Practical advice for struggling atheist clubs

Following my bitter retrospective on 9 years of participation in atheist university groups, here are some concrete tips for how you can do better than what we did. They are roughly in order from high priority to low priority.

1. Have a mailing list and a Facebook group. Announce every meeting and event through both channels.  Don’t have more than one.

2. Register your group with the university, and keep it registered every year.

3. Reserve room space for regular meetings. Weekly meetings in the evening are common practice. This must be done far in advance.

4. Know the dates of the activities fairs at your university. You probably need to register for them far in advance, so look it up immediately. The minimum requirement for the activities fair is a large sign and a sign-up sheet for your mailing list.

5. Make a good impression at the first meeting of the year. The first meeting is often the one with the most people, so make sure you know how to run discussions for various group sizes (see below). You may think that it will be exciting to discuss your upcoming plans for the year, but it usually comes across as sharing boring administrative details, so don’t do it unless it’s absolutely necessary. Your main objective is that students should meet each other and make positive social connections. That means that each person should learn, and remember, the name of one or two people who are not in the leadership.

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Are atheist clubs dying?

I’m now saying my last goodbyes to the local atheist student group. This is a significant event. I’ve been atheist student groups since 2008.  I first joined the UCLA skeptical group as an undergraduate, and then I participated in the UC Berkeley atheist group for the entirety of my PhD.

As I reflect back on 9 years, how do I justify my participation?  I don’t think I can.  Even when the leadership has been good, I have never felt they produced any sort of effective activism.  I was resigned to using the group just to have a few interesting discussions and meet a few new people.  Even so, I spent a lot of time being dissatisfied or angry with them.  This last semester, I skipped a lot of meetings (since an origami group competes for the same time slot), and I mostly felt it improved my life.

I’m saying goodbye because I intend to graduate before fall semester.  But also, the club is dying.  Right now, there is nobody to lead the group in the fall.  After years of struggling, maybe it will finally disappear.

This is a post where I present no evidence, and instead brazenly generalize my personal experiences.  Our atheist club is dying.  Are all atheist clubs dying?  Clearly not.  I’ve always heard that atheist groups in the southern US are more active than their counterparts on the coasts.  And lots of local non-student atheist organizations are still active as far as I know.  Even so, if the atheist group at UC Berkeley dies, it feels like an indicator of a broader decline, and a herald for the death of other atheist groups that now prosper.

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Ethnicity in Xenoblade Chronicles X

This is an article I wrote in 2015 about a video game.  My commenters had some insightful responses, so a few of their insights are now incorporated.

In my apartment, free time has recently become dominated by Xenoblade Chronicles X, epic Japanese RPG. The premise is explained in this video:

Quick summary: In 2054, Aliens destroy earth. Earth sends out colony space ships. One of these, New Los Angeles, crash lands on an alien planet.

Xenoblade Chronicles X offers an interesting case study of ethnicity in Japanese video games, because unlike other games which take place in fantasy worlds, this one takes place in our world (although a different planet). What’s more, it takes place in a future version of Los Angeles. Los Angeles, of course, is very ethnically diverse, so by looking at the cast we can see a Japanese interpretation of ethnic diversity.
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On equal opportunities and outcomes

I recently found an article interviewing Jonathan Haidt. It’s in the rather tedious “liberals are going too far and eliminating free speech” genre. I’m not going to address most of it, just this part (emphasis mine):

The left, meanwhile, has undergone an ideological transformation. A generation ago, social justice was understood as equality of treatment and opportunity: “If gay people don’t have to right to marry and you organize a protest to apply pressure to get them that right, that’s justice,” Mr. Haidt says. “If black people are getting discriminated against in hiring and you fight that, that’s justice.”

Today justice means equal outcomes. “There are two ideas now in the academic left that weren’t there 10 years ago,” he says. “One is that everyone is racist because of unconscious bias, and the other is that everything is racist because of systemic racism.” That makes justice impossible to achieve: “When you cross that line into insisting if there’s not equal outcomes then some people and some institutions and some systems are racist, sexist, then you’re setting yourself up for eternal conflict and injustice.”

Here’s the thing. Outcomes are a product of several things: opportunities provided by society, the abilities of the individuals, and random chance. I believe that people in these minority groups do not systematically have less inherent ability than people in the majority. So if we truly had equality of opportunity, I would expect that minority groups would also have equal outcomes, plus or minus some statistical noise.

Comic transcript: This Ayn Random number generator you wrote *claims* to be fair, but the output is biased toward certain numbers. Well, maybe those numbers are just intrinsically better!
Source: XKCD

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Linkspam: April 15th, 2017

Yeah, just finished my taxes!  So now it’s time for my monthly linkspam.

Double-Dipping Datasets – Why is it wrong to use an old dataset in order to answer new questions? Answer: It’s not wrong, I do it all the time in my research. Oh, and social scientists do it too, as in the well-known study from 2004 showing that asexuals make up about 1% of the population–based on a survey from 1990.  Nonetheless, there are some cases where it intuitively seems like using the same dataset twice sounds wrong.  HJ Hornbeck digs into some of the reasons why.

Here’s another thought.  Researchers have limited resources and can only collect so much data.  Collecting a few large datasets and using those for many purposes is fine.  But if you’re collecting lots of little sets of data, you shouldn’t be testing lots of hypotheses on each data set until you get a hit.

Trans 101: Put Down the Map – Heh, well this isn’t the kind of article that tries to explain trans issues in a simplified and accessible format.  There’s a lot about epistemology, using the “map vs territory” metaphor.  I will say that every social justice advocate should have a healthy amount of empiricism, and that’s why we encourage listening to people rather than just theorizing about them.

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Paper: Overbooking flights

In recent news (cn: autoplay), a United Airlines passenger was unwillingly dragged off a plane to make seats for employees. The incident was partially blamed on the common practice of airlines to deliberately overbook flights in order to make up for all the no-show passengers.

While I won’t discuss the particulars of this incident, I am willing to do something that most journalists are not: read relevant academic literature. I just picked one paper that appeared to have a sufficiently broad perspective:

Marvin Rothstein, (1985) OR Forum – OR and the Airline Overbooking Problem. Operations Research 33(2):237-248.

The basic problem is that many people who buy airplane tickets don’t show up. In 1961, the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) reported that 1 out of 11 ticket sales were no-shows. These numbers are about the same today, with 7-8% no-shows. The airlines could create wait lists to fill the empty seats, but it would be impossible to contact the wait-listed customers in a timely fashion unless they were already present at the gate.

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Immigration is a science issue

The March for Science happens this next Saturday. I don’t typically participate in protests, but if you’re interested there are hundreds of them occurring throughout the world. The March for Science website explains why they organize:

Science, scientists, and evidence-based policymaking are under attack. Budget cuts, censorship of researchers, disappearing datasets, and threats to dismantle government agencies harm us all, putting our health, food, air, water, climate, and jobs at risk. It is time for people who support science to take a public stand and be counted.

I’m surprised by an omission from this agenda: immigration policy. Immigration is very obviously a science issue. My advisor is an immigrant. 1/3 to 1/2 of the students and postdocs in my research group have been immigrants. The same is true of my class. The effect is so large, you hardly need statistics to show it.

Nonetheless, some statistics…

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