Monthly Archives: February 2015

The Parable of the Professor and the Rocks

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The professor was standing behind his desk in the lecture hall as I came in. That was odd because he usually dashed in just as class was to start.

He looked out at us silently—also odd—and everyone took a seat quickly. He reached under the desk and took out a clear glass jar, the gigantic kind that cafeterias get mayonnaise or pickles in. He set the jar on the desk and then reached under again and took out a box.

From the box, he took out a baseball-sized rock and carefully set it at the bottom of the jar. Then he added more until he placed one last rock in the top.

“Is this full?” he said, the first words he had spoken.

No one said anything. They seemed a little stunned.

“Everyone must vote—is the jar full or not? Raise your hand if you say it’s full.”

Everyone raised their hands.

He pushed the first box aside and reached underneath for another box. This one held sand. He slowly poured sand into the jar, tipping it from side to side until sand spilled onto the desk.

“Now is it full?” he said.

He waited for a bit. When the silence had become painful he reached under the desk again and pulled out a pitcher of water. Very slowly he poured in water and tapped the jar until water spilled out.

“Okay, now it’s full,” he said as he pushed the jar forward. “Now tell me: what is the lesson here?”

I finally raised my hand. “That you can always get more stuff inside?”

“A good guess, but that’s not it.”

No one else wanted to interpret this odd Zen story.

Finally he said, “The lesson is this,” and then he spoke deliberately, “you would never have gotten the rocks in unless you put them in first.”

And then he walked out. Class dismissed.

I don’t remember much from that Philosophy course, but I remember that.

In discussing this with friends afterwards, I decided that the jar is your life. It can only hold so much. There are always enough low-priority issues to more than fill it up—television, internet, time wasting, urgent but low-priority tasks at work.

But if you want to get important things done, the rocks must go in first.

(This is a variant of a story that originally appeared in Stephen Covey’s First Things First (1996).)

The real measure of your wealth 
is how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money
— Bernard Meltzer

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/22/12.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Are the Stupid Too Stupid to Realize They’re Stupid?

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Has it ever seemed to you that less competent people rate their competence higher than it actually is, while more competent people humbly rate theirs lower?

It’s not just your imagination. This is a genuine cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The Dunning-Kruger experiments behind the research focused on cognitive tasks (logic, grammar, and evaluating humor), but similar disparities exist in other areas. In self-assessment of IQ, below-average people overestimated their score and those above average underestimated.

Studies of healthy and unhealthy behaviors are handicapped when they rely on self-reporting because test subjects tend to improve their evaluation. In self-evaluations of driving ability, job performance, and even immunity to bias, we tend to polish our image.

This is called the Lake Wobegone Effect, named after the town where “all the children are above average.”

Notice that there are two different categories of error:

(1) the error where there is a preferred answer and most people are biased toward giving that answer (“How much snack food do you eat?” or “How popular would you say you are?” or “How good a driver are you?”), and

(2) the error where bias changes depending on actual competence, with the less and more competent groups rating themselves too high and too low, respectively.

Let’s look at the second category, where the two extremes make opposite errors. The Dunning-Kruger research hypothesizes that the competent overestimate others’ skill levels. But the error is more complicated for the incompetent—they overestimate their own skill level and they lack the metacognition to realize their error. In other words, they were too incompetent to recognize their own incompetence. Improving their metacognitive skills drove down their self-assessment scores as they became better evaluators of their own limitations.

The original paper was titled, “Unskilled and Unaware of It,” for which the authors won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000.

The trouble with the world
is that the stupid are cocksure
and the intelligent are full of doubt.
— Bertrand Russell

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/25/12.)

Photo credit:  Robert Orr, flickr, CC

Did You Hear? North Korea’s “Brilliant Comrade” Got a Haircut!

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kim jong un haircut north koreaThe Hermit Kingdom’s Brilliant Comrade, Kim Jong Un, is rocking a new hairstyle that is big news. One source critiqued it this way: “The style is a variation on Kim’s signature shaved sides, but with the top now sculpted into a high, wedge-shaped pompadour that sits atop Kim’s head like a hat, or perhaps a small, dormant woodland creature.”

Some speculate that he’s trying to look more like his grandfather, the founder of North Korea and still its “Eternal President.” Grandfather Kim was a revolutionary hero, and Li’l Kim may be using his new hairdo to declare that he’s maturing into that role.

Why so much excitement over a haircut? Because North Korea is a dangerous and unstable enemy, and there’s so little information that even something this trivial is parsed for clues.

Remind you of Someone?

And that’s also the Christian’s task. They have their own unpredictable Great Leader whose intentions they must infer from minimal clues. Christians become pigeons in a B.F. Skinner experiment, where intermittent reinforcement produced better results than continuous reinforcement. The dribbles of approval they infer falling from God’s table are enough to keep them eager for more.

Kim’s uncle was executed a year ago, presumably with Kim’s approval. Similarly, God is also dangerous, and Christians unashamedly admit that he’s killed millions. But, like the North Koreans who wept genuine tears at the death of the previous leader in 2011, Christians are quick to justify God’s actions. Someone’s child dies? Their faith is strengthened. The Canaanite genocide? Those bastards had plenty of chances. The Flood? They deserved what they got. In fact, God’s actions are good by definition.

I wonder if they say that about Kim in North Korea.

North Korea is officially the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” but how can a dictatorship be democratic? I suppose in the same way that Yahweh the genocidal murderer is “all loving.”

Don’t we have better, more tangible things to talk about in North Korea than a haircut? Instead of the hair, we could ask about the quality of life of North Koreans. And instead of God worship, we could focus on helping his children.

God knows he’s not doing it.

Choose faith in spite of the facts.
— Rev. Joel Osteen

Image credit: Vox

Who Cares About Charles Darwin?

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Tomorrow is the birthday of Charles Darwin, so it’s a good time to ask the blasphemous question: Who cares about Darwin? More precisely: Who cares about what Darwin wrote?

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species revolutionized biology. In the history of science, he’s a god, but in biology today, Darwin’s writings don’t count for anything. No one checks their results against Darwin’s thinking. No biologist says, “That’s an interesting hypothesis, Chuzzlewaite, but let’s compare it against the Great Darwin to see if it holds up.”

By contrast, consider how Aristotle was elevated during the medieval period. What Aristotle said, not what experiment showed, determined science.

Aristotle’s views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics. (Source)

Liars for Christ

Creationists want to put Darwin into the Infallible Sage bin along with Aristotle, and they love to quote him as if biology today were constrained by what he said. What Darwin wrote about evolution is important today only for the history of science, not biology. Even if they could make him look bad (and they don’t), so what? That would have nothing to do with the validity of the theory of evolution.

A popular Creationist tactic is to twist Darwin’s The Descent of Man to argue that he supported eugenics. Ben Stein’s 2008 “crockumentary” Expelled accurately quotes Darwin:

Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

Ah, so Darwin was rabidly in support of eugenics, right? Nope. The very next paragraph clarifies. He talks about our instincts for compassion and says,

Nor could we check our sympathy [for the weakest], even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.

Unsurprisingly, Expelled just quote-mines the first passage out of context to deliberately misrepresent Darwin’s views.

Here’s another excerpt popular among Creationists, this time from On the Origin of Species.

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

A frank admission by Darwin of the inadequacy of his theory? Not really. As you might guess, the very next sentence explains how evolution could account for it.

If numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist … then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection … can hardly be considered real.

Creationists out there, do your research into what Darwin actually said, and don’t quote him out of context. It makes you look like a liar. And, of course, misrepresenting Darwin as an evil person does nothing to respond to the argument for evolution. It remains the best explanation that we have for why life is the way it is.

Doth humor have charms to soothe the savage breast?

In the hope that humor can make the point where reason can’t, let me modify a popular Christian joke. Here’s the Christian version: A flood drives a devout man onto the roof of his house. A boat comes to take him away, but he says, “No—God will provide.” The water level keeps rising. Then another boat comes, and then a helicopter, but the man sends them all away. The flood water continues to rise, and he’s swept away and drowns.

He goes to heaven and he’s furious at God. “Why didn’t you save me?” he says.

“What did you want?” God says. “I sent two boats and a helicopter!”

Now: imagine a fundamentalist in heaven. With his new heavenly wisdom, he realizes that science was right all along, and his literalist take of the Bible was laughably wrong.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he demands of God.

“What did you want?” God says. “I sent Charles Darwin and 100,000 evolutionary biologists!”

It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly)
that direct arguments against Christianity and theism
produce hardly any effect on the public;
and freedom of thought is best promoted
by the gradual illumination of men’s minds
which follows from the advance of science.
— Charles Darwin

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/20/12.)

Photo credit:Wikipedia

A Crazy Natural Explanation Or a Supernatural One: Which One Wins?

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Christian podcaster Jason Rennie, in an interview with John Loftus, gives an example that he hopes will stretch the natural vs. supernatural distinction to the breaking point. Just how long will atheists cling to the natural explanation?

It’s all the fault of Elvis

He proposes a deliberately ridiculous natural explanation for the gospel story: time-traveling insurance salesmen led by a clone of Elvis go back in time to manufacture the idea of Jesus to get the concept of “Act of God” into insurance law. He asks whether this is more improbable than the gospels being true. It’s natural, but does that mean that it beats the supernatural explanation?

Rennie touches on an important point—the distinction between the rule of thumb “a plausible natural explanation beats a supernatural explanation” and “any natural explanation beats a supernatural explanation.”

The first statement is enough for me. We don’t always have natural explanations—science has many unanswered questions, for example—but where we do, the natural explanations that dismiss the supernatural explanations are all plausible. There’s no need to support a crazy natural explanation simply because it’s natural. We have quite plausible natural alternatives to the gospel story and needn’t imagine time-traveling clones of Elvis.

But ignore that for now. Let’s actually compare these two alternatives.

Introducing the “Like what?” test

Consider the pieces of this proposal one at a time—first, the clone of Elvis. With the “Like what?” test, we ask, “So you propose a clone of Elvis? Like what? What precedents do we have that would make such a thing possible?”

In this case, we have quite a lot of precedent. We’ve already cloned two dozen species of animals.

Next: insurance salesmen eager to improve their business. There’s no problem finding precedents to this.

Time travel? This one is quite far-fetched, but it’s simply technology, and we understand technology. We’ve seen almost unbelievable progress in technology in the last 200 years. No one today can even sketch out how time travel might work—indeed, it may be impossible—but 10,000 more years of technology might well deliver this.

Note that this isn’t about time traveling wizards. We have no precedent for that. Everything here is natural.

How crazy is the Elvis story, anyway?

In summary, the explanation has:

  • A clone of Elvis, like clones of sheep and dogs that we’ve already made.
  • Cost-cutting insurance salesmen, like insurance executives today.
  • Time travel, like the technology today that would seem miraculous to people just 50 years ago.

That hardly means that this ridiculous explanation is the best one—while it’s possible, it fails because of Occam’s Razor. It brings no evidence to support it over likelier explanations. But we have precedents for all major components of the story.

Consider the other explanation in play

Now apply the “Like what?” test to the supernatural explanation, that the Jesus miracles happened pretty much as claimed in the Bible. Like what?

Here, we have no universally-accepted supernatural explanations. Christians don’t accept the supernatural stories of Hinduism, Muslims don’t accept those of Christianity, not everyone accepts ghosts or other paranormal phenomena, and so on.

The only prior examples on which there is universal agreement is that there are false supernatural claims. Consider supernatural claims about the sun, for example: the Greeks explained it as Apollo in his chariot, the Mesoamericans said that Quetzalcoatl created the current sun (the previous four having been destroyed by disasters), and the Salish said that the raven brought the sun to mankind. All nonsense, we agree.

Present a universally-accepted prior example of the supernatural—like clones, salesmen, and technology in the Elvis story—and the gospel story has some standing. As it is, it doesn’t even leave the gate. The Christian position is trounced even by this deliberately ridiculous example.

Any sufficiently advanced technology 
is indistinguishable from magic
— Arthur C. Clarke

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/15/12.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

The Great Commission and How It Doesn’t Apply to You

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great commission jesusChristianity continues to change with the times—it has 42,000 denominations and counting—and I nurture the hope that it will adapt to become more civilized, at least in the West. Maybe a strain could simply be cultural Christianity, a philosophy or way of life with no supernatural baggage. Millions of practicing “Christians” don’t actually believe, and they deserve to keep the good things of Christianity while discarding the unsupportable claims.

One thing holding Christianity back is the Great Commission. This was the final charge of Jesus to his disciples before he returned to heaven. “Go and make disciples of all nations,” he tells them in Matthew 28:19. Sounds like Christians are obliged to actively get out there and spread the meme. But that stands in the way of Christianity becoming a healthy worldview instead of the dogmatic busybody that conservative politics has made it in America.

But are Christians’ hands really tied? Consider who Jesus was talking to. He wasn’t talking to today’s lay Christian; he was addressing the disciples. You flatter yourself to imagine that you’re one of the Twelve, and the charge of the Great Commission was placed on your fragile shoulders.

Nevertheless, most Christians still hear that, yes indeedy, Jesus was addressing them. Let’s pursue this and see if it holds up.

The lesser commission in Matthew

There are several variations of this assignment of Jesus. An earlier commission in the same gospel also charges the disciples to hit the road, but this time Jesus gave them superpowers. They had “authority to drive out impure spirits and to heal every disease and sickness” (Matt. 10:1). If the commission comes with power to help carry it out but Christians today don’t have those powers, then they probably weren’t given the commission either.

And even more superpowers

In another gospel, Jesus sends the disciples on their way with a power you’d think would be reserved for God himself: “If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven” (John 20:23).

We see something similar in Matthew. Jesus said to the disciples, “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Matt. 18:18). Binding means to forbid and loosing means to permit, both by an indisputable authority.

The disciples weren’t ordinary chowderheads like you and me. They obviously had superpowers not available to the rank and file. I wonder then how Christians can imagine they share the disciples’ assignment.

Four reasons to ignore the Great Commission

Many Christians are uncomfortable with the idea that they make baby Jesus cry by not witnessing to strangers. I’d like to empower them by showing why this isn’t their fight.

1. Jesus wasn’t talking to you. The Great Commission was given to the apostles. Don’t flatter yourselves—you’re not Matthew or Peter or John.

2. Apologists acknowledge the difference. Some apologists capitalize on this and use it to their advantage.

Here’s the problem they face. The book of Acts shows Paul healing a lame man, Ananias curing blindness, and Peter raising the dead. “Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles.”

What about the incredible power of prayer? In Matthew, Jesus says, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” In Mark, Jesus says, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” In John, Jesus says, “He who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do.”

Trouble is, it doesn’t work that way for Christians today, and everyone knows it. Many apologists will avoid the problem by saying that these remarkable claims were relevant only to the disciples. That works, but then the Great Commission logically falls into the same category.

3. The Bible makes a nutty demand? Then rationalize away the demand! Christians easily dismiss aspects of the Bible that don’t translate well into modern Western society—God’s support for slavery, polygamy, genocide, human sacrifice, and so on. God’s position is clear, but loftier principles override the Bible, and Christians (correctly) take the sensible approach where there are conflicts. If pushing your beliefs on others also doesn’t seem right, maybe that’s because it isn’t.

And what’s the point of evangelization anyway? Fundamentalists will tell you that it’s the Holy Spirit that does the work, not your evangelization, “so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). Surely the omnipotent Holy Spirit has the capability to save souls and isn’t constrained by what people do or don’t do.

4. It’s not everyone’s job to evangelize. Paul says that we have different gifts (1 Corinthians 12:4–11). You may simply not be an evangelist. And don’t take on the teaching role lightly: “Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly” (James 3:1).  

There’s no need for the Great Commission

Christians have been told that it’s their duty to save people. Just imagine if your neighbor went to hell simply because you were too lazy to convince him that he was worthless scum who needed what your church was selling.

Paul makes clear that this fear is unfounded. Comparing the symmetry of Adam’s sin with Jesus’s sacrifice, Paul said, “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19). The price has been paid—you’re good. (Thanks to Greg G. for this insight.)

We see a similar attitude in the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. The King gives eternal life to those who lived honorable lives. Evangelism and mandatory beliefs aren’t necessary.

Christians, discard the great baggage of the Great Commission. There’s work enough to just live your life as a good Christian. If someone asks, you can give the “reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15).

If instead you want to follow the lead of Jesus, he spoke at length about helping the disadvantaged. That’s a charge that makes a lot more sense.

Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural,
the incomprehensible, the unreasonable,
the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd,
and nothing but a vacuum remains.
— Robert G. Ingersoll

Photo credit: Wikipedia