Atheism is important — that I’ve become disenchanted with the front men for the movement does not diminish the significance of the cause. If you want to understand why, read Vyckie Garrison’s story, or watch her tell it.
Ancient nerds. Look at this: an icosahedral die from somewhere between 30 and 300 BCE. Egyptians were throwing d20s back before Jesus worshippers founded the cult that would eventually call D&D satanic.
“You’ll have to roll a θ to hit that lemure, dude.”
Excellent talk at the UN.
The story going around right now is that, in order to install iOS 8, the latest version of the operating system for iGadgets, you need to delete the Bible app.
She wrote to me to explain that some of the speculation going around about her assault by Shermer was incorrect, and gave me permission to post her clarifications.
We had some discussion here a few years ago about implementing some scoring method for comments — there were some proponents who thought it would be a useful way to get community input. I’ve always been dead-set against it. It turns out I have scholarly justification now.
Abi Sutherland discusses a psychology paper at Making Light, which examined the effect of up- and down-voting on large user communities at CNN, IGN, Breitbart (oops, there’s a dollop of poison in the database), and allkpop, a Korean entertainment site. Cheng, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Leskovec proposed to test a prediction of the operant conditioning model, that peer feedback would lead to a gradual improvement in the quality of posts. That’s not what they saw.
Christina Hoff Sommers came out with a video a short while ago about the oppression of those poor boys who play video games — the feminists are out to get them, don’t you know? — and it was pretty bad. Right away she asserts that people who play games that aren’t violent and sexist aren’t really “gamers”, so she defines away everyone who might disagree with her. Par for the course for that anti-feminist — she’s absurdly illogical.
I couldn’t get through the whole video, but Jonathan Mann did it — by autotuning everything and singing a musical counterpoint. It’s hilarious. Listen, especially if you already hate autotuning.
I noticed that Ophelia referenced a paper on “institutional betrayal”. I sat up at something else: it’s from the University of Oregon, my ol’ grad school! And then…it’s out of the department of psychology, where my wife got her degree! Even before I read it, I was curious…and I discovered that it was an amazing act of prophecy, or, I guess, insight into human behavior.
Isn’t that what psychologists do?
Read the traits of institutions that feel like betrayals to their members. You’ll feel a familiar sense of deja vu.
Stephen Law has a very good list of general humanist traits. I can go with this:
1. Secular humanists place particular emphasis on the role of science and reason.
2. Humanists are atheists. They do not sign up to belief in a god or gods.
3. Humanists suppose that this is very probably the only life we have.
4. Humanists usually believe in the existence and importance of moral value.
5. Humanists emphasize our individual moral autonomy and responsibility.
6. Humanists are secularists in the sense that they favour an open, democratic society and believe the State should take neutral stance on religion.
7. Humanists believe that we can enjoy significant, meaningful lives even if there is no is a God, and whether or not we happen to be religious.
But then he raises an objection I wouldn’t have even considered:
Now some readers may be thinking, ‘But hang on, you haven’t mentioned naturalism. Surely secular humanists also sign up to naturalism, right? They reject belief in the supernatural. So why no mention of naturalism here?
Apple announces a new line of iPhones, and the annoying pretentious yuppies all descend on the Apple Store in New York.
