“Communication Is a Two-Way Street” is a trite metaphor that, although useful at times, is an incomplete description of the reality of the process of communications.  Yes, there are senders and receivers in communications.  The senders can only control how they present messages.  They can’t control how messages are received. Only receivers can control their reception.

In intro psychology courses, many of us spent weeks trying to get a solid grasp of the subtle differences between sensation and perception.  Just as two people can experience (perceive) a temperature of 55° F as either warm or cool depending on their preconceptions and other environmental factors, two people can also hear or read my message and either decide that I am “right on” or that I am “not helping.”

I sincerely intend to attend someday a conference where all the cool kids congregate. If I had been at TAM8 in Vegas last weekend, I would have caught this speech that Phil Plait gave on being a dick when it comes to skepticism.  Stephanie was there and wrote about it.

That’s the closest thing I have to a conversion story I have. It’s also why I was a touch disappointed in Phil’s speech, although I appreciated most of it. He asked how many of us used to believe in woo, and he asked how many of us had been converted by people being angry and mean to us. He didn’t ask how many of us had been converted by someone being angry and mean on our behalf or on behalf of the ideals of skepticism.

I’d have raised my hand. High.

I have been wondering what has been learned lately in the blogosphere regarding the best methods to communicate skepticism and interest in science to the general public.  It still seems to me that with the You’re Not Helping self-immolation, the lesson learned was that people don’t like sock-puppets (and for good reason).  Or perhaps that Chris Mooney had better do a better job of checking on someone before vouching for him.

In most of the discussions related to accommodation of religion and science, most of the effort at discovery and focus has been placed on the methods of the message senders.  Who is right?  Who is wrong? Is it okay to be a jerk?  Are jerks making it more difficult for the non-jerks?  Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas even has a post that suggests that we can use science to determine the best way to get people to like science.  He even proposes a (lame) experiment:

Someone grounded in that body of research could develop some testable hypotheses about how folks might respond to NAs. Then you could do lab work, bringing in a large and representative sample of folks with views across the c/e spectrum. Do a pretest, then have some of them read a selection from Dawkins’ The God Delusion, others read from Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, and a control reading something unrelated to creationism and evolution and theism. Then do a post-test. Follow up a month later, and see how their views on science generally, evolution specifically, and on the relationship between science and religion have changed. Follow up a year later. What sticks, and what doesn’t? What do people remember? What do they convey to their friends? Then follow up the study with treatments that vary the extent of contact with New Atheist writings, to see whether people who read all of TGD, or watch a 2 hour talk by Dawkins, react differently than those with more fleeting contact with NA ideas.

The reason that I think that this idea is “lame” is because the concept doesn’t take into account the individual prejudices, the environments and the presuppositions that people bring into a reading of a book that looks at religion to determine that belief in God is the result of a delusion.  It’s a loaded experiment that I think would yield little.  A reading of either Miller’s book or Dawkins’ book is unlikely to find an audience of readers who were initially unbiased towards the concepts of religion and science.  Such an experiment wouldn’t be able to isolate the independent variables enough to create a sufficiently testable hypothesis.

More importantly, though, Josh makes the mistake of assuming that there is a “best” way to do all of this science communicating.  I don’t see how there can be one “best way” to turn an “Unscientific America” into a scientific America when there isn’t any single “America.”  There are 300 million Americans, and each of them have their own looking-glass selves. Communication doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  A message is by necessity interpreted by the receiver.  Communication is colored by the recipient’s background, history and environment.  Perception is a function of perspective.

Suppose the experiment were to be set up using the two books that Josh suggests; Finding Darwin’s God, by Kenneth Miller and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.  Suppose a sizable portion of the Miller readers were anti-Catholic and decided that his book is pure papist nonsense.  Would their non-acceptance be skewed by his catholicism?  How would the experimenter control for such an extraneous variable?  That is just one possible objection, and I am sure that social scientists can find more problems with the idea.

Humans are not psychic.  There is no direct communication available from my brain to yours.  We are limited in communications by the usage of symbols whether visual or audio.  We talk, we write, we listen, we read and use other means to indirectly communicate.  The indirect means we have to communicate are filtered through our perspectives.  We can’t control how other people filter.

Let’s try looking at it this way.  Is there an experiment that can show the “best” temperature to take a shower?  Would Josh be able to come up with a statistically valid sample to prove that 140°F is the “best” temperature and then expect that everyone take their showers at that temperature in order to get a consensus on clean?

Communication is not a two-way street.  It is an intersection.  Sometimes there are four corners and sometimes there are seven corners, and I think it unreasonable to expect that a left turn is always the correct course of action.  People who receive your directions and your communications have varying needs.  Stephanie needed someone to be angry at flim-flammers on her behalf, and Randi was there for her. Some people don’t need to hear that; some people just want discussion.  Some people just want the facts.  The trouble is the communicators don’t know what the receivers need. Most of the time we just know what we want to give. That’s just fine as long as we recognize that the message may vary and still have a desired effect.

So, be a dick or don’t be a dick.  Just don’t pretend to tell me that you know which size fits all.

Once you eliminate the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth (or a close approximation thereof). Almost A.C. Doyle

I have a friend who has often told me that as an atheist I rest too much on my preconceptions that God doesn’t exist for me to be open to evidence that his God does, in fact, exist.  He has told me that because of the problem of induction,  there is no way that I can “know” that God doesn’t exist, and that nothing in the scientific method can be used to support atheism.  Since no one can be justified, apparently, in drawing absolute answers from repeated observations, then it is silly to say that there is no God just because I have never experienced “Him.”

It’s the problem of induction, again.  I hesitate to discuss such a philosophical quandary among those who read this blog regularly; those who will likely school me on where my lack of formal philosophical training has failed me, but I have been thinking about the differences between science and religion as “ways of knowing.”

In order to maintain confidence that a causal relationship between natural phenomena has been established, one scientific method that I learned was to disprove a null hypothesis using statistical tools to analyze my data.  If the null hypothesis is not disproved, that means that the proposed hypothesis probably establishes a causal relationship and my investigation has yielded a good answer within a specified confidence interval. In other words, by following a scientific process, an investigator has come up with a good explanation for why something is so, or how something works.

This is only one of the methods that scientists use to discover how things work, one of the ways that people discover “how the world goes.”

Religion promises knowledge based on non-verifiable acceptance of authority, resignation to “mystery,” and the record of inscripturation.  Apologists for religion promise to provide “other ways of knowing” that aren’t limited to verifiable, positivistic methods. Religion, in general, tells people that we can know for certain that the supernatural exists and interacts in measurable ways with the natural.  Religion explains, in its “way,” the creation, miracles, interventions in personal lives and through catastrophic natural events.  The explanations are authoritative but not testable nor replicable through any reliable means.

There is a difference between the process of science and the nature of religion.  Science provides the “probable” answers, while religion promise certainty as long as the seeker will accept Mystery. ¹ Cosmologists have teased out most of the probable answers as to what happened following the Big Bang to within Planck Time and are still trying to determine how this universe came into being.  They don’t know absolutely if the current understanding of the process of expansion has been accurately described, but they have reason to acknowledge that it has been described very accurately using the process of inductive reasoning.

Inductive reasoning, as I understand it, is the process of analyzing subsets of the whole to make rational judgments of the nature of the whole.  For a common example of how inductive reasoning works, I will use political polling.  A sample of the population of likely voters is queried as to how they plan to vote in an upcoming election.  The larger the sample polled, the more likely the pollster is to obtain an accurate prediction of the eventual outcome.  Once the sample size exceeds a certain level, the returns of accuracy and confidence change little and it would be foolish and expensive and time-consuming to sample more than necessary.  A poll of all the people who will vote would be the most accurate way to predict an election, it would yield an “absolutely true” result, provided that none of those polled were deceptive or changed their minds.

The ideal sample size can be determine through some quick calculations, for example:

Determining Sample Size

((The trick to stats is designing the proper formula.  Once that has been done it is a simple matter of algebra.))

Nate Silver didn’t need to sample all of the voters in the 2008 election to predict that Obama would carry the electoral vote.  He merely needed to analyze the polls that sampled populations within the whole of the electorate.  The results he predicted were accurate to a specified confidence level, the famous “margin of error” of ±3 per cent.  There was a 5% chance that he could have predicted incorrectly.  In experimental design, a scientist will determine what margin of error will allow for the most probable and acceptable description of the causality of a natural phenomenon. Shorter:  Is this what caused that?  The  possible answers are not “yes” or “no.”  They are “probably” or “probably not,” or “that’s funny.”

The “problem of induction” is related to absolute knowledge.  If all knowledge is tentative, then any solution is as good as any other.  There is no certainty and there can be none, so my answer is as good as yours even if I haven’t done any serious investigation.  If you can’t state with a 0% margin of error that something is so, then you really have no useful knowledge. I can’t predict that the sun will rise tomorrow with absolute certainty, because I can’t see into the future.  I can confidently state that it will because I have an understanding that the sun doesn’t really rise, instead the earth rotates and creates an effective illusion that the sun is rising. For the Earth to stop rotating sometime in the middle of the night, events would be a bit more jarring due to the forces of momentum than I would care to deal with.  I wouldn’t then be too concerned that my prediction was wrong.

The “problem of induction” has been misused to claim that since there is no way to “know” that there is no God then God is likely to exist even if there is no direct nor indirect evidence of such an entity.  Not by any professional philosophers has this been done, mind you, but by friends of mine who think that they have stumbled onto something that “no atheist can answer.”

When it comes to the differences between religion as a “way of knowing” versus science as a way of understanding, religion offers something that science doesn’t.  Religion offers the comfort of absolute knowledge.  It offers the absolute answers, the answers that people want:  there is a creator that is watching after us and providing a way for us to experience a blissful afterlife.

The conflict between science and religion is in the means of acquiring knowledge.  Religious authority is often derived from personal revelations of prophets who have experienced something that to them is “real” and “true,” as true as the feeling of a burned hand in a fire. I have “felt” the presence of the Holy Spirit, but I have also “felt” the presence of the pagan Goddess in a drawing down of the moon. Both experiences were very emotional, uplifting, exciting and convincing. God’s presence was revealed to me, as was the Goddess’s. I should also note that both experiences were accompanied by prophecies from the respective supernatural agents.

Through these experiences, I found out how religious people “know” what they know. There could be no doubt, because the words came directly to me while I was experiencing the ecstasy. There was no induction needed, because through those experiences I had the Truth.  As Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason:

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication — after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

I could tell you the Truth of those prophecies, but you would have to take my word for it.

Religion and science are not compatible because of the illusory nature of “truth.”  We all have truths.  Religion claims to provide Truth.  Science is just a process that uses methods to get close to truth.  Religion provides other ways of knowing.  My question is in knowing what?  What does religion help us know, exactly?  And if induction can’t be used to prove an absolute, is that really a problem that religion can solve?

I don’t know.

1. Have you ever noticed that Catholic theologians pronounced the word “mystery” with the “M” capitalized? How do they do that?

How is it that the Sea View was supposed to be doing all this research but was really engaged in the fight against the enemies of mankind most of the time? Perhaps there is a clue in the opening episode.

Oh. I see.

Well, anyway, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and other TV shows like it helped young Americans learn what and who to be be afraid of, and most importantly, what our enemies looked like.

In the following clip we see part of the plot unfold when an Evil Third World Dictatorship messes with a new gas Weapon of Mass Destruction with the support of Nefarious Second World Agents. One can see how a child who feeds on this tit could grow up to be George Bush:

I live on a north-south street in a suburb where most streets are on a squared-off grid.  In order to drive to my favorite restaurant on the big local county road, I drive south on my road and then take a right to get to the county road.  This county road runs on a diagonal, northwest-southeast. Most of the time this doesn’t cause a perspective problem for me, except when I approach it from an east-west road…as I always do when coming from home.  For some reason, my perspective overrides my rational understanding of directionality.  It overrides my knowledge that the sun rises in a generally easterly direction and sets in a generally westerly direction depending on the time of year.

This may be based on the fact that I grew up in the flatlands. The homesteads were laid out in even quarter sections and the roads were for the most part laid out based on the homestead boundaries.  The roads are almost all either north-south or east-west, unless they are diverted to accommodate a river.  I have always had this problem and diagonals have always messed with my sense of direction.  I need a map whenever I am in a strange city or neighborhood, because I need to have street names matched up with those in the map if I have been faced with driving in an area infested with curvy roads or diagonal streets.  I lose my north/south/east/west innate sense of direction, even when the sun is out and I should know my directions based on its position in the sky.

When I visualize through my intuitive sense of direction rather than one adjusted by rational direction or matching a map to my surroundings, in my suburb, I encounter streets that are 90° “off” from where they should be.  My kids’ mother’s street is a north-south street, but to me it feels east-west.  I can’t fully orient myself in this town, and I will have to move as soon as I can back to St. Paul or to Minneapolis just to get my bearings again.

Perception, in psychology, is the manner in which we interpret the sensations we receive through from our environment. The five senses are touch, taste, sight, sound and smell.  What we do with data we get through the senses is based on our perceptions of what is and even what “should be.”  The sensation of “cold” is actually a perception; in other words our nerves send to our brains the information that a certain amount of thermal energy has made contact with our nerve endings.  The brain compares this volume of thermal energy to a standard that we use to decide, based on the situation in which this information is being processed, whether or not that amount of thermal energy translates to “hot,” “cold” or “warm.” If I was determining whether or not a cup of water is hot enough to brew tea, the standard that my brain uses for that measure is different than if I am determining if the same temperature of water is safe for taking a shower.  In one situation, the water can be hot or cold to my touch even though the temperature is constant at 150° F. Very hot for a shower; very cold for tea.

Perspective is a function of perception.  My sense of direction is based on perception of data brought in through my sensations of sight and the kinetic sense, and there is no absolute direction or sensational cue of directions.  People only know the directions based on their prior learning and interpretation, and mine happens to be faulty at times and requires direct thought for correction.  My fault in perspective is something I’m aware of, and knowing this, I can the apply rational thought to reorient myself so that I don’t drive into a ditch or someone’s house and instead drive to the proper house and make the proper turn.  Not proper in the sense of seeing my ex-wife, but proper in the sense of being reunited with my children.

What I apply in order to regain my bearings is critical thinking.

The process of using critical thinking involves several steps. These steps work formally in experimental design and analysis, studying and mastering new concepts as we learn and in making decisions that people need to make in the various aspects of our lives.  They also work informally and people process these steps often when we are not aware of them, nor even that we are following them.  Stephanie listed the steps she used in the process of critical thinking in her article “Trust and Critical Thinking in Science Reporting:  A Case Study.”  Her steps were; use the controversy, check the tools, check the controls, check the claims, untangle the logic, and to finally identify the biases.

Between checking the controls and identifying the biases there is an overlap, because the controls should be designed to correct for the biases. If the author of a study, as in the case of the report that Stephanie had analyzed, doesn’t recognize that he was in fact trying to find a reason to justify his belief that there is a measurable IQ difference in races, then he will not set a proper control against that bias.  He will be disoriented, and while it seems perfectly reasonable to him to come to the conclusion that he did, the results will still be off by ninety degrees.  Metaphorically, of course, but in defending his work, he has gone in the ditch.

This is where a layperson, or a journalist, reporting on science can muck up the analysis when reading and reporting on the results of a recent scientific finding.  If the writer doesn’t seek to find their own perspective and how it might color the way that they write on or analyze the topic, then they will either accept the conclusions as the are delineated in the abstract of the paper or seek an outside and irrelevant source of clarification that will take them away from the truths either found or obscured.

For those of our Quiche Moraine readers that have been following the controversies brought out here, at Greg Laden’s Blog and at Almost Diamonds, there will be an invaluable resource on how the layperson can balance trust in science journalism with skepticism using tools of critical thinking.  Greg and Stephanie will be joining PZ Myers, Desiree Schell and Kirsten Sanford in a panel to discuss the issue, and resources will be made available for you during and following the discussion at ScienceOnline2010. Much to my regret, I will not be there in person, but I will be following the events as well as I can from here.

Why is this so important for the lay (nonscientist) person out here in Reader Land?  Steven Newton has an excellent, if brief article in the Huffington Post on the issue.  Firstly, we should hope that the editors of Huffington Post read the article and apply their own critical thinking to the stories that they decide to publish.  Secondly, Newton makes a very important point that there are dragons out there and they are ready to consume our intellects:

From evolution to global warming to vaccines, science is under assault from denialists–those who dismiss well-tested scientific knowledge as merely one of many competing ideologies. Science denial goes beyond skeptical questioning to attack the legitimacy of science itself.

Recent foment over stolen e-mails from a British research group inspired an American creationist organization to pronounce that “a cabal of leading scientists, politicians, and media” has sought to “professionally destroy scientists who express skepticism” about climate change. The Discovery Institute usually reserves this kind of over-the-top language to attack evolution, so it was remarkable to see it branch out to climate-change denial.

Despite such misleading hyperbole, science is meritocratic. Once you achieve a minimum level of education and competence, you can participate, ask a challenging question of even the most respected scientist, or submit papers to scientific journals, where research is judged by the data and methodology. Esteemed scientists face relentless criticism. This is how science works.

Even when a scientific consensus based on evidence emerges–as it has for evolution and climate change–there is opportunity for dissent. As the great physicist Richard Feynman noted, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

Feynman was not saying that the experts are idiots. He was saying that their work is open to analysis and must be checked before being accepted to make sure they have corrected for their biases before reaching their conclusions.  They may or may not be ignorant of them, but they certainly aren’t going to be able to be credible if they hide their biases rather than deal with them.  Many good science journalists have all but abandoned HuffPo because it publishes stories by denialists and woomeisters who cloak their biases in scientific sounding jargon.  I hate to see it, because HuffPo’s readership is large, and they need offsets to this trend so that people who read the site can learn how to dismiss the crap and, at least conditionally, trust the good stuff.

Ninety degrees screws everything up when I don’t understand the bias created by a diagonal. If I were to sit at the intersection on the county road and tell you that it’s oriented from northeast to southwest, I would certainly hope that you would be able to look at my analysis and tell me it is faulty.   I would hope that you as my passenger would recognize what I have missed, and be able to correct me.  At some point, I hope that science journalists and lay bloggers learn to use the same steps that you would use to prevent me from turning the wrong direction.

Given that, I thought I’d capture what I set out to do in my post. Mind you, all these strategies involve modeling critical thinking. I have no data on how effective modeling may be, but it’s the best idea I have right now and it’s fairly easy to do as a writer.

Use the Controversy
This is something that a lot of science writers do. Controversy is conflict is the basis of story. Stories order information, making it more accessible, and stories get remembered. I only hope I did it right.

I used the conflict between those who want us to believe that IQ testing differences between racial categories is indicative of some underlying, immutable, fundamental difference between races and those who find the concept abhorrent. I also used the conflict between a researcher who showed up to tell a bunch of science geeks and some scientists that they were incompetent to understand his field and all the people he stepped on. I used the first so that people would know they were dealing with competing claims that would have to be analyzed and the second to find a study that people would be interested in analyzing.

What I didn’t do: I didn’t generate controversy where none existed (except by writing one of the posts to which said researcher objected). I didn’t report on the controversy (they say this, but they say that). I didn’t suggest the researcher had any political reason to produce the results he did, because I don’t have any way of knowing his motivation.

Check the Tools
The first thing I noticed when the author recommended his paper was that he was using a tool (reaction time testing) that I had seen used for intrapersonal testing (looking at the effect of situational variables) but not interpersonal testing (looking at the effect of variables intrinsic to the person). So I read up on the tool.

It turns out that I was mostly correct. The majority of uses for the tool involve things like attentional priming and measures of distraction, although some trends in individual differences due to age and sex have been found. A good chunk of my post is giving the reader a summary of the background needed to understand the use of this tool, as well as resources for further understanding.

Check the Controls
Once I understood how the tool was used and what results it had produced in the past, I understood what variables affected it. I saw that age and sex had been controlled for and noted that in the post. I also noted some that could plausibly also vary with race and noted that they hadn’t been measured, much less controlled for.

Check the Claims
This was where things really fell apart and where I think much reporting of scientific findings falls apart. The researcher was making claims online about what his study proved that weren’t part of the Discussion section of the paper and weren’t supported by the citations in the paper. That didn’t mean they were wrong, but it did mean they were well worth investigating.

In the end, I contrasted the study’s findings with the researcher’s assertions by setting them next to each other. I presented the strongest support I could find in the literature for the leap being made by the researcher and explained where and why it still fell short of bridging the gap.

Untangle the Logic
This one came up in the discussion on my post. Someone asked me to evaluate the overall evidence for there being genetic differences between races that lead to differences in intelligence as measured by IQ tests. I think this person was looking for a simple summation.

Instead, they got an explanation of why it isn’t a simple question, as I broke the large hypothesis down into smaller hypotheses that would each, individually, need to be proved in order to prove the large one. I identified six, but there are almost certainly more. Making the steps explicit hopefully exposed some of the leaps of logic required by those who still say that “of course” these differences are real and genetic.

Identify the Biases
Also in the comments, someone noted that I was setting a high bar for evidence on this particular topic. I agreed, noting it wasn’t entirely an academic question, but I also pointed out that I was wary of accepting weak evidence because we’ve identified cognitive biases that make us more likely to believe the race/IQ hypothesis instead of the appropriate null hypothesis, which is that there is no connection.

We make a whole host of attributional errors on a regular basis. That is to say, we are much better at seeing how environment affects us than others and groups of which we’re a part than those we’re not. In each case, we’re more likely to look at “the other” and ascribe behavior to fundamental features of the other instead of to environmental factors. Race is one of the mostly highly “othering” factors in our society, and I pointed out that counteracting that bias (not even a one-race-good, other-race-bad bias) requires a great deal of skepticism.

Easter Eggs
All right, despite what I said above, this one doesn’t involve modeling critical thinking. There is a statement toward the end of the Discussion of the paper I blogged on that is pure assertion without experimental support. Nothing in the study addressed the question, and there was no citation.

I didn’t point it out. I don’t know how many people will read the paper in full, but those who do will have enough information after my post to have a little moment of discovery of their own when they read that. They will have figured out for themselves that something is wrong. I hope they find that as rewarding as I do and that it offers encouragement to continue thinking critically.

Okay, that’s it for my ideas. For those of you who read my guest post, were these strategies effectively modeled? And more importantly, did you identify the Easter egg statement in the original paper?

IQ Tests: Do They Measure Intelligence?
A quick overview of the topic in lay terms.

Stalking the Wild Taboo–Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns
The comprehensive report of a task force established by the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Association in response to The Bell Curve. Includes references.

Never a Dull Moment
A follow-up to the above report, addressing critiques of the report. Presents additional references, including a critique of Rushton’s work.

IQ tests: Throwing out the bathwater, saving the baby
An argument for a very limited use of IQ tests in educational assessment, with a clear discussion of their limitations.

Alfred Binet
A biography of the psychologist, including a discussion of his development of a scale of activities to measure “mental age.”

Lewis Madison Terman
A biography of the psychologist, including a brief history of the development of the Stanford-Binet test.

Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale
An overview of the subtests and scales involved in the most commonly given IQ test for adults.

The Construct Validity of IQ Tests–A Comprehensive Psychometric Meta-Analysis
A meta-analysis designed to determine how many types of intelligence the WAIS is measuring.

Individually Administered Intelligence Tests–The Testing Process
A sample of the variety of intelligence tests offered.

“Reliability” and “validity” of IQ tests
A discussion of the different types of validity required of scientific tests and how well those requirements have been met in IQ testing.

SoYouWanna score higher on an IQ test?
Not any sort of definitive site. However, it lists strategies for practicing to the test, which does have an effect on even tests that are supposed to measure innate, unchanging qualities.

Excerpt: ‘IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea’
Coaching a child to perform well on an IQ test in order to get into a prestigious private school.

Is IQ actually AQ? (Mistaking Achievement for “Intelligence”)
A discussion of what is measured by IQ tests.

Stereotype threat
How the knowledge of low expectations can lead to lowered IQ scores.

The Chitling Intelligence Test
A facetious look at how cultural background can influence the development of intelligence tests.

Shattering Intelligence: Implications for Education and Interventions
James Flynn (of the Flynn Effect) breaks apart the concept of general intelligence. Discusses the interaction of cognitive skills and exercise.

Heritability Estimates Versus Large Environmental Effects: The IQ Paradox Resolved
Uses basketball as a model to discuss how small genetic differences can interrelate with environment to exaggerate the measured heritability of a trait. Aimed at the results of Jensen’s twin study data.

Lewontin vs. Jensen debate
Lewontin answers Jensen’s objections to targeted educational enrichment. A classic debate on the topic.

Human Diversity
A review the book by Lewontin (a population geneticist) on the intersection of genetics and culture. Or read Human Diversity (Scientific American Library Series).

The Mismeasure of Man
A summary of the book by Stephen J. Gould on the study of biological determinism. Or read The Mismeasure of Man.

The Impact of National IQ on Income and Growth–A Critique (pdf)
Criticism of Lynn and Vanhanen’s work on the basis of imprecise modeling and insufficient controls.

A Review of the Bell Curve: Bad Science Makes for Bad Conclusions
A brief but broad overview of the unsupported assumptions and confounding variables used by the authors of this “simple treatise of conservative ideology” that attempts to link race to IQ to social outcomes directly.

Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined (book)
A “thoughtful, readable anthology” of essays critiquing The Bell Curve.

…In Different Voices
Part one of a technical but accessible Q&A on the topic of the heritability of intelligence. Much snark.

Those Voices Again
Part two.

My roommate is a Christian.  His mother is a clergywoman, his stepdad a clergyman and his aunt a preacher as well.  He invariably interrupts me whenever I open a conversation on something cool I learned regarding evolution with the standard disclaimer that he is religious.  Yesterday, I told him that he should really think about how it is weird that if I were to explain to him that the sky is blue because of light ray refraction, or that the reason that lakes turn over just before freezing in winter because of the unusual crystalline properties of water ice and its density, that he wouldn’t interrupt me about his religion.

He equates evolution with atheism. No matter how many times we go through that whole thing about “This is what we find out through science, and this is how they do it, and religion really shouldn’t interfere with your interest in it,” the conversation gets stuck there. To me it seems as though his religious belief is blocking him from an area of understanding of nature that is really fucking cool.  It saddens me, and makes me think that the main purpose of religion is the preparation for death and making sure that one is going to the right place for eternity.  What else we can do in the meantime is meaningless in the long run when eternity is at stake.

This is the nihilism that is religion. (I find it extremely odd that there is so much ethical resistance to euthanasia.  The idea that the extremely sick should have their suffering prolonged indefinitely so that they can experience the “dignity of suffering” is an incredibly cruel interpretation of “God’s Will.” If you believe they will be in Heaven when they go, let them go.)  Death is inevitable, and we should spend our lives prepping for it and not offend God by questioning the world around us.  It is why we must deal with the idiocy of theodicy and let theologians justify the reasons that nature plays horrendously cruel tricks on us; “Suffering is God’s way of letting us know that he has a Plan that we can’t fathom.”  But, to find alternative explanations to the God hypothesis is ludicrous.  For every answer that scientists propose that coincides with the observations of the natural world and how it works, the response is “Silly Atheist, you are not as learned as Kierkegaard.”

Spreading enthusiasm for evolution, such as I experience, and the extreme wonder that the intellectually curious find in teasing out the details is not easy when faced by such resistance. I don’t think anyone who is also enthusiastic about science has the answer, either.  If they did, then we wouldn’t be seeing the acceptance of evolution stall and continually have to face resistance from so many quarters.  We  wouldn’t see so many polls that place a public acceptance of evolution below that of creationism.

The strategy of groups such as the NCSE will work with some people, I think. But I don’t know.  There seems to be this underlying assumption that they know how to do it, by being assuring and enlisting the help of theologians and by saying that many scientists believe in God and see no conflict.  It may work for some people, but for others it won’t matter.  They know that death can come at any time and that if they are not solid enough in their faith when it comes, then they go through the coal chute to Hell and eternal agony and fire.  It’s not likely when faced with that sort of fear they are going to accept such assurances, and certainly not from someone who doesn’t interpret the Bible the Right Way. Creationism is not an intellectual conclusion.  It is an emotional conclusion.  It backfills data to agree with their foregone conclusion (which is what makes it ridiculous).

No one really knows the strategies that will work to help break the barriers that place religion in front of intellectual curiosity about evolution.  What we do know is that there are many people who are making assumptions that it should only be done in calm, assuring and moderating tones and that the straightforward approach of the New Atheists is going to set everyone else back a hunnert years so that the Friendly Atheists have to start all over again. ¹

The insistence that atheists be quiet about what we think are the implications of evolution and cosmology are very religious in nature, in the sense that the accommodationists want to use “shaming” to influence the behavior of a subset of their own group.  They are also using a “sense” of what is the absolute right way to develop a strategy of what they seek to achieve.  To those of us who are serious about atheism, and especially for those of us who left religions that place a high value on using guilt as a means to modify behavior, it is a reminder of what we are trying to get away from when we finally declare our atheism publicly.

The conciliatory approach that has been tried for years has not done much to change the situation, and the New Atheists, no matter how gentle and careful we are to stick to the details on why we hold the positions that we do, seem to offend people just by our very existence.  And yes, we lash out angrily at this often and return the offense with ridicule and bile.  We have our reasons and we have human emotions, so no one should be too surprised.  We expect to be shamed by our religious friends and relatives, so it doesn’t bother us as much as it does from other atheists and agnostics.  They should know better.

It’s the assumption part that makes me angry. It is what made me so angry about the book Unscientific America, and it is what makes me so angry about the idea of “Framing Science” when it comes to the interplay between science and religion.  It is what makes me so angry about the comfortable atheism that Michael Ruse insists on, when he says that Dawkins makes him embarrassed to be an atheist.  I will tell you now that I am more interested in having a beer with a creationist than I am with someone who insists that he or she knows the “right approach” to build enthusiasm for evolution.  I get to the point where I can’t stand to be around people who know this answer, but can’t see the irony in the idea that they have come to this conclusion on how to increase the acceptance of science without using science to find out.

Sociology may be a young science, and like economics it is not a “hard science” in comparison to chemistry, physics, biology and the other fields.  But it does provide tools for understanding what can and should be done to help people see the excitement that discovery of the natural world and its workings brings to us no matter what their religion says about the natural world.

The sociologists should be the ones to help us figure out how to do this.  What needs to be done before people like Massimo Pigliucci, Matthew Nisbet, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Josh Rosenau, Chris Mooney and hundreds of others (who I admire greatly on so many fronts but with whom I disagree on this issue,) is to ask people clarifying questions before deciding whether or not there is a one-size-fits-all approach.

My bet is that there is not. However,  I don’t know for sure.  I am basing this on my impressions and a rational decision using incomplete data that have not been seriously analyzed.  I would like for the friends of science and religion to prove that they are really friends of science in order to find out how to help people see the wonder that is the natural world without continually placing philosophical roadblocks in place.

If the data conclusively show that in order for Johnny and Susie to grow up to be good scientists, I should shut up about atheism, then I will consider it. Until then, don’t shame the New Atheists.²  We get enough of it from the religious and self-righteous.

And I just want to share info about cnidarian opsins and the evolution of vision with my roommate without having to get sidetracked into this same discussion about atheism every single time.

1. I am a very friendly person.  I am also very honest about my atheism; the whys and wheres and hows are not something I hide when I try to explain myself to people who have a hard time comprehending.  I smile while not conceding, and it is the “not conceding” that makes me a New Atheist.  The smiling part keeps me connected as a person to a non-atheist.
2. It’s a silly term but we appear to be stuck with it.

CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas, but it is the most important one, and most of it is put there by humans.

The focus in the global warming discussion is on fossil “carbon” in the form of CO2 gas. There are other global warming related gases, but this is the main one. We often hear people complaining that water vapor is a more important greenhouse gas, or that there are other greenhouse gases, etc. The reason that none of that is important, and that this question is nothing other than a poorly executed canard, is this: Global warming is caused by the atmospheric release of carbon previously trapped in solid or liquid form during ancient times. With that carbon trapped, the earth is a bit cooler, with the carbon in the atmosphere, the earth is a bit warmer. That is the part that matters.

While large climate changes have happened in the past, they are always bad news for the organisms living on the planet.

Have you ever heard about the famous genetic bottlenecks the human species went through? A bottleneck is when almost all the individuals of a species die off. Our recent bottlenecks were caused by climate change.

The earth has been much much warmer (and colder) in the past. In fact, than it is now. It was so warm that dinosaurs lived within the arctic circle! So, given this, why do we care about global warming?

Well, the truth is, global warming probably isn’t that important. If we put all that carbon that was at one time in the atmosphere back, and make a warmer earth, we’ll just have a warmer earth. Life will go on.

Of course, the ecology of the planet will be entirely different, and most living species will have a hard time adapting to that change. There will be a mass extinction. But I wouldn’t worry about that mass extinction as much as other mass extinctions. A mass extinction caused by a cosmic impact could actually kill off ALL life instead of just a whole bunch of species, and could have a much longer recovery time if it happens to not kill everything. But a warming-related mass extinction may not be so bad.

Many humans will die miserable deaths, but in the larger scale, that is of no great consequence.

There is one small problem…if there is enough warming and the warming is fast enough, the cyanobacteria in the ocean could face a major die-off, which in turn would cause oxygen-breathing organisms to die off. But again, lots of other organisms would survive, so life would go on. But, well, whatever.

There is natural variation in climate, but it is easy to see the long-term anthropogenic warming as something added.

Short term natural variation such as El Nino cycles can be fairly intense, and it may be difficult for an individual to understand that over medium and long time scales AGW is occuring. There is also “natural” variation in the direction your car goes as you drive between two distant points…you don’t drive in a perfectly straight line, which might take you through people’s yards and across rivers where there is no bridge, and so on. You drive on roads and there is some back and forth that happens along the way. You don’t go, “OMG, we’re varying back and forth in our exact direction! We’ll never get to where we are going!!! We can’t possibly understand or measure our direction or know or plan where we will end up!!!! OMG!!!”

Well, some people do, but most people get that there are different signals of variation in time-series phenomena and, even so, it is possible to understand longer-term trends. And with respect to climate, we do understand and there is a warming going on now.

The effects of global warming have already started to occur.

People often say that we can’t be sure if the effects of global warming will be severe, but this is one of the most offensive things people say, because it overlooks the things that have already happened, including the moose dying off in Minnesota (for a local example) and the millions of people who have died with desertification in North Africa (to provide one of the more tragic examples). The effects of global warming are not confined to the future.

A related question is about the link between global warming and severe weather events. There is a link, though the link to each kind of weather event is not clearly proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by multiple scientific studies. And never will be, because it is hard to do that and probably not necessary. The link is so impossible to avoid that it is not necessary to work out the proximate mechanisms to the level that would be.

A lot of well-meaning people claim that you can’t connect a particular hurricane or other weather event with global warming “because it does not work that way.” But those well-meaning people are wrong, exactly because it DOES work that way. Weather events are linked to the process of movement of excess tropical heat energy towards the poles and towards the outer atmosphere. With a warmer earth there will be more severe and more extreme weather events. Some specific types of weather events may not increase in magnitude, while others do. But overall, more warming = more “weather,” which will be in the form of more rain in a given rainfall, more wind-related events, and yes, even more snow under certain conditions.

Think of it this way. You can’t blame a given convenience store robbery on poverty during a period of crime rising with worsening economic conditions, but when the business association meets and 14 store owners were robbed since the last meeting (rather than the old average of, say, 1 or 2) then you can blame that phenomenon on the crime rate/poverty connection (assuming there is a connection). We can blame increased severity of weather events on global warming because it makes perfectly good scientific sense to do so.

Can AGW denialists ever be convinced that AGW is real?

I had a global warming denialist on my blog a few months back. He kept pointing out that it was just as warm in Minnesota at one point in the past as it is now, so there is no global warming. I explained that he was cherry picking and misinterpreting the data. He fought back until I posted a couple of items that fully and indubitably proved that he was in fact being intellectually dishonest. He went away and has not been back.

I don’t expect these dyed-in-the-wool cranks to change their minds, but it is appropriate that those of us who do have bits and pieces of the internet in our charge keep the dialog honest and progressive. The denialists are putting up offensive, inaccurate, one-liner billboards. We are burning the billboards down with science. It is worthwhile work, important work, and it can even be fun on occasion.

You’ve met the others, too. “My friend told me about an Oprah show where she talked to a writer who explained how the universe really works. I always knew it was a special place made just for me.”

There’s no polite way to say it, but it can be said simply. They’re both doing it wrong.

Any of us who present complicated or contentious information to the rest of the world–bloggers, podcasters, journalists, interviewees, teachers–have an opportunity to help people figure out how to interact with it. We can model critical thinking. We can tell others why we trust those we do. We can….

Well, there has to be a fair number of things we can do. If I knew what they all were, I wouldn’t have proposed this topic at ScienceOnline ’10.

C. Trust and Critical Thinking – Stephanie Zvan, PZ Myers, Desiree Schell, Greg Laden, Kirsten Sanford

Description: Lay audiences often lack the resources (access to studies, background knowledge of fields and methods) to evaluate the trustworthiness of scientific information as another scientist or a journalist might. Are there ways to usefully promote critical thinking about sources and presentation as we provide information? Can we teach them to navigate competing claims? And can we do it without promoting a distrust of science itself?

In addition to the crew who’ve signed on to the session, I expect we’ll get lots of good ideas from the session attendees. That’s the grand thing about an unconference. Well, that and the fact that we can start early and finish late, with input on the blogosphere even from people who can’t afford the time or travel to the event itself.

We’re dealing with a spectrum of trust, of course, among other things. See my examples at the top of the post. Trusting anyone to trusting no one. Credulity to cynicism. And not to indulge in reflexive centrism, but the healthiest point in this spectrum is somewhere between the two ends.

It’s easy to spot what’s wrong with each extreme. The credulous can’t account for fraud or for the fact that our brains are are only good at some kinds of impulsive (gut) decision-making. The documentation of cognitive biases and fallacies is not just a creative venture. The cynics can’t account for anyone who doesn’t do science for mercenary reasons (and how many people do?) or for the continuous advance of knowledge. We really do understand more about how the universe works than we ever have, even if we have much, much more to learn.

The problem in getting to that healthy point is two-fold. First off, we need to encourage the credulous how to identify the professionally sympathetic. We also need to help the cynical identify sources of information that they can trust. However, we also need to do this without swinging the pendulum too far and making cynics of the credulous and vice versa.

That may sound like two problems, but it isn’t. It’s teaching people how to sort information and sources. We can still cause a broad swing, nonetheless, if we’re not careful. Finding out that the positive evidence for parapsychology was mostly based on bad research design and not reporting negative results certainly made me cynical for a time, although it mostly now gives me ideas on what to look for in good research design.

The second part of the problem is that, barring severe brain dysfunction, neither the cynics nor the credulous really exist. The spectrum isn’t a spectrum but a rugged terrain. Those people who don’t trust scientists believe the people who tell them where the conflicts of interest arise and those who poke holes in (or near) methodology. The one who trusts all of Oprah’s guests is deeply suspicious of pronouncements from faceless governments, universities and corporations.

Whether we’re right or wrong on a particular topic, we’re all partly credulous and partly skeptical. There is too much information required to make reasonable decisions in modern life for us evaluate it all. Instead, we trust some sources and distrust others and trust still others only on some subjects. We accept some evidence as valid and reject some as flawed or irrelevant. We decide when consensus has been reached among the experts who “count.” And often, we do all that without examining how or why, even if we think of ourselves as skeptics.

Does that mean we’re doing it all wrong or that it’s impossible to do it right? No, or we’d live in the postmodern nightmare my stock cynic at the top of this posts thinks we’re in. It does mean there’s plenty of work to be done, because the problem isn’t a simple one of teaching people how much to believe, but teaching them how to figure out what to believe, instead of basing their decisions on who is saying the things they want to hear or the things that get their attention. It isn’t even necessarily the case that credulity or cynicism aren’t occasionally called for.

So, skeptical and scientific interwebs, share your tricks. What do you do to promote critical thinking? How do you help others figure out who to trust when they aren’t experts in the field? And maybe more importantly, help us learn from an even wider group. What have people done to help you understand what you can trust and what you can’t?

There are times when it is helpful to understand why facts are not a function of one’s place on the political spectrum.  Helpful enough that I feel it counts as customer service.

There are two very dangerous forms of denialism that are gaining strength over the facts because of the absolute power of sound-bite propaganda to destroy the work of fact-based science communication.  I have been doing a bad thing in just trying to tell people where to go for information, I guess, when all they want to hear is affirmation that leaked e-mails and a severe cold spell disprove the facts of anthropogenic global warming.  I have been doing a bad thing by just trying to tell people where to go for real information on vaccinations.  They respond by telling me, as one woman did yesterday, “I guess we are just on the opposite sides of the political spectrum.”

I do need to be careful on how I approach the issue because when I am talking to a customer I am “Big Corporate” with an operator number and a first name.  All that the customer knows about me is that I have a friendly voice and that I can help them resolve a business-related issue. They don’t know my background in studying experimental design or how I know that there are ways to detect bullshit in bad science that nearly anyone can learn.  They don’t know I also understand that the economic cost of global warming denialism is as high as the environmental cost, and that the delays in trying to resolve it will further weaken our economy.

I deal with small business customers.  Our customer service protocol involves building “rapport” or making a connection with the customer so that they associate my employer with friendly customer service to build loyalty to a company whose fees are in some cases higher than those of our competitors.  (Don’t get me started on those sorts of complaints from people with high-end accounts yelling at me for a $3 photocopy fee.)  We need them to add on to their relationship with us by adding services, and one way to do that is to get them to feel comfortable that they are working with nice people.

We ask them how their business is doing, and I cringe to ask some people because I can see it is not doing well.  When I ask them, I do so in a sympathetic voice and prepare for an onslaught of sob story.  I truly sympathize with their plight, but I am dismayed at the level of “blaming” they toss at me.  The government is to blame for everything for some people.  Taxes and Regulations Are Destroying the Small Business Economy in America.  For far too many, there is conservative self-victimization going on, and I hear the name Obama used as a pejorative explanation for why business sucks.

It bugs me.  I had a chiropractor tell me business is really good, but he will probably go out of business if the socialists in Congress get their health bill passed.¹  I had an oil drill maintenance company owner tell me business is good, but if the government doesn’t start letting businesses drill he will be out of work.  I had a naturopath tell me business is good, but the FDA will ruin it for her if they start regulating her remedies.  I had a small church tell me business was dropping off because people are leaving for MegaChurches.  Oh, wait, they aren’t the government.

I have construction people telling me they can’t get work bidding on schools because they have to bid too low to get a job, and they can’t afford to take the work because of it.  I have real estate agents who are stuck because the market is making it hard to resell anything because their customers can’t afford to sell for the market price.  It’s the economy that the Democrats ruined, is what it is.

There’s a lot of blaming, and not much taking responsibility and adapting.  That’s what people need to do, rather than wait for Sarah Palin to come along and destroy the damage that Barack Obama is doing.  The world is changing, and livery stable owners need to start looking at making a go at the auto dealership business.

But no.  They don’t think they should need to adapt to a changing economy.  They want things the way they were when they were successful in the old days, when things were booming and the work and money fell at their door.

I try to make rapport with them and continue to provide a soothing voice and help them with their business-related problem, but occasionally I slip up and try to help them understand further what the consequences of denialism will be.  The problem is that they just don’t expect it from a customer service representative and are pretty sure they are just going to have a sympathetic ear for whatever they say.  When I try to gently correct them, they dismiss me or engage me with the propagandistic bullshit that is winning over explanation.

I talked to a woman yesterday, who told me how cold it is in Austin, Texas.  ”Good thing we got global warming!”  So I started to explain that the “global” in “global warming” means “not local” and reflects larger trends which seem small, but considered as a measure of additional energy in the atmosphere, cause very large effects. She cut me off and said that she believes that the Earth’s temperature always goes in cycles and that this is just another cycle.  I tried to explain to her that there are resources she can use if she wants to get more information, but again she cut me off and said, “Well, I guess we are just on opposite ends of the political spectrum.”

I dropped that particular subject and went on to the business matter at hand. I was frustrated to be dealing with yet another person who confuses science with political persuasion.  The science of global warming is settled, and the increasing level of concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is a major contributing factor.  That’s a fact, but denial of that fact has become a tenet of conservative thought.  In my experience, small business owners tend to be politically conservative and where they once saw innovation opportunities, now continue to cling to their ways even while they see their business tanking.

What I want to tell them is to take this opportunity to get into the nascent renewable energy fields.  What I want to tell them is to shake their ideas that Al Gore invented global warming so that he cold be more powerful and better-liked by the country that gave him an electoral majority in 2000.  What I want to tell them is that if painting contractors are not getting bids that can support them, it is time to learn how to apply materials that capture sunlight.  What I want to tell them is that there is money to be made.  Chiropractors I want to tell to find an honest line of work, and churches I want to tell to start looking at the possibility of converting their buildings to museums.

I can’t tell my customers this, of course, because I like my job.  My frustration builds because we are in a social setting that prevents me from having a conversation about an important issue.  I avoid the Big Three topics (religion, sex and politics) at work as much as possible.  I understand the reason that this is necessary and avoid it for the purposes of keeping the level of customer service professional. There are times, however, when I just want to yell at these people for avoiding the future and contributing to the dissemination of invalid information.  I want to yell at the naturopath who tells me that vaccination is dangerous and that she is selling cures that help people avoid sickness.  I want to tell them to stop it, to wake up and prepare for a new economy rather than allow themselves to lose out by hanging on to an old economy.

Denialism and customer service are two difficult bedfellows, but this is where I lay.

1. These are representative but not necessarily actual scenarios I’ve dealt with–as an additional service to my customers.