An epistemological battering

Peter Boghossian has a schtick: he presents some simple, logical rules that are great for smacking down irrational claims and getting people to engage in critical thinking, and he shows how they can be applied effectively to ideas he doesn’t like. But then he pulls a switcheroo, and starts promoting his own biases, and never applies his own tools to them. It’s weird, annoying, and inconsistent, and it means I can never take him seriously. In his case, it’s obvious who shaves the barber — it’s no one, and he runs around absurdly unkempt and shaggy.

Siobhan does a marvelous and entertaining job of tearing Boghossian down. Go read that. I could just stop here, case closed, Siobhan has hammered all the high points, but I can’t help myself: Boghossian punched a few of my buttons, so I have to be all superfluous and redundant.

  1. There’s the “It’s all the Left’s fault!” mantra, which we’ve heard from the Sam Harris wing before.

    It’s fascinating. I would be lying to you if I told that I wasn’t genuinely concerned about Trump’s presidency. I think the Left bears considerable responsibility in him being elected.

    I think Boghossian would have no problem dealing with an accusation that “it’s atheists like you who make people turn to Jesus!”, but somehow he can’t recognize the inconsistency here. People who voted for Trump got him elected, not the people who didn’t vote for Trump. You could legitimately argue that poor decision-making and over-confidence by the Left contributed to Clinton’s loss, but let’s not let the people who pulled the lever for the horrible plutocrat off the hook. Do you deny them agency?

    But here’s another thing that bugs me: what side are you on? If you yourself are a left-leaning, social justice, anti-racism and misogyny type (as they all say they are), why are the complaints always phrased as “they lost the election” rather than “we lost the election”? These guys always refer to the losers in the second or third person, distancing themselves from the outcome. If you’re aligning yourself with the right wing, be confident and say so. Again, apply your reasoning to yourself. Are you willing to bear some of the responsibility for this election? What will you do in the future? Besides blaming everyone else.

  2. Then there’s his small-minded version of post-modernism.

    Disciplines such as gender studies don’t have a dialectic. They’re not truth seeking enterprises. They think they’ve already found they truth and exist to indoctrinate students. There is no dialectic at the core of those disciplines like there is in philosophy. And there are profoundly negative consequences for peoples’ views of reality — it untethers them from what’s real.

    This is so completely, utterly the reverse of the truth. Post-modernism does have a very severe dialectic, and in fact is all about dialectics, which I’ll remind Boghossian is the discipline of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions. It is actually the very heart of skepticism, although most people who call themselves skeptics are more interested in bigoted dismissal than, you know, investigating it. I’ve written about postmodernism before, so I’ll just quote Michael Bérubé here:

    Sokal’s admirers have projected almost anything they desire–and they have desired many things. In early 1997, Sokal came to the University of Illinois, and quite graciously offered to share the stage with me so that we could have a debate about the relation of postmodern philosophy to politics. It was there that I first unveiled my counterargument, namely, that the world really is divvied up into “brute fact” and “social fact,” just as philosopher John Searle says it is, but the distinction between brute fact and social fact is itself a social fact, not a brute fact, which is why the history of science is so interesting. Moreover, there are many things–like Down syndrome, as my second son has taught me–that reside squarely at the intersection between brute fact and social fact, such that new social facts (like policies of inclusion and early intervention) can help determine the brute facts of people’s lives (like their health and well-being).

    I love that counterargument. People like Boghossian like to thunder about how they know precisely what a fact is, yet never seem to recognize how strongly shaped their version of “fact” is conditioned by their social world, and never consider the possibility that social facts can represent a significant truth. Consider race, for instance. Race is scientific nonsense; people’s perception of “race” does not coincide with the patterns of descent they purport, and ought not to be used to justify the discrimination and prejudices they endorse. But at the same time, race is a social fact, and ignoring those perceptions has “profoundly negative consequences for peoples’ views of reality”. Declaring that all humans came from Africa is true, but doesn’t do a thing to negate the harsh realities of how society’s have judged humans on the basis of their skin color.

    Denying social facts, as Boghossian does, is harmful.

  3. Boghossian’s specific rant in this case is about gender, and again, he scores an own goal by failing to perceive his own social facts. In response to a quote from a transgender studies professor who rightly points out that biological sex is a complex, messy topic that doesn’t divide neatly into the boy-girl binary, he makes this ranting non-argument.

    That is the most asinine, ridiculous, preposterous piece of ideological tripe. The only way someone could possibly believe that is they’ve been sufficiently indoctrinated by radical Leftists. I was once covering a lecture for a colleague and this topic came up. I said: “If sex were really a cultural construction, why don’t men menstruate? Why don’t men have babies? Why are there no women on professional football teams?” And an individual from the back of the class got up and started yelling, “Fuck you,” gave me the middle finger, shouted at me and stormed out of class.

    That student did the right thing, and I give them credit for speaking out. Professors are supposed to be informed on a subject, and Boghossian just outed himself as an ignoramus.

    He’s a philosopher, for dog’s sake, and he just proudly created an ontological framework and declared it to be an absolute. Women are people who menstruate, have babies, and don’t play football; men are people who don’t menstruate, don’t have babies, and play football.

    Is he even aware of how intensely socially constructed his list is? Does he consider all the exceptions? He’s blitheringly oblivious. If I declared that, for example, women have long hair and men have short hair (which is not as absurd as it sounds — Americans of my parent’s generation took that as a fact), then I have just made Rachel Maddow a man and Fabio a woman. If you bounce back and rightly explain that there are multiple factors, not just one criterion, then you have admitted that the gender binary is already false. Thanks for doing my job for me.

    And if you try to play the “biological reality!” card, I’ll just point out all the exceptions to your claims that women menstruate (not all do), women have babies (childless women aren’t men), XX chromosomes (not always), and anatomy.

    Boghossian is not a biologist, yet he’s always claiming biological authority for his narrow-minded views. He’s a lot like creationists that way.

    4. Boghossian ends by citing his supporting sources, which is a good idea, but in his case, undermines everything he says. Who supports him? Dave Rubin, a right-wing pundit on youtube. Christina Hoff Sommers, anti-feminist hack and lackey of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. Joe Rogan, misogynistic and unfunny comedian. And a Twitter account I’d never heard of before, @RealPeerReview, which is nothing but a person loudly laughing at gender studies articles they don’t understand. Some of those papers are terrible, I agree, but I seem to have frequently found papers in biology that are terrible (it’s actually not hard to do at all), and yet I don’t think all of biology is wrong, because I understand the theory and the evidence behind what I criticize. I can’t say that for Boghossian’s sources.

    Goddamn, but organized atheism has enabled a lot of cocky asswits who like to hide behind “objective reality”.

Mary’s Monday Metazoan: The reindeer are suffering

Climate change isn’t helping the reindeer.

reindeerReindeer are getting smaller. As temperatures inch up, winters are getting warmer in Norway, where Svalbard reindeer (Rangifer tarandus platyrhynchus) live. Instead of being able to brush aside the snow that covers the grasses, lichens, and mosses they eat during the 8-month-long chill, the animals’ diet is locked away under a layer of ice when warming temperatures cause rain to fall on existing snow cover, freezing it solid.

Meanwhile, climate change denialists are feeding richly in Washington DC.

What a wonderful endorsement!

Ken Ham has a few things to say about an upcoming movie.

The filmmakers’ recent public comments have revealed that they were not telling the truth when they insisted that AiG would be portrayed in a fair and accurate manner, Ham said. Therefore we don’t expect their finished film to feature the straightforward reporting on the Ark and Creation Museum that we were assured we would receive. It looks like their film will be more of a mock-umentary than a documentary.

Oh, baby. Take my money. Take my money now.

Hey, they can: They’re still raising money for the film.

Should be good.

I’m still hoping to make it out to the Ark Park myself, sometime this summer.

Keep your biological reductionism off us men, too

I’m going to disagree with Ed Brayton, who reposted an article by Joe Herbert that blames toxic masculinity on testosterone. It starts out with facts that are rather inarguable:

Young men are particularly liable to become fanatics. Every dictator, every guru, every religious leader, knows this. Fanatics have an overwhelming sense of identity based on a cause (a religion) or a community (gang, team), and a tight and exclusive bond with other members of that group. They will risk injury, loss or even death for the sake of their group. They regard everyone else as outsiders, or even enemies. But why are so many of them young males?

In a world of nation-states, young men fought the wars that formed most countries. The same goes for tribes, villages and factions. Young males have qualities that specialize them for this essential function. They readily identify with their group. They form close bonds with its other members. They are prone to follow a strong leader. This is why young males are so vulnerable to environmental influences, such as the prevailing culture in which they happen to live, and why they are so easily attracted by charismatic leaders or lifestyles that promise membership of restricted groups with sharply defined objectives and values. They like taking risks on behalf of their group – and they usually underestimate the danger that such risks represent. If they didn’t have these properties, they would be less willing to go to war, and therefore less able to fulfil one of their essential sociobiological roles.

That’s a good question, and it is a real problem. But the first hint that the answer is going to go awry is that phrase, “essential sociobiological roles”. Uh-oh. And then it plunges deeper into overly simplistic complexity: it’s because of testosterone. It’s differential development of the frontal lobes. It’s male genes.

Ugh. No, it’s not. I have all of those things, but somehow have avoided fanaticism and obedience to authoritarian leaders and war mongering. Tomi Lahren lacks all of those things, yet somehow exhibits all the properties Herbert is labeling as masculine. You cannot simply go shopping for correlations and label them as causal by ignoring all the evidence against your hypothesis.

I could argue, for instance, that if we look at warriors throughout history, they all have arms that can hold weapons, and language even synonymizes “armed” with “holding a weapon”. Therefore, possessing forelimbs is the explanation for aggression and violence. I think everyone would agree that hypothesis is nonsense. But somehow, we’re going to be less critical of a hypothesis that having testicles is synonymous with violence?

There will be predispositions caused by hormones and cortical development, but they are going to be far less specific than “join the army, follow a charismatic leader, and have happy times killing people with your boomstick”. Testosterone makes people more aggressive? Sure. But it depends on the dose, and how it is expressed is going to be culture-dependent. Whether it makes you want to kill things or whether it makes you want to dance or create art or make love is going to be a product of your history and social environment. Testosterone is not the villain here, no more than arms are the bad guys causing wars.

I happen to like my testosterone, and I consider the role it played in shaping my biological history to be a good one — it made me who I am, in small part. I think being a man should be a good thing, just as being a woman is a good thing, just as being any of the diverse patterns of expression of our human selves is a good thing. To blame behavior on the size and shape of our frontal lobes is a phrenological kind of error.

Besides, did you know young women readily identify with their group, form close bonds with its other members, and are prone to follow a strong leader? Herbert makes the mistake of thinking general human qualities are special to one sex in order to make his essentialist argument. It’s wrong.

Resist now

We’ve added a new group blog to our roster, FREETHOUGHT RESISTANCE. Many of the writers here can contribute to it, and we’ll be adding more anti-fascist content as time goes on…and as our outrage grows. We’ll also welcome guest posts, and in fact have already added a post from Sunsara Taylor, calling for action at the refusefascism.org site. We would favor posts that have specific proposals and information for activism; tell us about your local event, about organizations working towards good causes, about unjust actions by the illegitimate regime that require responses. Send such posts to any of your favorite bloggers here; we do require that you use a valid email address, but you can request that it be posted anonymously.

What motivated this new blog is the appalling normalization of Trump by the media. We refuse to be part of that, and many of us have decided that we needed to be clear in our stance, that we reject this government hijacking by the alt-right, and further that we oppose the widespread apologetics for racism and misogyny and homophobia and all the other vicious bigotries that have been revitalized by the right. I want to someday be able to tell my grandchildren that I resisted, I fought, I spoke out. I hope you feel the same way.

This will not be us.

When Hitler’s party won influence in Parliament, and even after he was made chancellor of Germany in 1933 – about a year and a half before seizing dictatorial power – many American press outlets judged that he would either be outplayed by more traditional politicians or that he would have to become more moderate. Sure, he had a following, but his followers were “impressionable voters” duped by “radical doctrines and quack remedies,” claimed the Washington Post. Now that Hitler actually had to operate within a government the “sober” politicians would “submerge” this movement, according to The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. A “keen sense of dramatic instinct” was not enough. When it came to time to govern, his lack of “gravity” and “profundity of thought” would be exposed.

In fact, The New York Times wrote after Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship that success would only “let him expose to the German public his own futility.” Journalists wondered whether Hitler now regretted leaving the rally for the cabinet meeting, where he would have to assume some responsibility.

Yes, the American press tended to condemn Hitler’s well-documented anti-Semitism in the early 1930s. But there were plenty of exceptions. Some papers downplayed reports of violence against Germany’s Jewish citizens as propaganda like that which proliferated during the foregoing World War. Many, even those who categorically condemned the violence, repeatedly declared it to be at an end, showing a tendency to look for a return to normalcy.

Journalists were aware that they could only criticize the German regime so much and maintain their access. When a CBS broadcaster’s son was beaten up by brownshirts for not saluting the Führer, he didn’t report it. When the Chicago Daily News’ Edgar Mowrer wrote that Germany was becoming “an insane asylum” in 1933, the Germans pressured the State Department to rein in American reporters. Allen Dulles, who eventually became director of the CIA, told Mowrer he was “taking the German situation too seriously.” Mowrer’s publisher then transferred him out of Germany in fear of his life.

We will be taking the Trump situation seriously. We will condemn it without reservation.

Kristof is what passes for “liberal” in the media? That’s a problem.

Nicholas Kristof does it again, demonstrating the all-too-common inanity of the NY Times’ op-ed pages. He’s very concerned that college campuses have become “echo chambers”.

I share apprehensions about President-elect Trump, but I also fear the reaction was evidence of how insular universities have become. When students inhabit liberal bubbles, they’re not learning much about their own country. To be fully educated, students should encounter not only Plato, but also Republicans.

We liberals are adept at pointing out the hypocrisies of Trump, but we should also address our own hypocrisy in terrain we govern, such as most universities: Too often, we embrace diversity of all kinds except for ideological. Repeated studies have found that about 10 percent of professors in the social sciences or the humanities are Republicans.

“We” liberals? Kristof is more of a privileged center-right kind of White Dufus. Just the fact that now, in the time of Trump, he finds it important to wag his finger and tut-tut at those damn liberal universities tells you that he isn’t one of us. He’s the sleazy con man cozying up to you, smarmily reassuring you that he is on your side, while he’s planning to pick your pocket.

It is ridiculous to even suggest that students live in a bubble, and that we need to make a special effort to help them meet Republicans. We are surrounded by them. Many grew up in Republican families. There are Republican students here, and Republican student clubs. Republicans have been aggressively plastering campus bulletin boards with Republican political slogans. We have a far right Republican alternative paper littering the campus. If 10% of our professors are Republican, it’s rather definite that students will encounter them. Even his own numbers make it clear that his whine is nonsensical.

Since 40% of Americans are creationists, does that mean, that using Kristof’s calculus, we should be hiring more biology professors who deny evolution and reject all of the evidence? We should aim to be representative of all good ideas, not simply all ideas; we should have standards. Education is not simply the indiscriminate dumping of every delusion that has been farted out into the world into students’ heads.

Some of you are saying that it’s O.K. to be intolerant of intolerance, to discriminate against bigots who acquiesce in Trump’s record of racism and misogyny. By all means, stand up to the bigots. But do we really want to caricature half of Americans, some of whom voted for President Obama twice, as racist bigots? Maybe if we knew more Trump voters we’d be less inclined to stereotype them.

That’s standard right-wing cant coming from our so-called fellow liberal. How do you know that “many” of them voted for Obama twice? Only about 40% of eligible voters did their duty this time around, you know; it is possible for [Obama voters] and [Trump voters] to be non-overlapping sets. I expect that there are some who did vote that way, but keep in mind that 3% of the electorate voted for Gary Johnson. There’s a fair bit of noise and badly informed voting going on.

But this is the tired old “I have friends who are black” or “I’d let a black man use my bathroom” excuse. It doesn’t matter. Trump campaigned on nativism, discrimination, and open racism. The people who voted for him didn’t see any of that as a problem. That makes them implicitly racist.

I know a few Trump voters. It’s not stereotyping to say they made a bad decision for very bad reasons. And yes, the entire white population of America is racist to varying degrees, so it’s not a caricature, it’s a statement of fact. (Which statement will, no doubt, elicit louder howls of protest than the fact that unarmed black men get murdered by the police. I know my people.)

The weakest argument against intellectual diversity is that conservatives or evangelicals have nothing to add to the conversation. “The idea that conservative ideas are dumb is so preposterous that you have to live in an echo chamber to think of it,” Sunstein told me.

Of course, we shouldn’t empower racists and misogynists on campuses. But whatever some liberals think, “conservative” and “bigot” are not synonyms.

Good grief. Liberals didn’t equate conservatives with racists and misogynists. Conservatives did, by happily embracing the Southern strategy, making theocracy a key plank, using racist gerrymandering to pad their representation, engaging in voter suppression, and now, electing a racist, misogynist incompetent to the presidency. You don’t get to complain that conservative and bigot have become synonymous when that is precisely the identity modern conservatives have consciously adopted!

I’ve known conservatives. I’ve listened to conservative ideas, and even when I’ve disagreed with them haven’t necessarily thought them stupid. I consider Obama to be a moderate, sensible conservative, too, who has implemented quite a few policies I find wrong…but Jesus, at least he’s been a competent bureaucrat. But those were conservatives before Reagan, the Gingrich revolution, the Tea Party, and the ascendancy of Trumpkinism. I’d be willing to agree that those crappy ideas are actually radical, reactionary bullshit that is not conservative at all, but when Republicans, the conservative party, have become the willing reservoir of the brain-eating prion disease of far-right loonitarianism, they’ve bought it, they own it, and they don’t get to now claim conservative thinking isn’t a vile toxin infecting the Republic because Eisenhower was pretty restrained and sensible, once upon a time.

Yay! I’m on the Professor Watch List!

They did it! I’ve made it on to the list! I feel so appreciated.

The entry is all about my contempt for that racist rag, the Morris NorthStar, an organization that really doesn’t like me…and I’d feel like I wasn’t being a responsible human being if I hadn’t made them angry. I’ve also heard a rumor that their next issue is going to feature an article that accuses me of rape — another empty set of lies built around the dishonesty of the slymers, Michael Nugent, and Mike Cernovich, which tells you something about the quality of their reporting.

Cling to the dream

I’m one of Rachel Swirsky’s patrons on Patreon, so I get to read all these little stories, and you don’t. One of her latest is November, 2016 — One Dozen Counterfactuals for the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections, which consists of 12 alternate histories for how the past year could have turned out. I’m going to mention just one:

9. During the nomination stage, both Warren and Biden tossed their hats into the ring along with Sanders’ and Clinton’s. Exciting debates about how best to move forward with progressive policy led to a renaissance in thought. Intellectuals, activists, and community leaders were invited to lead vigorous discussion. Some – like Noam Chomsky – became candidates themselves. The ultimate winner’s name has been lost to history, as they insisted on giving collective credit to the movement which transformed the American political landscape into a pony-strewn rainbow meadow.

I think I’ll just lie back and pretend that one really happened, because the reality is too dystopian and vile.

Just for a little while, though. Because we have to wake up soon and fight back.

Even us sacrilegious jerks have limits

I got drawn into a Twitter conversation, because I am apparently the living manifestation of sacrilege. I actually wouldn’t object to my apotheosis as the god of god-hating, but even in that job, there are rules.

It started off with Madhusudan Katti objecting to an act of sacrilege by Jenniffer Lawrence.

The story of the Lawrence Heresy:

How do you define “sacred?” One simple answer: it’s something you keep your butt off. Jennifer Lawrence got that memo, but decided to disregard it. In a recent interview she recalls her “butt-scratchin’” on sacred rocks while shooting Hunger Games in Hawai’i. They were, to her mind, a useful tool to relieve her of itchiness.

In the comments, which she made on a recent episode of the BBC’s Graham Norton Show this week, she says: “There were … sacred … rocks — I dunno, they were ancestors, who knows — they were sacred.” She goes on to say: “You’re not supposed to sit on them, because you’re not supposed to expose your genitalia to them”. But she did. “I, however, was in a wetsuit for this whole shoot – oh my god, they were so good for butt itching!”

She knew this was a gross cultural breach – that much is clear – but Lawrence decided to go ahead and desecrate the rocks anyway.

Razib Khan seems to think this is an example of a double standard — people defended my act of sacrilege, so how can they find Jennifer Lawrence’s act offensive?

Katti notes some differences: Are you punching up or punching down? Are you disrespecting a whole culture or criticizing an intrusion of one culture into another?

Long story short, Katti’s right. I wouldn’t do that. I said over and over again during the whole Catholic wafer episode that what I was protesting was 1) the assumption that the Catholic church gets to control what I or anyone does in our private, secular spaces, and 2) the historically toxic influence of religion as a whole and Catholicism in particular on people around the world. Trashing a communion wafer turned out to be a surprisingly effective way of highlighting those problems without violating anyone’s rights or committing violence, and most of the effectiveness came not from my trivial act, but the exaggerated outrage from Catholics. It became quite clear that many people did want to control my beliefs in my home, and were willing to threaten violence to do it.

Catholics are free to practice and believe whatever they want in their spaces. Aside from finding their beliefs silly, I’m not going to outlaw communion or blow up churches (although I would like to tax them) or show up at church to disrupt their ceremonies. I will point out the sacred Catholic practice of sheltering pedophiles, of denying birth control to people, of buying up hospitals and then imposing arbitrary Catholic rules on medical practice, of just generally trying to tell non-Catholics how to live, are all examples of using their wealth and power to oppress others.

I find the idea of sacred stones rather silly, too. But I don’t find the native people of Hawaii to be silly, and do find them lacking in harmful intent. There’s nothing I (or Jennifer Lawrence) have to protest, even symbolically, about native Hawaiian culture; if anything, we have amends to make for our great big Western European butts rolling over and largely crushing their people, and wiping our butts further on little things they ask us to let them have is simply condescending, cruel, and wrong. If you go to someone’s house and they ask you to not sit in Grandpa’s favorite chair, do you then make it a point to reject their request and insist on taking that chair and only that chair for your entire visit?

Sure, if it’s a great and comfy chair buy one just like it for your house, and then you can complain if they try to reserve your sacred chair for their grandfather. But otherwise, show a little courtesy. It doesn’t do you any harm. Especially if you’re a hugely overpaid fabulous actor getting millions of dollars to play-act on a Hawaiian beach, and who can afford to buy their own non-sacred custom-designed butt-scratcher and hire a poor Hawaiian to haul it up and down the beach at your convenience. It’s just petty and rude to go out of your way to ‘defile’ a shared public resource simply because you can.

I am mighty!

I have heroically completed a small mountain of grading today. It is DONE. Only an optional final exam remains next Thursday (of course it is on a Thursday), but otherwise, I can stand atop this awesome pile of exams and lab reports and thump my chest and howl.

Except…and oh, how this rankles…five (5!) students forgot to write their names on the lab final exam — they must have been stressed out. Which means there are 5 gaping holes in my grade book, which means that, although these papers have been officially graded, I am unable to make the final step of actually entering them into the spreadsheet. There are holes in the grid. They pain me. Maybe I could randomly assign an unclaimed exam score to each student? Or average them together and give each one the average? Or just insert zeroes in there! Or (RAND*MaxScore)! Or (RAND*-MaxScore)! Anything to heal these wounds!

And the papers…they just squat there on my desk, frustrating ciphers demonstrating some knowledge of laboratory techniques, but unattached to any useful human. Maybe I should put my cat’s name there.

A cat that could carry out unit conversions and make up lab solutions and analyze spectrophotometer readings would be kind of useful.