How normal is Kearny?

Maybe it’s a bad, bad idea for a community to have an open-access electronic bulletin board, because it sure is a great tool for exposing the ugly underbelly of the group. Kearny, NJ has had its moment of fame, with the story of the history teacher babbling nonsense to his class, and
Jim Lippard has found some troubling stuff on the Kearny bulletin board. Paul LaClair, the father of the young man who recorded his teacher’s rambling BS, posted a
review and complaint about the community’s failure to support good teaching, and what’s bothersome are the replies. A few are supportive, but some are still defending the history teacher’s poor instruction, and worse, there are some comments that verge on being death threats.

It’s depressing to read if you have any optimism about people at all: the stupidity on display is shocking. Maybe we just have to hope that Kearny, NJ is some kind of magic dumb-magnet that sucks in mobs of the mindless, leaving the rest of the country much smarter. I fear, though, that it might actually be representative.

Atheists are now officially in the majority!

Thanks to Hilzoy, I’ve learned that our dearly beloved president has enunciated an important principle.

Bush said that despite declarations of piety from Muslim radicals now fighting the United States, he doubted that they believed in God.

“‘Terrorists’ can’t be God-believing people,'” Richard Joel, president of Yeshiva University, quoted Bush as saying.

Before you run off and dismiss this as the ravings of an incompetent, deluded boob, think it through. It means that if someone does something wicked, we get to declare that they must not really believe in God — true faith only belongs to saints. All those angry people in the Middle East? Atheists. People who push buttons to launch cruise missiles? Atheists. People who order people to launch cruise missiles? Atheists. People who set policies that drag us into wars that require people to order other people to kill people? Atheists. Personally, I think people who extort the elderly into mailing them substantial portions of their social security checks are also atheists. People who are wicked enough to try and teach creationism must also be atheists. Only an atheist can do bad things.

Since saints are a negligible minority, it’s now safe to say that America is an atheist country.

Now comes the hard part, though. We have to get all those atheists in America to stop lying and calling themselves Christian, and we have to get all those atheists in the Middle East to stop lying and calling themselves Moslems. I’m not sure how we’re going to get them to confess.

Torture, maybe?

It’s never going to end

Deepak Chopra is still blathering on. I’m afraid that while he can’t shut up, I can ignore him, and this will be my last response to his drivel; it’s also the last time I’ll be linking to the Huffington Post. Arianna Huffington’s exercise in indiscriminate narcissism is not the direction I want to see liberals taking, and while my voice isn’t a significant one, I can at least deny the kook wing of the Left my tiny bit of support.

This time the obsessive small-minded mystic is still whining against science and reason, still railing against his own idiotic imaginings.

But how can anyone seriously defend science as a panacea when it gave us the atomic bomb?

First of all, no one defends science as a panacea. It’s not leading us to utopia, it’s taking us towards a better understanding of the real world…which, contrary to the quacks who claim reality is what you imagine it to be, is often going to expose uncomfortable truths. There is no paradise. There is no perfection. There’s just a world where we have to struggle and compromise, and in the end we all die.

Secondly, the people who whimper about science bringing us bombs (and we’ve also got a few trolls wandering around scienceblogs damning scientists for that) have got it all wrong. Nuclear reactions are a property of the natural world—they go on in stars, they take place beneath our feet. Science did not invent fission and fusion, it only exposed the nature of the event, explained how it worked, and made this knowledge available to human beings. People chose what to do with it. We don’t have any choice in what science reveals. What would you have had 20th century scientists do, intentionally suppress all knowledge of a fundamental property of matter, and all of the unpredictable consequences of that knowledge? And just how would you propose to do that, short of destroying the scientific enterprise all together?

Reason isn’t the savior of the future. That role belongs to wisdom. With all the threats to human survival that we now face, I resort to a phrase coined by Jonas Salk: the survival of the wisest. Although a great researcher in medicine, Salk had the vision to look beyond materialism. He saw that evolution, as it applies to modern human beings, isn’t Darwinian. We no longer live in a state of nature.

Good grief, the inanity, it burns.

No, reason isn’t the savior of the future. It’s just the absolute bare minimum of what we ought to expect from the people to whom we entrust our futures—it’s the foundation of everything we ought to do. I don’t care what other wonderful virtues Chopra wants to tout, if they are built on irrationality and unreason, they are destructive.

I also don’t know what Chopra means by this fuzzy word “wisdom” he’s throwing out in his little essay, but he writes as if he thinks it is something completely orthogonal to reason, but of course it isn’t—unreasoning people can’t be wise, although they may pretend to it, and other irrational people may believe them. He’s using the word in an utterly meaningless way, the same way his kind of people use the words “spirituality” or “vibrations” or “quantum”, as subliminal tokens for indefinable emotions they might have; it’s shorthand for empty pseudo-profundity. It’s the hook the con artist uses to persuade his mark to fork over his respect, but it’s all a lie.

The rest I have no patience for. Chopra doesn’t know what “evolution” or “Darwinian” means, so trying to dissect the meaning he is reading into them as pointless: he’s just reciting buzz words, stringing them together like pretty beads on a string. It’s all noise from a fool.

Enough.

Socializing them right into the hate camp

Ah, the pleasures of living in a small town in Red America: the high schools are fertile fields for fostering hate, and now it’s facilitated by technology, like Facebook, that allows them to sow it far and wide. My daughter is on a rampage right now, upset because her erstwhile peers at the high school have been putting their bigotry proudly on display. There is currently some ferocious babble going on in a Morris Area High School facebook site, and here’s one of the more outrageous comments:

Okay this is really random but it has to deal with the comment about homosexuality issue that Sibley brought up. Honestly why must our country keep discussing this issue. We all know it’s wrong and that it just shouldn’t be that way. If you want to go with the same sex move somewhere else. Please before we ship yah off. Honestly just get rid of them and then we won’t have this issue. Just ship them to Canada. But yah homosexuality is just wrong so just say no and get over it. It’s never gonna be right so yah!!

There’s more there—way too much more—and there are lots of kids who are blindly supporting that kind of statement. They say “it’s wrong” and that’s enough: their brains shut down, they’ve got nothing to back it up, and they just repeat the “just wrong” mantra over and over again, spicing it up with eliminationist calls to get rid of them. “So yah!!” sums up their reasoning perfectly.

Where do these kids pick up this kind of bigotry? From their parents and churches, of course, but also, the schools out here have been collaborators in a conspiracy of silence. A year ago last Spring, we had a perfect example: the university put on a play about tolerance and diversity, and regional schools boycotted the event, and the reaction to the Vagina Monologues has been similarly backwards. There are no processes in place to teach kids something more than their tradition-based dogmatic ignorance: the schools have given up, some of the churches encourage it, and whole families wallow in this level of stupidity.

And the kid who says we should ship all the gays to Canada? He’s student body president at the high school. He’s a member of the popular clique.

If there were a god, he’d make Deepak Chopra shut up

This has been really tiresome. Deepak Chopra’s endless string of ignorance is simply wearing me down, but he has declared that he has made his last post on The God Delusion. I’m sure, though, that he’ll find other things to babble about.

In this one, he claims he’s going to deal with objections that people have brought up to his previous inanity; he doesn’t, really, and the few things he does choose to highlight expose the fact that he hasn’t been listening to the criticisms. He only makes four rather incoherent points.

  1. Chopra has claimed that Dawkins believes in a purely random universe, which is complete nonsense, of course, and certainly Dawkins claims nothing of the kind. Chopra’s response is to say that “Dawkins stoutly maintains that genetic mutations are random”, which is a true, but incomplete statement, and further, Chopra seem to think that suggesting that “atoms and molecules know what they are doing” is a rebuttal, rather than evidence that he is koo-koo for cocoa puffs.

  2. Chopra thinks that when someone says God is an unnecessary hypothesis, that means they are condemning “art, music, truth, beauty, etc.” This is just stupid stereotyping on his part, in which he wrongly assumes that godlessness entails a denial of human values.

  3. His third point will leave you gawping in astonishment. He’s trying to argue that the brain is not the source of the mind, and he makes a banana argument. “I want to eat a banana, and once I do, my brain carries out the necessary action”…he’s simply asserting that the “I” precedes the biological process of the brain that generates an action, rather than considering the possibility that the “I” is also a consequence of the activity of the brain. He’s surprised at this idea: “How in the world do our thoughts manage to move the molecules in our brain?” It’s a classic example of being stumped entirely because you’ve phrased the question in an invalid way.

  4. His final point is the same old excuse of theistic apologists everywhere: that Dawkins is dealing with a crude and stupid version of religion, not the sophisticated, clever, wonderfully enlightened kind of religion he practices. Someday, someone is going to have to tell me about this brilliant version of religion, because I’ve never found it (I’ve looked), and if Chopra’s is the kind of mind that emerges from his faith, I don’t think I want any part of it.

He also asserts that materialistic science is “a model that is quickly crumbling”. He might be right in that, but only because his kind are fostering stupidity and ignorance, two properties that are antithetical to science. He seems to be proud of that, though.

True Confessions Day at Scienceblogs!

Since Orac is confessing to a stupid thing, I thought I’d repeat my own public admission of stupidity.

Public Service Announcement: Things Not to Do

Don’t carry batteries in your pocket.

This evening, I was stretched out on my recliner, enjoying a little light reading, when I smelled something odd—an odor of burning, and a faint chemical reek. I looked around and saw nothing, but the odor was getting stronger. I set my book aside, looked down, and saw something no man likes to see: tendrils of smoke rising from my fly. Then, I felt searing pain from my thigh. I jumped up and danced around (to the amusement of my daughter), and frantically tried to fish all the loose change out of my pocket. The coins were flaming hot. I was caught in the dilemma of letting my leg burn, or burning my hands trying to get these things out. I ended up throwing sizzling bits of money around the room.

I had tossed a couple of spare NiMH AA batteries in my pocket earlier, when I was out doing some photography. A pair of them had apparently jostled into exactly the right configuration to short out against the coins in my pocket, leading to the surprisingly rapid and intense generation of heat.

I don’t think I’ll carry batteries that way anymore. I now have the imprint of a pair of quarters scorched into my palm, and feel a bit like Belzig, the fat sadistic Nazi from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. And my kids are laughing at me for dancing around with my pants on fire.

And now I tell you this cautionary tale, O Gentle Reader, to spare you the humiliation of repeating my error. See how much I care?

Whether I’m admitting this to make Orac feel a little less alone, or whether it’s because I have reason to worry that he might be about to do the same thing and needs a warning, is left to the interpretations of the reader. You may also argue among yourselves which of us is more foolish.

I posted that about two years ago, and I’m pleased to say that I haven’t carried batteries in my pockets since. See? I can still learn! It’s so much more sensible and safer to stick them up your nose.

Watch out, Google

Microsoft has added everything to a search engine that you’ve missed in Google: long load times, half of the screen space dedicated to flash animation and another quarter just empty charcoal grey, results that are shown 3 at a time and displayed in a light gray font on a distracting pale graphic, and most importantly, the most annoying librarian in the universe, Ms. Dewey, who seems to be there to nag you to type faster and mock you if she doesn’t understand your request.

Is there a prize for the most idiotic abuse of web technology? This deserves a nomination. Unless, of course, it’s actually not a search engine, but a psychological experiment in optimizing interface design to maximize frustration and rage. It’s very good at that.

Chopra, again

Chopra’s latest attempt to critique Dawkins is as lame as his first. I summarized that first one as “Well, you can’t see love in your fancy microscope, now can you, Dr Smarty Pants?”; this one is the Incredibly Agile Evasive God trick. He’s going to play a game and try to define his god and religion into a kind of vague god he’s going to conveniently pull of out his pocket, one fuzzy enough that no one can criticize it, and he’s also going to engage in some blatant projection:

But Dawkins has pulled the same trick that he resorts to over and over. This is the us-versus-them trick. Either you think there is a personal God, a superhuman Creator who made the world according to the Book of Genesis, or you are a rational believer in the scientific method.

I begin to have doubts that Chopra has even read the book. Right at the beginning, Dawkins carefully and plainly explains that he is not setting up this false confusion, where everyone who believed in an impersonal ‘god’ made up of cosmic laws was going to get lumped with the fundies and slapped around with a bible.

By ‘religion’ Einstein meant something entirely different
from what is conventionally meant. As I continue to clarify the dis-
tinction between supernatural religion on the one hand and
Einsteinian religion on the other, bear in mind that I am calling only
supernatural gods delusional.

There is nothing comical about Einstein’s beliefs. Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle- wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.

My title, The God Delusion, does not refer to the God of Einstein and the other enlightened scientists of the previous section. That is why I needed to get Einsteinian religion out of the way to begin with: it has a proven capacity to confuse. In the rest of this book I am talking only about supernatural gods, of which the most familiar to the majority of my readers will be Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament.

Notice that Dawkins has already pre-empted Chopra’s deliberate confusion.

I guess that since Chopra was getting whomped on for the silliness he was saying before, he felt the need to invent some silliness that Dawkins did not argue so he’d have something to whomp back. Pathetic. He’s threatening to have another part to this feeble criticism…it sounds like he’s already dribbling off into irrelevant nonsense.

Africa is filled with people too dumb to live, according to the LSE

My university doesn’t subscribe to the journal, but I’d really be interested in reading this paper by Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics. Even better would be if someone else would critique it so I wouldn’t have to waste my time on it.

Mind the gap…in intelligence: Re-examining the relationship between inequality and health.

Kanazawa S.
Interdisciplinary Institute of Management, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.

Wilkinson contends that economic inequality reduces the health and life expectancy of the whole population but his argument does not make sense within its own evolutionary framework. Recent evolutionary psychological theory suggests that the human brain, adapted to the ancestral environment, has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment and that general intelligence evolved as a domain-specific adaptation to solve evolutionarily novel problems. Since most dangers to health in the contemporary society are evolutionarily novel, it follows that more intelligent individuals are better able to recognize and deal with such dangers and live longer. Consistent with the theory, the macro-level analyses show that income inequality and economic development have no effect on life expectancy at birth, infant mortality and age-specific mortality net of average intelligence quotient (IQ) in 126 countries. They also show that an average IQ has a very large and significant effect on population health but not in the evolutionarily familiar sub-Saharan Africa. At the micro level, the General Social Survey data show that, while both income and intelligence have independent positive effects on self-reported health, intelligence has a stronger effect than income. The data collectively suggest that individuals in wealthier and more egalitarian societies live longer and stay healthier, not because they are wealthier or more egalitarian but because they are more intelligent.

What brings it up is that a reader sent me a link to a Guardian article on the subject of this paper, and I find it hard to believe that it actually makes such strong causal claims…even though the abstract does plainly state that the author is arguing for a causal relationship between intelligence and poverty, and it’s not in the direction I would think reasonable.

The London School of Economics is embroiled in a row over academic freedom after one of its lecturers published a paper alleging that African states were poor and suffered chronic ill-health because their populations were less intelligent than people in richer countries.

Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist, is now accused of reviving the politics of eugenics by publishing the research which concludes that low IQ levels, rather than poverty and disease, are the reason why life expectancy is low and infant mortality high. His paper, published in the British Journal of Health Psychology, compares IQ scores with indicators of ill health in 126 countries and claims that nations at the top of the ill health league also have the lowest intelligence ratings.

You know, I could believe that the populations of nations ravaged by disease, poverty, and war would test poorly. I am not surprised that people could develop tests in the Western world, rush into a completely different culture (not to mention one distracted by serious internal problems), and find that the inhabitants do not respond to their tests with quite the due seriousness they do at home. I do wonder, though, how anyone in their right mind could make this claim:

In the paper he cites Ethiopia’s national IQ of 63, the world’s lowest, and the fact that men and women are only expected to live until their mid-40s as an example of his finding that intelligence is the main determinant of someone’s health.

An IQ of 63 means the average person in Ethiopia is clinically mildly mentally retarded; that’s a result that’s over two standard deviations away from the mean. If you look it up in the DSM-IV, you’ll find that this means they are at best capable of sixth-grade work, and that they are marginally capable of living independently with some community support. When a test reports that a population of 75 million people is dominated by a cohort that is incapable of reading beyond the grade school level and is unable to understand geometry, I tend to be suspicious of the validity of the test, or of the conclusions about ability being drawn from it.

I also have to wonder about the chain of reasoning behind this. I guess when I see a nation wracked by civil war with its infrastructure blown to pieces, a life expectancy of 49 years, and an infant mortality rate of almost 10%, combined with poor performance on some abstract IQ test, my conclusion would be that that situation isn’t exactly conducive to educating children. I don’t see how you would come to the conclusion that they’re just too dumb to live; perhaps the full paper would explain this in some plausible detail.

I don’t have much hope, though. I look at the evolutionary rationale in that abstract and am astonished. So this guy thinks African populations, unlike, say, European populations, have not faced the challenges of “evolutionarily novel problems”? That on an evolutionarily significant timescale, selection has been working on Europeans to generate nearly 40 point differences in IQ from their ancestors, and more improbable still, these same forces haven’t applied to Africans? This is cartoon biology, free of any constraint by fact or theory.

I also don’t have a lot of confidence in work coming out of the London School of Economics. What is it with the wacky stuff coming out of the LSE lately?