I know, it’s weird, it’s mid-August — but we’re having a primary right now. It’s been buried in the news and won’t get much attention because there aren’t any presidential candidates on the ballot, but it’s still important to turn out and do your civic duty. Stephanie has some recommendations for who good smart sensible liberals should vote for.
I had been wondering for a while whether I should join the masses and add my own answer (and story) to the question “why are you an atheist?”. The new year brought with it a sense of “why the hell not?”.
Reading the answers of others, i’ve seen it often helps to give some basic background first. Don’t worry, most of it is relevent to the actual answer. I’m a person of the male persuasion in my early 20s, living in the pleasant (if you like mud) countryside of the east of England. I’m pretty much the stereotype of a geek/gamer (without the “fat, no sense of personal hygiene and glasses” parts). I grew up a basic countryside-dwelling family (as an only child), complete with the usual passive conservatism and Christianity – passive in the sense that it’s just “there”, everyone expects everyone else thinks the same as they do, so the subjects rarely come up. This is hardly perfect, but a lot better than being bombarded with it every day. But in other ways, it’s a lot more insidious.
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly. It is hedgehog day.
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
Crommunist just published something I wrote, and has properly recognized it as the greatest thing ever, as well as acknowledging his fealty. I am gracious; I am magnanimous; I shall let him live.
For now.
The new American Atheist billboard designs are now online, and I don’t want to disappoint Dave Silverman, so I’ll give my usual review: better than the last set, but still needs work.
Stuff I like: it’s a strong, assertive message, and that’s what I want from AA. The “Atheism: Simply Reasonable” slogan is clear, short, punchy. They’ve gotten away, mostly, from the blocky multi-colored Mondrian look of previous signs.
Stuff I don’t like: the text on the left is 5 lines long. That’s too much for a billboard. The central image is sort of arbitrary — it says religion is silly, but it doesn’t contribute much to the message on the left. The other billboard, on Mormonism, is worse in this regard; why is there a guy in his underwear there? Really, on a billboard, everything must be distilled down to deliver one clear, simple argument.
I know Dave is rolling his eyes right now and wondering why he’s even trying to lead those fractious, critical atheists at all…wouldn’t sheep be so much easier?
There is a magic and arbitrary line in ordinary statistical testing: the p level of 0.05. What that basically means is that if the p level of a comparison between two distributions is less than 0.05, there is a less than 5% chance that your results can be accounted for by accident. We’ll often say that having p<0.05 means your result is statistically significant. Note that there’s nothing really special about 0.05; it’s just a commonly chosen dividing line.
Now a paper has come out that ought to make some psychologists, who use that p value criterion a lot in their work, feel a little concerned. The researchers analyzed the distribution of reported p values in 3 well-regarded journals in experimental psychology, and described the pattern.
Here’s one figure from the paper.
The solid line represents the expected distribution of p values. This was calculated from some theoretical statistical work.
…some theoretical papers offer insight into a likely distribution. Sellke, Bayarri, and Berger (2001) simulated p value distributions for various hypothetical effects and found that smaller p values were more likely than larger ones. Cumming (2008) likewise simulated large numbers of experiments so as to observe the various expected distributions of p.
The circles represent the actual distribution of p values in the published papers. Remember, 0.05 is the arbitrarily determined standard for significance; you don’t get accepted for publication if your observations don’t rise to that level.
Notice that unusual and gigantic hump in the distribution just below 0.05? Uh-oh.
I repeat, uh-oh. That looks like about half the papers that report p values just under 0.05 may have benefited from a little ‘adjustment’.
What that implies is that investigators whose work reaches only marginal statistical significance are scrambling to nudge their numbers below the 0.05 level. It’s not necessarily likely that they’re actually making up data, but there could be a sneakier bias: oh, we almost meet the criterion, let’s add a few more subjects and see if we can get it there. Oh, those data points are weird outliers, let’s throw them out. Oh, our initial parameter of interest didn’t meet the criterion, but this other incidental observation did, so let’s report one and not bother with the other.
But what it really means is that you should not trust published studies that only have marginal statistical significance. They may have been tweaked just a little bit to make them publishable. And that means that publication standards may be biasing the data.
Masicampo EJ, and Lalande DR (2012). A peculiar prevalence of p values just below .05. Quarterly journal of experimental psychology PMID: 22853650
Don’t you hate it when they do that? The latest Sci-ence is talking about your choice of avatars — those little icons we so thoughtlessly (in my case) attach to our posts. I thought Jeffrey Rowland’s cartoon of me in a diaper and angel wings was so adorable I snagged it a few years ago and have been using it ever since. But it turns out that your choice of avatar actually has an effect on naive user’s impression of you.
It’s really no surprise that your online avatar influences others’ perceptions of you. In an old UConn computer behavior study (lol IM), participants were asked rate a series of avatars that ranged from people to objects with faces. What they found was pretty obvious: when faced with an avatar in online interactions, participants relied on the characteristics of the avatar for social clues about who they were interacting with.
What’s really interesting about the Nowak/Rauh study is that participants who were more familiar with online interaction relied on the avatars less and instead looked for behavioral cues. It makes sense, given that those who are used to navigating around avatars are generally aware that they aren’t really talking to a bottle of laundry detergent, rather a person who has chosen a bottle of laundry detergent as their avatar.
I haven’t really been paying much attention to those little avatars — hey, I’m a participant who is “more familiar with online interaction” — but now I’m thinking of tweaking the display to make them twice as big and make new user’s default icon really ugly, just to be mean.
I’m not feeling any compulsion to change mine, though.
For those of you wondering how to set your avatar: go to Gravatar.com, and upload an image under the same email address you use to log on here. That’ll do it!
That’s Paul Ryan’s official new title, granted by Charles Pierce, the one political commentator you must read this election season. He’s got Ryan pegged.
Paul Ryan is an authentically dangerous zealot. He does not want to reform entitlements. He wants to eliminate them. He wants to eliminate them because he doesn’t believe they are a legitimate function of government. He is a smiling, aw-shucks murderer of opportunity, a creator of dystopias in which he never will have to live. This now is an argument not over what kind of political commonwealth we will have, but rather whether or not we will have one at all, because Paul Ryan does not believe in the most primary institution of that commonwealth: our government. The first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution make a lie out of every speech he’s ever given. He looks at the country and sees its government as something alien that is holding down the individual entrepreneurial genius of 200 million people, and not as their creation, and the vehicle through which that genius can be channelled for the general welfare.
The other appalling thing about Ryan is how much the media is puling about how smart he is, and calling him a brilliant policy wonk (also hammered on by Pierce). Ryan is a guy with a bachelor’s degree in economics whose entire career is defined by political gladhanding and devotion to far-right ideological nonsense. He’s not particularly well-qualified; a BA is a degree that gives you a general knowledge of the basics of a field, and it’s a good thing, but it does not turn you into an expert. Ryan’s degree in economics is worth about as much as Bobby Jindal’s degree in biology.
OK, one other guy you should listen to: Paul Krugman.
What [Saletan]’s doing – and what the whole Beltway media crowd has done – is to slot Ryan into a role someone is supposed to be playing in their political play, that of the thoughtful, serious conservative wonk. In reality, Ryan is nothing like that; he’s a hard-core conservative, with a voting record as far right as Michelle Bachman’s, who has shown no competence at all on the numbers thing.
What Ryan is good at is exploiting the willful gullibility of the Beltway media, using a soft-focus style to play into their desire to have a conservative wonk they can say nice things about. And apparently the trick still works.
That’s the painful spectacle we’re going to be suffering through for the next few months: Mitt Romney pretending to be a human capable of empathy, and Paul Ryan pretending to be serious and intelligent. And the media will play right along.
(via Ivar Husa)
It took me a long time to jettison the religious beliefs that had been instilled in me from my early youth. While my father, an ordained deacon, was almost silent on religious matters while at home, my mother made certain that I knew of her beliefs every day. She taught sunday school to teenage girls in our local Baptist church, and pressed my brother and me into attendance whether we liked it or not.
