Linkspam: August 10th, 2016

Interrupting the health insurance discussion for my monthly linkspam.

Scientific Charity Movement – Jeff Kaufman is part of the effective altruism (EA) movement, which seeks the most efficient ways to do charity. In the late 19th century, there was a “scientific charity” movement that also tried to apply scientific methods to determine the best way to do charity. Unfortunately, their “scientific” method involved investigating individuals to see if they were deserving of charity. How horrible and inefficient. I support giving people money unconditionally.

Exits and Entrances – Somebody on FTB wrote a novel! As a skeptical/atheist nonfiction blogger who may one day write a novel, this is relevant to my interests. However, at the moment I am in the middle of the Cormoran Strike series (J. K. Rowling’s pseudonymous mystery novels).

Academic transphobia and The Media: The persistence of the “activists vs science” false dichotomy – Dr. Zucker’s clinic for conversion therapy for trans kids was recently shut down, and many of its defenders use an “activist vs science” narrative.  Siobhan points out that the clinic was wrong on scientific grounds, and that critics come from both within and without academia.  Hi!

The thing about academically-minded social criticism is that it’s not very accessible.  It’s there, but it usually won’t go viral, and is harder to find.  When people say that activists and academics are opposed to each other, that tells me that they like nuance in theory, but in practice can’t be bothered to actually find it and read it.
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Why health insurance?

Barrack Obama, well-known Nobel Laureate, recently authored an article published in JAMA about the Affordable Care Act (ACA). I had half a mind to write one of my paper reports about it.

However, I thought it would be more interesting to have an open discussion on health insurance. I don’t pretend to be an expert, so please add your thoughts and/or tell me how wrong I am. Shorter posts encourage more reader discussion, so I’m splitting this into three bites:

Part 1: Why health insurance?
Part 2: Challenges to health insurance
Part 3: What does the ACA solve?

Health insurance seems really complicated to me, and I’m amazed that so many people think they understand it. It’s basically an exchange of money, for money. It’s not at all obvious how this is beneficial, and yet it is. Below, I list some possible reasons why it might be beneficial.
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Paper: The Chaos within Sudoku

“The Chaos within Sudoku” is a paper about solving Sudoku puzzles with physics. They simulate an imaginary physical system, let it run, and when it stops the puzzle is solved. See the video below:

The thing about Sudoku is that Sudoku is hard. More specifically, when Sudoku is generalized to grids of arbitrary size, it’s NP-complete. What happens when you translate an NP-complete problem to a physical simulation? The authors find chaotic dynamics.  And in the process, they identify the hardest Sudoku puzzle…
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Origami: Bellflowers Ball

IMG_0872 (small)Bellflowers Ball, by Yuri Shumukov

As a gift, I got this new origami book called Origami Kusudama Garden: Delightful Paper Spheres.  But when I looked inside, I was dismayed.  This isn’t modular origami!  The flowers are all glued together, or sewn together.  Call me a traditionalist, but I prefer my origami to just have folding.

Of course, it turns out I was wrong.  Using sewing to make floral balls is in fact an old tradition, and modular origami is the modern innovation.  Well, okay, it’s worth a try, I thought.  I was also briefly tickled by the idea of assembling a dodecahedron using squares.

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My take on burden of proof

While I’m criticizing Austin Cline, I also want to say something about his article on burden of proof in the context of the atheism vs theism debate.  Again, I have nothing against Cline, and in fact he brings up several points that I agree with:

A more accurate label would be a “burden of support” — the key is that a person must support what they are saying. This can involve empirical evidence, logical arguments, and even positive proof.

The “burden of proof” is not something static which one party must always carry; rather, it is something which legitimately shifts during the course of a debate as arguments and counter-arguments are made.

The part I disagree with Cline’s assertion that the (initial) burden of proof “always lies with the person who is making a claim, not the person who is hearing the claim and who may not initially believe it.”

This leaves open the question of who has the initial burden of proof when both people are making claims.  For example, what if the theist claims there is a god, and I claim there is no god?  According to Cline, atheism refers to people who make no claims about gods, and thus atheists don’t have the initial burden of proof.  However, I am part of the subset of atheists who positively claims there are no gods, so where does that leave me?

In my analysis, burden of proof is the answer to three different questions:

  1. Who wins if no further arguments are made?
  2. Who should win if no further arguments are made?
  3. Whose turn is it to advance the argument?

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Atheist definitions, according to atheism 101

In an earlier post, I discussed the need for better “atheism 101” resources.  One of my complaints about current resources is anything regarding definitions of atheism.  Part of this has to do with me being an opinionated contrarian, but you can judge that for yourself.

Here I will discuss, “What is Atheism? Overview of How Atheism is Defined in Dictionaries, By Atheists” by Austin Cline on about.atheism.com.  I don’t have anything against Cline, on the contrary he seems a decent writer, which is perfect to start this discussion.

Long-time readers may know that I already object to the title of Cline’s article.  Definitions are overrated.  Words have meanings, which cannot always be encapsulated by definitions.  As I recently observed, identity terms especially communicate a lot through subtext and connotation.  One alternative to definition theory is prototype theory (from linguistics and philosophy).  Under prototype theory, we have an idea of what an atheist looks like (i.e. a prototype), and we classify someone as an atheist if they look sufficiently close to the prototype.

But let’s just note the inadequacy of definitions and move on to the content of Cline’s article…

What Is Atheism? Why Atheists Define Atheism Broadly?:

[…] broadly defined, atheism is the absence of belief in the existence of any gods. Most disagreement over this comes from Christians who insist that atheism must be the denial of gods, or at least of their god.

Introductory atheist resources often hammer endlessly about the distinction between “absence of belief in the existence of any gods” and “denial of gods”.  And it makes sense–there are certainly people out there who lack any belief in gods, and yet they do not deny the existence of gods.  For instance, newborn babies have no coherent beliefs whatsoever.  But babies are besides the point. [Read more…]

Life lessons from board games: Hanabi

Just as we can analyze fiction for its meaning and implication on our lives, we can also analyze board games. In some cases, the analogy is direct, if the board game is heavy on narrative and flavor (“You are investigating strange occurrences in Arkham, closing portals to other realms while the Ancient Ones stir in their slumber”). However, a lot of meaningful content could be extracted from the underlying mechanics and rules. Hanabi is a card game with virtually no narrative at all (it’s about making a fireworks show), and yet it says something deep about the nature of communication.

A Hanabi box stands in front of some tokens, and cards with colored numbers on them. The box says 'Race the clock... Build the fireworks... Launch your rockets!'

Hanabi is a cooperative card game, where players, as a team, seek to play cards in the right order. The problem is that players hold their cards backwards, and thus each player can only see other players’ cards, not their own cards. You can’t just tell other players what they are holding, you have to provide them with a limited number of clues, each clue obeying certain constraints. The game is thus all about efficient communication.

Hanabi is easy to carry around and teach to new players, so I’ve played a lot of games with beginners. I will discuss a common beginner’s mistake, and what it says about communication.
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