A notable lack of tentacles, firearms, and razor-edged weaponry

At last, I am safely home after an excessively long and annoying trip back from Skepticon. One of the pleasures of these trips, at least, is meeting ferocious Pharyngulistas who are otherwise just fierce pseudonyms on a page, and who usually turn out to be fun and interesting human beings. Here’s one nice photo of some familiar people:

i-df9328d02b06c9fb76ac9bc30d25bca1-thegangatskepticon.jpeg

From left to right, that’s:
Mattir, Tone of Death
cicely, Death’s Imaginary Friend
Reality Enforcer, Spawn of Death
The Floating Cheerful Head of PZ
Blake Stacey
KOPD, Death’s Chia Pet supplier
Jules, Bride of Death
Rey Fox, He who has nothing to do with Death

Now it’s almost noon here, and I’ve got a frantic quantity of work to catch up on, and a whole long evening of administrative duties.

Would you believe I’m still trying to get home?

It was a rough night—roads in Minneapolis were clear, so I managed to drive halfway home, but then they turned into glassy sheets of frozen slickness, so I stopped for the late night at a cheap motel. Now the journey resumes by daylight, at least. It’s still icy, but at least I’ll be able to see.

I’m relieved that there will be no more travel this semester.

This’ll settle the current atheist/skeptic argument: a poll!

The current silly Skepticon controversy is easily resolved: just vote on it.

How much of a so-called skeptic convention can be about religion?

None 0% (0 votes)

No more than 25% 0% (0 votes)

No more than 50% 0% (0 votes)

Just so long as it isn’t all of it 25% (3 votes)

All of it, why not? 75% (9 votes)

Nicely done. There’s only one choice that isn’t arbitrary and incoherent and unjustifiable; I’d like to see the complainers confront the specific details of their position.

Oh, and by the way, I haven’t escaped Missouri yet — I’m stuck in an airport, waiting to fly out, and facing the prospect of some fierce, nasty, icy weather in Minnesota. I might be holing up in a hotel waiting for the snow and ice to clear tonight.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Let’s see…where am I? Oh, yeah. Springfield. Skepticon. My talk went OK, it was an all-science talk, and maybe disappointed those who expected me to lasso a god out of the sky, set him on fire, and stomp on his smoldering carcass. Afterwards, the party went on for quite a while. I was supposed to referee a drinking contest between Rebecca Watson and Richard Carrier, but they both faded pathetically early, forcing me to continue on for both of them.

No sleep for me. I ended up shooting the breeze all night long with DJ Grothe and Amanda Marcotte and Bug Girl and a few others.

Now I’ve got a long day of travel ahead. I expect to simply sleep through it all.

Episode CXXXIII: Boys’ Night Out

Forgive the neglect lately, but I’m a) distracted by the chaos that is Skepticon, and b) mildly enfreakened out by the fact that my talk is still not ready for prime time, and I have to give it in a few hours. So now I see that the thread of perpetual growth is getting overlong, despite the fact several of the participants ought to be similarly distracted because they’re also here at the meeting (Hello, Mattir & Spawn).

Oh, well. I babble at 7, ending the agony, and then it’s some kind of party time all night long.

(Current totals: 11,379 entries with 1,191,005 comments.)

An online abortion poll — for real

I’m about as pro-choice as you can get; I’m even willing to say that I’m pro-abortion, and would like to encourage more people to abort. But I’m also rather shocked by my fellow Minnesotans, Pete and Alisha Arnold, who have decided to allow people to vote on whether they should get an abortion. Way to trivialize a significant life decision, Pete and Alisha!

They have an online poll, and you can go vote right now.

Should We Give Birth or Have an Abortion?

Give Birth 77.3% (118,301 votes)

Have an Abortion 22.7% (34,741 votes)

Clearly, looking at those numbers, the ‘bots have been at work, trivializing the poll even more. I don’t care how you vote; what’s at stake is a mere embryo, so it’s no big loss if it’s flushed and incinerated, and I don’t have any illusions about whether this is deciding the fate of a human life — it’s not. There’s no person in Alisha’s belly yet.

I have deep reservations about voting on this at all, because it is not and should not be my decision. But I had to vote to abort, not because of any consideration about the embryo, but because I’m looking at Pete and Alisha, the full-grown, conscious, decision-making human beings who are considering whether to take on the responsibilities of a child. And no, they are not. I’d say the same thing to someone who decided whether to have a baby or not by a flip of the coin. If that’s how you make decisions about whether to commit a significant part of your life to a lot of hard work and the emotional roller coaster of child-rearing, then NO, you do not want to do it.

They’re already lousy parents, and they haven’t even created a child yet.

As several have already pointed out, this poll is not “for real”. It’s the work of a couple of libertarian anti-choice frauds. So go ahead, vote however you want, it doesn’t matter and the perpetrators are a pair of morons.

I had no idea I was stepping into a controversy

It’s such a petty and trivial one, though, I can’t be too concerned. I’m at Skepticon 3, and I just learned tonight that the convention has been a source of dissent…and when I read the argument, I was stunned at how stupid it was. Apparently, Skepticon has too many atheists in it, and is — wait for it — “harming the cause”.

I’m not joking. Jeff Wagg, formerly of the JREF, has a long lament deploring that 3 of the 15 talks are explicitly atheistic, and that JT Eberhard, the organizer, emphasizes the problem of religion too much for it to be True Skeptic™ conference. It’s utterly batty. Some people have this grandiose notion that they have the only acceptable definition of skepticism, and somehow, in some way, religion is excluded from skeptical criticism.

As Reed points out in his IndieSkeptics article, atheists (and free thinkers and secularists and scientific naturalists, etc.) are fighting a cultural war in this country. It’s a very important war, and I’m a combatant as well. Atheists have been bashed and had religion forced on them forever, and it’s shameful to allow it to continue in a country purporting to be “free.” But to conflate atheism with skepticism dilutes atheism and destroys skepticism.

And I fear the damage has already been done. I see a lot of good people leaving the skeptical community because they’re uncomfortable with the tone and disappointed with, frankly, the lack of skepticism presented by many people.

And I say good riddance to those people. If these so-called good skeptics are going to abandon the movement because they’re uncomfortable with people who openly question their superstitious beliefs, then they don’t seem very committed and their departure will be no loss. I also think that the only hypothetical destruction of skepticism going on here is this bizarre insistence that we privilege certain weird notions as being outside the scope of skepticism. Wagg also throws up a strawman or two.

I’m convinced that a litmus test over who’s a skeptic and who isn’t based on religious belief is harmful to both movements.

Absolutely no one has proposed such a litmus test. Even I, loud and obnoxious hard core atheist, have specifically stated there should be no such restriction. Does Wagg really think Randi or DJ Grothe are going to be more snide about religion than I am?

Skepticon does have a strong anti-religion emphasis. So? This is a subject open to criticism, and it’s perfectly fair to apply skepticism to religion as much as we would to dowsing or Bigfoot. If someone had organized a skeptics’ conference with an emphasis on, for instance, quack medicine, I doubt that anyone would have squawked that “it’s harming the cause!”, “it’ll make skeptics who believe in homeopathy uncomfortable”, or “it’s diluting medicine and destroying skepticism”. And if Wagg really feels strongly about reinforcing his narrow vision of what skepticism should be, he’s welcome to organize his own conference. Complaining that someone else has put in the hard work of creating a successful conference because it isn’t the conference Wagg would assemble smacks of pettiness and sour grapes.

The closest thing to a reasonable attempt to describe a boundary putting atheism outside skepticism is this:

I believe that if you equate skepticism with anything other than science, you’ve missed the point. As for Christianity, skepticism has nothing to say except about testable claims associated therein. Bleeding statues? Yes, skepticism comes into play. Jesus rose and is in heaven? Seems unlikely, but there’s not a lot more to say.

This is a common and entirely unbelievable rationalization that I most often hear from theists, and I don’t buy it for a moment. A claim that a magic man rose from the dead and flew up into the sky is certainly something we should be skeptical about! And further, the argument that because it is untestable, it is a statement that skeptics must be neutral about is thoroughly bogus, and opens the door to exempting the most ludicrous, poorly justified, crazy claims from skeptical scrutiny. It’s also dishonest about Christianity; it certainly does make specific historical claims that are subject to assessment (and several of the talks today did just that), it proposes phenomena that violate our knowledge of how the world works, and it lacks credible evidential justification for its central ideas.

It also takes an awesome amount of arrogance to declare certain subjects off-limits to inquiry, and that even considering them damages the skeptical movement. That also requires a truly astonishing lack of self-awareness.

JT has also responded to this nonsense. I think we can tell where the future of skepticism lies.

The War on Christmas will be waged on the field of internet polls

It’s telling that kooks like Bill O’Reilly can turn purple with rage if you say “happy holidays” to them, seeing affront in friendliness. You know, It doesn’t matter — so why do we need a poll to find out if some jerks want to dictate how you say hello?

How do you feel when you hear “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas?”

I prefer it 21%
I don’t care much either way 34%
It bothers me 45%

I suggest that everyone who is offended by being told either “happy holidays” or “merry christmas” should start wearing a little sign so we know not to hurt their delicate little feelings by using the wrong salutation. Instead, we’d greet them by thrusting a middle finger up at them and shouting, “Up yours!”

Ever want your own Zener cards?

I didn’t think so. I never did, either. But now at least you can get them for free: the JREF has a teaching module on ESP that you can download.

It’s pretty good. The module strongly emphasizes good record keeping and rigor, which are important skills for young investigators. I was a little disappointed in the bit about statistics—it basically tells the students to use a table to look up values, don’t worry about the math behind it, and trust us, getting 8 hits in 25 trials does not mean you have ESP. I would think the very best first module to throw at students would be an introduction to statistics; have the kids throw dice or flip coins and tally results, and learn what randomness really looks like and how we test for it.

Particularly if you’re going to critically examine parapsychology, an understanding of how subtle biases can lead to statistically significant results is a good idea, because I suspect that the casual fudging of a few numbers is the foundation of the whole field. Just look at Daryl Bem’s work to see what I mean.

The screaming of the lambs

Scientists are often accused of cruelty towards animals, and there are some experiments that do cause pain…but at the same time, what we can do is very tightly regulated and scrutinized, with every experiment requiring rather thorough justification, and in every case that I know of, the investigators themselves are greatly concerned about minimizing suffering, even without the watchdogs of animal care and use committees hovering over them. And need I mention that scientists actually accomplish something useful in their animal work?

If animal rightists want to focus right now on a widespread practice that causes intense pain, they ought to look to the rules for halal/kosher meat. As Johann Hari explains, there are religious rules that demand that animals needlessly suffer when they are slaughtered, and when criticized, of course the barbarous butchers hide behind the claim that their religion demands this agony.

Atheists who criticise religion are constantly being told we have missed the point and religion is really about compassion and kindness. It is only a handful of extremists and fundamentalists who “misunderstand” faith and use it for cruel ends, we are told with a wagging finger. But here’s an example where most members of a religion choose to do something pointlessly cruel, and even the moderates demand “respect” for their “views”. Their faith makes them prioritise pleasing an invisible supernatural being over the screaming of actual living creatures. Doesn’t this suggest that faith itself – the choice to believe something in the total absence of evidence – is a danger that can lead you up needlessly nasty paths?

It says something about faith that it can be used to justify torture, simply because they’ve always done it that way.

Oh, and for a beautiful example of misplaced priorities, contrast the insensitivity of the public to slitting the throats of conscious farm animals to this bizarre story of pulling plastic pigs from children’s toy sets, because of the possibility that kosher/halal gobbling religionists might be perturbed by the existence of itty-bitty models of smiling swine.