Continue reading »]]> I just returned from Washington DC yesterday, and early tomorrow morning I have to fly off for the IHEU General Assembly and to speak at the Humanism Romania conference. The theme is “Education, Science, and Human Rights” — I might be able to say a few words about that.

I don’t think I’ve fully recuperated from the last trip, though, so I’m going to be thoroughly worn out by this one. Blogging may be a little intermittent for a while, especially since I think my flights and layovers total about 13 hours each way. And I’m plunging into the lab as soon as I get back, too.

Continue reading »]]> Some people have considered the recent criticisms of the CEO of the Center for Inquiry to be a wholesale attack on the organization (well, “some people” meaning “freakin’ loons”). Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m a supporter; I think many of their causes are essential; I appreciate the work of many of the people there. Let’s not forget that the whole of the organization is not the brain of the CEO, whether it’s Paul Kurtz or Ron Lindsay, both of whom have also done good work. We have to trust in the quality of the group to overcome the flaws of the individual.

So I thought I might throw out an occasional post to let you know about a few of the commendable efforts of CFI — you know, try a little positive reinforcement in addition to my usual spiked bludgeon of criticism.

CFI has an Office of Public Policy.

The Office of Public Policy (OPP) is the Washington, D.C. political arm of the Center for Inquiry. Our mandate is to advocate for public policy based on reason, science, and secular values. This includes lobbying at all levels of government — Congress, the Administration, and the international community, including the United Nations — to promote and defend separation of church and state, the role of scientific evidence and secular ethics in policymaking, and basic civil and human rights. 

This is the unit that lobbies the government directly for secular causes — if there is something that pisses you off about public policy, this is an effective place to ask for assistance. The director of the OPP is Michael De Dora, who has been working his butt off to get things done. He’s also their representative to the UN.

He meets with the State Department on issues of international concern for secularists, and as we all know there have been a number of those lately, with atheists being persecuted in several countries. He lobbies to keep religion and politics out of science, and has fought against the corruption of our educational system.

He’s also stood up for women’s issues, opposing restrictions on emergency contraception and abortion. You can find a good summary of his position in his speech at the Unite Women rally.

If CFI had really felt it necessary to tap a high-ranking man to give an introduction at the Women in Secularism conference, it would have been a good choice to delegate it to De Dora, who has a solid record on women’s issues and would definitely have been politic enough to avoid throwing a few rhetorical grenades into the crowd. In the past I’ve said some rude things about a few remarks he made about creationism, but…he got better. I’ve met with him a few times, and I’m confident in his abilities in his job — and he’s one of a lot of faces at CFI who do great work.

So keep on criticizing where criticizing needs to be done — it’s how the organization gets better. But let’s not forget that CFI also does invaluable work on our behalf.

Michael De Dora of CFI addressing the Unite Women rally

Continue reading »]]> As mentioned in this post, I was waiting for Foundation Beyond Belief to put up a crisis response page. If you were thinking of making an aid donation, go here to help victims of the Oklahoma tornado.

I’ve seen some reluctance to donate because Oklahoma’s senators, Coburn and Inhofe, are fucking selfish scumbags. Don’t let that hold you back — the children who were killed or hurt or made homeless didn’t vote for them, so just think of them when you dig into your pockets.

(Also, apparently my very general link from last night led to about $3000 in donations — you can do better now that you’ve got a specific focus!)

Continue reading »]]> Adam Lee has a nice summary of the Women in Secularism conference. However, he does reveal that we Ftbullied him into talking the picture below, which is a no-no. You were told not to tattle, Adam Lee. The next time we meet, expect a pantsing, or even a swirlie. Also, put your lunch money in an envelope and mail it to me right now.

Oh, and look — even more ftbullying! We’re all holding signs abusing the theocratic governments that jail atheist bloggers.

Continue reading »]]> The normalization of rape continues apace.

Three teenagers face sex assault charges after they raped a 12-year-old girl at gunpoint and posted a video of the December attacks on Facebook, prosecutors said.

Scandale Fritz, 16, Kenneth Brown, 15, and Justin Applewhite, 16, were all ordered held in lieu of $900,000 bail in a hearing today before Criminal Court Judge James Brown, said Cook County state’s attorney spokeswoman Tandra Simonton. The three were charged as adults.

That’s not just dumb, it’s a problem of attitude: now raping a 12 year old girl is something so amusing, something to be proud of, to the point where rapists are sharing videos of their criminal attacks on facebook.

I’m curious to know if they were surprised when police officers showed up at their door, and I’d love to know what kind of excuses they offered.

Continue reading »]]> Sikivu Hutchinson has a new book, Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels, and she was recently interviewed about it.

What’s the most important take-home message for readers?

That humanism can be culturally relevant to communities of color. Traditional mainstream white-dominated freethought/atheist/humanist models don’t offer an adequate basis for social justice. They don’t address the intersection of women’s rights, civil rights, anti-racism, heterosexism, the racial wealth gap, and educational apartheid.

…

So while there are numerous grassroots atheist groups spearheading their own projects, the movement as a whole continues to be publicly defined by a handful of superstars and their limited vision. The absence of historical and sociological context for atheist politics, and its disconnection from social justice activism, will keep it in the lily-white one-percent column.

I have no patience for single-issue white male atheists who inveigh against the backwardness of organized religion as the fount of all evil and then have the luxury to retreat into their segregated ivory towers, insulated conferences, and highly-paid seminar bubbles. In Godless Americana I address the lived experiences of some of the most religious communities on the planet in one of the richest nations on the planet. I probe the sociological context for faith traditions and hyper-religiosity in American communities of color.

I have this grand, optimistic vision of humanity’s future, and escaping the dead-end lies of religion is part of it. But mostly what I see are people — all people — given the security and knowledge to live lives with true meaning, where they can grow and learn and engage in productive struggle, fighting to make the world a better place with every generation. I have my causes and my biases, but I don’t see how we can achieve that goal by having the causes and biases of a narrow subset imposed on the whole; rather, the few have to open themselves up to appreciate the experiences of the many. We must have the humility to change.

I am one of those white male atheists. I work in an ivory tower that is mostly white, I go to those conferences in beige, softly carpeted hotels, I sit contentedly in the seminar bubbles (but not highly paid — I have something better, a secure position that gives me the privilege to not have to ask for payment). But I am not a leader. I have no position in any hierarchy of any atheist/humanist organization. I just write and speak what I think, and that’s all I can do.

What I think is that for my vision to come true, no one can grasp at power, we have to surrender it. We have to sacrifice control by an elite for an expansion of opportunity for the base. We have to let go of the perspectives and interests of one gender, one race, one class and start thinking in terms of humanity.

You’d have a hard time finding someone more committed to the importance of freethought and science than myself — those are the ways to build a better world. It can’t be a better world if it only includes me and people like me — it has to be a better world for all. We have to include that in our equations and our principles.

Continue reading »]]> Hey, we added a couple of male bloggers here…I thought we were supposed to be man-hatin’ banshee feminists? It’s surprising but true, though, that some people with a Y chromosome and a penis can actually care about social justice. Say howdy to Ally Fogg and our very newest addition, Tauriq Moosa, who helpfully explains how to pronounce his name in his first post.

Continue reading »]]> Moore, Oklahoma has been completely flattened by a tornado. Homes and businesses have been destroyed, but also a couple of schools and a hospital.

And here’s a time-lapse video of this monster ripping through the countryside.

What can we do? I mentioned it to Foundation Beyond Belief — go to the “Crisis Response” link and tell them you want to contribute to the relief efforts. If enough of us do that, they’ll set something up to take your godless donations and send them to where they’re most needed. And then send them money!

Zingularity also has a post on the catastrophe.

Foundation Beyond Belief now has a crisis response page. You can make charitable donations there.

The death toll is at 51 and rising, with at least 20 dead children.

Continue reading »]]> Or we could be in big trouble. The antis of Ireland have a whole arsenal of secret weapons in the battle to keep women pregnant that I haven’t seen deployed here — they have access to Catholic magic. I don’t think we’d be able to resist if they started cruising our country with magic paintings, magic garments (guaranteeing immunity from hellfire!), and magic faces.

No word yet on whether they have any magic briar patches.

Continue reading »]]> Amanda Marcotte has written an excellent open letter to the Center for Inquiry — it’s measured and reflects the consensus of the 30+ people who packed my hotel room on Saturday night.

Well, there are exceptions. This was Justin Vacula’s response on twitter:

Get out, Amanda, you not welcome here. Take your dogma elsewhere (you too, Ophelia)

This is the same guy who couldn’t get anyone to pay attention to him at the Women In Secularism conference — we had more interesting people to talk to — so he spent his Saturday doing an interview for that misogynist hate site, A Voice For Men.

Who’s supposed to get out again?

Continue reading »]]> It took longer than I thought — I was so worn out from an invigorating and stressful weekend that I didn’t trust myself to drive all the way from the airport to Morris, so I got a cheap motel room and got some sleep before completing the journey. And that means I’ve arrived back just barely in time to switch out of the lampshade on my head and dancin’ shoes to tidy up and swing into professorial action and run some meetings. The blog thing will have to wait a little while as I get some work done.

Continue reading »]]> Russell Blackford (@Metamagician) made a problematic assertion on twitter (the following paragraph is from four sequential tweets):

Just to be clear. My stance as a pro-feminist man does NOT follow from the fact that I am an atheist. Even if I became a philosophical deist overnight, I would maintain the same stance. Let’s not oversellMere atheism what mere atheism entails. None of which is to deny that actual religions can be used to provide false rationales for some abhorrent views.

That’s a bit of a mess, so let’s unpack it. I find interesting because my pro-feminist stance does follow from the fact that I am an atheist; perhaps we ought to recognize that there is more than one way to be an atheist, something I’ve been saying for a long time, and apparently Blackford and I are very different kinds of atheist.

There are some peculiarities in that statement. There is also more than one way to be a feminist, so announcing that one would still be feminist if they were a “philosophical deist” is both trivial and irrelevant: irrelevant because no one denies that there are religious positions that are compatible with feminism, and trivial because Blackford selected as an alternate a philosophy that’s about as close to atheism as you can get. I think we’d have a very different answer if he had speculated about an overnight conversion to Southern Baptist, or Amish, or conservative Muslim. As he notes at the end, there are religions that would impose abhorrent views that are incompatible with feminism. So about half of his comment is empty noise that contributes nothing to his thesis.

The interesting part is this: that “mere atheism” does not entail feminism. I both agree and disagree.

The agreeable side is that if we assume he means “mere atheism” the simple position that no gods or supernatural forces exist, then it’s true that that does not directly promote feminism. We could have a hypothetical atheism that postulated other, non-divine phenomena that contradicted feminism. For instance, a libertarian atheism that rationalized virtual enslavement of half the population to serve the other half, which just happened to recognize that it was easier to maintain the existing patriarchal framework, rather than going to all the trouble of inverting it. Or we could imagine a scientific atheism on a world with extreme sexual dimorphism, where the female sex was significantly smaller brained than the male sex. Or we could postulate a solipsistic or psychopathic atheism, in which an individual atheist considered members of the complementary sex to be resources to be exploited.

Blackford says he is pro-feminist (and he lives on this planet), so presumably none of the above scenarios apply. So why would an atheist be feminist?

In my case, the absence of a god invalidates all truth claims by revelation and all the traditional authority of holy books. It creates an epistemic gap, which I suppose someone could fill with just about anything: whim, utility, emotional needs, dice-rolling, whatever. I have no idea how Blackford explains cause and reason, but I know how I do: by an acceptance of natural causes which can be examined empirically and by experiment…by science. I also concede that where I can’t apply science in evaluating human motives, I use empathy and the principle of equating another’s condition with my own.

My atheism entails using those methods to resolve ethical decisions, for instance. That’s my toolkit. My atheism has stripped me of the tools of dogma and authoritarianism (and good riddance).

So now my atheism compels me to confront the question of the status of women by evidence and empathy. And what answer do both of those give? That women are my equals. That they share all the attributes of humanity that I have; there is no deficit in the quality of the experience of being a woman vs. being a man. That I cannot make assumptions about the capabilities or desires of a person on the basis of their sex.

This same reasoning applies whether I apply it to sex, to race, to class, or religious belief. My atheism requires me to be egalitarian because the evidence of our common humanity demands it. My reliance on that evidence is not independent of my atheism, but of course people who are not atheists can also share that same appreciation of others; the difference is simply that my form of “mere atheism” which is driven by naturalism means I have no other recourse, no other way of justifying my interpretation of the world.

But then, I don’t need any other mechanism — it seems to me that science and love of my fellow human beings is more than sufficient argument to guide the entirety of my life. And those are necessary axioms that I am compelled to accept by my atheism, even if there could exist alternate axioms that would also fill the gap left by the absence of gods.

It’s just that those alternate axioms, those other atheisms, also make one a jerk.

Continue reading »]]> Amongst the debris left over from last night’s late ruckus in my hotel room, I find in my possession many empty wine and beer bottles, a quarter of a fifth of vodka, one set of mysterious keys and a Shelley Segal CD. Look for me at the conference and I’ll return them to you.

Except for the clutter, the room is surprisingly tidy and undamaged. You atheists really have no idea how to trash a hotel room, do you?

Continue reading »]]> It’s been a strange evening. I had a crowd of people descend on my hotel room after the evening’s events at Women In Secularism and a good day of wonderful and inspiring talks from strong women, and besides just wanting to talk and celebrate, they wanted to complain. These are people who came here for a conference on women’s issues, and they were really annoyed that the head of CFI, Ron Lindsay, chose to use the opening talk of the conference to basically chastise the attendees and instruct them in how to behave, and I’ve had more than one person tell me that they were irate that their introduction to an event that they paid a considerable sum of money was to be greeted by a talk that pandered to people who hated the event, and were volubly complaining on the internet throughout the day about it. The impression they had was that the organization was unhappy to be sponsoring this conference.

That is a weird and impolitic message to send to attendees. It was especially weird to hear that on day one, and then to watch Melody Hensley, the person who did the organizational work to set up the meeting, make fundraising pitches at the evening reception on both days. Melody definitely stands behind the purpose of this event, there’s no doubt about that at all, but we’re simultaneously getting this bizarre vibe that CFI, as represented by Lindsay, does not like this feminist stuff, and would rather that we all went away and the MRAs who are crowing about his talk were here instead.

Who is he supporting? The people who actively invest in this meeting and CFI, or the jerks who lurk on the internet and rage at women all day long with no commitment to any cause besides hatred, and are openly hoping to see the meeting fail?

What has also caused all these people to lose confidence in Lindsay is that today, he posted a complaint against Rebecca Watson, who is here both as a speaker and as a sponsor of attendees here, comparing her to a propagandist for North Korea, and blathering misconceptions about his odd understanding of the idea of privilege and asserting that there is an effort to silence men (he’s very resentful of the idea that men might be expected to be silent long enough to listen to the experience of minorities). Or rather, he’s unhappy with the hyphenated entity Myers-Watson (really, we aren’t married, not even close), because he also posted a tirade against me for stating that shutting up and listening, that is, paying attention to and respecting the experiences of the underprivileged, is an appropriate strategy for learning about and responding to the concerns of people outside your class, sex, and race. Which, I thought, was the goal of this conference.

A lot of people are extraordinarily irritated by this effort by the head of CFI to undermine a CFI-sponsored conference. That’s why this one tired old man was listening to a crowd of annoyed conference attendees packed into his hotel room at 2am complain about mismanagement and loss of confidence in the administration of CFI. Attendees who paid $250 each, plus transportation and hotel costs, to listen to big names in feminism and secularism talk, and who got that plus a director who seemed more interested in appeasing an obsessed gang of manic, moronic anti-feminist spammers who’d been flooding the twitter feed (a strange corruption of the usual use of conference hashtags that I’ve never witnessed before) and countering the purpose of the conference.

I was put in the unusual and awkward position of having to reassure these attendees that CFI really was a great organization (something the head of CFI should have been doing, right?) despite the apparent opposition of the man in charge…a man who had just posted a bitter complaint about me on the web. I had to remind them that the woman who was specifically in charge of this conference, Melody Hensley, was on their side, and supported the cause of women in secularism despite the apparent intransigence of her boss.

I’m only here as an attendee myself, yet here I am having to defend the organization. I have no reputation as a diplomat, yet here I am trying to put out the fires that the CEO of the organization himself has enflamed. What kind of screwed up mess is this?

OK, I give up. I’m going to bed to get a couple of hours of sleep. Let’s hope Ron Lindsay wakes up and realizes he’s just blown up what ought to be a great success for CFI (the speakers here have been phenomenal) and turned it into a colossal PR disaster, and tries to change course. If it’s not too late already.

Continue reading »]]> Rebecca Watson has a few things to say about The Silencing of Men at Women in Secularism, and Ron Lindsay’s opening talk. You know, there is a very, very tiny grain of truth to what he said — I’ve been in a few situations this weekend where I’ve felt uncomfortably like an outsider because I’m a man — but the thing is … that’s fair. I should be somewhat marginal here, because this is an event to try and correct the privileges I can usually rely on feeling at other events. So my internal conversation when I’m feeling that way is “OK, that was a bit weird. Shut up. Think about it. Do they have good reason to think that way? Maybe I should consider where they’re coming from more.” My plan is to listen and learn here.

What I think now is that even if Lindsay hadn’t said those objectionable things that so thrilled the Misogyny Brigade, he would have been wrong to speak at this event anyway. He objected to being told to “shut up and listen” and instead asserted his privilege as the head of the organization to lecture at the attendees…but shutting up and listening in this case was exactly what he needed to do, and speaking in the opening session was an extraordinarily impolitic thing to do instead.

It is perfectly legitimate to tell someone to shut up when you’ve heard their voice in a thousand variants many times before, and you need some small space in which to express yourself, too. This conference should be that space for the many who have been shushed.

Continue reading »]]> I’m off in Washington DC at Women in Secularism 2, and I’m taking it easy. You can try to follow what’s going on at the conference via twitter, but that’s going to be a mess: unlike every other conference I’ve ever been at, the twitter feed for this one is nearly completely divorced from the reality of the event. It seems that if you put on a woman’s conference, the anti-feminists will send a representative or two to attend and throw out occasional twisted remarks prejudicial to the event, which will then be echoed by the obsessive mob in the lovely manosphere.

It’s genuinely bizarre. If you thought the #wiscfi hashtag was a corrupt mess before the conference, it’s even worse now. It’s representative of the endemic bigotry against women that even atheist/skeptic cons don’t get this degree of malicious nastiness from their opponents.

It didn’t help that the opening remarks (by a bearded white guy, no less) were basically a high five to the people trolling the con — Ron Lindsay tut-tutted the attendees for using the concept of privilege to shut down conversations with…who? The thugs who hate the whole idea of Women in Secularism? It was the most inappropriate, uninspiring, wrong-headed conference opening ever. The director of CFI trolled a conference built by his own organization, and offered words of encouragement to the people trying to disrupt it!

All I can think is that he decided to make all the other talks look good by starting off on the lowest note he could. He shouldn’t have bothered, all the talks on the first day were excellent. Oh, you aren’t here? We’ve got three people from FtB live-blogging it all.

Jason/Miri/Kate covered the first panel, on faith-based pseudoscience. The panelists discussed the ways medicine in particular is undermined by quackery, and to give the True Skeptics™ conniptions, specifically addressed how religious lies contribute to the problem.

Jason/Kate covered Amanda Marcotte’s talk on how feminism makes better skeptics. She mainly talked about how patriarchal assumptions corrupt decision-making, highlighting, for instance, the opposition to Plan B, which cannot be attribute to rational decision-making at all, but is entirely faith-based. And when you look at the agenda of the theocrats of the religious right, it’s appalling how much of it is all about controlling women.

Jason/Miri covered Rebecca Goldstein’s talk on religion, humanism, and moral progress. She covered the philosophical and historical theme of “mattering”, of struggling to live a notable or even extraordinary life. Humanism is the only attempt to make lives matter that has progressed to including everyone.

Check in with those guys throughout the day as they take on the job of representing the conference accurately to the world — you sure won’t find that on twitter, which is worrisome. I wonder if other groups will organize to bully other events by disrupting their twitter feeds? Nah, only defending the rights of women seems to generate that much hate.

Continue reading »]]> Maybe it’s something in the air: Spring brings out the sociological criticisms of science, or something. But for some reason, this week people have been talking at me about the “deficit model” repeatedly, and it is really beginning to annoy me. The latest source is Alice Bell in the Guardian, who says some sensible things (don’t treat scientists as a priesthood!) and then gets all mushy-mouthed over the myth of the deficit model. How nice of her, though, to define it for us.

It’s the critique of the so-called “deficit model” many of us have been dancing to for decades. The deficit model, if you’re lucky enough not to have come across the term, assumes science has the knowledge the public are deficient in, and that many of our social ills will be solved if we all listened to the experts. It’d be a nice idea maybe if science, the media, policy or people were that simple, but they’re not (I talked about similar issues in my Radio Four piece on scientific literacy last year).

Oh, no…it brings back cranky memories of those annoying rounds of argument with Mooney and Nisbet, who loved to slam us with sneering rebukes that we’re true believers in the Deficit Model, and don’t you know, everybody rejects that model nowadays.

And I’d just, what, say what, I what? I’m right here, why are you arguing with that caricature? Look, I’ve spent decades battling creationists, giving them the actual facts in the face of their distortions, and I know they heard me, and I know they’re not so stupid they couldn’t comprehend what I was saying, and yet they’ll be back the next week saying the same lies. I know that there’s more to getting people on the side of reason then calmly stating the evidence while equipped with a Ph.D. I don’t know anyone who subscribes to this “deficit model” of which you speak.

Here’s the model I actually accept; let’s call it the Obstacle Model. Everyone has a whole collection, to varying degrees, of obstacles that interfere with effective progress: for instance, there’s poverty, and racism, and sexism, and religion, and authoritarianism, and ignorance. Focusing on just one without paying any attention to the others means you won’t get very far. Every good educator knows that teaching is a multi-dimensional problem.

Correcting ignorance has a rather critical role to play in the solution. I think the other factors I listed are more important in giving people the will and capability to make decisions, but addressing an intellectual deficit is essential in giving them the power to decide how to decide; without it, you’ve got a blundering herd of enthusiastic incompetents.

But ignorance also has a special place because it’s the one thing teachers are commissioned to address, so if you’re interested in deprecating expertise, finding a straw man like the “deficit model” to set on fire is a handy tool to knock those scientists and educators down a peg. It’s also a useful bludgeon if you’re a sociologist and want to assert your authority over those puffed-up boffins (not that I think most sociologists have an inferiority complex, but some of the dumbest things ever said about science come out of the mouths of sociologists).

You want examples? Alice Bell continues by citing sociological analyses of the scientific establishment.

The deficit model sticks around partly because it feeds scientists’ social status, implicitly underlining their powerful position as people who get to define what counts as important, true, reliable knowledge. Stephen Hilgartner put it well back in 1990, saying such top down approaches implicitly provide the scientific establishment with the epistemological right to print money. Something we don’t appreciate enough though is that also serves the handmaidens of the deficit model – science communication professionals, less powerful scientists, many science “fans” – offering them some social status by association. Play into a game of hierarchies, and even if you don’t get to the top, you get to climb a bit. Pierre Bourdieu, in his classic sociology of the university campus, Homo Academicus, talks about the way students are happy to submit to the idea that they are inferior to senior academics because doing so earns them subsequent admittance to a distinguished club of graduates. I think we can see similar patterns at work in terms of the way academic ideas are shared outside of universities too.

O My Fellow Scientists, do you feel like you have the right to print money? Here we are in an occupation with relatively limited recompense — we tend to be solidly middle class, which is very nice, but not much more — and we had to spend much of our youth in training, which from a purely economic point of view, represented a tremendous loss in earning potential. Deferring getting an entry level job because you spent a decade in graduate school and post-doctoral positions isn’t sound financial sense. Are these critics even aware of how many scientists get thrown into the churn of the unending provisional appointments? Somehow, though, we always get this criticism from creationists and other outsiders that we’re in it for the big bucks, as if we’re investment bankers or oil company executives.

O My Fellow Scientists, do you feel like you have high social status? I certainly don’t. Scientists are not particularly well-regarded in the communities I live in, except among ourselves; I follow politics, and scientists certainly don’t play much of a role there. Except when they’re trying to fill knowledge deficits (which is constantly trivialized by these critics of the deficit model), scientists are treated as awkward nerds with no social skills at all — the archetype we see flaunted on shows like The Big Bang Theory. You’re very confused if you think Sheldon is regarded as having high social status. He’s a pretentious clown.

O My Fellow Scientists, do you scorn your students and think of them as your inferiors? Maybe some do; I certainly don’t. I’m in this teaching position because I respect and enjoy the company of students. I identify with my students.

And here’s the thing: that hierarchy? Definitely a mixed bag. I remember being a student, and my professors were pretty much just like me, except with added obligations. Graduate school was wonderful — they had to order me to wrap up and get the thesis done. I tried to keep my post-docs going as long as I could stretch them out, because every step up the academic ladder meant less playing in the lab, more uncertainty (where am I going to get a job?), and more teaching and administrative responsibilities. If I had my druthers, I’d still be a grad student.

Even now, I’m dragging my heels about getting promoted to full professor, despite the nudges from my unit head. Promotion would mean a little more money (but I’m not in this job for the money!) and additional responsibilities in campus-wide governance. Why should I do that? Because I’m a good citizen of my university, not because I have some illusion that it will let me lord my superiority over others.

But OK, Bell does salvage the article in the end.

Less cynically, top down models also stick around because scientists do, genuinely, have special ideas and information to share. We pool our resources to allow a few people to cut themselves off and become experts in particular subjects. We do this so that they might feed back their knowledge and we can, collectively, try to make a better world. We should listen to them. As David Dickson wrote in 2005, factual reporting of science can be socially empowering for audiences. It’s worth remembering this. Political systems of scientific advice in government are built partly for this reason too, to make best use of scientific expertise. I don’t want to throw the baby out with bathwater, and lazy critique of science is not just silly, it can be dangerous (if you’ve never read Merchants of Doubt, do).

Yes, that is the way it works. I’m glad to see a realistic perspective on the matter — now if only everyone would realize that most scientists share this same view, and that this deficit model crap is a sociological contrivance intended to take a back-handed slap at expertise.

Continue reading »]]> Facebook allows porn sites? Yeah, it looks the other way. So I find it hilarious that a group of feminists managed to gain control of a facebook page dedicated to creepy content and give it a total makeover.

The Bra Busters page now has just over 3,000 subscribers. One admin spent an hour removing all the old content, including memes about women being “bitches” and “sluts,” upskirt shots, creepy close-ups of bras and underwear, and a photo of Jennifer Lawrence’s nip slip. (“She looked very unhappy and the guys on this page were laughing and joking about it,” wrote one moderator.)

About a thousand members have so far “unliked” the new Bra Busters and complained loudly about the change in management, with such eloquent phrases as, “fack (sic) you bra busters new editor bitch!! … go scissor your buth biker slut girlfriend.” The original male moderator seems to have disappeared.

Most ironically, after ignoring lots of sexist content that objectified women, when the new Bra Busters management started posting photos of men with their comments superimposed — their own public photos, with their own public words — Facebook finally stepped in and told them to stop that. I guess objectifying men is a no-no.

So the feminists moved those photos offsite, to a new page called Whiney Dudes. It’s great to see these straight-up images of guys putting on their friendliest face…next to their words of hate.

But…but…they look so normal!

Unfortunately, there isn’t universal cause to celebrate: it looks like the site takeover was by the transphobic wing of feminism, so hate’s been replaced with a different flavor of hate.

(via Stephanie)

Continue reading »]]> I think David Dobbs is going to be amused to learn that the Discovery Institute thinks he has just demolished Darwinism by way of psychiatry. But in an article that is delusional even by the standards of that bastion of lunacy, the DI argues that the collapse of evolution is just around the corner. Again. Like always.

Here’s how David Dobbs decided the demise of Darwinism: he wrote a positive review of a book critical of the impending release of DSM-5, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry. Such a small thing, the tiniest pebble that will lead to an avalanche of destruction and the total demolition of the edifice of modern science.

Or not. The book is critical of one component of the understanding of the mind, and it’s no surprise…hasn’t every edition of the DSM led to the gnashing of garments and the wailing of teeth, or something? As Dobbs points out, there really are fundamental flaws in how psychiatry handles mental illness.

The DSM, Greenberg concludes, “dresses up symptoms as diseases that are not real and then claims to have named and described the true varieties of our suffering”. Technically, the APA concurs, admitting sotto voce (for instance, in planning documents and public discussions for earlier versions of the DSM) that many psychiatric diagnoses are constructs of convenience rather than descriptions of biological ailments. This originates in an explicit decision the APA made, during the creation of DSM-III, to base diagnoses not on aetiology but on recognizable clusters of symptoms that seem problematic. The APA did so recognizing that this would mean stressing consistency among clinicians in recognizing symptom clusters rather than any other marker of a condition’s origins.

A slippery deal, but essential. For by formalizing this scheme, psychiatry can claim medical legitimacy and accompanying insurance coverage and pay rates so that it can help people. Unfortunately, writes Greenberg, this scheme has led everyone, psychiatrists included, to talk about and treat DSM’s conceptual constructs as if they are biological illnesses — a habit that has bred troubles ranging from overconfidence to incestuous liaisons with Big Pharma.

Yet neither Greenberg or Dobbs are predicting the annihilation of psychiatry. Rather, they seem to be discussing serious problems that need to be corrected so the discipline can advance.

As Greenberg writes, the DSM, and psychiatry with it, increasingly “casts its subjects into dry, data-driven stories, freed from the vagaries of hope and desire, of prejudice and ignorance and fear, and anchored instead in the laws of nature”. Yet when psychiatry works, it often works less at a biological than at a humanistic, narrative level, by helping the sufferer to reframe the story of his life and of his place in the world into one that includes a sense of agency, strength and social connection. This is doubtless why a combination of drugs and talk therapy generally works better than just drugs. It also helps to explain why schizophrenia, as described in Ethan Watters’ Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (Free Press, 2010) and in work by Tanya Luhrmann, is much less disabling in cultures — or even treatment regimes — that cast its eccentricities more as variations in human nature than as biological dysfunction.

For more than 100 years, psychiatry has been getting by on pseudo-scientific explanations and confident nods while it waited for the day, always just around the corner, in which it could be a strictly biological undertaking. Part of the DSM-5′s long delay occurred because, a decade ago, APA leaders actually thought that advances in neuroscience would allow them write a brain-based DSM. Yet, as former APA front liner Michael First, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York, confirms on Greenberg’s last page, the discipline remains in its infancy.

So…it works, but our understanding of how it works is in its infancy. That’s not the act of carving its tombstone, but merely issuing its first grade report card (“little Psych is very creative, but needs focus and discipline.”)

That doesn’t fit into the creationist trope, though, so they had to…reinterpret what was said (“little Psych is about to die, deservedly!”) This is a really old line: the Discovery Institute has a hard-on for psychiatry that rivals Scientology’s. Some years ago they were fond of citing the troika of 19th century failed philosophers: Marx, Freud, and Darwin. They predicted that because Communism was already dead and Freud was an old discredited pervert, Darwin was next. It was highly irrational ‘logic’, and smacked more of superstition than reason, but it was a big deal for them. They’ve also been arguing for years for dualism — there is a supernatural soul or spirit in the brain — and anything that tries to find natural causes for the mind is anathema to them.

So Dobbs, published in Nature, and Greenberg, author of a very serious book, are dragooned into the service of intelligent design, their conclusions twisted to support the dogma of the day, and are now cited as not just pointing out the problems with past assertions or the politics that distort the publication of a major reference work, but as a science in crisis, on its deathbed, about to be pushing up daisies.

I agree with Greenberg, Dobbs, and the Discovery Institute (Erk! My heart!) that psychiatry is rife with conceptual problems and a serious absence of sound natural causes for the phenomena they describe. But I’m not about to write it off completely, and I certainly do not understand this massive bounding leap of illogic.

The things being said about psychiatry now, though, on the eve of publication of its latest upgrade, the DSM-5, are revealing it to be a science in crisis — if it ever was a science at all. As we list the problems, ponder whether many of the same criticisms could be leveled against Darwinism.

That makes no sense. The 18th century assertion by spermists that the spermatozoon contained a tiny homunculus has been disproven, therefore I’m pondering whether the same criticism could be leveled against stem cell therapies. The archaic economic structure of the Ottoman Empire contributed to its collapse, therefore I’m pondering whether the same criticism could be leveled against the apocalyptic popularity of Fifty Shades of Gray. The designated hitter rule ruined American league baseball, therefore I’m pondering whether the same criticism could be leveled against the use of polysiloxanes in McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets.

A = B, therefore X = Y is not sound reasoning.

But reason won’t get in the Discovery Institute’s way, now or ever! So they compile a list of psychiatry’s shortcomings, as they gleaned from a number of criticisms they found on the internet, calling it a “failed science”, even though that’s not the impression I got from the sources they cite.

1. Long history of failure.

2. No theoretical basis grounded in biological reality.

3. Reliance on a book.

4. Conflicts of interest.

5. Lack of quality control.

6. Ignoring critics.

7. Focus on symptoms instead of causes.

8. Category errors: confusing arbitrary classification with reality.

9. Attempting to pigeonhole complex entities into simple categories.

10. Concern for consistency and consensus over empiricism.

11. Tortured attempts to fashion theories.

12. Formalizing schemes to gain legitimacy.

13. Promissory notes to do better in the future.

14. Hopes that other sciences will legitimize it.

And now the fun begins. They have cobbled up 14 reasons why psychiatry is totally wrong, so let’s make up 14 complementary reasons why evolution is totally wrong!

1. Failure to explain the Cambrian Explosion since Darwin.

2. Extrapolating natural selection far beyond the evidence.

3. Continuing to exalt Darwin and his Origin.

4. Scheming to keep criticisms of Darwin out of journals and classrooms.

5. Flimsy assertions that “it evolved,” with little rigor.

6. Refusing to hear or publish scientific critiques of Darwinism.

7. Use of homology as evidence and explanation for adaptation.

8. Inventing terms like “kin selection” and “evo-devo.”

9. Attributing the whole biosphere to undirected causes.

10. Claiming the consensus accepts evolution in every meaning of the word.

11. Applying natural selection recklessly to everything, even the universe.

12. Scheming to prevent intelligent design from gaining a hearing.

13. Always saying “more research is needed.”

14. Misappropriating genetics, computer science, and development to support it.

Uh, wait. Despite having the same number of items, the lists don’t really line up at all well — there’s virtually no correspondence between the two. Furthermore, many of those items are just plain wrong or repetitive.

1. We do have explanations for the Cambrian explosion, and good ones at that. That one is just a plug for Stephen Meyer’s hack book that’s supposed to come out next month (and I’ll write more about the reasons when it’s out.)

2. That some people overuse a powerful explanation does not imply that the phenomenon does not exist. This is the same as #5 and #11.

3. We do not exalt Darwin. We respect him as a great scientist who still got many things wrong. Also, you do not need to read the Origin to learn about evolution.

4. “Scheming”? No. Demanding rigor. Half-assed assertions of a “designer” with no evidence are not adequate. This is the same as #6 and #12.

5. This is the same as #2 and #11.

6. This is the same as #4 and #12.

7. No, I’ve never heard homology or common descent used as an explanation of adaption. Retention of non-adaptive features, sure.

8. Both kin selection and evo-devo are terms for real phenomena, one for a gene-centric explanation for altruism (for instance) and the other for a discipline that relates evolution and development.

9. This is not false. There is no evidence for teleology in evolutionary history.

10. The scientific consensus accepts the scientific meaning of the word. What else would we do? Anything else, it wouldn’t be a consensus!

11. This is the same as #2 and #5.

12. This is the same as #4 and #6.

13. But we always need more research! If we had all the answers, we’d be done with science.

14. It’s not misappropriation. Genetics does support evolution; have you ever heard of the neo-Darwinian synthesis? Computer science provides an essential contribution to modern biology; have you ever heard of bioinformatics? Development and evolution work together beautifully; have you ever heard of evo-devo? Oh, right, you have, you just believe we made it all up.

The creationists are just getting more desperate and pathetic. They didn’t even try to come up with a reasonable set of correspondences — apparently they trust their readers to be so stupid that they won’t actually read or think about the comparisons, they’ll just see 14 reasons evolution is just as wrong as psychiatry — it’s about as reasonable as saying that the 14 stations of the cross mean Catholicism is as doomed as Freudian psychoanalysis.

But then, non sequiturs are what I’ve come to expect from those awful writers at the DI.

Dobbs D (2013) Psychiatry: A very sad story. Nature 497:36–37 doi:10.1038/497036a

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I’ve been trying to understand how people — not just people, but self-declared “leaders of the atheist movement” — can claim that atheism is only the lack of belief in any gods, and further, that absence of god-belief entails no other significant consequences. It’s been difficult, because that way of thinking is alien to me; atheism for me is all tangled up in naturalism and scientific thinking, and it’s not just a single, simple cause but has a whole cascade of meaning. But I’m trying, and I think I’m beginning to get it. There is a reasonable way to regard atheism as important while at the same time limiting its import.

Think of atheism as something like having a favorite color in a world with a set of cultural mores that dictate the value of colors. You’re five years old, and in kindergarten, and the teacher asks you to draw a picture of your mommy in your favorite color. You proudly go for the big red crayon in your box, and you start to draw, and everyone in the class turns to look at you strangely…and every single one of them is holding a blue crayon. “Everyone knows your favorite color is supposed to be blue,” they say, “You’re weird.” The teacher helpfully takes your red crayon away and gives you a blue one instead.

You might be a little resentful. You might think this is an infringement of your rights and an attempt to police your thoughts, and you’d be right. That would be a terrible thing to do to children. And then, what if you grew up and discovered that enshrined in your country’s constitution was a clause that specifically said the government did not have the right to dictate the citizenry’s favorite color? Why, you might become a crayon activist, fighting for the right of everyone to choose their own color, and you’d go to meetings where everyone would wave red crayons in the air and draw slogans on signs in red.

You might even be angry with other militant red crayon activists who tried to explain why red was the best color — that smacks too much of the blue crayonists who spent your childhood nagging at you why blue was the best. No, your cause is simply to let everyone have the right to choose their own color — it’s all about individual liberty and freedom of conscience. The crayon has no meaning beyond personal expression, and you don’t believe these stories that it has further implications, and you certainly don’t want to discuss why you liked red the best. It just is.

I sympathize with that perspective, and I think it’s entirely valid. There is a level at which you can fight for atheism in our culture purely on principle — that everyone should have a right to personal beliefs without meddling interference from outsiders, and certainly the government should not be in the business of supporting religion or its absence. There’s also a purely legal component to the argument, since America does have a constitution that plainly says “”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” — you can be a believer and still support the rights of atheists, just as someone in your kindergarten class could favor blue but still respect your choice of red.

But like all metaphors, this crayon story breaks down.

If religion were a purely personal matter, a case of individual preference (and for many people it is), the analogy would hold up. When we “militant” atheists speak about eradicating religion, that’s really what we mean — not that we’ll close all the churches and force everyone to publicly repudiate their faith, but that it will be reduced to a curious hobby or matter of choice, something that you might feel deeply (BLUE IS THE BESTEST COLOR!), but that you don’t get to impose that view on others, and that on matters of public policy, everyone will approach problems objectively and try to make decisions on the basis of evidence, rather than opinions about angels and ghosts and what’s best for your afterlife. So, yeah, someday I want your choice of religion to have about as much significance as your choice of a favorite color.

But that day is not now.

Religion is not merely a matter of taste. People attach great importance to an irrational explanation for how the universe works, to the degree that they use it to shape government and community decisions. You cannot get elected to high office in most districts in the US without professing a belief in a god — and in most places, it must be a belief in the specific Christian god. They use their irrational beliefs to justify actions that have real effects on thousands or millions of other people: we can pollute the atmosphere because god says we have dominion, and he promised to not ever kill us en masse again; black people and women are destined to servility because the holy book says so; you should punish or ostracize people who do not have sex in the traditional ways of your people.

Religion and atheism are not just different colors in the box of Crayolas.

Some of us are atheists for different reasons than just arbitrariness or thoughtless acceptance of a particular perspective. Among the New Atheists, we’re largely in this position because we reasoned our way to it, or adopted doubt and testing as our philosophical guidelines, or preferred science to faith. Atheism wasn’t a choice at all: we’re naturalists who accept observable reality and the universe around us as the metric for determining the truth of a claim, and every religion fails that test spectacularly, while science struggles honestly to accommodate understanding to the evidence.

I didn’t “choose” atheism. I can’t reject it without paying too high a price, the simultaneous rejection of a vast body of knowledge and a toolset that effectively discovers new knowledge.

Atheism also has implications. It actually makes significant claims about the nature of the universe…you know, that place we live in? The big box of rules and phenomena that determines whether we live or die, and how happy we’ll be during our existence? It’s important. As a science educator, that understanding of our world directly affects my occupation. As a human being, it directly determines how I will live my life.

When I say there is no god, it means that the foundation for a huge number of arguments that currently poison public policy evaporate. God created woman to be a helpmeet to man and to serve him as man serves God? Nope. We’re going to have to actually look at the evidence and determine from observations whether women are inferior (answer so far: no.) Black people were marked with that color as a curse from God and have servile natures? Nope. No god, no curse, no way to claim independent peoples are destined to be master or slave. Two men having sex together is an abomination unto the Lord, and the only fit response by a moral culture is to kill them, or at least abuse them? Nope. Your objective moral standard is a fiction, and perhaps a truly moral culture is one that gives all of its citizens equal respect.

Being an atheist means you can no longer learn your moral code by rote and tradition and obedience to authority^*, but have to rely on reason and empathy and greater human goals, and you don’t get to justify actions simply because they “feel” right or good — you have to support them with evidence or recognition that they directly serve a secular purpose. Our atheism, our secularism, our rejection of divinity and ecclesiastical authority determines how we move through our life, and that movement matters. It’s not superficial, it’s not a fashion choice, and the absence of god has meaning.

Thank you to those who are willing to stand up for atheism simply as a matter of choice and principle, but you should know and be warned that we intend to change the world. We are more dangerous than you can even imagine. And apparently, more dangerous than even some atheists can imagine.

^*I have to add that many theists also accept a secular morality — they may like their religion, but they also recognize that you must have a better excuse for community action than “god said so.”