September 17, 2013

What if Lincoln had run on immediately ending slavery, pro mixed-race marriage, pro integrated...

...military and police forces, pro integrated schools, etc.?

Those are worthy and necessary goals. Anything less is immoral. That's completely true. I understand the disgust with accepting anything less. Every moment that a slave remained a slave was a tragedy. Every moment African Americans were denied equal standing in society was a grave injustice.

Nevertheless, the only way any of that eventually happened was in slow steps. The hellfire anti-slavery Lincoln I imagine never would have come close to winning the presidency, or yielding any sort of significant political power at all. Lincoln only ran against the spread of slavery beyond where it already existed, not for it's immediate cessation. Emancipation came only as a strategic move in the war with the South. I'm pretty sure Lincoln would have been shocked by blacks marrying whites. By modern standards, Lincoln would likely be considered a bigot.

That made him the right man for the job at the time. Just ahead of the curve of the American public, and not so far ahead that no one would follow.

There are times when too much patience is wrong, when waiting for tomorrow has got to stop. What's difficult is knowing when patience is a virtue and when patience is a vice. It's always more complicated that simply knowing what's right.

July 5, 2013

You are a liar.

You have lied about something, sometime, haven't you? In fact, if we include "little white lies" in this discussion, your lying is probably a weekly, if not daily, occurrence. If we could examine the whole of your life, there are almost certainly a few whoppers in there -- lies to cover your ass, maybe even a few mean-spirited lies that hurt someone.

Technically speaking (with maybe the occasional one-out-of-a-billion exception?) every last one of us is a liar.

But you're still going to be pissed if someone calls you a liar, and in most cases rightly so, if they do it with condescension, with an accusatory tone, as if lying defines your very nature.

Consider this something to think about with many of the other labels and blanket characterizations being tossed around DU lately, about DU members, about Snowden and Greenwald, about the president and other leaders, about the nature of governments and countries. Is it enough that you have in mind one or two issues or incidents (if you're even sure you're right about those one or two things) to apply a label to a person or a situation, a label that could be technically true, but only in the same sense that you're a liar, hurling that label about in a sneering tone as if you're just defined the very nature of that person or situation?

There are even things that happen frequently in raw numbers, far more than one or two incidents, where nevertheless these frequent events are not representative events.

Take car accidents, for example. Imagine if a poster on DU started screaming about our "deadly" roads and highways. It's certainly technically quite true. That poster could have a field day posting page after page of links to stories about deadly car crashes.

What then if that poster acts like you're an absolute fool if you don't stop driving NOW, after they've shown you THE TRVTH!? What if you try to explain how automotive safety has improved over the years, and for your trouble you get shouted down as a shill for the automotive industry or an apologist for the highway department?

June 5, 2013

Is it a person's "fault" if they're fat? What does that question really mean?

I'm writing in response to various comments in another thread a few days ago where people were getting all steamed up about "fat shaming" and "taking personal responsibility" and the like.

Just to get this out of the way, I'm currently 178 lbs at 6'0", having lost 85 lbs since last April, along with 10" from my waist, taking me down to 30" waist jeans that I had to mail order since 30x34 is a hard size to find locally. (I guess it says something about the average American male that 34x30, not 30x34, is in plentiful supply.) My last physical (when I'd only lost about 50 of the 85 lbs.) showed I was very healthy in terms of cholesterol, blood sugar, and plenty of other measures. (My blood pressure, oddly enough, went up for a while, just crossing into Stage 1 hypertension, but it's back to a healthy value again. I blame the then on-going election! )

I say this not to fish for compliments (well, OK, maybe a little!) but because some people don't seem to take you seriously about diet and exercise unless you're in good shape, even if same information and opinions you might convey are shared by both fit and fat people. I would have said much the same things I'm going to say now back when I was 263 lbs.

Was it my fault I'd gotten so fat? Is it to my credit that I've become fit and trim? Does what applies to me apply very much to anyone else?

I grew up an out-of-shape geek, the kid picked last for teams in high school gym. I didn't get fit until my 30s, I let myself go during my 40s, and in just the past year I've gotten myself back on track at 50. Clearly I can make up my mind to eat better and exercise, and I get good results when I do. Just as clearly, I can also fail when a situation that makes it a lot easier for me to take the time for exercise (a work-at-home job I held for seven years) gets replaced with a less conducive situation (losing 1.5-2 hours a day to commuting, feeling more worn out from working and driving).

I don't think "fault" is always such a clear concept, even though people get very impassioned about what is and isn't a person's fault. It's more useful to consider of how easy or hard some personal choices might be. Does a choice require trivial or heroic effort, or something in between? Can 8 out of 10 people resist an extra cookie in one situation, but change circumstances a bit, and only 3 out of 10 can resist?

As a thought experiment, imagine an overweight prisoner locked in a cell. The only food he can get is what a jailer provides him through a narrow slot. Imagine further than the calories burned by the prisoner are closely monitored -- not just calories burned via exercise and general motion, but calories burned by all metabolic activity.

Human bodies follow the laws of physics. I can guarantee you (minor issues such as water retention aside) that if the jailer puts fewer calories through the slot than the prisoner burns, the prisoner will lose weight over time. He might be very unhappy about it, he might suffer from frequent and distressing hunger pangs, and if the jailer makes poor nutritional choices the prisoner might become ill or malnourished -- but he will lose weight.

I know that the phrase "calories in, calories out" infuriates some people, but when you fully account for every bit of the "in" and the "out" (which can be complicated and nuanced) you can't help but lose weight when your body is burning more calories than it is taking in. The energy your body uses has to come from somewhere, and if that energy is not in your food, your body has to start breaking down fat and/or other body tissues to provide that energy. People who struggle with weight loss, whatever their real you-don't-want-to-blame-them-for-it problems might be, do not have a magical ability to suck energy out of the aether. A "low metabolism" can only go so low if you're still alive.

If you aren't locked in a cell, if you aren't being fed by a calorie-counting jailer, it's a difficult question how much calorie-counting knowledge and discipline (or adherence to good non-calorie-counting habits which yield equivalent results) is a reasonable expectation for any given person, especially when we're not just talking about food calories ("in&quot , but knowledge of your own metabolism and activity in terms of caloric values ("out&quot .

Some people stay at a healthy weight with little effort at all. They aren't especially disciplined or conscientious, they aren't counting calories, they eat what they want, they don't go out of their way to exercise -- they're just lucky. Others have to work hard at reaching and maintaining a healthy weight, but they succeed. Some work hard and fail. Some, for good or bad reasons, don't make much effort at all.

When you look at the American population as a whole, clearly something is going wrong with our high and growing rates of obesity. A large portion of the population didn't simply transform from good, hard-working responsible people into bad, lazy, irresponsible louts. Many things about our food supply, eating habits, and physical activity have changed. You can, of course, blame the Evil Capitalists and Evil Corporations for that, and they certainly bear some of the blame, but they can't do all that they do without the public cooperating to some extent. They won't sell it if we won't buy it.

It is simultaneously dastardly yet eminently understandable that a snack food maker, given resources like focus groups and food laboratories, will be driven to figure out how to make you want to keep eating their tasty treats until your hand reaches the bottom of the supposedly six-serving bag.

Would you outlaw this kind of irresistibility in food? Would you tax it? Warning-label it? How much responsibility do you place on the consumer to resist temptation and exercise self-control?

Some people say, for example, diet soda makes you gain weight. Let's suppose this is true (might be real cause and effect, might be more a matter of mistaking correlation for causation), and the reason it's true is that diet soda increases your appetite for foods that contain the calories that the soda doesn't contain. If so, you still have to give into those cravings before the unwanted weight gain occurs. If you drink diet soda, feel those cravings, yet still manage to restrict your calorie intake, you will still be able to lose weight. It might be a more stressful, unpleasant task, more prone to eventual failure, but in the bigger picture the diet soda can only be an indirect cause of weight gain. It's an unclear value judgment whether a person's susceptibility to induced cravings and ability to battle those cravings when they occur constitute a blame-worthy failing.

I've been able to change my eating habits and even my food cravings themselves so healthier eating comes more naturally. Can I expect that will work for everyone? No. Do I think people who are eating poorly should at least give it a try? Yes.

I now do lots of exercise, several hours worth every week, cardio and weight training. But I've now got a blissfully short commute to work, and a free gym at the office. I'm quite sympathetic to people not being able to find the time to exercise as much as I do now. On the other hand, I think people should reconsider their priorities if they aren't doing what they can do to make at least some time for some exercise.

There are good medical reasons why the potential for exercise is limited for some people. On the other hand, I've seen people like my own father use every excuse he could for inactivity, not fighting to do as much as was still possible for him to do, until he essentially crippled himself for the last 10-15 years of his life.

I have no clear conclusion to present, just a mixed bag of feelings and a sense of many gray areas. I know that many individual people could improve their health if only they decide to do it. I know that's easier said than done. I know good excuses for poor health exist, I certainly don't want to go as far as the mindless "motivational" rhetoric of people who smugly shout "NO excuses!", but that many of those excuses aren't as good as many people think. I'm pretty sure that most people who claim to "eat like a bird" but can't lose weight are simply in denial about how much they eat and/or suffer badly from "portion distortion". I believe that real metabolic disorders exist, but that they aren't as common as claims to suffer from them are. I believe we've created a food environment that makes it harder to find healthy food, harder to resist overeating, but that with some effort we can all eat better. I believe a lot of improvement in diet can be made without getting fanatical about all-natural, all-organic, non-GMO, gluten-free, etc. -- you shouldn't give up on eating better just because the whole package deal of "clean eating" fanatics seems horribly restrictive and overwhelming (and perhaps, in some areas, absurdly and needlessly puritanical).

February 2, 2013

70 lbs. down. Now I can rant about obnoxious fitness fanatics.

Everything I have to say now is just as valid (or invalid) as it would have been 70 pounds ago. Before I started seriously working on my weight this past April, however, much of what I have to say would be too easily dismissed as "making excuses" or "defeatism". I had been fit for a very long span of time once before too, however, and I would have said many of the same things back then as I will say now, but when I've tried to say these things during my out-of-shape years, somehow any experience from my past, when I'd been fit and trim for eight years, didn't count.

Hear me now and believe me later, fitness fanatics, your experience of fun and exhilaration in exercise is not universal. Just because you love to "feel the burn" doesn't mean everyone else will (if only they'd give it a chance!). Not everyone who runs gets a "runner's high". Not everyone gets a big thrill out of lifting ten more pounds than they could lift last month (at least not a thrill that it exceeds the pleasure of a pint of Ben & Jerry's). Not everyone will feel like an exercise session is "my special time for myself".

For some of us, exercise and a healthy diet means unpleasant work. Worth the effort, but work. Drudgery even. For me the rewards of diet and exercise are in the results, not, by far, in the process that gets me there.

I'm all for trying to psych yourself up for a big effort, and for a sensible, non-fanatical form of positive thinking. I'm not, however, for the magical quasi-religious version of positive thinking, where people speak as if they're going to bend reality to their will by blowing sunshine out their asses, by the sheer power of determination combined with gross oversimplifications crafted into unctuous motivational slogans.



For example: I personally have to translate "Find something you love to do!" into "Find something you can tolerate". It helps for me to have something I'd rather do even less than my exercise too, so that exercise becomes a break, relatively speaking, from that other thing that's even less appealing. I've run into fitness fanatics so certain that there's a FUN! FUN! exercise option for everyone that if you don't agree there's something fun you'd like to do, then you must (in their eyes) simply be looking for an excuse not to exercise, and you must be deliberately setting yourself up for failure.

The most tolerable exercise I've found so far is walking -- fairly brisk walking, often getting up around an average speed of 4 mph for as long as two hours and change. The trade-off here is that for a given span of time, walking doesn't burn as many calories as jogging or running or many other exercises focused on calorie burning, but at least walking is the closest thing I've found to a pleasurable form of exercise. Walking certainly has its very pleasurable moments, particularly on a nice, sunny day, but it's still more on the side of hard work when you're putting up with bad weather and putting in more than 120 miles per month.

I managed 112 miles of walking in December before the weather got too bad for doing much walking in my favorite park. I've since done a little snowshoeing, but now most of my exercise is on indoor equipment, with a much lower pleasure/drudgery ratio there. I have to rely on the trick of exercise being a way of getting out of doing something I like doing even less, which is where having a gym at work comes in handy. Using the sort-of-elliptical-rider-like-thing at work counts as a break when compared to sitting at my desk. I have an elliptical rider at home, but using it seldom feels like a "break" from relaxing at home, so it's harder to motivate myself to use that conveniently located equipment.

I've wondered how widely applicable the common advice of going to the gym (or doing other exercise) with a friend might be. While I can see how some people might get something out of making exercise more social, it certainly wouldn't help me much. I can hardly be alone in that. Given many people's busy schedules, trying to coordinate exercise time with someone else sounds like a recipe for failure, an opportunity for bad excuses to pop up when your friends aren't available.

Further, I imagine a lot of the people who need to get into shape later in their lives were people like me who weren't in great shape when they were younger, who don't have strong, positive associations with exercise and team sports. Maybe for some of the enthusiastic fitness fanatics out there they find their fitness activities to be a recapturing of joyful memories from their youth. Some of us, however, are trying to get in shape without being reminded of what it was like when we were picked last for teams in gym class.

Some fitness fanatics have an obnoxious, Republican-like "we built that!" sense of their own glorious self-made achievements, one that admits little to no room for luck and fortuitous circumstance.

While I think I have a lot to be proud of in what I've accomplished over the past 9 1/2 months, I'll gladly admit to having some great advantages that certainly aren't due to any particular special virtue of mine.

One of the biggest advantages I have is that I've got a lot more free time than many other people: I work about six miles from home, so I don't use up a lot of my day commuting. I have no children, so I'm not spending time playing taxi driver or sitting through soccer practice. I've got a good paying job that nevertheless seldom keeps me in the office late or follows me home after hours.

When you add in extra time for changing, showering, going to and from the gym on top of 45 minute workouts and two hour walks, I've easily been spending 8-12 hours per week on exercise. I certainly wouldn't blame others for having a hard time trying to make that much time in their lives for getting fit. In fact, it was going from a mostly work-at-home job to a commuting job where I spent 1.5-2.5 hours/day stuck in my car, depending on traffic, that killed my first eight years span of staying fit. Over the course of a year "fuck it, I'm tired!" slowly won out over my commitment to fitness. Even once I was working close to home again, it took years (until just last year, in fact) for me to finally get sick of the weight I'd put on and get started working out again.

Now that weather has reduced my walking time, I've got a great advantage in working at a job that provides free membership to a health club in the same building, and where my boss doesn't mind me taking afternoon workout breaks when my fairly flexible schedule permits.

One dieting advantage I have: I'm not a big fan of heavy helpings of sauces, sandwich spreads and salad dressings. It's no sacrifice at all for me to say "hold the mayo". There's 100 calories or more saved right there by doing something that makes a sandwich taste better to me. I like this dish at Friday's called "Cajun Shrimp and Chicken Pasta", but I ask for 1/4 of the sauce (as well as substituting multigrain pasta and adding extra red bell pepper), and I love it that way. Big puddles of sauce at the bottom of a dish of pasta frankly disgust me. I like just enough sauce to slightly moisten pasta, and that's it.

I cringe to see the amount of salad dressing that many other people drown their salads in. I've decided not to bother with low calories dressings because I can get by with 100 calories or so of bleu cheese on a big salad and be perfectly content.

Another dieting advantage: I seem to be someone who gets a bit of an appetite suppression effect out of exercise. It's not that I'm never resisting cravings, not by far, but I'm seldom racked by hunger pangs either. (Sorry, ladies, from what I've read men are much more likely to benefit from this suppression effect than women.)

I'm doing just fine losing weight without adopting any particularly special or strict diet. No puritanical elimination of this or that, no all-organic, no low-carb, no gluten-free. I'm not spending a lot of time trying to find "superfoods" or other foods with this or that purported fat-burning, immune-boosting effect. I'm simply eating less overall, cutting out a lot of desserts I used to indulge in (but not all of them!), eating more vegetables and a little more fruit, making more of the carbs I eat whole grain, eating lean meats and a little more seafood. I certainly am not freaking out over GMOs, diet soda, or artificial additives. While I think we should all be a bit careful and wary about what goes into our food supply, I certainly do not buy into the hair-on-fire "OMG!111!1!1! TEH CORPORATIONS R FEEDING US POISON!1!!1!" histrionic freak out that's popular on DU.

I used to do the low-fat diet thing, during the first long span of fitness in my life, but this time around I've decided not to worry so much about fat, so long as I favor healthier fats. Not only have I lost a lot of weight this way, but I've got my cholesterol down to 133, with good HDL levels and low triglycerides, all while suffering much less from hunger pangs than I did on the low-fat diet.

May 1, 2012

Giant Jar of Jellybeans

What does this have to do with religion? I'll get there.

Most of us I assume are familiar with the idea of a jellybean jar contest. Participants attempt to guess the number of jellybeans in what's typically a large, and possibly oddly shaped, container of jellybeans. The person who guesses the correct number of jellybeans, or, in a more lenient version of the contest, guesses closest to the correct number, wins a prize.

Those running the contest might not even know the correct answer themselves until the contest is being decided and a careful counting is performed.

The relationship to religion I'm getting at? The difference between a scientific and rational approach to problem solving and a religious or mystical approach, as well as the problems of trying to be a bit too generous about wanting to say that everyone is "right" in their own special way.

DISCLAIMER: Yes, the analogy is less than perfect. Discussing how the analogy does and does not work could be an interested part of this discussion, and I don't want to discourage that. All I ask is that people who see a mismatch don't jump down my throat as if I'd insisted the analogy was perfect, terribly upset that I'd dare compare these things and be oh so terribly wrong about them.

(1) There is a truth, a single truth that's true for everyone, even before anyone knows what that truth is.

(2) The more precise your guess, the more likely that you're wrong. Although there might not be a prize for being vague, a guess like 1000-1200 is more likely to be correct than 1048.

(3) If there's a price for entering the contest, the smartest choice might be not to play at all, or only play the game in your mind without committing to anything.

(4) Two people with different guesses can only be correct at the same time if they both guess ranges rather than exact numbers, and those ranges overlap. If one person guesses 2030, and another guesses 1443, either one is wrong or both are wrong. Parables about blind men and elephants can't fix that.

(5) It's fine not to give a damn about the contest or the prize, but not giving a damn doesn't mean that there isn't a correct answer, or that everyone else should share your disinterest in the answer. Your desire for everyone to stop arguing over the jellybeans and just "try to get along" doesn't make the question or the answer go away. Your insistence that there are more important things to worry about than jellybeans doesn't mean that people arguing over the jellybeans have somehow abandoned all other concerns in life.

(6) Some answers are obviously crazy, like 2 or 3,000,000,000,000,000,011. The fact that "no one knows for sure" doesn't open up a door that makes all guesses "equally valid".

(7) I don't need to know the correct answer myself to judge the odds of your answer being correct. If you guess 89009, I say that's way too high, and you snap back, "Well then, what's the answer Mr. Know-it-all!?", that's frankly a stupid retort. I don't need to "know it all" when limited knowledge and understanding is sufficient to rule out some answers or approaches to obtaining answers.

(8) Even if there is no prize or I don't care about the prize, the challenge of getting to the answer might be interesting in and of itself. I might learn something by trying to come up with a good guess.

(9) Choosing an answer that "makes you happy" or that "works for you" (like maybe your child's birthday) will have no bearing on your odds of being correct, even if doing so has some other side-effect benefit of amusement for you.

(10) A person who says the answer "came to them in a dream" could turn out to be right. A person who performed a complicated mathematical analysis could be wrong. Probability favors the math over the dream, however, and the mere chance that the dream might be correct doesn't make the dreamer's approach "equally valid".

(11) If you're going to appeal to quantum mechanics to find a way that everyone can be correct -- for example, the multiverse interpretation -- then you have to accept that there are still many more ways for most people to be wrong, not to mention plenty of universes where the contestants all turn into jellybeans themselves or die in an asteroid strike before the contest ends, and you will then have stepped so far off the deep end searching for a way for everyone to be correct that you will have made discussion of the problem, not to mention everything from charity hospitals to retirement planning to congressional representation, pointless in the process.

April 14, 2012

How to always be undeniably right about religion

These handy rules also work well for "spirituality", homeopathy, Bigfoot... almost anything you might need.

• First and foremost, just know you're right. What more do you really need?
  
• The very fact that anyone might want to argue that you're wrong is suspicious in and of itself. Such disagreeable people must be insecure, attempting to dominate you, or both. Which means they're wrong and you're right.
  
• Words mean whatever you need or want them to mean. Anyone who tries to win an argument by trying to assert clear definitions of words, or by asking you to provide clear definitions, is playing a "power game", attempting to impose meanings on you. Resist this intolerable umbrella! Be free, be right, be adiabatic!
  
• Make no distinction between experience and interpretation of experience. You've experienced what you've experienced, it means what you say it means, and anyone disagreeing with that is denying you your experience. These power games are everywhere.
  
• Be deliberately obtuse and frustrating. When someone actually becomes frustrated, that proves they're wrong and you're right.
  
• Science, like any other word, means what you need it to mean. If you need it to be an unbounded playground of bright shiny ideas that appeal to you, then it's an unbounded playground of bright shiny ideas that appeal to you. Anyone who says otherwise has no right to speak for science, is in fact a scientismismist, is a power monger trying to turn your playground into an imperialistic prison camp. You're too open-minded and wise and free to fall for that.
  
• Accuse people of "projection". Don't worry how well the actual meaning of "projection" fits, since there are no actual meanings to any words, that word included.
  
• Obsequiously polite and careful requests for evidence might merely mean someone doesn't understand your brilliance. Demands or expectations of evidence are power games, attempts to impose paradigms. Assert your independence.
  
• Quantum. Somehow, someway... quantum. Superimposition and decoherence for bonus points.
  
• Despite the fact that Einstein actually did the hard work of calculation and research and spectacularly meeting the requirements of evidence that mean old scientismismists so cruelly demand, a few Einstein quotes about imagination and religion prove he'd be right there by your side, as aware of your brilliance as you are.
  
• Expecto patronum!

The insular bubble protecting your private little world from assault is now complete. If people can't see how right you are, now you know it's all their fault.

March 28, 2012

It's people ever-so-gently treading on this kind of fuzzy-headed thinking...

...that helps perpetuate it. If you blather nonsense, and all you ever get in response is other people chiming in and amplifying that nonsense in a big gushing lovefest, and anyone who questions the nonsense is quickly shouted down as a big meanie... then what do you expect but more fuzzy-headed nonsense?

People respond much less to reasoning than they do to emotional cues and identity politics and tribal signifiers. If the most reasonable people eschew emotion just to show how reasonable they are, they lose. We need more people in this world gasping out loud, "Really? Are you nuts!?", not fewer.

March 25, 2012

Up w/Chris Hayes discusses the Reason Rally

This morning's episode was a refreshing change from the last time I discussed the intersection of Chris Hayes' show and atheism:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12182340

This time Hayes had actual self-professed atheists on the panel, a couple of whom had spoken at the rally, and also Richard Dawkins for part of the show, as a remote guest. This is in contrast to when Christopher Hitchens' atheism was previously discussed, which went more like... oh, having a Catholic-leaning all-male panel discuss abortion and contraception.

Since news coverage of the rally has been pretty sparse (Trayvon Martin and Etch A Sketch had, I suppose, consumed most of the available and always limited major media attention span) it was a pleasant surprise when I realized Hayes was starting his show this morning talking about the Reason Rally and atheism, and even more amazing when it turned out that atheism was the subject of nearly the entire two-hour show, with the initial atheist guests staying on to participate in the discussion all the way to the end.

This time Hayes even said he considers himself an atheist, albeit only as something very low on the list of things he'd first identify himself as. Consistent with the previous show, Hayes clearly remains disapproving of the more confrontational approach of some atheists. He'd rather have matters of religious doctrine treated as out-of-bounds for critical discussion unless they bear very directly on matters of public policy.

Changed from the previous show, however (whether this is an actual change of opinion for Hayes, or just a matter of trying to get along better with this show's guests), I don't recall the idea of "militancy" coming up at all, and no one tried to get away with calling atheism a religion.

This show is well worth seeking out if you haven't seen it or don't have it recorded already to see later.

March 7, 2012

Who is supposing answers here?

"Better" in what way? More emotionally satisfying to you? If you remain consistent with your opening words "There is no answer" then "better" is stopping there with that admission of ignorance.


"To give is better than to receive" is a value judgment. The existence or lack thereof of a God is not a value judgment, it's a condition of the universe that we all share. Ignorance of the truth of that existence doesn't turn an assertion in the face of that ignorance into a value judgment.


In other words, even if I don't have evidence, until you prove me wrong, I'm right!


Apart from the fact that "this radical atheism" of yours is probably a cartoon caricature of atheism, what exactly needs to be "improved" here? A magic "black box" God who is nothing more than "the thing that does all things for which we don't understand how they are done" is not any sort of improvement, unless perhaps your only goal is to dress up human ignorance in a shinier, more impressive-sounding package, and not deeper understanding.


My "case to the opposite" is that I don't know, but neither do you. That you prefer to make up an evidence-free answer does not obligate me to have my own provable answer to replace yours.

If someone brings up what you're calling a "primordial soup" explanation for the origin of life they don't have to prove it to argue that it is plausible. Where plausible explanations exist based on proven principles and known quantities, even if the overall explanation is unproven, this demonstrates that there is no compelling reason to spend much effort exploring the unproven and the unknown as explanations, not until the known, and logical extrapolations of known principles, have been well exhausted and shown to be inadequate.

Suppose a bank has been robbed and the perpetrator is unknown. Hypothetically at least, the crime could have been committed by a werewolf or a zombie. There had better be good reason, however, to eliminate human suspects before you go wasting your time investigating werewolves and zombies. If the crime remains unsolved, the fact that it hasn't been solved, in and of itself, does very little to improve the odds that werewolves or zombies were to blame.

We may not know everything there is to know about how life works and where it came from, but using known principles of physics and chemistry and biology has increased our understanding of life far more than saying "God did it!" ever has. Given the track record of the scientific approach, I'd say the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate why it's better to say "God did it!" rather than to simply admit that our knowledge is limited, that we don't have all of the answers, but to stick to science as the best hope for increasing our knowledge.

February 29, 2012

Dancing around judgment of differing beliefs and opinions

I have serious doubts when many people champion the idea of "not judging" that they're really as free from making judgments about the beliefs and opinions of others as they'd like to appear, or as they might like to believe themselves to be.

Keeping judgments quietly to yourself doesn't mean you aren't judging.

Adding disclaimers like "I could be wrong" doesn't mean you aren't judging.

Avoiding an overlap between judging an opinion or belief in particular and judging the person who holds that opinion or belief in general doesn't mean you aren't judging.

Blithely saying "whatever gets you through the night" is not an avoidance of judgment. You might think you're avoiding judging the character of a person that way, but you're taking what could well be strongly held beliefs and judging them to be nothing more than a coping strategy. I think it's actually much more respectful to treat others as having opinions worthy of debate than to treat them as children in need of a security blanket that you're oh-so-generously trying to not to upset.

Matters of personal taste aside, what is an opinion if not a judgment that some idea or conclusion is superior in some manner, more likely correct, more moral, or more justifiable than differing opinions. Opinions do not exist in isolation from other opinions, they exist in contrast to other opinions.

Consider a non-religious example:

It is my opinion that global warming is a real phenomena, and that human activity is a major cause of it.

I therefore believe that the opposite IS WRONG (gasp! shudder!). Believing that the opposite is wrong isn't a matter of me going out of my way to be judgmental, it isn't some special effort that I could avoid even if I wanted to avoid it, it's simply a totally obvious and integrally connected conclusion, like knowing that if the sun is up, then the sun isn't down.

Am I absolutely, 100% certain that I'm right? No. I consider there to be a very small chance I'm wrong, which means there's a small chance that those who disagree with me are right. Judging myself highly likely to be right, and others highly likely to be wrong is, however, still a judgmental stand on the worthiness of the opinions of those who disagree with me.

If I believe that climate denialism is wrong, then in the one respect, on that one issue, I believe that the people holding that view are wrong, that the denialists are wrong. Yes, I dare to say out loud that I think other people are wrong, and that I am right. One conclusion follows the other. No special effort, no particular penchant for being judgmental is required. A kind-hearted desire for being diplomatic wouldn't change this, even if it might change the carefully chosen words of diplomacy.

Having any opinions at all beyond matters of personal taste inherently implies some kind of negative attitude toward the opinions of others which are in disagreement with your own opinions.

By the way, none of the above has the slightest thing to do with anyone's right to hold differing opinions. That should be totally obvious, but sadly people constantly blur the distinction between respecting other people's right to hold different opinions and respecting those opinions themselves. Criticize X on the internet, and the odds quickly approach 100% the more you criticize X that someone will indignantly cry out how people have the right to believe X if they want to! (And leave Britney alone!)

What was that I said about the sun before? If it's up, then it isn't down? Did I forget that the sun can be up in the sky in one place while being down in another? No, I did not forget that. The question is this: Do you think that this caveat really makes a deep difference about what's right and what's wrong, or do you realize that in many contexts that such caveats are merely semantics games?

While it might often be a good and useful thing to point out that the validity of some opinions depends on unstated assumptions (like that we're talking about the same location on the planet) the fact that one view is right and another is flat out wrong remains, once you make sufficiently explicit any unstated assumptions and conditions. Right and wrong cannot remain infinitely plastic and personalized on all issues in anything but a through-the-looking-glass world, a world in which normal human functioning and interactions would be impossible.

You can try to duck the apparently horrible, unforgivable act of judging the opinions of others by trying to turn all issues into personal issues, as if believing in God or not is no different a matter than preferring chocolate ice cream over vanilla. I contend that such an approach, however, is itself a kind of judgment, a diminution of the importance of the opinions of others for the people who hold those opinions, a diminution many of those people are not likely to appreciate.

Besides, if you don't treat opinions on global warming as mere matters of personal taste, or as if some weird metaphysics applies where global warming deniers live in an alternate universe where climate change isn't actually happening, why treat issues of religion that way?