Thanks for clearing up that reasoning

If you haven’t noticed, the whole Republican raison d’etre has been distilled down to one thing: ramping up the culture war. Once it was semi-benign because it was stupid (the War on Christmas, for instance), but now it’s escalated because their target isn’t a mythical being, it’s real humans, and specifically, the “T” in LGBTQ. We can thank a Canadian for spelling it all out for us. It’s religion. Here’s Jordan Peterson telling us he thinks the male and female distinction is more fundamental than up and down, and tracing it all back specifically to the book of Genesis, where God created us, male and female.

Transphobes have a divine transcendent value now. Like god-soaked Peterson, they are going to be justifying their bigotry with the Bible, and they’re going to be increasingly blatant about it. I made a mistake backing away from the atheist movement, since right now it’s clear that trans rights are an atheist issue. (I’m going to get so much hate mail from atheists for saying that.) And Peterson is a fundamentalist fanatic.

Also, the stupid, it burns. Seriously? Using “up” and “down” as an example of a categorical binary? Think, guy, if you can with your drug-addled constipated brain.

I think you have the wrong address

What a strange spam email.

Hey Friend,

(Resending this to make sure you saw it…)
We’re putting together a group of 12 Pastors/Church Leaders who want to GET RESULTS for a new LIVE cohort inside our FB Ads Bootcamp Coaching Program starting on Tuesday, February 7th:

Specifically, we’re looking for:

You have at least 1 hour per day to devote over the next 8-10 week to implement our proven system to land high ticket clients
You’re Kingdom minded and feel called to being a Digital Tentmaker so you can support the Church
You want more time freedom AND financial margin
You genuinely want to serve businesses and help them grow
No marketing experience needed, but you’re coachable, take action, and are willing to get out of your comfort zone

If that’s you, please hit reply to this email and I’ll send you more info and details on getting started.

We’re starting ASAP and space is limited to 12. So let us know if you’re in.

Cheers,

Jeremy & Alejandro

P.S. Yes this email is real, and yes, I will reply!

It’s kind of revealing, though, isn’t it? The message isn’t about spreading the gospel — it’s about landing high ticket clients, financial margins, and serving businesses. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that there’s some MLM scheme underlying it, too.

I didn’t reply to Jeremy & Alejandro, even though I felt like just sending them one image.

It’s funny that Jesus and an atheist can find common ground in scourging the venal profiteers in the church.

Felicia Entwhistle has the deets

She’s speaking out on Facebook about the problems with Andrew Torrez. It’s all about constant harassment, violation of boundaries, unwanted innuendo, etc. An excerpt:

Here’s what I find particularly infuriating: several well-known atheist groups were “aware of multiple instances [of harassed individuals] with Andrew and none of them have cut ties with him at this time” and also “I’ve left all these communities. I felt unsafe and frankly unwelcome. People with power to do something have done nothing.”

I’ve also abandoned so many atheist communities after seeing this behavior time after time, which has made me one of those people with no power to do anything. I’ve heard similar stories so many times, just the names change…but it’s like there’s an endless reservoir of sex pests out there who ruin everything.

Goddamnit, American Atheists

Not this again. It’s another wave of sexual harassment allegations, and big names stepping down.

Two board members of American Atheists, one of the nation’s best-known atheist advocacy organizations, resigned in the past month after ethical concerns were raised about their actions at conferences for nonbelievers.

One of them is Andrew Torrez, who I don’t know personally at all, but I have listened to his podcast, Opening Arguments. I’d heard rumors third hand, so this isn’t entirely surprising.

The other is Mandisa Thomas, and that is shocking! I’ve known her for years as an energetic leader of the Black Nonbelievers, and now, what’s worse is that there is a wave of resignations from other members of that organization. Bria Crutchfield is leaving? It’s hard to believe.

Embarrassing confession: in all my years, decades even, of atheist promotion and activism, I’ve never even been asked to serve on the board of any atheist or humanist organization. Not even so much as a tentative enquiry. I used to think it might have been that I was too controversial, but now I’m wondering…maybe I’m too boring? Too homely? Too unreliable? Too anti-Dawkins?

Anyway, if American Atheists (or other godless organization) would like to recruit a staid old atheist who is also incredibly unsexy (but also fundamentally monogamous), I’m available. I feel sad about saying this, but maybe I’ve been the uncontroversial atheist all along.

Montana is right next to North Dakota

The disease is spreading. Montana legislators have introduced a new law.

4 A BILL FOR AN ACT ENTITLED: “AN ACT ESTABLISHING REQUIREMENTS FOR SCIENCE INSTRUCTION IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS; DEFINING “SCIENTIFIC FACT”; AND PROVIDING AN IMMEDIATE EFFECTIVE DATE.”

WHEREAS, the purpose of K-12 education is to educate children in the facts of our world to better prepare them for their future and further education in their chosen field of study, and to that end children must know the difference between scientific fact and scientific theory; and
WHEREAS, a scientific fact is observable and repeatable, and if it does not meet these criteria, it is a theory that is defined as speculation and is for higher education to explore, debate, and test to ultimately reach a scientific conclusion of fact or fiction.

That isn’t how it works! That isn’t how anything works! The legislators clearly don’t know the difference between scientific fact and scientific theory, and it sounds like their understanding is straight from the Answers in Genesis school of ignorance.

If I were to dig up a trilobite fossil in my backyard, a location that makes finding 350 million year old fossils highly improbable, it is still a fact; it is a demonstrable phenomenon, even if I can’t repeat it and find more of them. I would then have to formulate an explanation for how the fossil got there, that’s the theory part, and it’s often the more interesting scientific question that requires further investigation and hypothesis testing.

There isn’t a progressive scale from theory to fact. Theories are explanatory frameworks to integrate a body of facts. They don’t ‘become’ facts, although they can be so well supported that you’d have to be a fool to reject them.

It’s clear that this is a bill targeting evolutionary theory, composed by ignoramuses who know nothing of science. Evolution is a fact and a theory. There is a body of facts that creationists would like to disappear, such as it is a fact that the Earth is billions of years old, it is a fact that life exhibits a pattern of constant change on a geological time scale, it is a fact that there was no global flood, but that there have been many cataclysmic geological and geochemical changes, it is a fact that organisms share genetic properties that reveal common descent. Then there are theories to explain those facts: evolution is a good one that robustly accounts for the phenomena we observe, and creationism is a bad one that fails multiple tests and does not explain the facts we have.

Trying to associate scientific theory with the colloquial interpretation of “theory” with unsupported guesswork is a tired old stratagem that creationists have been playing with for decades and it doesn’t work, it just flags them as idiots and fools and liars.

Creepypastor

Who are these people?

  • David Lloyd Walther
  • Timothy Jason Jeltema
  • Chad Michael Rider
  • David Pettigrew
  • William C. Robinson
  • Brian Pounds
  • Lawrence Hopkins
  • Conner Jesse Penny
  • Jonathan Ryan Ensey
  • Aaron Duane Shipman
  • Conrad Estrada Valdez
  • Rob Shiflet

Hint: they’re all Texans.

Not enough? Another hint: they’re all church leaders.

Now you can probably guess what significant fact unites them: they’re all people who have been charged with child porn, sexual assault on a minor, or child sex trafficking in just the past year. I have to wonder how many atheists have been similarly arrested.

That’s just scratching the surface!

In May, a document released by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) revealed the case of more than 700 Baptist leaders—including pastors, teachers, ministers and volunteers—accused or found guilty of sexual abuse of children.

The 205-page document, which looks at cases dating back to a period between 2000 and 2009, details the arrests and—sometimes—sentencing of Baptist leaders found guilty of sexual assaults, soliciting children, child pornography and more.

I wonder what it is that draws pedophiles and groomers to religion.

You know what’s worse than a faceful of spiders?

Anti-vaxxers.

Harriet Hall, a well-known doctor who had been prominent on the skeptic circuit, died last week of heart disease. This was unfortunate, but one thing she didn’t die of was COVID…not that that would stop the ghouls from announcing that she died of a COVID vaccination. They wedged her into their “died suddenly” meme.

It makes no sense to me. This is no “died suddenly” event: a 77 year old woman with a history of heart problems and several years of declining health dying of congestive heart failure is not “sudden”, nor is it in any way correlated with vaccination. But then, facts don’t matter in the anti-vax crowd: if a critic of their fallacious doom-squealing did die suddenly by being hit with a bus, even then I’d expect them to claim it was vaccine-related.

David Gorski talks about the dishonesty of quacks at length, you might want to give that a read.

This “died suddenly” phenomenon is not unique to vaccines and antivaxxers. It is, rather, a subset of a more general phenomenon in which those who deny science-based medicine blame deaths on the intervention or preventative, rather than the disease itself. Long before the pandemic, I was writing about how quacks and cranks would seize on the deaths of celebrities of cancer to blame chemotherapy, rather than their cancers, for having killed them. Examples are numerous (some catalogued here) and include David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Tony Snow, Farrah Fawcett, Elizabeth Edwards, Patrick Swayze (with a particularly despicable use of a photo showing how emaciated he was). Alternatively, they “lament” how a celebrity with cancer might have lived if only he had chosen (or stuck with) alternative medicine, such as Steve Jobs. The ghoulishness is a feature, not a bug, of the denial of medical science.

It is a denial that Harriet dedicated her post-Air Force life to combatting and that we here at SBM will continue to do. Antivaxxers can try to claim that vaccines killed Harriet all they want, but we know the truth, that unfortunately there are things medicine can’t always fix or prevent and that none of us gets out of here alive. All we can do is to use what time we have to do as much good as we can while we are still breathing, which is what Harriet tried to do. Ironically, by trying to add Harriet to their “died suddenly” conspiracy theory, antivaxxers gave her one last chance to help push back against quackery. I hope, but can never know, that she approves.

Plumbing the depths of gullibility

I was reading some of Elon Musk’s claims from July, and marveling at how much he gets away with.

“Mars may be a fixer upper of a planet, but it has great potential!” the billionaire wrote.

User @PPathole responded, asking Musk what he believes is the “timeframe for creating a self-sustaining civilization” there.

“20 years? Self-sustaining meaning not relying/[dependent] on Earth for supplies,” he said.

“20 to 30 years from first human landing if launch rate growth is exponential,” the Tesla co-founder replied. “Assumes transferring ~100k each rendezvous and ~1M total people needed.”

I goggled at that exchange. Such blithe confidence! Where were those numbers coming from? He seems to believe plopping one million people (as if he could) onto the surface of Mars will trigger some miraculous auto-catalysis that will solve all the biological and engineering problems that he can’t even imagine. Throw enough people at this hostile world and they’ll figure everything out for him.

I don’t know that he actually believes in that. He seems to be an autonomous hype machine.

But then I wondered, are there actually people out there who listen to Musk and don’t constantly think, “that’s bullshit”? Are you one of them? I’ve never met a Musk true-believer, but if they exist at all, they’d be fascinating to have a conversation with…until it got too frustrating. Speak up! Explain in the comments how MuskMath works.

And finally, I wondered how a credible journalist could quote that claim without instantly raising objections (I know, it’s a Fox News link, so it’s a purely hypothetical credibility.) The commenters on that article, with a few exceptions, certainly are gung-ho, and amusingly, many are complaining that they are so old that 20 years is unattainable. Again, if you’re out there, explain here how you would support the claim. I know, it’s a bit like jumping into a shark tank, but hey, you’re the one who’d provide the math and engineering background.

As a starting point, let’s begin with a simpler example. You’ve been granted a large chunk of Antarctica as a gift (and a generous exception to international law), and have been able to lease a fleet of cruise ships, with a capacity of 5000 people each. You load them up, and make 200 trips from ports around the world, dropping them off on a rocky beach in Antarctica, along with tents and prefab buildings. How long until you have a self-sustaining colony that is sending profits back to you? How long until the distress calls go out and you have to rescue the survivors?

I’ve often wondered how, if erecting self-sustaining colonies is so easy, we haven’t been eagerly plundering our southern-most continent, which, while possibly a bit inhospitable, does have the little amenities of air and water, both lacking on Mars.

Shouldn’t we also consider the possibility that this is all an improbable fantasy of total civilian control by a breed of ignorant oligarchs, anyway?

It’s a brain! Don’t trust it

Well, ain’t this a kick in the pants. Here’s a compilation of failed concepts in psychology, for example, the oft-mentioned Stanford Prison Experiment is a badly done botch, the Pygmalion effect is small and inconsistent, the Milgram experiment is full of experimental errors, etc., etc., etc. It’s rather depressing.

As someone who spends a lot of time online, though, I was relieved to learn that’s not responsible for feeling low.

Lots of screen-time is not strongly associated with low wellbeing; it explains about as much of teen sadness as eating potatoes, 0.35%.

So you’re saying I should cut potatoes out of my diet, then?

The impression I get is that a lot of the popular ideas that have emerged out of psychology arise not because the experimenter is rigorous and cautious, but because they either conform to conventional wisdom or are surprisingly contrary. There’s also something analogous to the TED Talk effect, where people are convinced more by the certainty of the presentation of the story than by the data. I’m beginning to develop my own rubric for assessing psychological claims: if it’s so simple that it gets condensed down to just the investigator’s name, it’s probably shoddy work with questionable validity. I’m calling it the Myers Rule.

The author of the list says something I think is worth keeping in mind, though. They’re talking about the concept of Ego Depletion, which has a substantial wiki page.

It’s 3500 words, not including the Criticism section. It is rich with talk of moderators, physiological mechanisms, and practical upshots for the layman. And it is quite possible that the whole lot of it is a phantom, a giant mistake. For small effect sizes, we can’t tell the difference. Even people quite a bit smarter than us can’t.

If I wander around an old bookshop, I can run my fingers over sophisticated theories of ectoplasm, kundalini, past lives, numerology, clairvoyance, alchemy. Some were written by brilliant people who also discovered real things, whose minds worked, damnit.

We are so good at explaining that we can explain things which aren’t there. We have made many whole libraries and entire fields without the slightest correspondence to anything. Except our deadly ingenuity.

Human brains are so easily diddled by grand simplifications (religion, for instance) that they’ll then turn phantasms into sweeping, detailed rules for existence. It’s all superstitious behavior in the psychological sense — we’re all searching for patterns so obsessively that if they aren’t there, our minds start imposing them on the world.

I’m so glad I’m not working in psychology. Evolution and developmental biology would never cultivate popular errors. Wait — but those sciences are studied by human minds, which are clearly kind of squirrely.

Follow-up on ID at conferences

The other day, I posted about the Discovery Institute’s end of year wrap-up. One of the things that bugged me about it was that while Brian Miller said, In 2022, I participated in several conferences and private events in which I interacted with prominent scientists, he failed to mention any of these conferences or the names of these prominent scientists. That’s a striking omission! Waving vaguely in the direction of unspecified conferences and scientists is the opposite of persuasive. So I browsed through the archives of the Disco Institute to see if he mentioned any of them at the time they occurred.

This is not definitive at all — these are just the conferences he mentioned on Evolution News & Views. Maybe he was jet-setting around the world attending an international conference every week, but then it’s peculiar, given the braggadacio of his year end post, that he never brought them up before. Here is just the 2022 conferences he mentioned. There weren’t many of them.

  • In November, he attended a Catholic conference on creation.

    I’m back now from a conference this past week at Notre Dame, titled “‘And It Was Very Good’: On Creation,” hosted by the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. The Center described the conference as follows:
    In the created world, Pope Francis writes, we are able to perceive “a grammar written by the hand of God” (Lumen Fidei). If creation is a language, what can we discern regarding the creator? The de Nicola Center’s 22nd annual Fall Conference will explore the many facets of the created world and the act of creation, including questions of cosmology, teleology, natural ends, natural law, the Imago Dei, creaturely status, ecology, stewardship, cocreation, recreation, redemption, and more.
    The organizers accepted my abstract for a talk titled “The Return of Teleology to the Natural Sciences.” I presented the talk as part of a panel with two other scholars, and it seemed well received.

  • In September, he mentioned a conference, but it’s not clear that he attended.

    As an engineering professor at Bristol University and Cambridge, Stuart Burgess has researched biomechanics for nearly thirty years. He is one of the leading engineers in the UK. Earlier this year, he presented a talk at the Westminster Conference on Science and Faith titled, “Why Human Skeletal Joints Are Masterpieces of Human Engineering: And a Rebuttal to the ‘Bad Design’ Arguments.”

  • In May, he was at a conference on science and faith.

    At the recent Dallas Conference on Science and Faith, Discovery Institute physicist Brian Miller gave a great talk on the convergence of biology and engineering. It’s up now on YouTube and eminently worthy of being shared. Miller’s theme is that “you see the same engineering principles in human engineering as you see in life.”

    (Yes, he wrote the article, and is referring to himself and the great talk in the third person. Weird.)

  • I don’t know that this one should count, but in March he was promoting a Disco Institute summer seminar. He doesn’t say, but I assume he participated in this yearly event in 2021? Maybe?

    In 2016, I attended the Center for Science & Culture’s annual Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design, and that fateful week pulled me into the epicenter of the design debate. For years, I had studied and lectured on the evidence for design in nature.

I’m being generous in noting the conferences he talked about, but note: none of these are professional conferences, and they all have a religious agenda. It’s not that religious people can’t be excellent scientists, but these are not events that would attract a diverse group of scientists — all the attendees would have had a certain bent towards favoring creationist explanations to varying degrees. It makes his implication that he was reasonably representing the views of many prominent people in the sciences a bit suspect. Talk to creationists, you tend to find they like creationism…news at 11.

He may have also attended real, secular, professional conferences as well that he didn’t tout, but I have reservations about that, too. He has a Ph.D. in physics. Not to demean physicists, but few of them have the kind of knowledge of biology to be able to appropriately assess the evidence for evolution, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some brilliant minds in physics are part of the crackpot fringe in biology.

I suspect that a creationist who wanted to present his theorizing on gods and design at a physics conference would get the same response Paul Nelson got at a biology conference — uninterested neglect. Lonely indifference.He sure wouldn’t have cause to brag about his reception.