medium” who is producing strange sounds and apparitions while holding hands with people in the dark? Bring Houdini in to determine the ways your subjects could be cheating, set up your situation so they can’t cheat, then test them again.
James Randi really was (and presumably still is) an expert on how people can communicate invisibly. Have someone who claims to be getting message from God or a “psychic” partner? Bring Randi in to determine the ways your subjects could be cheating, set up your situation so they can’t cheat, then test them again.
Magicians are not some sort of all-purpose skeptical experts. There’s no such thing. Skepticism requires subject-matter knowledge to be effective.
Magicians are very narrow experts in the ways that humanity can disguise their behavior from naive observers. Outside of that, they have no more expertise in skeptical matters than anyone else.
This is worth remembering. Trust them to some degree when you need their expertise. Treat them like any non-expert when you don’t.
Note: This is one of those posts you really want to read all the way through before commenting on or characterizing.
I think this question is mostly a thing of the past, but at one point, it was a favorite of those who didn’t like to see the atheist movement criticized were all over wanting to know how we could knew that the harassment and anti-feminism coming our way was coming from atheists. Typically, we pointed to the communities from which the bulk of the harassment came. Now, we can point to some numbers in yet another community that suggest we’re on the right track.
Or at least they make me laugh. Continue reading “But How Do You Know the MRAs Are Atheists?”
Ophelia brings news that those of us who have participated in a particular hashtag are not really skeptics:
What a joke #UpForDebate is. Skeptics should be willing to revise any and all of their beliefs given sufficient reason, argument, evidence.
No idea who said it, because Twitter is finally hiding posts by people you’ve blocked on the search function as well as in your mentions. Well, no, that’s not quite true. That alone gives me some ideas.
For example, I can be pretty sure that this is someone who would have been demanding that the feminist women in the atheist and skeptical movements debate their rights to bodily autonomy over the last couple of years. I can be pretty sure this same person tried to play the “bad skeptic” card then too, saying that things like, oh, blocking them on Twitter constituted an “unskeptical” refusal to address argument.
I can’t tell you whether this person followed along when I participated in the dialogue that Mick Nugent set up a year ago, but I can tell that they should have if they really thought every good skeptic has an obligation to interact with the people they oppose. And if they did that, they really should go running around confusing debate and inquiry like that, because I addressed it at the time. Nor is that the first time I’ve addressed the difference. Either someone isn’t paying attention to me the way they think I should pay attention to them, or they’re ignoring what I’ve said to restate their own premise again (which isn’t exactly good skepticism either). Either way, it’s time to say this again:
Debate is not inquiry. Argument is not skepticism. Fetishizing debate makes us less knowledgeable as a culture and even as a movement, not more. Continue reading “Debate Is Not Inquiry”