Oh, that is a useful term. As Aaron Rabinowitz explains, “Cheap talk skepticism occurs when someone expresses skepticism in a way that comes at little cost to them, though it frequently comes at a significant cost to others.” These are people who cultivate an environment in which they can make bold assertion and receive little pushback, who don’t actually invest something of themselves in challenging the status quo. And Rabinowitz delivers examples!

If there is any room for criticism in this explosion of cheap talk skepticism, I believe it should be focused on the individuals with the platforms that allow them both the time for proper skepticism and the obligation to skepticism properly. In the parts of the skeptical world referred to as the Intellectual Dark Web, there has been rampant cheap talk skepticism around both Covid and the recent American election. Under the umbrella of “distrusting institutions”, there has been such an absurd amount of “just asking questions” that Sam Harris felt compelled to very publicly “turn in his IDW membership card”. Unfortunately, Harris neglected to explicitly criticise anyone by name, which makes is hard to determine if his criticism was meant just for the brothers Weinstein, or if he was including folks like Maajid Nawaz, who he has frequently promoted and who I’d argue has been one of the worst of the cheap talk skeptics.

For example, here’s Nawaz retweeting Team Trump Twitter sharing a video from OAN (One America News Network), an unreliable right wing “news” organization, which they claim is evidence of election tampering. Rather than emphasise the high likelihood that the video proves nothing of the sort, Maajid’s response is “I see what this looks like & I hope I’m wrong” followed by “sensible people should agree that this entire controversy needs to be resolved ASAP & urgently”. That tweet is not an isolated event either, here he is unknowingly sharing election fraud conspiracy materials from the explicitly antisemitic Red Elephants website. Here he is getting strung along by Trump’s reality tv shtick . Here he is citing Ted Cruz’s election denialism as proof that Nawaz was “right all along”. I could continue, but the pattern is obvious, and it’s not unique to Nawaz. This is deeply irresponsible, but the cost of cheap talk skepticism will be born by the American electorate and not by Nawaz, who has since circled back around to claim the OAN video produced a state audit, but not to point out that Georgia found no significant fraud of the sort that Team Trump and OAN were claiming.

Nawaz has also engaged in cheap talk skepticism around Covid conspiracy theories, favorably retweeting a thread by a guy who thinks Covid is caused by 5G and directly quoting his claim about “the myth of a pandemic”. Similar cheap talk skepticism towards Covid and the Covid vaccine has arisen from Brett Weinstein and unsurprisingly from James Lindsay, given his ongoing business relationship with conspiracy theorist Michael O’Fallon. James recently attended a Sovereign Nation conference and a conservative event in California with Covid lockdown skeptic Dave Rubin. Rubin has attended several anti-lockdown events and posted cancel bait tweets implying that he’s hosting dinner parties in violation of social distancing rules. Again, the cost of their skepticism is far less likely to be born by them than by medical workers and vulnerable individuals, like my aunt Sue who suffered a stroke while being treated for Covid. Society doesn’t even condone the desire that they should directly experience the consequences of their skepticism. We’re forced to hope that their cheap talk remains cheap.

It’s a great term. Add it to your lexicon! One of the things skeptics and atheists have to do is police their own — we’ve been telling religious people to do that for years — and it’s only fair that we do the same for ourselves.

Remember Cardinal Pell? Tim Minchin wrote a catchy song about him. Did you see Spotlight? Even the mainstream movie industry could make critically acclaimed movies about Catholic sex abuse. It was an easy target. Now Rebecca Watson singles out another rape apologist in…watch to the end for the unsurprising twist.

I’ll refer you to the Washington Post, in a 2018 article:

Organized secularism has been struggling with charges of misogyny, sexism and sexual harassment for almost a decade. The problem went public in 2011 when a then-little-known atheist blogger, Rebecca Watson, described unwanted sexual advances from a man at an atheist conference who followed her into an elevator and to her hotel room.

She was flooded with both supportive and haranguing comments. World-renowned atheist Richard Dawkins told her to “stop whining” and “grow up.” Dawkins — whose appearances at secularist gatherings can make or break attendance — has been called out multiple times for sexist statements but remains much in demand as a speaker.

Richard Carrier, a science historian and popular secularist speaker, has both apologized for and denied accusations of unwanted sexual advances at secularist and atheist events. He has been banned from at least one conference.

Michael Shermer, who has denied allegations of sexual harassment and assault from several women, remains editor of Skeptic magazine and a top speaker at secularist events.

Most recently, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, another star speaker and best-selling author, was suspended in the spring by Arizona State University for what it described as a decade of inappropriate behavior, some of it at secularist events.

Has Dawkins ever commented on the behavior of his good buddy, movie co-star, and lecture circuit partner Krauss? I am also amused by the sneaky low blow of saying that Carrier “has both apologized for and denied accusations”.

But it’s so intuitive! The idea that the less people know, the more they have an unwarranted confidence that they know more than they do, seems to explain so much. There is now evidence that the Dunning-Kruger Effect is an artifact.

The two papers, by Dr. Ed Nuhfer and colleagues, argued that the Dunning-Kruger effect could be replicated by using random data. “We all then believed the [1999] paper was valid,” Dr. Nuhfer told me via email. “The reasoning and argument just made so much sense. We never set out to disprove it; we were even fans of that paper.” In Dr. Nuhfer’s own papers, which used both computer-generated data and results from actual people undergoing a science literacy test, his team disproved the claim that most people that are unskilled are unaware of it (“a small number are: we saw about 5-6% that fit that in our data”) and instead showed that both experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency. “It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range,” he wrote to me.

Then I have to rethink who it applies to. We’re so used to pointing at stupid people doing stupid things and explaining it as Dunning-Kruger in action, and it’s not.

The most important mistake people make about the Dunning-Kruger effect, according to Dr. Dunning, has to do with who falls victim to it. “The effect is about us, not them,” he wrote to me. “The lesson of the effect was always about how we should be humble and cautious about ourselves.” The Dunning-Kruger effect is not about dumb people. It’s mostly about all of us when it comes to things we are not very competent at.

Wait wait wait. So I may have been a victim of the Dunning-Kruger Effect when I thought I knew what the Dunning-Kruger Effect was about? Dang. Well, that was a good solid punch in the balls to start my morning. But then, it’s always good to rethink your assumptions and reconsider your ideas, so thank you very much may I have another?

Are there dumb people who do not realize they are dumb? Sure, but that was never what the Dunning-Kruger effect was about. Are there people who are very confident and arrogant in their ignorance? Absolutely, but here too, Dunning and Kruger did not measure confidence or arrogance back in 1999. There are other effects known to psychologists, like the overconfidence bias and the better-than-average bias (where most car drivers believe themselves to be well above average, which makes no mathematical sense), so if the Dunning-Kruger effect is convincingly shown to be nothing but a mirage, it does not mean the human brain is spotless. And if researchers continue to believe in the effect in the face of weighty criticism, this is not a paradoxical example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. In the original classic experiments, students received no feedback when making their self-assessment. It is fair to say researchers are in a different position now.

Wait, what, so maybe I’m not afflicted with Dunning-Kruger? OK, I need to get out of the house and take a walk now.

It’s not a credible compromise with creationism, so why do people keep telling us we ought to use it to teach evolution?

[Read more…]

Here’s a curious letter to the editor of the local paper in Little Falls, Minnesota. I know where that is! If you draw a straight line from Morris to Duluth, it lies about halfway along that line. I haven’t been there. I don’t think many have. If I wanted to go to Duluth, I’d take I94 east, get on 35 in Minneapolis, and not go anywhere near it. It’s a small town backwater, in other words, which can be quite nice if you like the quiet life, but it’s also the kind of place where ignorance can fester.

Like in the mind of this guy, Michael Dalquist Randall.

Evolution is going the way of the dinosaur due to modern scientific evidence.

How would you know? Seriously, go to any university where science is taught, and you’ll find the biology department is full of professors who accept evolution, teach evolution, and research evolution. That hasn’t been changing. The actual modern scientific evidence is all supporting evolution — all the fossils, the genes, the geology, the biochemistry, the comparative anatomy, etc., etc., etc. Check out the biology curriculum at these universities and you’ll find it’s typically built all around evolution. It’s the unifying principle of the science!

I notice that Mr Randall claims the “modern scientific evidence” supports his assertion, but he doesn’t provide any. I can predict what he’d say if he did, though: a lot of nonsense about complexity (not an obstacle to evolution), or nit-picking about details, which he doesn’t understand, that he’ll claim invalidate some scrap of evolutionary theory.

More and more scientists in every field are becoming Creationists as the outdated “evidence” of evolution is overshadowed by modern discoveries that reveal The Theory (yes, theory, not law) of Evolution to be what it truly is: a desperate (and not very tenable) attempt to prove that there is no God and that there is no need for a God.

The idea that more and more scientists are becoming creationists is nonsense. You can find a scattering of individuals who claim to have abandoned evolution after studying science, but most of them are lying: they went into it with a predisposition. Others may be sincere, but they are not numerous, and aren’t going to advance science at all — they’ve become religious apologists, not scientists.

What Mr Randall is demonstrating is confirmation bias, in which anecdotes about miscellaneous individuals are treated as hard data only because they fit his preconceptions.

Again, what is the outdated “evidence” of evolution, and the modern discoveries that overshadow them? He doesn’t say.

Yes, we know it’s a theory. We also know that there isn’t a ranking of credibility where “law” is better than “theory”. It just doesn’t work that way. Laws are strong definitions of simple ideal relationships; theories are explanatory frameworks that can integrate information about significant bodies of knowledge. A theory can encompass many laws, does that mean theory outranks law? That’s probably not a productive way to use the concepts.

I personally think that evolution makes gods superfluous, but that’s not why evolution was proposed. Darwin agonized over the effect his discovery would have on religious belief, it’s one of the reasons he sat on it for 20 years. Rather, evolution was an explanation of observed natural phenomena. You might as well complain that “2+2=4” is an attempt to usurp the divinity of numbers, and was clearly formulated to undermine godly revelation.

Evolutionism was a valid theory in Darwin’s time, but if he had the evidence available to him that we have today, Darwin himself would probably not believe in Darwinian evolution.

Once again, we get a vague reference to unevidenced evidence that would have made even Darwin a creationist. Sorry, guy, I would suggest instead that the molecular evidence of common descent alone would have been ample confirmation of evolution. I suspect, though, that if you sprung the mathematical basis of evolutionary theory on him all at once, he might find it a little too overwhelming.

Mr Randall, go read a book other than your Bible or the propaganda from ICR or AIG (which he cites in the letter) and learn something real about evolutionary biology. It’s awesome stuff.

In a previous post, I quoted John Richards, who said of Lawrence Krauss:

He was a personal friend of Christopher Hitchens, who sadly died nine years and three days ago (there’s been talk about designating December 15th “Hitchmas”) and he was an expert witness at the Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District trial of Intelligent Design*.

I pointed out the “Hitchmas” nonsense, but I should have also mentioned that no, Krauss was not an expert witness at the Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District trial of Intelligent Design. In fact, he had nothing to do with the Kitzmiller trial.

What a curious little claim. Why would Richards just make that up?

Don’t be shocked or surprised: sex pests always bounce back and climb back into positions of prominence. The rehabilitation of Lawrence Krauss has begun.

I am very pleased to announce that eminent Cosmologist/Physicist Dr Lawrence Krauss has accepted our invitation to join the Advisory Council of Atheist Alliance International.

Lawrence has been an active atheist for decades. He was a personal friend of Christopher Hitchens, who sadly died nine years and three days ago (there’s been talk about designating December 15th “Hitchmas”) and he was an expert witness at the Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District trial of Intelligent Design*.

“Hitchmas”? What? Where has this talk been going on, and by whom? Anyone can talk about designating any day as anything — the question is, by what authority and who will care? There has been talk around my household (there, I’m already more specific than John Richards) of designating the 15th as Squidmas, so get in line.

But, you might ask, doesn’t AAI know about the decades of credible accusations of harassment, that ASU acted on the accusations to deny him his leadership of the Origins project, haven’t they read the articles describing his behavior in Buzzfeed and the Arizona State Press, haven’t they read Krauss’s own words defending Jeffrey Epstein?

Yes, they have. They just don’t care.

Our Executive Director, Michael Sherlock, has personally welcomed Lawrence onto our Council of worthy Advisors in the knowledge that he was an early victim of the woke movement (see Wednesday’s blog). Please note that no charges have ever been brought against Dr Krauss.

When asked about the potential blowback from those who have propagated and uncritically believed the unsubstantiated allegations made against Dr Krauss in the past, Sherlock stated,

“After examining the claims made against Dr Krauss, and finding no merit therein, I made a decision to position AAI firmly against the cancel culture that has infected the atheist and secular movement, particularly in the USA. As skeptics, it is important that we lead the way in practicing evidence-based thinking and behaviors and not give in to the fatuous and harmful aspects of a relatively new social and political phenomenon that holds allegations as conclusions by mere virtue of the existence of the allegations themselves.” Sherlock added: “I am extremely enthusiastic about working with Dr Krauss and believe that he will add immense value to AAI’s efforts around the globe”.

As “skeptics”, they will lead the way in practicing evidence-based thinking…by ignoring the evidence they don’t like. For instance, I know the conference organizer he assaulted in a hotel room, waving around a condom; she’s a good person who was in a committed relationship who wouldn’t do that sort of thing, and Krauss admitted that it all happened — he just claimed it was “consensual”. I was one of the people Krauss tried to dissuade from criticizing Epstein. As a guy, I was oblivious to all of his creepy behavior at conferences, but when all these women stepped forward to tell me all about his obnoxiousness, I believed them. AAI does not believe any of that, I guess.

By the way, that “Wednesday’s blog” he references reads like an MRA screed that belongs on one of their horrid sites, like A Voice for Men. It rails against the “new religion of wokeism” and literally calls any accusation of harassment against men a “witch hunt”.

Anyway, it set me thinking – let’s compare some of the properties of religions and wokeism…

The ‘Congregations’ are predominantly female. They are about purity and judgmentalism. They exhibit disapproval of whatever they deem to be unacceptable and they show intolerance of those who have different standards. This is the typically ‘polarising’ mentality that I wrote about a few days ago. https://admin.patheos.com/blogs/secularworldbyaai/wp-admin/post.php?

In summary, it’s a ‘Holier than thou’ attitude.

In wokeism, all the greys are gone. A person is guilty from the moment they are accused. It’s, “We have no time for the cumbersome processes of jurisprudence.” And the accused are immediately sentenced by being cancelled! Their associates are punished too!

What does this remind you of? Oh, yes! Witch Hunts! Jim Crow Laws!

And who are, by far, the most common victims?

Men!

Won’t someone think of us poor men, says the male-led organization that just appointed a known sex pest to their mostly male advisory board, which also includes Michael Shermer, Gad Saad, and Thomas Sheedy. They’re such victims!

How dare women show intolerance of those who have different standards (such as tolerating molestation and crude come-ons), or exhibit disapproval of whatever they deem to be unacceptable, like rape and groping. They need to appreciate the value of men who hold different opinions on those matters.

They also make the common defense that “well, they weren’t convicted of an actual crime, therefore they couldn’t have done anything wrong”, which is just stupid. There are lots of things that someone can do that don’t justify throwing them in jail, yet do warrant considering them unsavory and unpleasant and not someone you want to invite to a party, or a business meeting. They complain about black and white thinking while insisting that there exists a perfect dichotomy between being in prison vs. being a commendable citizen.

They also commit gross leaps of irrationality.

Allow me to point out that if accusations were an indication of guilt, we would have had no President Obama, since he was accused of not being born in the USA. Also, Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton would have been locked up because she was accused of leading a pedophile ring located in the basement of a restaurant that turned out not to have a basement!

We’re only talking about credible accusations backed up by evidence, which was lacking in the cases of Obama and Clinton, and which was present in the case of Krauss.

For instance, I can accuse the leadership of Atheist Alliance International of being a bunch of aggressively idiotic bigots and misogynists, using the evidence of those two posts, and suggest that no one should join that odious group or donate to them. Note that I’m not accusing them of an outright crime for which they should be arrested; I’m saying they are unworthy of support by any responsible citizen. John Richards and Michael Sherlock are simply truly awful people.