New signs, same criticisms

The new American Atheist billboard designs are now online, and I don’t want to disappoint Dave Silverman, so I’ll give my usual review: better than the last set, but still needs work.

Stuff I like: it’s a strong, assertive message, and that’s what I want from AA. The “Atheism: Simply Reasonable” slogan is clear, short, punchy. They’ve gotten away, mostly, from the blocky multi-colored Mondrian look of previous signs.

Stuff I don’t like: the text on the left is 5 lines long. That’s too much for a billboard. The central image is sort of arbitrary — it says religion is silly, but it doesn’t contribute much to the message on the left. The other billboard, on Mormonism, is worse in this regard; why is there a guy in his underwear there? Really, on a billboard, everything must be distilled down to deliver one clear, simple argument.

I know Dave is rolling his eyes right now and wondering why he’s even trying to lead those fractious, critical atheists at all…wouldn’t sheep be so much easier?

Live by statistics, die by statistics

There is a magic and arbitrary line in ordinary statistical testing: the p level of 0.05. What that basically means is that if the p level of a comparison between two distributions is less than 0.05, there is a less than 5% chance that your results can be accounted for by accident. We’ll often say that having p<0.05 means your result is statistically significant. Note that there’s nothing really special about 0.05; it’s just a commonly chosen dividing line.

Now a paper has come out that ought to make some psychologists, who use that p value criterion a lot in their work, feel a little concerned. The researchers analyzed the distribution of reported p values in 3 well-regarded journals in experimental psychology, and described the pattern.

Here’s one figure from the paper.

The solid line represents the expected distribution of p values. This was calculated from some theoretical statistical work.

…some theoretical papers offer insight into a likely distribution. Sellke, Bayarri, and Berger (2001) simulated p value distributions for various hypothetical effects and found that smaller p values were more likely than larger ones. Cumming (2008) likewise simulated large numbers of experiments so as to observe the various expected distributions of p.

The circles represent the actual distribution of p values in the published papers. Remember, 0.05 is the arbitrarily determined standard for significance; you don’t get accepted for publication if your observations don’t rise to that level.

Notice that unusual and gigantic hump in the distribution just below 0.05? Uh-oh.

I repeat, uh-oh. That looks like about half the papers that report p values just under 0.05 may have benefited from a little ‘adjustment’.

What that implies is that investigators whose work reaches only marginal statistical significance are scrambling to nudge their numbers below the 0.05 level. It’s not necessarily likely that they’re actually making up data, but there could be a sneakier bias: oh, we almost meet the criterion, let’s add a few more subjects and see if we can get it there. Oh, those data points are weird outliers, let’s throw them out. Oh, our initial parameter of interest didn’t meet the criterion, but this other incidental observation did, so let’s report one and not bother with the other.

But what it really means is that you should not trust published studies that only have marginal statistical significance. They may have been tweaked just a little bit to make them publishable. And that means that publication standards may be biasing the data.

Masicampo EJ, and Lalande DR (2012). A peculiar prevalence of p values just below .05. Quarterly journal of experimental psychology PMID: 22853650

Why is this comic making me think about science?

Don’t you hate it when they do that? The latest Sci-ence is talking about your choice of avatars — those little icons we so thoughtlessly (in my case) attach to our posts. I thought Jeffrey Rowland’s cartoon of me in a diaper and angel wings was so adorable I snagged it a few years ago and have been using it ever since. But it turns out that your choice of avatar actually has an effect on naive user’s impression of you.

It’s really no surprise that your online avatar influences others’ perceptions of you. In an old UConn computer behavior study (lol IM), participants were asked rate a series of avatars that ranged from people to objects with faces. What they found was pretty obvious: when faced with an avatar in online interactions, participants relied on the characteristics of the avatar for social clues about who they were interacting with.

What’s really interesting about the Nowak/Rauh study is that participants who were more familiar with online interaction relied on the avatars less and instead looked for behavioral cues. It makes sense, given that those who are used to navigating around avatars are generally aware that they aren’t really talking to a bottle of laundry detergent, rather a person who has chosen a bottle of laundry detergent as their avatar.

I haven’t really been paying much attention to those little avatars — hey, I’m a participant who is “more familiar with online interaction” — but now I’m thinking of tweaking the display to make them twice as big and make new user’s default icon really ugly, just to be mean.

I’m not feeling any compulsion to change mine, though.

For those of you wondering how to set your avatar: go to Gravatar.com, and upload an image under the same email address you use to log on here. That’ll do it!

The Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver

That’s Paul Ryan’s official new title, granted by Charles Pierce, the one political commentator you must read this election season. He’s got Ryan pegged.

Paul Ryan is an authentically dangerous zealot. He does not want to reform entitlements. He wants to eliminate them. He wants to eliminate them because he doesn’t believe they are a legitimate function of government. He is a smiling, aw-shucks murderer of opportunity, a creator of dystopias in which he never will have to live. This now is an argument not over what kind of political commonwealth we will have, but rather whether or not we will have one at all, because Paul Ryan does not believe in the most primary institution of that commonwealth: our government. The first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution make a lie out of every speech he’s ever given. He looks at the country and sees its government as something alien that is holding down the individual entrepreneurial genius of 200 million people, and not as their creation, and the vehicle through which that genius can be channelled for the general welfare.

The other appalling thing about Ryan is how much the media is puling about how smart he is, and calling him a brilliant policy wonk (also hammered on by Pierce). Ryan is a guy with a bachelor’s degree in economics whose entire career is defined by political gladhanding and devotion to far-right ideological nonsense. He’s not particularly well-qualified; a BA is a degree that gives you a general knowledge of the basics of a field, and it’s a good thing, but it does not turn you into an expert. Ryan’s degree in economics is worth about as much as Bobby Jindal’s degree in biology.

OK, one other guy you should listen to: Paul Krugman.

What [Saletan]’s doing – and what the whole Beltway media crowd has done – is to slot Ryan into a role someone is supposed to be playing in their political play, that of the thoughtful, serious conservative wonk. In reality, Ryan is nothing like that; he’s a hard-core conservative, with a voting record as far right as Michelle Bachman’s, who has shown no competence at all on the numbers thing.

What Ryan is good at is exploiting the willful gullibility of the Beltway media, using a soft-focus style to play into their desire to have a conservative wonk they can say nice things about. And apparently the trick still works.

That’s the painful spectacle we’re going to be suffering through for the next few months: Mitt Romney pretending to be a human capable of empathy, and Paul Ryan pretending to be serious and intelligent. And the media will play right along.

Why I am an atheist – pedantik

It took me a long time to jettison the religious beliefs that had been instilled in me from my early youth.  While my father, an ordained deacon, was almost silent on religious matters while at home, my mother made certain that I knew of her beliefs every day.  She taught sunday school to teenage girls in our local Baptist church, and pressed my brother and me into attendance whether we liked it or not.

[Read more…]

I’VE BEEN WARNING YOU ALL

They’re evil…EEEEEEEVVVIIIIILLL.

In a horrifying study, ordinary housecats were fitted with little cameras to monitor their activities throughout the day and night. It turns out that cats are carnivores, real predators, that scurried about murdering little creatures. Are you surprised?

About 30 percent of the sampled cats were successful hunters and killed, on average, two animals a week. Almost half of their spoils were abandoned at the scene of the crime. Extrapolating from the data to include the millions of feral cats brutalizing native wildlife across the country, the American Bird Conservancy estimates that kitties are killing more than 4 billion animals annually. And that number’s based on a conservative weekly kill rate, said Robert Johns, a spokesman for the conservancy.

"We could be looking at 10, 15, 20 billion wildlife killed (per year)," Johns said.

When we had cats, they were confined to the house, and only allowed outside under close supervision, because we understood their savage, beastly natures.

Pity and pitilessness

Maggie Koerth-Baker, ex-fundamentalist, has a fine post up explaining why fundamentalists are against seemingly innocuous things like set theory. It’s because it’s symptomatic of a deeper conflict with the modern world.

Instead, they see modernism as the opposing worldview to their own. They are all about tradition (or, at least, what they have decided is traditional). Modernism is a knee-jerk rejection of tradition in favor of the new. Obviously, they think a very specific sort of Christian God should be the center of everything and all parts of society, public and private. Modernists prefer ideas like secular humanism and think God is something you should be doing in private, on your own time. They believe strongly in the importance of power hierarchies and rules. Modernism smashes all of that and says, “Hey, just do your own thing. Nobody’s ideas are any better or worse than anybody else’s. There’s no right and wrong. Go crazy, man!” [Insert obligatory bongo drumming session]

I am hamming this up a bit, but you get the picture. Modernism, to the publishers of A Beka math books, is sick and wrong. The idea is that if you reject their specific idea of God and their specific idea of The Rules, then you must be living in a crazy, dangerous world. You could kill people, and you would think it was okay, because you’re a modernist and you know there’s really no such thing as right and wrong. Basically, they’ve bumped into a need to separate themselves from the almost inhuman Other on a massive scale, and latched on to modernism as a shorthand for how to do that. It doesn’t matter what you or I actually believe, or even what we actually do. They know what we MUST believe and what we MUST be like because of the tenets of modernism.

I understand this. They’ve been brought up to think the godless world is a deeply dangerous threat to everything they hold precious, and it’s simpler to just shut down any thing that has to do with it. It’s like somebody has been told that some mushrooms are delicious, and others are deadly poisonous, and they’ve been told that they can, if they’re very careful, tell the difference between them…and they choose to never, ever eat mushrooms because they don’t want to go to the bother of learning how, and they also don’t want to put anyone they love at any risk at all. So they’re very, very cautious about new ideas, because their social structure is both important to them and sensitive to external perturbations.

I can even sympathize with this conclusion.

If this sounds crazy … you’re right. It’s pretty crazy. In fact, it’s this kind of thinking, and my realization that it was based fundamentally on lying about everybody who wasn’t a member of your religious tribe, that led me away from religion to begin with. Ironically. But there is a coherent thought process going on here, and I want you to understand that. If all you do is point and laugh at the fundies for calling set theory evil, then you are missing the point. This isn’t about them being stupid. It’s about who they think you are.

Yes, I can appreciate that. I could be toxic to their worldview. I’m (and you all, too) are dangerous in that we could damage their equilibrium and send their children — and maybe even themselves — off into new patterns of thought that would repudiate all that they hold dear right now.

I read Maggie Koerth-Baker’s piece and had no problem putting myself in their shoes: if someone were making a serious challenge to my social and intellectual framework, if I were concerned that some blundering clod could come along and with some thoughtless nudge, knock it all down, I’d be protective and suspicious, too. I would be building fences around my world to keep those evil insensitive assholes out.

And then I read stuff like this summary of what Bobby Jindal’s education plan is going to do to children in Louisiana: the stupidity of arguing that dinosaurs were fire-breathing dragons who lived into the middle ages, the callousness of teaching that the Trail of Tears was an opportunity for Christian proselytization, the evil of putting a happy shine on slavery and the KKK, the equation of gay people with child molesters and rapists, the contempt for the environment, and I think…

Tear it all down.

They’ve built cages for themselves and their children, and have beliefs that harm others. I can see that they’re quivering in fear at the modernists, the liberals, the gays, the atheists, all coming to expose their ‘worldview’ for the rickety tissue of lies and hate that it is, and I say…no mercy. No hesitation. No apologies. Break it apart, and set those people free.

Pointing and laughing is just one step in the process of liberating those Christians trapped in their prison of lies. I can feel pity for them, while I let reality crash into their delusions and send them scurrying. They fear change, but they must change.