Meanderings on violent protest

Recently, there was a protest at UC Berkeley, which led the loathsome Breitbart journalist Milo Yiannopoulos to cancel his talk. Some of you may have figured out by now, this is a local story to me. I saw the protest myself.

Well, I only really walked by the protest on my way home. There were maybe a hundred people at 5 pm, but UC Berkeley says it later grew to 1,500. Protestors were chanting “No Milo! No Trump!” There was someone holding a giant dove. I took a flyer, which was produced by refusefascism.org–and then being anti-social I went home and played video games.

Photo of someone holding a giant dove made of cloth and sticks. Another person holds a red flag that says RESIST.Somebody managed to capture the dove. This photo is on the edge of the crowd so it doesn’t tell you how big it was. From Chicago Suntimes, who credits it to Ben Margot/Associated Press.

It was later I heard from Facebook that the protest had turned violent, and the university cancelled the talk. I heard that protestors attacked police, set a portable generator on fire, and then broke a bunch of windows nearby.  There were few minor injuries.

Among my friends, many expressed sympathy for the protest, or were at the protest, but they condemned the violence. They were keen to highlight this particular part of the UC Berkeley statement:

The violence was instigated by a group of about 150 masked agitators who came onto campus and interrupted an otherwise non-violent protest.

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Origami: Six Intersecting Squares

Six Intersecting Squares

Six Intersecting Squares, a model of my own design

Description: 6 squares, each made of four sheets of identically patterned paper.  The squares are organized into three pairs of parallel planes.  Each square has a square hole cut out from the center so that you can see straight through it.

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No words

I am so pissed off by the immigration ban, and all the circumstances surrounding it.  I feel as if the most pessimistic predictions about a Trump presidency are coming to fruition, and the truly morbid ones sound realistic.  Are we currently witnessing the rise of the American Hitler?  The fall of the US?  Is this the prelude to WWIII, this time with nuclear weapons?  Does anything else matter?

When I set out to write a post, I usually start with a potentially contentious point, and build arguments in favor or against it.  But in this situation, there is no contentious thesis, and no one to argue with.  This is unacceptable, and I can’t think of what else to say about it.  I don’t think I could bear to turn it into yet another thesis and essay.  Blogging simply isn’t the right tool to address this problem.

I have a draft, entirely unwritten, where I talk about the value of low-priority activism.  For example, atheist activism is still valuable even though religion isn’t the root of all evil.  Feminism is still important even if not everything can be blamed on the patriarchy.  It’s okay to fight for a thing that is not the most important thing.  Anyway we don’t even know what the most important thing is.  You get the general idea.

I still stand by this thesis, but just this moment I’m not feeling it.  Because right now we do know what the most important thing is, and that is to stop Trump.

My issues with queer-positive atheism

Following my big rant on queer-positive Christianity, I have a much shorter rant on queer-positive atheism. There are fewer things to unpack, but even the smaller issues are important to me, because I interact more frequently with atheists than I do with religious people.

So you’re not a fundamentalist Christian

The number one criticism I have about atheist attitudes towards queer people is that they’re very self-satisfied about it. Yes, we all know you’re way ahead of fundamentalist Christians. We all know you were in favor of same-sex marriage (or opposed to all marriage) before it was cool. Good for you?

As I previously said, one of my major issues with queer-positive Christianity is that they’re starting from very low standards, the standards of Christianity. Atheists have the advantage of being able to scrap Christian standards entirely and build something better. But you’re tossing out your advantage if you’re always comparing your attitudes to those of very religious people.

And I’m not even saying that we as atheists need to be more ashamed of [insert prominent anti-SJ atheist here]. Shame is not what I’m going for at all. It’s just that, even when we’re all on the same page about social justice, social justice is still a thing that takes work and not just lip service.
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Announcements

Mandisa Thomas, president of Black Nonbelievers, is giving a talk this Sunday!  If you live near Berkeley, California, please consider attending.  Details below:

Fear of a Black Atheist: How Religion Has Crippled the Black Community
Sunday, January 29th, 6 pm
2040 VLSB at UC Berkeley.

If any readers attend, you can also say hi to me.  I’m the tall Asian guy.  If you live near Sacramento, she is giving the same talk on Thursday.

There is currently a legal defense fundraiser against Richard Carrier.  I talked about Richard Carrier earlier, and how he’s using a lawsuit to silence several people and organizations.  At that time, I mentioned a defense fund for Skepticon, but apparently those funds will only offset Skepticon’s costs.  This new fundraiser is for the other defendants, including the FreeThought Blogs network.  I donated.

Meaning of “theory” in science and pop-science

In science, a theory is “a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that is acquired through the scientific method and repeatedly tested and confirmed”–according to Wikipedia. This is frequently contrasted with the colloquial meaning of “theory”, which usually refers to something speculative and unconfirmed. It is suggested that in a scientific context, it is more appropriate to refer to a speculative idea as a “hypothesis”.

However, in my experience as a physicist, this is not how the word “theory” is used in practice. Generally, the word “theory” is contrasted with “experiment”, describing the kind of work rather than the quality of the work. Since theories are carefully crafted by experts, it is fair to say that they are more than mere speculation, but that doesn’t mean that every theory has been thoroughly tested and confirmed. Some theories are untested, some theories are in direct competition with other equally viable theories, some theories intentionally model things that do not presently exist, and some theories are just poorly crafted.

So, basically, Wikipedia–and most dictionaries as well–appear to be in conflict with my understanding as a fluent speaker of English physics. That probably means there’s some bad lexicography going on.
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The PBR Theorem explained

The PBR theorem is another theorem of quantum mechanics, which could go alongside Bell’s Theorem and the Kochen-Specker Theorem.  I wrote this explanation in 2011, before the paper was officially published in Nature.  Since then, it’s been recognized as a moderately important theorem, and it has been named after its three authors (Pusey, Barrett, and Rudolph).  But at the time I didn’t really know whether it would become important.

There’s a new paper on arxiv called “The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically“.  It has a theorem which proves that, given a few basic assumptions, the quantum state (ie the wavefunction) must be real, rather than a merely statistical object.  Nature has an article which mostly just harps on how “seismic” the paper is. 

Nature (correction: the article’s author, not Nature itself) compares its importance to Bell’s Theorem, which is a very important result indeed from 1964.  Bell’s theorem proved that if there were “hidden variables” underneath the quantum state, then entangled particles must be communicating with each other faster than light.  I’ve explained Bell’s theorem in the past.

I felt the news coverage left a lot of unanswered questions.  What do they even mean by the “statistical interpretation” of quantum mechanics?  Roughly how is it proven?  What is the difference between this and Bell’s theorem?  I found the answers in the arxiv print, and will attempt to summarize them.

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