Religion's Sins Against Science

PZ Myers posted a list of 10 12 sins of Christianity (and, as he clarified in the comments, most religion) against science.

I particularly like the sin of Predestination:

Predestination. I've had a few one-on-one conversations with creationists, and one of the weirder but fairly common discoveries is that they reject the concept of chance. Everything must have an intentional cause. A branch fell off my tree because the wind blew it down; similarly, if an ancient ape evolved into a human it must be because…? They've filled in the ellipsis with "God", and they are not satisfied with explanations that do not invoke causes and intent. Try it yourself sometime; they have an almost allergic reaction to the notion of junk DNA, for instance, because there's no way molecules could have a random element, it must all be for a purpose.

This trait isn't exclusive to religion, of course; you can see causality built right into the structure of our language, and it's probably hardwired into our brains. Religion makes it difficult to oppose, though, because it provides a convenient catch-all repository of causality: god did it. It doesn't matter that it's a meaningless phrase, it seems to satisfy an intrinsic desire to wrap up loose ends with an explanatory purpose.

Some of the comments are also quite insightful, and one links to this related article.

Time 100 Follies

Moonflake contemplates the absurdity of Time magazine's entrusting Michael Behe with writing the profile of Richard Dawkins for the 100 Most Influential People list:

I can only imagine what the next Time 100 is going to look like:

• Tony Blair, profiled by Robert Mugabe


• Sir Ian McKellen, profiled by Fred Phelps


• Michael J. Fox, profiled by Rush Limbaugh


• Jon Stewart, profiled by George W. Bush


• Neil Armstrong, profiled by Bart Sibrel


• Noam Chomsky, profiled by Paris Hilton

The Mismeasure of Bias

This is one of the most astute critiques of a methodologically flawed paper that purports to measure ideological bias in the media. Nyhan's main points are:

(1) Technocratic centrist to liberal organizations like Brookings and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities tend to have more credentialed experts with peer-reviewed publications than their conservative counterparts. This may result in a greater number of citations by the press, which seeks out expert perspectives on the news, but not more citations by members of Congress, who generally seek out views that reinforce their own.

(2) The Groseclose/Milyo methodology doesn't allow for differential rates of productivity in producing work of interest to the media or Congress between organizations. To the extent that a think tank is better at marketing itself to the press than Congress (or vice versa), it could skew the results.

He quotes other sources, too, and this argument from Media Matters is particularly convincing:

For instance, according to their data, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the third most-quoted group on the list. But stories about race relations that include a quote from an NAACP representative are unlikely to be "balanced" with quotes from another group on their list. Their quotes will often be balanced by quotes from an individual, depending on the nature of the story; however, because there are no pro-racism groups of any legitimacy (or on Groseclose and Milyo's list), such stories will be coded as having a "liberal bias."

And there are more general issues that would remain even if these details were somehow fixed. The very notion that some average (median or whatever) of population's views is "unbiased" is unfounded; and, even if the population's median view were deemed "unbiased" by definition, there would still be a big leap from the median member of Congress to the median voter, and another from the median voter to the median member of the population.

Too bad Andrew Gelman's endorsement of Brendan Nyhan's critique is only lukewarm, even though he realizes that "bias" is a misnomer for the quantity that G&M measured. More generally, it is sad that so often people with great analytical skills fail to appreciate the world beyond the limitations of a mathematical model.

If Republicans Debated Herod

Finerman suggests moving the newly discovered Herod's tomb to the Heritage Foundation. I can't help imagining how the Republican presidential candidates would debate that issue:

TANCREDO: I don't care if he is dead, I wouldn't let him into the country.
MCCAIN: We can bury him in Baghdad. He'd be safe there.
ROMNEY: I think he should stay in France.
GIULIANI: Mitt, you are a complete idiot.
BROWNBACK: Herod makes Baby Jesus cry. And so do you, Rudy.
HUCKABEE: Yes, Herod makes Baby Jesus cry, and so he and all of his descendants to this day should burn in Hell.
TOMMY THOMPSON: I like the Hell part. Oh, and some of my best friends are Jews.
GIULIANI: Tommy, you are sick. You need professional help.
ROMNEY: I am now really concerned about Baby Jesus. I am personally going to ask Ann Coulter to make sure Herod suffers really bad in Hell.
GIULIANI: Look, people, Herod didn't make Baby Jesus cry. He wanted to make him stop crying, forever.
HUCKABEE: This New Yorker guy is an infidel. Rudy, do you even believe in virgin birth?
GIULIANI: Mike, you mention virgins once more and I'll break your nose. I was once personally attacked by crazy terrorists who wanted 72 virgins.
MCCAIN: (humming) 72 virgins on the wall... take one down, pass it around...
ROMNEY: I once married 72 virgins.
HUCKABEE: We used to burn people like you at stake.
TANCREDO: That's what happens when you let Mexicans in, they have 72 children and soon our children will have to learn Mexican in school!
GIULIANI: Oh, shut up, Tom, you stupid moron!
ROMNEY: My allegiance is first and foremost to the United States of America and its Constitution!
MCCAIN: You may uncross your fingers now, Mitt.
BROWNBACK: (tearful) Look, people, you are joking, but Baby Jesus is still crying. And Rudy, you, like Herod, favor killing the innocent!
GIULIANI: No, I support judges who don't kill babies. Actually, last time I saw a judge who killed a baby, I said "Shame on you!"
TANCREDO: I bet he was a Mexican.
THOMPSON: Some of my best friends are Mexican.
ROMNEY: None of my best friends are from Massachusetts.
GIULIANI: All of my best friends are pitt bulls.

Protect the Children by Locking Them Up

A 17-year-old and a 16-year old took photos of themselves engaged in unspecified "sexual behavior" and got charged and convicted as child pornographers. They didn't even intend to distribute the photos; they were for their private use only. Florida state appeals court upheld the conviciton.
The idiot judge who wrote the opinion reasoned that

the statute was intended to protect minors like appellant and her co-defendant from their own lack of judgment...
Appellant was simply too young to make an intelligent decision about engaging in sexual conduct and memorializing it. Mere production of these videos or pictures may also result in psychological trauma to the teenagers involved.

So, to protect her from "psychological trauma", we should lock her up and stigmatize her as a criminal. Remarkably, another judge agreed with this bullshit, producing a 2-1 opinion.

People like this not only shouldn't be judges, they shouldn't even be allowed to vote for their neighborhood association boards. Heck, they should be locked up, to protect them from their own idiocy.

Atrios has more on this and related subjects, as does Yglesias.

The Wealth of Nations Self-Interested Agents

Brad DeLong buys into a Hayekian view of economic morality, but several of his readers call his foul in the comments. One witty comment might spread wider:

The learned autism of economists is really remarkable sometimes.

Rhetoric aside, this comment gets to the core:

As for the moral point: well, we live in a world of nation states, which are all about treating citizens differently from non-citizens. The question of the morality of a nation-based trade policy is really a sub-question of the issue of the morality of the nation state.

Is Yglesias on Drugs?

This is utterly ridiculous:

...lately there seem to be an awful lot of what you might call evangelizing atheists who want to publish books about how awful religion is. Kevin names Richard Dawkins, Victor Stenger, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens and I was also add Daniel Dennett into the mix. What's going on?

It seems especially odd to me because it's so contrary to the spirit of non-theism to go around writing books like this. The whole strength of the non-theistic intellectual enterprise over the years has simply been to go about our business without talking about God.

WTF?!? Evangelizing atheists?!? What is next? Pious scientists? Fanatic deconstructionists? Crusading Quakers? Nerdy NFL quarterbacks? Intelligent Fox newsanchors?

Several people took Matt to task in the comments, but some have built further upon his oxymoronic (as well as just plain moronic) idea. A lot of people need a bucket of cold water poured on them.

Trivial Economic Trivia

Dani Rodrik wastes his time and his audience's:

I asked the audience a favorite question of mine: would you rather be poor in a rich country, or rich in a poor country. I gave them the following terms for thinking about the question:

1. Assume you care only about your own consumption
2. Define poor and rich as someone who is the in the bottom or top decile of a country
3. Define poor and rich country analogously as a country in the bottom or top decile of the distribution of per-capita incomes across countries.

The audience was divided evenly between those who would choose to be rich in a poor country and those who would rather be poor in a rich country. The real answer is that it is not even close. This has important implications for how we think about poverty reduction in the world.

Sorry, but this should not be a prominent Harvard professor's favorite question. As defined, it is a question about an artificial world that has little to do with reality. First, he assumes away the value of status, power, and other non-consumption sources of utility. He also pretends that people's desires are absolute, independent of what they are accustomed to or what they see that their neighbors have; such absolute utility for consumption is a very useful concept for typical microeconomic problems, but it leads to absurd conclusions when comparing people in vastly different situations. By Rodrik's criteria, it is better to be a postal worker in the US today than a king in 18th century. But if Rodrik had taken lessons from Mel Brooks, he would know that "it's good to be king."

Second, the way Rodrik defines "rich" and "poor" for this problem is divorced from the words' meanings in normal language. In any country I can think of, the wealth distribution is skewed. Nowhere is the top 10% considered rich, but the bottom 10% is considered poor almost everywhere. The poorer the country, the more skewed the distribution is likely to be; the 90th percentile person there may be a rich person's servant.

Rodrik is right that comparisons between any combination of rich/poor people in rich/poor countries have important implications for poverty reduction, but only if the comparisons are meaningful and fair. Misleading comparisons like this will have important wrong implications.

P.S. In case you haven't guessed, the answer to Rodrik's riddle is here.

Not Worth the Used Toilet Paper It's Printed on

Everybody knows Mitt Romney is full of shit, but it is hard to imagine that somebody can be so full of shit that the last used car salesman you met was closer to the mythical cherry-tree-hacking George Washington than to this guy:

In France, for instance, I'm told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past.

Sure. And in Belgium people have tails. But that's Mitt Romney, he leaves droppings like that a lot. The serious question is, how does the Washingon Post report on this poopy accident? Does it inform the readers that they should not be so foolish to quote Mr. Romney outside of indecent jokes? Does it at least present the relevant facts in a neutral fashion? Nope. It just moves on, washing its hands Pilate-like by linking "France" to all its news on France. Let the readers sort it out; they are paid for it, aren't they?

The Washington Post has become a joke. Were it printed on used toilet paper, it wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on.

Where Is the Outrage?

Richard Posner offers an interesting view regarding the lack of violent protests against the Iraq war. He disagrees with the conventional wisdom (and his co-blogger Gary Becker) that the main difference between the Vietnam era and today is the draft. Instead, he lists five ways in which protesting has higher cost and lower benefits today than it had in 1968:

1. Opponents of the Iraq war have the support of one of the two major political parties. They thus have less reason to feel abandoned and more hope that their goals will be achieved through the regular political process. They also may be reluctant to jeopardize the efforts of Democratic Party politicians.
2. The opportunity costs are higher today: wages are higher (especially for the highly educated), more women work, and the greater competitiveness in the economy means that a reputation as a violent protester poses a higher risk to one's career.
3. Blogs and other electronic media provide alternative outlet and support networks.
4. People learned from earlier mistakes: Vietnam protests probably didn't end the war, but they did help Nixon become president.
5. Vietnam protests were also about the system in general; there was a revolutionary or Utopian element then. In contrast, most people today believe strongly in the American political and economic system in principle.

That's some food for thought, and all of Posner's reasons deserve to be taken seriously. But they should also be scrutinized. Are they factually correct? Can they explain the lack of outrage in other recent situations that might have resulted in mass protests, such as the stolen 2000 presidential election? (Obviously, the draft and the number of casualties do not apply there, so Posner's reasons should only be more important.) And finally, if Posner is right, what are the broader implications? Should we be happy about what we learned?

Factually, Posner seems mostly correct, except that, for most people, real wages are not much higher now than in 1968, and it is likely that the protests did speed up the end of the war, although we'll never know for sure.

As for explaining the lack of outrage over the 2000 election, I can only see #2 as a convincing factor, although it is far short of a full explanation. The Democratic Party did not rock the boat, blogs hardly existed, there were few, if any, related past mistakes to learn from, and a belief in the American system of government might have been an additional reason to protest. (On the other hand, the belief in the system could also have resulted in the Gore position - accepting the decision despite strongly disagreeing with it - but at least the net effect is ambiguous.)

I suspect there is an additional cultural reason - that Americans have become more risk-averse. That would be consistent with the observed changes in other areas, from school safety rules to product liability lawsuits. Admittedly, that same change in attitudes makes us more sensitive to the military deaths (so 3,000 in Iraq feel closer to 60,000 in Vietnam than the raw numbers suggest), but the aversion to relatively small personal losses (like time and career prospects) has apparently grown more than the aversion to risking lives. Other people's lives, that is, which brings the draft issue back into play.

Finally, I find Posner's reason #2 troubling. There is no causal connection between a more competitive economy and career risk for protesters. If someone has been a protester, can we infer that that person is likely to be less productive? Certainly, there are traits that make one both a likely protester and a productive worker; for example, enthusiasm, initiative, and willingness to take risks. There must be something other than competitive economy that creates the link between protests and career risks, and that something does not look benign.

UPDATE: Posner addresses some readers' comments here.